Beauty
As I recently finished my new book ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’, to be published by Oneworld in October 2021, I’ve had occasion to ponder beauty. So, here are some of my thoughts.
When we experience something as beautiful it is as if the chasm that usually lies between the ideal and the real, between the world of the imagination and the earthly burden of our body, is temporarily bridged. So, to limit the idea of beauty to ‘beautifying’, to decoration and adornment, fails to do justice to the profound significance beauty can have for us. Beauty seems intimately linked to the conviction that despite plentiful evidence to the contrary all is well with the world, which is why the French novelist Stendhal wrote: "beauty is only a promise of happiness." In other words, beauty is a principal affective medium through which to channel and direct hope.
To sense something as ‘beautiful’ means consciously carving it out and detaching it from a ground of general stimuli and holding it there for rapt attention. This experience is more than simply an instinctual response involving pleasure, as it also involves definition and distinction, and designation, replication, and promotion - the sharing of the experience. But when we are confronted by something beautiful we won’t be much concerned with use or symbolic meaning, and unlike in other circumstances where we desire something and feel pleasure, will have adopted a contemplative rather than active state of mind, and are being relatively disinterested. Beauty, so it seems, is its own sufficient cause and effect. Despite the absence of any perceived practical use value, we will also probably want to take longer over savoring this experience, and actively seek to repeat it. But no one can tell us to have it, and we must be in the presence of the thing of beauty in order to be affected, although at the same time we sense that beauty is in a sense unattached, it seems to be a memory of some kind of perfection triggered by the stimulus. We are also subliminally aware that our experience is shared with others, and while finding something beautiful is a personal experience, it also connects us to our community. A consensus over what is considered beautiful reconciles people with their community in the present, but also with the ancestral past.
The ‘heart’ will tell us that the eyes and nose that sense something to be beautiful are responding spontaneously to an alluring force. But the ‘head’ will judge beauty to be a product of history and education. We have learned to find something beautiful. We experience beauty in a social context which is bounded and organized in terms specific human interests. Our eyes furnish representations rather than an objective record of reality, and this means beauty cannot simply be an objective property of a rose upon which we gaze. What we are aware of seeing as ‘beautiful’ within the rose is the result of social conditioning, a manifestation of ‘visuality’ rather than straight physiological ‘vision.’ Visuality is socially coded, and largely depends on associative learning. Even our sense of smell, the most chemical and ‘animal’ of our senses, is culturally structured. In one recent scientific experiment, researchers took 15 odours which ranged from ‘pleasant’ via ‘natural’ to ‘disgusting’, and presented them to subjects with names attached to the odours that were intended to communicate positive, neutral and negative associations. They found that regardless of the objective status of the odour as ‘unpleasant’, ‘neutral’ or ‘pleasant’, an odour was rated more pleasant if it was given a positive name, and rated less so when it had an unpleasant name. Remarkably, this was even registered on a somatic level in terms of changes in skin conductance and heart rate.[i]
Children learn to make discriminative responses to what they see and smell as a result of imitating the preferences and behaviour of adults. Their preferences are not hard-wired. What we will find beautiful is closely tied to who we have imitated in order to develop a stable set of values and beliefs. The concept of beauty can also be mobilized to conceal and embellish the nefarious social world by aiding in the construction of an ideal and illusory dimension. Beauty is socially manipulative, even deceptive, and is inevitably connected to power. Through organizing and policing judgments of taste in relation to beauty, a ruling elite creates a favourable hierarchy through which to distinguished insiders from outsiders – the ‘them’ from ‘us’. Even apparently ‘frivolous’ kinds of beauty can become weapons of seduction, exploitation, and oppression, as the changing cycles of fashion within cultures show. When seen from the point of view of the paramount need for social cohesion, the function of beauty, and its embodiment like a rose, is to aid conformity and guarantee social cohesion. The beauty code influences the sense and sensibility of society. Sharing in the same sources of beauty unites a society behind the same values, enhancing chances of survival through creating a sense of community. But it often does this at the expense of other members of the society. As Naomi Wolf wrote in her book The Beauty Myth (1990):
‘Beauty’ is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to woman in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.’
Edward Steichen, ‘Heavy Roses. Voulangis, France, 1914’
But to limit beauty just social conditioning is obviously only to tell part of the story. If we consider the dynamics of beauty from the point of view of natural selection - that is, as linked to human sexual choices and competition, to compulsions of reproductive success - a more complex picture emerges. Evolutionary psychologist have shown that over millennia the human brain has constructed a motivational system in which the complex natural and humanly-made order are unconsciously being exploited to wire the brain and calibrate our senses. These processes are vital, because both our awareness of being an individual self and the physical survival of the species depend on it. Specific patterns or structures in the world seem to be especially salient, because in perceiving them humans acquire inherent advantages in terms of natural selection. At birth, selective pressures equip babies, for example, in ways that predispose them to think and behave in particular ways. The universal preference for symmetry, say, may be related to the need to find a healthy mate, because as disease and physical deformity tend to make people look less symmetrical, this provides a clear visual signal indicating the biological advantage of the symmetry.
Humans have also learned to organize experience though the systematic categorization of phenomena and concepts into regulative patterns, which are then culturally inscribed, thereby increasing chances of survival. Humans seem to have an instinctual tendency to want to fit things into predetermined categories, and especially gain pleasure from identifying and perceiving ‘perfect’ examples of the categories that are habitually recognized - what psychologists term ‘preference-for-prototypes’. [ii] In this context, the factors that mark something out as ‘beautiful’ can be understood as linked to what seems most representative of its kind, or what makes something closest to the prototype. This tendency supplies a non-metaphysical basis for the belief that when we find a rose beautiful we are moving beyond the sensible experience and grasping a construct which, while it is based on sensory experience, is mentally autonomous.
A sense of beauty is also important in relation to the brain-based chemical rewards that are essential for cognition and action, because human encounters with the world are evaluative. We engage with the world in terms of its positive or negative implications for us, but these assessments must also be dynamic, because rewards of value are unstable.[iii] Our response to something beautiful triggers chemicals in our brain associated with the positive experience of happiness, and this benign emotional state in its turn increases my survival potential. The sight of something beautiful can trigger dopamine, a chemical that is emitted when there is expectation of a reward. The role of beauty within deeply entrenched rituals and actions also help to stimulate the release of oxytocin, the so-called ‘bonding hormone’. Something beautiful can also release serotonin, which is linked to a sense of social status which bolsters good feelings associated with the positive values they embody for those who grow, give, or receive them.[iv]
In this sense, beauty is much more than simply a pleasurable experience. It is closely related to optimizing brain-body coordination. Our embodied mind is responding on physiological and mental levels to a harmonious experience that involves our senses in unison. We experiencing a complex sensory stimulus emerging in an orderly way that is suggestive of some underlying generative process. What all this evidence suggests is that we are unconsciously aligning our senses and brain with the beautiful thing’s dynamically patterned order of growth.
But if this is all true, then why didn’t all humans in the past, and humans in the present, share the exact same aesthetic preferences? Because humans live in ecological habitats in which a wide variety of different stimuli are constantly being encountered, and so from the point of view of natural selection it would make no sense for them all to have the same emotional and cognitive responses to stimuli wherever they are. Information from the environment is often ambiguous, making interpretation difficult, and so we call on past experiences, stored knowledge, and social norms to help us make rapid inferences about what we perceive, and how to respond. Rather than having a predetermined set of responses, we have learned how to respond ‘appropriately’ to a particular stimulus when encountered.
In other words, instead of being constrained by instinctual patterns we are capable of learning the lessons taught to us by our culture. So, alongside the hard-wired perceptual or sensory responses registered by our body there are acculturated and specific contexts that help determine our aesthetic preference. In terms of evolutionary advantage, the dual sources of the experience of beauty - the biological and the cultural - have provided humanity with its most important characteristic: socially coordinated adaptability. This allows for greater openness to changing circumstances, based on shared social knowledge and not just on direct responses to stimuli, employing our neural architecture, involving emotion, perception, imagery, memory and language. This means that when we say something is ‘beautiful’ our judgment isn’t determined by either purely biological or purely cultural influences. The aesthetic experience emerges from the networked interactions within our brain and body, and in relation to the world around us. In the end, it seems the best way to explain why we can have the experience of beauty when we look at or smell a rose is that it is a benefit of having a uniquely flexible relationship to the world.
Names of Muhammad written around a Damask Rose. Persia. 18th Century.
[i] Djordjevic, J.; Lundstrom, J. N.; Clément, F., et al, ‘A Rose by Any Other Name: Would it Smell as Sweet?’, Journal of Neurophysiology, Vol. 99, No.1, 2008, 386-393. Available on-line at:https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00896.2007[ii] See: Scharfstein, B.-A., Art Without Border. A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 48[iii] Starr, G. G., Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Boston: The MIT Press, 2013)[iv] Breuning, L. G., ‘Why Flowers Make Us Happy’, Psychology Today, Posted June 21, 2017. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-neurochemical-self/201706/why-flowers-make-us-happySee also: Breuning, L. G. , Habits of a Happy Brain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).