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Essay on Beauty Modifications
All human societies possess the perception of beauty, time and again with a very specific vocabulary and a tradition of quarrel about it. People see (hear, touch, taste, smell) the beautiful, and be familiar with it by a natural intuition and a natural pleasure. Even animals do: antiphonal birdsong, the brilliant shapes and colors of flowers (what more precise record could there be of the esthetic preferences of bees?), and the gorgeous ritual mating garments of tropical fishes and birds of paradise, all attest to a more-than-utilitarian attraction in certain forms of organization.
This "natural intuition" is for us human beings activated, sensitized, and deepened by culture; that is, a natural capacity of the nervous system now incorporates a cultural feedback loop, and also uses the physical world, through art and science, as part of its own hardware. The theory of such training or sensitization, the incorporation of this cultural feedback loop, the plugging of it in to the prepared places in our brains, is what I call "natural classicism." The foundation of the natural classical perspective is that the universe, and we, evolved. This fact entails two truths about beauty: a special evolutionary truth and a general evolutionary truth.
The special evolutionary truth is that our capacity to perceive and create beauty is a characteristic of an animal that evolved. Beauty is thus in some way a biological adaptation and a physiological reality: the experience of beauty can be connected to the activity of actual neurotransmitters in the brain, endorphins and enkephalins. When we become addicted to a drug such as heroin or cocaine we do so because their molecular structure resembles that of the chemistries of joy that the brain feeds to itself. (Cohen, Howard (2002)For over a million years the most important genetic determinant in the milieu of our type was our own culture......
