I've been slowly getting through the entirety of the original article but it's written out well:
> What I mean here is that art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature. The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted. We are putting the cart before the horse when we understand ourselves as the source of sense and meaning. In reality, we are participants in something that exceeds us, and the aesthetic, poetic dimension of great art reconnects us with that excess as a matter of course.
It's interesting to think about iterating over "drawing pictures of animals" before starting to "draw pictures of humans"
Yes, that is close to what I was gesturing at with the walk in the woods and the berries. Before humans had a word for berries or hunger we had a latent relationship with nature, in the ability for nature to draw our attention to objects and effect our nervous system. And the first expression of that relationship may well have been externalized in the pictorial representation of animals, or maybe in gestures, or grunts - we can't know it was too long ago.
A larger point that could be drawn from the article is that we then gained a new kind of relationship, not just with nature but with the very expressions it elicited. Instead of our mouth watering at berries, suddenly our nervous system was reacting to the art we created. It is this indirect relationship, with the symbol itself, that the author is arguing created what we think of as the human mind. So nature creates the grounds for expression creates the grounds for minds. My original point was that "drawing animals" is only one kind of possible expression, and it is possible to broaden our idea of "expressions worth contemplating" well beyond paintings on cave walls, all the way down to how a flower attracts the attention of a bee.
> What I mean here is that art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature. The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted. We are putting the cart before the horse when we understand ourselves as the source of sense and meaning. In reality, we are participants in something that exceeds us, and the aesthetic, poetic dimension of great art reconnects us with that excess as a matter of course.
It's interesting to think about iterating over "drawing pictures of animals" before starting to "draw pictures of humans"