There is no beauty in nature.
Meaning that beauty is purely a human construct. If we see something in nature we call beautiful, that’s only because we see it so, and not due to some inherent characteristic. The particles comprising reality have qualities such as mass, motion, composition, energy. Beauty not among them.
It’s even said there is no such thing as color in nature. Strictly speaking, that’s true; we see colors only because that’s how our visual systems work. Yet if a flower looks yellow, that’s because of something in its structure different than if it looked pink. That difference is something real, which our brains register as colors. A useful trick helping us navigate through the world.
But that doesn’t apply to beauty (or its correlate, ugliness). While again, something in nature may truly have characteristics we see and label as “yellow,” nothing in nature correspondingly entails beautifulness. And while seeing colors is obviously adaptively advantageous, that’s not true of beauty. Seeing it is nice, but doesn’t help us survive.
So why is beauty even a thing?
Evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould propounded the idea of “spandrels” — features that got incorporated into our natures not because of usefulness, but because they came along for the ride as offshoots of features that were useful. Seeing the world accurately is useful, and an offshoot of that is some things being more visually pleasing than others. But the pleasingness itself does nothing for us evolutionarily.
The word beauty is redolent with meaning. It’s a noun — apart from locutions like “a thing of beauty,” beauty can itself be a thing. But what, exactly, do we mean by it? When speaking not just of physical things, but also conceptually? We might form a mental image representing the word, one’s idea of beauty. But what is it about that image making it so? Suppose it’s the Venus de Milo, or a landscape. What about them makes us apply to them the concept “beauty?” Is the word a metaphor? For what, exactly?
A dictionary defines “beauty” as something that “aesthetically pleases the senses.” Begging the question of what “aesthetically” means. This can get very circular.
Something highly relevant here is our capability for abstraction. Ability to relate one thing, or one idea, to another. Obviously adaptively useful, for thinking up different ways to tackle problems. It also enables us to look at a thing and see not just the thing itself but what it represents, what it means, what it symbolizes.
And so — looking at a beautiful landscape — what makes it beautiful to a viewer is not something intrinsic to the particular configuration of trees, rocks, mountains, or whatever — but, rather, one’s mentally abstracting from those particulars to somehow more ethereal ideas. Like harmony, tranquillity, grandeur, etc. All purely human constructs not at all part and parcel of the trees or rocks or mountains, except insofar as a person so conceptualizes.
This is true for all objects of beauty. A painting can be beautiful not by virtue of the physical characteristics of the molecules of paint upon the canvas — nor, even, by virtue of the things depicted (a landscape, a face, a still life —or for that matter, an abstract image) — but only, rather, on account of the ideas that seeing it generate in our heads.
Thus beauty is not something seen with our eyes. They are merely mechanisms for conveying information to our minds. That’s where the beauty happens.
So too for music. One set of sounds (perturbations of the air) is no more inherently beautiful than another. Those auditory phenomena have various physics-based characteristics, of which “beauty” is not one. But they trigger happenings in our minds that are abstracted from those sounds, imparting them with feeling and meaning. Once again that’s all in our heads, not the sounds themselves.
Beauty is also often brought into philosophic discourse about science and mathematics. Where beauty is thought to reside in elegance, perfection, simplicity. Darwin’s theory of evolution is beautiful to me for such reasons; and because it bespeaks a deep truth; and because its achievement by one man reflects our highest aspirations and signifies what I love about our species. Here again — abstract concepts. The beauty in them a matter of what they symbolize.
And what of human beauty? One face being prettier than another might seem like just a fact. But of course it’s no such thing. We do say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That actually supplied the title for a famous Twilight Zone episode about a woman undergoing surgery to correct facial deformity. When the bandages come off, the procedure is revealed to have failed. But her face seems perfectly nice (to us) — while all the “normal” ones around her, now first seen, are grotesque.
Indeed, if you think about it, any human(like) face — even if created by a great artist! — would be repellent if not conforming very closely to our norms, with scant tolerance for any deviation. That’s something encoded in our genes, whose great imperative is reproduction. Thus what really underlies our notions of human beauty is reproductive fitness. Planted deep in our unconscious. When we see a beautiful person, what our unconscious really sees is a likelihood of producing good offspring.
The Twilight Zone episode, presumably, was set on a different planet. But even on ours, culture (as well as biology) also shapes ideas of beauty. At one time pale skin was venerated because that signified (indoor) leisure, as against peons exposed to the sun by outdoor toil. Nowadays we deem attractive a “healthy” tan as signifying the leisure to acquire it. And while we might idealize slenderness, in some human cultures even today that’s associated with starvation, making fatness more alluring.
So even human attractiveness is not directly a matter of the physicality we see, but how our minds abstract from it to ideas.
And what of ideas themselves? People for whom they’re important can find beauty in them. Or in certain ideas; others floating around are pretty ugly. But of those we do find beautiful, is that because of something intrinsic in them, or because they too evoke another level of abstraction?
Keats told us beauty is truth and truth is beauty. But some truths too are ugly. It’s hard to see beauty in the truth that we all must die. Yet falsehood is uglier still, there can never be any beauty there. What is beautiful is our quest for truth.
