290 - Nicholas Humphrey: Why Does Beauty Exist?

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Robinson Erhardt (0:55)

We're talking today largely about your upcoming book, Why is the World So Beautiful?

And the first thing that I'm curious about is you spent so much of your career thinking about consciousness and intelligence. Why does beauty fit in so well with those topics for you?

Nicholas Humphrey (1:15)

In a way, I wouldn't say it fits in.

I've come back to it. I did some work on aesthetics and questions about the beauties of nature far back when I was a student back in Oxford. And then I'm kind of diverted. I got diverted to working on neuropsychology and issues about evolution of intelligence and consciousness. You're right, I've concentrated on that really for the 50 years since and written several books about it. But always at the back of my mind has been the nagging questions, which I was asking all those years ago about a very surprising fact about the world we live in, which is that it is amazingly beautiful. It's almost too good to be true.

I mean, I know there are awful things about it, but nonetheless, why are we so lucky to live in a world which is full of rainbows and birdsong and mountain landscapes and, for that matter, human-made art and animal-made beauty too, peacocks' tales and the rest of it, all of which we humans have an eye for and an appreciation of. But the question is why. I mean, I'm an evolutionary psychologist by trade, and so I expect to be able to answer questions about why people like things and why there's so much around them that they like in Darwinian terms. And yet if you look out the window and look at the flower meadows and at the clouds scudding across the sky and just hear the vices of nature and see waves rolling in on the beach, and you take an in, you know, think what an extraordinary thing is going on out there. But why do we like it so much? I don't think all animals like it. There's a question the New Scientist has a Reader's Questions section. One that's very weak is, do animals appreciate sunsets? And I think the answer is, well, they may in some sense appreciate them. I can come later to talk to you about some of my experiments, which I did, showing them monkeys actually do have a sense of balance and proportion and rhyme and so on. But I don't think animals love these things. They notice them, they are attracted to them, but they don't love the beauties of nature and the way that we do. And that raises another question too about what's different? What's the nature of our aesthetic response? Because it's quite clearly an emotion of sorts. It's not purely a cognitive response to what's out there. We feel good about what we find in nature. We feel almost good about ourselves for being so much attracted to it. But what lies behind that? And it's been a question very little studied by philosophers, psychologists. Plenty of people have been interested in art and aesthetics and asked about the nature of beauty and about the human responses to it. But of course no one has asked exactly or just why do we like these patterns and these balance, these rhymes and rhythms which we see out in nature. And what good does it do us? And then on top of that, if we've got an answer to that question of why we humans like it, why are we blessed to live in a world where there's so much of it? I mean, it could have been different. We could have lived in a world where there were occasional things which drew our attention and attracted us to them. And there would have been the things which helped sustain our lives, which is true of most animals in nature.