Art imitates life: René Magritte’s La condition humaine (1933): it's only human to see nature as art
Psychologists are taking a new interest in the evolutionary history of beauty. But there are still large unknowns. Evolutionary theory has had no problem explaining many—even most—of the things that give human beings pleasure: honey, orgasm, sunshine, lullabies, flower gardens. But, the closer we get to high art and beauty proper, the less easy it is to see how people's attraction to it can be contributing to biological survival. If beauty were of relatively minor significance in human lives, we could push it to one side. But in reality it's the opposite. With beauty, people can find the very point of being alive. John Hadfield, the publisher and critic, said, for example: "What is it that makes life so abundantly, so triumphantly, worth living? If I had to answer the question in one word the word would be beauty." Or GE Moore, the philosopher: "Personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in art or nature are good in themselves... [They] include all the greatest, and by far the greatest, goods we can imagine." We may not agree entirely. But we can certainly see where these enthusiasts are coming from. The proposition that it is beauty that gives life a purpose, makes human sense—as it would not if we were to replace beauty with, say, food. Yet, is beauty truly something so distinct? Isn't beauty just the limiting case of the ordinary pleasures—produced, perhaps, by the coming together of several species of pleasure at one time? Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, suggested something like this. In the case of music, for example: "I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties." Pinker is likely right that music does this—and no doubt a similar story about "visual cheesecake" could be told about painting. But this low-level explanation of music's appeal surely cannot be nearly the whole story. True, some music hardly counts as beautiful. True, too, we are not always in the mood to respond to the beauty of music. But when it is beautiful and we are in the mood, we know the difference between music and muzak. We feel a different kind and degree of emotional response. There are several reasons for believing the response to beauty is indeed special—and distinct from the response to cheesecake. We think of beauty, as Moore said, as good in itself. We don't think of cheesecake as good in itself. We feel virtuous (and not merely greedy) in pursuing our love of beauty, and expect others to appreciate us for it—as if, rather than indulging a private appetite, we were honouring something wonderful outside ourselves. We love beauty through the medium of our senses, but what we love is obviously not merely the sensory stimulus. With cheesecake, we have only to have the stimulus on the tongue and the right affective buttons will be pressed. But with beauty it's not so straightforward. For a start we often need to be told that this is beauty before we will respond to it at all. Henry Thoreau, the American essayist, said: "We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry." And the same holds for many other kinds of art. We find beauty in a framed picture in a gallery where we might miss it entirely if we were to come across the same pattern of colours unframed outside. As Robert Browning wrote: "We're made so that we love/First when we see them painted, things we have passed/Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see." Moreover, it isn't enough that an object with the right sensory qualities should have come to our attention as art. We still need to know who made it and how. We care deeply about creative input, genuineness and authenticity. While we find a copy of a slice of cheesecake quite as tasty, we find a reproduction of a Rembrandt less valuable—and surely less beautiful—than the original. While we enjoy the cheesecake without thinking to ask how it was made, we value the work of art only when we see the human hand behind it. We marvel at the cave paintings at Lascaux, for example, only because we believe they were made by artists. If it were to turn out these images had been created by accidental water stains, they'd become merely quaint. Alongside this concern with authenticity comes our concern about being taken in by fraud. We want to be sure that the author of a work of art is indeed worthy of our respect. Looking at a Kandinsky painting or hearing Schoenberg's music for the first time, we worry perhaps that a child could have done it—or even a machine. No one has such worries about cheesecake. Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter says that if it should turn out that a computer program could emulate the artistic genius of Mozart, "that would be for me an absolute tragedy, because my entire life I've been moved by music." Beauty stirs us up, and takes us over—giving rise on occasion to the peculiar feeling of "flow," "melding," or "union." Rebecca West can write, for instance, of: "this crystalline concentration of glory, this deep and serene and intense emotion that I feel before the greatest works of art." "What in the world," she asks, "is this emotion? What is the bearing of supremely great works of art on my life which makes me feel so glad?" Well, what does it look like to an evolutionary psychologist? One thing stands out immediately, and that is the telltale signs of a social emotion. Beauty arouses moral passion. And the moral passions—jealousy, rage, infatuation, grief, devotion, admiration, humility—are in origin always concerned with other people. So it is too with beauty. We may seem to love beautiful things as if it were the existence of the things themselves that counts. But, what if our feeling about the things were really a proxy for our feeling about some idealised person in the background? What if the emotions aroused by beauty mirror those we might otherwise have for a child, a mother, a friend, a sexual partner? GE Moore lumped together "aesthetic enjoyments" with "personal affection" as the greatest goods we can imagine. But, suppose the two classes of enjoyment belong in the same category, then this apparently arbitrary combination would make sense. I said "a child, a mother, a friend, a sexual partner." But of course it would have to be sexuality that holds the key. The evidence stares us in the face. The imagery of aesthetic ecstasy is, time and again, transparently erotic. We saw it already in Rebecca West's talk of "this crystalline concentration of glory." Or here in a commentary by the French cultural icon Jacques Barzun: "The experience of great art disturbs one like a deep anxiety for another... a feeling of being penetrated and pervaded and mastered by some irresistible force." George Santayana wrote: "The whole sentimental side of our aesthetic sensibility—without which it would be perceptive and mathematical rather than aesthetic—is due to our sexual organisation remotely stirred." I believe Santayana was right. Yet he had no good idea about why he was right (and nor did Sigmund Freud). Charles Darwin, however, had a pretty good idea. What Darwin proposed in his great book, The Descent of Man: and Selection in Relation to Sex, was that human aesthetic preferences have in fact evolved in the context of courtship and mate choice. The argument can be summarised in a few lines. It's this. When we are excited by beauty—whether in painting, music, sculpture, words or ideas—what is happening at a deeper level is that we are responding to features in the beautiful object that reveal the hand of an artist. In the real world any such artist is likely to be an individual with especially well developed manual, sensory, intellectual, and maybe even moral skills. And a person with such skills is likely to be a person with highly desirable traits as a progenitor or parent or companion. Hence, when we are turned on by beauty in the things around us, we are being turned on by cues from the environment that we are in the presence of a potentially good mate. This one idea—that aesthetic preferences arise through sexual selection—can provide a ready solution to much that is otherwise puzzling about people's response to art: the nature of the emotion, the idolisation of artistry, the demographics of who makes art and who responds, the anxiety on the part of both artists and consumers about authenticity, and so on. What's more, it goes a long way to explaining the specific content as well as the social context of artistic creation. For, if works of art are being (or at any rate in the evolutionary past were being) created primarily as a way for the artist to demonstrate his or her desirability as a partner, we should expect these works to be—as they so obviously are—showcases for just those bodily and mental traits that most count in mate-choice: dexterity, sensitivity, creativity, loyalty, mentorship, humour, good judgement, rich resources. When Giotto was asked by Pope Boniface VIII to prove his skill as an artist, he drew a perfect circle freehand. Tellingly, Raphael in his picture of the School of Athens showed Archimedes doing the same—drawing a circle, under the admiring gaze of young disciples, whose rapturous expressions resemble those of boppers at a rock concert. The musician Brian Eno once asked: "Art seems to be something that we are biologically inclined to do. If we are, then what is the nature of that drive? What is it doing for us?" Darwin's answer is still the best we have: that artistry is indeed sexy, it's a way of showing off what you are worth. Still, even if this is a plausible answer to "Why do people make and appreciate art?", it cannot be the complete answer to "Why do people love beauty?" For as it stands this theory explains nothing about the human response to beauty in the natural world. Yet, the aesthetic emotions aroused respectively by beauty in art and in nature—though not the same—are certainly very much alike. Compare, for example, the celebrations of man-made beauty quoted above with Victorian author Richard Jefferies's paean to the beauty of the earth: "The hours when the mind is absorbed by the exceeding beauty of the earth are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time." Or, compare the ardent sexuality of Barzun's swooning response to art with Albert Camus's description of his mystic union with the landscape at Tipasa in Algeria: "How many hours I have spent crushing absinthe leaves, caressing ruins, trying to match my breathing with the world's tumultuous sighs! I must be naked and dive into the sea, still scented with the perfumes of the earth, wash them off and consummate with my flesh the embrace for which sun and sea, lips to lips, have so long been sighing."
Psychologists are taking a new interest in the evolutionary history of beauty. But there are still large unknowns. Evolutionary theory has had no problem explaining many—even most—of the things that give human beings pleasure: honey, orgasm, sunshine, lullabies, flower gardens. But, the closer we get to high art and beauty proper, the less easy it is to see how people's attraction to it can be contributing to biological survival. If beauty were of relatively minor significance in human lives, we could push it to one side. But in reality it's the opposite. With beauty, people can find the very point of being alive. John Hadfield, the publisher and critic, said, for example: "What is it that makes life so abundantly, so triumphantly, worth living? If I had to answer the question in one word the word would be beauty." Or GE Moore, the philosopher: "Personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in art or nature are good in themselves... [They] include all the greatest, and by far the greatest, goods we can imagine." We may not agree entirely. But we can certainly see where these enthusiasts are coming from. The proposition that it is beauty that gives life a purpose, makes human sense—as it would not if we were to replace beauty with, say, food. Yet, is beauty truly something so distinct? Isn't beauty just the limiting case of the ordinary pleasures—produced, perhaps, by the coming together of several species of pleasure at one time? Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, suggested something like this. In the case of music, for example: "I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties." Pinker is likely right that music does this—and no doubt a similar story about "visual cheesecake" could be told about painting. But this low-level explanation of music's appeal surely cannot be nearly the whole story. True, some music hardly counts as beautiful. True, too, we are not always in the mood to respond to the beauty of music. But when it is beautiful and we are in the mood, we know the difference between music and muzak. We feel a different kind and degree of emotional response. There are several reasons for believing the response to beauty is indeed special—and distinct from the response to cheesecake. We think of beauty, as Moore said, as good in itself. We don't think of cheesecake as good in itself. We feel virtuous (and not merely greedy) in pursuing our love of beauty, and expect others to appreciate us for it—as if, rather than indulging a private appetite, we were honouring something wonderful outside ourselves. We love beauty through the medium of our senses, but what we love is obviously not merely the sensory stimulus. With cheesecake, we have only to have the stimulus on the tongue and the right affective buttons will be pressed. But with beauty it's not so straightforward. For a start we often need to be told that this is beauty before we will respond to it at all. Henry Thoreau, the American essayist, said: "We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry." And the same holds for many other kinds of art. We find beauty in a framed picture in a gallery where we might miss it entirely if we were to come across the same pattern of colours unframed outside. As Robert Browning wrote: "We're made so that we love/First when we see them painted, things we have passed/Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see." Moreover, it isn't enough that an object with the right sensory qualities should have come to our attention as art. We still need to know who made it and how. We care deeply about creative input, genuineness and authenticity. While we find a copy of a slice of cheesecake quite as tasty, we find a reproduction of a Rembrandt less valuable—and surely less beautiful—than the original. While we enjoy the cheesecake without thinking to ask how it was made, we value the work of art only when we see the human hand behind it. We marvel at the cave paintings at Lascaux, for example, only because we believe they were made by artists. If it were to turn out these images had been created by accidental water stains, they'd become merely quaint. Alongside this concern with authenticity comes our concern about being taken in by fraud. We want to be sure that the author of a work of art is indeed worthy of our respect. Looking at a Kandinsky painting or hearing Schoenberg's music for the first time, we worry perhaps that a child could have done it—or even a machine. No one has such worries about cheesecake. Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter says that if it should turn out that a computer program could emulate the artistic genius of Mozart, "that would be for me an absolute tragedy, because my entire life I've been moved by music." Beauty stirs us up, and takes us over—giving rise on occasion to the peculiar feeling of "flow," "melding," or "union." Rebecca West can write, for instance, of: "this crystalline concentration of glory, this deep and serene and intense emotion that I feel before the greatest works of art." "What in the world," she asks, "is this emotion? What is the bearing of supremely great works of art on my life which makes me feel so glad?" Well, what does it look like to an evolutionary psychologist? One thing stands out immediately, and that is the telltale signs of a social emotion. Beauty arouses moral passion. And the moral passions—jealousy, rage, infatuation, grief, devotion, admiration, humility—are in origin always concerned with other people. So it is too with beauty. We may seem to love beautiful things as if it were the existence of the things themselves that counts. But, what if our feeling about the things were really a proxy for our feeling about some idealised person in the background? What if the emotions aroused by beauty mirror those we might otherwise have for a child, a mother, a friend, a sexual partner? GE Moore lumped together "aesthetic enjoyments" with "personal affection" as the greatest goods we can imagine. But, suppose the two classes of enjoyment belong in the same category, then this apparently arbitrary combination would make sense. I said "a child, a mother, a friend, a sexual partner." But of course it would have to be sexuality that holds the key. The evidence stares us in the face. The imagery of aesthetic ecstasy is, time and again, transparently erotic. We saw it already in Rebecca West's talk of "this crystalline concentration of glory." Or here in a commentary by the French cultural icon Jacques Barzun: "The experience of great art disturbs one like a deep anxiety for another... a feeling of being penetrated and pervaded and mastered by some irresistible force." George Santayana wrote: "The whole sentimental side of our aesthetic sensibility—without which it would be perceptive and mathematical rather than aesthetic—is due to our sexual organisation remotely stirred." I believe Santayana was right. Yet he had no good idea about why he was right (and nor did Sigmund Freud). Charles Darwin, however, had a pretty good idea. What Darwin proposed in his great book, The Descent of Man: and Selection in Relation to Sex, was that human aesthetic preferences have in fact evolved in the context of courtship and mate choice. The argument can be summarised in a few lines. It's this. When we are excited by beauty—whether in painting, music, sculpture, words or ideas—what is happening at a deeper level is that we are responding to features in the beautiful object that reveal the hand of an artist. In the real world any such artist is likely to be an individual with especially well developed manual, sensory, intellectual, and maybe even moral skills. And a person with such skills is likely to be a person with highly desirable traits as a progenitor or parent or companion. Hence, when we are turned on by beauty in the things around us, we are being turned on by cues from the environment that we are in the presence of a potentially good mate. This one idea—that aesthetic preferences arise through sexual selection—can provide a ready solution to much that is otherwise puzzling about people's response to art: the nature of the emotion, the idolisation of artistry, the demographics of who makes art and who responds, the anxiety on the part of both artists and consumers about authenticity, and so on. What's more, it goes a long way to explaining the specific content as well as the social context of artistic creation. For, if works of art are being (or at any rate in the evolutionary past were being) created primarily as a way for the artist to demonstrate his or her desirability as a partner, we should expect these works to be—as they so obviously are—showcases for just those bodily and mental traits that most count in mate-choice: dexterity, sensitivity, creativity, loyalty, mentorship, humour, good judgement, rich resources. When Giotto was asked by Pope Boniface VIII to prove his skill as an artist, he drew a perfect circle freehand. Tellingly, Raphael in his picture of the School of Athens showed Archimedes doing the same—drawing a circle, under the admiring gaze of young disciples, whose rapturous expressions resemble those of boppers at a rock concert. The musician Brian Eno once asked: "Art seems to be something that we are biologically inclined to do. If we are, then what is the nature of that drive? What is it doing for us?" Darwin's answer is still the best we have: that artistry is indeed sexy, it's a way of showing off what you are worth. Still, even if this is a plausible answer to "Why do people make and appreciate art?", it cannot be the complete answer to "Why do people love beauty?" For as it stands this theory explains nothing about the human response to beauty in the natural world. Yet, the aesthetic emotions aroused respectively by beauty in art and in nature—though not the same—are certainly very much alike. Compare, for example, the celebrations of man-made beauty quoted above with Victorian author Richard Jefferies's paean to the beauty of the earth: "The hours when the mind is absorbed by the exceeding beauty of the earth are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time." Or, compare the ardent sexuality of Barzun's swooning response to art with Albert Camus's description of his mystic union with the landscape at Tipasa in Algeria: "How many hours I have spent crushing absinthe leaves, caressing ruins, trying to match my breathing with the world's tumultuous sighs! I must be naked and dive into the sea, still scented with the perfumes of the earth, wash them off and consummate with my flesh the embrace for which sun and sea, lips to lips, have so long been sighing."
Universal language: the devices with which a peacock attracts a peahen—colour, pattern and symmetry— also inspire admiration in human observers
I think it's not hard to see why humans who have evolved to look for artistry in a potential partner should be turned on by the beauty of certain animal and plant displays. Many creatures besides humans have evolved under sexual selection and have faced similar challenges to show off their fitness. So, in particular, the courtship displays of animals will often boast many of the same features that we look for in displays by humans. Thus the particular devices with which a peacock tries to inspire attraction in a peahen—the symmetrical patterning, colourfulness and glossiness of his tail, for instance—will very likely inspire similar feelings of admiration in a human observer. If the tail was in fact man-made, it would certainly say something good about its human maker. The same goes for the wings of a butterfly, the dance of the grebe, the flashy colours of the coral fish, the song of the nightingale. We humans find these animal displays attractive because they speak to us in the universal language of the biological courtier and troubadour. Yet this can hardly explain everything about human beings' love of nature. For it's patently not true that everything we find beautiful has been made for display. To the contrary, much of it must be counted in some sense accidental. The patterns and colours of a seashell, for example, or a sunset were not made for us or for anybody else to look at. Yet they still work a remarkable spell on us. Why should we humans be so lucky as to be surrounded by so much order, intelligence and harmony in a world that for the most part was not made to be admired? I think the answer lies in the remarkable convergence between the features of works of art that we value because they provide evidence of human skill, and the features of natural things that have evolved and persisted because these features have typically given them staying power and survivability. That's to say, the convergence between our sense of aesthetically "good form" and nature's selection of evolutionarily "stable form." In the case of animals and plants, part of the explanation is the working of ordinary natural selection. To have a body that grows in an ordered and harmonious fashion is the best way of building a living machine. So—even without the added stimulus of sexual selection—good form will have proved to be biologically adaptive. Symmetry, segmentation, rhyme, balance, grace. These features will be the preferred choice of the "blind watchmaker." But there is another quite separate reason for the convergence. This is the existence of universal laws of morphogenesis, common to the development of all complex systems, that result in the emergence of so-called "attractor states"—states that draw order from chaos. And these laws work across the whole of nature wherever complex systems are in flux. So that we find order and harmony emerging not only in organic nature but all around us in inorganic nature too—in the shapes of mountain ranges, clouds, snow-crystals, galaxies. Similar laws may even be at work among populations of abstract entities, such as the natural numbers. As, for example, in the behaviour of a "cyclic" number, such as 142857—a number which, when added to itself repeatedly, twirls like a honeysuckle up the pole till it spills over: 142857... 285714... 428571... 571428... 714285... 857142... 999999. Suppose, now, our default assumption when we come across any such patterns in nature is to imagine there has to be the hand of an artist behind it. "Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion," Clive Bell once asked, "for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?" Then the answer (though it wasn't Bell's) could well be: yes, we do feel similar emotions when we see the butterfly or the flower as a cathedral or as a picture. The illusion of natural beauty works, I'm suggesting, provided we do indeed imagine the hand of an artist. But this proviso raises problems. For, as I said, we have evolved to be highly sensitive to questions of authenticity in art. In general, if a work of art turns out not to be the work of the artist we imagined—but the work of an imposter, or a computer program, or even nothing at all—we change to regarding it as relatively worthless. Hence, there's a real question about why we should continue to value nature's works when in reality we know there is no artist who made them. The answer, of course, is that we don't know it: or at any rate we are very willing to deceive ourselves. And this deception could have several factors helping to sustain it. To begin with, it happens—at least in modern culture—that many of our encounters with nature come first through art. We see man-made pictures of flowers, animals, landscapes, before we ever encounter the real thing. And even when we do see the real thing first, we often do not notice it until a human artist has captured and framed it for us. Thus, by the time we get to see the natural scene, we are already seeing it through the eyes of an earlier artist. To continue that poem from Browning: "Art was given for that;/God uses us to help each other so,/Lending our minds out." But Browning hints here at a factor that's surely far more important still. This is the ubiquitous and incorrigible human tendency to believe that phenomena of nature are not merely as-if works of art but genuine ones—the work of a supremely intelligent and skilled creator. Or the belief that, as the hymn has it: "All things bright and beautiful,/All creatures great and small,/All things wise and wonderful,/The Lord God made them all." "Because God made you," says another hymn, "that's why I love you." And there is now every reason to think that it is indeed this admiration for the Big Artist in the Sky that justifies and explains the romance we have with nature. So we find Newton, for example, arguing that only a supremely gifted and loveable artist could have made the laws of physics as they are. Or, to take a lesser case, we read the geneticist Francis Collins quoted in the journal Science: "When something new is revealed about the human genome, I experience a feeling of awe at the realisation that humanity now knows something only God knew before. It is a deeply moving sensation." We love nature because we believe God made it. But I suspect it would come still closer to the psychological and biological reality to say: "Because God made nature, that's why I love God." For, following my argument, it would seem bound to happen that our experience of natural beauty will lead to an erotic infatuation with whoever we suppose created it. Religious ecstasy, aesthetic ecstasy and sexual ecstasy will have become part of the same package.A detail from The Ecstasy of St Catherine of Siena by Pompeo Batoni (1743)
