No, Beauty Will Not Save the World

The notion that beauty will save the world seems to come around on a cycle, like a comet streaking across the heavens, filling hearts with wonder for a while, and then fading into the cold blackness of space once again. It’s a lovely, neat, satisfying idea, a balm of solace, perhaps, in a world which is often ugly and careless of beauty. It is a beautiful thought, though a little light on the specifics, like what exactly the world needs saving from or how beauty will save it from that particular peril. Oh, but do not sully the beauty of the thought with such mean practical questions!

Here’s one example of the argument:

Will Beauty Really Save the World?

But beauty will not save the world. Something beautiful might, if it also possesses practical world-saving virtues that address specific world-threatening perils, but not beauty itself. Beauty already has a job, a common, workaday job.

The problem with the discussion of beauty is that it tends to fall into two camps: subjective and objective. The subjective camp says that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The objectivist camp, of which the article above is an example, sees it as a kind of high abstract principle or metaphysical reality.

Beauty is neither of these things. Beauty is a marker of fruitfulness. That is its common, workaday job. Beauty is a marker of fertility and wholesomeness. Human beings, women in particular, are most beautiful when they are most fertile. As fertility fades, so does beauty. Ripe fruit is beautiful. Rotten fruit is ugly. Verdant fields and forests are beautiful. Scrublands and wastes are ugly. Disease and deformity make beautiful things look ugly. Healthy people, like healthy plants and animals, are regularly shaped, brightly colored, and smooth-surfaced. We find these properties beautiful. When these same things are injured, sick, broken, or dead, we find them ugly.

This is to say that our brains identify properties that collectively they interpret as beauty, which activates the pleasure centers of the brain, so that we will be drawn to these things, so that we will choose good things to eat and fertile partners to mate with. That is beauty’s common workaday job. It is an important job, and beauty is good at it.

This attraction to health and fertility extends to our other senses as well. Good food tastes good and smells good. Rotten food tastes bad and smells bad. This is not a coincidence. It is how the brain signals to us those things that it has learned are good to eat. The markers of health and fertility, such as symmetry and purity, also occur in other things that are not themselves either fertile or wholesome, but which have similar characteristics to fertile and wholesome things. Thus we find these things beautiful too.

In music, the love of rhythm very obviously comes from the human pulse. Music with a fast rhythm is exciting. Music with a slow rhythm is calming. When we are excited, our hearts beat faster. When we are calm, they beat slower. Melody echoes the sound of joyful voices; discord echoes the sound of voices raised in anger. You don’t have to teach children to like music. It is as natural to them as breathing. Beauty is the pleasure we feel in the basic satisfactions of life. It is our guide to living, both as a beacon and as a confirmation.

To say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, therefore, is in one sense correct and in another completely wrongheaded. It is correct in that the distinction between beauty and ugliness is one made in our heads. What is wrongheaded is the suggestion that the distinction is not made based on objective properties. It is made on objective properties, those properties that mark things as fertile and wholesome, whether they occur on things that are actually fertile or wholesome, or on things that share characteristics with things that are.

But the philosophical view of beauty as some kind of independent abstract force for good in the world is also wrong. Beauty is a reward that the brain gives us, a signal it uses to guide us to things that are fertile, wholesome, and free of defect. This is why we desire beauty. It is not some grand abstract desire free from the moil and toil of everyday existence. Quite the opposite, it is one of the most basic safety signals we have to guide us through our daily lives. This is why, for instance, pretty privilege is a real thing and always will be. Beautiful people are percieved a safer to be around than ugly ones, and to a degree this proves to be true, though with troubling exceptions. Beauty won’t save the world, but it does help it function in it on a day-to-day basis. That is its common, workaday job.

Beauty is not, therefore, the transcendent moral force that some philosophically minded folks make it out to be.

Falling in love with real Beauty is the sign that we are on the way to ultimate truth or that we are ready to put away our selfish desires and pursue something outside of ourselves.

Timothy G. Patitsas quoted in an ad for a First Things intellectual retreat on beauty

This sentiment has it exactly backwards. Our sense of beauty is, in fact, a biologically developed mechanism that guides us to the successful satisfaction of our selfish desires. Phrases like “real Beauty” and “ultimate truth” reveal the thought pattern behind the sentiment here. The stuff of the real world is somehow not as real as an abstraction; concrete everyday truths are not as true as the ultimate truth of an abstraction. And yet, no one has ever seen, no one has ever been moved by, beauty in abstract. We have only ever seen particular beautiful young women, particular beautiful flowers, particular beautiful landscapes, particular beautiful ripe pears and apples and peaches. It is curious, then, that we find so much abstract philosophizing about something that can only be observed in physical reality. There is no such thing as beauty in abstract; there are only beautiful things.

This is not to suggest that we should never use beauty to describe non-physical things, only that we should not forget the source of the metaphor when we do so. The pleasure we take in beauty exists because it is a basic everyday safety signal, without which we would eat tainted food and mate with infertile partners (thus bringing the species to a swift end). But we certainly see other things as beautiful. The brain gives us the same beauty signal when we see things that share the properties that signal fertility and wholesomeness. We are rewarded for recognizing these features even in inanimate things like a painting, a desert landscape, or a sky filled with stars. And so we can and do recognize similar properties in non-material things, at least by analogy.

And thus it is actually quite understandable and appropriate that we choose to call abstract ideas beautiful, such as mathematical equations or scientific proofs, and even that we should see beauty as an attribute of God. God, after all, is beyond our experience and beyond our understanding. Anything we say about Him, we must say by analogy. And what is a more appropriate analogy for the nature of God than to assign to Him the properties which are to us the signs of fertility and wholesomeness? God, after all (if you are so minded), is both the author and the sustainer of life. Fertility and wholesomeness could hardly be improved upon as analogies for the Divine nature.

Some readers of a religious persuasion may be troubled by this argument. We have become very used to hearing naturalistic explanations of things used to argue against religious explanations, so much so that we have come to accept the false premise that that which is attributable to nature cannot be attributable to God. But from a religious point of view, such an argument is absurd. God is the author of nature. God created it and saw that it was good. That which is attributable to nature is also, ipso facto, attributable to God. Indeed, we should be suspicious of any explanation of beauty that is not founded in our physical nature, which is, after all, intended for harmony with our spiritual nature, at least in the Christian understanding of things.

But Christianity is not a religion of abstractions. It is, most particularly, a religion of particular concrete things, a religion that holds that God himself took flesh as a particular man, born of a particular woman, in a particular time and place, who gathererd particular men and women to follow him and recieve his teaching, and who established a particular rite as his commemoration in which we consume his particular flesh and blood under the guise of particular bread and wine. Whatever beauty we find in Christianity is particular and concrete beauty, expressed through the ages in the concrete and particular beauty of Christian art, music, and architecture. The idea that we should turn our back on the beauty of this world to contemplate beauty in abstract seems to me particularly un-Christian.

If we are going to use beauty as a theological or philosophical category, therefore, we have to remember that the abstraction proceeds from the concrete, not the other way round. Similarly, if we are going to talk about beauty in art, if we are going to use beauty as a principle of operation, we had better not get too hifalutin in our ideas of where the human sense of beauty comes from. And particularly so if we are looking for a tool for saving the world. Beauty is far too common a thing, a thing with a too common and workaday job, to bear the weight of any such ambition. Beauty is not an abstract phenomenon. It is a perceived property of particular real things.

You can say, of course, that it is a subjective property. One cannot measure beauty with an instrument. It does not appear in a microscope or a Petri dish, but in the human eye. It is a learned response, as a signal of certain specific properties of things that are vital to sustaining human life. And this is why we can say that beauty is indeed an objective property of things, and that while the appreciation of beauty is an inherent property of the human mind, it can still, like so many other inherent properties of the mind, be critiqued, trained, studied, and refined.

Part of what confuses the debate over beauty as an objective vs. subjective phenomenon is that beauty is not a singular property yielding a single detectable signal. Rather, it is what we might call a collective property, a collection of individual properties that together indicate some good or useful purpose. There are many such properties. If we call a person healthy or food nutritious, we are referring not to a single property but to a collection of properties which, taken together, tell us something useful or important. Beauty is a collective property that tells us that something is conducive to a joyful and bountiful life.

Like any other collective property, there is no one scale with which beauty can be measured. Though our sense of beauty is innate, we can still disagree about the exact definition of beauty, we can still have different perceptions of beauty, and we can still be educated to see beauty more clearly and in more things, just as we can with other collective properties like being healthy or nutritious.

Beauty, then, is not merely in the eye of the beholder. It is in that set of individual properties that constitute a collective property, each of which is individually measurable and objectively knowable. As with other collective properties, it is not the case that each of the constituent properties has to be present in a single exact proportion for the collective property to emerge. Many different mixtures and proportions can add up to the collective property, which may emerge in different degrees as a result.

Because we are all different in our genetics and in our culture, the eyes of different beholders may still see beauty differently or not at all in any particular object. But these variations in perception do not invalidate the objectivity of beauty as a property any more than, for instance, the presence of celiac disease in an individual invalidates the property of nutritiousness for a loaf of bread. The property remains; the fault is in the receiver, who cannot process it.

Subjectivity and objectivity are not opposites; they are complementary. The subjective is the impression that the individual receives of the objective reality before them. That impression can be warped or inadequate because of their individual defects of perception or interpretation, both of which are, in principle at least, detectable and correctable. The subjectivity of perception is not an objection to the objectivity of the thing perceived; it is simply the consequence of our limitations, limitations which we can, through study and by working together, learn to perceive and overcome, at least to a significant extent.

How many of the properties that constitute the collective property of beauty have to be present for us to see something as beautiful? Are some of these properties more strongly indicative of beauty than others? Is any combination of a sufficient number of such properties enough to signal beauty? Is the brain’s native sense of beauty constituted identically in every human being, or does it vary from one brain to another?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. I don’t particularly need to know. I go down this road only to say that both of the prevailing opinions on beauty seem misguided to me, one because it acknowledges no objective properties constituent of beauty, and the other because it seems to regard beauty as a purely abstract or spiritual property, an objective reality not founded in any objective physical or measurable property or function of an object. Both these opinions seem to have in common a curious flight from the concrete, from the observation and appreciation of the properties of particular things.

It is, of course, true that we apply the idea of beauty to abstract and spiritual realities. And why not? Beauty is a collective property indicating fertility and wholesomeness, properties essential to life itself. What better metaphor for that which is true and that which is good? But we are physical beings in a physical universe possessed of minds constituted in physical brains. We perceive abstractions and spiritual things by analogies to the physical world we inhabit. It is natural that we should use the word beauty to describe things that are good and true. But it is vain, in both senses of the word, to suppose that beauty is a transcendent phenomenon rather than simply a singularly apt metaphor, borrowed from the world of concrete, fertile, and wholesome things.

Concepts are useful for thought, particularly philosophical thought, but it is not the concept of things that we should love. We should love individual concrete things in particular. It is a tragedy to be more in love with beauty than with any one beautiful thing, as it is a tragedy to be more in love with love than with any beloved person. It is better to love one square yard of grim city concrete in particular than to love the abstract idea of all the forests in the world.

That which saves the world, if indeed it needs further saving, will not be beauty. But, precisely because to save the world is to further the existence of life, and thus of fertility and wholesomeness, whatever does save the world will, in that sense at least, be beautiful.