Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it
Confucius
Beauty is everywhere, if only one cares enough to look for it and open themselves to the experience of beauty.
… What are we talking about here? Is beauty a thing that can be described? Are there specific characteristics needed for something to be called “beautiful”? Does it apply to thing and person equally? Is it a specific concept or is it just an umbrella term?
One thing is for sure, “beauty” is a concept that fascinated philosopher and scientists for millenniums. Socrates was the first on to introduce the view that beauty was both physical and spiritual, with an emphasis on the moral. This led to a still common idea that what is good is beautiful… and what is beautiful is good. I think this is a trap more than one person felt for, assuming that because someone is “beautiful”, they must be a good person… Guess what? Not always true.
Later on, in the 18th century, the concept of beauty was one of the hot-topic in philosophical discussions and introducing another related concept: the “sublime”. Let’s try to disentangle all that. The main protagonist of that area is Edmund Burke, who defined beauty as “some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses’’; on the other hand, he defined the sublime as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible . . . is a source of the sublime: that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”. Moderns definitions go as such: beauty is “a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight”, whereas sublime (in terms of "things in nature and art") is "affecting the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power; calculated to inspire awe, deep reverence, or lofty emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur". Right… but can we characterise the beautiful and the sublime? What makes something beautiful (or sublime)?
Looking at the sublime first, it is big, it is huge, it is gigantic. It is the sense of fear you get standing on the edge of a cliff. It is the realisation of how small you are next to a waterfall. It is your own vulnerability next to the almightiness of Nature or the closeness to danger. It is made for epic story, it is destructive and awe inspiring all in one. And it is out of the scope of this post. I’d like to focus on something we can experience on a daily basis, something within our reach, that we do not fully understand, but we can at least grasp an understanding of: beauty.
The question of what beauty is remains unanswered, vague, and incomplete. Throughout history, we tried to form an understanding of it, but we are still grasping for straw. Some like Da Vinci tried to define it in terms of the characteristics of an object. When referring to visual art and architecture, symmetry, proportion, and harmony are most important. In music, we pay more attention to beat, harmony, and rhythm. We struggle to define key characteristics to define beauty when looking at more complex scenes, such as theatre and drama, opera, or cinema. All those (art, music, cinema) have tangible reality, we can see them, measure some characteristics and try to understand the ones that make them beautiful. It is trickier to do the same when it comes to “moral beauty”. And let’s not forget that the concept of beauty itself is highly subjective, as Clive Bell said: “All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience–that is to say, they must be subjective”.
When it comes to understanding beauty, one thing researchers did was to stop trying to define it and rather tried to grasp how it was understood by the brain. After all, something exists (might it be real or not) if and only if the brain says so, right? And the research found something interesting: to be judged as beautiful or not, a picture (in the sense “visual stimulus”) has to be processes by an area of the brain specialised in dealing with attributing beauty value. It means that when you are looking at something, you only have an idea or whether it is beautiful or not if you want to classify it as beautiful or not. You can pass by something every day, let’s say a flowers bed or a building, and think nothing of it – it is there, a landmark on your way to work. But one day, you stop and actually look at it, wandering how you find that specific landmark; then, and only then, will it be processed by the “beauty categoriser” area of your brain and will you know whether you find it beautiful or not. Now, it won’t be a strict judgment, beautiful or not; beauty is a continuum, you attribute beauty values to the things around you and this value is subject to change from one viewing to another and can differ between individual. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all… or maybe in the brain of the beholder.
When looking at the way the brain deals with “beauty-judgement”, researchers found that music, pictures, and mathematics formulas (no, for real, there is beauty in complex mathematical formulas!) were analysed by the exact same brain region. One region to judge them all. One region to place each stimulus on the beauty continuum and attribute a “beauty-score”. This really differentiated art and beauty; any form of creation can be labelled as art, let it be visual or auditory, painting or cinematographic. The definition of art is all in all quite loose. But the definition of beautiful art such became much simpler: if anything can be art, the only beautiful art there is is the one activating the medial orbito-frontal cortex, and the greater the activation of that area, the more beautiful the art we are exposed to. It really shifts the idea of inherent beauty to a more subjective and personal beauty; if some qualities are shared between all forms found beautiful (symmetry, harmony, rhythm, proportions…), it is the specific effects of those qualities on the brain that makes us see beauty. It is the impact of inherent characteristics on the human minds, through our senses, that we call “beauty”.
In matter of taste, there should be no dispute as what we find beautiful is hard-wired in our brain and is highly subjective. It is true for art, and it is true for people. Finding someone attractive is seeing the beauty in them… but that is a story for another day.
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