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Originally Posted by Mark Lapierre  Michael, I'm having trouble associating the "upper margin of expectation" with beauty, as opposed to familiarity. Though familiarity does inspire pleasurable feelings. |
Sure, sure, let's see what comes out of this.
I see two starting points for exploring the concept of beauty. The first is theoretical: the concept of pleasure. The second is observational: noting one example of something that I consider beautiful, then generalizing what I see across as diverse a field as possible, including others' perspectives.
So, let's start with theory.
What is pleasure? Clinically, it's an endorphin rush: some stimulus triggers a surge of endorphins which makes you feel good. (I'm very ignorant on the subject of biochemistry, so I'll undoubtedly make slip-ups.) This increase in endorphins is tempered by the presence of some other chemical, differentiated by stimulus and intensity... and the result is that there are myriad types of pleasure, such as (the list is from Raph Koster's
Theory of Fun) schadenfreude, fiero, naches, kvell, grooming, and fun.
Oddly enough, in going back to that book, I've found an entire page on aesthetic appreciation. I will reproduce it in full at the bottom of this post.
In keeping with Cicero's assertion ("No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure."), we may presume that pleasure is a biological feedback mechanism of reward. Anything pleasurable is so because it triggers some evolutionary advantage, vestigial or not. We may consider beauty to be pleasurable, but it is tempered by some other set of reactions that makes it different from other pleasures. It is not a pleasing smell or taste; it is not a product of victory, like fiero, or sadism, like schadenfreude; it is not visceral, like orgasm or embrace.
Thus, we can understand what it is not, while remaining within the frame of what it is. In order to dig deeper, we need to bridge into the second starting point: observation.
What is beautiful? Common agreement suggests that works of art, whether by human being or nature, evokes visual beauty. It suggests that musical masterpieces, like Beethoven or Bach, is beautiful. It suggests that narrative can create imaginative beauty beyond the visual. And I can discern only one other category of beauty: that of people. But in a sense, human beauty seems to be a sum of the above three with the addition a sense of kinship. A sense of, "We have something in common, even if it is only our humanity."
But we run into a slight problem here. It is easy to agree that one person's notion that someone is beautiful will clash with another's idea that the same person is ugly. Less commonly, we find this disagreement in narrative beauty, even less often, in musical beauty, and rarely, but present, in visual beauty. Ask a hundred people about the beauty of a Picasso. (That it is fantastic art is another story.)
So what does this have to do with expectation?
Visual beauty is almost always presented in a single instant. Certainly, you may take years to inspect its details, but there is minimal anticipation from the first sight to full appreciation. You do not view a painting by inspecting a corner and then sweeping back and forth to the opposite; that's absurd. You take it all in at once!
Your reaction, on the other hand, comes in stages. There's the first impression, where you recognize the most obvious elements, then upon study, you see other recognizable elements, if they're there. And then (and this is seconds past the first impression), you notice what you didn't notice before and decide whether or not it's beautiful.
Musical beauty, on the other hand, takes time. You are presented, first, with an initial trigger, the opening bars. Classical music is the simplest to analyze, and I encourage you to view Leonard Bernstein's lecture (four parts, a-d).
YouTube - Bernstein Beethoven pastoral symphony a. I will let his commentary stand in place of my own.
Narrative beauty, in the same sense, builds upon the various stories that we have heard again and again before. The rising action, the climax, the falling action. The Hero's Journey. The problem and its resolution. Boy meets girl. Saving the world. Etc. ad nauseum. By this, we would suggest that beauty comes from the slight twists. Perhaps the hero is a dark and self-centered man, an anti-hero. Maybe the world that needed to be saved, instead, needs to die. Are such stories beautiful? We'd have to read them to answer that question.
But we spoke of beauty as a moderation in expectation, falling between familiarity (blonde hair, blue eyes, expert swordfighter, wooer of ladies, blah, blah, blah) and consternation (the hero is a... monster out of a horror story who is going to save the world? wtf?).
And lastly, of course, we have people, but I've gone on and on so long that I think I should stop.
Suffice to say that people are generally either everything we expect ("compatible", to pull a word from Van Wilder's nemesis, Richard) or completely shocking ("they use... lids from opened cans as... jewelry?"). The middle seems to be where we find beauty, where everything is anticipated, but then there's this extra that we didn't expect, but that we still like.
In any case, here's Raph's bit:
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Originally Posted by Raph Koster, Theory of Fun, p94 Aesthetic appreciation is the most interesting form of enjoyment. Science fiction writers call it "sensawunda." It's awe, it's mystery, it's harmony. I call it delight. Aesthetic appreciation, like fun, is about patterns. The difference is that aesthetics is about recognizing patterns, not learning new ones.
Delight strikes when we recognize patterns but are surprised by them. It's the moment at the end of Planet of the Apes when we see the Statue of Liberty. It's the thrill at the end of the mystery novel when everything falls into place. It's looking at the Mona Lisa and seeing that smile hovering at the edge of known expressions and matching it to our own hypothesis of what she's thinking. It's seeing a beautiful landscape and thinking all is right in the world.
Why does a beautiful landscape make us feel that way? Because it meets our expectations and exceeds them. We find things beautiful when they are very close to our idealized image of what they should be but with an additional surprising wrinkle. A perfectly closed off plot, with just a couple of loose threads. A picture of a farmhouse, but the paint is peeling. Music that comes back to the tonic note and then drops a whole step further to end on an unresolved minor seventh. It sends us chasing off after new patterns.
Beauty is found in the tension between our expectation and the reality. It is only found in settings of extreme order. Nature is full of extremely ordered things. The flowerbed bursting its boundaries is expressing the order of growth, the order of how living things stretch beyond their boundaries,e ven as it is in tension with the order of the well-manicured walkway. |