What is beauty?
Is beauty, as the saying goes, in the eye of the beholder? Maybe. A baby’s face, Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy,” movies like “The Wizard of Oz,” or the plays of Anton Chekhov, a central California landscape, a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji, "Der Rosenkavalier," a stunning match-winning goal in a World Cup soccer match, Van Gogh's "Starry Night," a Jane Austen novel, Fred Astaire dancing across the screen. This brief list includes human beings, natural landforms, works of art and skilled human actions. An account that explains the presence of beauty in everything on this list is not going to be easy.
Perhaps the most convincing and most powerful theory of beauty that we yet have comes from some place rather unexpected. It does not come from philosophers of art. It does not come from postmodern art theorists or bigwig art critics. It comes, rather, from an expert on pigeon breeding, barnacles, and earthworms: Charles Darwin.
What can Darwin possibly tell us about artistry, artistic perception, and artistic creation? It is undeniable that Darwinian evolution may explain how and why physical traits may arrive in the Human species – the function of the kidneys and why the laryngeal nerve extends out of the brain, all the way down and around the heart only to turn “northward” again to head back to the larynx - but can it explain our love for Emily Dickinson, Mozart, Michelangelo, or Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31: 1950? Can the idea of an instinct for conceiving, creating, and perceiving art as beautiful ever seem to be anything more than oxymoronic? The answer is, quite possibly, yes.
The creation of art, in some form or fashion, is a universal human trait. Of course, a lot of people think they already know the proper answer to the question, "What is beauty?" It's in the eye of the beholder. It's whatever moves you personally. Or, as some people, especially academics prefer, beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder – people agree that paintings, or movies, or music are beautiful because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste. But the taste for both natural beauty and for the arts travels across cultures with great ease. Beethoven is adored in Japan. Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints. Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures in British museums, while Shakespeare is translated into every major language on the planet. Or just think about American jazz or American movies - they go everywhere. There are many differences among the arts, but there are also universal, cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures and values.
How can we explain this universality? The best answer lies in trying to reconstruct a Darwinian evolutionary history of our artistic and aesthetic tastes. We need to reverse-engineer our present artistic tastes and preferences and explain how they came to be engraved in our minds by the actions of both our prehistoric, largely Pleistocene environments, where we became fully human, but also by the social situations in which we evolved. This reverse engineering can also enlist help from the human record preserved in prehistory, like fossils, cave paintings and so on. It should take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of the isolated hunter-gatherer bands that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries.
Dennis Dutton, a philosopher of the Aesthetics of Art and professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, notes that he has “no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty, with its emotional intensity and pleasure, belongs to our [collectively] evolved human psychology.” He says, “the experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations. Beauty is an adaptive effect, by which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment.” Evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms. The first of these is natural selection - random mutation and selective retention - along with our basic anatomy and physiology - the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails. Natural selection also explains many basic revulsions, such as the horrid smell of rotting meat, or fears, like that of snakes or of standing too close to the edge of a cliff. Natural selection also explains pleasures - sexual pleasure, our liking for sweets, fats and proteins, which in turn explains a lot of popular foods, from ripe fruits to chocolate milkshakes, and barbecued ribs.The other great principle of evolution is sexual selection, which operates very differently. The peacock's magnificently adorned tail is a good example. It did not evolve for natural survival. In fact, it hinders survival. No, the peacock's tail results from the mating choices made by peahens. (It's quite a familiar story. It is women who actually push history forward.) Darwin himself, by the way, had no doubts that the peacock's tail was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen. Now, keeping these ideas firmly in mind, we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination, even obsession, in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction. Beauty is nature's way of acting at a distance. We cannot expect to eat an adaptively beneficial landscape. Evolutionarily speaking, it would do more harm than good to eat your baby or your lover. So evolution's trick is to make that beneficial landscape, our offspring, and our lovers beautiful to us, and to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give us the pleasure of simply looking at them.
America’s Most Wanted, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid
Consider an important source of aesthetic pleasure, the magnetic pull of beautiful landscapes. People in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a landscape that just happens to be similar to the Pleistocene savannas where we evolved. This landscape shows up today on calendars, on postcards, in the design of golf courses and public parks and in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from New York to New Zealand. It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with groves of trees. Dutton notes that
The trees are often preferred if they fork near the ground, that is to say, if they're trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix. The landscape shows the presence of water directly in view, or evidence of water in a bluish distance, indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery and finally a path or a road, a riverbank or a shoreline, that extends into the distance, almost inviting you to follow it. This landscape type is regarded as beautiful, even by people in countries that don't have it.
The ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience.
But that's natural beauty. How about artistic beauty? Isn't that exhaustively cultural? Probably not. It is widely assumed that the earliest human artworks are the skillful cave paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet. The paintings in the Chauvet caves are about 32,000 years old. But artistic and decorative skills are actually much older than that. Shell necklaces that look like something one could find at an arts and crafts fair and ochre body paint, dating to around 100,000-135,000 years ago have been found in what is now modern-day Algeria. But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are even older than this.
Acheulian hand axes, the oldest known stone tools used by ancient hominids date back to somewhere around 1.4 million years ago when proto-humans started shaping thin stone blades into arrestingly symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop forms. These tools have been unearthed across all around the world from Africa, to Europe and as far as East Asia. The sheer number of these hand axes shows that they can't have been made solely for butchering animals or other utilitarian purposes. Unlike other Pleistocene tools, many hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their fragile blade edges. Some are far too big to have had any practical use whatsoever. Their symmetry, the materials from which they are made, and their meticulous workmanship are regarded as beautiful, even today.
So what were these “tools” used for? The best available answer is that they are the earliest known works of art, practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship. Hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human history - tools fashioned to function as what Evolutionary Biologists call "fitness signals" - displays that are performances like the peacock's tail, except that, unlike feathers, the hand axes were consciously and cleverly crafted. Competently made hand axes indicated desirable personal qualities - intelligence, fine motor control, planning ability, conscientiousness and sometimes access to rare materials. Over tens of thousands of generations, such skills increased the status of those who displayed them and gained a reproductive advantage over the less capable. It is the oldest line in the book, but it has been shown to work - "Why don't you come up to my cave, so I can show you my hand axes?"
Even more interesting about this is that we cannot be sure how that idea was conveyed because the proto-humans that made these objects did not have language. It's hard to grasp, but it is an incredible fact. These objects were made by a hominid ancestor, Homo erectus or Homo ergaster (there exists some taxonomical confusion), between 50,000 and 100,000 years BEFORE the advent language. Stretching over a million years, the hand axe tradition is the longest artistic tradition in human and proto-human history. By the end of the hand axe era, Homo sapiens - as we have come to call ourselves - were doubtless finding new ways to amuse and amaze each other by telling jokes, telling stories, dancing, or hairstyling.
For us modern humans, skillful technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies, to express intense emotions with music, painting, and dance. But still, one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the beauty we find in skilled performances. From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall, human beings have a permanent and innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts. We find beauty in something done well. So the next time you pass a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut teardrop-shaped stone, don't be so sure it's just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful. Your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it, even before they could put their love into words.
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? No, it is deep in our minds. It is a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors. Our powerful reaction to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to the night sky, will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists.