Publisher's Synopsis
Beauty has lost definitive meaning. Beautiful is applied quite indiscriminately leaving us with little real-world understanding. The physical, personal and spiritual aspects of beauty get lost in art, music and literature and leave us with nothing by which to judge. These may be beautiful but beauty in daily life has been relegated to secondary characteristic status. Rather than a defining feature denoting identity beauty has often been cloaked as a novel superficiality. Such underestimation of its superlative nature often finds us merely shocked or stunned when we see it; it confuses us and we begin to freeze in thought and action as if Gorgon had solidified our senses. We fain to look away yet find ourselves returning, peeking at beauty. This little book attempts to gain understand of beauty in a different manner. Instead of initially idealizing beauty and then finding examples in daily experience; a reverse course attempts to grow a real conceptional understanding from experience, persons or objects associated with beauty, meeting reality head on, and, when possible, to recount beauty's salient philosophically abstract considerations . Philosophy is herein considered secondarily as beauty may not be so practically understood in rational or even irrational terms. J.D. Stewart has also written Loss of Others, John Dewey: Modernity, Modern Public Education, A Teaching Trilogy and Education, Culture, Individualism: Public Education in a Struggle for Authority and Falling off the Twig.
