“Here’s Looking at You” Response
We are only intelligent apes who are trying to recognize their own reflection. “Educated” apes are able to recognize themselves. I would contend the idea of ‘educated’ and instead use the concept ‘primed’ apes, in order to include the idea of socialization. When I speak of ‘primed,' I mean to say: taught a specific branch of semiotics: able to read the symbols current to our culture. I propose this idea because I remember giving a portrait as a present to an uncle (an elder) who was uneducated in Western culture— or symbol reading within the context of the art— and he immediately tried to look behind the portrait as if there existed a world beyond the flat surface he was being presented with. It struck me as a peculiar gesture outside of the ‘norm’ of fine art.
Humans like to speak about ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ as if they were fixed, definite terms while in reality, they are constantly shifting and consistently ungraspable. Take vision for instance: if we were to stretch a string from LA to NY and this string were to represent the whole spectrum of visual reality within the universe, our visual perception as humans would only span three inches out of the almost 3,000 mi of string. Understanding these sensory limitations puts us in a rather awkward position as ‘intelligent’ beings, especially when we try to speak about a concept such as aesthetics. This is an area of study which is so subjective and dependent on perception and contextualized modalities of ‘culture,' that it only serves to highlight our mediocre ability to perceive truth and reality. We can only speak of aesthetics and perception within the limited scope of visual understanding which we posses and only within a specific historical moment within the development of our civilization.
Gombrich would argue that visual representation is just a matter of ‘unlocking’ a series of perceptual locks within our brains. These locks are defined by social conventions and evolutionary adaptations geared toward pattern recognition. The artist takes advantage of these traits to present a recognizable visual pattern to the viewer who will then use their cultural context to frame the information in terms of “visual art.” Our wiring is so refined that very few cues are necessary to recognize the pattern woven into the visual message. Like Dr. Ramachandran says, almost half our brain is devoted to visual processing. Even so, we are very limited in comparison an octopus’s visual spectrum. We might have an advantage in raw processing power but our visual apparatus is not as acute as we would like to think. This complicates the matter of ‘objectivity’ within perception.
Facial response is linked to emotion in our brains: our ability lies not in the visual refinement we possess but it the brain power which makes the editing and classification of stimulus possible. This focused classification allows our brains to quickly sift and organize information into useful, socially relevant categories which we develop throughout our lives and according to our culture’s priorities. We are beings able to make deductions from very small cues, which is likely a reason we tend to overestimate our visual abilities.
Therefore, “Aesthetics” becomes trickier to define and study. We would like to think about it as a ‘science of order and beauty’ but there is no concrete way of categorizing ‘beauty’ because we don’t fully understand perception and consciousness yet. It will be the job of hermeneutics and semiotics to carry the study of aesthetics into a further realm, in line with our Westernized vision of beauty once Neurobiology and Psychology offer an answer to the matter of consciousness and perception.