All This Useless Beauty
A matter of perplexity
1.
How strange are the stirrings of the heart. Here we have nothing less than the promise of death; our ancestors, if on their nomadic wanderings they found themselves facing the above landscape, would have been well advised to turn back, turn aside, flee, and find some grassy place capable of sustaining human life. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the image above should hold nothing for us — except perhaps fear. And yet the image is arresting to the eye, alluring, fit for contemplation, even pleasurable to look upon — and, more than that, stirs up deep wells of longing. The desert is beautiful, though we have no use for it. I don’t know why.
“All art is quite useless,” said Oscar Wilde, failing to go far enough. In fact it is the aesthetic instinct itself which seems to be useless. If we characterise the experience of beauty as a way of being “drawn to” those objects which seem to possess it, then we seem to be as much drawn to things that are bad for us, or which we ought to be indifferent to, as we are to things which are good for us. Easy enough to imagine that humans drawn to Claude Lorrain pastures gain some fitness advantage by that instinct — there would be good grazing, as it were. But our instinct for beauty seems just as well to favour the desert, the jungle, the barren slopes of snow-tipped mountains, the spectacle of grinding glaciers — places which give no promise of human habitation. And it’s not only landscapes; who is not stirred and excited by the sight of a tiger’s “fearful symmetry”? And yet this aesthetic instinct, this feeling for beauty, is a fully developed faculty of the human mind, capable of distracting us and obsessing us. What advantage, in Darwinian terms, have we ever had from it? It’s not at all clear.
Think even of that example of beauty which seems most promising for evolutionary psychology: that of our fellow humans. In this case our affection for beauty can, surely, be seen as an antechamber of the sexual instinct — beauty here is a proxy for breedability. But this is precisely the sort of thing we could not say about the targets of our affection, since it seems to deny the content of that affection as we know it. The account is incomplete. The beautiful person may or may not be the subject of the sexual appetite, but will certainly be the subject of adoration; and even our desire, our longing for the beautiful is not only a sexual desire. Even to say that lust is not the whole story seems to be to say more than crude evolutionary psychology can account for; what advantage do we gain from the deep well of emotion, that eros which poets have struggled for centuries to express, which we would not have gained from animal lust alone? Is it not as liable to debilitate as be a spur to action?
Why has the sight of the full moon such a beneficent, quieting, and exalting effect? Because the moon is an object of perception, but never of desire.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Leaving aside Schopenhauer’s proposed explanation for the moon’s beauty — mankind in the 20th century has made it the object of desire and wooed her in Apollonian fashion — we must agree with his characterisation of its effect as “beneficent, quieting, and exalting”. The moon is beautiful in almost any condition but when it is full and low on the horizon and thereby seemingly magnified in its glory, it can make one catch one’s breath. But when in all the hundreds of thousands of years of humanity’s existence has one single man or woman gained any advantage in Darwinian fitness by admiring a sphere of rock some 400,000 km away? We may say that we gain some advantage by its light — but it provides that light whether or not we admire it, and, besides, what thing would we rather see by moonlight than the moon itself? Still, it arouses our instinct for beauty — uselessly if not, as Schopenhauer would have it, disinterestedly. This is to say nothing of the rest of the night sky — even more distant, even more useless to us, and yet the Milky Way, seen without light pollution, is surely worthy of being called beautiful.
Now consider the peacock’s tail.
The standard story of the evolution of the peacock’s tail is given in terms of the handicap principle: the male ancestors of modern peacocks could signal their fitness to the females of the species by growing slightly larger tails than their fellow males. The tail is an encumbrance; it imposes a cost on the peacock that grows it, and if the peacock was otherwise weak or sickly, it would not be able to survive either the metabolic costs of growing it nor the energy costs of dragging it around. As a signal of fitness, it cannot be faked. Thus, peahens who mated with peacocks with larger, more extravagant tails had fitter offspring, conferring a fitness advantage on those peahens who were attracted to large tails. This creates a feedback loop across the generations: peahens benefit from being attracted to large tails, so peacocks benefit from growing large tails, so the tails of peacocks get larger and more extravagant up to the point where growing an even larger tail would be more costly than can be borne.
An alternative hypothesis is summarised by Sarah Perry1 in her essay “An Ecology of Beauty and Strong Drink”:
A less well-known possibility, surprising in its arbitrariness, is the sensory exploitation or sensory bias hypothesis: that traits evolved to capitalize on some pre-existing sensory capacity for pleasure and beauty. Under this framework, animals have built-in sensory and discriminatory capacity – that is, aesthetic capacity. This capacity is then exploited in sexual selection, directing the color, sound, shape, and other features of sexual displays. Frog calls evolve not to signal any particular adaptive trait, but to optimally stimulate frog hearing organs; guppies get orange spots because the fruit they like is orange. Female wolf spiders like leg tufts on male wolf spiders because they look cool, even if their species hasn’t yet evolved them.
She goes on:
Why are island animals and plants so beautiful? The birds of paradise evolved on islands and are some of the most varied and beautiful birds, showing off extreme secondary sexual characteristics. Cichlids in isolated lakes in Africa – islands of water – evolved bright and varied colors. Even the lowly fruit fly, when it migrated to Hawaii, evolved into beautiful forms, perhaps a thousand species, including the colorful “picture-wing” flies sometimes called the birds of paradise of the insect kingdom. The males use visual, auditory, and even tactile signals to establish their mating suitability.
In biological evolution, the maintenance of arbitrary aesthetic preferences is possible as long as the costs are not too high (pp. 296-298). In virgin environments, such as islands or isolated lakes, lucky immigrants find that their co-evolved parasites and predators are not present; the costs of maintaining some arbitrary preference for beauty in mating may therefore be decreased. The fewer parasites and predators you have to contend with, the more you can focus on within-species competition, often expressed in complex (and beautiful) adaptations for mating display.
Isn’t it odd that the outcomes of these processes should so often coincide with our human perceptions of beauty? Why is it the case that a peahen’s sexual instincts, moulded in the crucible of Darwinian selection, should produce something that we find as splendid and delightful at the peacock’s tail, when our interest in peacocks is (one hopes) of an entirely different kind to hers? Why should birds of paradise be so pretty? If the sensory bias hypothesis is true, where are the species whose arbitrary aesthetics preference led to the evolution of secondary sexual characteristics such as huge red warts, ichor-dripping orifices, great folds and drapes of needless pale flesh? Certainly there are repulsive animals — think of the naked mole rat — but these are not animals that have evolved under conditions where aesthetic preference has had space to work. The island effect outlined above seems to select for riotous colour and strange delightfulness; it seems that when animals have the freedom to select their mates according to aesthetics their preferences accord with our own. But that seems to suggest universal aesthetic standards; that aesthetic preferences are not, in fact, arbitrary. How could such a thing come about?
And if we take the handicap hypothesis as true (I think both must be true to some extent2), well, that’s even stranger: why should the peacock better signal its fitness not by encumbering itself with a swinging gut of flab, but with a resplendent and dazzling display of colour? Why does nature prefer beauty to ugliness?
2.
The mystery here is three-fold: firstly, there is the question of why we, human beings, have an instinct for beauty in the first place, when it seems to serve for us no purpose which renders any Darwinian advantage. Secondly there is the question of why evolution itself, when it has the leeway to do so, seems to prefer to produce beautiful forms rather than ugly ones. Thirdly, we must wonder at this catalogue of diverse phenomena: sunsets, the moon, light on the ocean, flowers, birds of paradise, the faces of our fellow human beings, figurative and non-figurative art, music, poetry, architecture, sculpture, deserts, icebergs, clear blue skies, mountain ranges, and the Milky Way, and ask why we feel there is something they have in common that they can share the name “beauty”.
One attempt to answer some of these questions is found in various forms in the works of Kant, Schopenhauer, and most recently Roger Scruton. It proposes that we experience aesthetic pleasure when we are drawn to contemplate an object or vision; that it is precisely when we wish to make no use of it, but consider it disinterestedly that an object seems to us beautiful — or rather that beauty compels us to consider it in this way, and this form of consideration is the nature of aesthetic experience. I find this account deeply inadequate. Let me explain why.
The first thing to consider is whether our response to beauty can really be called “aesthetic pleasure”. Certainly encounters with beauty often involve hedonic pleasure, but just as often beauty is poignant and invokes deep melancholy. I also question the implications of the term “disinterested contemplation” — which seems to imply a silence or calm which, again, is part of the aesthetic experience, but which is often accompanied by its opposite: agitation or longing. Indeed, our contemplation of the beautiful is not really disinterested at all. It would be more accurate to say that it’s hopeless — not desireless but invested with desires beyond any possibility of fulfilment. It’s not that we want to use or possess the beautiful, but that we want to, in some way, be with it, in the place where it is which, it seems, is somewhere other than the place we’re looking from. The way we have beauty, which is in contemplation, is not the way we wish to have it — but under normal circumstances there is no overcoming the separation between us and the beautiful, which, as Scruton says in his documentary Why Beauty Matters, is “something not of this world”.
This longing or desire does find occasional fulfilment. Scruton says:
Consider the joy you might feel when you hold a friend’s baby in your arms. You don’t want to do anything with the baby. You don’t want to eat it, to put it to any use, or to conduct scientific experiments on it. You want simply to look at it, and to feel the great surge of delight that comes when you focus all your thoughts on this baby, and none at all on yourself.
But of course, upon seeing a friend’s baby we do desire more than to simply contemplate it; as Scruton observed without noticing the contradiction, we desire to hold it. This is an adequate and fulfilling form of Being-With — the distance between ourselves and the somehow-other-worldly object of adoration has been closed. Something similar happens, perhaps, in romantic love: we attain a kind of unity with the beloved, and it is as though the transcendent has been brought somehow close to our mundane condition, or vice versa.
So where is the place that beauty seems to come from? It is, I suggest, our imagined home — the place where beauty is not a momentary, if happy, accident, ultimately contingent amidst the chaos and disorder of the world, but the place where it has dominion — which is to say the Fairyland of the imagination, or that Fairyland of all Fairylands, Heaven. And as a reminder of Home, beauty gives pleasure as at a happy memory, but it also induces homesickness; both the desire to return and the sadness at being away. To contemplate the beautiful is a happy condition, but it is as though we have only the memory of the thing, not the thing itself. What we long for is a true homecoming. But this otherworldliness, the sense that beauty is somehow distant even when it is at-hand, is cause not only for longing but for consolation; what seems to be beyond us seems also to be beyond the abuses of the world. As Tolkien put it:
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
Of course, to say that beauty speaks of another world is not to say that that other world exists, necessarily. But there we return to our mysteries. Whereas we can say that man in the midst of his exile has imagined for himself a distant home in which humane order reigns, in relation to which he stands as Don Quixote did to romantic literature — he manifests some part of it in himself — it becomes difficult to explain why some part of that imagined order should show itself in the world in a way that has nothing to do with man: in a sunset, the moon, the peacock’s tail etc.
3.
Look: I am a Darwinist. Evolution through natural selection is the true account of how life on Earth came to take its form. Ultimately, I suppose our experience of beauty must find somewhere a naturalistic explanation — but no less than our religious friends should we be willing to say, “Through doubt we come to questioning and through questioning perceive the truth.” I wrote this piece only to own up to my bafflement. I do not have a theory of beauty, only this baggy and disorganised phenomenology. I remain baffled.
Those unfamiliar with Sarah’s contributions over at ribbonfarm should make themselves familiar. Your time will be well rewarded.
Although strictly speaking animals arbitrary aesthetic preferences would explain nothing; rather they must have arbitrary sexual preferences which somehow correspond to our aesthetic preferences, arbitrary or otherwise.