Evolutionary Aesthetics of Human Ethics in Hardy’s Tragic Narratives

Professor Rıza Öztürk's new book, Evolutionary Aesthetics of Human Ethics in Hardy's Tragic Narratives, represents the cutting-edge thinking about narratives in terms of evolutionary science. The book reflects the best knowledge in this area (e.g., Paul Ekman, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby) as well as the best thinking on literary Darwinism (e.g., Joseph Carroll). In a well-written and well-organized book, Öztürk carefully delineates how aesthetics interacts with chance and selection in the work of Thomas Hardy, who embodies tragic figures with altruistic behavior to render reader response. Öztürk skillfully outlines how (evolved) emotions influence intention, attention, and consciousness; emotions are adapted functions designed to deliver aesthetic response (which means that art is not necessarily a human byproduct but is a necessary, evolved need). Stories (in both the telling and listening) are cognitive adaptations driven by aesthetics (and with significance for ordinary life). From aesthetics come ethics. Aesthetics is part of the process of selection so that triggered behaviors are put into play; such behaviors indicate fitness. Furthermore, Öztürk demonstrates, Hardy epitomizes how total ecological forces tap into basic (adapted) human emotions: Hardy's natural world embodies evolutionary fitness to evince adapted behaviors in society and culture. For Hardy, nature is a complex web of real and cognitive inter-weavings: that is, selection (competition to attract a sexual partner) operates on (and within) individuals. Öztürk concludes that we find two categories of characters in Hardy: outsiders whose selfishness limits control; those who strive for fitness (even if failure is inevitable). While there is suffering in Hardy's novels, such pain and grief exist to illustrate altruistic fitness – sympathy and compassion. Thomas Hardy does not create this suffering (it is in nature – or in society), which serves to reveal (or not) an individual's adaptability (or not). Thus, Öztürk explains, Hardy helps make readers sympathetic to characters; he is hopeful regarding his characters and demonstrates how to be humane in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Because we feel sympathy and compassion we are not, then, vulnerable but active, and such an emotional state prepares readers for survival (and reproduction). For Hardy, the facts of life help us develop (seen through Öztürk's evolutionary approach) ethical sensibilities. As Joseph Carroll has remarked, the linguistic and textual poststructuralist readings of the 1970s and 1980s have yielded, ultimately, unsatisfactory results. Now, along with names such as Carroll's, Rıza Öztürk will rank among the top scholars of this important, robust meeting of the sciences and humanities.