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The Routledge Handbook Of Philosophy Of Relativism
THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF NEUROAESTHETICS
The Routledge International Handbook of Neuroaesthetics is an authoritative reference work that provides the reader with a wide-ranging introduction to this exciting new scientific discipline. The book brings together leading international academics to offer a well-balanced overview of this burgeoning field while addressing two questions central to the field: how the brain computes aesthetic appreciation for sensory objects and how art is created and experienced.
The editors, Martin Skov and Marcos Nadal, have compiled a neuroscientific, physiological, and psychological overview of the systems underlying the evaluation of sensory objects and aesthetic appreciation. Covering a variety of art forms mediated by vision, audition, movement, and language, the handbook puts forward a critical review of the current research to explain how and why perceptual and emotional processes are essential for art production. The work also unravels the interaction of art with expectations, experience and knowledge, and the modulation of artistic appreciation through social and contextual settings, eventually bringing to light the potential of art to influence mental states, health, and well-being. The concepts are presented through research on the neural processes enabling artistic creativity, artistic expertise, and the evolution of symbolic cognition.
This handbook is a compelling read for anyone interested in making a first venture into this exciting new area of study and is best suited for students and researchers in the fields of neuroaesthetics, perceptual learning, and cognitive psychology.
Martin Skov is Senior Researcher at Copenhagen Business School and the Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance. His research focuses on understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of sensory liking. He has published extensively on neuroaesthetics, including the book Neuroaesthetics (2009) and an influential series of papers on the conceptual foundations of the field.
Marcos Nadal is Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology of the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain. His research is devoted to characterizing the psychological, neural, and evolutionary foundations of aesthetic appreciation. His contributions earned him the Baumgarten Award from the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics and the Daniel Berlyne Award from the American Psychological Association Division 10.
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THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF
NEUROAESTHETICS
Edited by Martin Skov and Marcos Nadal
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Skov, Martin, 1968– editor. | Nadal, Marcos, editor. Title: The Routledge international handbook of neuroaesthetics / edited by Martin Skov and Marcos Nadal.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge international handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015583
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ISBN: 978-0-367-44274-3 (hbk)
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003008675
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CONTRIBUTORS
Ionela Bara Department of Psychology Bangor University Bangor, UK
Amy M. Belfi Department of Psychological Science Missouri University of Science and Technology Missouri, USA
Kent C. Berridge Department of Psychology University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Jo Bervoets Department of Philosophy University of Antwerp Antwerpen, Belgium
Giacomo Bignardi
Language and Genetics Department
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Indra Bishnoi
Department of Neuroscience University of Western Ontario London, Canada
Aenne A. Brielmann
Department of Computational Neuroscience
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics Tübingen, Germany
Beatriz Calvo-Merino Department of Psychology City, University of London London, UK
Rebecca Chamberlain Department of Psychology Goldsmiths, University of London London, UK
Anjan Chatterjee Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Ana Clemente Institute of Neurosciences University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain
Alex Coburn
Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Ivan Colagè Pontifical University of the Holy Cross DISF Research Centre and Faculty of Philosophy Rome, Italy
Julia Crone Vienna Cognitive Sciences Hub University of Vienna Vienna, Austria
Emily S. Cross Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK
Contributors
Kohinoor M. Darda
Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics
University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Francesco d’Errico
University of Bordeaux, PACEA, UMR 5199
Pessac, France
Gulce Nazli Dikecligil Department of Neurology and Psychology University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Zakaria Djebbara
Department of Architecture and Media Technology
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Michael Donner
School of Psychological Sciences University of Melbourne Melbourne, Australia
Alejandro Dorado Department of Psychology
University of the Balearic Islands
Palma, Spain
Lars Brorson Fich
Department of Architecture and Media Technology
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Alejandro Galvez-Pol Department of Psychology
University of the Balearic Islands Palma, Spain
Jay A. Gottfried
Department of Neurology and Psychology University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Franziska Hartung Department of Psychology
Newcastle University Newcastle, UK
Claire Howlin
Autism Research Centre, University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK
Aniko Illes Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest, Hungary
Tomohiro Ishizu Department of Psychology Kansai University Osaka, Japan
Arthur M. Jacobs Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany
James. M. Kilner Institute of Neurology University College London London, UK
Christoph Klebl School of Psychology University of Queensland Brisbane, Australia
Stefan Koelsch Department of Biological and Medical Psychology University of Bergen Bergen, Norway
Morten L. Kringelbach Center for Music in the Brain Aarhus University Aarhus, Denmark
Helmut Leder Faculty of Psychology University of Vienna Vienna, Austria
Contributors
Haeeun Lee
Department of Psychology Goldsmiths, University of London London, UK
Psyche Loui
Department of Music Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Ernest Mas-Herrero Institute of Neurosciences University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain
Agnes Moors Research Group of Quantitative Psychology and Individual Differences KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium
Enric Munar Department of Psychology University of the Balearic Islands Palma, Spain
Marcos Nadal Department of Psychology University of the Balearic Islands Palma, Spain
Guido Orgs Department of Psychology Goldsmiths, University of London London, UK
Michael J. Ryan
Department of Integrative Biology University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas, USA
Martin Skov
Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance Copenhagen University Hospital Hvidovre Copenhagen, Denmark
Eloise Stark Department of Psychiatry
Oxford University Oxford, UK
Liila Taruffi Department of Music Durham University Durham, UK
Pablo P. L. Tinio
Educational Foundations Department Montclair State University Montclair, New Jersey, USA
Fredrik Ullén Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology
Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics Frankfurt, Germany
Esther Ureña Department of Psychology University of the Balearic Islands Palma, Spain
Sander Van de Cruys Laboratory of Experimental Psychology KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium
Oshin Vartanian Department of Psychology University of Toronto Toronto, Canada
Giovanni Vecchiato Institute of Neuroscience Italian National Research Council Rome, Italy
Edward A. Vessel
Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics Frankfurt, Germany
Adam Weinberger Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
FIGURE S
1.1A Data from a search of Google Ng rams’s corpus of publications in English. 2
1.1B Data from Pubmed showing the number of publications indexed as “neuroaesthetics” in the period between 1965 and 2020. 2
1.2 A timeline of the development of aesthetics as a conceptual category 5
1.3 Data from a bibliometric analysis of the development in the way the word “aesthetic” was used together with other conceptual terms. 7
1.4 A figure adapted from Descartes’ book L’homme (Paris: Girard, 1677) depicting the physiological system underpinning vision. 10
1.5 Chatterjee’s (2003) and Leder et al.’s (2004) two models of the neural processes involved in aesthetic experience combined into one representation. 15
2.1 Sensory liking evaluations always occur in the context of behavioural tasks. 33
2.2 A schematic depiction of the functional components that constitute sensory liking systems in biological organisms. 35
2.3 Midsagittal representation of the human brain showing the approximate location of the neuroanatomical structures that make up the human evaluative system. 37
2.4 A schematic overview of the human evaluative system that shows how computational mechanisms map onto structures in the mesocorticolimbic reward circuitry. 42
2.5 Model of computational mechanisms known to be involved in human sensory liking evaluations, based on the empirical evidence reviewed in the chapter.
3.1 The Pleasure Cycle.
4.1 Illustration of the human brain with the bilateral insula highlighted in dark orange. 72
5.1 Interoceptive processes and their influence on stimulus processing.
5.2 Active sensing of stimuli in interoception.
6.1 Methodological “sources of variation.”
6.2 Amount of “shared taste” across obser vers varies by visual aesthetic domain.
6.3 The visual system and aesthetic appreciation.
6.4 Prefrontal and subcortical structures implicated in visual aesthetic appeal. 116
6.5 The default-mode network (DMN) is a network of highly interconnected brain regions that are thought to support self-referential and inwardly directed thought and are typically suppressed by tasks that require external focus. 120
8.1 Illustration of two differing models of odour valence perception. 151
8.2 Neuroanatomy of the human olf actory regions. 153
9.1 The representation of motion in photography, paintings, and sculpture. 173
9.2 Typical motion cues used in visual art. 175
9.3 Brain networks implicated by previous research in movement appreciation include the perceptual/visual areas, sensorimotor network, reward network, and regions of the default-mode network.
10.1 The Aesthetic Triad.
184
11.1 Examples of sexually selected traits. 219
11.2 The túngara frog has an unusual larynx characterized by a large fibrous mass (FM) that protrudes from the vocal cords (VC). 225
11.3 A power spectr um of human speech normalized to the frequency with the greatest amplitude, and consonance rankings of musical dyads as a function of the normalized spectrum of speech sounds.
12.1 Frequency of books mentioning aesthetic sensitivity (blue), esthetic sensitivity (red), aesthetic sensitiveness (green), and esthetic sensitiveness (orange) from 1800 to 2019.
13.1 Simplified representation, in the for m of a sequentially branching tree, of the evolutionary relations among the major groups of organisms mentioned in the text.
13.2 The figure shows a representation of how neurons evolved from individual choanoflagellates as they joined in colonies and became able to exchange the contents of vesicles in a regular fashion.
13.3 The photog raph shows an exemplar of the ctenophore species Mertensia ovum swimming in the dark.
13.4 Schematic representation of the central ner vous system of the vertebrate ancestor with differentiated diencephalon, mesencephalon, rhombencephalon, and nerve cord.
13.5 Representation of the telencephalon of an amphibian (salamander, top row), reptilian (turtle, middle row), and mammal (hedgehog, bottom row).
13.6 Phylogenetic tree showing the relations among major groups of mammals and illustrating the extension of primary and secondary visual, auditory, and somatosensory cortical areas.
13.7 Illustration of the evolutionar y relations among hominoids species, with macaque monkeys as outgroup, with a comparison of adult brain sizes.
13.8 Distributed association zones are disproportionately expanded in humans.
13.9 Differences between humans and macaques in cor tico-striatal resting-state functional connectivity of the left and right dorsal caudate.
231
241
259
261
262
263
266
269
272
14.1 Tinio’s (2013) Mirror model of art. 298
14.2 Leder et al.’s (2004) model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgements.
14.3 The Aesthetic Triad (Chatterjee & Vartanian, 2014).
17.1 The anatomy of a neuron.
17.2 Magnetic resonance imaging.
17.3 The proposed network relevant to the identification and interaction with the built environment is based on the reviewed studies.
18.1 Extension of the neurocognitive poetics model sketching the likely main neural correlates of subprocesses involved in implicit and explicit fiction processing.
19.1 Hierarchical processing memor y for narratives by Hasson et al.
21.1 The cognitive mechanisms identified in the literature and how they fit together.
25.1 A simplified schema illustrating the interplay of top-down and bottom-up processes involved in perception and evaluation. 462
25.2 Schematic over view of the development of models of aesthetic experiences. 465
26.1 Art, a prime example of appreciated stimuli, often breaks order or simplicity. 477
26.2 Two-tone or so-called Mooney images are created by blurring and thresholding greyscale photographs. 483
26.3 A photograph of a frog that has been used to create Figure 26.2. 484
26.4 A squiggly line that actually makes up the boundary of profiles of two different opposing faces. 491
29.1 Occurrence of cultural innovations in four regions of the world during the last 850 ky. 543
29.2 Frequency of cultural innovations in the last 850,000 years at the regional scale and (insert) at the global scale. 545
29.3 Schematic representation of the “top-down-also” view. 546
30.1 Two examples of Loring Hughes’ artistic work. 559
30.2 Four examples of Federico Fellini’s performances in line-bisection tasks, with characteristic personal cartoons. 560
30.3 William Utermohlen. Series of Self-Portraits. 562
30.4 Change in painting style observed after the star t of dopaminergic treatment in a patient with Parkinson’s disease. 564
30.5 Results of Bromberger and colleagues’ (2011) voxel lesion symptom analyses showing areas where damage was associated with significant deviations of art attribute judgments. 566
TABLE S
17.1 A brief overview of the main disadvantages and advantages of fMRI and EEG that the reader must consider when further reading through the different studies.
17.2 An overview of the positively involved brain regions as reported by the reviewed studies.
349
356
PREFACE
When we first dipped our feet into neuroaesthetics, in the early 2000s, it was a new area of inquiry on the fringes of neuroscience and psychology. The people doing the research were few and scattered about, and it wasn’t difficult to read all the relevant literature in a single semester. The picture today is very different: papers, chapters, and talks on neuroaesthetics can be found in major psychology and neuroscience journals, in handbooks, and in mainstream neuroscience conferences such as Human Brain Mapping or Society for Neuroscience. We now count our colleagues in the hundreds, and it has become difficult to keep up the pace with everything that is being published. In only 20 years, neuroaesthetics has become a true scientific field that is attracting a new generation of scientists.
This publication is the first handbook to provide a broad and comprehensive overview of neuroaesthetics. As editors, we have been confronted with the daunting task of deciding the best way to present the scientific accomplishments of a discipline that is still very much in its infancy. We decided that, rather than focusing on prominent theories or authors, it would be better to organize the book around a selection of the most important topics addressed by neuroaesthetics. We selected only topics that have generated a substantial body of experimental evidence. That we managed to assemble a list of 30 topics that warranted inclusion in the book shows the amount of progress neuroaesthetics has made in just two decades.
For historical reasons explained in Chapter 1, aesthetics refers to two different issues: the experience of art, or how and why artworks are created and appreciated, and hedonic valuation, or how and why objects are liked or disliked. Accordingly, neuroaesthetics has sought to identify the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning both the experience of art and hedonic valuation. But it is important to realize that, although in some cases art and aesthetic liking overlap, the two problems are not identical. Engaging with music, dance, or narrative storytelling involves the activation of many neural processes that are not related to aesthetic evaluations. In contrast, the human brain assesses the hedonic value of many sensory objects other than artworks. We have therefore chosen to divide the handbook into two parts that deal with each problem separately.
In the first part, on aesthetic liking, we have collected chapters that provide a solid introduction to what is known about the neurobiology of sensory liking. The first chapters in Part 1 present the general context for the study of neuroaesthetics and the general principles of sensory liking, reviewing findings that explain how liking and disliking occur as a function of perceptual computations occurring in different sensory modalities, as well as projections from cognitive and interoceptive systems. The next chapters present a detailed account of how the human brain uses this capacity for hedonic evaluation in different artforms:
music, visual art, dance, architecture, and so on. We have also included a chapter that discusses the ongoing effort to understand why aesthetic evaluations vary not only across the human population but also in the same individual as a consequence of experience and context. Finally, we have included two chapters in Part 1 that specifically review examples of sensory liking in other animals, both in the context of mate choice and in contexts that are perhaps less obviously adaptive. While comparative work remains limited, we are convinced that developing a common theory of hedonic evaluation that can explain how sensory liking and disliking work in different functional contexts and in different nervous systems will be the next frontier in “aesthetic” neuroscience.
Part 2, on art, provides a comprehensive overview of the existing research on the mechanisms underlying the experience of works of art. Each chapter presents what is known about the neural mechanisms involved in the perceptual, cognitive, and affective aspects of our engagement with music, visual art, dance, built environments, and literature. This part also includes chapters on the way art is experienced in social situations, such as museums or concerts, and how art experiences may serve to elicit physiological and emotional responses that can benefit health and well-being. Furthermore, we have included several chapters that discuss research showing that art experiences are profoundly shaped by contextual conditions, including knowledge, experience, and expectations. Finally, the last four chapters of the book survey work on different aspects of art production, including questions of why humans began creating art, what artistic creativity is, how the brains of musicians differ from non-musicians, and how art production can break down or change in patients with brain damage or neurodegenerative diseases.
Our overarching aim in editing the book has been to provide a first entry into the field of neuroaesthetics with introductions that are comprehensive, reliable, and succinctly written. We especially hope that the handbook will find use as a textbook in some of many academic courses that have started to appear over the last few years around the world. But we also hope the book will enjoy wider use. We both believe that neuroaesthetics has reached a point where there is a need for taking stock of what is empirically known about perennial questions such as whether aesthetic liking is driven by stimulus properties or modulated by contextual conditions. Furthermore, the continuing progress of neuroaesthetics requires a collective enterprise with a common framework. This includes finding common ground with respect to how key concepts are conceived and employed in experiments. We also hope that the handbook can make a modest contribution in helping neuroaesthetics take these next steps in its development.
It has not been easy putting together a volume with 30 contributions at a time when the lives of many people have been severely disrupted. We want to thank the contributors who, living through a global pandemic, persevered and wrote excellent chapters. We think the end result is much more than could have been expected under such circumstances and a true testament to the vitality of neuroaesthetics as a scientific discipline and to the motivation of the researchers that make it all happen.
Martin Skov
Copenhagen Business School & Copenhagen University Hospital Hvidovre, Copenhagen, Denmark
Marcos Nadal
University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Spain
January 2022
1
NEUROAESTHETICS AS A SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE
An intellectual history
Martin Skov
A Google Ngram search reveals that use of the word neuroaesthetics was almost non-existent before the year 2000. It first became part of academic discourse between 2000 and 2005 and was only widely adopted after 2010 (Figure 1.1A). A similar trend can be observed if one searches for publications indexed with the keyword “neuroaesthetics” in databases such as PubMed or Web of Science: Before 2000, few such publications exist, if any. They then start to appear in increasingly frequent numbers during the 2000s, and multiply year by year throughout the last decade (Figure 1.1B).
What do these numbers tell us about the history of neuroaesthetics? First, they tell us that there was no scientific enterprise that referred to itself as neuroaesthetics before 2000. The discipline that exists today under this name was born between 2000 and 2010. Second, they tell us that the first 20 years of neuroaesthetics can best be described as two historically different periods: an initial era of incubation, where neuroaesthetics was established as a viable idea (2000–2010), followed by a mature period much richer in scientific output (2010–2021).
The new scientific discipline of neuroaesthetics did not, however, appear out of thin air. As I will show in this chapter, it is possible to trace an effort to furnish aesthetics with a neuroscientific basis back to the 18th century. We must therefore ask: what changed around 2000? Why did a new discipline dedicated to the exploration of the neurobiological basis of aesthetic experience emerge, and what was “new” about it? The answer, I will suggest, is that neuroaesthetics arose as a concerted effort to transform what had previously been almost exclusively a speculative and theoretical endeavour into an actual experimental science. What set neuroaesthetics apart from earlier attempts to craft a neuroscientific basis for aesthetics was the development, in the 1980s and 1990s, of non-invasive neuroimaging methods that allowed for the exploration of neural activity associated with complex human thought. What was new about the neuroaesthetics that emerged in the 2000s was an ability to probe the human brain as it engaged in aesthetic experiences.
It is, however, important to note that this new scientific enterprise did not simply break with the historical tradition that preceded it. Rather, the way the new field of neuroaesthetics conceived of its own mission and the problems it wanted to pursue was highly influenced by ideas that had developed much earlier, starting with the conceptual invention of the category of aesthetics in the 18th and 19th centuries. In my view, this prehistory remains both unknown and unexplored. I will therefore try to show how, over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, notions of beauty and taste were fused with that of fine art to form the idea
1.1A Data from a search of Google Ngrams’s corpus of publications in English.
Figure 1.1B Data from Pubmed showing the number of publications indexed as “neuroaesthetics” in the period between 1965 and 2020.
that humans have distinctive experiences called aesthetic experiences and why this idea prompted a quest to understand the psychological and physiological nature of these experiences that endures to this day. In some detail I trace how generations of researchers tried to apply emerging insights into the neurobiology of the human brain to (speculative) explanations of how aesthetic experience arises. My aim is to give the reader an
Figure
idea of how these theories served as a direct inspiration for the establishment of neuroaesthetics, influencing both theoretical models and experimental work in the early years of the new discipline’s existence.
I should perhaps stress that this chapter should not be thought of as a traditional introduction to neuroaesthetics. Its purpose is not to review findings or provide a representative overview of the work conducted over the last 20 years; the rest of the book covers that material. Instead, it is meant to be a historical study of the intellectual ideas and theories that prefaced neuroaesthetics. I hope it will give the reader an idea of where the impetus to study the neurobiological basis of aesthetics came from and why the scientific enterprise of neuroaesthetics took the form it did, especially in its first incarnation.
Inventing the concept of aesthetics
Neuroaesthetics calls for a neuroscientific study of aesthetics, but what does this mean? Most introductions to neuroaesthetics take “aesthetics” to refer to the study of mental states that are associated with the experience of art or evaluating sensory objects for their aesthetic value. For example, Chatterjee (2011) defines aesthetics as a term “used broadly to encompass the perception, production, and response to art, as well as interactions with objects and scenes that evoke an intense feeling, often of pleasure” (p. 53). Upon this definition, neuroaesthetics can be viewed as a branch of cognitive neuroscience “focused on understanding the biological bases of aesthetic experiences” (Chatterjee & Vartanian, 2016, p. 172). Aesthetic experiences, more specifically, “are an emergent property of the interaction of the sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and knowledge-meaning neural systems” (Chatterjee & Vartanian, 2016, p. 178).
It is worth pondering where this idea comes from. Why do we believe that the human brain experiences a special category of mental states called aesthetic experiences that are related to the engagement with works of art and evaluative appraisals? There are many forms of behaviour and experience that seem specific to Homo sapiens that are not singled out for similar psychological and neuroscientific scrutiny. For instance, sport is an activity that is every bit as particular to human behaviour and experience as art and aesthetic appraisals, yet there is no existing field of neurosports. Most neuroscientists simply consider the experience of a football game the emergent property of neural systems that are common to any other experience that involves perception, emotion, cognition, and so on.
Aesthetics is treated differently. Not only are aesthetic experiences considered mental traits that are critical to an understanding of the human mind, but they have been the subject of scientific inquiry for more than 150 years (Nadal & Ureña, 2022). While there is no concept in psychology and neuroscience of, say, specialized sports emotions, most psychologists and neuroscientists are convinced that distinctive aesthetic emotions exist (Menninghaus et al., 2019; Skov & Nadal, 2020b). Indeed, the ability to entertain aesthetic experiences has been routinely used in fields such as palaeontology or ethology to distinguish the psychology of Homo sapiens from that of other species, suggesting that modern humans have evolved a dedicated mental “faculty” for generating aesthetic experiences (Ayala, 2017; Dobzhansky, 1962; Klein, 2002; see also Chapter 13). What motivates this conviction? Since many of the assumptions associated with the idea of specialized aesthetic experiences are unsupported by empirical knowledge (Skov & Nadal, 2020a, 2020b), we can surmise that it does not stem from psycholog ical or neuroscientific findings. For example, while there is ample evidence that aesthetic evaluations rely causally on executive functions such as working memory (e.g., Cattaneo et al., 2014; Che et al., 2021; Sherman et al., 2015; see also Chapter 2), no theory of neuroaesthetics has developed a concept of “aesthetic working memory” akin to that of aesthetic emotions. Instead, the conception of aesthetics that continues to inform contemporary psychology and neuroscience was almost entirely invented by philosophers working before modern psychology and neuroscience. It is this complex of ideas, developed over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, that not only accounts for the continued belief in aesthetic experiences but also, by and large, determines how we still conceive of these today (i.e., that aesthetic experiences entail aesthetic emotional states but not aesthetic working memory states).
It goes beyond this chapter to trace all the historical roots of the ideas that constitute the conception of aesthetics (see, e.g., Dickie, 1996; Kivy, 2003; Shiner, 2001). However, several events are critical to the understanding of why Western philosophy became convinced that engagements with art and evaluative appraisals elicit specialized aesthetic experiences and why explaining these as a function of neurobiological mechanisms became an enduring preoccupation.
First, in the 16th century, Italian philosophers began using the word taste to describe the mental power governing judgments of liking and disliking (Tonelli, 2003). Before, classical and medieval philosophers had considered judgments of beauty as responses to specific objective properties (Dieckmann, 1974; Tatarkiewicz, 1972). This view implied that objects could either be beautiful or not and that judgments of beauty therefore had to be universal. Greek philosophers did not develop anything like a psychological explanation of how humans detect the beauty of objects, but as a general principle, they believed that mental judgments involved the application, by a faculty of reason, of concepts to sense impressions. Under this assumption, beauty judgments could be thought of as mental acts involving the recognition that the perceived properties of an object adhered to the principle of beauty (specifically that they were organized in a particularly harmonious and orderly fashion; Tatarkiewicz, 1972). Greek philosophers agreed that successful beauty judgments were accompanied by feelings of pleasure (Dieckmann, 1974).
An enduring problem for the classical conception of beauty was the fact that people often did not agree on whether an object was beautiful. This observation cast doubt on the idea that beauty is an inherent quality of sensory objects which the human mind recognizes and responds to. To many Renaissance philosophers, it seemed more reasonable to assume that beauty is an evaluative reaction to sensory impressions that varies from person to person. They introduced the concept of taste to capture this change in understanding of how beauty judgments worked: from an objectivist relation between object and evaluative power to a subjectivist conception. Rather than universal judgments, the philosophers of taste proposed that the evaluative power of the human mind produced different tastes that varied from one mind to another (Tonelli, 2003).
The concept of taste had two significant consequences for the development of a notion of aesthetic experiences. Both of these consequences sprung from the subjectivist implication of the concept of taste: that liking and disliking are based on individual evaluations, not universal judgments. Accepting this theory invariably raised the problem of a “standard” of taste. If beauty is a creation of subjective taste, how can we know which tastes are “good” or “bad”? During the 17th and 18th centuries, European intellectuals became fascinated by this question. Every aspect of social life was subjected to debates over what constituted good and bad taste, with “good” manners, “eloquent” speech, “haute” cuisine, and so on, being codified in normative treatises that the nobility and emerging bourgeoisie devoured to fit in with “good” society (Shiner, 2001; Smith, 1997). Deciding what counted as good taste was seen as crucial to Bildung—the edification both of the person and the nation (Shiner, 2001; Smith, 1997): only objects and behaviours determined to embody good taste were considered “good” for you.
The first consequence of this development was the creation of a category of “Fine Arts” (Kristeller, 1951, 1952). As the philosopher Paul Oskar Kristeller (1951) has shown, before the 18th century, there was no Western concept of art that comprised only “the five major arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry” (p. 497), “all by themselves, clearly separated by common characteristics from the crafts, the sciences and other human activities” (p. 498). When the Greeks had spoken of techné and Latin philosophers of ars, they meant “all kinds of human activities which we would call crafts or sciences . . . something that can be taught and learned” (Kristeller, 1951, p. 498). Neither was art specifically associated with beauty or other forms of evaluative judgments. Only in the late 17th century did art emerge as a “modern system” (Kristeller, 1951, 1952) that invested certain objects with a value and prestige they had hitherto not been assumed to possess and set them apart from nonart objects. This development was very much interwoven with the contemporaneous societal quest for standards of “good” taste: The new concept of fine art posited
The other consequence was a gradual reckoning with the psychological causes of taste. If beauty and other judgments of taste were subjective in nature, then the evaluative power they were the result of must operate by some discernible principle. The human mind had to contain some form of mechanism that determined the taste response to a given sensory input. In parallel to the invention, around 1700, of fine art as a sui generis category, philosophical attempts to provide a foundation for taste resulted in a psychological invention as well: the idea that taste is the result of its own “faculty” or “sense.” The Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1725/1973) was the first to argue the human mind comprises an “inner sense” specialized for beauty judgments. It is this sense of beauty, he argued, that gives rise to our individual taste experiences by acting upon the impressions we receive from the outer senses. Furthermore, Hutcheson distinguished the sense of beauty from a moral sense, introducing the notion—later to be much further developed—that beauty judgments only apply to certain sense impressions (Costelloe, 2018; Dickie, 1996; Kivy, 2003). His compatriot David Hume soon adopted Hutcheson’s idea that taste responses are grounded in a specialized faculty and extended Hutcheson’s account to the question of a standard of taste (Hume, 1757/1985). While taste is a subjective response to sense impressions, some tastes are better than others. How can this be possible? Because, Hume argued, the faculty of taste can be “improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice” (1757/1985, p. 241). In other words, people can acquire “good” and “bad” taste by means of experience and learning, presumably through some sort of reshaping of the beauty sense.
Figure 1.2 A timeline of the development of aesthetics as a conceptual category. Between 1500 and 1700, European philosophers invented two new concepts: taste and fine art. When Baumgarten introduced the word aesthetics into the literature in 1735, it was adopted as the general name for the study of judgments of taste, especially through the influence of the work of Kant. In the 19th century, spearheaded by Hegel, aesthetic judgments, especially beauty, came to be seen as primarily connected to an engagement with fine art objects. This novel interpretation created the idea that the human mind enjoys specialized aesthetic experiences that are elicited by fine art objects.
Now, none of these intellectual events happened under the banner of “aesthetics.” That word did not exist until 1735, when it was invented by a German philosopher, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1735/1951; see Figure 1.2). Indeed, as originally conceived by Baumgarten, aesthetics did not even refer specifically to existing questions of taste, beauty, or art. Rather, Baumgarten (1735/1951) had argued that philosophy needed a general study of those sensory judgments that are a not accounted for by logic; that is to say, all forms of judgments that involved “lower-level epistemology” (Allesch, 2018). Aesthetics was the name of this proposed study. It only became applied to the debates regarding the nature of taste discussed previously that, in contrast to “mechanical arts” (Kristeller, 1952, p. 21) and other human endeavours, objects that qualified as art were thought to conjure the especially refined and elevated kind of pleasure that characterized “good” taste.
several decades later (Reiss, 1994) and primarily through the influence of Kant’s third critique, Critique of Judgment (Kant, 1790/2001). Kant embraced Baumgarten’s nomenclature and used the term aesthetic judgment to distinguish judgments of taste from judgments of knowledge and moral judgments (the topics of his two other critiques). Furthermore, Kant (1790/2001) introduced a set of criteria for defining different kinds of judgments of taste, distinguishing between, amongst others, judgments of beauty, judgments of the sublime, and judgments of the agreeable. Most famously, he argued that pure judgments of beauty would be disinterested, universal, exhibit “purposiveness without an end,” and be necessary (Kant, 1790/2001).
The influence of Kant was so pronounced that, by the beginning of the 19th century, aesthetics had taken over as the de facto name of philosophical inquiries into taste. At first this seemed to be nothing more than a rebranding of the ideas developed in the preceding decades. Instead of speaking of a sense of beauty, the norm became to speak of an aesthetic sense as the mechanism of evaluative taste. However, it soon was clear that under the name of aesthetic evaluations, the phenomenon of taste became invested with a more specific and restricted meaning. Evaluations rooted in the aesthetic sense were considered to involve specific mental states, first and foremost feelings of pleasure or pain. But aesthetic evaluations also seem to involve distinct perceptual and cognitive states (concepts that philosophers at the time would not have used). For example, Kant insisted that aesthetic judgments were characterized not only by evoking states of subjective feelings but also by aspiring to be correct. They were subjective but also “universally valid” (Stolnitz, 1961). Similarly, Joshua Reynolds (1798) claimed that aesthetic evaluations were shaped by learning and experience. They depend on “our skill in selecting, and our care in digesting, methodizing, and comparing our observations” (pp. 212–13). The idea took hold that aesthetic evaluations apply a special form of contemplation to the object being evaluated, a unique type of “gaze” characterized by a particular kind of attention and “sentiment.”
At first, this emerging concept of aesthetic appreciation as a distinct kind of taste evaluation, produced by a special aesthetic sense, did not make any claims about being applicable only to certain aesthetic objects. However, this changed as the 19th century unfolded. In 1820, the German philosopher Hegel gave a series of lectures later collected in a book called Philosophy of Fine Art (1920). In the course of these lectures, he redefined the concept of aesthetics to mean the study of “schöne Künste”: Art, he claimed, is the principal means for “revealing” beauty (I, p. 125) because of its unique ability to embody “the Sensous Semblance [das sinnliche Scheinen] of the Idea” (I, p. 154). Hegel’s argument merged the idea of “aesthetic taste” with the new system of “Fine Arts.” In consequence, aesthetic experiences—a novel concept—came to be seen as a special class of experiences that human can have that involved the application of aesthetic appreciation to a limited set of Fine Art objects (Carroll, 2008; Shiner, 2001). By the end of the 19th century, aesthetics had ceased to be understood as a (broad) study of taste and was now exclusively known as the study of art and the aesthetic experiences art objects were believed to afford ( Kranjec & Skov, 2021; Figure 1.3).
Collectively, the events recounted here forged the concept of aesthetics we still employ. The assumptions and theories with which we continue to invest aesthetic concepts were inherited from the philosophic ideas described previously. This is especially true of the idea that the human mind is equipped with a distinct aesthetic sense, a mechanism for producing specific aesthetic evaluations of sensory objects. Even among contemporary neuroaesthetics researchers, it is common to see the notion of aesthetic evaluation characterized as a specific form of appreciative contemplation that is principally directed at fine art objects. Yet this idea was invented and formulated by philosophers who lived before the study of the human mind evolved into an empirical and experimental science (Reed, 1997). The assumptions underlying this idea continue to inform work in psychology and neuroscience on aesthetics. Indeed, this idea has guided empirical research unceasingly since experimental psychology and neuroscience first became possible: We focus our investigations on certain properties (e.g., aesthetic emotions) and disregard others (e.g., aesthetic working memory),
Epoch 1800–18501851–19001901–19501951–2000
RANK
1 culture sense experienceexperience
2 feeling judgment value(s) value(s)
3 education value sense appreciation
4 character pleasure theory theory
5 criticism point pleasure pleasure
6 principles culture appreciationquality(ities)
7 value taste enjoymentsense
8 pleasure feeling(s) judgment object
9 judgment nature emotion
10 part
Figure 1.3 Data from a bibliometric analysis of the development in the way the word “aesthetic” was used together with other conceptual terms. The topmost panel shows the correlation of the frequency of “aesthetic” with questions of art and beauty over the period between 1800 and 2000, demonstrating that the notion of aesthetics went from being associated with notion of beauty to becoming increasingly associated with the notion of art. The lower panel shows the top-ranked nouns modified by “aesthetic” in the same period. This data demonstrates how aesthetics went from being used to describe concepts related to taste (“aesthetic feeling,” “aesthetic character”) to primarily describe a general experience (“aesthetic experience”). Figure adapted from Kranjec and Skov (2021).
because we still—explicitly or tacitly—accept the basic ideas of aesthetics set out in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries.1
A neuroscience of aesthetics before neuroaesthetics
While the concept of aesthetics was motivated by pre-scientific ideas, it evidently made claims about human psychology and physiology. For example, every philosopher involved in the invention of aesthetics as a concept agreed that judgments of beauty involved the generation of pleasure ( Judgments of ugliness were thought to involve the generation of pain.) As we have seen, the central new intellectual invention inspiring theories of aesthetics was the claim that the human mind is equipped with a mechanism for producing aesthetic evaluations—an aesthetic sense. This claim implied that such an evaluative mechanism operated
according to specific principles—that the aesthetic sense was characterized by what we today would call a computational function with a physiological implementation. Even though 18th- and 19th-century philosophers did not speak in such modern terms, they understood that there had to be “laws” of some sort that determined if a sensory input was experienced as liked or disliked and that the aesthetic sense, if it existed, had to occupy a specific place within the architecture of the human mind (linking, for example, sensation to emotions). In consequence, they tried to explain how the aesthetic sense worked.
Naturally, these explanations were wholly uninformed by modern ideas about human brain structure and function. They were uninformed by modern knowledge of anatomy and molecular biology. They obviously were all speculative, based on analytic arguments rather than empirical findings. When, for instance, Hutcheson (1725/1973) argued that the “power of receiving” (p. 34) the idea of beauty consists of the mind forming “sensible ideas” (p. 36) that are characterized by “uniformity amidst Variety” (p. 40), he clearly did not advance a psychological theory that conforms to any contemporary models of human perception or cognition, nor did he bother to test if people do in fact experience beauty as a cause of the “uniformity amidst variety” principle his theory advanced. Still, it should be acknowledged, I think, that Hutcheson (1725/1973) was trying to explain how the evaluative mechanism—the beauty sense—he claims to exist functions. He understood that there is a psychological mystery at the heart of the new mental faculty he had proposed, and he realized that if we want to understand taste as a subjective response to sensory stimuli, we need to flesh out the computational rules according to which these evaluations operate. The same can be said of Hume, Baumgarten, Kant, or any of the other 18th- and 19th-century philosophers who helped found the concept of aesthetics.
In this sense, we can talk of a psychology of aesthetics avant la lettre. Indeed, from the very start, theories of aesthetic evaluation took their departure from existing models of the human mind. Thus, Hutcheson’s theory, to stick to this example, owed its notion of an “inner sense,” dedicated to beauty evaluations, almost completely to Locke’s theory of perception (Dickie, 1996; Kivy, 2003), which had radically upended the classical view of how sensations interface with reason (Reed, 1997). It has been argued that before Fechner, direct calls for a “psychological aesthetics” were limited to a few, largely ignored publications such as Johann Heinrich Zschokke’s 1793 book Ideen zur psychologischen Aesthetik (e.g., Allesch, 2018). This argument, however, misrepresents the degree to which all theories of aesthetic evaluation were conditioned by the existing (natural philosophical) understanding of human psychology.2 Of course, only with the advent of a scientific psychology in the 19th century (Reed, 1997) did theories of aesthetics begin to incorporate knowledge of psychological functions and processes that had their origin in empirical studies of the human mind (Allesch, 1987, 2018; Nadal & Ureña, 2022).
Similarly, the development of aesthetic experience as a category gave rise to a neuroscience of aesthetics avant la lettre, first in the form of speculation about the physiological properties of the aesthetic sense and later in the form of what Chatterjee and Vartanian (2014) have dubbed a descriptive neuroaesthetics. The term descriptive neuroaesthetics, in Chatterjee and Vartanian’s definition, encompasses all attempts to account for aesthetic phenomena that make use of facts about the brain derived from mainstream neuroscience research. In contrast, Chatterjee and Vartanian (2014) label experiments that specifically examine neurobiological processes thought to play a causal role in the generation of aesthetic experiences experimental neuroaesthetics. If we accept this terminology, I think it is appropriate to call the numerous papers and books published before 2000 that tried to incorporate findings produced by the nascent field of experimental neuroscience into theories of aesthetics examples of descriptive neuroaesthetics. These writings only rarely relied on actual examples of experimental neuroaesthetics, but they did attempt to connect the hypothesized functions of aesthetic experience to revealed functions of the brain.
To keep my discussion of this literature manageable, I will here only touch upon a few cases that illustrate this point. Common to all of them is the fact that they demonstrate how efforts to develop a neuroscience of aesthetics begin with a received conception of what aesthetics is. These publications all assumed the existence
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is in keeping with himself. Everything is perfect. Surely your Royal Highness should visit it.”
This suggestion found favor in the mind of the king and wakened his desire to see the ship. Accordingly he got into a boat, which was rowed by seven pairs of oarsmen, and, together with the queen, started for the vessel. [217]
When the girl-captain saw them coming, she ordered the crew to dress all in yellow, and, as the royal party reached the ship’s ladder, it was met with great honor and conducted to the captain’s stateroom.
Coffee was served, and the captain conversed so agreeably with the king that he was lost in admiration.
Finally, after remaining as long as court etiquette would allow, they returned to the palace, where the report of the visit was related to the prince, with such admiring exclamations that desire seized him to view this wonder with the rest. He hastened to the wharf, stepped into a small boat, and was rowed directly to the ship.
When the princess-captain saw him coming she ordered her crew to dress themselves all in green; which they did, and received their visitor with great honor. They conducted him to the captain’s stateroom, where he began conversing with the unknown princess.
In spite of his delicate and skillful questioning she did not betray herself; and the prince felt the same warmth at his heart which had affected him at sight of the maiden in the window of the crystal kiosk. He remained until evening before he could tear himself away. [218]
Let us return to the princess.
Word was sent to the director of the port, and arrangements were made to anchor her ship within the inner harbor. After that, the princess, with her attendants and belongings, went ashore and hired the finest house that could be found. It was situated directly in front of the king’s palace. Here she took up her abode.
Let us return to the prince.
The next day, upon going to the place where he first had seen the ship, upon the day before, he could find no trace of it, and beat his head upon the ground in disappointment.
Then he went to his tutor to learn if anything were known about the matter. The tutor’s answer was one which gladdened the young man’s heart. He returned to the palace and sat down at a window, to look at the house across the way, if, haply, he might catch sight of the one who had so entranced him.
Presently the princess appeared at her window; when his mind fell into a pitiable state. “A young woman!” he said to himself. “Who can she be? She is so like him as to be some relative of the young captain who so enchanted me. And both are like that wonderful vision of two years ago.”
As he continued to look at her, standing there [219]with the curls floating down upon either side of her face, he felt that it would be impossible to find her like in the world.
When the princess discovered the prince looking at her, she drew back hastily and the window was closed. But the poor young man— whose yielding to companions had caused his undoing before—had fallen more deeply in love this time. He determined not to be thwarted, and went to all sides of the house, grieving miserably at his
inability to find her again. Finally, when night came on, he withdrew into his own room, where he became lost in meditation.
At the dawn of morning he hastened out to the kiosk, to look again at the other house; but, though he waited long, he was filled with grief to see that the windows continued shut. Unable to bear the suspense longer, he went to his mother, kissed her hand, and said:
“O, my queen mother! You have long wished me to marry; but I have been unwilling. Now, in the house across the way, in the family of this young captain, there is one with whom I am deeply in love. Take her this jewel box, I pray. Give it into her hands and beg that I may see her again. If this be not brought to pass, life will become of no worth to me.” [220]
Very much against her will, but because she was a fond mother, the queen, accompanied by a minister of state, sought admittance at the house of the strangers and was admitted, with due reverence, by the princess herself, to whom the jewel box was presented.
The unknown princess accepted it courteously, then summoned the maidens from the kitchen and, without showing the slightest interest in the contents, gave it to them.
The queen could hardly smother her indignation and surprise, as she announced: “The prince, my dear young lady, sends you his very special greeting and is very desirous of meeting you. What answer shall be returned to His Royal Highness?”
The princess seemed lost in such deep thought as to be unconscious of any presence; and did not recover herself, although the queen addressed her twice.
After sitting some time the royal visitors returned to the palace, where the queen said to the prince, in great anger: “My son, I gave the box of jewels to the ridiculous young person in question; and, while she was courteous in receiving it from me, it was given at once to her kitchen servants. After that, no matter how I addressed her, there was no answer vouchsafed. She seemed unconscious, absolutely, [221]of my presence. I was obliged to return without an answer for you. My son, you are no longer a child. Henceforth you must attend to your own heart troubles.”
The prince retired to his own room and grieved all that day. The next morning he approached his mother again and, after kissing her hand three times, said: “O, my most revered queen mother! You hold my fate in your hands. You are a woman. Can you not find some way to the heart of this other woman for me?”
It was her only son who pleaded before the queen; and she, loving him greatly, turned the matter over in her mind, until thoughts of a very valuable string of pearls—which were her own private property —came to her.
“I will give her the pearls,” she said to the prince. “We will see what she will do with them.”
The grateful young man kissed both of his mother’s hands; after which she laid the pearls out beautifully in their casket, called her minister of state, and again went to the house across the way.
As upon the previous occasion, she was received with grave courtesy by the young princess; to whom she delivered the pearls, along with a more pressing message from the prince.
The young woman received the casket most graciously, [222]opened it, turned to her pet parrot—which hung in a cage near at hand—held
before it the box in which the beautiful pearls were lying, and waited, silently, while the bird ate every one of them; grinding each, with a crackling sound, in his bill and swallowing it as if priceless pearls made his regular morning repast.
In open-mouthed astonishment the queen looked on; then, without having the ability to utter a word, she arose, swept from the room, and, with her minister of state, returned to the palace, from which the prince came running to meet her, saying:
“Ai, mother, most honored and beloved! Hasten! Tell me what thou hast to tell this time!”
“Ai, my son! Conquer this foolish madness, or no one is wise enough to foretell what will become of us. When I gave the matchless pearls —my most precious possession—into the hands of this mad creature, she received them courteously, but immediately fed them— as if they had been so many kernels of wheat—to her parrot, who swung in a cage near at hand. I could not speak for rage!”
But the prince cared for the maiden. Pearls were of no account to one in his frame of mind. “Calm yourself, mother dear and honored!” he said. “It was but an evidence of girlish waywardness. It proves how unworldly is this maiden. Do [223]not be offended, I beseech you! Remember! I am your son!”
All that night he lay, or walked the room, sleepless, and when morning came went to the queen in a most humble and beseeching manner. “Reverend and, indeed, beloved mother! I have here a most holy book. If you will deign to comfort my heart by taking this to the maiden, I trust that its sacredness will insure more reasonable action from her.”
Truth to say, the womanish curiosity of the queen was aroused. Without at all suspecting it of herself, she had become interested in this very surprising young person, and, consequently, persuaded herself to set off again, with her minister of state, to the house of their neighbor across the way.
At this visit the young princess, herself, came down the stairs to greet and escort the royal visitor into her drawing room. This surprised and gratified the queen, who, straightway, put her hand into her bosom and drew forth the Holy Book. It was received with reverence, kissed three times, and laid carefully away.
At this the queen was emboldened to press the suit of her son. “O, my dear young maiden!” she said, “since seeing you, my son, the prince, neither sleeps by night nor rests by day, for thinking upon [224]you. If he continues to be affected in this way, his days are numbered. Whatever happens, his fate rests with you. Will you kindly show your face to him once more and permit a little joy to come into his soul?”
When she had spoken thus the one addressed answered: “For no ordinary matter will I permit myself to be looked upon by the prince.”
“Ai, my child!” urged the queen, “order whatever pleases you. If it be possible, it shall be accomplished.”
“Verily,” was the reply, after long and slow thought, “let the prince have a golden bridge builded, with roses planted upon either side. Let him provide a seat at the farther end, in which, if he await me, I will come to him there.”
“Very well, my daughter, I will report your decision,” answered the queen. Then she returned, and, upon meeting her son, said to him:
“Of a truth, the sphinx has broken silence. But her demands are most extraordinary. If you would see her, you are to build a golden bridge, plant roses upon either side, prepare a seat for yourself at the farther end, from which, if you will await her there, she will permit you to gaze upon her. Now it is for you to say, my son, whether this extravagant request of one who came to our shores in a ship [225]incrusted with diamonds shall be granted. There’s no divining her next demand.”
But the prince was blinded by love and saw nothing impossible which would bring the object of his affection nearer. He caused the bridge to be builded—as she had desired—the borders of roses planted, and a seat prepared at the farther end. Then, after sending respectful assurance that all was according to her requirement, he hastened to the place of waiting.
Thereupon the princess caused herself to be arrayed beautifully and, accompanied by her maidens, went to the bridge. But, in some way, as she was crossing it, a branch from one of the rosebushes was blown out by the wind and pricked her in the face. Upon that she complained of being hurt, turned, and went back to her home.
Now, the prince had been waiting, in great eagerness, to see her, and was heartstricken when she turned back. Returning to his mother, he exclaimed:
“Everything was done according to her command; but, alas! she went away before I could fix my eyes upon her face. I need not put into words that which my mother can read upon my heart.”
Thereupon the queen became indignant and [226]hastened, of her own will, to the house of their neighbor, where, after she had been greeted, she asked why, with one half of the agreement fulfilled, a
prince should be made to wait in vain for a simple glance at a maiden’s face.
“Ai, queen mother! I cannot go where thorns are placed to prevent my passing. I release all claim to the bridge as well as to the prince. Henceforth he need not vex his soul concerning me.”
“Ai, my girl!” exclaimed the distressed queen, “why will you put us so to shame? There must be some reason for these ruses. Be gracious! Unburden yourself to me.”
Then came this answer: “Verily, queen mother, since you seem to believe the matter unintentional, I will speak the truth with you. Make a golden bridge. Upon one side of it place golden and upon the other silver candlesticks. Then let the prince die and be buried in a tomb at one end of the bridge. Afterward I will stand beside his head and his eyes may fix themselves upon me.”
Then the queen arose and hastened away in great anger.
“My son,” cried she, “the maiden, because of whom we are so put about, went home because a thorn pricked her cheek!”
“Alas, that it should have hurt her sweet face!” [227]sighed the prince. Then, arousing himself, “But what are we to do now?” he asked.
“The final answer of this young vixen is this, my son—ah, woe is me that the diamond ship visited our shores!—you are to build a golden bridge, as before, and place golden and silver candlesticks upon either side.”
“That is not difficult,” interrupted the prince.
“Wait! After that—what think you? My son, you, the prince, are to die and lie in a tomb at one end of the bridge; after which she will deign
to come and stand at your head! O, my son! my son! Cease this madness! Let me prevail upon you.”
But the prince became jubilant. He kissed both of his mother’s hands three times, crying: “So she will come and stand beside me! Have patience, my honored mother! All will be well. I will pretend that grief for her has broken my heart unto death. For her coming one can wait —even in a tomb!”
“Verily,” answered the queen, “you are the prince. You will have your way. We shall see what will result from all this.”
The next day gold and silver candlesticks replaced the rosebushes along the bridge’s sides. A tomb was built, and the prince, arrayed as for burial, was borne upon a litter and laid therein. [228]
Let us return to the princess.
That night she asked permission from the director of the port, who granted it, that her ship be taken from its moorings in the harbor. All that had been carried from it into the house was returned thereto. Then, with her attendants, she went upon board and sailed near to the tomb in which the prince was lying. The ship ceased plying for a little, and, when all was still, the princess stood at the bow and called out:
“Ai, my prince! Here is the ship, and yonder is Stamboul!”
Then all sail was hoisted, and the ship sped away.
The prince, who was listening for a light footfall, heard the words of the princess-captain. He arose hastily and stood up, in his burial clothes, to see the ship sailing away. When he felt assured that it was making off, he sank down in deep despair.
Arousing himself at last, he was borne to his mother; and when she began to pour forth her indignation he prevented her, saying: “Alas! alas! Now am I enlightened! The fault is my own. I have been loving the same maiden all of the time. You have known, my mother, how I was induced to leave the weeping princess in the crystal kiosk? This is that one, come to avenge herself. Because of my former love, this latter has been intensified. [229]Now do I understand why it has so swept away my reason.”
The enlightened prince went to his father, kissed his hand, and asked: “O, king! my most honored father, once more wilt thou grant permission that I go abroad?”
“Most willingly, my son. Only, I pray thee, have a care for thy most precious life! Go, and may happiness attend thee!”
Then the young man returned to the queen and said: “The way has been made plain before me, O, my honored mother! It removes me from the favor of thy presence for a little. Give me thy blessing, I pray!”
The queen kissed both of his eyes, gave him her blessing, and he went, at once, to set sail upon a ship that belonged to the fleet of his father, the king. It is needless to state that its course was directed toward the crystal kiosk. Arriving there, he dressed himself in princely apparel, alighted, and went directly to the radiant dwelling of the maiden.
Now, the princess had seen the approach of his ship, and, when it drew near, she recognized the prince. With her maidens she met him at the outer door of the kiosk and escorted him up the stairs.
When they had entered, he stood before her and [230]asked: “Ai, adored princess! was it not grievous of thee to make me do all those
useless things?”
“Ai, my prince,” answered she, “was it not grievous in thee to come in thy ship, to make me love thee, and then to sail away with those cruel words? How does that matter stand before Allah? Was it just?”
“O, my beloved one! guilty, indeed, is he who seeks thee. But I have suffered a hundredfold for all my fault toward thee. Is thy heart stone? Canst thou not forgive? See, I am kneeling before thee!”
Then they embraced each other and were very happy.
Afterward the princess led her lover to the king, her father, and related all that had passed. When the king had conversed with the prince and found him to be just, honorable, and very greatly in love with his daughter, his heart became glad. He thanked Allah that all had turned out so happily.
The next day they were married, and the wedding was celebrated during forty days and forty nights. Afterward the young couple spent one half of each year at Yemen and the other half at Stamboul, to the great delight of both kings. Thus two kingdoms were united and all became peaceful. Salaam!
The End
C
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Title: Told in the gardens of Araby
Author: Izora Cecilia Chandler (–1906) Info https://viaf org/viaf/311835681/
Author: Mary Williams Montgomery (1874–) Info https://viaf.org/viaf/541151246516744131118/
File generation date: 2024-03-23 21:11:38 UTC
Language: English Original [1905]
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