Beauty is objective-ish

The last post was about how I think/feel that aesthetic “goodness” is in some sense objective, and capable of being skillfully evaluated. Now I am going to attempt to defend that supposition by getting philosophical on your ass.

Instead of starting with logic, let me start with feelings. The aesthetic difference between a cathedral and a parking garage is pretty immense, right? And the aesthetic difference between Denali and Fayetteville, NC is also pretty immense, right? These are not things we need to make intellectual evaluations about; just being in those settings has a noticeable effect on how we feel.

The same goes for music and any of the more “fine” arts. When I go from listening to Van Morrison or Bob Dylan or Ray LaMontagne to listening to hit radio (LMFAO/Adam Levine/Pitbull), it feels just like stepping out of a cathedral and into a parking garage. The difference is so immense that it seems somewhat absurd that these things share the same planet (let alone the same city block). It’s almost like, okay, to the left we have our sacred stuff, and to the right we have, well, the other stuff.

We can pretty easily drop the sacredness quotient by theorizing about why we silly primates care about aesthetics. The only reasonable way to answer such ‘why’ questions is through invoking evolution. You can make a natural selection argument that our ancestors were more likely to survive when they preferred landscapes that looked “lush” and “verdant,” and that their offspring were more likely to survive when they preferred mates who looked “symmetric” and “proportioned.”¹ And you can make a sexual selection argument that ladies were more likely to choose dudes who could display “complex” and “harmonious” qualities-that-are-hard-to-fake-that-signal-important-things through their music/painting/other creations. These arguments seem to me not only plausible but really the only reasonable way to think about it.

You can hear a more eloquent articulation of this view in Denis Dutton’s TED talk.²

The point is that, like everything else, our sense of aesthetics is just another mechanism to increase our genes’ probability of surviving for a couple more generations. In that sense, you can kind of see how there would be an “objective” “standard” of beauty—it’s whatever things are most likely to help genes survive. It’s an arbitrary and incidental standard, sure, but it’s still there.⁶

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I’m guessing that some religious readers might find this notion of mine terribly sad. Where’s the sacredness? Love⁵ and compassion and (depending on your particular religious flavor; I’m looking disapprovingly at you, protestants) beauty—this is what it’s all about. This is God’s stuff.

My response would be sorry, but I think you’re stretching it, because I can pretty easily explain all of those things through the lens of evolution. It’s comforting to put some extra padding and narrative around our proclivities toward these things, but if you ask me, it’s kind of (ahem) sad that we seek that kind of comfort.

There is just no escaping this biological reality of ours. There are no islands where beauty reigns free of biology. Even cathedrals have places for people to poop.

I’ll say, though, that I probably seek my own comfort through the lens of evolution. It’s a process (which is probably better conceptualized as a “Law of Biology”) that results in things that are so unfathomably complex but also so strangely coherent that it seems to me, in a way, sacred-ish. Totally unintentional, and totally arbitrary, but sacred-ish. Somewhat paradoxically, the process/law that created our perception of beauty is now seen by us (or at least by this creature; Me) as “beautiful.”

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¹If you buy this theory, then one prediction is that other animals possess a sense of aesthetics. This may surprise you, but that seems to me almost certainly true. Aesthetics are not limited to appreciating music or paintings—these are the complex/hard-to-fake brand of aesthetics that we creatures who rely heavily on our brains use to signal our intelligence and sensitivity and such things to mates, but other animals have less-brainy ways of addressing this information problem. I certainly think that most animals and probably all mammals make comparisons on beauty in landscapes and in mates. If you don’t believe me, maybe you should try looking at what the birds are up to in Spring.

²This might be the third or fourth time that I’ve linked to that TED talk on this blog. That video probably increased my intellectual³ confidence in my unreligiousness more than any other idea/argument. It told me that, oh, you can pretty easily explain that sacred-seeming stuff in very non-sacred ways. Instead of finding this notion sad, I actually found it a bit… freeing?

⁴The word “intellectual” here may seem unnecessary and wordy, but what I mean to say is that I don’t necessarily feel emotionally confident in my unreligiousness. Life, of which Death is one part, scares the shit out of me.

⁵“Love,” by the way, seems definable in large part as an appreciation of beauty/goodness. So what we’re talking about in this post is no trivial visual design-y topic. We are indirectly talking about Love.

⁶This also explains how aesthetics, while being kind of objective, also has a subjective component. What matters is the probability of our genes surviving, but which aesthetic judgments are going to most increase that probability will depend on context. It’s going to be partially geographic and partially cultural, and even within cultures there is going to be personal variation, both across individuals and within individuals across time. Even the emphasis on the importance of aesthetics probably varies based on context. This might sound like a horribly un-P.C. thing to say⁷, but some cultures probably value braininess less than others, and I’d predict that those cultures are going to have less emphasis on the excellence (complexity, harmony, etc.) of their music and other fine arts.

⁷I love how evolution/logic excuses me from saying such things.