Does beauty truly lie in the eye of the beholder? Do the objects of the universe have an inherent beauty that lies beyond the need for human apprehension? To what extent are we genetically predisposed to consider something beautiful? Do we truly have free will in our apprehension of beauty?
How much consideration ought we to give to matters of beauty? The concept, vague and shadowy as it is, has moved philosophers and poets, archbishops and professors, lovers and dreamers. Is something inherently beautiful? Can something possess intrinsic beauty? Or does the human mind endow an object with beauty? The word “beautiful” has semantic problems as well: to say one has read a beautiful book, in effect, means that one has read an interesting book, or a wonderful book, or a captivating book. Yet these words are certainly not synonyms of the word “beautiful.”
Philosophers have tried to capture the enigmatic sprite that is beauty in an attempt to undress it and scrutinize its various parts, but so far, all efforts to pin it down have been evaded.
To put it simply, perhaps beauty is nothing more than that which is aesthetically pleasing, that which draws praise or admiration. On some levels this notion grapples with the semantic problem of using the word beautiful. For then, to say a painting was beautiful or to say it was fascinating or captivating would mean more or less the same thing. The meaning would be interchangeable.
However, this would undoubtedly leave many dissatisfied. Surely, beauty is much more than that which is merely fascinating, or interesting, or wonderful. Or is something beautiful precisely because it fascinates or captivates? Does one derive from the other?
But that raises the possibility of something ugly and hideous being fascinating and therefore beautiful, albeit in an unconventional sense. A painting that portrays the decapitation of a little girl or a photo that depicts the genocide of a people may be harrowing and wrenching, but at the same time if it were artfully and aesthetically presented, would it be unfair to refer to it as beautiful? Can something be ugly but beautiful?—A strange paradox, but one that has to be contended with in any philosophical contemplation of beauty.
Another issue that draws attention to itself is whether beauty has to be necessarily apprehended by the five senses. We are all cognizant of things that are commonly construed as being beautiful: a painting, a symphony, a statue, a young maiden, a flower…But what about ideas? Can something as abstract as an idea be considered beautiful? Can a thought be beautiful? Can an emotion be considered beautiful? There are those who might say communism is a beautiful idea; or, that empathy and euphoria are beautiful feelings; or, that string theory is a beautiful concept. However, it must be admitted that perceiving a work of art is not really that different from perceiving an idea. To put it colloquially, it’s all in the head. So, it doesn’t matter if something exists physically in the external world or psychically in the mental world. The pertinent point is that the braincomprehends both: it is the brain’s perception of both that allows us to be cognisant of that which exists in the physical world and the mental world.
So, if it is all about how the brain comprehends, then beauty does indeed lie in the eyes of the beholder—or rather, the comprehender.
Much of why we find beauty appealing lies in the fact that it gives us pleasure. But this pleasure doesn’t derive from the object perceived as being beautiful but rather from the power of the brain to generate and associate pleasure with that object. This may be illustrated by examples involving our ability to perceive light and colour and what happens to some individuals when they lose this ability.
There are some unfortunate individuals who, during the course of their life, either through an accident or cellular degeneration, become completely colour blind—a condition known as cerebral achromatopsia. The world for them becomes black and white. Such people would know what colours such as red or green mean, but only as a verbal memory—they lose all visual knowledge of it.
Now, losing our sense of colour might not seem as calamitous as going completely blind, but it can be severely trying when we realise that much of our emotional state is tied to our perception of colour.
Oliver Sacks describes one of his patients suffering from this condition. Intellectually the patient knew what colour was, but he couldn’t see it and had absolutely no neural access to it. The world looked dirty and grey. The words he used to describe the landscape of his new reality included unnatural, dead, hollow, stained, impure, sullied, and so on. The colour of people’s skin became cadaverous grey; a normal blue sky appeared pale and ashy; brilliantly coloured flowers looked abhorrent and nauseatingly dull. Reds and green appeared as black; blues and yellows appeared as white. Rainbows appeared to him as colourless semicircles in the sky. Even his dreams were either washed out or garishly contrasted but colourless. His world was gloomy and macabre, and he was filled with despair.
Experiments with light filters and Polaroid cameras have proved that colour doesn’t exist externally but rather is generated internally by our brain’s perception of it. Newton showed us that each colour is absolute and determined by its wavelength. But Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera showed that colour is not something that can be perceived in isolation; it must be viewed holistically in conjunction with the surroundings and how it is reflected. He proved this by means of a simple experiment. A multi-coloured image was projected onto a screen. But when the colour we normally see as green was isolated and projected through any coloured filter it would appear as white. Thus, colour is not an intrinsic property of an object.
Users of hallucinogenic substances such as LSD or psilocybin report seeing vivid colours; colours become new and fresh—as if seen for the first time. But what is fascinating is not just the new and refreshing colours that individuals see—it’s the fact that colours fill them with a nameless thrill—an ineffable exuberance. Colours themselves become exhilarating and blissful. This is in complete contrast to sufferers of cerebral achromatopsia who find their world dirty and perverse. Obviously, there must be some connection between colour and emotion.
People suffering from cerebral achromatopsia report seeing some colours such as red as black, but using different wavelength of light to illuminate objects, colours such as red would appear white or black, depending on the wavelength of the light used. These and other experiments have proved that the brain has centres for perceiving colour and wavelength. Thus, colour can simply be generated in the brain by electromagnetic stimulation of these two areas of the brain. In colloquial terms: colour can be generated out of thin air.
But the brain doesn’t simply generate colours objectively. It performs a higher-order subjective function: photons of light reach the eye. These are converted to electric impulses that are sent to the colour- and wavelength-recognition spots in the brain. These brain spots then communicate with several other areas of the brain, including centres for emotion and memory. Only then does the brain generate colour. In this way colour and emotions are intricately linked. Therefore beauty—or our perception of it, which is ultimately the same thing—is undoubtedly not an objective external fact but an internal subjective experience. Beauty does lie in the eye of the beholder.
