The Beauty of Perception
感知之美
Stand in a garden at dusk. As the light fades, the red flowers darken first, into a black mass, while the blue flowers stay bright. The flowers have not changed; what has changed is the eye that looks. A subject who has seen this cannot not acknowledge: the world has weight for a living thing and appears to it; what appears is not everything, it is about something, and it has a look of its own: even unused, it is still as it is. That sentence is the beauty of perception. It is two halves of one beauty: the half of selection is weight, a difference in the world beginning to bear on whether a living thing remains, and what remains is not everything; the half of perception is appearance, the differences that bear on it beginning to appear to it, with color, sound, warmth and cold. The two halves are one thing: selection is blind, and appearance is where that same weight is no longer blind; in a single act of looking, what shows through of the weight is the very cut and the very "about" of appearance. "Even unused, it is still as it is" is the point peculiar to this level. The beauty has two faces: completive beauty is a stretch of blue, a low note, a polished stone surface, just so at this moment; generative beauty is the eye adjusting bit by bit in the dark, as things come out one by one. The paper has one main thread: beauty and pleasure cannot be derived from each other; beauty is not necessarily pleasant, and what is pleasant is not necessarily beautiful; the ground of acknowledgment lies in the point that is seen, not in feeling. The paper says what perception is and is not (not pleasure, not a production line from stimulus to response, not the first layer of neural coding, and selection is not who won); what this paper takes over from Kant and where it parts from him; what can pass for the beauty of perception (pleasure, what everyone chooses, what is easy on the eye, reward, useful signals, novelty, fame); and what is left to each person. It traces where the question comes from, from the refutation of "beauty is the pleasure that comes through sight and hearing," from pathos and terror too becoming rasa, and "when the colors of things stir, the heart too is shaken," through Hutcheson, Baumgarten, Darwin and Wang Guowei, to today's experimental aesthetics and neuroaesthetics. It ends by handing on to the beauty of cognition the question of whether what is no longer before one's eyes is still there.
Keywords: beauty of perception, weight, appearance, pleasure, completive beauty, generative beauty, Kant, selection, overlap, 9DD, 10DD
1. A Garden at Dusk
Stand in a garden at dusk. While the sky is still light, the red flowers and the blue flowers each have their own color. As the light fades little by little, the red flowers darken first, into a black mass; the blue flowers stay bright, much brighter than the red. A little later the blue flowers too can no longer be told by color; only shades of light and dark remain.
The flowers have not changed. What has changed is the eye that looks. When the light is strong, the kind of cell in the eye that handles color is doing the looking; as the light weakens, those cells gradually stop working and another kind takes over, one more sensitive to bluish light and scarcely responsive to red.[^1] Two hundred years ago Purkinje looked at colors just before daybreak and noted that the most vivid reds and greens then look the blackest, and that the first color to be seen is blue.[^2]
Someone standing in the darkening garden sees two things. One is that red has its look and blue has its look, and as the sky darkens these looks withdraw one by one. The other is that what appears is never everything: the same flower is red when the sky is light and black when it is dark; what it appears as, and whether it appears at all, is not settled by the flower alone, but also by the pair of eyes looking at it. And these eyes are not ones he chose for himself.
That point is what this paper is about.
This paper follows the reading set out in the general outline.[^3] A personal aesthetic is each person's own and comes from his own cannot-not; aesthetics is the part that subjects with judgment cannot not acknowledge together, here called the overlap. The overlap is large; what does not overlap is larger. The overlap is not everyone being obliged to agree: whoever looks cannot not see, and whoever has seen cannot not acknowledge. When someone says "it is beautiful," he is claiming that this time he has landed on the overlap, and that claim can be right or wrong. What settles out of an act of drawing a boundary is called a construct; what it cannot contain is called the remainder. The remainder gives a place where one can go on, and a direction; it pushes no one; whether to go depends on a person's own cannot-not.[^4] A beauty has two faces: when the construct has come into place, it is completive beauty, quiet; when the construct is being chiseled out, it is generative beauty, tense. The beauty of perception has both faces. A ray is a direction of judgment, not a classification of objects: the same flower can also be looked at from the direction of biology, or from the direction of reproduction. This paper asks about one direction only, how the world has weight for a living thing and appears to it, and what the power of judgment sees in that direction.
2. What Perception Is and Is Not
The beauty of perception has two halves. The half of selection: a difference in the world begins to bear on whether a living thing remains; what remains is not everything. This paper calls this half weight. On the Galápagos Islands, a population of Darwin's finches met a severe drought, and what was left were mostly large, hard seeds; the larger birds, especially males with larger beaks, could crack these seeds, and they survived in the greatest numbers.[^5] A beak a little larger or a little smaller makes no visible difference in ordinary times; that year, it bore on who remained. The half of perception: the differences that bear on it begin to appear to it. This paper calls this half appearance: something shows itself to a living thing, and what shows itself is about something (there is a thing over there, a small lump, hard, round, amid a moving green; whether it can be named comes later), and it has a look of its own: this red, this low, this cool.
Researchers have said something about how the two halves are linked in the world. Old World monkeys, apes and human beings can tell red from green; some studies say this makes ripe fruit and newly grown young leaves stand out from a mass of green; whether the fruit or the leaves matter more is still disputed.[^6] This can show that whether a color appears can carry weight; it cannot show that the look of red is only weight, nor which account is right. There is also a frog whose males add a brief tail note to their call, which the females prefer; the males of a closely related species never call this way, yet the inner ears of the females of both species are tuned to the same point, and from this the researchers inferred that the females' hearing was tuned first and the call came later.[^7] Later, behavioral experiments were done: the call of the related species that does not call this way was given the tail note artificially, to see whether its females preferred it; one study first said they did, a later one repeated the experiment without reproducing the result and held that the preference and the call arose together, and the matter is still disputed.[^8] If this case holds, it can show that the look that is chosen can grow along the lines of the choosing side's existing senses; it cannot show that all choosing comes about this way. As for the choosing side having first to sense, that needs no frog to show it: what cannot be sensed cannot be chosen.
All this is what research tells people, not what they see. This paper does not claim that the history of selection can be seen in a single act of looking: someone standing in the garden cannot see how his eyes grew into what they are, generation by generation. What he can see in a single act of looking is taken up in Section 3.
Nor is perception pleasure. Pain, in the internationally accepted definition, inherently carries unpleasantness: an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage.[^9] Yet there are patients whose sensory pathways are intact, but who, when given painful stimuli, lack the withdrawal and the emotion that usually follow, and are indifferent to their own deficit.[^10] At least in these patients, sensation and unpleasantness are not bound together.
Nor is perception a production line from stimulus to response, nor the first layer of neural coding. Those accounts describe how it happens; seen from that direction, it is the affair of the beauty of causation and the beauty of biology. To say that perception is where the world first appears to someone is to use "first" in the order of asking: on this ray, the world is asked about for the first time as something appearing to someone; it does not mean that before this no one had looked at the world. There is a test for where this level ends: take away the knowledge of kinds, take away names, memory and language; what remains belongs to this level; what can be seen only with their help is handed to later rays, and the part that relies on memory is the beauty of cognition.
Nor is selection who won. The birds that survived the drought were not better birds; they were the birds whose beaks were a little larger, that year, before those seeds.
Whether a female bird watching a male spread his tail is exercising a personal aesthetic, this paper does not rule on the bird's behalf. This paper says only that when one side is choosing, what it chooses has weight for it; it must first sense before it can choose.
3. The Beauty of Perception
Once a subject has seen the world having weight for a living thing and appearing to it, he cannot not acknowledge:
The world has weight for it and appears to it; what appears is not everything, it is about something, and it has a look of its own: even unused, it is still as it is.
That sentence is the beauty of perception. "Has weight" and "appears to it" are the two halves. "Not everything" and "about something" are what weight looks like as it shows through in appearance. "It has a look of its own: even unused, it is still as it is" is the point peculiar to this level.
What of weight can be seen in a single act of looking is not its history, but two things. One: appearance has a cut: some things show, some do not, and this cut is not one the looker made himself. Two: what shows is always about something: there is a thing over there, not a patch of light with nowhere to settle. Selection is blind; a drought does not look at anyone; appearance is where that same weight is no longer blind: the differences that bear on whether it remains show themselves to it, and show themselves as about something. So the two halves are not two things that happen to meet: the cut and the "about" of appearance are exactly what weight looks like in appearance. How it came to be this way, generation by generation, is something research told him, not something he saw.
In the looker's own looking, weight shows through as use: what it tells him, what he does with it. A fruit turns red, and he knows it can be eaten. But the red of the same fruit, if he does not use it to judge whether the fruit is ripe, is still just this red, and is not diminished one whit by not being used. What can be seen here beyond weight is this point: even unused, it is still as it is.
The seeing at this level is in the looker's own looking. Looking at a stretch of blue, he is looking at how the world appears to a living thing. What cannot the looker not see at this moment? If he stops, and does not use this blue to recognize whether it is sky or wall, or this red to judge whether the fruit is ripe, he cannot not see: it is blue like this; blue like this is not everything, and withdraws as soon as the sky darkens; blue like this, even unused, is still as it is. Having seen, he cannot not acknowledge. To watch a finch crack a hard seed, or a female bird gazing at a spread tail, is also to watch weight at work; what is watched is not the history.
Why is it overlap and not preference? People love different colors, and their eyes are not all the same either. But anyone who does not take it up to recognize anything or to use it can see, in what appears to him, the same point: appearance has a look of its own, is not everything, and even unused is still as it is. This does not depend on nationality, or on the era, or on any particular sense: a blind person, on a polished stone surface or in a low note, sees the same point.
This seeing and pleasure or displeasure are two different things. The ground of acknowledgment lies in the point that is seen, not in feeling; whether feeling comes along is up to each person. Beauty is not necessarily pleasant: in a harsh dissonance, what the looker cannot not acknowledge is that its look is fully there: sharp, hard, two notes grinding against each other, lacking nothing; there is no sensory pleasure here, nor need there be any other pleasure. A stretch of iron-grey sea, the whistle of wind squeezing through a broken window, are like this too. And what is pleasant is not necessarily beautiful: gulping down a sweet when one is hungry, soaking one's feet in hot water on a cold day, scratching an itch, are all pleasant; but one has not stopped to look at anything; the sweet is for eating, the hot water for warming one's feet, and the pleasure lies in the use. If one stopped to taste how this mouthful of sweetness spreads over the tip of the tongue, that would be something else; that would be seeing; and once one has seen, pleasure may be there, or may not. The two often come together: having seen a pretty stretch of blue, one is usually pleased as well. Coming together does not mean that one can be derived from the other. From "it is beautiful" one cannot derive "it is pleasant," and from "it is pleasant" one cannot derive "it is beautiful."
Understanding is not seeing either. An ophthalmologist has lectured for many years on how the two kinds of cell in the eye take over from each other between light and dark; that red flowers go black first when the sky darkens, he could say with his eyes closed. In all this he was not looking; he was only using. One evening, in his own garden, watching the red flowers darken little by little while the blue ones stay bright, he learns nothing new, yet for the first time he stops to look at it: this red is withdrawing just like this. His understanding has not changed; what has changed is that this time he is looking.
Seeing can also go wrong. One may think one is looking at this red when one has taken in only "this is a rose"; one may also think one is looking at this blue when one is looking at another blue one remembers. To say "it is beautiful" is to claim that this time one really has seen, and the claim can be wrong.
Completive beauty: appearance has come into place, just so at this moment. A stretch of blue spreads before the eyes, unfolding between light and dark, thinning toward its edges; when another blue comes near, it shows itself warm or cool. A low note sounds on, thick, a little dark, filling the whole room, with breath, with friction, and with an edge about to vanish. Fingers touch a polished stone: cool, smooth, hard, fine-grained; the fingertip moves across it with almost no resistance. This stretch of blue is only what this pair of eyes lets in, not everything, yet it lacks nothing: completeness is lacking nothing, not being everything. Completive beauty is quiet: appearance has come into place, just so at this moment.
Generative beauty: appearance coming out. Walk from a bright place into a dark room, and at first one sees nothing. After a few minutes, the brighter places come out first; after a good while longer, more than half an hour, the things in the dark come out one by one.[^11] The tension is here: they may not come out; and what comes out is not entirely as it was before. A female bird stands on a branch, watching a male spread his tail, and has not yet moved; what the looker sees is a choice not yet settled, weight in the act of falling; what appears on the bird's side, this paper does not say for it. The completive face is "just so at this moment"; the generative face is appearance coming out, weight in the act of falling.
4. Kant's Satisfaction
This paper takes three things over from Kant, takes one step further, and parts from him over beauty and pleasure.
The first thing it takes over is that looking is not for use. Kant says that the satisfaction that determines the judgment of taste is without any interest.[^12] The second is that the agreeable is not the beautiful. He distinguishes three kinds of satisfaction: in the agreeable, the beautiful and the good. The agreeable is what gratifies; the beautiful, what merely pleases; the good, what is esteemed, what is held to have objective value; of the three, only the satisfaction of taste in the beautiful is disinterested and free.[^13] The half of this paper's claim that what is pleasant is not necessarily beautiful, he had already stated. The third is order. He asks whether, in the judgment of taste, the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging of the object or the judging precedes the pleasure, and says that the answer is the key to the critique of taste. If the pleasure came first, it would be only the agreeableness of sensation, valid only for oneself; so the judging comes first, and the pleasure follows, and follows necessarily. What comes first, he says, is the universal communicability of the state of mind in the free harmony of the cognitive faculties.[^14] What this paper takes over is only the order, with what comes first replaced by seeing.
The step further is at "purposiveness without an end." Kant says that beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object insofar as it is perceived in it without the representation of an end.[^15] This paper's "even unused, it is still as it is" is close to this: an appearance bears on whether a living thing remains, yet the one looking at it does not look at what it is for. This paper places this point in the look of appearance itself, not in the free play of the cognitive faculties: this red has a look of its own, and what the looker sees is that look, not the harmony of faculties in his own mind.
Where it parts from him is beauty and pleasure. Kant says that to decide whether something is beautiful, we relate its representation to the subject, to the subject's feeling of pleasure and displeasure; so the judgment of taste is aesthetic, and its determining ground can only be subjective.[^16] For Kant, the judging comes first and pleasure necessarily follows; this paper says that seeing comes first, and pleasure may follow or may not. Seeing a harsh dissonance or an iron-grey sea, one is not pleased, and still cannot not acknowledge. This paper's ground lies in the construct, not in feeling.
One more point, already made in the general outline, is only mentioned here. From disinterestedness Kant derives a universal claim: someone who is conscious that his satisfaction is without interest can only judge that it must contain a ground valid for everyone, and so he believes he has reason to expect a similar satisfaction from everyone.[^17] This paper keeps the two apart: not-for-use stays with looking at this level; the universal half belongs to aesthetics itself, that is, the overlap, and this paper says not "ought" but only that whoever looks cannot not see.
5. What Can Pass for It
The method is still the same: take it away and see.
Pleasure. Take away the looking and see: gulping down a sweet when hungry, one has not stopped to look at anything, and the pleasure is still there; it lies in the use. Take away the pleasure and see: a harsh dissonance, unpleasant, its look still there. Pleasure can sit in the same act of looking as beauty, but it is not the beauty spoken of here.
What everyone chooses. Ask a hundred people to pick from a pile the rectangle easiest on the eye, and the number of times each is picked can be counted. Take the vote away and see: the point in one person's own looking does not vanish because others picked it less often. The number of picks is a distribution of preference; the overlap is not a vote.
Easy on the eye. One school of psychology says that beauty is grounded in the looker's experience of processing a thing: when processing goes smoothly, it seems pretty.[^18] Take away the smoothness and see: a stretch of dissonance heard for the first time, hard to make sense of, not smooth at all, and the point can still be seen. Being easy on the eye is one kind of pleasure.
Reward. Neuroscientists had people look at paintings and listen to music and report how beautiful they found them; for both looking and listening, the same area at the lower front of the brain, toward the middle, lit up, and the stronger its activity, the stronger the reported beauty. From this they said that, at least as far as the brain is concerned, there is a faculty of beauty that does not depend on which sense beauty comes through.[^19] They themselves also say that activity in this area is in any case correlated with pleasure and reward, real or imagined, and with their anticipation.[^20] Take away the reward and see: a harsh dissonance gives no reward, its look is still there, and the looker still acknowledges it. Whether that area lights up measures whether pleasure and reward came along; it cannot tell whether anything was seen. And correlation is not yet constitution.
Useful signals. Red tells a monkey the fruit is ripe. Take away the use and see: when the same fruit is not used to judge whether it can be eaten, that red is still there.
Novelty. Seeing the aurora for the first time, one stares. Take away the newness and see: the hundredth time one sees it, that light is still as it is; if the staring came only from newness, it will be gone next time.
Fame. The blue in a famous painting. Take away the name and see: without knowing who painted it, that blue is still blue like this.
Neighboring rays. The beauty of physics looks at how the wavelengths of light fit a form at its point of necessity; the look of red is not a wavelength. The beauty of biology looks at how a living thing keeps itself while exchanging its material; this paper looks at how the world appears to it. The beauty of reproduction looks at how difference becomes role and how offspring grow again; the prettiness of ornament belongs to this level. The beauty of cognition looks at how what is no longer before one's eyes is still there, and how what has not yet come arrives first; this paper looks only at the appearance before one's eyes.
One last sentence, which this aesthetics says of every ray: beauty is not correctness, not usefulness, not importance, not understanding. At this level, where the world begins to have sweetness and pain, the word pleasure first enters; so one more thing must be said: beauty is not pleasure, and pleasure is not beauty.
6. What Is Left to Each Person
Which colors and which sounds one loves is each person's own. Some spend a lifetime looking at the sea, some a lifetime listening to the double bass.
What appears to each person is not entirely the same either. To someone who cannot tell red from green, to the blind, to the deaf, the world appears otherwise than it does to others. This paper sets no standard for anyone's senses; there is no pair of "standard eyes." The overlap does not lie in one and the same color, but in the point that can be seen in what appears to each person who has looked: appearance has its look, is not everything, and even unused is still as it is.
A person's eyes have a history too. A painter teaches him to look at the colors in shadows, and from then on he sees purples and blues he could not see before; this is cultivation: someone helped him grow his own eyes. A climate of opinion says that only certain colors are refined, and he follows it; that ruler may then take the place of his own law. Take the ruler away and see: if he still acknowledges what he said, and can revise it himself, it is his.
To say "this blue is more beautiful than that one" is a judgment of beauty, and it can be discussed: does its look show more fully? Discussion may find that each has a look of its own, and then each keeps its own.
Aesthetics says only this: whoever has seen cannot not acknowledge that it is beautiful; aesthetics decides for no one whether to stop for it.
7. Where the Question Comes From
What beauty in the senses is, and whether it is the same as pleasure, was asked very early; the answers have been rewritten several times. First someone defined beauty as the pleasure of sight and hearing, and was refuted on the spot; on another side, someone looked at drama and saw that pathos and terror too can become rasa, and someone looked at writing and saw that when the colors of things stir, the heart is shaken with them; then beauty was placed in cognition, in an internal sense, in the perfection of sensory cognition; Kant separated the agreeable from the beautiful, and yet left beauty in a kind of satisfaction; Darwin said that birds' taste is much like ours; and today psychologists and neuroscientists put pleasure and beauty under the same instrument. What follows runs in the order of these rewritings. For each figure, the paper reports faithfully what he discerned, why he looked, where he presses on this paper, and where this paper parts from him; other traditions appear in their own words.
Is beauty the pleasure of sight and hearing? In Plato's Hippias Major, Socrates first puts forward an account: whatever gives us pleasure through hearing and sight, we say is beautiful; then he fixes it in a sentence: beauty is pleasure that comes through hearing and sight. Then he refutes it step by step, until at the end: so the pleasure that comes through sight and hearing cannot be beauty.[^21] He discerned that specifying which senses pleasure comes through still cannot say by what right these pleasures are beautiful, nor why sight and hearing in particular. He asked in search of a "beautiful itself" running through all beautiful things. He presses on this paper: if this paper defined the beauty of perception as the pleasure of certain senses, it would run into the same questioning. This paper meets him here: pleasure does not yield beauty, a step he had already taken; it parts from him here: this paper does not seek one beauty running through everything; each dimension has its own construct.
Pathos and terror too become rasa. Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra lists eight rasas, among them the pathetic and the terrible; and it says that rasa arises from the combination of the determinants, the consequents and the transitory states.[^22] Why is rasa called rasa, taste? Because it can be tasted. He compares it to eating: people who know how to eat, eating food well seasoned, taste its various flavors and attain delight; so too spectators who understand drama taste the durable emotions shown on stage through the various kinds of acting, and attain delight.[^23] He looked for the sake of drama: how love, pathos, terror and anger on stage become flavors the audience can taste. He discerned that feelings unpleasant in ordinary life can become, on stage, flavors that are tasted. In his own word this is rasa, and this paper does not replace it with beauty. He presses on this paper: even pathos and terror, once tasted, bring delight; when it comes to rasa, are beauty and pleasure always together? This paper meets him here: pathos and terror can be tasted without first becoming everyday pleasure. It parts from him here: this paper does not take that delight as the ground; rasa is generated by the arrangement of the drama, and its setting is theater and poetry, while this paper's setting is the world appearing to a living thing.
When the colors of things stir, the heart too is shaken. Liu Xie says: "Spring and autumn succeed each other; yin turns somber and yang expansive; when the colors of things stir, the heart too is shaken." He also says: "Feeling shifts with things, and words issue from feeling. Even a single leaf may meet one's intent; the sound of insects is enough to draw the heart." In describing scenery, one "follows things as they turn and wind"; in arranging diction and sound, one "lingers along with the heart."[^24] He looked for the sake of writing: where writing comes from. He discerned that things, heart and words are one process; a single leaf or the sound of an insect can open a whole situation, which is not cut into two stages, an outside stimulus and an inside response. He presses on this paper: on the face of it, it is things that stir and draw the heart. This paper's reading: the colors of things changing is the affair of things; whether the heart is shaken is up to the person. The same leaf falls; this person is moved, that one is not; the movement comes from each person's own cannot-not. This paper meets him in "following things" and "along with the heart": appearance cannot be had by keeping subject and object apart. It parts from him here: he asks where writing comes from; this paper asks about appearance itself.
What pleases when seen. In a question on the good, Aquinas answers an objection by distinguishing the good from the beautiful: the good concerns desire, the beautiful concerns the cognitive power, for those things are called beautiful which please when seen; hence beauty consists in due proportion, because the senses delight in things duly proportioned.[^25] He looked in order to distinguish the beautiful from the good. He discerned that beauty is tied to cognition, not to desire, which goes the same way as this paper's seeing. He presses on this paper: he speaks of beauty through "pleasing when seen," so that delight enters the account of beauty. This paper parts from him here: seeing is there, delight need not be; and proportion is only one reason among those that can be discussed; each of this paper's dimensions has its own construct.
An internal sense. Hutcheson says that this higher power of perception is rightly called a sense because it is like the other senses in this: the pleasure does not arise from any knowledge of principles, proportions, causes or the usefulness of the object, but strikes us at once with the idea of beauty; nor does the most exact knowledge increase this pleasure of beauty.[^26] He looked to show that the human mind has a perception that relies neither on knowledge nor on advantage. He discerned something not inferred and not used, which goes the same way as this paper's seeing. He presses on this paper: he calls beauty a pleasure, and secures what is shared by an internal sense that is the same in everyone. This paper parts from him in two places: seeing need not be pleasant; and what is shared is only the overlap of those who have seen, and what does not overlap is larger; its ground lies in the construct, not in a sense that is the same in everyone.
The perfection of sensory cognition. Baumgarten named aesthetics, and said that its end is the perfection of sensory cognition as such, and that this is beauty.[^27] He looked in order to establish a discipline of its own for sensory cognition. He discerned that sensibility has its own completion and incompletion, and is not merely a lower grade of understanding. He presses on this paper: when this paper says that beauty is not understanding, does it exclude even the perfection of sensibility itself? This paper's answer: it does not; appearance come into place is exactly this paper's completive beauty. It parts from him here: he still places sensibility within a hierarchy of cognition, while the order of this paper's rays is an order of asking, not a ladder, and perception is not a grade below understanding.
Kant separates the agreeable from the beautiful, and leaves beauty in satisfaction. See Section 4.
Birds' taste is much like ours. Darwin says that, on the whole, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals except man, and that their taste for the beautiful is much like ours.[^28] He wrote this to bear witness that females choose and that males' ornaments come from that choosing. He discerned that when birds choose mates, the senses and liking are at work. He presses on this paper: if birds' taste and human taste are much alike, does the overlap cross species? This paper's answer: it does not rule on the bird's behalf. The point a human sees in a peacock belongs to this level; when a bird chooses, it must first sense, and what it chooses has weight for it; whether what the bird sees is the look a human sees, this paper does not say.
The realm with a self and the realm without a self. Wang Guowei says: "There is a realm with a self, and a realm without a self. ... In the realm with a self, one looks at things through the self, so that all things take on the coloring of the self. In the realm without a self, one looks at things through things, so that one does not know which is self and which is thing."[^29] He looked for the sake of judging lyrics. He discerned that from the moment things are seen, they can carry the looker's coloring, or can be seen to the point where self and thing are not distinguished. He presses on this paper: if an appearance first required a layer of appearance uncolored by feeling, there is no such layer in the realm with a self. This paper meets him here: appearance is not a neutral stimulus from the start. It parts from him here: jingjie, the realm, is a measure for judging lyrics, and its setting is the lyric; this paper's setting is the world appearing to a living thing, and it does not rank the realm with a self above or below the realm without.
Aesthetics from below. Fechner says that aesthetics, the study of liking and disliking, or, as others put it, the study of the beautiful, can be done from above, by descending from the most general ideas, or from below, by ascending from particulars.[^30] He had people choose from a pile of rectangles to see which proportions were chosen most often, comparing the golden section and the square.[^31] He looked in order to make aesthetics an experimental discipline. He discerned that aesthetics can start from particulars without first defining beauty. He presses on this paper in two places. First, he treats "the study of liking and disliking" and "the study of the beautiful" as two names for one discipline, which is exactly what this paper's main thread separates. Second, if the overlap were only a distribution of choices, aesthetics would be only a statistics of preference; this paper writes this into Section 9. It parts from him here: the number of picks has the shape of a vote, and the overlap is not a vote.
Is beauty a pleasure? Experimenters today go further. In one set of studies, people either looked at an image, or held a sweet in their mouths, or stroked a teddy bear, reporting continuously how much pleasure they felt, and at the end said whether they had felt beauty.[^32] They found two things. One: beauty requires thought: adding a distracting task weakened both beauty and intense pleasure, but left weaker pleasure unaffected; this half, they said, confirmed Kant. Two: the intensity of pleasure rose linearly with felt beauty, and intense pleasure was always called beautiful, even when it occasionally came from a sweet; this half, they said, refuted Kant's claim that sensory pleasure cannot be beauty. Later they compared beauty ratings for nine hundred images with pleasure norms for the same images, and the two correlated highly; of those who most lacked the capacity for pleasure, none had an average beauty rating above the overall median. They therefore said that intense beauty requires intense pleasure, and that beauty is a kind of pleasure. The same study also found that each person's own taste influenced beauty ratings about three times as much as shared taste.[^33]
They discerned that when people say "beautiful," they are often also pleased; and that those who cannot feel pleasure seldom say they have felt intense beauty. They looked in order to answer the old question of beauty and pleasure by experiment. They press on this paper most directly: if beauty and pleasure always rise and fall together, and without pleasure one can scarcely speak of beauty, what is the point of saying that neither can be derived from the other?
This paper's answer has three steps. First, their first finding stands on this paper's side: beauty is not just any pleasure; weaker pleasure needs no thought, and beauty does. Second, this paper can join them in opposing Kant: a sweet can be beautiful; only it is not in the pleasure of gulping it down, but in stopping to taste how that mouthful of sweetness spreads over the tip of the tongue, which is seeing. What this paper denies is only the derivation: from intense pleasure one cannot derive seeing, and from seeing one cannot derive pleasure. Third, what they measure is "how intensely beauty is felt," which is a feeling; what this paper speaks of is seeing and acknowledging, whose ground lies in the point that is seen, not in the intensity of a feeling. When someone says "it is beautiful," he is making a claim, and the claim can be wrong. But this is exactly where this paper could be wrong: if those who lack pleasure are shown also not to see and not to acknowledge, this paper is wrong, as Section 9 states. That they find each person's taste outweighing shared taste goes in much the same direction as this paper's "what does not overlap is larger"; this paper does not take the "shared taste" they measure to be the overlap.
A faculty of beauty in the brain. Neuroaesthetics has also put beauty under the instrument; see Section 5.
8. The Question Left Open
It is fully dark now, and there is no color left in the garden. Is that red still there? Tomorrow morning, when it brightens again, what the looker discerns is yesterday's flower, not a new one.
Appearance is only before one's eyes. How what is no longer before one's eyes is still there, and how what has not yet come arrives first: this level cannot contain it.
The world does not push anyone to ask this. A person can spend a whole life looking only at the blue before his eyes; if he cannot not ask how what has passed is still there, that is another ray. This ray stops here.
The question left open is: whether what is no longer before one's eyes is still there, and how what has not yet come arrives first. That is the beauty of cognition.
9. What Would Make This Paper Wrong
If any one of four things held, this paper would be wrong. First, at this level one direction between beauty and pleasure is shown to be derivable: intense pleasure, wherever it comes from, is shown to be seeing; or those without pleasure are shown not to see and not to acknowledge. The experiments of Section 7 are the most direct pressure on this item. Second, the look of what appears is shown to be completely explained by its weight: the look of every color and every sound is only its use for whether a living thing remains, and unused it is nothing at all. Third, the looker's acknowledgment at this level is shown to be only a distribution of choices: take away what everyone chooses, and no one acknowledges any longer. Fourth, the looker can see appearance but cannot make out the cut and the "about"; weight can be known only from research, so that the two halves are only two things, and the seeing this paper speaks of is only inference. This paper does not think any of these will happen, but it writes them here, and leaves them to those who look to test.
Acknowledgments
This paper is the eighth ray paper in the aesthetics branch of the SAE (Self-as-an-End) philosophical system and is published under the sole name of Han Qin. The author made the final decision on all philosophical arguments and choices, and alone is responsible for the final text.
Both drafting assistance and review were carried out with large language models. Drafting and internal precision audit were done by Claude (Anthropic); the structural gate and pre-publication sign-off were handled by ChatGPT (OpenAI). The material on the history of ideas used in Section 7, "Where the Question Comes From," was first gathered by ChatGPT's deep research, and its sources were then checked item by item. This paper, together with the second edition of the general outline and the other twelve ray papers, passed final review by both the internal precision audit and the structural gate, and passed a key-sentence acceptance check. The author thanks these systems and the research and engineering teams behind them. The author ruled on their comments one by one, and both acceptances and rejections are on record; the record of revisions and withdrawals across rounds is not reproduced here.
Notes
[^1]: Stuart Anstis, "The Purkinje Rod-Cone Shift as a Function of Luminance and Retinal Eccentricity," Vision Research 42, no. 22 (2002): 2485–2491, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0042-6989(02)00267-5.
[^2]: Jan Evangelista Purkinje, Beobachtungen und Versuche zur Physiologie der Sinne, vol. 2, Neue Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Sehens in subjectiver Hinsicht (Berlin: Reimer, 1825), 109, quoted in Grace Maxwell Fernald, The Effect of Achromatic Conditions on the Color Phenomena of Peripheral Vision, Psychological Review Monograph Supplements 10, no. 3 (Baltimore: Review Publishing, 1909), 9.
[^3]: Han Qin, SAE Judgment and Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (2026), §5.1, "How to Read the Rays," DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19296710.
[^4]: Han Qin, SAE: The First Critique (2026), DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21439120.
[^5]: Peter T. Boag and Peter R. Grant, "Intense Natural Selection in a Population of Darwin's Finches (Geospizinae) in the Galápagos," Science 214, no. 4516 (1981): 82–85, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.214.4516.82.
[^6]: Daniel Osorio and Misha Vorobyev, "Colour Vision as an Adaptation to Frugivory in Primates," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 263, no. 1370 (1996): 593–599, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1996.0089; Nathaniel J. Dominy and Peter W. Lucas, "Ecological Importance of Trichromatic Vision to Primates," Nature 410, no. 6826 (2001): 363–366, https://doi.org/10.1038/35066567.
[^7]: Michael J. Ryan, John H. Fox, Walter Wilczynski, and A. Stanley Rand, "Sexual Selection for Sensory Exploitation in the Frog Physalaemus pustulosus," Nature 343, no. 6253 (1990): 66–67, https://doi.org/10.1038/343066a0.
[^8]: Santiago R. Ron, "The Evolution of Female Mate Choice for Complex Calls in Túngara Frogs," Animal Behaviour 76, no. 6 (2008): 1783–1794, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.07.024.
[^9]: Srinivasa N. Raja et al., "The Revised International Association for the Study of Pain Definition of Pain: Concepts, Challenges, and Compromises," Pain 161, no. 9 (2020): 1976–1982, https://doi.org/10.1097/j.pain.0000000000001939.
[^10]: Marcelo Berthier, Sergio Starkstein, and Ramón Leiguarda, "Asymbolia for Pain: A Sensory-Limbic Disconnection Syndrome," Annals of Neurology 24, no. 1 (1988): 41–49, https://doi.org/10.1002/ana.410240109.
[^11]: Michael Kalloniatis and Charles Luu, "Light and Dark Adaptation," in Webvision: The Organization of the Retina and Visual System, ed. Helga Kolb, Eduardo Fernandez, and Ralph Nelson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Health Sciences Center, 1995–), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11525/.
[^12]: Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §2, 5:204.
[^13]: Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §5, 5:209–210.
[^14]: Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §9, 5:216–218.
[^15]: Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, explanation following §17, 5:236.
[^16]: Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §1, 5:203–204.
[^17]: Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §6, 5:211–212.
[^18]: Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz, and Piotr Winkielman, "Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver's Processing Experience?," Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, no. 4 (2004): 364–382, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3.
[^19]: Tomohiro Ishizu and Semir Zeki, "Toward a Brain-Based Theory of Beauty," PLoS ONE 6, no. 7 (2011): e21852, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0021852.
[^20]: Ishizu and Zeki, "Toward a Brain-Based Theory of Beauty."
[^21]: Plato, Hippias Major 297e–298a, 303d, in Platonis Opera, vol. 3, ed. John Burnet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903).
[^22]: Bharata, The Nāṭyaśāstra, trans. Manomohan Ghosh, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1950), chap. 6, 102, 105.
[^23]: Bharata, Nāṭyaśāstra 6, prose following verse 31 (GRETIL e-text, adapted from the Sanskrit Documents edition).
[^24]: Liu Xie 劉勰, Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍, juan 10, "Wuse" 物色, Sibu congkan edition. Characters in quotations follow standard forms.
[^25]: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1, Leonine ed.
[^26]: Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 2nd ed. (London, 1726), treatise 1, sect. 1, art. 13.
[^27]: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Frankfurt an der Oder: Kleyb, 1750), §14.
[^28]: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), 2:39.
[^29]: Wang Guowei 王國維, Renjian cihua 人間詞話, sec. 3 (Beijing: Pushe, 1926).
[^30]: Gustav Theodor Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetik, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1876), 1.
[^31]: Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetik, 1:184–202.
[^32]: Aenne A. Brielmann and Denis G. Pelli, "Beauty Requires Thought," Current Biology 27, no. 10 (2017): 1506–1513, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.04.018.
[^33]: Aenne A. Brielmann and Denis G. Pelli, "Intense Beauty Requires Intense Pleasure," Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019): 2420, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02420.
References
Works of the SAE system cited here are archived on Zenodo, with the Chinese and English versions in the same record. The DOIs cited are concept DOIs, which always resolve to the latest version, so version numbers and access dates are not given. All are single-authored (Han Qin). Drafting and review assistance is described in the Acknowledgments.
Anstis, Stuart. "The Purkinje Rod-Cone Shift as a Function of Luminance and Retinal Eccentricity." Vision Research 42, no. 22 (2002): 2485–2491. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0042-6989(02)00267-5.
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Leonine ed.
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Aesthetica. Frankfurt an der Oder: Kleyb, 1750.
Berthier, Marcelo, Sergio Starkstein, and Ramón Leiguarda. "Asymbolia for Pain: A Sensory-Limbic Disconnection Syndrome." Annals of Neurology 24, no. 1 (1988): 41–49. https://doi.org/10.1002/ana.410240109.
Bharata. The Nāṭyaśāstra. Translated by Manomohan Ghosh. Vol. 1. Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1950.
———. Nāṭyaśāstra. GRETIL e-text, adapted from the Sanskrit Documents edition. Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages.
Boag, Peter T., and Peter R. Grant. "Intense Natural Selection in a Population of Darwin's Finches (Geospizinae) in the Galápagos." Science 214, no. 4516 (1981): 82–85. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.214.4516.82.
Brielmann, Aenne A., and Denis G. Pelli. "Beauty Requires Thought." Current Biology 27, no. 10 (2017): 1506–1513. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.04.018.
———. "Intense Beauty Requires Intense Pleasure." Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019): 2420. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02420.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1871.
Dominy, Nathaniel J., and Peter W. Lucas. "Ecological Importance of Trichromatic Vision to Primates." Nature 410, no. 6826 (2001): 363–366. https://doi.org/10.1038/35066567.
Fechner, Gustav Theodor. Vorschule der Aesthetik. 2 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1876.
Fernald, Grace Maxwell. The Effect of Achromatic Conditions on the Color Phenomena of Peripheral Vision. Psychological Review Monograph Supplements 10, no. 3. Baltimore: Review Publishing, 1909.
Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. 2nd ed. London, 1726.
Ishizu, Tomohiro, and Semir Zeki. "Toward a Brain-Based Theory of Beauty." PLoS ONE 6, no. 7 (2011): e21852. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0021852.
Kalloniatis, Michael, and Charles Luu. "Light and Dark Adaptation." In Webvision: The Organization of the Retina and Visual System, edited by Helga Kolb, Eduardo Fernandez, and Ralph Nelson. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Health Sciences Center, 1995–. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11525/.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. First published 1790.
Liu Xie 劉勰. Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍. Sibu congkan edition.
Osorio, Daniel, and Misha Vorobyev. "Colour Vision as an Adaptation to Frugivory in Primates." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 263, no. 1370 (1996): 593–599. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1996.0089.
Plato. Hippias Major. In Platonis Opera, vol. 3, edited by John Burnet. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903.
Purkinje, Jan Evangelista. Beobachtungen und Versuche zur Physiologie der Sinne. Vol. 2, Neue Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Sehens in subjectiver Hinsicht. Berlin: Reimer, 1825.
Qin, Han. SAE Judgment and Aesthetics. 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19296710.
———. SAE: The First Critique. 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21439120.
Raja, Srinivasa N., et al. "The Revised International Association for the Study of Pain Definition of Pain: Concepts, Challenges, and Compromises." Pain 161, no. 9 (2020): 1976–1982. https://doi.org/10.1097/j.pain.0000000000001939.
Reber, Rolf, Norbert Schwarz, and Piotr Winkielman. "Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver's Processing Experience?" Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, no. 4 (2004): 364–382. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3.
Ron, Santiago R. "The Evolution of Female Mate Choice for Complex Calls in Túngara Frogs." Animal Behaviour 76, no. 6 (2008): 1783–1794. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.07.024.
Ryan, Michael J., John H. Fox, Walter Wilczynski, and A. Stanley Rand. "Sexual Selection for Sensory Exploitation in the Frog Physalaemus pustulosus." Nature 343, no. 6253 (1990): 66–67. https://doi.org/10.1038/343066a0.
Wang Guowei 王國維. Renjian cihua 人間詞話. Beijing: Pushe, 1926.