Social Matter

“Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of its own accord.” -Nikolai Gogol

A consideration of beauty always starts with the concept of ‘prettying things up’, which is another word for adornment – something we have come to regard as useless. What does Gogol mean other than utilitarianism? Or is utilitarianism merely a misinterpretation of a real phenomenon: the natural emergence of the Beautiful?

I have a pet theory about the domain of the Beautiful, and that while truisms spoken about it are true, they are in many cases trivially so. If we say beauty is useless, do mean that beauty has no actual function, or do we mean we have no use for it? If it were a bit of both, maintaining the first would certainly produce the second over time. The pet theory is this: beauty only flows from usefulness, but utilitarianism creates ugliness because it narrowly constrains ‘utility’ – and obsesses over it with a monomania.

This monomania in turn generates objects and concepts designed and optimized for a single use – either the train which can only go forward and back, or the paper plate that soaks up organic-laced liquids and becomes irretrievably dirty after one use.

Gogol’s contention could line up with this theory – as an artist he would not be as rigorous about his thinking, but merely report his own experience. A man of certain skill, ability and mind produces beautiful things not because he is creating beauty, but because he is doing something else well. “Beauty is the Splendor of the True” said Frithjof Schoun. If we run into a situation where something evil or false is beautiful, we usually interpret this to mean that like in the Picture of Dorian Gray, Beauty is completely independent of other forms of goodness, when rather it might be that we perceive only beauty on the surface, the similitude of it, which may go no deeper than the skin.

If we presume that there is a difference between a beautiful appearance and natural beauty, what would this difference in practice mean? Most artists acknowledge that Beauty exists naturally in nature – by which we mean things not made by the hands of men – but how do we presume it does? It must be an emergent property of things that are, and these things are not made to be beautiful, but to be useful in their own right (to survive, to prolong their existence, etc.) but yet display beauty almost liberally, generously beyond reason.

Thus the ‘worthiness’ of beauty we judge by our experience of it – as we do with all other worthy things, all other goods – and since it is manifest in appearance while hiding the manner of its generation, in the same way actions hide their intent, beautiful appearances can be artificially induced. If it were not the case that we understood on a basic level the connection of Beauty and Truth, or Beauty and Goodness, there would be no utility in mimicking – having the appearance of – beauty. But because that connection exists, that utility exists as well. What may we say the connection is, without denying other things we know to be true?

This is a broad and sweeping opinion, so take it with a grain of salt, but my belief is that beauty increases or else decreases with usefulness. But this is not in the sense of a single use – things which have a single use, even if they are very optimized, tend to be less beautiful than things which have multiple uses. The reasoning is pretty clear; the requirement placed on a form that must be maximally excellent at two things rather than merely one is greater on it; it is inherently shaped in response to multiple other things, the implied space of actions and other objects.

In Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order, there are a number of properties that relate to this inter-relation of wholes – entities – that affect whether or not we perceive the object as beautiful or not. The two obvious ones are Positive Space and Good Shape. Positive Space is exactly this concept, almost to a tee – that well-formed things create well formed spaces around them. La Corbusier’s designs often failed because humans, trees, ground, grass and sky are not squares, perfect spheres, cones, pyramids, but rough shapes with curves and local symmetries, things with the other property mentioned; Good shape. And good shape is mainly about Compactness. (I don’t know for sure how this relates to Talib’s Convexity yet, but you may offer opinions on the subject if you wish.)

Aristotle infers the roundness of the earth using reason – by noticing that things fall, he assumes for them to stay in one place they must all fall to the same point, and if they all fall to the same point, the process will over time roughly generate a sphere. He therefore reasons that the Earth must be round. (While he fails to grasp the reflexive property – the positive feedback loop created by gravity that allows for many satellites around many stars – his derivation tells us something very important.) A sphere is the primary form of compactness, and that compactness comes about due to matter hanging together.

That matter hanging together is useful in-itself, as a resistance to dissipation – entropy. It is not a great negentropic thing, and therefore a chunk of matter, roughly round like some asteroids, has a certain elegance due to its mere roundness, but the full worlds like Mars or Jupiter are more so – they have many more uses (inorganic ones that are mostly about the perpetuation of high energy states) and Earth, which supports not only itself but a massive array of other things is the most beautiful as it is the most ‘useful’ in this general sense. It has the most uses and does them quite excellently.

The problem with the term ‘use’ is that we infer a will behind it, and if we are purely materialistic (i.e. we do not assume some agency behind the cosmos however defined) we may miss about 99 percent of actual ‘usefulness’. Compact forms tend to be very useful, but there are other shapes that Christopher Alexander notes. The point is that
compact forms are often the result of necessities – the result of adapting to, and sometimes benefiting from necessities. Our basic unit of bodily structure and function – the cell – is quickly described by drawing a circle inside a circle – less a prison and more a place of contemplation.

A basic problem with circles galls us, though; if one tries to make a pattern out of just circles, one finds that while the circle is adapted to other shapes, circles and circles put together leave odd remainders. This is because Good Shape is a relational and a recursive property; and as I have said above, to merely make things circular to try to make them beautiful (as some have erred in home design) is to miss the point that the beauty of a circle in nature has as much to do with its roundness as it does the reasons why it is useful for it to be round. (You can do this exercise yourself, trying to inscribe circles with circles or circles inside any other shape, and find the ‘weird remainders’ problem.)

If we believe that the so called ‘natural’ (I do not like this term, as it makes it seem like men are unnatural) formations are beautiful, we must realize also that they result from utility – but from a wide range of parallel utilities operating in an overlapping fashion (overlap is part of another Property of Order.)

Moreover, we trick ourselves when we consider adornment as without use. People should be encouraged to not be overly concerned with outward adornment, as this optimizes for appearance of beauty over substance, for effect over cause, and so forth. But this does not mean that outward adornment is useless (or forbidden.) We talk about the importance of social signals (and deride our opponents using them as though they were not adornments) but yet somehow ‘utilitarian’ accounts of use do not consider this ‘useful’ – I can only conclude that Utilitarians are slightly stupid. They seem to mean well and are trying to understand the world, but to miss so many fundamental categories of usefulness makes me think that a slight dullness is responsible; a slight lack of imagination or lack of self control in the use of imagination, but I digress.

It is hard to know the uses something can be put to that might come up, and things which are ‘jacks of all trades’ often make no sense because they were top-down designed to do a variety of conflicting or clumsily overlapping things, and to do them in a mediocre way. But the ones that do all of what they do well are inevitably wonderful to
behold – setting aside the mitigating factor of emotional attachments. But even more beautiful are the things that accidentally have other uses – who would have guessed?

To demonstrate this, we can formally acknowledge that women are more beautiful, on the average, than men. This is even setting aside the pickiness of women which has its worst expression in hypergamy. (And why Peter admonished women to not be concerned so much with outward adornments.) There are several ways that this phenomenon is described: Man is called the ‘Glory of God’ but woman, the ‘Glory of Man.’ Glory should be interpreted in this case not so much as praise but as splendor – thus what it is saying is a truism to us: that men tend to have beautiful souls and women, beautiful bodies. Men have a spiritual splendidness, while women have a earthly splendidness.

But what I am to do here is explain how this comes about – we first observe the form itself, and in general the metaphysical truth ought to have insinuated itself into the level of the physical some how – and how is this? It is very simple, based on my principle above, that beauty results from a multitude of well formed uses – that a woman has at least two more additional uses than a man. Yes, both can produce haploid cells for reproduction – species that create young outside of the body do this, and limit it to this. But the woman both bears and nurses (as well as nurtures) children. These two uses require her body to, you know, actually be able to do them.

They do crowd out slightly her other powers, such as strength, for example, but women are not therefore weak. They are not naturally deficient in any of the normal functions of a human being, but they do not possess the same level of overcompensation and redundancy that the male does, who have a bit more ‘space’ to optimize for strength, or intelligence, or cunning, or speed, or endurance as needed.

But these two capabilities themselves, I believe, explain the increase in her beauty over the man. For her form itself has more implicit forms of actions and objects overlapping with it; the word we might use is manifold. But the body is still single, thus it is ‘einfach’ – simple, but in it we see, without directly seeing, more things through their positive spaces that make that body shaped the way it is. And that is a good reason to keep it covered up.

Beauty therefore in its natural form is the result of many forms being brought into one, not by mixing or composition, but by emergence in response to their overlap. An ergonomic handle is nothing other than a
handle that overlaps nicely with a hand; people love ergonomics because it inherently makes ugly single-use objects a little more beautiful by improving one of their uses – being held in the hand.

The appearance of beauty – like Dorian himself in the Picture of Dorian Gray – imitates the results of this process, even better if its surface is malleable. That men do, while animals do not, respond to Beauty itself means that a natural process of adaptation can therefore create unnatural results. Like with holiness spirals, beauty spirals
are about outward imitations of that thing, which inevitably undermine it. In the case of beauty it is that eventually the object (say Lady Gaga) becomes fully optimized for one function – which is to imitate some form of the beautiful, often in a very exaggerated and sometimes grotesque manner – resulting in objects that are not naturally
beautiful at all but have a certain attractiveness in appearance.

The lesson here is like that of Tolkien’s elves: in terms of beauty, it can matter as much how something is made as what is made; this is not a religious affection for handicrafts, but rather pointing out that some of the beauty of handicrafts definitely relates to how they are made and not just the end product. To get a similar end product involves looking not only at the outward form, but other properties the process imbues the object with, which need to be considered if one wishes to make objects of a similar quality through other means.

Lastly, since adornment and even contemplation (such is the use of paintings on walls) are now uses as well, the idea that utility is maximized by removing complications or ‘frills’ is incorrect. It is the case that removing all unnecessary complications makes things better (and more beautiful, actually) but it is not the case that complications or ornateness themselves reduce utility or hinder beauty.

The purposes must be considered and the thing must be fashioned with skill. If done well, the object will be ‘true’ – and it will be in some way beautiful. A world full of ugly things is as much the result of poor craftsmanship as it is narrowness of purpose – a hallmark of the totalitarian state, but also of excessive, premature optimization.

That is a spiral going in the wrong direction.