Deutsch’s views on beauty are, like the rest of his work, worth reading. Even though I’ve been critical, most of what is in Chapter 14 of The Beginning of Infinity is good, far better than the majority of aesthetic thinking I’ve seen. When I read it the first time, I was just slightly disappointed. It felt as if Deutsch had tried to shoehorn his compelling ideas about good explanations and open-ended progress into a part of reality — aesthetics — where they don’t naturally fit.
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Our love of flowers could just be cultural.
Maybe we like flowers because we learn from our parents and society that flowers are beautiful. Not so, Deutsch says:
We find flowers beautiful that we have never seen before, and which have not been known to our culture before – and quite reliably, for most humans in most cultures. The same is not true of the roots of plants, or the leaves.
Of course, the “parochial” kind of beauty, which can be cultural, comes into play. A culture might really like roses, have rose gardens everywhere, and depict roses in their art a lot, thereby making the people in that culture find roses more beautiful than expected from the natural properties of roses. But all humans will tend to like roses by instinct even if they’re from a place where roses don’t grow.
Okay, it’s innate, but it comes from some general evolved preference for nature, fertile land, presence of water, etc.
Why, then, are flowers more reliably attractive than other plant parts like stems and roots, as Deutsch alludes to in the quote above? Flowers on their own are quite useless; we rarely eat them.
Deutsch doesn’t mention fruit. That’s a shame. I guess he would say that a lot of flowers don’t become edible fruit, and most flowers are more beautiful than most fruit. It’s weird if the “promise” of a thing is more attractive than the thing itself, unless there’s some other reason.
That reason might be our innate love of colors.
Good guess. Flowers are colorful, and it’s pretty clear that humans like colors, as evidenced by (among other things) the aesthetics of every toy for young children ever.
But not all flowers are colorful. Deutsch:
However, some flowers are white (at least to us – they may have colours that we cannot see and insects can), but we still find their shapes beautiful.
