From : Powell's Books
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Hello, Beautiful: What We Talk About When We Talk About Beauty.

A review by Arthur Krystal Beauty is a mess, a sinkhole, a trap. Approach it philosophically and you're immediately bogged down in questions of idealism, empiricism, subjectivity, and objectivity. Plato began the conversation, Kant tried to finish it, and Santayana, embracing Plato and Kant, tried to encapsulate it. Take a cultural run at it, and you're stumbling over issues of relativism, where nothing is either beautiful or ugly but time, class, nation, or ethnicity makes it so. There is also everything that artists, poets, and critics have said about beauty, with enough variance in emphasis to make your head spin. More recently, an entirely new field of study has emerged that considers beauty -- and attendant feelings of attraction and repulsion -- from an evolutionary standpoint. And, as if all this were not enough, there exists the impression that no matter what or how much is said about beauty, something is sure to remain unsaid.

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