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Etcoff begins by confronting our intellectual apologism for the cult of beauty:
Many intellectuals would have us believe that beauty is
inconsequential. Since it explains nothing, solves nothing,
and teaches us nothing, it should not have a place in
intellectual discourse. And we are supposed to breathe a
collective sigh of relief. After all, the concept of beauty has
become an embarrassment.
But there is something wrong with this picture. Outside the
realm of ideas, beauty rules. Nobody has stopped looking at
it, and no one has stopped enjoying the sight. Turning a cold
eye to beauty is as easy as quelling physical desire or
responding with indifference to a babys cry. We can say
that beauty is dead, but all that does is widen the chasm
between the real world and our understanding of it.
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Etcoff admonishes against confusing beauty with all the manufactured and
industriously exploited stand-ins for it:
must-reads
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One of the most fascinating aspects of beauty, however, is how bound it is with
judgment, and self-judgment in particular. One of the products of our
narcissistic bias, Etcoff argues, is that we greatly exaggerate the minute
fluctuations in our outward appearance:
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She traces the cross-cultural, age-old extremes to which people go for beauty
or, really, for control of those judgments, whether by self or others:
JOHN CLEESE ON THE 5 FACTORS TO MAKE
YOUR LIFE MORE CREATIVE
But our fixation on beauty is so profound that it even permeates the most
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elevated of human spirits. Etcoff gives Eleanor Roosevelt, one of historys most
remarkable hearts and minds, and Leo Tolstoy, enduring sage of human
wisdom, as tragic examples:
(It is especially ironic and demonstrative of the oppressive power of such ideals
that Roosevelt famously wrote, When you adopt the standards and the values of
someone else you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your
surrender, less of a human being.)
Still, the mesmerism of beauty and its grip on us, Etcoff argues, is too deepseated to be undone by its mere intellectual recognition:
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1958 LETTER
actually the sign of a healthy human mind. Conversely, the absence of such a
response is one of the key symptoms of severe depression, one that goes handin-hand with anhedonia the inability to take pleasure in things that once
pleased us.
Although the object of beauty is debated, the experience of
beauty is not. Beauty can stir up a snarl of emotions but
pleasure must always be one (tortured longings and envy are
not incompatible with pleasure). Our body responds to it
viscerally and our names for beauty are synonymous with
physical cataclysms and bodily obliteration breathtaking,
femme fatale, knockout, drop-dead gorgeous, bombshell,
stunner, and ravishing. We experience beauty not as rational
contemplation but as a response to physical urgency.
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She offers some exquisite examples of beautys contemplation from the annals
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But as unique as we would like to think we are, these inner templates turn out to
be far more uniform. Etcoff cites the work of anthropometrist Leslie Farkas,
who measured the facial proportions of 200 women, including 50 models, as
well as young males and kids, and asked a large sample of participants to rate
their appearance, then compared the results with the conventions of the
classical beauty canon. The surprising findings, Etcoff argues, illustrates how
measurement systems have failed at producing a formula for beauty and instead
reveal something profound about the brokenness of the prescriptive canon:
The canon did not fare well. Many of the measures did not
turn out to be important, such as the relative angles of the
ear and nose. Some seemed pure idealizations: none of the
faces and heads in profile corresponded to equal halves or
thirds or fourths. Some were inaccuratethe distance
between the eyes of the beauties was greater than that
suggested by the canon (the width of the nose). Farkass
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results do not mean that a beautiful face will never match the
Renaissance and classical ideals. But they do suggest that
classical artists might have been wrong about the
fundamental nature of human beauty. Perhaps they thought
there was a mathematical ideal because this fit in a general
way with platonic or religious ideas about the origin of the
world.
And yet beauty is a very real piece of the human experience and bespeaks some
of our greatest existential tensions, such as the mortality paradox. Etcoff
writes:
Attitudes toward beauty are entwined with our deepest
conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit. We view the body as a
temple, a prison, a dwelling for the immortal soul, a
tormentor, a garden of earthly delights, a biological envelope,
a machine, a home. We cannot talk about our response to
our bodys beauty without understanding all that we project
onto our flesh.
Though at first glance borderline reductionist in its excessive reliance on
evolutionary explanations, the rest of Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of
Beauty goes on demonstrate why science and philosophy need each other and
how the social sciences fit into the intellectual debate on beauty. Complement it
with Etcoffs compelling TED talk on the surprising science of happiness a
fine addition to these essential reads on the art and science of happiness in
which she explores the evolutionary explanations of beauty:
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Nancy Etcoff
Happiness and its surprises
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On Scientific Taste
Michele Banks'
Biological
Watercolors
A Poetic Definition of
Science Circa 1997
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