Elaine Scarry

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 writes an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms. 7 line illustrations.

On Beauty and Being Just

Elena Kuran

In law school I've been thinking about how beauty fits into the life of a lawyer (drab..) and this book captures something so nicely; seeing something beautiful out in the world ignites the desire for truth and moves us to correct errors

Caitlin Bohannon

The first half of this essay is a wonderful tribute to beauty and its ability to inspire creativity, vitality, even generosity, and a great reminder of how lovely Matisse's window paintings are. 

However, this treatise falls apart in the second half - misrepresenting the arguments against the value our culture places on aesthetics and ignoring the completely real damage our over-valuing of beauty does to people, the environment, poetry, and yes even to religion. The effects of objectifying human beings are obvious, but less obviously the obsession with, for instance, beautiful lawns and cute animals does very real harm to the ecosystem and to conservation efforts, while the focus on beauty in speech and written word causes us to overvalue pleasantness over truth (it can even be found in MLK's negative peace vs positive, just peace), and even though the gods themselves may not be hurt, a focus on aesthetics does do a great deal of harm to religions and practitioners alike (it's easy here to point to the mishandling of funds for lavish worship centers, etc., but also in shallowness of most charity work). Scarry's argument that care for the beautiful will bleed into caring for the less beautiful falls apart in reality, when we do not have infinite attention and resources. Perhaps she only views this as an imperfect version of the idealized perception of beauty that she envisions, and likely it is, but unfortunately it dominates our culture. There's certainly an argument to be made that admiring beauty and being inspired in itself is not a bad thing and is in fact good - and that drawing attention to this beauty should not be forbidden as it is in some circles - but it must learn to coexist with the argument that we often focus too much on beauty at the expense of other, arguably greater, values. 

Though she references Kant and Plato a great deal here, their arguments on beauty were also built on very faulty (and often misogynistic) premises - Plato's Phaedrus and Eros in particular are built on a very patriarchal and possessive idea of love and beauty, such as that love is covetous and always desiring, never satisfied. Ironically, Plato's arguments are quite beautiful, but not ultimately logical or truthful, though the elegance of his speech is often mistaken for both great logic and truthfulness. It is the same with her reference to the phrase “We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal. . . . ” - very beautiful, but as our country has shown again and again, this truth is not self-evident. And unfortunately our love of beautiful phrases and symmetrical aesthetics does always inspire the same love of those ideals in terms of justice. And all too often our love of symmetry gets in the way of restorative justice, which by its nature must tilt the balance of the present to redress past wrongs.

In the end it is not a question of whether beauty is right or wrong, but where we place it in our priorities, and whether it can aid in pursuit of justice, and her arguments here remain ultimately unsatisfactory.

On Beauty and Being Just

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