Biosystems theory and empirical aesthetics

Abstract

The project of an ‘empirical aesthetics’ in the sense of a rigorous ‘science of art’ is subjected to critical analysis. The underlying traditional naive idea of universalist, ‘objective’, knowledge is exposed as a paradoxical myth by a brief recapitulation of both the self-disenchantment of physics and mathematics and the empirical analysis of science history. Some of the essential constraints on human cognition are then proposed in the context of a radically new approach to the theory of living systems as autopoietic systems. This new self-referential views of cognition yields stringent epistemological criteria. It proves, furthermore, that all cognitive phenomena are products of the selective historical operation of interacting living systems and, therefore, neither determined by biological mechanisms nor reducible to them. Both ‘art’ and ‘science’ are thus not amenable to biological self-explanation and critical control, or, more generally, to traditional ‘scientific’ understanding.