Fish, volcanoes and the art of brains: review of John Onians European Art: A Neuroarthistory By Matthew Rampley

https://www.academia.edu/29398064/Fish_volcanoes_and_the_art_of_brains_review_of_John_Onians_European_Art_A_Neuroarthistory What bearing should considerations of human nature have on the study of art? Many might disagree with the basic premise of this question. There is no such thing as 'human nature,' they might state, for we are shaped by multiple social, cultural and linguistic determinations. This rules out the very possibility of talking about human nature in the first place. As Hannah Arendt suggested in a much discussed argument, when stripped of the 'external' predicates of culture and society, what is revealed is not the essence of human being, but something that is hardly human at all, what Giorgio Agamben has since referred to as 'bare life.' 1 Yet the matter is not so easily resolved. Arendt and other promoters of constructionist theories of the self are, after all, offering a thesis about human nature (that it is socially constructed). Moreover, there are many aspects of human being that would hardly be disputed. We are the outcome, it is generally agreed, of biological evolution. The details may remain areas for disagreement and refinement, but the consensus is that our biological character is the result of the processes of natural and sexual selection, that we are endowed with characteristics that conferred some kind of competitive advantage. The disappearance of Neanderthal humanoids, for example, is usually attributed to the fact that they were unable to complete with modern humans for resources, once the latter, with superior cognitive powers and forms of social organization, started encroaching on the same European territory. With the exception of a small number of modern day Cartesians, it is also widely accepted that human mental activity is intimately connected with human physiology. Cognition does not operate somewhere outside of the body. Analysis of the relation between brain functions and mental activity has thrown up remarkable findings; correlations between the two enable scientists to localize a wide range of cognitive functions in the brain. ...