The Pleasures of Thought and the Terror of Beauty

Abstract

The relations between aesthetics and neuroscience have been largely over determined by questions of beauty and the fatal allure of universal principles and criteria for value judgements. It is more relevant to question the gap between this reductionist desire for testable and repeatable criteria and the elusive quality of pleasure, first identified by Gustav Fechner, that escapes such definitions. If, as Quentin Meillassoux asserts in his ‘philosophy fiction’ rereading of Bergson in ‘Subtraction and Contraction’, the body chooses from the enormous multiplicity of the real and then in a secondary process the mind selects from this filtered material, then human perception functions as a form of impoverishment of the real. Aesthetics in this context is as much a cultural and circumstantial response to this accumulation and recognition of partial data. It may prove more useful to focus on an alternative term for beauty, such as pleasure, as more genuinely inclusive of the range of intellectual and natural stimuli affecting the brain. More significantly, neuroscience and its myriad imaging systems may offer the tantalising prospect of moving beyond the limits and hegemony of the senses and opening up the possibility of new forms of experience.