I cannot go into this kind of detail with the other genres, but they show the same kind of fascinating interplay between inherited biological and learned cultural factors. I shall just list a few of them.
1. The metrical "operator" of music, which is related to but different from the poetic metrical operator, and which also connects with dance. It is very highly developed in African drum rhythms.
2. The reflexive or dramatic operator, by which we are able to simulate other people's consciousness and point of view in imaginative models (containing miniature models of the other person's model of us, and so on), and set them into coherent theatrical interaction. "O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us," says Robert Burns, "To see oursels as others see us!" This natural-classical genre does exactly that.
3. The narrative operator, that genre by which we give time a complex tense-structure, full of might-have-beens and should-be's, conditionals, subjunctives, branches, hopes and memories. Fundamentally the narrative operation constructs a series of events which have the curious property of being retrodictable (each one seems inevitable once it has happened) but not predictable (before it happens, we have no sound basis on which to foretell it); which is why we want to know what happens next. This operator comes with a large collection of archetypal myths and stories, such as The Swan Princess, which are fundamentally identical all over the world, because their seeds are in our genes.
4. The color-combination preferences that are associated with the so-called color wheel.
5. A similar visual detail-frequency preference system, which makes us prefer pictures and scenes with a complexly balanced hierarchy of high-frequency information (dense textures and small details) ranging through to low-frequency information (large general shapes and compositions). Consider, for instance, Japanese prints, or the arcadian landscape paintings of Poussin and Claude.
6. A representational operator (unique to human beings), whereby we can reverse the process of visual perception and use our motor system to represent what we see by drawing, painting, or sculpting.
7. Musical tonality and the inexhaustible language it opens up, from Chinese classical music, through Balinese gamelan, to the fugues and canons of Bach.
And many more. Researchers of great boldness and brilliance are working to clarify the neuropsychology and anthropology of these systems; their results so far are described in a recent book entitled Beauty and the Brain.9
As yet this list is just a list, with no systematic classification and no attempt to organize its members according to criteria of greater or lesser neural generality. But it does indicate that the forms of the arts are not arbitrary, but are rooted in our biological inheritance. To say this is not to imply that the natural classical genres are constraints, or limits upon the expressive powers of the arts. Quite the reverse; they are like what computer enthusiasts call turbos--programs or hardware that can accelerate and improve the operation of a computer. These systems, which incorporate a cultural feedback loop into the brain's processing, can enormously deepen and broaden its powers. Language itself may be one of the most comprehensive and earliest of them. They are not constraints any more than the possession of a hammer or a screwdriver is a constraint upon our carpentry; but their use must be learned. An esthetic education that assumes that genres are obstacles to creativity, and which thus does not bother to teach the old ones, deprives our children of their inheritance.
So much for the special evolutionary truth about beauty. Without the general evolutionary truth, it would be meaningful only in a practical sense, it would leave out that tremble of philosophical insight that we associate with beauty, and would ignore the beauty that we find in nature and in the laws of science. It is not enough, from an evolutionary point of view, that individuals within a species should be endowed with a species-specific sense of beauty related to co-operation and sexual selection, even if the selection favors big brains, sensitivity, and artistic grace. The whole species must benefit from possessing a sense of beauty. This could only be the case if beauty is a real characteristic of the universe, one that it would be useful--adaptive--to know. How might this be?
What I want to suggest is that the experience of beauty is a recognition of the deepest tendency or theme of the universe as a whole. This may seem a very strange thing to say; but there is a gathering movement across many of the sciences that indicates that the universe does have a deep theme or tendency, a leitmotif which we can begin very tentatively to describe, if not fully understand.
Let us play with an idea of Kant's and see where we get if we treat the esthetic as something analogous to perception.10 Imagine dropping a rock on the floor. The rock reacts by bouncing and by making a noise, and perhaps undergoes some slight internal change; we would not imagine that it felt anything approaching a sensation.
Now imagine that you drop a worm on the floor; the impact might cause it to squirm, as well as merely to bounce and to produce a sound of impact. The worm, we would say, feels a sensation; but from the worm's point of view it is not a sensation of anything in particular; the worm does not construct, with its primitive nerve ganglia, anything as complex as an external world filled with objects like floors and experimenters.
Now imagine that you drop a guinea-pig. Clearly it would react, as the rock does, and also feel sensations, as the worm does. But we would say in addition that it perceives the floor, the large dangerous animal that has just released it, and the dark place under the table where it may be safe. Perception is as much beyond sensation as sensation is beyond mere physical reaction. Perception constructs a precise, individuated world of solid objects out there, endowed with color, shape, smell, and acoustic and tactile properties. It is generous to the outside world, giving it properties it did not necessarily possess until some advanced vertebrate was able, through its marvelously parsimonious cortical world-construction system, to provide them. Perception is both more global, more holistic, than sensation--because it takes into account an entire outside world--and more exact, more particular, because it recognizes individual objects and parts of objects.
Now if you were a dancer and the creature that you dropped were a human being, a yet more astonishing capacity comes into play. One could write a novel about how the dance-partners experience this drop, this gesture. Whole detailed worlds of implication, of past and future, of interpretive frames come into being; and the table and the dancing-floor do not lose any of the guinea-pig's reality, but instead take on richnesses, subtleties, significant details, held as they are within a context vaster and more clearly understood. What is this awareness, that is to perception what perception is to sensation, and sensation to reaction? The answer is: esthetic experience. Esthetic experience is as much more constructive, as much more generous to the outside world, as much more holistic, and as much more exact and particularizing than ordinary perception, as ordinary perception is than mere sensation. Thus by ratios we may ascend from the known to the very essence of the knower. Esthetic perception is not a vague and touchy-feely thing relative to ordinary perception; quite the reverse. This is why, given an infinite number of theories that will logically explain the facts, scientists will sensibly always choose the most beautiful theory. For good reason: this is the way the world works.
Beauty in this view is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action. It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency or theme of the universe, to be able to model what will happen and adapt to or change it. Such benefits might well be worth the enormous metabolic expense of the brain, that organ that spends a third of the body's oxygen and sugar, and for which the body will willingly sacrifice itself.
But this line of investigation has clearly brought us to a question which it seems audacious to ask in this anti-metaphysical age. Let us ask it anyway: what is the deepest tendency or theme of the universe?
Let us make another list, a list of descriptions or characteristics of that theme or tendency. We can always adjust or change the list if we want.
1. Unity in multiplicity--the universe does seem to be one, though it is full of an enormous variety and quantity of things. Our best knowledge about its beginning, if it had one, is that everything in the universe was contracted into a single hot dense atom; or if it had no beginning, then it is bounded by a single space-time continuum out of which all forms of matter and energy emerge.
2. Complexity within simplicity: the universe is very complicated, yet it was generated by very simple physical laws, like the laws of thermodynamics.
3. Generativeness and creativity: the universe generates a new moment every moment, and each moment has genuine novelties. Its tendency or theme is that it should not just stop. As it has cooled, it produced all the laws of chemistry, all the new species of animals and plants, and finally ourselves and our history.
4. Rhythmicity: the universe can be described as a gigantic, self-nested scale of vibrations, from the highest-frequency particles, which oscillate with an energy of ten million trillion giga-electron volts, to the slowest conceivable frequency (or deepest of all notes), which vibrates over a period sufficient for a wave to cross the entire universe and return. Out of these vibrations, often in the most delicate and elaborate mixtures or harmonies of tone, everything is made.
5. Hierarchical organization: big pieces of the universe contain smaller pieces, and smaller pieces contain smaller pieces still, and so on. Relatively big pieces, such as planets and stars, control to some extent--through their collective gravitational and electromagnetic fields--the behavior of the smaller pieces of which they are composed, while the smaller pieces together determine what the larger pieces are to begin with. We see the same hierarchical organization, much more marvellously complex and precise, in the relationship of the smallest parts of the human body to the highest levels of its organization, from elementary particles through atoms, molecules, cells, organelles, and organs, to the neural synthesis that delegates its control down the chain. Consider also the elegant hierarchy of support, control, cooperation and dependency that one finds in the parts and whole of a Bach canon.
6. Self-similarity: related to the hierarchical property is a marvelous property now being investigated by chaos theorists and fractal mathematicians: the smaller parts of the universe often resemble in shape and structure the larger parts of which they are components, and those larger parts in turn resemble the still larger systems that contain them. Like Dante's Divine Comedy, in which the three-line stanza of its microcosm is echoed in the trinitarian theology of its middle-level organization and in the tripartite structure of the whole poem, so the universe tends to echo its themes at different scales. If you look at the branches of a tree--Yeats' chestnut tree, perhaps, that "great-rooted blossomer"--you can see how the length of a twig stands in the same relation to the length of the small branches as the small branches stand to the large branches, and the large branches to the trunk. You can find this pattern in all kinds of phenomena--electrical discharges, frost-flowers, the annual patterns of rise and decline in competing animal populations, stock market fluctuations, weather formations and clouds, the bronchi of lungs, corals, turbulent waters, and so on. And this harmonious relation of small to large is beautiful .
Now these descriptions would be immediately recognized by scientists in many fields as belonging to feedback processes and the structures that are generated by them.11 Indeed, it is often difficult to tell the process apart from the product: how can we tell the dancer from the dance? The fundamental tendency or theme of the universe, in short, is reflexivity or feedback. We are beginning to understand more and more clearly that the universe is a phenomenon of turbulence, the result of a nested set of feedback processes. Hence it is dynamic and open-ended: open-ended, moreover, precisely in and because of its continual attempt to come to closure, to fall to a stop. Moreover, as with any dynamic nonlinear open feedback process, the universe continually generates new frames and dimensions, new rules and constraints, and its future states are too complicated to be calculated by any conceivable computer made out of the universe as it is. It is retrodictable but not predictable, like a good--a beautiful--story.
In other words, the universe is what we call free. We human beings possess a larger degree of freedom, perhaps, than any of the other parts of the world, but we are not unique in being free, even in a very powerful sense of the word. If we could isolate any part of the universe--which is the aim of a good laboratory experiment--then we might be able to create small pockets of determinism: planetary orbits are one example of a sort of natural isolated experiment of this kind. But even here both the microcosm--quantum uncertainty--and the macrocosm--the gravitational influence, however weak, of distant stars--will create a margin of irreducible error.
The process of evolution itself is a prime example of a generative feedback process. Variation, selection, and heredity constitute a cycle, which when repeated over and over again produces out of this very simple algorithm the most extraordinarily complex and beautiful lifeforms. Variation is the novelty generator; selection is a set of alterable survival rules to choose out certain products of the novelty generator. And heredity, the conservative ratchet, preserves what is gained.
But evolution is only one of a class of processes that are characterized by various researchers in various ways: nonlinear, chaotic, dissipative, self-organizing. They are based on very simple iterative formulae. The Mandelbrot set is a nice mathematical example: take a number; multiply it by itself; add the original number; then take the number that you get and repeat the process several times. Now start with a different number, and do the same thing. Make a collection of original numbers, and then map them on a plane, coloring them according to whether, and how fast, the algorithm makes them rush off toward infinity, or to zero in on some limit, called an attractor. (This is best done on a computer, because it would take many years to do it with paper and pencil.) You will get a self-similar shape of great beauty and infinite complexity and variety.
All such processes produce patterns with the familiar characteristics of branchiness, hierarchy, self-similarity, generativeness, unpredictability, and self-inclusiveness.12 To look at, they are like the lacy strands of sand and mud that Thoreau observed coming out of a melting sandbank in Walden; they are filled with lovely leafdesigns, acanthus, chicory, ferns or ivies; or like Jacquard paisleys, the feathers of peacocks, the body-paint or tattoo designs of Maoris or Melanesians, the complexity of a great wine, the curlicues of Hiroshige seafoam or Haida ornamentation or seahorses or Mozart melodies.
The iterative feedback principle which is at the heart of all these processes is the deep theme or tendency of all of nature--nature, the creator of forms. It is the logos and eros of nature; and it is what we feel and intuit when we recognize beauty. Our own evolution is at the same time an example of the principle at work, the source of our capacity to perceive it in beautiful things, the guarantee of its validity (if it were not valid we would not have survived), and the origin of a reflective consciousness that can take the process into new depths of self-awareness and self-reference. As the most complex and reflexive product of the process that we know of in the universe, we are, I believe, charged with its continuance; and the way that we continue it is art.
Notes
1.
E.g. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 1-2;
C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning
of Meaning (London and New York: Harcourt Brace, 1923), etc.
2.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Bantam, 1974), 287.3. Charles Hartshorne, Born
to Sing: an Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1973).
4.
Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963).
5.
Frederick Turner, Natural Classicism (New York: Paragon House, 1985). See
also, especially, Ingo Rentschler, Barbara Herzberger, David Epstein, eds., Beauty
and the Brain (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhauser, 1988)
6.
Frederick Turner, op. cit., pp. 248-255.
7.
Ibid, pp. 52-53n.
8.
Ibid, pp. 61-108.
9.
Op. cit., n.5.
10.
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of
Esthetic Judgement, trans. J.C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford U.P.,
1911).
11.
See, especially, James Gleick, Chaos:
Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987); Benoit Mandelbrot,
The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: Freeman, 1977).
12.
See Gleick, Mandelbrot, op. cit..
[Dan
replies: Art & science should inform each other, rather than control each
other. Q- Is not Ugliness as interesting as beauty? The notion of beauty as
progenitor to the arts & sciences is a bit passé- it’s really more an
occasional goal, like truth. Beauty is a biological adaptation- it increases
sexual opportunities by broadcasting perceived ‘good health’. I think you
veer in conflating artists’ search for beauty with evolution. Your jump from perhaps
to indeed in speaking of what made us human is quite a chasm- would that
it were with a wink. A big veer is when you talk of meter in pseudoscientific
terms. The attempt on Willy’s Sonnet 18 is a BIG digression, especially
since meter is much the fantasy anyway. The 10 syllables of line 1 that you scan
[dualistically] as / - - / - - - / - / I hear quite differently. I hear the
stress levels as [1 being most stressed, etc.] 1 5 6 2 7 8 9 3 10 4. But even an
ear less attuned than mine can easily hear anywhere from 3-4 to 6-8 stresses at
least. Plus meter has proven greatly ineffectual at dealing with punctuation
& enjambment. The invocation of alot of this pseudoscientific jargon is
interesting because for one so at odds with Postmodernism the dialectic
techniques used are strikingly similar. Your rationale for beauty is quite
circular (& religious): ‘this is the way the world works.’ The
last paragraph especially exemplifies this view.]
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