multispecies aesthetics in times of ecological crisis argue that there are universal standards of beauty concerning landscapes2 and human bodies, that humans are predisposed to find symmetrical forms and contours aesthetically pleasant, and that they are innately attracted to other humans’ faces (babies, in particular, tend to find symmetrical human faces most attractive).3 Other scholars have traced beauty back to fluency, to the simplicity and smoothness of stimuli processing dynamics, so that the easier it is for humans to perceive and/ or to conceptualize an object the more beautiful this object is judged to be.4 There have also been researchers making a case for comparative approaches to beauty, under the premise that it might be that at least some human aesthetic standards apply not only or not exclusively to the human species but also to other nonhuman animal species, more or less phylogenetically close to us.5 A difficult point, when it comes to investigating the concept and standards of beauty, is whether it is possible to isolate
biological-natural (allegedly universal) components of the beautiful (i.e., features or traits that are invariably perceived as beautiful by humans due to species-specific biological/ cognitive/perceptual constraints) from cultural (relativisthistorical) ones; and, if so, how these two components are or should be integrated.6 The concept of beauty is a unitas multiplex – a multifaceted, malleable, and multi-layered notion in which many elements intervene. Whenever humans experience something as beautiful (or whenever we have an aesthetic experience, since beauty represents only one of the several forms of aesthetic experience possible in the world) it involves at the same time perception, emotion, cognition, and imagination together with a self-reflecting activity on the part of the experiencing subject (“how does the experience I am having right now make me feel?”). This is why aesthetic experiences require time, and duration, to happen: although they certainly have to do with
