Crispin Sartwell's Six Names Of Beauty

In Crispin Sartwell’s Six Names of Beauty, he discusses the numerous ideas and meanings behind the word beauty, highlighting how it can be taken in an infinite amount of ways, though the way that Sartwell explained “Yapha”, meaning “to glow or bloom” in Hebrew was the explanation of beauty that was most relevant to me as it speaks of the small moments in life that allow us to experience the overall beauty of the world. Sartwell explains that “…a thing, as it were, sheds or exudes its beauty. Beauty is something the beautiful object emits, like a light: a thing is beautiful in virtue of what it gives” (28). As an artist, specific paintings, like “Starry Night” by Van Gogh, for example, is a piece that has it’s own beauty, that emits beauty from within. As it was said, something is found beautiful because it simply is: it is beautiful, in the way that Van Gogh worked his way along the canvas in rushed, frenzied strokes, yet when the rapid strokes blend together, they ultimately produce a piece that is able to emit its own beauty and its own virtue; it must rely upon nothing else but itself.

By identifying beauty as a sense, Sartwell opens up the door to say that beauty is ever changing, like our senses.

People often become overwhelmed by senses, beauty included: they become so entrenched in documenting the beauty that they no longer see the purity of the object, they see labels and values. An example would be Sartwell’s discussion on identifying just the ‘right’ shade of blue to the indigo Bunting bird. The idea of seeing things in values also relates to the individuality of beauty: the subjectiveness of beauty and how it is most often found in the smallest moments. It appears to me that in said small moments are the moments in which we are most innocent as it allows us to look at the individualities of a subject before gorging ourselves on the typical ‘grand scheme of things’. Beauty is in simplicity; and that is

innocence.
It is our attraction to the simply beauties on life that allow us to be more open to complex ideas and objects of beauty. “It is worth noting that people collect, cultivate, and depict roses, that they are activity as much as object” (38). The fact that Sartwell points out that people are able to build careers and entire lives out of finding, growing, and reproducing beauty only strengthens the idea that beauty is an irreplaceable aspect of human lives and that singular idea of beauty does not exist. Each person has their own individual idea of the definition of beauty, and focusing of our own simply idea of beauty only opens us up to integrating other’s conceptions of beauty into our own. The ability of beauty to be as much of an activity as much as an object stems from our integration and melding of countless other’s ideas of beauty. After all, if each person truly had an individual sense of beauty, then how could we have celebrities, models, or other people who uphold ‘standards’ of beauty if no more than two or three people saw them as beautiful? The act of observing and assimilating our personal ideals of beauty is as much of an activity as those who ‘produce’ the beauty itself. The interaction between numerous ideas of beauty, seems to be a source of harmony rather than contention.
As Sartwell speaks of perfumes and scents on pages 39-41, he states that “the history of perfume is by and large a history of purifications…” relating to my idea that true beauty is innocence and simplicity as perfumes are simplified versions of a larger scent, or a ‘bigger picture’, yet they chose to focus in on a singular scent, just as we focus in on the smaller moments of life and said moments that are the true producers of beauty. However, when synthetics were introduced to perfumes, the real sense of beauty and innocence was lost as the object was no longer pure; yet it is now practical and even better to use synthetics as the general conception of the beauty of perfumes as changed, thought some individuals ideas may have not.
The idea that beauty is enteral is both both correct and incorrect: beauty will forever be a integral part of the culture but the general and conceived concepts of beauty will and are forever changing. Though the example is superficial, the models of today would have likely not been well received in the 1950s and the same can be said of the 1950s models in today’s society, “words obviously have histories…” (44).
Sartwell also briefly discusses the idea of the loss of beauty stating that, “their loss as beautiful things would immediately make them available again” (45). As beauty is lost, we immediately seek it again; it is a part of the endless cycle and we must put forth the effort to find it again causing us to us beauty as much of an activity as an object of longing. Just as the stars in the sky change, so will our concepts and ideals of beauty change as well. That is perhaps why beautiful objects fade in the first place, to allow us as humans to grow and evolve and search for beauty in things we could not have found beauty in otherwise.
Beauty is obviously ever-present in our society but there are countless ways of describing the beauty and different types of beauty that one can be associating with. Out of the six names of beauty mentioned by Crispin Sartwell in his novel, the idea of the small moments of everyday beauty in “Yapha” that aligned most clearly with what I believe to be the true meaning of beauty. The idea that there are millions of individual beautiful aspects that comprise a piece of art or a scent only give cause to seek out the simple, individual moments of beauty that are always happening in the world around us.