Our sense of beauty strikes me as the most redeeming thing about us. We stop to look at a sunset that gives us nothing. Where that sense comes from is an open question, and the answers on offer disagree.
One answer is mate choice. Darwin argued in The Descent of Man that animals choose mates for their looks. Richard Prum has revived the idea as a force of its own in evolution.
A second answer is the useful signal. What looks good to us once helped us. Children from many nations prefer pictures of savanna with trees, the kind of landscape where much of human evolution is thought to have happened.
A third is the by-product. Steven Pinker called music “auditory cheesecake”. A taste for fat and sugar was useful. Cheesecake played no part in that selection. It just presses the buttons.
A fourth says beauty is real. The physicist David Deutsch argues that there is objective beauty. Some beauty is local to a species or a culture, he says, and some is universal, “as objective as the laws of physics”. His case is the flower, which evolved to attract insects and yet attracts us.
I lean toward the by-product, and I get there from the body. Pleasure is the useful signal. Eating when hungry feels good, and so, to be plain, does relieving yourself. What helps the body feels right. My guess is that the sense of beauty is that same machinery. It fires at things it was never built for: a sunset, a fugue, an equation.
Brain scans fit this. One region responds to beauty in paintings, in music, and even in mathematics.
Pleasure and beauty are still not the same thing. Kant drew the line long ago. The agreeable is a good steak. The beautiful is something we stop to contemplate, wanting nothing from it.
So I part with Deutsch on one point. He thinks the standard is out there. I think it is in us, a by-product that works as a compass. It draws us to objects and ideas that sit in harmony with what we are. That is why I call it redeeming. It is a way of choosing that has nothing to do with winning.
Science tells me what is true. Beauty helps me choose what is worth wanting.