Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph. D
Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India
“Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.”
― Sophia Loren
Before we discuss the psychology of aesthetics, it is necessary to make few things clear about the concept of beauty.
The first and foremost is to define the concept of beauty. From the lay-man point of view ,beauty is the effect one feel after receiving or perceiving any stimulus, concrete or abstract. This effect can be pleasing or repulsive.
Actually the above point refers only about the effect of beauty, but” what” aspect of the basic question is still unanswered. Actually beauty is nothing but an equilibrium among the various inherent components in anything, may it be music. Painting, literary work , a thought in philosophy or anything in nature including biological structure or social and cultural impact factors.
This topic is certain to lead to furious discussion, as the idea that objects of beauty, as well as their creation and appreciation, are subject to scientific scrutiny appears abhorrent to most people, There appears to exist a fear that clumsy handling might crush the butterfly’s wings; an idea that analysis may destroy what it is intending to study.
Associated with this fear is perhaps another. Most people hold views regarding aesthetics which they are extremely unwilling to give up. Indeed, the very idea that one’s views ought to be related to factual evidence is usually dismissed, and it is asserted that subjectivity reigns supreme in this field. This, of course, is a tenable view; it is contradicted, however, by the well-known tendency of most people to argue about their aesthetic views, often with great acerbity, always with great tenacity. If aesthetic judgement are completely subjective, there would appear as little point in argument as in scientific experiment. Perhaps the objection to scientific investigation is in part due to a fear that facts may be more potent than arguments in forcing one to give up a cherished position, and to acknowledge certain objective factors which one would prefer to overlook.
However that may be, there can be little doubt about the hostile reaction which psychology has experienced on all sides when it attempted to introduce scientific methods into the study of aesthetics. A good deal of this hostility is probably based on misunderstanding.
We observe that certain types of judgement are made frequently for certain objects, and are phrased in terms of ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, or some synonymous terms, and apply to various combinations of colors and shapes, as in the visual arts; words, as in poetry; or sounds, as in music. The essential datum with which we deals, therefore, is a relation – a relation between a stimulus (picture, poem, piece of music) and a person who reacts to this stimulus in certain conventional ways. Along with the usual verbal response , it is desirable, and useful in certain situations, to record physiological reactions indicative of emotion, such as heart- beat, pulse-rate, skin temperature, or changes in the electric conductivity of the skin.
There is a twofold problem in analyzing this relation. In the first place, the psychologist must ask himself: Just what is the physical property of the stimulus which causes a favorable reaction as opposed to an unfavorable reaction in the majority of the subjects. In the second place, he must ask himself: Just what is the reason why one person reacts favorably to a given stimulus, while another person reacts unfavorably? Possible answers to the first question might be in terms of certain ‘laws of composition’. Answers to the second question might be in terms of temperamental traits or types; thus it might be argued that introverts prefer classical, extroverts romantic music
Inevitably, the psychologist will start his work by experimenting with the simplest possible stimuli – simple colors and color combinations, simple proportions of lines, and so forth. In doing this he is following the usual path of scientific progress from the simple to the complex. It is here that he frequently encounters the first serious objection on the part of the philosopher and aesthetician, who claims that judgement regarding the relative beauty of simple colors or lines are not in any way related to judgement of more complex stimuli, and that consequently rules and laws derived from simple stimuli can have no relevance to what are considered ‘real’ works of art. No proof is offered for this rejection of evidence, other than the subjective feeling of the critic that these judgement are ‘qualitatively’ different
To design his experiment psychologist will provide a series of stimuli whose physical properties are known, and ask his subjects to rank these in order of aesthetic merit, i.e. from best liked to least liked. Alternatively he may offer his subjects two stimuli at a time, with the request to say which of the two is more pleasing aesthetically; all possible combinations of stimuli are shown in this manner. Either procedure will result in an average order of preference, and experience has shown that this order will be pretty much the same regardless of the exact method used for deriving it. From this average order of ‘aesthetic’ merit, certain deductions may be made regarding the physical properties associated with high-ranking and low-ranking objects respectively.
It is here that a second objection will often be made. Psychologists, are treating the perception of ‘beauty’ as if it were essentially similar to some ‘objective’ property like greenness, or size, or shape. Surely ‘beauty’ is not a property belonging to an object in the same way that one might say the color green, or the triangular shape, belonged to the object. Beauty, in other words, is essentially subjective; color, shape, and other properties of a stimulus are objective. The objection is how can one reasonably use methods appropriate to the study of one type of stimuli in the study of other, different types?
This objection is based on an essential fallacy. An object does not ‘contain’ the color green in any meaningful sense of the term; it reflects light of a certain wavelength which some people experience as ‘green’, others, who happen to be color- blind, as ‘grey’. Similarly, an object does not ‘contain’ beauty in any meaningful sense of the term ; it reflects light in certain combinations of wavelengths which some people experience as ‘beautiful’, others as ‘ugly’ or ‘indifferent’.
Some people, would say, there is complete correspondence between stimulus and experience ; everyone sees a circle as round, a triangle as different from a square. But, the facts contradict even this confident assertion. Experiments with people whose congenital blindness was re- moved surgically in later life, and who thus experienced sight for the first time, have shown them to be quite incapable of distinguishing between a circle and a square, or of recognizing triangles and other simple figures. Many months of learning were needed for them to make even such very simple discrimination, and the disheartening slowness with which such learning proceeded bore ample testimony to the absurdity of the notion that ‘ roundness ‘ or ‘ squareness’ were inherent qualities in the object, just waiting to be perceived. Rules for the perception of these qualities had to be acquired, without these rules there is literally no perception at all.
This fact was brought out with clarity in experiments on animals, mainly chimpanzees and rats, where the animal was reared in darkness. Although there was no interference whatever with the physiological apparatus of vision, the animals, when brought into the light, behaved to all intents and purposes as if they were blind; they could not learn to avoid a large, distinctive object they failed to learn to recognize the white-clad attendant to whom they were attached, in spite of the fact that he stood out conspicuously from the uniform grey background. Perception of colors, shapes, and other physical properties is a learned activity, and what is perceived depends very strongly on the type of learning and the amount of learning which the animal – or the human – has gone through. In this respect the perception of ‘beauty’, therefore, is no different from the perception of other qualities.
Now it necessary to inquire into the precise meaning of those terms, ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, so often used to mark the distinction between properties such as color and shape – and others which are not – such as beauty. ‘Objective’ is usually taken as synonymous with ‘real’, ‘subjective’ with ‘unreal’. But we have shown that to call a stimulus ‘green’ is far from being an ‘objective’ description; all that we can say objectively is that the stimulus object reflects light-waves of a certain periodicity. The experience ‘green’ is subjective, i.e. inherent in the observer rather than a characteristic of the stimulus. If it is permissible to link up the subjective experience and the objective stimulus in the case of color or form perception, it is beyond comprehension why it should not be permissible to do the same in the case of perception of ‘beauty’.
Here the argument often changes its content, and the term ‘objective’ assumes a different meaning. It is said that everyone is agreed on the experience of ‘green’ when his eyes are stimulated by a light of the wavelength of 515 millimicrons, while he will report an experience of ‘red’ when the wavelength changes to 650 millimicrons. But there is no such agreement with respect to experiences of ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’; one man’s meat is another man’s poison. In other words, ‘objectivity’ is now defined in terms of agreement among observers; where such agreement obtains, as it does in the case of color judgement among individuals with perfect color vision, the judgement is said to be objectively based. Where there is no agreement, judgement is said to be subjective. We may accept this type of definition, but we should be aware that in so doing we abandon the absolute distinction be- tween ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, and recognize instead degrees of ‘objectivity’ depending on the amount of agreement observed among our subjects. In other words, our decision as to the ‘objectivity’ of a judgement ceases to be determined by philosophical argument, and becomes instead an empirical and experimental question, to be settled by observations regarding the degree of agreement found. This is the sense in which the term will be used here.
As an example of experimental work in this field, let us take the numerous studies on color preferences. In order to appreciate their outcome, we must first of all be able to specify exactly the color stimulus; unless we can do this. Now essentially there are three dimensions along which colors can differ from each other (black, white, and grey are called ‘colors’ here in addition to red, green, yellow, blue, and the other chromatic colors) . These three dimensions are known as hue, saturation, and brightness . Hue refers to the chromatic quality which distinguishes red from yellow, or blue from green; it is measured in terms of wavelength. Brightness refers to the amount of light reflected by the color, while saturation refers to the amount of chromatic color shown (its vividness) . Hues are arranged in a circle (the so-called ‘color-circle’) in such a way that colors at opposite poles of the circle (complementary colors) give grey when mixed together.
If we take colored chips representing the various parts of the color circle, being careful to have them all of the same brightness and saturation, and ask a number of people to rank them in order of preference by means of either of the two methods described earlier, we find that there is considerable agreement between different people. This agreement is still manifest when we are less careful to keep brightness and saturation equal for all our colors, but it is much less strongly marked, because judgement are now based not on one characteristic (hue) only, but on a combination of several.
There seems to be a definite physical property in the stimulus which is responsible for this universal order of preference. Short wavelengths are generally preferred to long wavelengths; the correlation between wavelength and preference is almost perfect. For young children this relation- ship does not appear to hold, but for adolescents and adults it appears to constitute a natural law.
If people differ in their preference judgement, then it would follow that some people’s judgement are more in accord with the average order of colors than are the judgement of other people. If, in accordance with our definition of the term ‘objective’, we call this average order of color preferences the ‘ objective’ or ‘true’ order, then we can perhaps call those who agree with it most the ‘best’ judges, and those who agree with it least the ‘poorest’ judges. Alternatively, we may say that our ‘best’ judges have good taste, while our ‘poorest’ judges have had bad taste.
What happens if we extend our work to color combinations – say combinations of two colors of equal brightness and saturation, to keep the problem at a manageable level? The answer to this question is important, for two reasons. In the first place, aestheticians often maintain that judgement regarding single colors are not aesthetic judgement at all ; it is at the level of complexity represented by color combinations that the simplest form of aesthetic judgement begins. Thus a demonstration that what is true of simple color is also true of judgments regarding color combinations is important in showing that the aestheticism’s argument is possibly wrong, and that we may generalize from simple color experiments to more complex stimuli.
Even more important is another argument. There is an important school in psychology, the holistic or ‘Gestalt’ school, which maintains that complex units or ‘gestalten’ are not built up atomistically from simpler units or ‘atoms’ ; rather, the more complex unit shows ‘emergent’ qualities which cannot be predicted from knowledge of the simpler constituents and the relations obtaining between them. Here we have an ideal testing ground for the ‘atomistic’ hypothesis. If we can predict preferences for color combinations on the basis of knowledge of preferences for single colors, and knowledge of the relation on the color circle between the colors in each combination, then we would have disproved the ‘ Gestalt’ argument, and might with reasonable assurance go on with our general plan. If such prediction should prove impossible, then we would have to abandon our ‘ atomistic’ approach, and look around for a different methodology.
First of all, let us note that with respect to color combinations we again find a certain marked degree of agreement or ‘objectivity’. Secondly, let us note that again those who prove to be ‘good’ judges on one test involving color combinations also turn out to be ‘good’ judges on other tests involving color combinations. Thirdly, let us note that these ‘good’ judges of color combinations are precisely those who earlier on were found to be good judges of single colors and their aesthetic values. Whatever constitutes ‘good taste’ in the one experiment obviously constitutes ‘good taste’ in the other; we can justifiably generalize from simple to more complex stimuli.
It is possible to show that preference judgments of color combinations depend on two factors. The first is the simple sum of the preferences for the individual colors ; if both the individual colors making up the combination are liked, then the combination will on the whole be liked. If both colors are disliked, the combination will tend to be disliked. If one color is liked, the other disliked, or if both are neutral, then the affective value of the combination will tend to be neutral.
The second factor relates to the position of the two component colors on the color circle. The closer together the two colors are on that circle, the lower will be the aesthetic ranking of the combination ; the further apart they are, the higher will be the ranking of the combination. Best liked of all are pairs of complementary colors, i.e. colors exactly opposite each other on the color circle.
If we combine these two factors – liking of the individual colors, and knowledge of their separation on the color circle – then we can predict with very great accuracy indeed the aesthetic ranking of the color combination.
Fortunately there exist tests constructed for the express purpose of obtaining a measure of this ability to judge the factors entering into good composition. Great care is taken in the construction of these tests to obtain the best advice available from artists, art teachers, and art critics Here, then, we have rather a different criterion of ‘good taste’, one much nearer to the way in which the term is used in ordinary speech. It would of course still be possible to argue that the unanimous verdict of all the experts who had devoted their lives to the practice and study of painting was mistaken, and that their standards were quite arbitrary ; such a nihilistic view would find it very difficult indeed to account for some of the findings to be reported presently.
In the first place, tests of this type predict with considerable accuracy which students in the arts school make a success of their studies, and which fail ignominiously. They merely predict that he is likely to paint well regardless of the particular manner he chooses, or the style which he finally adopts. The controversy over ‘modern’ painting has blinded many people to the fact that paintings differ in quality as well as in style, and that one can paint well or badly in any style; it is this quality which tests attempt to predict, and the evidence shows that they are successful in doing so at least to some extent.
In the second place, it has been found that people who show good taste in their judgement of simple colors and of color combinations also do well on these completely achromatic tests of composition. This finding must certainly be somewhat unexpected to the subjectivist; it is accountable in terms of the hypothesis that there exists some property of the central nervous system which determines aesthetic judgments, a property which is biologically derived, and which covers the whole field of visual art. People would on this hypothesis be expected to differ with respect to ‘good taste’ in the same way in which they are known to differ with respect to acuity of vision, ranging from an extreme of Philistine lack of all aesthetic appreciation – a true ‘ blindness’ to all that is beautiful – to the other extreme of almost instinctive appreciation of the good and beautiful, and abhorrence of the bad and ugly. This appears to be the only hypothesis to account for all the facts, and it is scientifically valuable in that verification or disproof can be very easily arranged. One deduction, for instance, might be that this ability should be very strongly determined by heredity.
Another deduction might be that a person who showed good taste (as defined) with respect to one type of visual art should also show good taste with respect to any other type of visual art. This deduction has been verified by constructing tests involving a great variety of different types of visual stimuli – portraits, landscape paintings, book-bindings, silverware, statues, landscape photographs, carpets, and many more. In each case it was found that the person showing good taste on one test tended also to show good taste on the others, just as predicted by our hypothesis.
It might be argued, this agreement may be due entirely to intelligence; the more intelligent may also be the more ‘artistic’, and perhaps the more knowledgeable regarding aesthetic values. This hypothesis falls to the ground because intelligence correlates only to a very slight extent with ‘good taste’; certainly the correlation is much too low to account for the findings.
A more reasonable hypothesis might be one which referred the observed correlations to cultural factors entirely; the argument might run something like this. A person who is knowledgeable with respect to current views about the aesthetic value of certain paintings would also be knowledgeable with respect to current views about the aesthetic value of different types of carpets, or statues. Thus the tests might merely measure ‘cultural knowledge’, rather than something more fundamental.
This point should not be stretched too far; it certainly is not denied that cultural influences have very great importance indeed. When we look at the factors which determine the judgments of many people in the field of art, we find that some of these factors are not of an aesthetic nature at all. The monetary value of the picture, its fame, and many other extraneous considerations determine what people will say when asked : ‘ Do you like this picture? ‘ But the psychologist – no more than the aesthetician and the philosopher – is not particularly interested in these irrelevant factors; he wishes to isolate the determinants of genuinely aesthetic responses. In order to do that he has to select his material carefully, so that considerations of the type described cannot influence his subjects. Such control of irrelevant factors is absolutely essential ; without it we would be lost in a welter of contradictory and non-aesthetic determinants.
We cannot neglect such important factors as those associated with the Ancient vs. Modern controversy? The answer is surely that we cannot neglect them in any orderly description of the whole of aesthetic appreciation, but that we must pass them by in our attempt to isolate and measure one particular aspect of aesthetics, namely the qualitative one, which appears to be largely independent of the controversy .What we want to measure depends upon our purpose. If quality and style of painting are independent variables – and the evidence in favor of this view is very strong – then we must measure them independently and in isolation. If there are still other factors, then they also must be investigated and measured, each in its turn.
In actual fact, measurement of style preferences is very much easier than measurement of quality judgments. The usual method has been to select sets of two pictures, both of which depict a similar scene, a windmill, say, or a waterfall ; one of these is taken from the paintings of a well-known modern painter, the other from the paintings of an equally well-known classical painter. In this way we may hope to keep under control interest in the subject-matter, the quality of the painting, and the acceptability of the artist’s name; preference judgments as between the two paintings should then be strictly a measure of ‘style’ preferences. Studies along these lines have shown fairly convincingly that these preferences are related to temperament; introverts tend to prefer the older, extraverts the more modern works.
It may be said, in a way, to have taken the average order of preference of the population as our standard of ‘good taste’. This motion is so alien to the most cherished tenets of aestheticians and philosophers that it is liable to be ridiculed on irrelevant grounds.
This criticism misses the whole point of the argument. The average rank order of works of art is a good criterion of excellence only under carefully specified conditions’, all irrelevant and extraneous factors must first be ruled out before we can accept the average judgement as having any value at all. The usefulness and value of an average in science depend entirely on the question asked, the conditions of the experiment, and the precise nature of the figures averaged; under appropriate conditions.Criticisms of the notion that the average ranking of aesthetic objects can furnish us with an acceptable criterion of aesthetic value are usually based on examples in which all the rules for obtaining a meaningful average are broken; this may make for a good knock-about argument, but it does not help much in the search for scientific criteria of ‘ beauty.
One last point should be considered. In addition to general ‘good taste’ and style preferences, aesthetic judgments are often determined by highly individualistic and idiosyncratic factors.These are extraneous factors which may be of interest in themselves, but which do not affect the determination of our average order; being specific to one individual, they tend to cancel out over large numbers. Essentially, this type of preference determinant is non-aesthetic in nature, being mainly based on associations with particular events which have brought happiness or pain to the individual concerned.
On the whole, we may say that experimental work in aesthetics has unearthed a number of facts which cannot be disregarded by anyone interested in the problem of the formation of aesthetic judgement, and that these facts all point with remarkable unanimity to a theory of aesthetics which is firmly anchored in biology and derives judgments of ‘beauty from inherited properties of the central nervous system. Over-simplified and inadequate to deal with the tremendous complexities of great works of art?
It would be useless to review the whole history of attempts of this kind, but we must mention one psychologist who may be said to have elevated the study of aesthetics into a scientific discipline. Fechner was particularly interested in the experimental determination of preferences for proportions, and tried to relate these to a well-known aesthetic doctrine; namely, that of the golden section. This section of a linear segment is that which divides it into two segments in such a way that the longer segment is the mean proportional between the shorter segment and the whole segment. Fechner’s particular interest concentrated in the so-called golden rectangle’, i.e. a rectangle whose sides are in the ratio of the golden section. These rectangles, with the ratio of the longer to the shorter side of 1-618, or very nearly 8 to 5, were supposed to have some occult beauty by philosophers and aestheticians, which made them quite outstandingly superior to other types of rectangles.
Experimental work by Fechner, and many of his successors, has shown that rectangles having proportions some- what similar to the ‘golden rectangle’ are indeed well liked. It has also been found, however, that the exact proportion of the sides required by the alleged law is not conspicuously superior to neighbouring ratios, and, in fact, it is often found to be inferior to them. Thus, there appears nothing very occult or mystic about this ratio, and the general theory endowing it with special beauty must remain very suspect.
In addition, there is some evidence to suggest that practice and familiarity also play a part in determining a person’s appreciation Apparently, familiarity itself must be counted as an additional order element in the formula,so that simple repetition, of viewing, or hearing, may change the aesthetic measure of a given object. These additional complications can all be taken into account in the final formula, of course.
Unfortunately, there is at present little interest among psychologists in the experimental study of aesthetics, and the very promising beginning made in the fields of colour preferences and the aesthetic measure are not likely to be followed up on a sufficient scale to make rapid progress in this very difficult field likely.
Throughout we have been concerning ourselves with formal aspects of art. These have always been of major interest to psychologists because they alone lend themselves easily to measurement and, hence, to the formulation of laws and the accumulation of experimental evidence so desirable when exact statements of relationship are required. However, rightly or wrongly, the man in the street, the literary critic, and the artist have usually shown much more interest in a rather different kind of analysis. This type of analysis deals with content rather than with form. It is subjective rather than objective. It does not make exact statements in a numerical form, but rather tries to convey impressions by means of words. These features, which render it somewhat suspect to the scientist, make it much more readily acceptable to a wide variety of people who are more interested in the humanities than in science, and who do not look kindly upon any attempt to make aesthetic experiences amenable to scientific laws.
