Popular science book readers know that everything in this world is made of stardust, with which more complicated materials like atoms, molecules, amino acids....life are made gradually, and then creatures with mental activity evolved.
Most of the steps can be explained scientifically and artistic activity, being on this line of progress, should be the same.Lining up cosmology, physics, chemistry, bio-chemistry, physiology, neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, psychology, sense based formalistic art theory should be between neurophysiology and cognitive psychology.
Let me quote from Langer's"Philosophy in a new key".
"Quotation could be multiplied almost indefinitely, from imposing list of sources-from John Dewey and Bertrand Russell....from....Piaget and Mead, Kohler....Cassirer, Whitehead, from philosophers,
psychologists, neurologists and anthropologists to substantiate the claim that symbolism is the
recognized key to that mental life which is characteristically human and above the level of
sheer animality-the use of sign is the very manifestation of mind. It arises as early in biological
history as the famous "conditional reflex"....this is the real beginning of mentality."
The scholars seem to have more conditional habit than the ordinal.
My claim is that sense activity is the basic mental activity and conditional reflex is more advanced stage of mentality.
Conditional reflex is higher mental stage with two activity: sense; reference.
Whitehead says that he cannot dissociate the yellow colour from a yellow triangle but he does not have to.
There are two levels of seeing: retinal; foveal.
Paying attention on the three sides of a triangle one by one,we can see the triangle on the fovea and the colour is on the retina all the time without attention.
Act of sensing a shape pleasantly is not communication with symbol but receiving information of shape which everything has.
Accumulation of the memory of shapes may be the second stage of formal seeing, which start revealing a priori structural system of shapes.
This structure is the normative model of art, logic, geometry et cetera.
Without realizing that shape-seeing is different from sign-seeing, all the current aesthetics were developed under the influence of those people.
Imagine that we reconstruct Pavlov's famous experiment using monkey this time: ringing a bell every time when we give him a banana, then the bell only can make him salivate.
A whistle could be chosen instead of the bell.
It means that any sound can be used as the signal: the bell is not always the symbol of banana.
Symbol can be anything for the same thing.
This is why symbolic level of art cannot be studied scientifically; symbol is accidentally picked, therefore is studied historically.
The taste of banana is different from apple.
Taste is universal, on which scientific theory may be established, likewise the shape of anything is the universal object to start a theory.
An organism developed sensory organ;first tactile one then visual one.
When the sensation became pleasure feeling, this is the beginning: the taste is good.
The second stage is that the taste is better: the act refers to the memory; more complicated activities.
When we see unfamiliar wild flower in the field, we just feel it is beautiful.
We do not have to know the name.
When we see a new thing like new art, w can just enjoy seeing it unconditionally: seeing with no reference.
The thought that this is more beautiful comes immediately after seeing.
This is taste judgement which consists of three activities: seeing a flower and remembering the past experience of seeing the other flowers and comparing all.
Formal seeing starts as early as the stage Piaget called topological;earlier in biological history than conditional reflex.
The obvious consequence of art being on sense is that there is no art history.
Art historians ,relying on their taste, select art objects among artifacts to fabricate a history.
Artifact can be artistic because the maker has natural inclination to appreciate good shape,which does not mean that he necessarily had intention to express some artistic feeling.
There is no use seeking the oldest art work since if we admit art work is visually interesting object, the beginning of art appreciation is much older than making of so-called art.
The best we can do is finding oldest visually-interesting artifact and guessing that the maker already had such a good taste.
Actually there is no pure art work but artifact except some experimental modern art in art history.
Although it seems that there is no interesting contemporary art going on, we now know two wrong reasons : aesthetics is on the wrong foundation; art is dependent on art history.
We can get back to the right track anytime.
What we should start with is the early abstract art in the last century; they suggest proto-formal theory.
