The purpose of art is tied to the biological origin of social behavior which developed the moral imagination

If we deepen the term “moral imagination” by Burke and Kirk we arrive at the biological origin of social behavior, which includes the moral imagination, and that is where art philosophy begins.

Looking through the history of art and literature most people agree that the greatest art is an affirmation of what the people and the society hold sacred. For example, structures of architecture could be thought of as very large sculptures which display in their form what the people and the society hold sacred. If the architect and the society reject traditional values and morals, as modern architecture tends to do, then the architecture reflects that, which many people think makes ugly architecture and ugly art.

Thinking of great art as an affirmation of what the people and the society hold sacred, we can also see that what the people and the society hold sacred also tends to affirm real human nature. That is, tradition usually relates closely to the sociobiological definition of human nature as being kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection.

The purpose of art in the deep sense is tied to the biological origin of social behavior which developed the “permanent things” and the “moral imagination” of Burke and Kirk. That is how great art can arrive at the affirmation of a specific people, ethnic groups, cultures, and societies, which we see in different religious art and national art.

But all great art shares the same affirmation of what the people and the society hold sacred, and what is sacred is related to real human nature, the biological origin of social behavior, and the survival and reproductive drives.

Modern and postmodern art reflects ugliness, decadence, and degeneration because it spends most of its time both rejecting the affirmation of the sacred and attacking real human nature.