Excerpt: Mariagrazia Portera on Beauty and the Constructed Environment

This excerpt of Mariagrazia Portera’s “The Aesthetic Niche: A multispecies aesthetics in times of ecological crisis” comes from the just-released LA+ BEAUTY, the latest issue of LA+, the interdisciplinary landscape architectural journal of the Weitzman School. Portera, a research fellow in aesthetics at the Università di Firenze, Italy, sets the stage for the issue’s examination of beauty as it relates to landscape architecture and the constructed environment, by giving an overview of the term from the perspective of philosophical aesthetics.

It is not obvious to answer the question “What is beauty?” Why do humans, from almost every culture in the world, invest so many resources in the beautification of their bodies, natural objects, and surroundings? Can we measure beauty? Are we biologically determined, as members of the species Homo sapiens, to find certain things invariably beautiful and others ugly?

Over the centuries, and within the framework of philosophical aesthetics, philosophers have championed an array of different hypotheses on beauty: some have argued that small, smooth, levigated forms are always and invariably beautiful (as opposed to angular and sharp ones, which are sublime; this is Edmund Burke’s view in his Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1757). Some others have contended that beauty is no quality in things themselves; “it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”(1) Turning the spotlight onto empirical and experimental research on beauty, attempts have been made to argue that there are universal standards of beauty concerning landscapes(2)  and human bodies; that humans are predisposed to find symmetrical forms and contours aesthetically pleasant and that they are innately attracted to other humans’ faces (babies, in particular, tend to find symmetrical human faces most attractive(3); other scholars have traced beauty back to fluency, to the simplicity and smoothness of stimuli processing dynamics, so that the easier it is for humans to perceive and/or to conceptualize an object the more beautiful this object is judged to be.(4) There have also been researchers making a case for comparative approaches to beauty, under the premise that it might be that at least some human aesthetic standards apply not only or not exclusively to the human species but also to other nonhuman animal species, more or less phylogenetically close to us.(5)

A difficult point, when it comes to investigating the concept and standards of beauty, is whether it is possible to isolate biological-natural (allegedly universal) components of the beautiful (i.e., features or traits that are invariably perceived as beautiful by humans due to species-specific biological/cognitive/perceptual constraints) from cultural (relativist-historical) ones; and, if so, how these two components are or should be integrated.(6)

The concept of beauty is a unitas multiplex – a multifaceted, malleable, and multi-layered notion in which many elements intervene. Whenever humans experience something as beautiful (or whenever we have an aesthetic experience, since beauty represents only one of the several forms of aesthetic experience possible in the world), it is at the same time perception, emotion, cognition, and imagination that are involved, together with a self-reflecting activity on the part of the experiencing subject (“how does the experience I am having right now make me feel?”). This is why aesthetic experiences require time, and duration, to happen: although they certainly have to do with immediate (more or less perceptually pleasurable) appearances, they are not exhausted by them.

Research has shown that there is neither a single area of the brain nor a gene “responsible for all forms of beauty” that people are born with. Rather, the human aesthetic capacity—the capacity to engage in aesthetic experiences and to appreciate beauty—seems, on the one hand, to rely on the activation of an array of multiple neural circuits and brain areas and, on the other hand, to realize itself ontogenetically only if embedded in and scaffolded by suitable environments that ensure its development and transmittance. Even something so “simple” and apparently non-problematic as the allegedly universal attraction of human beings to symmetric stimuli has been called into question. Although “disciplines as diverse as biology, chemistry, physics, and psychological aesthetics regard symmetry as one of the most important principles in nature and as one of the most powerful determinants of beauty,” write Austrian cognitive psychologist Helmut Leder and his collaborators in a recent paper, it seems that the level of expertise in aesthetics and the arts deeply affects the extent to which we appreciate symmetry. People untrained in the visual arts do show the often-claimed preference for symmetry, but experts tend to disregard symmetry and show more consistent preferences for non-symmetrical stimuli.(7) Culture and experience matter.

It is also worth stressing that each of the objects with which we engage in aesthetic experiences is never “pure”—that is, neither purely natural nor purely cultural—but always the fruit of a co-construction of naturalness and “culturalness,” even though not exclusively human-derived. This is obvious when we aesthetically appreciate the beauty of a human-made artifact, but it is also true (though perhaps somewhat less obvious) when we engage in aesthetic experiences with natural beauty, such as landscapes. The Tuscan landscape that surrounds me (I am writing this paper from Florence, Italy) is unanimously recognized as one of the most beautiful and aesthetically fascinating landscapes in Western Europe, celebrated by thousands of tourists and artists over centuries. Landscapes in Tuscany are, however, nothing purely natural (under the premise that we define the “naturalness” of an environmental object as “(in)dependence” – that the more or less an object’s identity depends on human intervention and action, the more or less that object is natural or artificial/cultural, respectively)(8), but are rather the sedimentation of human and nonhuman natural-cultural transformative actions (I will come back to this point later), which cumulatively “make up” beauty.

A concept originally coined in the field of evolutionary biology—namely, the concept of the niche and the theory of niche construction—may help us better understand the interrelationship between natural-biological and cultural components of beauty and the intertwinement of human and nonhuman “aesthetic” actors. Through the lens of the niche, the historical and geographical variability of aesthetic standards and the human-nonhuman entanglement, also from an ecological-environmental perspective, come to the fore.(9)

1) This is, famously, David Hume’s empiricist concept of beauty. See David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Four Dissertations (A. Millar, 1757).

2) Ecologists G. H. Orians and J. H. Hervageen championed these ideas in “Evolved Responses to Landscapes,” in Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby (eds), The Adapted Mind (Oxford University Press, 1992), 555–79.

3) See, for this, Gillian Rhodes, et al., “Are Average and Symmetric Faces Attractive to Infants? Discrimination and looking preferences” Perception 31 (2002): 315–21.

4) The theory of fluency, applied to aesthetics, is described in Rolf Reber, Norbet Schwarz & Piotr Winkielman, “Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver’s processing experience?” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, no. 4 (2004): 364–82.

5) I have discussed pitfalls and promises of a comparative research program in aesthetics in the paper: M. Portera, “Animal Aesthetics? Promises and Challenges of a Comparative Research Programme in Aesthetics” in Martino Rossi Monti & Davor Pecnjak, What is Beauty? A Multidisciplinary Approach to Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge Publishing Scholars, 2020), 60–80.

6) See for example Jan Verpooten & Siegfried Dewitte, “The Conundrum of Modern Art: Prestige-Driven Coevolutionary Aesthetics Trumps Evolutionary Aesthetics among Art Experts,” Human Nature 28 (2017): 16–38.

7) See Helmut Leder, et al., “Symmetry Is Not a Universal Law of Beauty,” Empirical Studies of the Arts 37, no. 1 (2019), 104–14.

8) I take this definition of natural/artificial from the brilliant paper by Elena Casetta, “Making Sense of Nature Conservation After the End of Nature,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42, no. 18 (2020).

9) I have discussed the notion of the niche in two earlier papers and some sections of the present paper are taken, with modifications, from these two previous publications: Mariagrazia Portera, “Why Do Human Perceptions of Beauty Change? The Construction of the Aesthetic Niche, in Molding the Planet: Human Niche Construction at Work,” RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society, no. 5 (2016): 41–47; Mariagrazia Portera, “Babies Rule! Niches, Scaffoldings, and the Development of an Aesthetic Capacity in Humans,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 60, no. 3 (2020): 299–314.