Beauty, Sigmund Freud postulated, is an offshoot of our need to find happiness:
We may go from here to consider the interesting case in which happiness in life is predominately sought in the enjoyment of beauty, wherever beauty presents itself to our senses and our judgement - the beauty of human forms and gestures, of natural objects and landscapes and of artistic and even scientific creations. The aesthetic attitude to the goal of life offers little protection against the threat of suffering, but it can compensate for a great deal. The enjoyment of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling. Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it
