The Beautiful 2.1 Initial distinctions To discuss beauty we must first get out our philosophical knives and make some distinctions. Sometimes the term ‘beauty’ is used in a broad sense to mean ‘aesthetically good’ (e.g. Mothersill 1984). However, my interest in this chapter is with beauty in a narrower sense, as a specific variety of aesthetic value, though one of central importance. So I’m not too concerned to fully capture our ordinary and rather vague usage of the word ‘beautiful’. I am interested in delineating a definite psychological sensitivity that plays an important role in our appreciation of the world. We can roughly grasp this narrower sense by thinking about paradigm or clear cases where we are particularly happy to apply the adjective beautiful. These include lush forests, orchids, snowflakes, diatoms, Bengal tigers, and the faces of most Hollywood film stars. ‘Pretty’ is a more specific aesthetic term that is quite close, but paradigmatic beauty often draws in more voluptuous and more formally striking cases than we’d feel comfortable calling pretty. Classical works of art such as Michelangelo’s David, Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night are beautiful in the sense I am getting at. The same can be said of works of exquisite craftsmanship such as the chairs by George Hepplewhite and the ceilings of gothic cathedrals. However, the beauty we discern in these works can be difficult to unravel from our appreciation of the artists’ skill. For the time being, I want to isolate the aesthetics of beauty from our appreciation of artistic qualities. Thus while my account of beauty will definitely apply to artistic cases, I will tend to concentrate on natural phenomena (and return to artistic values in Chapter 8). I assume that we need not regard natural phenomena as the work of God to find these things beautiful, so there is no background sense of intentionality involved in the beauty I am aiming at. Another complicating factor is that some, if not most, objects of aesthetic appreciation are capable of sustaining more than one aesthetic value. For instance, sunrises are beautiful, but they are also sublime (to be addressed in Chapter 3) and dramatic (to be addressed in Chapter 4). A face may be beautiful, but it also tends to be sympathetic (to be addressed in Chapter 5). It is even possible to be dramatic or sympathetic in a beautiful way (e.g. when a dramatic narrative is perfectly constructed). Thus, even when we give an account of beauty we will not have fully explained the value we take in many beautiful things. Instead, think of the account as articulating one of the elements of aesthetic value, the one closest to our paradigmatic sense of beauty. 2.2 Form and function It is widely acknowledged that beautiful things like the examples I listed above display formal perfection. I understand form here in what has been called the ‘descriptive’ sense (Carroll 1999: ch.3, part II). That is, something has form when it has discernible parts that bear some kind of relation to each other (be it conceptual, material, or functional). The object then shows formal perfection when these parts relate to each other in a definitely ordered way; a way that makes sense. I will have rather more to say about this quality later. But an initial point to stake out is that appreciating formal perfection demands that we have some idea about the nature or kind of thing we are appreciating. This claim may be disputed. A distinction we owe to Kant is between ‘free’ and ‘dependent’ beauty, where dependent beauty is relative to being a certain kind of thing (chair, tiger, face) and free beauty is not (1790/2007: §16). It is only dependent beauty where ideas about a thing’s natural kind are supposed to be influential. Thus my account may be appear to be limited in scope. Of course, I have just noted that my interest in this chapter is in a central or paradigmatic kind of beauty, so I’m not forced to include all cases. Nevertheless, I want to show that my account applies as widely as possible. As such, I’m to going to attack this idea of free beauty. Philosophers seem to like the notion of free beauty because it requires us only to concentrate on the thing before us; on its intrinsic properties rather than its extrinsic relationships with a type or species (e.g. Zangwill 2005). However, I confess that I lack a sense of free beauty. I find it impossible to introspectively distinguish my appreciation of a thing’s qualities from my concept of what it is. Even if my concept is false, I always have some minimal idea of a thing’s place within the world, and I cannot avoid the potential influence of this (cf. Davies 2006a). There are cases where I concentrate on certain details of surfaces which in some ways resemble abstract artworks (e.g. the pattern on a leaf or a bit of stone). Yet even here I have some idea of the kind of surface I’m looking at and the kinds of form or variations typical of its material nature. For instance, does it appear to be gloopy paint-like stuff, or a hard, metallic sort of material? My appreciation is then liable to draw in ideas about the causal history of the material or its physical integrity. I suppose there are some objects where the material basis is unclear, such as a pattern presented on a computer screen. But in such cases, I’m still apt to perceive the object under the category of ‘artwork’ or ‘natural effect’ and accordingly form ideas about its causal history. Now the defender of free beauty can admit that it is hard to screen off knowledge about the object, but still insist that free beauty is an ideal of aesthetic appreciation. The motivation for stipulating such an ideal seems to derive from a background theory that the pleasure of beauty does not rely on knowledge. The existence of such a pleasure, it must be noted, is pure speculation. Kant supposes that it must exist in order to explain why we expect others to agree with our aesthetic judgements (i.e. that they are worth arguing about). Since knowledge about objects varies from person to person, Kant wants to exclude the pleasure of beauty as dependent upon it. Yet it’s not at all apparent to me that our expectations for agreement rule out the influence of knowledge. Consider a potential candidate of free beauty; the dappled light in a forest glade.1 Suppose that someone I’m observing this with simply does not grasp that it is sunlight filtered by leaves. This person does not organize the parts of this phenomenon in the same way that I do. They do not consider the sun as a distant, powerful source of energy, or the leaves as living, supple things, absorbing that energy. As such, I would not expect them to detect the kinds of aesthetic properties that I detect such as tenderness, vitality, or serenity. So while this person may find the image beautiful I have no confidence that we ought to agree. More generally, to appreciate form, we must consider how the parts relate to the whole, and this means we must have some idea of what makes a part count as a part. That is, to grasp form, we must organize our perceptual data in some way, and our understanding of the object is an indispensable contributor to this process. All this is to say that I’m not impressed by the notion of free beauty. I think we can admit that some experiences of beauty take in more of the object’s natural kind or functional properties than others. That is, the object’s type can be more or less prominent in our experience of its beauty. But this is a difference of degree, and I do not recognize cases where a concept of the object is entirely lacking (even if false), and where it is not minimally salient in our appreciation. We simply cannot wall off our understanding of things when we appreciate them, and it is only because Kant is in the grip of a particular theory of aesthetic value that he tries. If the reader is still wedded to the idea of free beauty, then they should simply bear it in mind that I’m only offering an account of ‘dependent beauty’ here. However, given that an object’s nature is highly relevant to its form, and given the widely recognized role of form in our sense of beauty, I believe an account of beauty that accommodates our understanding of the object’s nature is more useful than one that does not (cf. Eaton 1999). I should also note here that my interest in form entails another limitation. I am going to stipulate that if an object lacks form, or we are not able to discern its form, then that object is not a candidate for beauty (or, again, the kind of beauty that I’m interested in) (cf. Paris 2018a). Descriptive form is an extremely broad notion. It can apply to objects as various as the discernible patterns on a material surface, the parts of a machine, the symbolic components of an equation, or the aspects of an individual’s personality. However, it leaves some things out, most notably pure colour and pure tones. Some people may well want to say that two colours differ in beauty merely in virtue of their intrinsic qualities. For instance aqua-marine is more beautiful than grey. However, I’m going to exclude this case from my account of beauty. To some extent, I will incorporate our aesthetic interest in simple colours in my account of dramatic value instead (see section 4.4). Yet we should also note that nearly every natural instance of colour instantiates some descriptive form, either because we relate the colour to some other aspect of the object such as its shape or type, or because the intrinsic colour possesses discernible gradations and nuance. For instance, the sky tends to show variation in colour and the delightful subtlety of these variations—such as blue shading into pink—can be an instance of the kind of beauty at which I aim. 2.3 Processing fluency It has long been recognized that an account of beauty must incorporate both the qualities of the object and the qualities of the mind that discerns that object. For instance, Kant’s theory is that beautiful objects display ‘purposiveness without purpose’. To be without purpose means that we lack a concept of the object in the manner I have rejected in the previous section. Meanwhile, to be purposive is to have a form that fits the individual’s cognitive machinery in a particularly harmonious way. The basic notion here can be traced further back. For instance, in his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757) Hume claims that some objects may fit the structure of the mind better than others. However I’m not going to linger on the details of these historical accounts. Given my opposition to Kant’s notion of free beauty it would be more trouble than it is worth. Instead I’m going to focus on a contemporary manifestation of the same basic idea: the processing fluency account. This account does not exclude our knowledge or concept of the object. It also benefits from some empirical support. The basic idea of processing fluency is that we take aesthetic pleasure in objects when they are easy to cognitively process. For instance, they are easy to identify, or their meaning is easy to grasp. An early piece of evidence, which will also help to clarify the claim, is the discovery of the ‘mere exposure effect’ (Zajonc 1968). Zajonc found that participants with no prior knowledge of Chinese were more likely to associate ‘Chinese-like’ characters with positive adjectives if they had been shown these characters before. Note in particular that participants’ judgements could be manipulated so that either of two characters could stimulate a more positive association, just on the basis of prior exposure. In later experiments, participants showed higher preferences for octagonal shapes even when prior exposure to these shapes was backwards masked. That is, the shape was shown very briefly, and then another image was displayed immediately after, causing participants to be unaware of having seen the shape (Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc 1980). A plausible explanation for the mere exposure effect is that, all other things being equal, we prefer stimuli that we have encountered before. The processing fluency account then claims that the cause of that preference is that prior exposure facilitates the brain’s capacity to process the image. We might say that we find the familiar character ‘easier on the eye’. Reber et al. (2004) hypothesize: High fluency may elicit positive affect because it is associated with progress toward successful recognition of the stimulus, error-free processing, or the availability of appropriate knowledge structure to interpret the stimulus…High fluency may also feel good because it signals that an external stimulus is familiar, and thus unlikely to be harmful. (2004: 366) So on Reber et al.’s account, the sense of beauty is mediated by the arousal of an affective state. We feel more comfortable or confident, and this leads to a preferential judgement of the object. Thus Reber et al. claim ‘presumably, perceivers interpret the positive affect elicited by processing fluency as their response to the target’ (2004: 367). Another claim that will become relevant later is that the effect will be most pronounced where it is not expected (2004: 372). Note that the participants in Zajonc’s experiment are asked to express a preference or make a positive association, and are not asked explicitly which character is the more beautiful (or striking, or elegant, or any other aesthetic property term). As a result, even if we accept the proposed explanation for the mere exposure effect, we need not be committed to the claim that mere exposure influences the sense of beauty, as opposed to some other criteria for preference. Beauty is just the most obvious way to describe a preference for visual form, independent of practical consequences. Another well-known piece of evidence for the processing fluency account is where participants rate women’s faces as more attractive when these faces are the product of averaging thousands of examples (the effect is first reported in Galton 1883). This averaging has been tested both within and across ethnic groups. The processing fluency account proposes that we find the averaged faces more attractive because, being averages, they correspond closely to mental prototypes we harbour for women’s faces (cf. Martindale & Moore 1988). Because of this close correspondence, the neural system is able to process the image more efficiently than a face with slightly more novel or less regular features. With this experiment, participants are explicitly rating physical attractiveness, and I am happy to treat averaged faces as an instance of the paradigmatic beauty I want to capture here. However, it is worth noting that there is an alternative to fluency, when explaining our judgements of these faces. The blending process results in faces that are highly symmetrical and seem to have very smooth skin. These people thereby look very healthy and youthful. It is possible then that psychological drives relating to the perceived reproductive fitness of the depicted humans are in operation in these cases. Despite some contentions with the evidence presented so far, it may still turn out that the processing fluency model is the best explanation. The account does not just apply to faces and symbols, but also to our preferences for images with clear figure-ground contrasts, as well as our preferences for symmetrical patterns. Our preferences for prototypical exemplars has also been observed in a wide variety of categories including birds, fish, and automobiles (see e.g. Hansen and Topolinski 2011 for a review). All these different cases plausibly involve easier processing. Thus the processing fluency account provides a way to unify the various examples we have considered. The theory may thereby have greater scope than its rivals. However, a clear problem for the processing fluency account is the common observation that sometimes we display an aesthetic preference for stimuli that are strikingly complex. For instance, I don’t think it is controversial to assert that the dazzling ceiling of the Borujerdi house in Iran is beautiful (see Figure 1). In particular, it is much more beautiful than my office ceiling, which is a simple grid of squares. Figure 1. Ceiling of Borujerdi house, Kashan, Iran (photograph by Amir Pashaei) It is obvious that processing the design of the mosque ceiling is harder than processing my office ceiling. Of course, we do not always prefer complexity. Most theorists accept Daniel Berlyne’s (1971) observation that preference for complexity follows an inverted U shape, where a moderate level of complexity is optimal. However, even our preference for a moderate level of complexity is hard to fit with the fluency account. Reber et al.’s response to these sorts of cases is to emphasize the role that expectations play in their model. They suggest that when we realize that an apparently complex stimulus is in fact not so complex after all, the object is easier to process than expected. So relative to our expectations, the object can be processed fluently. In particular, Reber et al. appeal to the traditional aesthetic ideal that complexity should be balanced with unity, or that there is unity in the complexity (Hutcheson 1726). Unity is a facilitating feature that allows us to fluently process complex details. A related point is developed in a (2013) paper by Bullot and Reber. Here they outline three distinct levels at which we cognitively process artworks: (i) basic exposure; (ii) artistic design stance; and (iii) artistic understanding. The first level concerns our basic acquaintance with the sensory properties of the work. The second two levels apply to artworks where our appreciation is relative to our understanding of artistic categories such as genre, historical style, and individual style. Bullot and Reber hypothesize that when we are familiar with a work’s style, we are able to process its features more easily, since they are the predictable consequence of the work’s style. Thus one of Pollock’s splash paintings may be visually very complex. Yet if we are familiar with Pollock’s style, and we know how the work was produced, the complex visual form of the painting is rendered much easier to process. Note that while these levels are tailored towards our appreciation of artworks, it is not hard to infer a parallel account for natural beauty. That is, when we understand the function or causal history of a natural object, this can help us to make sense of the sensory details, and thus increase the fluency of its cognitive processing. For example, understanding how a tree grows by branching outwards may help us to understand its complex form. Bullot and Reber’s overarching point then is that ease at one level can compensate for difficulty at another level. Thus complex objects can nevertheless deliver processing fluency overall. Despite these responses, I do not think Reber and colleagues have managed to overcome the problem of complexity. First of all, performing more fluently than expected does not make sense of cases where we actively seek out more complex stimuli. Indeed, some objects may disappoint precisely because they are less complex than expected. Consider for instance a piece of music that, on a brief sample, promises to be richly nuanced but which on full listening turns out to be simplistic because it repeats that one sample again and again. Conversely, a piece may delight precisely because it is more complex than we expected. Related to this, although numerous studies of mere exposure have shown the effect to be robust, it has some important qualifications. Bornstein (1990) observed that conscious recognition of the stimuli can reduce the intensity of the mere exposure preference. He suggests that if participants are conscious of the manipulation of familiarity, they suppress their natural inclination to prefer the familiar. This result is corroborated by Szpunar, Schellenberg, and Pliner (2004) who find that focused, as opposed to incidental listening to music follows an inverted U-shaped preference curve in line with Berlyne’s theory. Bornstein, Kale, and Cornell (1990) meanwhile find that boredom can be a limiting factor in our preferences for exposure, leading to decreased preferences. Meskin et al. (2013) also find that mere exposure to bad art can result in increased disliking.2 Clearly, our conscious evaluations of objects are influencing and sometimes reversing our aesthetic preferences for familiarity. A second, related, objection is that even if overall unity compensates or facilitates the processing of complex details, it still takes a lot of work to process those details. Why put ourselves to the trouble if what we really prefer is easier stimuli?3 By relying on our expectations, Reber et al. seem to be appealing to the contrastive value of relief. That is, they claim that we prefer easy stimuli because cognitive processing risks error or failure of identification and this is unpleasant. Perhaps we feel some kind of anxiety when we confront complex objects, and when they are easier than expected we feel a kind of relief that then gets attributed to the object. But this is utterly unconvincing as an account of aesthetic motivation. It is simply implausible that we spend so much time and money seeking out beautiful things, if the best we can hope for is that they are not quite as unpleasant as expected. Overall, the processing fluency model conflicts with a mundane observation about human nature that only sometimes do we like comfort or ease, while at other times we like stimulation and challenge. The processing fluency model is fixated on only one side of this picture, but beautiful things occupy both sides. 2.4 Complexity Despite the problems with the processing fluency account, it is well worth considering because it draws together quite a lot of observations about our aesthetic preferences. A good account of beauty must achieve at least as much in explaining our preferences for symmetries, prototypes, figure-ground contrasts, and probably the mere exposure effect as well. It is also important to consider the role that cognitive processing plays in our aesthetic appreciation. This sort of psychological approach has the potential to draw together the vast range of stimuli that appear beautiful to us. Indeed, I agree with the processing fluency account that we prefer to minimize the difficulties of understanding. However, I want to emphasize that we have no need for any mediating emotional state, in which we feel anxiety about making sense of things or relief that we manage after all. All of this is unnecessary. Rather, we need to understand complexity as a cognitive cost. To grasp this approach requires a digression on complexity, so please bear with me. The early ‘Kolmogorov’ definition of complexity measures the complexity of an entity or phenomenon by the length of programme it would take to reproduce a complete description of it. Highly ordered phenomena (e.g. a row of identical squares) contain predictable regularities, and so can be algorithmically compressed (e.g. with the instruction—‘repeat square a hundred times’). This means they are relatively simple. Meanwhile, random phenomena are maximally complex because the only way to fully describe them is to list each of their details in turn. Yet many theorists have wanted to place complexity somewhere in-between total order and total randomness. In ordinary language, complexity denotes an interesting degree of structure: of highly involved order or intricate relationships between entities. Thus various modifications of Kolmogorov complexity have been proposed (see e.g. Grassberger 1989 for a review). Here I appeal to one of the strongest candidates—statistical complexity (e.g. Crutchfield & Young 1989; Gell-Mann 1995) which has recently been philosophically defended by James Ladyman and colleagues (2013) and which, most importantly, can be linked with models of neural processing that conceive the brain as following principles of statistical predictive processing (e.g. Hohwy 2013, Clark 2013; see also the Hick-Hyman law, Hick 1952; Hyman 1953). Like Kolmogorov complexity, measures of statistical complexity appeal to the length of the programme required to reproduce a description of the phenomenon. However such a programme is only tasked to reproduce the statistical properties of the phenomenon. Thus a purely random string of information requires only a minimal programme because there are no interesting statistical features to capture; all variables are equally probable at any given point. Meanwhile, a perfectly ordered or repetitive phenomenon can be described in terms of the 100 per cent probability that a certain state will repeatedly occur. Hence both random and totally ordered states lack statistical complexity. What ramps up the level of complexity is less repetitive details. For example, if we were to produce a statistical description of Mondrian’s grid paintings, we might say that their essential features—containing rectangles, bold primary colours, and so on—appear in 100 per cent of cases, while more particular features, the appearance of the colour blue for instance, only appear in a proportion of cases. Such descriptions may potentially become extremely fine-tuned because although statistical complexity is basically concerned with the overall distribution of states in a phenomenon, the way that states are distributed in complex structures are likely to display mutual dependencies. For example, for a piece of music in traditional sonata form, it is highly probable that if the main theme is in C major, then the secondary theme will be in G major. Or, for music based on motifs, repetitions and modifications of motifs are probable—and some modifications are more probable than others. Thus the programme may describe the probability of one string of information given the presence of another. We can see then that the measure of statistical complexity will increase with the amount of structured, interrelated features in a phenomenon—cohering well with our intuitive sense of complexity. It is worth noting that statistical complexity can also encompass other aesthetically significant variables, specifically Berlyne’s other ‘collative’ variables of novelty, ambiguity, and conflict. A statistical measure of novelty is straightforwardly the low statistical likelihood of a certain state occurring given a certain background. Ambiguity could be glossed as the statistical uncertainty regarding what may follow, or co-occur given a certain state. For instance, if we watch a film where it is ambiguous whether a character is happy or sad, do we thereby expect to see more displays of sadness or more of happiness? It will be equiprobable that either state could follow or co-occur. Finally conflict (in the aesthetic sense of incoherence) could be partially described as a more involved kind of novelty.4 We take two sets of information, each of which internally contains mutually probable features, but also as a set implies the low likelihood of the other set. The difference with novelty is that both sets are internally stable, enabling a degree of equality that allows for genuine conflict as opposed to one set being the dominant frame. Now I am not claiming here that these variables are entirely reducible to the kinds of statistical properties that I have outlined. My claim is rather that these statistical descriptions are appropriate for capturing the difficulties that such variables present within the confines of an information processing task. Such a task is concerned with detecting patterns or regularities with which different states can co-occur, in order that the overall phenomenon may be more adequately described. In this respect, these variables all affect the manner in which information may be processed because they task a system to describe more than one possible state of affairs. More significantly, grasping such statistical properties is plausibly the way that the brain makes sense of the information it receives, particularly as it engages with stimuli over a period of time. The need to anticipate large numbers of possible outcomes will engender psychological effort or cost. But making accurate predictions regarding stimuli will allow these costs to be more efficiently met (cf. Huron 2006: ch.3). In effect, it is easier to make sense of an object that displays one pattern and its modifications than an object that displays two patterns and their modifications. Thus we are closer to understanding why it is that complexity engenders cognitive processing costs. These cognitive processing costs in turn have metabolic costs for an organism. Thus it is likely that an organism is disposed to minimize these costs. But at the same time, a creature endures metabolic costs only for the sake of acquiring some benefit. This is something that the processing fluency model seems to ignore. One point Reber et al. mention (quoted in section 2.3) is that fluency is ‘associated with progress toward successful recognition of the stimulus’. Successful recognition is a positive good: one that might be worth expending some effort to achieve. Moreover, by using the term ‘association’, Reber and colleagues are suggesting that the goodness of fluency is only due to a link with something else that is good, namely, successful recognition. But if it’s successful recognition rather than fluency that is itself good, why not focus the account of beauty on that instead? 2.5 Fitting together What are we looking for in an account of beauty is a cognitive reward that can compensate the cognitive costs of making sense of the stimuli. This is what my account aims to provide. It does this by combining the claim that we prefer to minimize cognitive processing costs with the claim that beautiful things display formal perfection. My basic idea is that we find objects or events beautiful when many parts seem to harmoniously fit together. Roger Scruton (2009: ch.4) has equally described beauty in terms of the sense of fittingness, and I agree that this term captures the phenomenology of beauty well. We can then clarify fittingness by appealing to the psychology of complexity outlined in the previous section.5 We find something fitting when parts appear mutually probable, and the more mutually probable parts there are, the better. Another way to put this point is that we find things beautiful at the moment we realize that they contain patterns that will allow lots of details to be reconciled or predicted. This theory harks back to the traditional notion of unity in complexity that was mentioned in section 2.3. Monroe Beardsley (1958/1981) is the philosopher most clearly associated with this view in recent times, and my view bears definite similarities to his. However, there are differences. For one thing, Beardsley regards unity and complexity as ‘general canons’ (i.e. principles) for aesthetic value in general, rather than beauty in particular. He moreover adds ‘intensity’ (roughly, expressive qualities) as a third principle, which I am leaving out my account of beauty altogether, since I largely assign this to dramatic value (see Chapter 4). Beardsley moreover regards both unity and complexity as properties that are always good making (though insufficient for aesthetic goodness). In contrast, I understand complexity and unity to be in tension with each other (cf. section 1.5). Thus you can have too much unity if it undermines complexity, and vice versa. Another recent account that bears similarities to my own is proposed by Hogan (2016: ch.1). Hogan claims that part of our sense of beauty is when the task of pattern recognition results in ‘non-anomalous surprise’. Non-anomalous surprise occurs where the completion of the pattern is not habitually predictable, but which nevertheless fits in retrospect. Hogan further suggests that many works juxtapose a simple background pattern with a more complex or unpredictable foreground pattern. This is an interesting way to balance simplicity and complexity and I can endorse Hogan’s view to a large extent. However, we should be careful not to suggest that beautiful things appear unpredictable. They should appear like they are going to make sense. This leads to the point where I believe my account most significantly improves on others. My model is supported by a psychological account of why things fitting together should be pleasurable to us. Neither Beardsley nor Hogan properly explain this, in my opinion, yet it is essential to truly understanding beauty.6 The basic idea is that the pleasure of things fitting together is a distal version of the reward we get from knowledge. Knowing things is plausibly an innate concern for creatures like us because on the one hand our knowledge of the world is vital for our practical engagements and, on the other hand, it is such an energy hungry process. As a consequence, it is plausible that creatures evolve mechanisms of pleasure or reward that track and reinforce this activity. That is, our brains reward us with pleasure when we successfully gain knowledge. So in this account knowledge is a kind of good, and knowledge-seeking or learning is a kind of attractant response. So far we can explain why knowledge may engender pleasure, but this is just the background regulatory system. What we need to add is that, in general, any motivational activity concerns the trading of costs against benefits. The optimal condition for an organism is where relatively little costs are required to secure lots of benefit. That is, where the cognitive costs of knowledge-seeking are well-compensated by the benefits of acquiring knowledge. This should be a more pleasurable state of affairs. Now we can bring in beauty as a distal version of this drive for knowledge. My claim is that beautiful objects appear to be cognitive bargains. We discern them as offering the opportunity to grasp lots of information relatively efficiently because they appear to harmoniously fit together. They appear to contain mutual probabilities that will allow us to predict or make sense of why a particular detail is the way it is. So, the more features or aspects of a thing harmoniously fit together, the more we can gain the benefit of knowing the object. In beautiful objects we detect the high accessibility of knowledge. One potential objection I should address here is the simple denial that when we introspect upon our experiences of beauty, we discern much knowledge-seeking going on or any pleasure based upon it. When for instance, I gaze upon a rose, must I really suppose that I experience pleasure because I experience the accessibility of information? In response, I should first emphasize a point that I made at the beginning of this chapter, which is that the aesthetic value of a beautiful object need not be entirely captured by the pleasure of beauty. In particular, there is a kind of tenderness involved in appreciating the soft delicacy of a rose that would be covered by the capacity we have to imaginatively identify with objects that I describe in Chapter 3. I also leave aside the pleasure of colour intensity for my account of dramatic intensity in Chapter 4. However, my account of beauty should account for our appreciation of the formal qualities of the rose, for instance, the concentric arrangement of its petals, their regular curving shapes, and the continuities in their colour variations. When we concentrate on these qualities, I find it quite plausible that this form is both immediately given to us as we gaze upon it, and yet still complex or rich. The form of the rose has a kind of marvellous clarity to it. I analyse that impression as a sense that our efforts to understand are being, or will be, rewarded. As Jenny McMahon has said, ‘the feeling of beauty is a feeling of clarity as if one had found a solution to a problem’ (2000: 29). It is worth noting that my model of beauty can link up with the theory of ‘functional beauty’ historically identified by philosophers like Hume (1739/1978: e.g. book II, part II, §V) and Adam Smith 1767: part IV, ch.1) and more recently defended by philosophers such as Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson (2008), Andrea Sauchelli (2013), and Panos Paris (2020). The basic idea of functional beauty is to link beauty with usefulness. According to Paris’ most recent formulation, an object is functionally beautiful if it is: (1) well-formed for its function(s), and (2) pleases most competent judges in so far as it is experienced (in perception or contemplation) as (1) (2020: 521). I can align my account with Paris’ by supposing that judges experience reward when, having grasped the functional category of the object, it appears that the object’s parts are mutually probable. That is, judges observe that the object has been functionally arranged, and in virtue of contributing to this function, the parts all make sense. Note that functional beauty applies very widely. It applies to human artefacts (including artworks aimed at certain effects) as well as to natural functions (the way the parts of an organism contribute to its functions). It can even apply to a person’s intellectual or moral capacities and thereby the sense of ‘moral beauty’ (as mentioned in Chapter 1). Again, beauty need not be restricted to sensory appearances, and neither is the capacity to detect fittingness. Thus, in moral beauty, virtues are functionally understood as qualities that allow the individual to successfully acquire various goods. If a person seems virtuous to us, we expect that their behaviours are going to be intelligible as manifestations of their virtue (more on virtues in section 8.7). So encompassing functional beauty should be an attraction of my model. Yet my model can also encompass the beauty of phenomena understood non-functionally. This includes the character of artworks not grasped in relation to an intended function but merely as ordered wholes, as well as inorganic natural phenomena (minerals, clouds) and features of organisms that we don’t relate to function (perhaps the grain of a piece of wood or the patterns in an animal’s fur). So long as we can make sense of the details by discerning patterns and continuities in them, the object will appear as fitting together. Knowledge of function, natural kind, and causal history are important aids to making sense of an object’s details, but a mere perceptual pattern is also a route towards beauty. 2.6 Beauty in time It is a general feature of our psychology that once a good is firmly acquired, pleasure fades. Thus once secure knowledge of the object is acquired, the pleasurable sense that knowledge is accessible (i.e. beauty) might also fade. We might still recognize that the object did please us, or that it may please us again once we forget various details, but the striking sense of reward might be lost. Alexander Nehamas is known for the claim that our sense of beauty can fade over time. Recall that Nehamas models beauty on love, which he believes involves a desire to understand the object (2007: 120, 131). Nehamas claims that coming to fully understand the object renders it no longer beautiful. He moreover thinks that we love to the extent that we don’t understand. That is, there is an essential element of mystery in the sense of beauty (2007: 76, 105). This underlies his central claim that beauty is the promise of happiness. I do not agree with Nehemas on this point, but the issue is a subtle one that strikes at the heart of my claim that aesthetic values are distal versions of practical values. The practical value I have associated with beauty is knowledge. The distal version of this value is the accessibility of knowledge. That is, the beautiful object appears knowable. We can know things without their appearing knowable. That is, we can thoroughly know objects while agreeing that they appear obscure, disordered, or otherwise resistant to our investigations. But on the other hand, it is not possible to find something beautiful without having at least some grasp of how the thing fits together, i.e. some knowledge. Thus the practical value of knowledge and the aesthetic value of beauty always coincide to a degree (which is not the case for all aesthetic values). Yet even though the practical and aesthetic values coincide, we can distinguish the introspective or meta-cognitive security of knowing something from the object-directed sense that an object’s form is highly accessible. This means that coming to fully know something is compatible with continuing to find it beautiful (though let us grant that we can sometimes become sated with beauty—the sense of accessibility isn’t fresh enough to impress us at that moment). At the same time, the sense of accessibility can be like the mouth-watering sense of smelling delicious food. We can discern that there’s a lot more to know about the object, and these can be some of the most rewarding cases—the ones that appear as cognitive bargains. Indeed, the sense of beauty can increase as we learn more, should we realize the presence of new patterns (cf. Budd 2011: 84). Despite my disagreement with Nehemas, we should agree that the most beautiful objects are those that best sustain our explorative projects. These objects contain nuances, or subtle details of form, that reward further investigation.7 In particular, one plausible principle of optimally complex objects is that they contain superficial or large scale features that can be easily understood, as well as finer details or aspects that become apparent upon closer inspection. This disposes the perceiver to successively grasp patterns or gestalts as they explore the object. The notion that beautiful objects sustain appreciative exploration resembles Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s well-known concept of flow (1990), which locates a special state of mental absorption in balancing the difficulty of an activity against our ability to perform it (more on this in section 4.6). Flow similarly describes an ideal state where benefits compensate costs. We may say that beautiful objects are more apt to sustain flow as we try to understand them. This link with flow also shows how my account can accommodate empirical data that the processing fluency model has trouble with: It has been observed that people’s aesthetic preferences vary according to their level of expertise, with experts preferring more complex stimuli than novices (e.g. Heyduck 1975; Silvia 2005; Sherman et al. 2015; for a review, see Van Geert and Wagemans 2019). The concept of flow allows that experts have greater abilities to match against the difficulty of the task. In cognitive challenges, the effort that experts expend in grappling with complex things is rewarded with understanding. A complex object offers potential rewards to all viewers, but novices cannot access this reward easily enough to make the cognitive cost worthwhile. Applying this to beauty, the way I balance simplicity and complexity is by treating beauty as proportional to a sub-personal calculation of psychological effort. Very complex objects can be very beautiful, so long as the effort to know them seems likely to be proportionally rewarded. Very simple objects can also be beautiful so long as they seem likely to reward very little effort. In general, simpler objects have fewer rewards to offer, but whether it’s worth seeking greater rewards depends on our capacities to access them. My model also manages to accommodate the other data we have considered so far. For instance, we can allow that brief prior exposure enables an individual to grasp the details of an object with less cognitive costs than an unfamiliar object that is in other respects just as complex. Thus the subject should initially prefer the more familiar item. At the same time, my model fits the earlier cited qualifications that conscious familiarity can eventually lead to boredom. Again, the more information available the better. A similar sort of response will be given regarding our preference for symmetry, prototypes, and pictures with clear figure-ground contrasts. The case of our judgement that blended faces are more beautiful is an interesting one. Certainly it can fit my account of beauty as the pleasure of things fitting together. Averaged faces tend to display a clear and functionally harmonious human form that can be efficiently grasped. However, I also hypothesize that given enough time, simple faces will be less attractive than faces which reveal finer nuances on closer inspection. Such faces make more information accessible. Meanwhile, it is possible that sexual attractiveness is playing a role in our attraction to human faces or bodies. If it is, this is an additional value connected to the aesthetic value of the erotic (see Appendix), rather than beauty strictly speaking (contra Levinson 2011). Studies of facial attractiveness have suggested that there are dissociable effects of attractiveness due to prototype approximation, and attractiveness due to sexual interest (e.g. Rhodes 2006; Franklin & Adams 2010). Notably, people with different sexual preferences are still able to agree that averaged faces are more attractive (for a meta-review see Langlois et al. 2000). A final important benefit of my theory is that it allows us to explain the particularism of aesthetic properties. I have already mentioned particularism in section 1.5, but it is such an important concept in aesthetics that it is worth reiterating. Frank Sibley (1959) is famous in philosophical aesthetics for arguing that although aesthetic properties supervene or depend on non-aesthetic properties, we cannot specify rules for exactly how this relation works. Philosophers differ on how strongly particularism holds. Particularism seems compatible with coming up with some general rules. At the most abstract level, we can still say that beauty involves fittingness. I think we can also allow that two perceptibly differing objects can possess the same aesthetic quality at quite a fine level of description (contra Mothersill 1984; Nehamas 2007) and so there must be some general criteria that both objects satisfy. Yet even a small change can make a difference between being say, vivid and gaudy, and it is truly hard to offer rules that will guarantee that an object will have one quality rather than the other. My approach to beauty can make sense of particularism by turning around the explanatory relation in a response-dependent way (cf. the general approach of Matthen 2017). Instead of explaining aesthetic pleasure by appeal to aesthetic properties, we explain aesthetic properties by appeal to aesthetic pleasure. It is because the aesthetic pleasure of beauty is so oriented towards details, specifically how those details fit together, that aesthetic properties are so sensitive to particularities. That is, to evaluate a non-aesthetic property in an aesthetic manner is to be oriented towards its nuances. The power of the object to sustain such attention can then be part of the analysis of the aesthetic property. For example, we might analyse an elegant object as basically a thin or smooth object that has enough nuance to sustain our search for the pleasure of things fitting together. Note that this analysis applies to aesthetic properties specifically associated with beauty such as elegance and gracefulness on the positive side, or dumpiness and clumsiness on the negative side. But analogous response-led accounts of particularities can be developed for other aesthetic values and where possible I will outline these in later chapters. 2.7 Ugliness No account of beauty is complete without an account of ugliness. Broadly speaking, ugly objects are those that fail to arouse aesthetic pleasure. However, just like aesthetic pleasures, there are a variety of ways that an object can fail to aesthetically please. As with beauty, my primary focus is on natural cases rather than artworks. Indeed, one sort of artistic achievement is to render an ugly object in a beautiful way (e.g. Matthias Grünewald’s incredible depiction of the crucifixion). To make sense of such cases we need an independent grasp of ugly objects. Sibley (2001) claims that ugliness is necessarily an attributive quality. That is, all ugly objects are ugly relative to some type. We possess norms for the way that objects of a certain type are supposed to appear, and ugliness is due to violations of the norm. That is, the object is discoloured, deformed, or distorted in some way when compared with ideal members of the type. One important factor of this approach is that the norm we psychologically apply to the object need not be drawn from its factual natural kind. For instance, it is plausible that the reason we tend to find blobfish ugly is that they appear like flabby and distended human faces. But perhaps if one spends a lot of time with blobfish, one comes to apply the blobfish norm instead, and thus ceases to find them ugly, or at least not all of them. Pity the creature that is not just a blobfish, but an ugly blobfish! It is clear that not just any violation of the norm is sufficient for ugliness. Beautiful things can often possess exaggerated features. For instance, an attractive face may have larger than average eyes or lips (cf. Davies 2006a: 229‒31). Plausibly the kinds of violation we are interested in are those that count against the well-functioning of the object. It might be objected that there can be beauty in delicacy, such as the delicate legs of a fawn, where such delicacy is not especially functional. However, I think the fawn’s legs are better understood as cute (see Appendix for an account) rather than beautiful. The mature deer’s legs are more beautiful. Certainly there is a common association between ugliness and disease. Most diseases look ugly. They are excrescences upon the body. However we must be careful here not to confuse aesthetic ugliness with a more emotional sense of disgust. Naturally we are averse to objects that have the potential to infect us. Sometimes a lesion or boil also ‘looks’ painful. We might claim that such cases lack beauty just because they shift us into a practical, non-aesthetic mode of engagement. However, this would merely inhibit our sensitivity to beauty rather than entail that the object itself is ugly. Moreover, one could say the same thing about objects of lust or pride. What we are after is a purer sense in which the mere appearance of something is ugly, and there are plenty of cases of this which do not arouse any noticeable disgust. For instance, ugly carpets, or scrubby areas of wasteland.8 In line with my account of beauty then, I propose that at least a central kind of ugliness is where we detect the breaking of pattern—where order is spoiled, or where the object simply seems messy or poorly articulated (cf. Paris 2017). This is not merely the absence of beauty (which would be bland) but a positive quality of ugliness. In engaging with such objects we might try and fail to grasp pattern, resulting in a sense of error and confusion (cf. McMahon 2008: ch.8). There are really aggressive cases of ugliness where we cannot resist engaging and experiencing this error (consider a blaring, out of tune vocal performance). But it is also compatible with this account that we simply anticipate that the object will not reward the effort. We dismiss it as ugly. Overall, I relate both beauty and ugliness to our detection of patterns in the object, including not just sheer repetitions but complex probabilistic dependencies. Objects can be more or less beautiful depending on how involved these patterns are, where detailed patterns are embedded within larger patterns. Objects can be more or less ugly meanwhile where pattern is broken or where details do not make sense, where appearance is noisy or distorted. Both beauty and ugliness, it should be emphasized, relate strongly to our sense of both function and causal history, since these are important ways in which we make sense of an object.9 2.8 Difficult beauty The last issue I want to consider in this chapter relates to the overall aim of this book to defend Aestheticism. I have freely allowed that some things are more beautiful than others, and that some things are ugly. Yet how can we regard everything as aesthetically good when there’s so much ugliness in the world (not to mention deliberately ugly art!)? Responding to this challenge will be an ongoing theme of this book. What must be grasped first is that beauty is not the only positive aesthetic value. Since ugliness is specifically opposed to beauty, it is entirely compatible with being ugly that the object simultaneously affords some other kind of aesthetic value. However, to finish this chapter, I want to outline one response to this challenge that stays within the realm of beauty. There is such a thing as ‘difficult beauty’ (Bosanquet 1915; Jacquette 1984). This is the observation that many things that are ugly in a prima facie way can be construed as beautiful when properly contextualized. In particular, when we take a scientific or philosophical point of view, we can grasp patterns or order in things that are commonly taken to be ugly (cf. Carlson 2000: ch.6). For example, consider the disease specialist who examines a large fungal growth and declares ‘this one’s a real beauty!’. She is not necessarily being ironic. She may legitimately regard such a prime specimen as beautiful. To that specialist, the fungus perfectly exemplifies the pattern appropriate to fungal growths, and she anticipates a rewarding investigation. Simultaneously that very same specialist might recognize that relative to human function, the growth spoils order and is ugly, but in the context of grasping fungal types, the growth is beautiful. All this ties into the earlier point that experts tend to prefer more complex objects, because they are capable of discerning the patterns in these objects. Indeed, part of the pleasure of philosophy and science is to tackle ever more challenging cases, and to incorporate them within one’s worldview. Thus once again, the pleasure of understanding underlies our account of beauty (I will again link aesthetic and philosophical pleasures in sections 7.8 and 8.5). Difficult beauty can also be realized by incorporating ugly details within a larger picture. For instance, scrubland has its special role to play in the wider ecology. Disease and deformity reveal possible variations in form. Even clumsiness can be understood as part of the learning process, or simply as the predictable consequence of certain freedoms of action. In such cases beauty is not found in an object’s intrinsic formal qualities but on its extrinsic relations. We are appreciating the ugly object as an element within a wider picture, analogous to the way in which a dissonant chord may contribute to the larger harmony of the music, or the way a dirty streak may contribute to the larger grandeur of a landscape. The scientific and philosophical viewpoint recognizes that all things are parts of the natural world. Thus the initial defence of Aestheticism against the problem of ugliness is that when placed in the right context, everything is beautiful. At the limit, from the perspective of the cosmos as a whole (or as much of it as we can comprehend) everything that is ugly seems to have a place, because everything promises to fit within natural patterns and principles. Perhaps not everyone will agree that everything in our universe does in fact fit together. Certainly it is hard to prove this claim. Yet the aestheticist maintains a kind of optimism that continued investigation will reveal patterns and order. Indeed, it is worth noting that the increase of entropy indicates that our universe is getting more disordered. But this does not imply that the universe is becoming more random. On the contrary, the universe is becoming more complex, and this complexity seems to be emerging from the ramification of simple laws. Should we be able to grasp the laws that make sense of all these complex details, further knowledge will be highly accessible. In effect, the universe may be getting more beautiful! Still, difficult beauty only offers an initial defence against the problem of ugliness because it is very often the case that we fail to take a wider perspective. If Aestheticism is to play the crucial role in the value of the world that I am seeking in this book, beauty needs to be supplemented with some other immediate aesthetic values. Let us move on to these. The Aesthetic Value of the World. Tom Cochrane. Oxford University Press. © Tom Cochrane 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848819.003.0003 1 I owe this nice example to Sebastian Gardner. 2 The ‘bad art’ used in these experiments were paintings by Thomas Kinkade, whose work is often regarded as kitsch. Given that kitsch works use clichéd themes and styles (see Appendix for discussion) we may say that they lack stylistic or expressive complexity. 3 There’s a similar problem for predictive processing accounts of the mind, which claim that we are always motivated to reduce prediction errors (see e.g. Clark 2013 and various commentators in that issue). This is known as the ‘dark room’ problem. 4 I say partial since it is unclear if statistical properties can capture the difference between a rare feature and a prohibited feature. To explain prohibition, an account of how social norms affect statistical processing would probably be required. I will address issues about social norms in Chapter 6 on comedy. 5 Scruton tends to eschew discussions of the underlying psychological mechanics, whereas I am unconvinced that we have grasped anything real until we can describe the psychological mechanics. 6 The other part of Hogan’s account of beauty is that when objects approximate our mental prototypes, this activates a reward based on the sense of attachment. It is unclear if Hogan thinks this also applies to pattern recognition, though he clearly thinks that beauty in general involves sense of attachment. In contrast, I reserve the reward of attachment for my account of sympathetic value in Chapter 5. 7 King (2017) has a rich discussion of the way that subtlety invites further exploration. King distinguishes subtlety from complexity, but I’m inclined to treat subtlety as a sub-type of complexity. That is, complexity can be obvious or not. 8 Thanks to Filippo Contesi for persuading me of this point. 9 Eaton (1999) describes a case where her friend finds a flower ugly, despite its vibrant purple colour, because the species is invasive to that environment. If awareness of invasiveness is spoiling a wider sense of the ecosystem’s functionality then I can count this as a legitimate case of ugliness (though perhaps in the even wider context of species migration dynamics, we might see beauty). If, however, the awareness of invasiveness spoils her friend’s experience on moral grounds, then I do not count it as a case of ugliness. 3