The contingency of cuteness: a reply to Sanders.
In his critique of my article |Cuteness', John Sanders argues that my treatment of the distinctively babyish features which get infants noticed and cared for by adults |is, if not an altogether fallacious way of explaining the matter, at least an extremely misleading one'.[1] The guiding hypothesis in my article, as Sanders noted, was that |in the evolution of our mammalian ancestors, the recognition and appreciation of the specialness of the young had survival value for the species. And so certain features evolved in the young which got them noticed and appreciated; these features constitute cuteness'.[2] The babyish features I discussed were drawn from the research of ethologist Konrad Lorenz: overall smallness; large head, forehead and eyes; round protruding cheeks; rounded body shape; short thick extremities; soft body surfaces; and behaviour indicating weakness and clumsiness.From my explanation of cuteness, Sanders concluded that I held four theses: that cuteness is (1) a characteristic set of features now common among human infants; (2) a set of features which the infant offspring of our mammalian ancestors once lacked; (3) a set of features which was attractive to adult members of our ancestor species independently of the fact that infants had them; and (4) a set of features which was selected specifically because of this attractiveness (p. 162). Sanders objects to all four theses.
I did not, however, claim or imply (3) or (4). I agree with Sanders that it is highly unlikely that early mammals found large heads, clumsy behaviour, etc., attractive before these became typical features of the young. The view that Sanders attributes to me, that |infants acquired a certain look because of its independent ability to attract and please adults of the species' (p. 163) is not mine. What I said was that at a certain stage in evolution, young mammals developed distinctively babyish features which served as |releasing stimuli' for affectionate behaviour from adults. These features had survival value and were passed on to succeeding generations. Earlier animals such as insects and reptiles, whose young needed no parental care, did not develop such features.
Sanders's objections to (1) and (2) require more comment. I do hold (1), that cuteness today is a particular set of visual features. But I do not hold this to be a necessary truth as Sanders implies; I hold it to be a contingent truth. He writes, |While it is no doubt true that cuteness in humans may now be identified with some such set as the one mentioned in (1), there is nothing essential about the link between any particular set of features and "cuteness"; no set of features is intrinsically "cut"' (p. 163). I agree: mammals might have evolved differently, so that some other features in infants were the distinctively babyish ones. On another planet right now, indeed, cuteness for some species may consist of having a bright green exoskeleton or flattened gelatinous tentacles. I was not trying to give cuteness ontic status, as Sanders implies (p. 164); clearly it has only functional status. Cuteness is visual features which get some biological job done - the nurturing of the young.
This explanation also helps clear up my position on (2). Sanders rightly points out that earlier in evolution, other features than those we today call cute may have made infant animals attractive to their parents. From that fact he wants to call into question (2), that cuteness is a particular set of features which the infant offspring of our mammalian ancestors once lacked. What I was claiming in the passages from which Sanders derived (2) was simply that at some stage in evolution, when parental care of the young became important, visual features made infants attractive to adults, and before that time there were no cute features. Our invertebrate ancestors, for example, had no need of cuteness. Throughout my article I focused on the features which constitute cuteness in human babies today, but I did not deny that other features may have constituted cuteness at earlier stages of evolution.
The gist of Sanders's objections to theses (1) and (2), then, is that the identity between cuteness and the particular set of features that are cute in contemporary human babies is only a contingent relation. Since I agree, his objections are misplaced.
Leaving aside our points of agreement, let me now consider a necessity claim which Sanders makes and I reject: that infants had to be cute. He complains that |it is too easy to infer from Morreall's line of reasoning ... that infants in general might conceivably never have developed cuteness' (p. 162). That in fact is my view; against it he argues that children are cute by necessity. Sometimes he makes the necessity sound logical, sometimes biological. In the logical argument he makes babies cute by definition. |For children, as a general rule, to be unusual, would be a logical impossibility. But for the same reason it would be impossible, as a general rule, for children to be uncute. Cuteness is just the attribute of looking like an infant (whatever it is that infants look like)' (pp. 162-3). At the end of his article, Sanders says that |Anything that is typical of infants, within any species that requires extensive nurture of parents for young, is definitive of cuteness for that species' (p. 164). But this simple identification of cuteness with all the features babies generally have is incorrect. Babies' bilateral symmetry and their opposable thumbs, for instance, are not cute. Not even all of their distinctively babyish features are cute - consider their tendency to vomit without warning. Cuteness is not |anything that is typical of infants'. Cute features, rather, are the distinctively babyish features which elicit nurturing behaviour in adults.
Sanders also offers a biological argument that babies are cute by necessity, according to which animals that need a great deal of care in infancy |must always be disposed favourably to babyish looking creatures'. If they had not been so disposed, Sanders asks, |How could the raising of such infants ever have got going?' (p. 164). But this claim of biological necessity for cuteness overlooks the other ways in which parents are or might have been motivated to nurture their offspring, aside from visual attraction. The releasing stimuli for nurturing behaviour might have been solely auditory or olfactory, for example. In many species today the young elicit nurturing from parents primarily by special calls or odours; in species such as moles visual stimuli play virtually no role in nurturing. And nurturing can be motivated independently of how the young look, sound, or smell. A human mother now is motivated to cuddle and nurse her infant by the hormone oxytocin secreted by her pituitary gland. In a world where young humans lacked babyish features to attract adults, the, might still have been nurtured by parents with the appropriate hormones in their bloodstreams.
Cuteness is a powerful mechanism, to conclude, but it is neither a logical nor a biological necessity that babies are cute.
REFERENCES
[1] John T. Sanders, |On "Cuteness"', The British Journal of Aesthetits, Vol. 32 (1992), p. 162. [2] John Morreall, |Cuteness', The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 31 (199I), p. 40.
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Title Annotation: | John Sanders, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 32, p. 162, 1992 |
|---|---|
| Author: | Morreall, John |
| Publication: | The British Journal of Aesthetics |
| Date: | Jul 1, 1993 |
| Words: | 1192 |
| Previous Article: | Physiology as art: Nietzsche on form. |
| Next Article: | Definitions of Art. |
| Topics: | |