I came to one of the Russian master’s most illustrious, if misleadingly named, paintings: “Several Circles.”
Those “several” circles, I saw, were more like three dozen, and every one of them seemed to be rising from the canvas, buoyed by the shrewdly exuberant juxtapositioning of their different colors, sizes and apparent translucencies. I learned that, at around the time Kandinsky painted the work, in 1926, he had begun collecting scientific encyclopedias and journals; and as I stared at the canvas, a big, stupid smile plastered on my face, I thought of yeast cells budding, or a haloed blue sun and its candied satellite crew, or life itself escaping the careless primordial stew.
I also learned of Kandinsky’s growing love affair with the circle. The circle, he wrote, is “the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally.” It is “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.” Kandinsky loved the circle so much that it finally supplanted in his visual imagination the primacy long claimed by an emblem of his Russian boyhood, the horse.
Or maybe the circle beckons not for its resemblance to human face but as a mark of human art. Dr. Dutton, author of “The Art Instinct,” pointed out that perfect shapes were exceedingly rare in nature. “Take a look at a billiard ball,” he said. “It’s impossible to imagine that nature threw that one up.” We are predisposed to recognize “human artifacture,” he said, and roundness can be a mark of our handiwork. When nature does play the meticulous Michelangelo, we are astonished.
達頓教授是一位熱情洋溢、博學多才的學者，一位和藹可親、特立獨行的加州人。去世時，他是基督城坎特伯雷大學的哲學教授，自1984年起便在該校任教。
儘管哲學界熱衷於分類，但達頓教授顯然超越了任何既定的範疇。他的研究領域涵蓋美學（他的主要研究方向是藝術哲學）；進化論（他於2009年出版的《藝術本能》一書，以達爾文主義視角探討了進化論，引起了國際關注）；編輯（他創辦並編輯了《哲學與文學》期刊）；晦澀難懂的文風（他公開表示反對這種文風，並舉辦比賽來「表彰」最嚴重的「文風之王」）；剽竊（他將其視為一種文化現象；他本人並非剽竊者）；以及西塔琴演奏（他確實會演奏西塔琴）。
他為主流媒體撰寫了大量文章，新聞媒體也經常就各種話題徵求他的意見，從鼴鼠的鼻子（他曾在8月份接受《紐約時報》採訪時說：「如果星鼻鼴鼠的星狀突起是虹彩藍色的，就不會有人覺得它醜了」）到剽竊和偽造指的本質區別（前者是相反的作品）。
達頓教授最廣為人知的或許是他於1998年創辦的「藝術與文學日報」（Arts & Letters Daily）。該網站是一個網路聚合平台，連結到大量關於文學、藝術、科學、政治等各個領域的線上文章，而他本人則為這些文章撰寫引人入勝的導語。 （例如，他在2009年為《科學美國人》撰寫的一篇文章的導語中寫道：「狗會說話嗎？最新的科學研究表明，它們在某種程度上會。但它們的發音往往很糟糕。」）
早在聚合平台普及之前，「藝術與文學日報」就已經擁有了一群忠實的讀者。該網站如同一個龐大而錯綜複雜的漏斗，充斥著豐富多彩的內容、引人入勝的話題、離題萬千的論述，最終展現了幾乎所有人類活動之間的相互關聯，堪稱數位時代的「《項狄傳》」。
作為最早意識到網路在促進學術交流方面強大力量的人之一，達頓教授被譽為「世界上最具影響力的媒體人物」之一，正如《時代》雜誌在2005年所描述的那樣。
《藝術與文學日報》（Arts & Letters Daily）於2002年被《高等教育紀事報》（The Chronicle of Higher Education）收購，目前每月頁面瀏覽量約300萬。該報總裁兼總編輯菲爾·塞馬斯（Phil Semas）週二在一份聲明中表示，該網站預計將繼續運作。
達頓教授的著作《藝術本能：美、愉悅與人類進化》（布魯姆斯伯里出版社）也引起了廣泛關注。在書中，他運用演化心理學的視角審視藝術，提出這樣的問題：繪畫、音樂或文學之所以呈現出現在的形式，其認知原因為何？ （或者更直白地說，為什麼即使我們對藝術了解不多，也能本能地知道自己喜歡什麼？）
總而言之，這本書是對品味的解釋——達頓教授認為，品味可以透過檢視那些幫助我們遠古祖先在艱苦的史前生存過程中得以延續的先天能力來解釋。
例如，我們對風景畫的本能喜愛，或許可以追溯到早期人類在稀樹草原上的生活。同樣，達頓教授寫道，正如孔雀展開尾羽來吸引配偶一樣，我們創作精美視覺藝術的動力，或許也源自於類似的生物本能。
儘管一些評論家批評達頓教授沉溺於未經證實的推測，但也有人稱讚這本書思想深刻、見解精闢、大膽創新。 《費城問詢報》的卡林·羅馬諾在評論《藝術本能》時寫道，達頓教授「或許是世界上最能解釋」人類普遍創造力需求的思想家。
丹尼斯·勞倫斯·達頓於1944年2月9日出生於洛杉磯。他的父母是書商，創立了後來成為全美知名獨立書店連鎖的達頓書店；多年來，直到不久前最後一家分店關閉，這家連鎖書店一直由他的兄弟戴夫和道格經營。
1966年，丹尼斯·達頓從加州大學聖塔芭芭拉分校獲得哲學學士學位後，加入了和平隊，在印度服務了兩年；之後，他又在聖塔芭芭拉分校獲得了哲學博士學位。在前往紐西蘭任職之前，他曾在密西根大學迪爾伯恩分校任教。
長期接觸學術散文促使達頓教授創辦了「糟糕寫作大賽」。在1990年代，他以哲學與文學系的名義，舉辦了這項賽事數年。
正如他在《華爾街日報》的一篇文章中所解釋的那樣，比賽規則如下：
「參賽作品應為已出版的學術書籍或期刊文章中的一兩句話。不允許翻譯成英文，且作品必須不帶諷刺意味：在一個無意中自我嘲諷如此普遍的領域，我們很難接受戲仿作品。”
學者們紛紛投稿——儘管他們從未真正…
Denis Dutton, Founder of ‘Arts & Letters Daily,’ Dies
December 28, 2010, 11:14 am
Denis Dutton, founder and editor of Arts & Letters Daily and a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has died. Born in California, Mr. Dutton received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He created Arts & Letters Daily in 1998. The Chronicle of Higher Education purchased the widely praised site in 2002.
“Denis was the creative force behind Arts & Letters Daily and wrote all the items on the page himself, even when he was on vacation,” said Phil Semas, president and editor in chief of The Chronicle. “He is nearly irreplaceable. Even so, we intend to continue Arts & Letters Daily in the spirit in which Denis created and nurtured it.”
Evan Goldstein of The Chronicle and Mr. Dutton’s longtime collaborator, Tran Huu Dung, a professor of economics at Wright State University, will continue to produce the site.
Denis Dutton, Philosopher, Dies at 66
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: December 31, 2010
Denis Dutton, a distinguished philosopher, writer and digital-media guru who founded Arts & Letters Daily, one of the first Web sites to exploit the Internet as a vehicle for meaningful intellectual exchange, died on Tuesday in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he lived. He was 66.
Martin Woodhall/Christchurch Star, via Associated Press
Denis Dutton in 2002 in Christchurch, New Zealand.
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The cause was prostate cancer, his son, Ben, said.
An impassioned polymath, genial contrarian and native Californian, Professor Dutton was at his death a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, where he had taught since 1984.
Although philosophy has a mania for classification, Professor Dutton was demonstrably beyond category. His portfolio ranged over aesthetics (his major field of inquiry was the philosophy of art); evolution (his book “The Art Instinct,” a Darwinian exploration published in 2009, commanded international attention); editing (he founded and edited the journal Philosophy and Literature); obfuscatory prose (he was a publicly sworn foe of same, and ran a competition to honor the worst offenders); plagiarism (as a cultural phenomenon; he was not himself a practitioner); and sitar playing (this he did practice).
He wrote widely in the mainstream press, and his opinions were solicited by the news media on subjects from moles’ noses (“No one would find the star-nosed mole ugly if its star were iridescent blue,” he told The New York Times in August) to the essential difference between plagiarism and forgery (in the first, one passes off another’s work as one’s own; in the second, vice versa).
Professor Dutton was perhaps best known to the public for Arts & Letters Daily, which he founded in 1998. The site is a Web aggregator, linking to a spate of online articles about literature, art, science, politics and much else, for which he wrote engaging teasers. (“Can dogs talk? Kind of, says the latest scientific research. But they tend to have very poor pronunciation,” read his lead-in to a 2009 Scientific American article.)
Long before aggregators were commonplace, Arts & Letters Daily had developed an ardent following. A vast, labyrinthine funnel, the site revels in profusion, diversion, digression and, ultimately, the interconnectedness of human endeavor of nearly every sort, a “Tristram Shandy” for the digital age.
As one of the first people to recognize the power of the Web to facilitate intellectual discourse, Professor Dutton was hailed as being among “the most influential media personalities in the world,” as Time magazine described him in 2005.
Arts & Letters Daily, which was acquired by The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2002, currently receives about three million page views a month. The site is expected to continue publishing, Phil Semas, The Chronicle’s president and editor in chief, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Professor Dutton also attracted wide notice with the publication of “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution” (Bloomsbury Press). In it, he examined the arts through the lens of evolutionary psychology, asking, What are the cognitive reasons that painting or music or literature takes the form it does? (Or, to put the question more bluntly, Why, even if we don’t know a lot about art, do we instinctively know what we like?)
In sum, the book was an accounting for taste — and taste, Professor Dutton argued, could be accounted for by looking at the inborn faculties that aided our distant forebears in the arduous prehistoric business of survival.
Our reflexive love of landscape painting, for example, might hark back to early man’s life on the savannah. Likewise, Professor Dutton wrote, just as a peacock unfurls its tail to impress a prospective mate, our drive to make glorious visual art may be rooted in a similar biological imperative.
While some reviewers criticized Professor Dutton for indulging in unverifiable speculation, others praised the book for its intellectual reach, nuance and daring. Reviewing “The Art Instinct” in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Carlin Romano wrote that Professor Dutton “may be the best-equipped thinker in the world to explain” man’s universal need to create.
Denis Laurence Dutton was born in Los Angeles on Feb. 9, 1944. His parents were booksellers who founded what became Dutton’s, a nationally known chain of independent bookstores there; for many years, until the last store closed not long ago, the chain was run by his brothers, Dave and Doug.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1966, Denis Dutton spent two years in India with the Peace Corps; he later earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Santa Barbara. Before taking up his post in New Zealand, he taught at the University of Michigan, Dearborn.
Prolonged exposure to academic prose drove Professor Dutton to create the Bad Writing Contest, which he ran, under the aegis of Philosophy and Literature, for several years in the 1990s.
The contest rules, as he explained them in an essay in The Wall Street Journal, were these:
“Entries should be a sentence or two from an actual published scholarly book or journal article. No translations into English allowed, and the entries had to be nonironic: We could hardly admit parodies in a field where unintentional self-parody was so rampant.”
Scholars rushed to submit writing — though never their own — which was judged by Professor Dutton and his Philosophy and Literature colleagues. Entries did not have to be long to be obscure, as attested by the 1997 third-place winner, from “Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory,” by Fred Botting:
“The lure of imaginary totality is momentarily frozen before the dialectic of desire hastens on within symbolic chains.”
Professor Dutton ended the contest after the annual turgid torrent threatened to overwhelm all concerned.
Besides his son, Ben, and his brothers, Dave and Doug, Professor Dutton is survived his wife, the former Margit Stoll; a daughter, Sonia Dutton; and a sister, Dory Dutton.
His other books include “The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art” (University of California, 1983), an essay collection he edited.
Though Professor Dutton delighted in the tangential, the parenthetical and the weaving of seemingly diverse strands of human enterprise into a seamless whole, there were a few byproducts of the human condition over which he declined to cast the expansive net of Arts & Letters Daily.
“We will never have horoscopes,” he told The Times in a 1998 interview. “If people want horoscopes, they will have to go elsewhere.”
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