On Beauty and Being Just

Beauty, Fairness, Justice On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry In this time of individual, corporate, and state corruption, can the presence of beautiful objects turn us toward fairness? As our screens are filled with actresses (and actors) conscripted into shameful stories, can beauty point us to the sacred? Professor Elaine Scarry's book--itself slim, pure, elegant, peaceful, beautiful--suggests to us that it does work this way. She encourages each of us "to place oneself in the path of beauty". She doesn't write of a rarified "unattached Beauty" but rather of beauty present in "objects (faces, flowers, birdsongs, men, horses, pots, and poems. In our present ugly period (although our fair author doesn't write of evil or ugliness herself) she reminds us of how the beautiful, in some circles "over the last several decades", has been bad-mouthed or ignored in serious discussion. Perhaps that has happened just because beauty can lead to fairness, to justice. Perhaps that is why some true art is desecrated ( & execrable art praised), why the landscape is despoiled, women demeaned (strip mines & strip joints are related)--perhaps it's because beauty makes us think or deliberate or perhaps it's because beauty is too convincing. But, she reminds us, most of us still admire beauty, if only in secret. Its symmetry (balance), its fairness, is not only reassuring and a joy: it also reminds us of errors in our own perceptions and actions, supplies a pattern or model for improvements and raises in us a desire to "reproduce" that beauty: "Beauty Prompts a Copy of Itself". Her long meditation on the palm tree figure in Odysseus's thoughts, on Matisse's "inner life of the mind" paintings, and her own belated recognition of the beauty of palm trees reminds us of Chaucer's palmers setting out for a distant shrine As we read, our author's gentle thoughts rise, bloom & surprise us. When we softly lift & turn her pages we are stirred like the fall of leaves. Our expectant steps along this path become an outing, a journey revealing the holy glow of beautiful things which move us to "protect or perpetuate a fragment of beauty already in the world or . . . supplement it by bringing into being a new object We learn that the word "fair" in fair maiden has the same etymology as in fair play. We don't have to be outwardly beautiful ourselves: for those not wholly dedicated to the bad, beauty's example is internalized and leads to an appreciation of the life-enhancement of fair art, the fairness of women, of Nature, of peace--that beauty can lead to the sacred and the just. This little book suggests that the shimmer and dazzle of beautiful things "carry greetings from other worlds", that "beauty is a call"--may we unstop our ears!

book was easy to read and very revealing as it was written during a time when beauty was absent in professional review.

Though it's easy to critique Elaine Scarry's logic and the completeness of her argument, that would miss this book's true importance. As a matter of fact, what's important about On Beauty is that it stood in the face of 20 years of literary and aesthetic criticism, a howling wind into which Scarry makes a simple claim: that the appreciation of beauty presses us toward justice and not away from it. In its simplicity, Scarry's proposition is as brilliant and unprovable now as it was then. But propositions are not the truth; they stake a claim to right action, and Scarry's courageous stand has liberated artists and writers to pursue right action as it resonates with what their eyes and ears hold to be a good and true beyond logic. Scarry uses arguments and descriptions from fellow travellers as various as Homer, Simone Weil. and John Rawls. It's a tour de force ending with a vision of the trireme as the birthplace of athenian democratic values. The logic that connects that vision to the political possibiities immanent in the visual world are as profound and mysterious as any attempt to defend beauty could ever be. Somehow, Scarry manages exactly what she claims for beauty: pressing us toward the good without suspending our desire for all things pleasurable.

Elaine Scarry presents a beautiful, thought-provoking and in the end, not altogether convincing (but still convincing nonetheless) that beauty is connected to justice, and shouldn't be tossed out of academic circles in the name of political correctedness. Scarry approaches the subject of beauty and the nature of beauty by first telling the world where people go wrong when it comes to aesthetics. She gets personal, yes, but she remains philosophically on the mark as long as the reader is willing to stay focussed on the central point of her entire book. Beauty is not some silly thing we humans should discard and treat as unimportant or not valuable. On the contrary, beauty is something that tells us much about ourselves and the world in which we live in so it cannot be ignored any longer! Kudos to Scarry for bringing it back into the discussion limelight. However, having said this, my only problem philosophically with the book was the way Scarry attempted to tell readers how the idea of justice is something ingrained within human beings and found consciously in human nature yet, the idea of beauty is not. She is not equating the two as the same, yes, but she is equating the two as being interdependent and so it seemed peculiar to me that she would make such a strong case for the root of justice and act as though beauty is some autonomous thing out there by itself. A sense of justice and a sense to experience and see and seek out beauty are both things we humans possess. It's in our nature and I wish Scarry would've made that a little more clearer to the readers. If she would've done that, her argument would've been so much stronger. Let the aesthetic discussion thrive on!

Scarry is to philosophy what James Woods is to criticism: a robustly poetic thinker. Her ambition is to talk about ways our experiences of beauty mingle with those of fairness, and when she contemplates her own experiences of these things, she is entirely original and provocative. The larger philosophical ideas within it are easy to argue with--but that is always the way with original claims briefly stated, as are these. Highlight: her discusson of Cezanne's palm trees is an exquisite rendering of an aesthetic inspiration--Cezanne's, hers, those in the paintings and those in the world.