The Science of Aesthetics

[kelltrill]

I was recently drawn into a debate with a close Christian friend about the argument from beauty. I have no idea how to answer her questions.

Her position: Why are things in nature beautiful? Why do we find them attractive/why are they attractive, as though they were designed for our enjoyment? Is there a scientific reason for flowers and animals etc to be pretty?

Any advice or suggestions on how to respond will be awesomely appreciated ^_^ I get the feeling this can spill over into a philosophical debate quite easily but I'm looking specifically for any scientific evidence to back up my response.

[SSY]

I would really like to hear her exact argument

1 Things in nature are beautiful
.
.
.
N Therefore, God exists


Care to fill the in the gaps?

[Logikos]

I would really like to hear her exact argument

1 Things in nature are beautiful
.
.
.
N Therefore, God exists


Care to fill the in the gaps?

It's unlikely to be a deductive argument - I suppose you could make one similar the moral argument such as (loosely)

P1: Objective beauty exists only if God exists
P2: Objective beauty exists
C: God exists

but P1 and P2 are not obviously true.

More likely she was using an "inference to the best explanation" - in which case we would need to decide what makes one explanation better than another.

[kelltrill]

I would really like to hear her exact argument

1 Things in nature are beautiful
.
.
.
N Therefore, God exists


Care to fill the in the gaps?

She's at work at the moment but I'll Skype her later and ask her to flesh it out a bit more.

I think her argument is very simply along the lines of: nature is beautiful for us, rather than nature appears beautiful to us. If nature wasn't designed to be aesthetically pleasing for us then why is it beautiful at all? What is the scientific reason for pretty flowers and brightly coloured birds and fish? It is as if the beauty was put there for our enjoyment.

*shrug* I'll update you on more details in a couple of hours. She's a very sweet, young, naive thinker so I'd be very surprised if her argument has more scope than that though. She actually said to me once that everything probably has a scientific explanation... but she's still a staunch Christian.  

[Tank]

I was recently drawn into a debate with a close Christian friend about the argument from beauty. I have no idea how to answer her questions.

Her position: Why are things in nature beautiful? Why do we find them attractive/why are they attractive, as though they were designed for our enjoyment? Is there a scientific reason for flowers and animals etc to be pretty?

Any advice or suggestions on how to respond will be awesomely appreciated ^_^ I get the feeling this can spill over into a philosophical debate quite easily but I'm looking specifically for any scientific evidence to back up my response.

Hi

Beauty is an abstract human construct, it does not exist anywhere but in our minds, a flower has no concept of beauty. So why do humans consider some things beautiful and others not? Symmetry is one key element in many things generally considered beautiful. The roots of this preference are probably evolutionary in that body symmetry is an important indicator of good genetic stock. However politically correct one is about it lop sided faces are not generally considered attractive. Objects that are analogues of sexual attraction are also often considered beautiful, statues can be beautiful as can paintings.

Ugly objects often carry implications of death, danger and disfigurement. Consider a Bumble Bee and a Wasp. Physically there is not a lot to choose between them yet many consider a Bumble Bee attractive with its little hairy coat while Wasp are often disliked.

Objects we consider beautiful are generally directly beneficial to us of resemble something beneficial. There is a lot more to this but I suspect that what we consider beautiful are now, or have been, evolutionarily advantageous to us or bear a resemblance close enough to prompt a miss-firing of enjoyment.

[Logikos]

Beauty is an abstract human construct, it does not exist anywhere but in our minds,

Can you support that assertion?

[SSY]

I would really like to hear her exact argument

1 Things in nature are beautiful
.
.
.
N Therefore, God exists


Care to fill the in the gaps?

It's unlikely to be a deductive argument - I suppose you could make one similar the moral argument such as (loosely)

P1: Objective beauty exists only if God exists
P2: Objective beauty exists
C: God exists

but P1 and P2 are not obviously true.

More likely she was using an "inference to the best explanation" - in which case we would need to decide what makes one explanation better than another.

You are right, P1 is incredibly weak, and objective beauty is also, super sketchy.

I would say an explanation that posits the fewest unnecessary entities is better than one which posits many unnecessary entities that themselves require many explanations. (edit, along with predictive capacity)

For my money, I think Tank has it broadly right, if people found trees and grass ugly, living in a forest or grassland would probably suck.

 Although, it would certainly be difficult to isolate the the cultural element of finding things beautiful, I find forests beautiful (partly) because I live in a city, I would be willing to bet that a caveman would find even a drab 1970s office block pretty enchanting.

[Tank]

Beauty is an abstract human construct, it does not exist anywhere but in our minds,

Can you support that assertion?

I'll have a go! Do you accept human language is a symbolic mechanism?

[Logikos]

I'll have a go! Do you accept human language is a symbolic mechanism?

Probably (depending on what you mean by symbolic mechanism), but that doesn't necessarily mean that I think language is only a symbolic mechanism.

[elliebean]

There is as much ugliness and plainness in nature as there is beauty. Why are only some things beautiful? What makes one thing more beautiful than another? Why does a thing appear beautiful to one person and not another? Just some thoughts:

Judgments of aesthetic value rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level. Aesthetics examines our affective domain response to an object or phenomenon. Immanuel Kant, writing in 1790, observes of a man "If he says that canary wine is agreeable he is quite content if someone else corrects his terms and reminds him to say instead: It is agreeable to me," because "Everyone has his own (sense of) taste". The case of "beauty" is different from mere "agreeableness" because, "If he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others; he then judges not just for himself but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things."

For Kant "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging our capacities of reflective contemplation. Judgments of beauty are sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once.

The contemporary view of beauty is not based on innate qualities, but rather on cultural specifics and individual interpretations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics
 Emphasis added

Also:

Aesthetic relativism is the philosophical view that the judgement of beauty  is relative  to individuals, cultures, time periods and contexts, and that there are no universal criteria of beauty. For example, statuettes like the Venus of Willendorf or the women in the paintings of Rubens would have been considered ideal forms of beauty when painted, but today may be regarded as fat, while contemporary standards of beauty (such as those that feature on the covers of contemporary fashion magazines) may have been considered less than ideal in Rubens's time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetic_relativism

[Tank]

I'll have a go! Do you accept human language is a symbolic mechanism?

Probably (depending on what you mean by symbolic mechanism), but that doesn't necessarily mean that I think language is only a symbolic mechanism.

I understand. I'm not trying to trick you I'm just establishing a common frame of reference if we can.

My use of symbolic in this context would be that when we use the word Cat, written or spoken, it is simply a linguistic representation of a real object. The object referred to as a Cat could equally be referred to as kočka if one were Czech. So we have at least two different linguistic symbols for one particular type of object.

Now a Cat can have existance, I could be referring to a singular real Cat, it could be a beautiful cat. Now while the object has an existance the concept of beauty does not have a physical existance. One can't have a bottle of beauty, it is an intangible concept, it is also abstract. The beauty of the cat it a refined quality, an 'abstraction' of one aspect of the cat.  So to go back to my assertion:-

"Beauty is an abstract human construct, it does not exist anywhere but in our minds,"

Beauty has no physical existance.
It is a human idea.
It is abstract.

As beauty has no physical existance, it is a human idea and abstract, it can only exist in the human mind.

How does that sound?

[Logikos]

My use of symbolic in this context would be that when we use the word Cat, written or spoken, it is simply a linguistic representation of a real object. The object referred to as a Cat could equally be referred to as kočka if one were Czech. So we have at least two different linguistic symbols for one particular type of object.

That's all fine and dandy to me.

Now a Cat can have existance, I could be referring to a singular real Cat, it could be a beautiful cat. Now while the object has an existance the concept of beauty does not have a physical existance. One can't have a bottle of beauty, it is an intangible concept, it is also abstract. The beauty of the cat it a refined quality, an 'abstraction' of one aspect of the cat.

By saying the "concept of beauty" aren't you implicitly assuming your result?  Concepts are by most definitions mind-dependent abstract objects.  What you need to show is that the referent of "beauty" is only a concept.

It might be helpful to run in tandem the same argument you make for beauty being a concept but replacing "beauty" with "quantity".  Quantity cannot be "bottled" - should we therefore conclude that quantity is a concept, and why?

[Whitney]

I think those who use the beauty in nature as an argument for god are willfully ignoring all the ugliness of nature...the disease, the hunger, the killing, the disasters...things like this:



I present to you the Naked Mole Rat as proof that there are ugly things in nature.

[Logikos]

I present to you the Naked Mole Rat as proof that there are ugly things in nature.

I don't think anyone has claimed that there aren't.

[Tank]

I think those who use the beauty in nature as an argument for god are willfully ignoring all the ugliness of nature...the disease, the hunger, the killing, the disasters...things like this:



I present to you the Naked Mole Rat as proof that there are ugly things in nature.

That's so cute!!! I saw some at Bristol zoo a couple of weeks ago and they were all warm and pink and little and... well... cute!