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The Biosemiotic Fundamentals of Aesthetics: Beauty is the Perfect Semiotic Fitting

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[...] after Baumgarten, semiotics was everywhere.

Frauke Berndt (2020: 49).

Esthetics, therefore, although I have terribly neglected it, appears to be possibly the first indispensable propedeutic to logic, and the logic of esthetics to be a distinct part of the science of logic that ought not to be omitted.

Charles Peirce (1902, CP 2.199).

[...] in an ecological age [...] beauty is always a little bit weird.

Timothy Morton (2016: 124).

Abstract

We propose a model which argues that aesthetics is based on biosemiotic processes and introduces the non-anthropomorphic aesthetics. In parallel with habit-taking, which is responsible for generating semiotic regularities, there is another process, the semiotic fitting, which is responsible for generating aesthetic relations. Habit by itself is not good or bad, it is good or bad because of semiotic fitting. Defining the beautiful as the perfect semiotic fitting corresponds to the common conceptualisation of the aesthetic as well as extends it over all umwelten. Perfection is not omnipotence, it only means the omnirelational semiotic fitting in the umwelt, or harmony with context. The process that presents something to be perceived as beautiful is of the same kind as the semiotic process that builds something to become beautiful. The argument is based on the observation that learning has a tendency towards perfection, until it is grounded (non-symbolically – based on imprinting, conditioning, or imitation). Semiosis is usually biased towards semiotic fitting, which stepwise leads towards perfection, and thus towards beauty. Such a general semiotic model implies that beauty is species-specific; that it is not limited to the sphere of emotions; that the reduction of the evolution of aesthetic features to sexual selection is false; and that humans should learn the aesthetics of other beings in order to avoid destroying valuable biocoenoses.

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Notes

  1. “Vollkommenheit ist nicht Allmacht, sondern bedeutet nur die richtige und lückenlose Ausnutzung aller vorhandenen Mittel.”

  2. “Ein jeder Organismus kann nur er selbst sein. Aber in sich selbst ist er vollkommen, […] im Gegensatz zu unseren Gegenständen […].”

  3. For instance, Denis Noble (2006) speaks about ‘multicellular harmony’ and ‘the orchestra of the body’. Also, Jakob von Uexküll’s views on harmony are receiving ever wider attention (e.g., Hofer, 2006; Haas, 2018; Caruana, 2021).

  4. E.g., Haeckel, 1899–1904; Flannery, 1993; Kittelmann, 2018; Cohen & Quigley, 2019; Matthäus et al., 2020; etc.

  5. Among them, importantly, John Dewey: “biological commonplaces […] reach to the roots of the esthetic in experience. […] To grasp the sources of esthetic experience it is […] necessary to have recourse to animal life below the human scale. […] Art is thus prefigured in the very processes of living. A bird builds its nest and a beaver its dam when internal organic pressures coöperate with external materials so that the former are fulfilled and the latter are transformed in a satisfying culmination.” (Dewey, 2005 [1934]: 13, 18, 25).

  6. The global mass of human-made material has now exceeded the total biomass on Earth (Elhacham et al., 2020).

  7. On eco-aesthetics, cf. e.g. Araeen, 2009; Miles, 2014; Phillips, 2015.

  8. This is in concordance with Deacon’s (2006) view that art presupposes symbolic reference. Hoffmeyer (2008: 323) concurs: “Art is presumably the most uniquely human way to express one’s aesthetic being”.

  9. Jesper Hoffmeyer’s and Morten Skriver’s biosemiotic art exhibition in Esbjerg Art Gallery (see a review in Kull & Velmezova, 2012) did not focus on the aesthetics of living; instead it presented biosemiotics by aesthetic means. Of course, the biosemiotic nature of beauty can also be studied by the arts (Kull 2016).

  10. “[…] die empfundene Zweckmässigkeit in der Umwelt ist Schönheit.”

  11. A biologist Edward Drinker Cope published in 1882 an essay “Archaesthetism” (Cope, 1882) in which he introduced the terms aesthetophore, archaesthetism, metaesthetism, and panaesthetism and discussed the factors of evolution. Cope’s work influenced Charles Peirce’s views (see more about this in Pearce, 2018).

  12. Cf. Bateson (1979: 8, 18): “What is the pattern which connects all the living creatures? […] By aesthetic, I mean responsive to the pattern which connects. […] ultimate unity is aesthetic”.

  13. Among inspirations to Sebeok’s work we find the study of developmental biologist C. H. Waddington (1970) on relationships between art and biology.

  14. According to a certain typology, the four levels used here correspond to (a) iconic, (b) indexical, (c) emonic, and (d) symbolic levels of semiosis.

  15. See in our context Xenakis & Arnellos, 2014.

  16. On normativity as related to esthetics in Peirce, see Pietarinen, 2009.

  17. In the sense of symbol ungrounding – see Raczaszek-Leonardi & Deacon, 2018.

  18. Cf also Ritterbush, 1972; Stebbing & Heim, 2011.

  19. Cf Menninghaus, 2019: 8.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jinan Kodapully from Kerala, whose questions about the biological basis of beauty and whose studies on how non-educated Indian children learn aesthetics by themselves, have inspired this research. Thanks to Wendy Wheeler (1949–2020) and our Tartu group, Timo Maran and others, who have demonstrated how to connect aesthetics and biosemiotics. I thank Yogi Hendlin, Alexei Sharov, Katya Mandoki and the reviewers for good advice and many helpful comments, Jonathan Griffin and Andrew Mark Creighton for corrections, and PRG314 for support.

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    Kalevi Kull

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Kull, K. The Biosemiotic Fundamentals of Aesthetics: Beauty is the Perfect Semiotic Fitting. Biosemiotics 15, 1–22 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-022-09476-w

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