Abstract
Seeking to identify the common and distinguishing attributes of effects one might call “aesthetic,” I examined hundreds of examples in music, visual arts, poetry, literature, humor, performance arts, architecture, science, mathematics, games, and other disciplines. I observed that all involve quasi-emotional reactions to stimuli that are composites of multiple elements that ordinarily do not occur together and whose interaction, when appropriately potentiated, is transformative—different in kind from the effects of the separate constituent elements. Such effects, termed synergetic, can evoke surprise-tinged emotional responses. Aesthetic reactions, unlike many other kinds of emotional reactions, are never evoked by biologically urgent action-demanding events, such as threats or opportunities. The examined effects were created by various concept manipulation devices: class expansion, identification of new relations, repetition, symmetry, parsimony, and emotional displays for the audience to mirror (I identified a total of 16 such devices). The effects would occur only for individuals with the necessary priming, in circumstances that include effective potentiating factors. Synergetic stimuli that evoke aesthetic responses tend to be reinforcing, via mechanisms related to their biological utility during our evolution. I offer a theory as to how aesthetics may have evolved from its primordial pre-aesthetic roots, with examples of how consideration of those roots often explains aesthetic and related effects. The article suggests that aesthetic phenomena are a special case of a more pervasive aspect of behavior and proposes research approaches involving laboratory models and fMRI technology.
Highlights
I performed the seminal work for this article at Columbia University from 1948 to 1960 and wish to express my gratitude to my Professors Ernest Nagel for helping me understand the nature of scientific inquiry and explanation in science; to Lofti Zadeh, for shaping my orientation in the quantification of information and uncertainty; and to Ralph Hefferline, W
Our private emotional reaction2 to a stimulus we find beautiful or surprising, such as the transient pang occasioned by a sunset or a Mozart melody, does not depend on any effects it may have or on what it may accomplish; it is unaffected by its consequences or outcomes, and it is often quasi-reflexive
Though the mate selection functionality of displays and performances may largely have fallen away, the disposition to be attracted by the various features described in the sections on symmetry (Sections 7.2 and 7.3), parsimony (Sections 4.7 - 4.9), and the various other devices described in Section 7.4 would have been preserved and may have evolved into our present-day aesthetic sensibilities, in accordance with the pathways proposed in Section 4.9 for parsimony and Section 7.3 for symmetry
Summary
Beautiful! Wow! Brilliant! Aha! Eureka! Magnificent! Amazing! Awesome! Elegant! Hilarious! Moving!—responses to music, visual art, poetry, film, literature, mathematics, science, performing arts, humor, architecture, culinary arts, and games like chess. Moving!—responses to music, visual art, poetry, film, literature, mathematics, science, performing arts, humor, architecture, culinary arts, and games like chess. What do these reactions, and the events that evoke them, have in common? Phenomena we may call “aesthetic” permeate our daily lives, there is something special about them. This may be why they captured the attention of many of the world’s greatest thinkers through the ages, from the ancient Greeks through today’s neuroscientists. This article takes an approach that opens aesthetics to the experimental methods of the behavioral and biological sciences, and positions aesthetics as a special case of a pervasive type of human behavior
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