My essay on beauty has given me a lot of trouble.  What was holding me up the past day or so was its beginning, I think because I wanted to use Mohan Matthen’s article for Aeon about it as a springboard into my thoughts about it, but didn’t understand him well enough properly to summarize his main point.  So I finally got around that problem by prefacing my attempt to summarize his thought with “If I have Matthen right . . . ”  I ended with the following two paragraphs:

“I began thinking my way toward this essay after reading an article about beauty at Aeon by Mohan Matthen about the possible evolutionary value of the (apparent) need of our species for it–to the point that some of us spend our lives making seemingly biologically valueless attempts to capture it in art. It had long been one of my (too numerous for a sane life) interests. But, although I’d written quite a bit about it, I was soon aware that I really had no good idea about its biological value, if any.

“If I have Matthen right, and I’m not sure I do, he considers the pursuit of beauty to lead to heightened powers of sensory discrimination. Our enjoyment of it would also cause us to try to make art objects that would provide us with it–and take the utilitarian objects we make beautiful as well as useful. The growing creativity involved in making things beautiful would have to spill over into creative ways of increasing their usefulness. The beneficial effects would spiral upward–beautiful art and decorated . . . utilitry, as I term the making of utilitarian objects (and utilitarian activities, thinking, etc.) would inspire new kinds of beautiful things, which would increase sensory discrimination, which would increase the need to be creative, which would keep the spiral ascending. So, for Matthen, if I understand him, the pursuit of beauty has been selected not for itself but for its utilitarian worthwhile by-product: enhanced sensory discrimination and creativity which has resulted in humankind’s ultimately foremost cultural–and biologically advantageous–virtue–the ability to interact constructively with the material universe.”

Does I make sense?  Matthen’s article, by the way, is here.

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