Now we should distinguish between two kinds of desire, the one that arises from the contrast between pleasure and pain (like an electromagnetic charge we are attracted to one and flee the other), and the one that arises from seeing beauty. Now many attempts have been made to reduce one to the other, we have tried to give biological explanations to seeing beautifulness. These biological explanations have some plausibility in some cases, for instance it is said that women get more attached to their newborn infants through the help of a hormone called ??. The release of this hormone in the bloodstream while breastfeeding for instance, would create an immense pleasure that would help bind the mother with the newborn child. The same kind of explanations can be given for many other kinds of attraction and binding. Why do women prefer strong men? Why do men prefer healthy women? Why do women tend to be more monogamous and men more polygamous? All these things and many others have received hypothetical explanations rooted on some reproductive advantage that would disseminate these characteristics given enough time. The problem with these kinds of explanations is that they never address beauty in itself. The need for something, motivated by evading pain or searching pleasure (like when one is addicted to a drug, a person, an activity, a tv show, etc) is different from sensing the beauty of a painting, a landscape, a Mozart symphony, or the butterflies freely flying in the Spring. One of the differences is that pain and pleasure act directly on our motivation, in fact what we call motivation is most of the time just trying to get the pleasure we are craving for, or to get away from the pain we abhor (or the opposite for masochists). Sensing beauty has a more complex relation with motivation. We might be seeing the sunset on the beach, and we see the immense beauty of it all, the stars beginning to appear to our eyes, worlds beyond our worlds, the sea waves tell stories of incalculable creatures and events, the whole scenario may remembers us of a primordial earth, where man was not even expected. All that immense beauty may strike us intimately but it does not solicit a response, it does nor make us crave anything or behave in this or that way. It is easy to simply forget it, as we get in the car and we hear the news on the radio, it is like it hasn't even happened. To avoid the tidal waves of pleasure and pain to direct our lives we need to make an effort (for addictions it may take a gigantic effort over a long period of time, even our whole life). Beauty may also inspire us and guide us. Our life may even become a search for beauty, but for beauty to have even a tiny influence on our aspirations an effort is needed, as if we needed to stitch, into the mesh of pleasures and pains, the reality of beauty. Only then will it start to have a weight, to influence our decisions.
Incidentally, "love" is also used in these very different senses. "I love you" usually means something along the lines of "I need you", "you make me feel good", "I can't live without you", etc. In this sense love is connected with a craving for pleasure, safety, etc. But we may use the word "love" in quite a different sense, along the lines of "seeing the divine in you" but with a significant addition: "I love you" means not only "I see the highest degree of beauty in you" but also "I want to protect it". This addition is essential because, as we've seen, seeing the highest degree of beauty has no direct and unique effect our motivation. We might want to destroy it! (like the bad guys do in the movies!) We might want to forget it, to use it, to sell it, to buy it and put it in a cave, to distort it, to ingest it..., I mean the possibilities are endless. Love, even in this more ethereal sense, must include the want to protect this beauty. This underlines the wide gap that separates beautifulness from motivation. It is not at all clear what role beauty played in natural selection. But by what we can observe today we know that a significant percentage of individuals will have a predisposition to destroy or distort beauty when they find it.