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Whatsapp What does philosophy have to say about cute animals?

Where does the idea of cuteness fit in relation to grander philosophical concepts like beauty? Has cuteness been wholly commodified? Do you like videos of kittens? The Philosopher's Zone does.

You think of philosophical discussions, and you tend to think of big things. Philosophy, after all, is the battleground of ideas central to life—truth, say, or how to define what is morally just. Is beauty an inherent quality of objects, or does it manifest only in the mind of a given individual? These are all quite big questions.

It can be tempting to say at this point that philosophy doesn't interact meaningfully with everyday life. Philosophy, after all, has little to say about Facebook feeds filled with cat videos or YouTube clips of obscure Japanese game shows. That's why Sianne Ngai, professor in literary and cultural theory at Stanford University, got a bit fed up.

There's a sort of sadism that's involved in our relationship to cute things.

'A lot of contemporary aesthetic philosophy seemed stuck in the 18th century,' Ngai says. 'The main concepts always spoken about were the beautiful, the sublime—these are wonderful aesthetic experiences, but didn't seem to be the ones people use most frequently in their everyday lives.'

Ngai has made a study of these lesser-known aesthetic categories: concepts like beauty that seemed neglected by the larger academic establishment. One such category is that of cute, or cuteness. Why, philosophically speaking, are certain things categorised as cute, and what does it mean that they are?

'Unlike the beautiful, there is no theory of the cute,' Ngai says. 'That begins with nature.'

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Whatsapp Is there an element of sadism in how we construe the idea of cute?

There is a biological underpinning to the idea of cuteness. In the 1940s, ethologist Konrad Lorenz theorised that what he called kinderschema, or typically childish aesthetic traits, would activate a kind of 'parental release' in adults.

Palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould took on the cause: his now-famous essay, A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse, contended that over time the flagship Disney cartoon character's cranium and bodily shape had been redrawn to juvenile proportions, in a sort of exact reverse of the aging process. Gould reckoned that these changes were made in order to make the character inoffensive and to better elicit nurturing parental instincts.

The Mickey Mouse example is an important one: Sianne Ngai argues that, as an aesthetic category, cuteness only starts to become prominent after the rise of commodity culture in the latter half of the 19th century. 'The cute,' as Ngai puts it, has quite a dark side to it. 'It's really important that things that we find cute are more powerless than we are. Things tend to be cuter when they're passive, when they're injured.'

Ngai cites the example of a post-war stuffed animal toy, popular in England, that was modified to become cuter and more appealing if it had a bandage or a crutch attached to it. 'There's a sort of sadism that's involved in our relationship to cute things,' he says.

Cuteness is also made exceptional by its ambivalence. 'Unlike the beautiful, which is a judgement,' Ngai explains, 'it's not really clear that calling something cute is praise or criticism.'

To Ngai, this reflects a world where people are generally less certain about their aesthetic judgements.

In a sense, this would seem to contradict the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who stressed that aesthetic categories such as beauty had some universal consistency. Ngai, however, sees this ambivalence around cuteness as fitting with more contemporary aesthetic categories. 'Many of our contemporary aesthetic experiences are mixed feelings; people aren't sure exactly what to feel.'

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Whatsapp The cute has a particular power to compel feeling and action in human beings.

One thing you can say for sure—cuteness is trivial in a way that beauty and truth aren't. There is, Ngai argues, a corresponding difficulty with attaching to cuteness any of the moral or religious claims that often hector ideas like justice or the greater good. But cuteness is also, in its way, a powerful experience, in that it changes our behaviour. Ngai identifies the phenomenon of infant-directed speech as evidence of the eldritch power of cuteness.

'Look at the way people lean over puppies or babies. Men or women imitate the cute object! Their speech gets softer and more infantile,' says Ngai.

'That's one aspect of the surprising power of the trivial aesthetic forms.'

It's something to think about next time you see a video of a particularly cute Instagram of a friend's baby, or an unlikely interspecies friendship, which you probably will today.

'Another example of the power of the cute,' Ngai says, 'is its cultural ubiquity.'