Evolutionary and cognitive aspects of beauty (attractiveness)

Abstract

The subjective nature of aesthetic experience and the different aesthetic evaluation of the same impulses raise the suspicion of many thinkers to see beauty as a matter of a percipient’s individuality, and of beauty’s formation through external historical and cultural influences. Authors impeach this thesis and present the questions, whether it is possible to find cognitive aspects or purposes in aesthetic judgements and in beauty perception, and if it is possible to meaningfully build cognitive aesthetics as a science about the epistemic background of beauty and art. On the example of attraction, the mechanisms of evolutionarily universalistic approach are shown. In this case, an attractiveness evaluation can be understood as an unconscious calculating process where we evaluate sensory inputs without consciously regarding the evaluation algorithms which were acquired in the course of evolution or upbringing. At the same time, authors add the cognitive approach stressing the idea, that the attractiveness of an average object proves that it has a higher degree of correspondence with its prototype. For this reason our ideal of beauty is often conditioned by our education, individual history, and culture. The clarification of functioning of these mechanisms enables to present a model of how both systems work together, and so provides an explanation of why there are objects which we all like and why we are sensitive to very similar impulses, but on the other hand, this could also explain why there is an individual, historical, and cultural interdependence of aesthetic values.