Nature, Art and Values; an Essay in Three Parts. 3.

  by Koenraad Kortmulder                                        k.kortmulder@kpnplanet.nl 

I. On Art and Nature; some parallels.

II. On Imaging in Art and Nature.

III. On Values of Art and Nature.

Abstract.

Individuals are members of classes, and of classes-of-classes. That is true for both individual animals and separate works of art. Classes result from break-throughs and the origination of new morphospaces. (I).

Interaction between or within individuals leads to imaging of one onto the other,, and thereby creates an archive of the evolution of nature, art and the planet. (II).

The archive of retained images and their integration defines an object’s value. (III).

Part III

III. On Values of Art and Nature.

III.1 Introduction: What is that: Value?

The first two parts of this essay could go without precise definitions of the main subjects. Though the contours of Nature and Art may be stuff for debate among specialists, everybody has some notion of both, sufficient for the present discussion. It is different for value. There is a considerable component of subjectivity in its appreciation, and the concept as such is often claimed to be philosophical rather than scientific. Hence this introduction.

All is true to its money, people say. Is that so? Is a thing worth as much as it costs? Lammert Leertouwer, at the time Vice-Chancellor of Leiden University, squarely contradicted it: “Politicians know of everything how much it costs; of none what its value is.” This was his reply to the suggestion that the university might sell part of its collections to meet its financial needs. Apparently, price is not the same as value.

For the opposite view take Georg Simmel. According to Rüdiger Safranski (2010: 58) the former’s great study Philosophie des Geldes (1900) was the very master piece of the entire philosophy of value. In Simmel’s view, money is the measure of all things. The values of the most diverse objects, services and operations can be compared in terms of money. So, value = money?

The present essay deals with the values of nature (individual plants or animals, populations, species) and of works of art. I think that, at least for these categories, money is a very poor measuring rod. That is because money has its own dynamics, which has no relation to the real value of the things sold, but rather with prestige, profitability, currency stability etc. If anywhere, that is so with respect to nature and art, witness the prices of art at the prestigious auctions. And politicians barter away existing nature or conditions necessary for its conservation for gain in votes or in money for public revenues which they think are ‘worth it’. Therefore, I choose Leertouwer’s side. What value is, however, and how it should be measured are still unanswered questions.

Let us try a different approach along the lines of: “what is it worth to you? Or to me; or to him?” Or more formally: “The value of an object is the effort you (or one) find(s) necessary and justified to preserve it for the future.” This is no longer necessarily about money or one’s own possessions, but refers to a more general (and vaguer) notion: effort. Should we succeed in transcending the personal aspect of ‘you, me or him’, this definition wouldn’t be so bad. What we need, thus, would be an objective measuring rod. Searching it is the main purpose of this part.

But can such objective measure exist? I think it does as far as there cannot be disagreement about the quantity the rod will indicate. Choosing one rod or another, as well as its calibration remain subjective. The task of the present essay then is to find a rod that you find convincing. If my quest is successful, the above definition will gain considerably in strength.

Another attempt: Is ‘value’ synonymous with ‘use’? No; according to an essay by Ralph Vaughan Williams, music does not have any use (1); but he did not deny that music may have value. Actually, the music-without-use that Vaughan Williams had in mind is a limit case, a purity of the art worth pursuing and to be approximated through the abolition of financial, economical and emotional motives. However, even if it exists, nothing has yet been said about the value of such music.

It is precisely to avoid the aspect of ‘usefulness to humans’ that some philosophers speak of the intrinsic value of individual animals, species or nature at large. They are mostly concerned with the welfare of animals in captivity, laboratory animals, cattle or with the permissibility of certain techniques, such as genetic manipulation (Visser & Verhoog, 1999). This intrinsic value is thought by them to arise directly from the animal’s being, not out of any external source (use, market value or worship). Reading these authors, one gets the impression that their point is dignity rather than value. A question of respect. That may be why some bio-ethicists write inherent dignity (2)instead of intrinsic value (Heeger & Brom, 2001).

Now one may appreciate or attach value to the animal’s dignity or to respect paid to it. One may even conclude as to animal rights, but none of these inferences are compelling to everyone. One may also wish to derive the intrinsic value of an animal from its supposed (self-)consciousness. After all, in spite of the difficulties in assessing the latter with rigorous scientific methods, there are strong indications of its presence in at least some animal species. It is, however, unclear how, or for how much, we should add its value to the animal’s account.

The concept of intrinsic value does prompt yet another question: is value a quantity? Is one object or creature always more valuable, or less so, than another? My tentative answer is: “No, not always.” Value can be a quality as well as a quantity, be it perhaps not both simultaneously. Which of the two we apply depends on conditions which I may call stress. In the absence of conflicts over the values of different objects - or in the absence of measurement anyway - value is a quality. Of the stars of the Milky Way, the waves of the ocean, the trees in the wood or the leaves of a lawn none is worth more than the others; their individual values are indeterminate. That means they are not equal either. Not-different may be the term to be preferred.

In practice, however, value is often a quantity, namely whenever there is a conflict of values or a necessity of measuring it for whatever reason. That is where the need arises of an objective scaling independent from personal tastes.

In spite of all this, it is not certain that value is an objective property of an animal or thing, that is: independent of its being observed; but for the time being, I do assume that it is. In order to attach a value to it, I mean to take an objective as possible view-point, that is at least at a great distance from this planet.

The risk that at the end of this essay we must conclude that value cannot be expressed in a figure or even not on an ordinal scale, is at this point real, but in that case we may, I hope, have understood a little more about what we mean by saying “value”.

III.2. Caveat: On Measuring Values and Ethics

The creation of an objective measure of values, the purpose if this essay, is not a purely philosophical issue. This is most evident when the results would be used for comparing human individuals. The essay does not deal with humans, but the theory developed in it does not exclude this possibility either. Comparisons of the sort may be undesired and unethical. Even an ordinate scale could have disastrous effects.

Even now, however, there are situations in which such comparisons are being made and morally accepted, though not by all. For instance when one has to choose between the lives of mother or child in a fatally disturbed pregnancy, or in certain cases of abortion. In other cultures than our own other moral principles are held, certainly in extreme circumstances such as we do not experience. Some Inuit peoples accepted the abandoning of elderly persons to die in case of famine. In the most extreme conditions even infanticide was condoned. All for the survival of those who could have new children when the emergencies were relaxed. One judged the survival of the tribe more important than individual lives.

In non-extreme conditions, laws tend to reject comparisons of the respective values of persons. Regimes that openly practise them tend to be repudiated. In its first article, the Dutch Constitution proclaims that all inhabitants have equal rights. Without, by the way, stating that they are of equal value. In fact, in the terminology of this essay, their respective values would be formulated as being not-different.

All this need not be an obstacle to the treating of our theme. To me, this is a purely theoretical exercise on the concept of value. If it leads to a better understanding of what we mean by ‘value’, it was worthwhile. Should others wish to develop the ideas further and take ethics seriously - which is what I want - it will be important to try and shift the border between quality and quantity as much as possible in favour of the former. That could be achieved by avoiding conditions of stress (as meant above) 1. politically by furthering a more hedonic (3) society, ecologically by a better relationship to nature, 2. as an individual, by striving to judge the same conditions as less stressful (personal philosophy of life), and 3. by shifting the subjective border between quality and quantity of value towards higher degrees of stress (ethics)

Finally, it should be emphasised that this is a theoretical study, and not a handbook for conservation.

III.3 Imaging and Value

So, my suggestion is that it is the degree to which an object carries images of its environment in past and present which creates its value (part II page ). Something, however, is missing. Typical for the objects we have chosen to study, organisms and art works, is that they not only register and retain, but integrate the incoming message with information they already contain. This is qualitatively different from the after-image of a flash of sun-light in one’s eye, orthe smell of a flower. Sensory images come and fade away with time. Integration, however, gives rise to new, unique results and has a high degree of irreversibility. So, could the quantity of images going in, together with the degree of their integration with the internal organisation already present  represent a practicable measuring rod of value? How to develop this idea? Let us first look at some of the terms: it is easy to say “integration” or “quantity of imaging”, but are these measurable things? And, is there any objective evidence for their existence? The following sections will seek an answer.

III.4 Is it visible?

As to organisms, one can see how they process incoming information. Most higher animals have sense organs receiving visual images, sounds, smells or gravitation. Besides, their skin is full of sensors for warmth, cold, pain, pressure, touch and patterns thereof. These animals respond to all these diverse stimuli, each in its own manner, according to their species-specific or individual inclinations, modulated by earlier experiences and depending upon their momentary state of excitation.

The controls for filtering, focussing, combining and selective responding are concentrated in a central nervous system, and in chemical networks of hormones, neurotransmitters and the appropriate receptors. Neuro- and chemo- are intimately connected with each other and interwoven. The main structures of the nervous system and their degree of (phylogenetic) development differ greatly between animal phyla. Vertebrates (phylum Chordata) are relatively well provided in this respect.

There is a lot to be read in their anatomy about the processing of information in the living organism. To the expert, that is. In these matters, I always consulted my late friend Jaap Dubbeldam, a neuro-anatomist, and I never came away without learning something new. For instance this: some animals are capable of developing in their brains a very detailed representation of their spatial surroundings, an atlas with maps as it were (4). Many mammals have visual maps. A nocturnal bird such as an owl does the same using acoustic  cues, while a nocturnal rodent’s maps are largely tactile. Fish that have electrical organs, such as the African Mormyrids, orient themselves by generating an electrical field in the space around them and detecting distortions of the field with specific sense organs. In all these cases, the brain region where the spatial information is stored contains a layered structure. The isocortex of higher mammals, which is part of the first brain division or telencephalon, is an example of this, but similar structures have been derived, in diverse vertebrate groups, from different divisions of the brain.

Incoming images are literally mapped into the cortical regions. These maps repeat themselves in each of the layers, so precisely that one can distinguish cylinders of cells, perpendicular to the plane of the layers and carrying the same parts of the same image. Cells within a cylinder are connected to each other, to neighbouring and more distant cylinders, as well as to other brain regions. Together, they form a complicated machinery, capable of analysis of the images, comparison with others and testing against memories, emotions, etcetera. And that is what actually happens.

Can one require more tangible proof of the processes of imaging and integration? Perhaps from the behaviour of live animals? Years ago Bill (W.M.S.) Russell theorised about the flow of information within an animal (1958-1962). He pinpointed several fundamentally different organisation principles. In the so-called ‘instinct system’, circuits generating different behaviour complexes do not communicate with each other. If the animal learns something new in one behavioural context, the innovations remains strictly limited to that context. In other contexts or moods it does not apply the new information. On the other hand, higher vertebrates in particular have what Bill called the ‘intelligence system’, where all information and all new experiences are immediately available to the whole animal, irrespective of its surroundings or mood. Not all behaviour of these higher vertebrates is ‘intelligent’. Especially under conditions of stress, even humans return to the instinct system (Russell & Russell, 1961). All this was mainly theory, but Bill underpinned it with observations and experiments on lower and higher vertebrates.

Every time an animal forms a new association between two events, or when it habituates to a repetitive, innocuous stimulus, something of the outer world is imaged within the animal. Each time it learns to change its behaviour - be it by learning a new movement, or by learning to perform something from its repertoire in response to a new stimulus - this means the integration of new information about the world around it with already existing circuits.

Thus, perception and integration in animals are visible. What about art? They are likely to be more elusive in that realm; or aren’t they?

III.5 Imaging and integration in the Artistic Process

Both artists and scientists are eager to observe and register their perceptions. Having processed the information, they bring it out again in an altered form. Yet, whereas an artist deliberately or subconsciously mixes observations with his own emotions and intuition, scientist strive to progressively parenthesise the latter. Many scientists may admit a role for intuition; some may even let themselves be inspired by considerations of beauty, but they all rate objective, empirical evidence, and repeatability, above both feeling and intuition. For artists, on the other hand, the stirrings of their soul are essential. Their works reflect self-observation as well as images from the outer world and the integration of the two.

In 1877 John Ruskin publicly disgraced a painting by James McNeill Whistler (‘Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket’, 1875). Whistler, feeling harmed in honour and interests, summoned the influential art critic for libel. In court, the following discussion took place between Sir John Holker as Attorney-General and Whistler (5):

H: “What is the subject of the ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold?”

W: “It is a night piece and represents the fireworks at Cremorne Gardens.”

H: “Not a view of Cremorne?

W: “If it were called ‘A View of Cremorne’ it would certainly bring about nothing but disappointment on the part of the beholders. It is an artistic arrangement. That is why I call it a ‘nocturne’.”

And a little later:

H: “Did it take you much time to paint the ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold’? How soon did you knock it off?”

W: “Oh, I ‘knock one off’ possibly in a couple of days; one day to do the work and another to finish it.

H: “The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?”

W: “No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.

In other words: a work of art is the precipitation of a life-long Auseinandersetzung between and an integration of an artist’s outer world and his own mind. Do we need more evidence that imaging and integration come together in an artist’s work? Perhaps a few examples which at first sight seem to contradict the thesis, but confirm it in the end.

In Hans Holbein the Younger’s double portrait ‘The Ambassadors’ (1533), some musical instruments, books and surveyor’s tools on a side-table are painted so perfectly à trompe l’oeil that one can hardly believe they are not three-dimensional. Similar perfection is found in the intarsio of the study of Duke Federico de Montefeltro’s palace in Urbino. Are these not merely quasi-photographic representations of neutral objects - exact replica’s of the images on the artist’s retina? Perhaps they are, and perhaps they are art as well, but if they are, it is art with a message: “Look what a clever painter I am.”

John Constable valued the precise reproduction of reality. Nevertheless, in his landscapes there is not more than a complicated correspondence between reality and his representation of it. In Art and Illusion (1960: 29-33) Gombrich adduces ample evidence for this, taking Constable’s picture of Wivenhoe park and castle (1816) as an example. Natural as the painting looks, it is full of unspoken agreements between artist and beholder. There is, for instance, not a single touch that has the same colour or intensity as the corresponding fraction of the real landscape. At best, it is the relationship between parts that enables one to recognise the subject. To further illustrate this point, Gombrich quotes a well-known amateur painter, Sir Winston Churchill (p.34):

“It would be interesting if some real authority investigated carefully the part which memory plays in painting. We look at the object with an intent regard, then at the palette, and thirdly at the canvas. The canvas receives a message dispatched usually a few seconds before from the natural object. But it has come through a post office en route. It has been transmitted in code. It has been turned from light into paint. It reaches the canvas a cryptogram. Not until it has been placed in its correct relation to everything else that is on the canvas can it be deciphered, is its meaning apparent, is it translated once again from mere pigment into light. And the light this time is not of Nature but of Art.”

What has been said on Constable, may be applied also to the adamant realist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Besides, one may surmise that the harsh solidity of his apples, rocks, and even the light itself in his paintings reflect his harsh character.

“Monet n’est qu’un oeil”, said Cézanne about his confrater. Monet (1840-1926) and the impressionist school discovered important new facts about what nature actually looks like. In applying them they reached a new stage in true pictorial representation. But does this mean that their works are perfect copies of nature? For instance as for the realistic rendering of colours? Shadows were not just dark, they discovered, but consisted of colour, mostly complementary to those of the immediate surroundings. However, from the viewpoint of Physics, complementary colours do not exist in the objective world. They are a product of our retina. There, at the bottom of the eye, where images are projected, the retina not only contains the light-sensitive cells, but also a complicated neuronal network that creates the complementary colours well before they are actually perceived by the brain. Thus, to say that Monet was just an eye is an understatement. The impression that he represented on the canvas contained already a good deal of interpretation.  Even if an artist would try to paint ‘just what his eye sees’, he couldn’t, because between the retina and final perception there is a central nervous system manipulating the signal, in short all one may subsume as cognition. One can learn to deliberately switch off some of this, only to find another layer of cognition behind the first. “Nobody has ever seen a sensory impression”, Gombrich summarises the situation. I guess that, in addition to all this, Monet translated what he perceived into hues and intensities which harmonised within the work. Neither this harmony nor composition were necessarily present in the fragments of reality he chose to represent. Just imagine how van Ruisdael or Henri Rousseau would have painted the same subject.

A final example: young Piet Mondriaan drew his own consequences from the impossibility of rendering the colours of a landscape in paint, and painted the lighthouse of Westkapelle in red. In his later, progressively more abstract works, he edited reality to such an extent that one may well ask whether sensory perception of the world still played a role in them. Yet, he maintained to have always remained a realist. Apparently, even his most non-figurative works were derived from real, observed objects, only with even more cognition mixed in. Whether this applies to all non-figurative artists may be a matter of debate. With Mondriaan, in any case, it is clear how much of the artist himself has gone into the process, even, or rather exactly when, the work is abstract.

III.6 What is integration?

When can one say that an image from the outer world has been integrated into the whole organism or work of art? I think when something new has arisen out of the interaction. In the examples of the fore-going section such is the case. Through abstraction to various degrees, both Whistler and Mondriaan created in paint an image belonging to a new order as compared to what they originally saw.

To some extent the same is true for perspective and for meaning. The suggestion of space, based on conventions, has become an integral aspect of the representation. Through its context, a lady’s portrait may become a Madonna. Through selective attention you may, for a moment, see the portrait again, or the touches of dark and light that create the illusion of depth, but in the whole picture they are forever joined together in a new meaning.

The process of integration is irreversible also in a broader sense. From Whisler’s or Mondriaan’s pictures, the fireworks or the tree will never rise again, and that is true of any work of art, whether abstract or not. If the work is made to disintegrate, it does not return to a more original state, but it changes again into yet something else.

Thus, from irreversibility one can read integration. This also applies to nature. At the level of individual animals, the registering of events and conditions leads to adaptive changes in behaviour through learning. A new connection brought about in this manner is not reversible. Unlearning does not undo that connection; the latter is overruled by a new learning process. Even less, of course, does unlearning re-establish the conditions or the sensory impressions that originally gave rise to the adaptive change.

It is similar with evolutionary adaptations. For the first organisms on earth, who got their energy out of diverse chemical transformations, oxygen was a deadly poison. For some, though, it was a by-product of their metabolism and, as a result, oxygen gradually became a substantial component of the atmosphere. As the O2 pressure grew, certain organisms made a virtue out of necessity. They re-adapted their metabolism making the poisonous gas into an obligatory commodity. It were these adaptors that gave rise to all higher plants and animals.

The semicircular tubes in the inner ear of mammals and birds reflect the three-dimensional space in which they developed the art, through evolutionary adaptation, of moving about. Camouflage colouring on butterflies’ wings image the barks of trees on which they rest but, also, the potentialities and the limits of the eyes of birds that prey on them. Sexual selection shapes males of certain species such as peacocks in the course of many generations to suit the idiosyncratic preferences of the brains of their female conspecifics. Here, as in learning, disintegration does not mean running the tape in reverse. Life progresses and does not retrace its steps. This principle is also known as Dollo’s Law: once an adaptive structure has been , it is never formed again in the same manner as the original.

III.7 How much of it? (Towards a formalism)

I have suggested to let the value of an organism depend upon the quantity of imaged material integrated into the whole of the organism. Can this be stated more precisely? One step may be to count the number of images being enfolded and assess the quantity of information enfolded with each image. One immediate problem is how to define one image. Can each image be divided into a collection of smaller ones? However, as long as quantities are added up, this does not matter. Next we may express the integration of new images as the number of new connections involved in the process (6). These connections may be visualised as psychological (associations and the like) or, at a smaller scale, neural.

But what is the whole organisation in which the incoming image is integrated; and how should it be accounted for in the organism’s value? I think it is the sum of life-long experiences, growth and development, in other words the sum of images of the outer world and, by the way, of parts and actions of the organism itself. One may visualise this as an arithmetic series of terms, to which new terms have been added throughout the life of the organism. The measurement discussed in the fore-going paragraph concerns the latest term.

Having included life-time, shouldn’t we also include phylogeny, because the latter produced the fertilised egg, capable of development, where the life of the individual began? The phylogenetic information contained in the individual is, however, largely shared with its conspecifics. Therefore it is elegant to deal with the phylogenetically caused fraction of value together with the values of the entire species, and leave it beyond the limits of this essay (7) (but see next section).

How does this apply to art? In the example of Whistler vs Ruskin we saw that the maker being imaged into his work may embrace his entire previous experience as an artist. Not all of it, possibly, but anything from that period of his life. One may also assume that the artist was not unfamiliar with works of contemporaries and predecessors at the moment he started his career. However, for this essay we may, as with nature, parenthesise everything beyond the individual’s own experience, while acknowledging that in the end it should be included.

The arguments on art and nature in the fore-going sections ran parallel, but the formalisation of the value of art objects seems to be more difficult, because the material representation of newly established connections is less tangible or even imaginable. Nevertheless, one may presume that a similar formula describes the value of an art object: a long series of terms, which is augmented by addition in each new work. 

It seems we are still incapable of substituting realistic figures into the formula. Even so, the fore-going sections have shown that the projected terms are natural; the processes are visible, both in art and nature. In practice, the ultimate goal of a measuring rod for value may be still be far removed, but we can visualise a formula and think about how to quantify its terms. Also, I think we have a better understanding of the concept of value.

This seems to be an appropriate ending to this essay, but I am tempted to peep over the fence of self-imposed limitations.

III.8  Other scales of magnitude

First, what happens when we consider entities larger than individual organisms or works of art? Not much news, I presume. Also populations of animal or plant  species are products of numerous, integrated influences, now and in the past, from landscape, climate and other species, and similarly for oeuvres or styles in art. Among the c. 4,000 planets so far discovered outside our solar system, none are very much like the Earth in size, composition and distance to their respective suns, nor are they like each other. Their diversities are thought to be  due to their origins as well as to their interactions with sister planets of the same system and/or their stars.

The extension to larger entities does create a new perspective: what does the uniqueness of individuals per se look like when considered from the viewpoint of the whole species or style? In the movie “The Third Man” (Carol Reed), the criminal Harry Lime takes his pursuer Holly Martins up in the giant wheel high above Vienna. He points at all those humans, far below them, appearing minute and anonymous as they move about like ants on their nest. “Would you notice if one or two of them were missing?” he asks. From afar - or within a wide angle - one loses sight of each individual’s unicity; they all look the same or at least not different and thus of little or no value; but that is deceitful (8).

How do we account for this multi-layered reality in our formula? Consider values only in one scale at a time? No, that is unfair. So value has to be calculated in all scales and somehow added up. What this should look like mathematically, I do not know yet.

A second exploration is concerned with time. Shouldn’t we add ‘value to be expected’ to our criteria? With a young organism we may be justified to have expectations on what it may gain in value later on, at least statistically. Individuals may differ greatly in this respect, and so do different species. Art objects may inspire whole generations, or at the other extreme remain practically unnoticed. Particularly in art such ‘potential values’ are difficult to estimate. There is a whole new field to explore.

Finally, speaking of time, one may wonder whether I haven’t focussed too much on the finished objects of art rather than on the artistic process per se. Doesn’t value reside in the latter? Instead of organisms at one or more points in time, one might emphasise the dynamics of development and evolution. I did, in fact, discuss the artistic process rather than pictures and gave some attention to the process of learning, but neither development nor evolution stop there. A more dynamical approach might open new vistas, but also extreme complications.

Certainly, concerning the evolutionary process of nature on our planet, it is more important than the artificial conservation of single species or individuals, though both are valuable too. However, it may be clear that the argument of the greater value of the evolutionary process is easily corrupted into a pretext to let individuals or species die. After all, it is all of them together that are the bearers of the evolutionary elan, and nobody can predict where the limits of the latter are. We may tempt it too far only once.

Notes:

(1) "We do not compose, sing, or play music for any useful purpose" (1972: 205).

(2) The notion of inherent dignity has been borrowed, I assume, from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, established in 1948 by the United Nations. In its turn, the latter concept is derived from the Kantian notion of Würde  (Drenthen & Kockelkoren, 1999) which is nicht-verrechenbar (cannot be bartered) (Wikipedia - Würde).

(3) The notion of 'hedonic society' may require explanation. In biological terms, human interrelations are often described as hierarchies (pecking order) and territoriality (in surface areas, competences, rights, powers). It was Michael R. A. Chance (1970) who first stated that these are patterns, the meanings of which are determined by two modes of behaviour which he dubbed hedonic and agonic. These modes may describe relationships between individuals, as well as social structures of and between groups. For example imagine this:

Your boss at the office is a tyrant. He gives orders and does not wait for comments. He does not trust you; checks your work and the way you spend your time, always ready to reproach or fire you at the slightest provocation. You distrust him. You are all the time aware of his presence and afraid to give him a reason for his wrath.

But things can also be like this: your boss says good-morning as he comes to your desk. Having instructed you as to your next task, he takes time to listen to any questions you may have about it. He may solicit your attention to its importance  to the firm, and says thank you when you have finished it correctly. He is boss, the one to take decisions, but he allows you to feel like contributing to the common purpose. You trust him to not unexpectedly punish or dismiss you.

These are examples of the agonic and the hedonic styles respectively. They differ in the structure of attention between the actors and in the direction of information: up-down only in the former case, both ways in the other. In the agonic mode the authority of the boss is based on his power to punish. He binds your attention. Social tension is strong. The hedonic boss also solicits your attention, but on the basis of his prestige rather than power. The atmosphere is relatively relaxed.

Both modes are comparatively stable, though not forever; both are economically effective. They can also coexist, even between the same persons, depending on the moods or on the well-being of the firm. In adverse periods the agonic mode may prevail; the hedonic may reestablish itself when the tide turns (Kortmulder & Robbers, 2005).

(4) One can conclude as to the presence of such brain maps whenever an animal proves able to solve spatial problems without help from an experimenter, viz. finding a short-cut it has never been able to see before (E,C, Tolman's classic experiments) or making an efficient detour when an obstacle is placed in its habitual path.

(5) Here quoted from Dorment & McDonald, 1984.

(6) The number of new connections is a rather primitive measure. Ideally, one should know how information is stored in a network as well as what kind(s) of network the brain consists of.

(7) But not to be ignored!

(8) Perhaps the H2 molecules of a cosmic hydrogen cloud are all the same, or the particles of a flu virus, but even that is not certain, since each of them has its history.

Discussion; questions asked at diverse presentations.

Q1: As to imagings from the outer world getting integrated in an individual animal’s or human’s system: this suggests that an individual gains in value with time, which seems intuitively to be right, at least during the active part of its life. Quite apart from old age, however, there is a phase in the normal development of a child where parts of the brain are broken down, connections abolished. How do you account for that in your assessment of the child’s value? It can’t go down, can it?

A1: In principle, I have no objections to the idea that an individual’s value - as visualised in my presentation - may temporarily go down. The local reduction of  brain connections around the age of three may be a question of se reculer pour mieux sauter. However, if the reduction is part of a reorganisation that as a whole improves the integration capability of the whole brain, there even isn’t a dip in value, only a shift in its content. Alternatively, I may point at what I said on ‘value to be expected’. So far, I stick with the concept of value at a certain moment, but that is mainly because the practical problems with assessment are multiplied in the alternative, more dynamic, model.

Q2: I think your view of value misses several points. In my eyes, a mediocre piece of art from a period of which little is left, is worth much more effort to conserve than a masterwork from a well-documented time or area.

A2: One of my points of departure is that the value of an art object as an art  object does not change when it becomes rare or when many similar objects are discovered. What you allude to as reasons for conservation is the scientific value, or the commercial. The latter I have left out from the beginning. The scientific value is possibly what Leertouwer had in mind. His remark served the purpose in the introduction, but I think also scientific value should be excluded from the artistic value.

Q3: On the whole, I appreciate your approach to the concept of value in nature. A similar treatment of art, however, is unjustified, because it ignores the transcendent values inherent in the latter, in particular the value of beauty. How do you propose to deal with them?

A3: This is a very important point. Let me add a few notes. First - at the risk of damaging my own point of view - I have doubts about any categorical distinctions between humans vs animals, culture vs nature. Nature too appeals to our sense of beauty. Moreover, wherever natural beauty is a result of sexual selection, it mirrors the sense of beauty of the selecting partner (who was/is an animal).

Second, it is important to distinguish between the concept of beauty and its actualisation in this or that object. As we all know, the presence and degree of it in a certain object is admitting of personal taste and of cultural background.

In the art world of to-day, the predicate of beauty is out. More weight is given to an object’s power to arrest and hold attention. This may do paltry justice to the concept of beauty, but the advantage is that one can measure that power by observing people. More or less the same is true for other non-verbal responses of spectators betraying the perception of beauty: being awed, stunned, reverent, devoted etc.

As to mutual gauging of different measures, I derive some confidence from the fact that it is all about images, also in the appreciation of beauty: the perfect balance between qualitatively different subjects in a painting, the brilliant turn in the plot of a story, the surprising yet familiar shift of key in music, etc.

Finally (but not least), should such integration of measures prove impossible, and our measurement of value be of necessity incomplete, this should not deter us from further developing and applying the new principle here proposed for as far as it goes, in art as well as in nature. In my opinion, it contributes to our understanding of what this is: an object’s value.

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