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Six Names of Beauty.

Article Excerpt
Sartwell, C. (2004). Six Names of Beauty. New York: Routledge, 167 pp., ISBN 0-415-96558-6 (hardcover).

There is an incipient phenomenology in this text on beauty, a neglected topic in the discipline of psychology. Sartwell reflects on the meaning of beauty by taking his cue from the linguistic meanings of beauty in six languages: "beauty" (English), "yapha" (Hebrew), "sundara" (Sansakrit), "kalon" (Greek), "wabi-sabi" (Japanese), and "hohzo" (Navaho). Phenomenological psychologists have neglected to search for structural constancies in naturally occurring cultural variations in meaning of a particular phenomenon. Not being aware of this possibility, Sartwell does not systematically and rigorously distill the essential structure behind the variations in meanings of beauty that these languages, and the culture they represent, provide. Still, his reflections on each of the meaning approximations of the English understanding of beauty yield a rich harvest that is truly inspiring.

In the tradition of the English language, beauty connotes erotic (in the broadest sense of the word) longing, desiring, and wanting. Moreover, beauty carries within it the sense of potential or ongoing loss, which in turn intensifies the yearning. Whereas truth is "built into belief" and goodness is "built into decision", "beauty is built into desire: what we desire we learn to find beautiful" (pp. 6-7). Beauty, Sartwell tells us, "is a feature of the situation itself that includes the beholder and the object.... [It] is something we make in cooperation with the world" (p. 5). Our senses are our conduits into and through our yearnings. Beautiful objects bring our yearnings to fruition or realization. They invite us to emulate, represent, or appropriate them; to cherish, preserve, and repeat them.

Beauty, however, has an underside, an impure side. Since we make beauty with the world and since we as "people are ill and the world, putting it mildly, is impure" beauty has "an unclean side" (p. 15). The world is somewhat cracked; so are we! "Love your crooked neighbor," W. H. Auden tells us, "with your crooked heart." This is why there is lightness and darkness in human desire. Discovering "beauty in ... darkness can bring us toward a love of ourselves" (p. 16). In...

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