The Science of Beauty
a symposion
Scene: The veranda of a house in the suburbs of Brisbane, shortly before sunset on a fine summer evening. The veranda has two levels: the upper is a platform, reached by a metal ladder, with a good view over the back garden to the western horizon.
From the house there emerge three people, carrying a bottle of wine, glasses, and some cushions. All are elderly. The oldest is TOM, the owner of the house; he is a retired literary academic, a widower. His house guests are ANNE, Tom’s sister; and MARK, her husband, a biologist.
ANNE: It’s so nice to see you again, Tom, after all this time. What is it, five years?
TOM: Six. Look, let’s carry these things up the ladder to the platform. If we put the cushions down by the east railing, we can be comfortable, and drink, and enjoy the view.
MARK Give me the bottle and glasses. I’m used to ladders like this, on expedition ships.
TOM: Well, I’ll take the cushions. I’ve been running up and down this ladder for thirty years. Do you need help, Anne?
ANNE: No, Tom, I’ll be fine.
[They go up and settle themselves. Tom pours the wine.]
TOM: Well, let’s drink to ourselves; and others.
ANNE: Absent friends—and relations, as Mother used to say. You remember that, Tom?
TOM: Very well indeed. Well, here’s to ourselves—and to absent friends.
[The touch glasses, and sip the white wine.]
ANNE: What a fine view you have, Tom! Especially now—such lovely colors in the air; and the flowers in the garden, those grey-blue hills in the distance, those little pink clouds over the setting sun.
TOM: It is good, this sunset. But it’s a rare thing, you know. Nature seems to have put on this show especially for you. The clouds are just right. You don’t get a sunset like this more often than about once a month.
MARK: I bet not. Either the sky is cloudless, which is OK but boring; or you have low strato-cumulus, heavy clouds which blot out everything and give you no sunset at all. We get plenty of that, at Dunedin.
TOM: Yes, you need feathery high clouds—
MAR: Cirrus.
TOM: Yes, like curls of red hair, or feathers from a flamingo. They catch the sun’s red rays, and reflect them down to ground level. See how that gives everything round us a special warm glow…
ANNE: The garden, the flowers! The white flowers look pink, the pale yellow flowers look warm yellow. Even the grass looks different.
TOM: Yes indeed. Everything is transfigured. It’s like Virgil’s Elysium, the Classical heaven, where “an ampler air clothes the fields in a rosy light.” It’s sheer magic. I have my own name for this: I call it the Hour of the Gods. But “hour” is an exaggeration: it won’t last more than a few minutes. Not at this latitude. You’d be luckier at Dunedin, half way to the Pole. And yet, even for you, it doesn’t last. In the end, the rose fades to grey. Beauty is precious, but it fades fast.
ANNE: All beauty? What about the beauty of literature, or music? That lasts.
TOM: The written texts and the scores survive, at least for centuries; but they have to be experienced by people, and people don’t last, nor do their experiences last. I’ve had very intense experiences with music, always for short times. The first I can remember was when I was nine years old: I heard on the radio Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Song of India” in an orchestral version, as background music to a radio play for children. The story was a fairy-tale set on the edge of a huge dark pine forest. The play and the music gave me a feeling of being in touch with another world—a mysterious, magical world. But the experience was all over in a few minutes: all I have now is the memory of the experience. I have had similar moments since, with several other pieces of music. But the experience is always short. Sometimes it comes to a high point at just one or two bars in a long piece. One moment in the Adagio of Mozart’s 23rd piano concerto, near the end, with a simple piano line over pizzicato strings; one moment in Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits,” just toward the end of the flute solo.
ANNE: Talking of flutes… We once had an experience with a bird, which was very flute-like, very magical. About ten years ago it was, one spring, before we left Australia. I woke in the early dawn; Mark was still asleep. And then I heard a single bird, calling as if from a great distance. It was like a flute, in a phrase of seven notes. I’d never heard that call before, and I’ve never heard it since. I started to record it with a microphone and a cassette--
MARK: And woke me up in the process!
ANNE: It was worth waking up for. You were a bit late for the bird, but I gave you the recording.
MARK: And I identified the species. A young Australian magpie, practising his adolescent song, and not getting it quite right. In other years, the young magpies did get it right. That’s why we never heard that strange call again.
ANNE: That’s only your theory. It might have been a magpie; or it might have been the god Pan, visiting our world for just that one time.
MARK: I’m afraid it was only a magpie. We have copious evidence for the existence of magpies; but no evidence at all for the existence of Pan.
TOM: [laughing] I like Anne’s theory better, Mark. Or could it be that both theories are right?
MARK: I don’t get that.
TOM: William Blake put that well in one of his poems. Walking in the fields, he came across a thistle. He said, outwardly it was a thistle, inwardly a grey old man. He wrote: “For double the vision my eyes do see / And a double vision is always with me.” So why not outwardly a magpie, inwardly the great god Pan?
MARK: That’s much too mystical for me.
TOM: But the universe simply is mystical. There is often an outward explanation, and an inward—not quite an explanation, but a perception. I think all beauty is like that. You can give a scientific explanation of this sunset’s colors—long-wavelength light, and so on. But there is also the emotional experience.
MARK: I am sure we can give a scientific explanation of that too. Certain lighting effects are pleasing to the human eye. Redder light suggests cosy night-time lighting, and hence it gives a feeling of peace.
TOM: It’s not exactly peace. It’s more like the experience of a better world, a more magical world, Schubert’s “bessere Welt,” which he says music can transport us to. But speaking of music, Mark, how do you explain, scientifically, the beauty of music?
MARK: I suppose the tonal intervals, octaves, fifths and so on, are naturally pleasing to the human ear.
TOM: That explains nothing. “Naturally pleasing”? Why should harmonic intervals be pleasing to primate animals? Why, for heaven’s sake, can we sing? No other mammal can do that!
MARK: It’s doubtless a spin-off. Evolution selected for very precise vocal control in speech, and that led to sensitivity to tones. Hence, as a side-effect, the ability to sing, and so to appreciate music.
TOM: Again, you’re giving the outer explanation. From the outside, it’s all evolution and usefulness. Even maybe sexual selection: the humans who could talk better and sing better got more mates. That’s very likely true. I once fell more or less in love with a girl's voice, a young woman on the radio whom I’d never seen. A lovely voice is certainly sexually attractive. But that still leaves us with the problem of the inner view. Then the question is, why do we perceive anything as beautiful?
MARK: Well, it’s tied up with wholesomeness. A beautiful thing has the characteristics of healthy life. That girl with the lovely voice was surely healthy.
TOM: The Moonlight Sonata is not much like a healthy girl. You see that blue-grey horizon, that long line of hills? It’s turning darker now, but during the day it’s a wonderful, mysterious blue color. It suggests a distant, mystical world. What’s that got to do with a healthy life?
MARK: Ah, well, that’s different. Now you’re talking not about beauty, but about the wonderful, the glamorous.
ANNE: Mark—that surely is a kind of beauty. And a very important kind. The distant blue hills… The blue horizon… I’ve often felt that myself. I’ve wanted to be there. To tread on that blue grass… It would be like standing in Elfland.
MARK: You wouldn’t tread on blue grass. There is no blue grass over there. If you got to those hills, you’d find just ordinary grass. Green grass.
TOM: I know, I know. The blue effect is due to atmospheric scattering of the sun’s blue rays. Painters call that “aerial perspective.” The further away a thing is, the bluer it looks. Yes, you can never stand on the blue grass; just as you can never stand on the horizon. When you’re there, it’s no longer the horizon. Similarly, you can never touch a rainbow. The mysterious is always beyond. But it is there: the better land, Elfland. It’s a psychological reality.
MARK: “Distance lends enchantment.” Everything mysterious is exciting, just as everything new is exciting. The sense of wonder, the appetite for newness—those also have helped humans succeed, and so have been selected for by evolution.
TOM: You bet. But still…
MARK: And the sense of wonder wears off when a thing is no longer new. If you could live in Elfland, for a year or two, Elfland itself would pall. You’d get used to it. It would become ordinary.
TOM: Point taken. I agree. I never denied that the moment of beauty was a passing moment. And many great English poets have admitted this. Wordsworth is full of this theme; so is Shelley, in his “Ode to Intellectual Beauty.” Even Shakespeare has Miranda exclaim: “O brave new world that has such people in it!” But then Prospero, world-weary, remarks “’Tis new to thee.” I know this is true, from my own experience. There was a street in my suburb—“of many, one”—which for some time seemed magical to me: I only looked into it, and thought it beautiful. But later it came to be a route I used almost every day—and the magic was gone.The place became ordinary. I imagine it must be the same with falling in love. Miranda again, with Ferdinand, and Ferdinand with Miranda. She’s never seen a young man before, so she thinks he’s a god. And he thinks she’s a goddess—before he’s known her five minutes.
ANNE: That’s exactly what happened to us two. Love at first sight. I saw Mark the first time at a party, and bang! He seemed to me a god…
MARK: And you were a goddess to me, dear.
TOM: You were never a goddess to me, Anne. I thought you were good-looking when you were a child, and later as a teenager. But you were never exciting to me, because I had known you when you were a baby. My little sister, that’s all. No goddess! I knew you before you were house-trained.
ANNE: Oh yes. And when Mark and I met, I knew he was quite wrong, I knew I wasn’t a goddess. I got a headache that evening, and then I rather wanted to go to the loo. Goddesses shouldn’t have problems like that.
TOM: This is interesting to me. Do you still regard each other like that—he a god to you, Anne, she a goddess to you, Mark?
MARK: Well, no, it’s not like that. But it’s still very good, in a different way. We love each other, knowing each other, as human beings.
TOM: I had noticed that. You love, but you are not now in love. You are not crazy with god-images. Being in love is a little madness. It’s a projection of a preconceived image onto another person. If you’re lucky, the other person isn’t entirely unlike your image. If you’re unlucky, when you find out it’s a disaster. When I was a schoolboy, I fell, I was in love madly for about three days. I hardly knew the girl, I never really spoke to her, I was too shy. Then she went away, and I soon forgot her. But during those three days I was really crazy with my projected image… With Emma, it was never like that. I never fell in love with her: the warmth just grew gradually. But that, too, became very good.
MARK: You can certainly explain falling in love by evolutionary benefit. It helps propagate the species.
TOM: Yes, perhaps human beauty is a fine example of what I’ve been saying: there is an outer and an inner description. But it often doesn’t lead anywhere near copulation. I’ve sometimes seen girls so beautiful that I have gasped. The moment of beauty, all right. But I never wanted to approach them. By that time I was older, and knew what was happening. I knew their perfection wouldn’t last—wrinkles would devour it; and that made me sad. But for the moment, they were perfect—like a perfect flower.
MARK: A perfect flower also appeals because it is an expression of very successful and healthy life. The symmetry of some trees, the incredible complex beauty of some insects. I’m not immune to that appeal, you know. Once, recently, I saw a red dragonfly in a garden, I saw all his thousand intricate parts and his gorgeous color—and I thought, My god! He was gorgeous. It was only later that I identified the species.
ANNE: Mark, your first reaction was, My God. I think you used the right exclamation.
MARK: Oh, here we go again…
ANNE: Tom, this is the one major disagreement we have, we two. Mark’s an atheist. I’m a Christian—well, sort of. A liberal believer in God. And the beauty and the wonderful structure of that dragonfly prove the existence of God.
MARK: The Design Argument, again. Rather shot to pieces, wasn’t it, by Darwin? Evolution can explain every detail of that dragonfly—
TOM: Except perhaps your gut reaction, Mark. I agree with Anne that My God is the right reaction. The first recorded poem in the English language says that—Caedmon’s Hymn, composed before the year 700. “The works of the Father of Glory—how he, the eternal lord, established the beginning of every wonder.” It sounds better in the original Old English, but I spare you that. Anyway, it’s the right reaction to a wonderful dragonfly. By the way, the Design Argument is very much alive and well today, in spite of Darwin. Darwin only disproves an interfering god, a god who has to tinker all the time to produce marvels like a marvellous dragonfly. Modern astrophysics suggests something much better—a really clever god, who programmed all the laws of the universe just so, to make our wonderful world possible, without the slightest later interventions. Fred Hoyle saw that—the great astrophysicist who worked out the synthesis of the elements in the stars. If any step in that intricate process had been even a fraction different, planets and life would have been impossible. Even the properties of water, hydrogen oxide, are quite eccentric—and without that eccentricity, no life. Well, Fred Hoyle said, “It does rather look like a put-up job.” And I agree with him.
MARK: All that can be explained by the Anthropic Principle. There are an infinite number of universes, with all sorts of laws, but only ours has the right laws which allow us to exist—
TOM: A pretty wild idea, for which there is no evidence at all. Don’t you atheists believe in Occam’s Razor? One god is a much simpler hypothesis than an infinite number of universes.
MARK: Not really. You will still be forced to an infinity—but of gods, rather than of universes. If one god created this universe, who created that god? And who created him? You get an infinite regress of gods.
TOM: Yes, yes. I know that problem. Actually, both the existence of God and the non-existence of God are equally implausible—logically. Let’s try to side-step philosophic logic, and leave the great Creator out of it, shall we? As far as possible.
MARK: Out of what? What are we talking about?
TOM: Beauty. The experience of beauty, and what it suggests.
ANNE: C.S. Lewis thought it pointed to God—and not by the Design Argument. You know his memoir, Surprised by Joy?
TOM: Yes. He called the experience of strange beauty “Joy.” Not a very good name for it. But he made it very clear what he was referring to: the yearning for the world you can never attain—the blue horizon, or Elfland—or this marvellous sunset, with its strange and lovely colors. Lewis in the end became a Christian, hoping to find Elfland in the Christian God. I must say, I don’t find that convincing. Elfland is very unlike the god of the Bible; or even any mere creator-entity. God himself may be clever, but he is not magical.
MARK: Then what are you arguing for, Tom?
TOM: Something beyond what science gives us. I must say, Mark, I find your view of the universe—just matter, evolution, and finally death—I find it utterly depressing. I call this the Corpseworld.
MARK: Corpseworld?
TOM: Yes. If space-time and matter-energy are the only realities, everything ends up dead. The are no happy endings in this world. Everything runs down, and after billions of years the whole universe is an utterly cold and lifeless vacuity, a black corpse of matter stretched almost infinitely thin, with nothing more happening, but persisting for ever and ever. Corpseworld! It’s a nightmare which has haunted me for most of my life.
MARK: Why should it? It won’t happen for a very long time.
TOM: Do you think that makes any difference? I don’t—I never have. The End may be billions of years away, but it is still the End. All life, and all the beauty we love, are doomed. That knowledge affects me now. The billion-year End has always pressed upon me. There is no escape, no salvation in this world of Time. And that is reflected in our own little lives. No happy endings: we all end up as corpses. Don’t I know it! I saw what happened to Emma, my dear love. The last time I kissed her, I kissed a corpse. And in a very few years now, I too will be a corpse. Well, not exactly I. The “I” goes out. But still—
ANNE: I believe in the after-life. Heaven.
TOM: I don’t—not as an extension of Time. Time is the great enemy, the destroyer of life, the destroyer of beauty. The only escape is out of time, by another dimension. To use an image, I would say, by a dimension at right angles to Time.
MARK: I don’t think that’s a dimension known to science.
TOM: Quite so. It is unknown to science.
MARK: What do you call it, then?
TOM: The dimension of beauty. Or eternity.
MARK: And you think you can escape from time via Beauty?
TOM: Not exactly escape. Perhaps rather, defy. Consider this: I accept your outward facts, Mark. Yes, we are animals, produced by evolution, and we are going to die like animals. We’re not even very pleasant animals. When you look at the history of the human race, you see enormous squalor, enormous stupidity, enormous tortures and massacres. When we are finally extinct, how can all that be justified? How can our brief years of mess and massacre make the universe worth while? Yet it may well be, that we are the only species that can do this. For all we know, among all the galaxies we may be the only species that can look up at the stars and question God and Time and Death. Question; and give at least one answer.
ANNE: What answer, Tom?
TOM: The answer of Beauty. I think that is the only justification for our existence, for our little lives. We are going to be extinct—yes, but meanwhile, we have produced Homer, and Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach and Mozart. The Iliad, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Hamlet, the Matthew Passion, the 23rd piano concerto—whatever happens to us, those are eternal facts, eternal achievements. Michelangelo’s God creating Adam, the space between that divine finger and that human finger—that is an adequate answer to the coming darkness. We once sent a tiny probe beyond the last planets, into interstellar space, with a recording of some of those great works; and we did rightly. Just Bach was an adequate message! And to whom did we send that? To another sentient species? I don’t think so. There may be no other sentient species, and space is so vast that even if there were one, that species would never retrieve our message. No, it’s quite clear whom we sent that message to. We did like those medieval sculptors who carved exquisite details in the high nooks of cathedrals, in places where no human eye could see them. But they thought, Well, God can see them. We did like them: we sent our message to God.
Who may not actually exist; but no matter. We have made our point. Whatever created us, we have created Beauty. And that justifies us, and justifies the universe which has contained us. It justifies us eternally, and will justify us forever when our last sun is set, and all its glorious colors are gone.
ANNE: The glorious colors of this sunset are now quite gone. The rosy-pink and the gold have gone down to grey.
TOM: Yes, it is getting really dark. Well, the final darkness is not yet upon us. Come, you two: let us go in, and have some dinner, and drink some more wine.
David Lake