Evolution in the Arts (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 127 And yet, with all his caviling, Aristotle does back up Socrates's examined life and his acceptance of arete as arete of someone and for something with the application of "know thyself" to the definition of man as a rational animal and with the advice that we try (some few) to reason and (all) to be reasonable in the affairs of life. Mr. Veatch is not sure whether the Socratic "know thyself" is to be taken generically, specifically, or individually. Possibly one should not discriminate; but I like to, being biased against the contemporary cult of the personality. But surely Mr. Veatch does give a clarifying and perceptive interpretation of this proud and modest design for living. And I for one, if I decline the singleness or finality of his advocacy, can willingly agree that such advice can well be widely helpful and perhaps especially so today. It is also an advice which leaves particular advising free enough to observe the wariness of either J. P. Sartre or A. J. Ayer. And it could, although it seems not to in Mr. Veatch, leave "meta-ethics," even Aristotle's and certainly Socrates's, radically undetermined. There is insight in Mr. Veatch's linking of his assertions that "doing is more than knowing" and "choosing is more than doing" with Aristotle's reply to the Lesser Hippias: "In the arts, again, a deliberate mistake is not so bad as an undesigned one, whereas in matters to which practical wisdom is applicable it is the other way around." Is not all this, Aristotelian and Veatchian, meta-ethics? It need not be called so if one dislikes the jargon. Mr. Veatch is for freedom and against posing when he deplores the feeling there is something academically improper in any moral theory or argued partisanship. He may be right in his association of the emphasis on meta-ethics with a contemporary moral confusion or emptiness; but we cannot say it must be so without failing into the philistinism of Anytus and those "good" Athenians who reprobated Socrates, whom Mr. Veatch is now preaching. ] suspect the last seventy years will be remembered in the history of ethics, if there is any, as not only lively but constructive. ALBERT L. HAMMOND University oTNorth Carolina Evolution in the Arts. By Thomas Munro. (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Arts, 1963. Pp. 545. Np.) Thomas Munro asks in his new monumental study the question: Do the arts evolve? I-tow and to what extent? There are two main criteria of evolution: (1) development, growth, and increased complexity; (2) descent with adaptive modifications. But we must guard against the errors and exaggerations of the nineteenth century, especially against the assumption that all artistic change is evolutionary and progressive. Devolution, dissolution , and regression also occur. Romanticists voice opposition to the concept of evolution in the arts. Th6ophile Gautier said: "Art differs from science in this: it begins again with each artist.... There is no progress in art." This argument was repeated recently by Aldous Huxley almost literally: "Every artist begins at the beginning . The man of science, on the other hand, begins where his predecessor left off." John Caird expressed such ideas in his essay "The Progressiveness of Art" (1887). Herbert Spencer's essay "Progress: its law and cause" published in 1857 was the first detailed, systematic attempt to fit the history of art into an evolutionary scheme. According to Spencer, art conformed with the law of increasing complexity called by him "progress" and later on "evolution." Increasing complexity meant here "a change from 128 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the homogeneous to the heterogeneous and from the indefinite to the definite." It included a phase of differentiation and one of integration. According to Spencer the development of the arts illustrated this tendency and thus exemplified the larger process of mental and social evolution. He regarded complication as adaptive, i.e., conducing to the survival of the individuals and groups. In antiquity both Pliny and Vitruvius already stressed two ideas: that of cumulative change and that of art as a social heritage which develops through the ages. The Italian Giorgio Vasari distinguished three periods in the history of the arts: that of...