In Critique
of Pure Reason (1781), the philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed
that the mind is endowed with attributes or categories of perception
that allow the senses to meaningfully encounter the real world.
In his Critique, the writing of which consumed one
third of his intellectual life, he went to extraordinary length
and detail to demonstrate that without the categories of unity,
quantity, totality, extension, cause and effect, possibility
and negation, we would not be able to conceptualize the perceptual
world.
Before and after
Kant, philosophers have 'informally' posited the existence of
metaphysical categories, without which man's inclination to
assign meaning and teleology to life would be severely tested.
Without exception, from the most primitive to advanced cultures,
there is overwhelming evidence that suggests we all possess
an innate understanding of right and wrong, which makes for
a moral category. We are all disposed to love
and hate, which gives rise to the category of
value: we embrace what we love and refuse what we hate. There
also exists a spiritual category through which we posit the
existence of a deity or first cause, which allows for a tentative
accounting of life’s origins as well as the freedom to
question the meaning and purpose of existence. And while these
metaphysical categories are directly implicated in the practical
considerations of daily life, they are distinguished from the
categories of perception in that the senses are not required
to mediate between the mind and its objects of thought, with
perhaps one exception -- the category of aesthetics, which bears
on both the perceptual and metaphysical. For this reason alone,
aesthetics is the most enigmatic and elusive of the metaphysical
categories, but one that Kant deemed of such critical importance
-- despite acknowledging the impossibility of rationalizing
aesthetic judgments (we can’t prove the Mona Lisa is beautiful)
-- that he made it the primary focus of Critique of Judgment
(1790), his reflections on the meaning and implications of beauty
(rendering aesthetic judgments).
The argument for
the inclusion of aesthetics as a metaphysical category rests
on the universally observed phenomenon that when circumstance
allows, we are all, in our fashion, sensitive and responsive
to the presencing of beauty in both entities and ideas, and
that we all prefer the beautiful to its opposite. In the many
large and small decisions we make on a daily basis, we are constantly
and often unconsciously rendering aesthetic judgments. Like
heliotropes that follow the course of the sun, both our senses
and understanding are attracted to the beautiful, which we provisionally
designate as a quality that inheres in, hovers around and vibrates
its objects much like “thought moves through language”
or “a gesture goes beyond the individual points of its
passage.” (Merleau-Ponty)
What distinguishes
the aesthetic category (that provides for the discernment of
beauty) from the others is its apparent lack of a pragmatic
basis: much of what is beautiful in life we can do without.
On the other hand, without a moral category, life would quickly
descend into chaos, which is why it is necessary.
In the selection
of a mate, for example, women, in general, are attracted to
men for their status and power to better optimize their chances
of survival. But, men, in their choice of the opposite sex,
are initially attracted to a potential mate’s beauty,
and not her skills and intelligence, where the latter demonstratively
bear more fruitfully on survival than the former, especially
as it concerns the transmission of genes from one generation
to the next. So if our attraction to the beautiful sometimes
beguiles us to act or choose in a manner that is not necessarily
in our best practical interest, why has natural selection vouchsafed
that innate capacity? Is the appreciation of beauty simply an
adventitious attribute that Nature wasn’t required to
deselect, or is there a
biological justification for its advent?
Prior to the highly
schematized world order we take for granted, early man (code
for tentative man, reduced to the sum of his fears) fabricated
and then situated himself a highly elaborate, compensatory,
mythopeic cosmos in order to account for and explain his contingency
in a largely inscrutable and indifferent world. Where the only
certainty of daily life was the insecurity of life, man was
drawn to any sign or activity that disclosed the idea of order
(as opposed to chaos) in the universe. He was possessed of what
Wallace Stevens characterized as the “blessed rage for
order,” which back then might have manifested in conjunction
with the domestication of of wild edible plants, where a crop
or vineyard’s rows and their deliberate spacing would
have conferred -- beyond the practical -- an aesthetic component
that would not be found in the untamed vegetative world. Agriculture
presences as one of man’s first comprehensive responses
to both his physical and metaphysical hungerings. And if during
that critical juncture of man’s evolution there was a
variant of himself that lacked an aesthetic component, it didn’t
survive for reasons which bear directly on the physiological
benefits derived from the aesthetic experience.
Preliminary scientific
studies reveal that after listening to uplifting
music our stress levels fall off, antibodies appreciate and,
more significantly, the immune system enjoys a boost. Who among
us has not experienced an improvement in mood or disposition
after listening to a favourite music? It is almost beside the
point whether all aesthetically agreeable experiences will generate
verifiable, life-enhancing effects, since the attentive individual,
through his innate ability to encounter beauty in both entities
and ideas, has already enjoyed the psychological and physiological
rewards.
That we are primordially
predisposed to seeking out and creating order to satisfy our
aesthetic wants seems beyond dispute. This was once memorably
brought to my notice during an evening of dance, where an apparently
untrained, untalented dancer was called upon to execute movements
and gestures that struck me as unconscionably unrehearsed and
offensive, but when four other dancers joined the lead and performed
the exact same movements, the whole suddenly appeared choreographed
(ordered) and deliberately conceived for my aesthetic contemplation.
In a moment of epiphany, I recognized that even though movements
were identical in both the solo and ensemble renderings, the
latter introduced the notion of order, which is an aesthetic
value, which in turn produced an agreeable physiological response.
Has there ever been
a time when man has not been actively engaged in the appreciation
or production of order and beauty? If his hunger for order was
once satisfied by the rhythms and cycles of Nature, he later
learned to provide the same through the invention of song and
percussion instruments. Today, the extraordinary monies we dedicate
to the arts and their institutions speak to the measurable salutary
effects that derive from our innate capacity to discern beauty.
Concerning slighted
theists for whom the appreciation of beauty obtains from God,
secularists and rationalists must grant that your belief in
no way compromises nor diminishes the effects of the beautiful
on the senses and understanding. That God, in His infinite
wisdom and invention, has seen fit to endow His creation with
the capacity to love and surrender to the beautiful is surely
proof of -- if not His existence -- the existence of the ineffable.
