How art can imitate and expand life (from the archive)

 Is “existence suspended,” in the experience of beauty, and do we become “detached” from immediate desires, is “disinterestedness” the central idea, all of which Kant suggests regarding art?

There is adaptive value to beauty which can be see n in both art and religion. One of the primary attributes of Godhood in theological materialism is to attain the zenith of beauty, along with the zenith of intelligence and the zenith of noble character. These higher values are here understood as evolved to in material and supermaterial evolution, which is where their adaptive value resides.

Contrary to Kant the “imaginative experience” of art is not detached from real biological life, it intensities, enhances, and expands life. Works of art do happen in the mind but they are not removed from biological drives and instincts. The fiction-drive relates to the beauty-instinct in the biological ways of desire. Beauty in human beings is related to good health and good health has survival and reproductive value.

Only when we trans-value and remove the definition of God from material and supermaterial life do we define beauty in art as suspended from life, after which art can only be seen in disinterestedness, which it is to many gurus. When Godhood is seen as a non-material, spiritual-only construction in the mind or soul, that is when art and religion depart from the real world.

We drifted away from didactic and moral art as we became more literate, but as evolutionary psychologists point out, story-telling had survival benefits in the Pleistocene. It still does, when we relate beauty to real biological life, evolution, and religion. There is no need to use a hammer to didactically or morally inspire us, art is usually best when it is subtle. Imagining Godhood attained in future material and supermaterial evolution has religious and artistic value, but it also has survival and reproductive value.