Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    On Beauty and Being Just
    On Beauty and Being Just
    On Beauty and Being Just
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    On Beauty and Being Just

    By Elaine Scarry

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political interests. In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch as well as her own experiences, Scarry offers up an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms.


    Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a "surfeit of aliveness." In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness.


    Scarry, author of the landmark The Body in Pain and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.

    Editor's Note

    Slim yet magnificent...

    While critics have argued that attention to the aesthetic distracts us from suffering or makes us objectify that which is beautiful, this slim yet magnificent essay shows with dazzling intelligence that the opposite is true.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateMar 21, 2013
    ISBN9781400847358
    On Beauty and Being Just
    Author

    Elaine Scarry

    Elaine Scarry, a professor of English and American literature at Harvard University, is the author of The Body in Pain. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    Read more from Elaine Scarry

    Related to On Beauty and Being Just

    Related ebooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Andrea Long Chu: Females: A Concern

      Dec 15, 2019

      Verso, 2019 Based in New York City, Andrea Long Chu is an essayist and critic whose writings have been credited with launching a “second wave” in trans studies. Females: A Concern is her first book-length work, which provides readings of contemporary

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Elaine Castillo

      Dec 1, 2020

      The writing in it is overall sort of bad, and somehow that’s been a balm, too: somehow I’m finding that I can’t bear a certain kind of good writing; it fits like an expensive coat whose style is all wrong for my body, for the climate, for the era. Th

      8 min read

    • Article

      Dismantling Society’s Narrative About Compulsory Sexuality

      Oct 10, 2020

      IN A SOCIETY obsessed with sexuality, what does it mean to be asexual? The world has become more open about discussions of what it means to be queer. But even in queer communities, which fight against culture’s oversexualisation of queer bodies and l

      2 min read

    • Article

      On Mary Oliver and Resisting Poems of Gladness

      Jan 22, 2019

      Was it possible that, despite my best efforts to resist proscriptive poetry doctrines, somewhere along the line I’d internalized the unspoken tenet that accessible poems of praise and wonder are less worthy of real attention? The post On Mary Oliver

      5 min read

    • Article

      Poem Of The Week: Air By Victoria Adukwei Bulley

      Jun 6, 2022

      Air Friend, I saw you sittingat the window of yourself high up in the loftwatching it all go on without you. I was ice & you were almost shadow.I waved like a child on a passing boat. Unsure of whether or not this countsI want us to remember the unr

      3 min read

    • Article

      This Is Love

      Jan 10, 2019

      This Is Love
      8 min read

    • Article

      Another Person’s Words: Poetry Is Always the Speaker

      Jul 16, 2019

      More than rhyme and meter, or any other formal aspect, what defines poetry is its self-awareness. Poetry is the language which knows that it’s language. The post Another Person’s Words: Poetry Is Always the Speaker appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Infrastructure of Joy

      Jun 27, 2019

      The Infrastructure of Joy
      3 min read

    • Article

      Top 5 Books To Take Down The Patriarchy

      Aug 30, 2021

      An ambitious book that tries to do for patriarchy what Marx did for class domination. The book includes radical utopian proposals, including the dissolution of the nuclear family, the liberation of children and the use of artificial wombs and IVF to

      1 min read

    • Article

      Agent Etiquette 101

      Jun 15, 2022

      Jade Wong-Baxter is a literary agent at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, where she specializes in adult literary/upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction. You can find her online at goldinlit.com or @jwongbaxter on Twitter. Wong-Baxter’s work as

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Burning House

      Jul 2, 2018

      The Burning House
      14 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for On Beauty and Being Just

    3.5/5

    50 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 1/5
      Interesting topic. I don't think she developed her ideas well.
    • 3/5
      I woke up thinking about “On Beauty and Being Just”, then finished reading “Seven Short Essays on Physics”, which inspired me with awed appreciation, and I wondered whether that would be a more satisfying way to approach beauty.

      Elaine Scarry’s formulation is that justice is invoked by the responses to beauty that she calls the four pillars which are that is “Sacred, unprecedented, lifesaving, inciting deliberation”. I keep returning to the word “anecdotal” to characterize her arguments. You can say that beauty educes those responses, but they don’t seem to comprise a comprehensive list, nor do they seem to distinguish beauty from other kinds of perception that can invoke the same responses.

      I want to be cautious. Elaine Scarry is a well-respected scholar, so I’m reluctant to be dismissive. At the same time, I don’t want to kow-tow to concensus, especially an academic one. It seems to me that beauty has more in common with awe and that it would be more fruitful to try to describe the nature of being sacred. The quality of sacredness includes not just the experience of awe, but an involuntary sense of caring that is evoked during or as a consequence of the act of witness. It is the caring, I think, that correlates to Elaine’s quality of being lifesaving. I find the quality of being unprecedented the least convincing, because, for one thing, she allows the definition to include things are deriviative of things that are unprecedented, and also because the moment in which we apprehend beauty is is implicity unprecedented and to name it separately is a tautology.

      Perhaps she is starting from the assumption that the apprehension of beauty is an implicity property of humanness, but that is what I was hoping to examine more deeply. We cannot rely on our visceral responses alone to make pronouncements about the nature of the world. We have to use all of the tools available to observe those responses and be careful about generalizing them, being satisfied with the smallest detail on which we can be in confident agreement. We must be satisfied with small hints at an indistinct reality.

      To that end, her observations on the errors in perceiving beauty are scintillating. She observes that we make errors about beauty in two ways: finding something beautiful that we later realize is not, and finding something unbeautiful that we later realize is beautiful. Of these, she says, the latter is the more painful. I will have to review the article to see whether there is more than anecdotal evidence to back this up, but the implication is powerful. In the latter case, the consequence is injustice. In fact, it may be implicit in the definition of narcissism that the former error causes more pain than the latter. This seems to be the heart of the matter, and I have to wonder what all the other words are about.

      This is the point at which I would have to re-read the essay. That requires an investment in time that I may not be able to muster. But I may.

    • 2/5
      I once overheard two young people (I was associated with them) in a museum suggest that the art should just be burned because it was such a waste of money. This is not an original or modern argument; Mozi said much the same thing thousands of years ago. Mozi at least had the intelligence to say that art should be burned if its production directly leads to suffering by depriving people of food and so on. My associates did not say that. They are the target of this book. I heard that in about 2002, and that is how dated this book has become.

      It's jarring to read someone claim that the American declaration of independence is beautiful because the first line scans okay, and that that beauty is somehow identical to the beauty of the ideas it declares and, if you're not already rolling your eyes, that this is somehow connected to the actual United States of America. And it is not jarring in a good way. I'd like to say it isn't Scarry's fault that our understanding of equality has changed since she published this in 1999, but unfortunately, even then, lots of people rolled their eyes at well-meaning NY Times liberalism.

      So, this book includes a polemic against people who don't think beauty should be an object of academic study, but never actually explains the arguments involved; never admits that the good versions of that argument are not about 'beauty,' but about kitsch; never deals with the way that 'beauty' has historically been bound up with some distinctly unbeautiful and unjust ideas (like, say, how black people aren't beautiful).

      The positive argument, that beauty is bound up with justice, ignores all thinking about modernity (which discusses how beauty, justice and so on have been separated in modern societies); because Scarry's discussions of the concept of beauty are so limited, it's hard to take anything else she says seriously. Is beauty bound up with justice? Is it mere ideology? Those questions can only be answered if we all know what we mean by 'beauty,' and I don't even know what Scarry means by it.

      An interesting period piece, but not much more.
    • 4/5
      I am not entirely convinced by her argument that beauty leads to justice--it is too easily disproved by a gloomy glance through history--but Scarry presents it all so, well, beautifully that I can't help but love this book.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    On Beauty and Being Just - Elaine Scarry

    133

    PART ONE

    On Beauty and Being Wrong

    WHAT IS THE felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird? It seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication. Wittgenstein says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.

    Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable. A beautiful face drawn by Verrocchio suddenly glides into the perceptual field of a young boy named Leonardo. The boy copies the face, then copies the face again. Then again and again and again. He does the same thing when a beautiful living plant—a violet, a wild rose—glides into his field of vision, or a living face: he makes a first copy, a second copy, a third, a fourth, a fifth. He draws it over and over, just as Pater (who tells us all this about Leonardo) replicates—now in sentences—Leonardo’s acts, so that the essay reenacts its subject, becoming a sequence of faces: an angel, a Medusa, a woman and child, a Madonna, John the Baptist, St. Anne, La Gioconda. Before long the means are found to replicate, thousands of times over, both the sentences and the faces, so that traces of Pater’s paragraphs and Leonardo’s drawings inhabit all the pockets of the world (as pieces of them float in the paragraph now before you).

    A visual event may reproduce itself in the realm of touch (as when the seen face incites an ache of longing in the hand, and the hand then presses pencil to paper), which may in turn then reappear in a second visual event, the finished drawing. This crisscrossing of the senses may happen in any direction. Wittgenstein speaks not only about beautiful visual events prompting motions in the hand but, elsewhere, about heard music that later prompts a ghostly sub-anatomical event in his teeth and gums. So, too, an act of touch may reproduce itself as an acoustical event or even an abstract idea, the way whenever Augustine touches something smooth, he begins to think of music and of God.

    Beauty Prompts a Copy of Itself

    The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato’s Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person. But it also—as Diotima tells Socrates—prompts the begetting of poems and laws, the works of Homer, Hesiod, and Lycurgus. The poem and the law may then prompt descriptions of themselves—literary and legal commentaries—that seek to make the beauty of the prior thing more evident, to make, in other words, the poem’s or law’s clear discernibility even more clearly discernible. Thus the beauty of Beatrice in La vita nuova requires of Dante the writing of a sonnet, and the writing of that one sonnet prompts the writing of another: After completing this last sonnet I was moved by a desire to write more poetry. The sonnets, in turn, place on Dante a new pressure, for as soon as his ear hears what he has made in meter, his hand wants to draw a sketch of it in prose: This sonnet is divided into two parts …; This sonnet is divided into four parts.…¹

    This phenomenon of unceasing begetting sponsors in people like Plato, Aquinas, Dante the idea of eternity, the perpetual duplicating of a moment that never stops. But it also sponsors the idea of terrestrial plenitude and distribution, the will to make more and more so that there will eventually be enough. Although very great cultural outcomes such as the Iliad or the Mona Lisa or the idea of distribution arise out of the requirement beauty places on us to replicate, the simplest manifestation of the phenomenon is the everyday fact of staring. The first flash of the bird incites the desire to duplicate not by translating the glimpsed image into a drawing or a poem or a photograph but simply by continuing to see her five seconds, twenty-five seconds, forty-five seconds later—as long as the bird is there to be beheld. People follow the paths of migrating birds, moving strangers, and lost manuscripts, trying to keep the thing sensorily present to them. Pater tells us that Leonardo, as though half-crazed, used to follow people around the streets of Florence once he got glimpses of it [beauty] in the strange eyes or hair of chance people. Sometimes he persisted until sundown. This replication in the realm of sensation can be carried out by a single perceiver across time (one person staring at a face or listening to the unceasing song of a mockingbird) or can instead entail a brief act of perception distributed across many people. When Leonardo drew a cartoon of St. Anne, for two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung. This impulse toward a distribution across perceivers is, as both museums and postcards verify, the most common response to beauty: Addis is full of blossoms. Wish you were here. The nightingale sang again last night. Come here as soon as you can.

    Beauty is sometimes disparaged on the ground that it causes a contagion of imitation, as when a legion of people begin to style themselves after a particular movie starlet, but this is just an imperfect version of a deeply beneficent momentum toward replication. Again beauty is sometimes disparaged because it gives rise to material cupidity and possessiveness; but here, too, we may come to feel we are simply encountering an imperfect instance of an otherwise positive outcome. If someone wishes all the Gallé vases of the world to sit on his own windowsills, it is just a miseducated version of the typically generous-hearted impulse we see when Proust stares at the face of the girl serving milk at a train stop:

    I could not take my eyes from her face which grew larger as she approached, like a sun which it was somehow possible to stare at and which was coming nearer and nearer, letting itself be seen at close quarters, dazzling you with its blaze of red and gold.²

    Proust wishes her to remain forever in his perceptual field and will alter his own location to bring that about: to go with her to the stream, to the cow, to the train, to be always at her side.

    This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences, like Plato’s dialogues, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity on what originally has none. They are a key mechanism in what Diotima called begetting and what Tocqueville called distribution. By perpetuating beauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward continual creation. Sometimes their institutional gravity and awkwardness can seem tonally out of register with beauty, which, like a small bird, has an aura of fragility, as when Simone Weil in Waiting for God writes:

    The love of the beauty of the world … involves … the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy. The truly precious things are those forming ladders reaching toward the beauty of the world, openings onto it.

    But Weil’s list of precious things, openings into the world, begins not with a flight of a bird but with education: Numbered among them are the pure and authentic achievements of art and sciences.³ To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.

    Errors in Beauty: Attributes Evenly and Unevenly Present across Beautiful Things

    The author of the Greater Hippias, widely believed to have been Plato, points out that while we know with relative ease what a beautiful horse or a beautiful man or possibly even a beautiful pot is (this last one is a matter of some dispute in the dialogue), it is

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1