Beauty Inspires Us To Connect, Care, And Act

Every species lives within its own aesthetic. The spring peeper hears the peep of neighbors through inner ears tuned to the range of frequencies used in its breeding displays. The sense of hearing is the first gate on the path to aesthetic judgment for the spring peeper, just as it is for all animals that find and select mates by sound. The anatomy and sensitivity of each species’ ear frame this portal to aesthetic experience. The next door is the narrower one, the unique preferences of each animal for the pacing, timbre, amplitude, and melodic structure of the call. A peeper’s ear is stimulated by many sounds, including sometimes the sounds of closely related frogs. For the frog, though, this long backstory of how preferences came to be resolves into an experience in the moment. Vibrations in air, when they are patterned just right, wake knowledge embedded in the frog’s genes, body, and nervous system. She hears and understands. Aesthetic experience is thus a meeting of the outer world with the knowledge that all animals carry within. The result is subjective, depending on the sensory abilities and preferences of each species and individual within the species. Only a spring peeper truly comprehends the peep.

Dark As A Dungeon

How this experience manifests in froggy subjective experience is unknowable. Even among humans, we cannot project our own experiences onto others. I hear sounds both as aural sensations and sometimes as bodily experiences of light and motion. For others among my family and friends, the same sounds evoke color, and every pitch has its own hue. The senses live in a net of relations, a web whose shape differs subtly among us. Imagining the experience of sound in other humans is therefore difficult. Imagining experience in other species is harder still, best approached in a mode of gentle conjecture. The spring peepers’ large mouths and noses are very sensitive to aromas, and so perhaps they experience sounds as odorous vapors or bursts. Or the peep may evoke a sense of movement in the chest, echoing its production, in the same way that our body sometimes feels itself in motion when we hear human music. Studies of frog physiology show that sound is transmitted to the inner ear not only through the eardrum but via forelimbs and lungs, making frog hearing perhaps more like the total bodily immersion that fish experience. We live in world of tantalizing otherness. So many experiences coexist, food for imagination and humility.

Tomorrow Never Knows

We humans can reach out to other species with science, empathy, and imagination, but such practices are also subjective, coming as they do from an animal with its own sensory biases and tastes, including our aesthetic preferences for some ideas over others. We hear other animals sing through the filters of our preferences for what is a beautiful or ugly idea. But subjectivity does not mean that we do not perceive truth. Aesthetic experience can, when it is rooted in deep engagement with the world, allow us to transcend the limits of the self and to understand more fully the other. Outer and inner worlds meet. Subjectivity gains a measure of objective insight. In an experience of beauty or ugliness is an opportunity to learn and expand. Biologists seldom discuss aesthetics or beauty. Further, all animals make sophisticated choices about social relationships, food, habitats, and the rhythms of their activities across space and time. Each of these is mediated by a nervous system that integrates inner knowledge and outer information, resulting in motivation and thus action. Every species has its own neural architecture, but all species share nerve cells and neurotransmitters of the same kinds. To presume otherwise is to suppose that humans and other animals are separated by an experiential wall.

Some Good Things Never Last

There is no neurological or evolutionary evidence for such a divide. Consider the many manifestations of aesthetic experience in our lives. Almost every important decision and relationship in human lives is mediated by aesthetic judgment. We have profoundly moving responses to habitats, both to houses and their surroundings. In some we find great beauty or ugliness. In others our aesthetic sense yields only a bland whatever. These judgments then motivate us to spend a large portion of our resources to locate ourselves in the most beautiful of the choices available to us. How to judge environmental change? We assess surroundings through our aesthetic responses. This is an especially profound experience if we have years of lived, sensory experience with a place. Sometimes, we are driven into grief by the ugliness of despoiled rivers, forests, and neighborhoods. But we can also feel a sense of gorgeous rightness at the emergence of new life congruent with the biological character of a place. Aesthetics are one of the roots of environmental ethics, powerfully instructive and motivating. There is beauty in craft, artistry, innovation, diligence, and persistence. We live embedded within webs of relationships and we instantly recognize when actions within that network are beautiful or ugly. We feel this deeply, and our aesthetic response guides both our own behavior and our reaction to others. Moral judgment of human behavior is tightly associated with the aesthetics of relationship. We also find beauty in the laughs and smiles of newborn babies, the wise and kindly advice of elders, the astonishing development of skills in children and young adults, and the sense of possibility for the future. In all these cases, aesthetic judgment emerges from an integration of the senses with our intellect, subconscious, and emotions. A deep experience of beauty draws together genetic inheritance, lived experience, the teachings of our culture, and the bodily experience of the moment. In doing so, an experience of beauty can be a great truth teller and motivator, more powerful than senses, memory, reason, or emotion acting alone. When experiencing beauty, multiple parts of our brains light up, a network of connection among disparate neural centers. The parts of the brain associated with emotion and motivation are activated, as are motor centers. Beauty inspires us to connect, care, and act.