Denis Dutton: Interview with John Horgan

• Published in: Philosophy and literature 2014-10, Vol.38 (1), p.A293-A313
• Main Author: Horgan, John
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cultural change; Human relations; Literary theory; Music; Philosophy; Post structuralist linguistics; Story telling; Studies
• ISSN: 0190-0013; 1086-329X; 1086-329X
• DOI: 10.1353/phl.2014.0039

Dutton: The idea . . . that has dominated academic criticism and scholarship of the last forty years [is] that our artistic values are relative to culture, are constructed by culture, are socially constructed by culture-a very popular idea with Marxists, with all sorts of social constructionists: culture, culture, culture. The book is not a denial of the importance of culture, but it says that culture is working on deeper, biologically evolved adaptations; that in the Pleistocene, the period . . . of 80,000 generations, 1.6 million years, before the modern period, where we became modern humans, we actually acquired as part of our nature hardwired tastes for storytelling, for music, for the enjoyment of images, for dancing, and these adaptations are the basis for the arts. The tide is going in our direction-in Pinker's direction and mine-and I think it is in part an almost Kuhnian breakdown of the poststructuralist, social-constructionist paradigm-art theory and literary theory as it's done by grayheads that got their graduate degrees in the '70s and '80s.