The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (60 page)

The processes of science and art can look rather different: a new artistic creation rarely proves an old one wrong; artists rarely look at a scene through microscopes, or understand a sculpture through equations. Yet scientific and artistic creation do sometimes look remarkably alike. Richard Feynman once remarked that the only equipment a theoretical physicist needs is a stack of paper, a pencil and a waste-paper basket, and some artists, when they are at work, closely resemble that picture. Before the invention of the typewriter, novelists used exactly the same equipment.

Composers like Ludwig van Beethoven agonized through change after change, apparently seeking something that they knew was there to be created, apparently meeting a standard that could be met only after much creative effort and much failure. Scientists often do the
same. In both science and art there are the exceptional creators like Mozart or the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who reputedly made brilliant contributions without any such effort. But from what we know of knowledge-creation we have to conclude that in such cases the effort, and the mistakes, did happen, invisibly, inside their brains.

Are these resemblances only superficial? Was Beethoven fooling himself when he thought that the sheets in his waste-paper basket contained
mistakes
: that they were
worse
than the sheets he would eventually publish? Was he merely meeting the arbitrary standards of his culture, like the twentieth-century women who carefully adjusted their hemlines each year to conform to the latest fashions? Or is there a real meaning to saying that the music of Beethoven and Mozart was as far above that of their Stone Age ancestors banging mammoth bones together as Ramanujan’s mathematics was above tally marks?

Is it an illusion that the
criteria
that Beethoven and Mozart were trying to meet were better too? Or is there no such thing as better? Is there only ‘I know what I like,’ or what tradition or authority designates as good? Or what our genes predispose us to like? The psychologist Shigeru Watanabe has found that sparrows prefer harmonious to discordant music. Is that all that human artistic appreciation is?

All these theories assume – with little or no argument – that for each logically possible aesthetic standard there could exist, say, a culture in which people would enjoy and be deeply moved by art that met that standard. Or that a genetic predisposition could exist with the same properties. But is it not much more plausible that only very exceptional aesthetic standards could possibly end up as the norm of any culture, or be the objective towards which some great artist, creating a new artistic style, spent a lifetime working? Quite generally, cultural relativism (about art or morality) has a very hard time explaining what people are doing when they think they are improving a tradition.

Then there is the equivalent of instrumentalism: is art no more than a means to non-artistic ends? For instance, artistic creations can deliver information – a painting can depict something, and a piece of music can represent an emotion. But their beauty is not primarily in that content. It is in the form. For instance, here is a boring picture:

and here is another picture with much the same content:

yet with greater aesthetic value. One can see that someone thought about the second picture. In its composition, framing, cropping, lighting, focus – it has the
appearance of design
by the photographer. But design for what? Unlike Paley’s watch, it does not seem to have a function – it only seems to be more beautiful than the first picture. But what does that mean?

One possible instrumental purpose of beauty is
attraction.
A beautiful object can be attractive to people who appreciate the beauty. Attractiveness (to a given audience) can be functional, and is a down-to-earth, scientifically measurable quantity. Art can be literally attractive in the sense of causing people to move towards it. Visitors to an art gallery can see a painting and be reluctant to leave, and then later be caused, by the painting, to return to it. People may travel great distances to hear a musical performance – and so on. If you see a work of art that
you appreciate, that means that you want to dwell on it, to give it your attention, in order to appreciate more in it. If you are an artist, and halfway through creating a work of art you see something in it that you want to bring out, then you are being attracted by a beauty that you have not yet experienced. You are being attracted by the
idea
of a piece of art before you have created it.

Not all attractiveness has anything to do with aesthetics. You lose your balance and fall off a log because we are all attracted to the planet Earth. That may seem merely a play on the word ‘attraction’: our attraction to the Earth is due not to aesthetic appreciation but to a law of physics, which affects artists no more than it does aardvarks. A red traffic light may induce us to stop and stare at it so long as it remains red. But that is not artistic appreciation either, even though it is attraction. It is mechanical.

But, when analysed in sufficient detail,
everything
is mechanical. The laws of physics are sovereign. So, can one draw the conclusion that beauty cannot have an objective meaning other than ‘that which we are attracted to by processes in our brains and hence by the laws of physics’? One cannot, because by that argument the physical world would not exist objectively either, since the laws of physics also determine what a scientist or mathematician wants to call true. Yet one cannot
explain
what a mathematician does – or what Hofstadter’s dominoes do – without referring to the objective truths of mathematics.

New art is unpredictable, like new scientific discoveries. Is that the unpredictability of randomness, or the deeper unknowability of knowledge-creation? In other words, is art truly creative, like science and mathematics? That question is usually asked the other way round, because the idea of creativity is still rather confused by various misconceptions. Empiricism miscasts science as an automatic, non-creative process. And art, though acknowledged as ‘creative’, has often been seen as the antithesis of science, and hence irrational, random, inexplicable – and hence unjudgeable, and non-objective. But if beauty
is
objective, then a new work of art, like a newly discovered law of nature or mathematical theorem, adds something irreducibly new to the world.

We stare at the red traffic light because doing so will allow us to continue our journey with the least possible delay. An animal can be
attracted towards another animal in order to mate with it, or to eat it. Once the predator has taken a bite, it is attracted to take another – unless the bite tastes bad, in which case it will be repelled. So there we have a literal matter of taste. And that matter of taste is indeed caused by the laws of physics in the form of the laws of chemistry and biochemistry. We can guess that there is no higher-level explanation of the resulting behaviour than the zoological level, because the behaviour is predictable. It is repetitive, and where it is not repetitive it is random.

Art does not consist of repetition. But in human tastes there can be genuine novelty. Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes. For instance, humans often act in ways that are contrary to any preferences that might plausibly have been built into our genes. People fast – sometimes for aesthetic reasons. Some abstain from sex. People act in very diverse ways for religious reasons or for any number of other reasons, philosophical or scientific, practical or whimsical. We have an inborn aversion to heights and to falling, yet people go skydiving – not in spite of this feeling, but because of it. It is that very feeling of inborn aversion that humans can reinterpret into a larger picture which to them is attractive – they want more of it; they want to appreciate it more deeply. To a skydiver, the vista from which we were born to recoil is beautiful. The whole activity of skydiving is beautiful, and part of that beauty is in the very sensations that evolved to deter us from trying it. The conclusion is inescapable: that attraction is not inborn, just as the contents of a newly discovered law of physics or mathematical theorem are not inborn.

Could it be purely cultural? We pursue beauty as well as truth, and in both cases we can be fooled. Perhaps we see a face as beautiful because it really is, or perhaps it is only because of a combination of our genes and our culture. A beetle is attracted to another beetle that you and I may see as hideous. But not if you are an entomologist. People can
learn
to see many things as beautiful or ugly. But, there again, people can also learn to see false scientific theories as true, and true ones as false, yet there is such a thing as objective scientific truth. So that still does not tell us whether there is such a thing as objective beauty.

Now, why is a flower the shape that it is? Because the relevant genes evolved to make it attractive to insects. Why would they do this? Because when insects visit a flower they are dusted with pollen, which they then deposit in other flowers of the same species, and so the genes in the DNA in that pollen are spread far and wide. This is the reproductive mechanism that flowering plants evolved and which most still use today: before there were insects, there were no flowers on Earth. But the mechanism could work only because insects, at the same time, evolved genes that attracted them to flowers. Why did they? Because flowers provide nectar, which is food. Just as there is co-evolution between the genes to coordinate mating behaviours in males and females of the same species, so genes for making flowers and giving them their shapes and colours co-evolved with genes in insects for recognizing flowers with the best nectar.

During that biological co-evolution, just as in the history of art,
criteria
evolved, and
means of meeting those criteria
co-evolved with them. That is what gave flowers the knowledge of how to attract insects, and insects the knowledge of how to recognize those flowers and the propensity to fly towards them. But what is surprising is that these same flowers
also attract humans
.

This is so familiar a fact that it is hard to see how amazing it is. But think of all the countless hideous animals in nature, and think also that all of them who find their mates by sight have evolved to find that appearance attractive. And therefore it is not surprising that we do not. With predators and prey there is a similar co-evolution, but in a
competitive sense rather than a cooperative one: each has genes that evolved to enable it to recognize the other and to make it run towards or away from it respectively, while other genes evolve to make their organism hard to recognize against the relevant background. That is why tigers are striped.

Occasionally it happens by chance that the parochial criteria of attractiveness that evolved within a species produce something that looks beautiful to us: the peacock’s tail is an example. But that is a rare anomaly: in the overwhelming majority of species, we do not share any of their criteria for finding something attractive. Yet with flowers – most flowers – we do. Sometimes a leaf can be beautiful; even a puddle of water can. But, again, only by rare chance. With flowers it is reliable.