Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 15 (2017)
Abstract
[1] This paper gathers a few points developed in my recent book, The Indispensable Excess of the Aesthetic: Evolution of Sensibility in Nature, where I explore the processes that involve aisthesis from their most primal manifestations to their more complex. I propose the concept of bio-aesthetics as the study of all forms of sensibility in living beings, and that, given the fact that it is a function of our corporeal condition, the required starting point is the evolutionary paradigm. Another crucial tool for understanding how different types of creatures value, understand, react, and relate to their environment is provided by the recent field of bio-semiotics, the study of the dynamics of signification in different forms of life. What becomes particularly salient is the role of female discernment and evaluation through mate selection and, consequently, in the future configuration of the species, a phenomenon that can be denoted as phylo-genetic poetics.