A letter on perception and aesthetics.
S.R.,
I have, since childhood, suffered from migraines.
Nothing terribly unusual, yet I’m disappointed to have never experienced the disturbances of one’s visual field which we commonly associate with them, known as auras, and gladdened to have largely avoided other symptoms— nausea, vomitting, vertigo, sensitivity to light and sound, etc., save the headache. The migraines themselves were more common in childhood, and at that, brief, and I hardly now, if only very rarely, if ever, experience them.
Oliver Sacks reports of himself that he too was a migraineur, and was subject to the visual disturbances which may accompany them. He writes in his Hallucinations,
“I was lucky to be one of those people who got only the aura without the headache, and lucky, too, to have a mother who could reassure me that everything would be back to normal within a few minutes…” (pp. 123)
He goes on to describe them, saying,
“I would sometimes see — vividly with closed eyes, more faintly and transparently if i kept my eyes own — tiny branching lines like twigs or geometrical structures: lattices, checkerboards, cobwebs, and honeycombs… these patterns were in continual motion forming and re-forming, sometimes assembling themselves into more complicated forms…” (pp. 124)
The geometrical quality of the images perceived by the migraineur is not unlike those found in other physiological states, e.g., something so mundane as hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), or alien, as in the altered consciousness produced by hallucinogenic drugs, e.g., LSD, or in sensory deprivation chambers.
What is more interesting is what the commonality of these experiences across different physiological states might suggest about the nature of visual perception —
“In [“Mescal and] Mechanisms of Hallucination[”], published in 1942, [Heinrich] Klüver spoke of the tendency to geometrization in the brain’s visual system, and he regarded all such geometrical hallucinations as permutations of four fundamental form constants (he identified these as lattices, spirals, cobwebs, and tunnels). He implied that such constants must reflect something about the organization, the functional architecture, of the visual cortex…” (pp. 98)
At one point Sacks goes on to suggest that the various “migraine-like”, geometric motifs that we find in art (Islamic art, Zapotec architecture, Swazi basketry — to paraphrase a few, cf., pp. 132), portray some human need to externalize our own internal experiences, in this case, the visual. And here is where I am not only interested, but somewhat amused:
“Do the arabesques and hexagons in our own minds, built into our brain organization, provide us with our first intimations of formal beauty?” (pp. 132)
Plotinus, in one of his discourses on beauty (Enneads I.6), considers its nature, beginning, very modestly in that manner of Aristotle’s, by rehearsing various possibilities.
He begins our discussion by naming the sorts of things that are beautiful, some of which are present to sense perception — bodies, sounds — and others which are not — deeds, actions, moral virtue (I.6.1). This is unoffensive enough — for who would deny that faces can be beautiful, or rhythms, or landscapes, or certain activities, or characters? The problem arises when we consider why these things are beautiful — are there several kinds of beauty? Or is there just the one kind of beauty, in virtue of which all things which are beautiful, are beautiful? But, then, what is there in common (for, we are seeking some commonality) between, say, a face, and a lyric, or a melody, or a landscape?
Plotinus considers one position, that of proportion and symmetry—
“It is said by all (mostly, anyway) that the symmetry of parts with respect to each other and respect to the whole, with the addition of good colour, makes something beautiful to sight, and that in them and other objects generally, being beautiful is to be proportional and measured.”
I.6.1.20–25 (my translation)
The Stoics purportedly defined beauty as being symmetry in addition to colour, but such a definition precludes those things which are simple, i.e., don’t permit of physical parts — such as moral actions, which we know to be beautiful, or those things which are wholes, but can be resolved to parts, as, if the wholes are beautiful, then the parts must be as well.
And while it is true that some things which permit of proportion are beautiful in so far as they are well-proportioned, beauty must not consist itself wholly in proportion, if we are to consider these other things beautiful.
And so I think Sacks’ postulation is correct, in so far as those things which are present to the senses are beautiful because of their proportion, in so far as those things which are present to sight can be resolved into these forms which exist at the earliest strata of the visual system — but then this begs the question as to why proportion is beautiful, and says little of why things which are disproportionate are beautiful, and how beauty is apparent to our other modalities.
But let us, for the moment, restrict ourselves to vision, and let us plumb a little further into the causes of beauty.
There is a brief aside that, I think, if pursued much further, would yield much in the way of understanding beauty —
“For it [beauty] is something that becomes apparent at first sight, and the soul speaks as if it understood it, and receives it as if it recognized it…”
I.6.2.20–25 (my translation)
From this we understand that beauty is a matter, at least in some form, of intellection, that the soul has some relationship to it whereby beauty is intelligible, that it is understood almost prior to thought, and immediately, and so beauty seems to be much more than perception, and something akin to intuition, in so far as some value is hidden within it or behind it, in so far as it draws and drags the gaze of the onlooker (I.6.1.20).
In this respect we might refer to G. Santayana, who, in his The Sense of Beauty, writes,
“We have now reached our definition of beauty, which… is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical language, [b]eauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.” (pp. 38–39)
This definition accounts for the intelligible aspect of beauty, in so far as it has some latent value, which is regarded, to perception, as being inseparable (to the eye, anyway) from the thing — and, additionally, it accounts for the phenomenological aspect of beauty which has not yet been addressed, in so far as we experience a kind of beautiful emotion in the experience of the beautiful thing.
And so I think this is quite apt a definition of beauty; it is succinct, powerful, and accurate.
That it reflects the intelligible aspect of beauty gives us an explanatory mechanism for how the beauty of an object waxes or wanes over time, which Plotinus mentions —
“The same bodies are at times beautiful, at other times not so, such that their being bodies is one thing, but their being beautiful is another. What, then, is this principle present in bodies?”
I.6.1.14–18 (my translation)
The contention that beauty may be separate from body, which Plotinus seems to gloss over, I think, is defensible enough — if X is somehow divisible from Y, separable from it, then it seems that X is different substantially with respect to Y, and that they can exist apart from one another, and this may be the case in beautiful things. The same faces may be beautiful, conceivably, and then not so, and much the same with any number of beautiful things, of which there are too many to list. And yet, if the body remains the same in its characteristics (those present, any way, to sense), and yet does not appear beautiful — what has changed? Is it merely in the perception, in so far as the perception of the subject is malleable?
We might accept that this waxing and waning of beauty as perceived by a subject is the result of psychological factors, but in so far as this is meant to explain beauty metaphysically, I find this unsatisfactory.
And, for that, I think, we must turn to Plato’s Symposium.
But I will end this here, as I feel the need to rest my eyes.
Farewell.
Sincerely,
George