{"id":783,"date":"2026-08-28T06:33:47","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T06:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/08\/28\/humans-did-not-invent-art-it-was-the-other-way-around-aeon-essays\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T06:33:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T06:33:47","slug":"humans-did-not-invent-art-it-was-the-other-way-around-aeon-essays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/08\/28\/humans-did-not-invent-art-it-was-the-other-way-around-aeon-essays\/","title":{"rendered":"Humans did not invent art. It was the other way around | Aeon Essays"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Indeed, science begins \u2013 and can only begin \u2013 in the world that art has made. Ultimately, what we call art is the fruit of the human imagination\u2019s capacity to go beyond immediate perception, to dream what lies around this corner, outside the human world. From this point of view, the hypothetical stage of the scientific method is nothing less than art: an exercise through which we step out of the mundanities of the actual to explore the possible as such, testing our dreams and extending our reach into the more-than-human.<\/p>\n<p>This is why the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in 1968 described aesthetics as a \u2018science of the sensible\u2019. Art, for him, makes the world that science later measures, but the world it makes is ultimately beyond all measurement because it is the world that exists before we divide it into lengths, magnitudes and quantities. Bergson, a major influence on Deleuze, had called this a \u2018qualitative multiplicity\u2019, closer in nature to a continuous melody than to a series of discrete, static things that can be isolated from one another. It is what comes first, because it is the Real itself.<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/humans-did-not-invent-art-it-was-the-other-way-around\">aeon.co\/essays\/humans-did-not-invent-art-it-was-the-other-way-around<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Indeed, science begins \u2013 and can only begin \u2013 in the world that art has made. Ultimately, what we call art is the fruit of the human imagination\u2019s capacity to go beyond immediate perception, to dream what lies around this corner, outside the human world. From this point of view, the hypothetical stage of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[194,81,7],"class_list":["post-783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-anthropology","tag-art","tag-consciousness"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}