Aesthetic Mixtures

Aesthetic phenomena are generally made up of mixtures of qualities from opposite, more and less exciting ends of perceptual and conceptual dimensions.

Well did Aristotle say that virtues in contrast to vices are judicious means between contrary extremes. But the principle holds much more generally than even Aristotle saw. It applies, for example, in aesthetic matters. Beauty, too, is a mean. It is not the opposite to ugliness. Ugliness is an incongruity, a disorder, a jolt; but the sheer absence of incongruity and disorder is not beauty. Rather, beauty and all aesthetic value is what, in the words of Kurt Sachs the musicologist, ‘lies between the fatal extremes of mechanism and chaos.’ By ‘mechanism’, understand a too strict and unrelenting orderliness, and by ‘chaos’, a sheer lack of order. In the first case there is too little surprise, sense of tension, or interest in how things may come out; in the second case there are no definite expectations to be met with pleased surprise or to awaken any desire to experience the outcome. With mechanism we are merely bored, with chaos merely confused. In neither way does the sense of beauty arise.

— Charles Hartshorne, Wisdom as Moderation: A Philosophy of the Middle Way (1987)

List 3 below shows the primitive perceptual opposites from lists 1 and 2 as dualities, separated by tildes (~), with the more exciting quality on the left and the less exciting quality on the right. This is meant to emphasize the idea of perceptual opposites occurring in juxtaposition, as what could be called aesthetic mixtures: heat mixed with coldness (hot~cold), fluidity with solidness (fluid~solid), dynamism with stasis (dynamic~static) and so on.

Primitive aesthetic mixtures (list 3): hot~cold, fluid~solid, dynamic~static, fast~slow, disorder~order, bright~dark, warm color (red, orange, yellow)~cool color (green, blue, purple), sound~silence, loud~quiet, high pitch~low pitch, up~down, out~in, left~right, long~round, long~short, spiky~round, big~small, more~less, novel~familiar.

The term “mixture” is borrowed from Galen’s De Temperamentis, “On Mixtures.” His title is a form of the Latin word temperamentum, meaning to be mixed properly, or in due proportion. In Galen’s treatise the physical qualities hot, cold, wet and dry vary in the body and interact to influence a person’s health and disposition, most ideally into an optimal condition of moderation between the extremes they represent.

Language-based aesthetic mixtures are essential to the structure of idioms, poetry, lyrics, scripture, slang, clichés, fables, nursery rhymes, chants, prayers, euphemisms, greetings, riddles, jokes, mottos, epitaphs, epithets, kennings, koans, slogans, the names of songs, albums, bands, books, companies and products, and they seem to exist throughout every type of aesthetic material in which linguistic references to phenomena exhibiting animal sensory opposites can occur in pairs or sequences. Nonlinguistic cultural instances of mixtures occur at high rates in music, dance, mythology, fictional stories, art, decoration, games, architecture and elsewhere. Mixtures also happen to describe traits used to attract mates in nonhuman animals, which indicates biases for mixtures are universal and that they originate with sensory systems and persist despite the diversification of other traits, rather than evolving independently or in conjunction with the traits they favor.

There’s nothing inevitable, based on current evolutionary theory, about the inclusion of mixtures in aesthetic things, which could have any structure, no consistent structure at all, or be avoided altogether with no negative consequences regarding survival. There’s no need for animals to sing songs, let alone songs in which the auditory qualities in list 3 are intricately juxtaposed, to dance, especially in ways that mix the given dualities of motion and direction, or to be colored in elaborate ways that attract the attention of predators. Lack of an obvious adaptive purpose is a feature that ties aesthetic things together, which could be taken to suggest the possibility of a single, ultimate explanation for their existence.

Because they were established as opposites early in animal evolution, the qualities in lists 1, 2 and 3 predate other concepts and can be used metaphorically or figuratively in all languages and in the communication of any species that’s capable of making reference to them. All animals understand them by default, and in a similar way, so they make convenient signals.

As a result of the ability to tell the difference between up and down, species have evolved to communicate by moving their bodies, limbs or other features in these directions. Such movements have probably always had meaning to an observer, at least in the sense that upwardness has conveyed a somewhat greater degree of arousal, and downwardness has done the opposite.

At the same time, mixtures of upward and downward orientations and motions have always been intriguing, so that individuals born with genes that compel them to integrate them into their courtship rituals have succeeded disproportionately at reproducing and passed on those genes more effectively than individuals who lack them. This same kind of scenario applies to the other perceptual dimensions of direction, and also to those of motion, color, sound, shape and size.

Mixture frequency, the rate at which mixtures occur per unit of sensory information, with units potentially being words, sounds, colors, shapes, periods of time, movements or other things, is higher in aesthetic material than in non-aesthetic, practical sensory material, such as that used purely to convey important information. Mixture frequencies are higher in a poem, for instance, than a nonfictional report, in a comic routine than a lecture, in a game than a work project, in a mythical or religious text than a science book, or in singing and dancing than speech or the average sequence of motions made in the usual, practical routine of an animal.

Each pair of qualities in list 3 can be thought of in at least three ways: (1) as a primitive duality of differentially exciting opposites in the animal mind, (2) as the structure of a universal psychological bias, and (3) as an essential ingredient in aesthetic phenomena, which evolve to match the structure of the bias. All three perspectives are isomorphic, or structurally similar, in that they incorporate opposites, implying a sequence of causation. Mechanisms of sensation lead to sensory biases, and these biases cause outward aesthetic effects. The mechanism underlying our ability to tell red from blue entails a preference for red~blue mixtures, which is responsible for biological and cultural aesthetic selection favoring their evolution in bodies and artifacts.

Aesthetic isomorphism can be used to predict the contents of aesthetic material, or to identify sensory dualities. We know that all sufficiently visual animals have the ability to distinguish motion from stasis, which allows us to predict that courtship routines and play behavior will alternate between those qualities perceptually. In reverse, we know that fluidity is mixed with solidness aesthetically in creation stories, mythology, poetry and language, and therefore that the duality fluid~solid should be thought as a primitive perceptual dimension, alongside those we recognize more traditionally as such bright~dark, high pitch~low pitch, up~down and so on. This is also true for disorder~order. Although it’s not normally thought of as a basic sensory dimension, its importance in the structure of aesthetic material tells us that it should be.

Physical qualities in list 3 include Galen’s hot~cold and fluid~solid (wet~dry), as well as dynamic~static and disorder~order. These are of special interest because they represent aesthetic biases that closely resemble the physical dualities that heat, fluidity, dynamism and disorder form with coldness, solidness, stasis and order (see Leslie 2016). The correspondence in this case could be called physical isomorphism, because it extends beyond the realm of biology into state of matter physics. It wouldn’t necessarily be improbable for a physical duality to be isomorphic with an aesthetic one, but there are at least four such corresponding dualities. Others like expand~contract and free~confined could be added to the list, and at some point it becomes difficult to believe physical isomorphism is a coincidence.

The closest psychological idea to that proposed here concerning preferences and excitement might be Daniel Berlyne’s aesthetic model of an inverted-U relationship between pleasantness and arousal. Berlyne demonstrated that both low and high arousal stimuli and mental states are unlikable compared to moderate levels, which are the most pleasing. Likability, or “hedonic tone,” increases from a low point to a maximum for an observer as stimuli become more arousing, before decreasing again as they gradually exceed the observer’s tolerance.

Perceptual variables shown by Berlyne to increase animal arousal levels and vary on a graph of hedonic tone in the shape of an inverted-U include novelty, complexity and surprisingness. In Berlyne’s model complexity as a variable increases with perceptual multiplicity, disorganization, irregularity, incongruity and asymmetry, qualities that might be more accurately described as disorderly than complicated.

Thermoaesthetics hypothetically extends Berlyne’s idea to all primitive perceptual opposites, and assumes the relevant biases for moderation and against extremes have exististed since the evolution of sensory systems, although they can presumably be modified by natural or sexual selection. Hedonic tone is predicted to follow an inverted-U as light level varies for an observer from zero (darkness) to half light to extreme brightness, as pitch moves from low to moderate to high or as the texture of an object changes from solid to soft to wet. In contrast to Berlyne’s perspective, complexity is assumed to correspond to moderate rather than high arousal.