On Beauty and Being Just

by Elaine Scarry

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Art, Essays, Theory, Theology, Academic

144 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 1999

Reviews

[Michael Austin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just is the sort of book that ought to have been very good. Its author is a major cultural critic whose early books--including The Body in Pain and Dreaming by the Book have been exceptional guides to the topics they explore. And she has incontestable academic credentials in the field of aesthetic theory. And then there is the fact that she is writing about beauty and, hey, who doesn't like beauty?

Well, according to Scarry, modern academics don't like beauty--or, at least, they don't like talking about beauty. There are, she insists, two common political arguments that have all but ejected discussions of beauty from scholarship in the humanities. In the first place, most academics are good Marxists who see aesthetic objects as bourgeois distractions from real social problems. In the second place, most academics are also good feminists, who see discussions of physical beauty as a way to objectify something (or someone) and turn them into extensions of our aesthetic needs. Scarry calls both of these arguments "incoherent" (57), and I think she is absolutely correct.

Scarrry's arguments, on the other hand, are extremely coherent. She makes two essential points, which constitute the two major divisions of the (very short) book. First, in "On Beauty and Being Wrong," she opines that an object of beauty creates in us a desire to be in harmony with it. When we see something beautiful, we want to be close to it--and we are willing to acknowledge the errors of our own position in order to do so. Second, in "On Beauty and Being Fair," she notes the fact that "fair" can mean both "attractive" and "just." The key to both definitions, she suggests, is symmetry, which underlies most of our conceptions of beauty, and which also underlies the notion of distributive justice that she favors. To put it very simply, a beautiful object teaches us the importance of symmetry, which leads us to a belief that people should be treated equally and resources distributed fairly.

Scarry's arguments about beauty and justice are philosophically impeccable. They are well grounded in the aesthetic theories of Plato and Augustine, they are internally consistent, and they are ingenious. They do not, however, appear to have antyhing to do with the lived experience of actual human beings. I'm not just talking about listening to Mozart at the gates of Auschwitz (but I am talking about listening to Mozart at the gates of Auschwitz). But I see no evidence in the world that people who have deep exposure to beautiful objects (musicians, say, or humanities professors) are 1) any more likely to admit that they are wrong than other people; or 2) any more willing to commit their own time and treasure to facilitate a more just world.

[Vivian · Rating 1 out of 5]

A poor copy of a Platonic argument, taking the profound and making it superficial. Essentially, take the word beauty, substitute it with ideal and you have the original argument. Here Scarry attempts to make the argument with quotes from literature on the ideal beauty, art masterpieces, and the author's own florid descriptions to fill a book whose argument could be made in less than ten pages. Throw in a few Kantian references and Seamus Heaney(?) and the argument is considered cogent.

Frankly, the author's PhD in English is evident both in the examples and the writing style, as well as the argumentation, which was weak. So weak that I refuse to read the second part. If you can't prove the first premise then you can't hang the second argument off of it; therefore, it is a waste of time.

Ideals are coveted and that is why the abject is rejected.

Advice: Just read Plato instead.

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 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.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

i bought this book because i saw it in the bookshelf of an artist i admire and also i like eggs and beauty as much as the next person (perhaps eggs a bit less and beauty a bit more?)

anyone who’s read any of my papers from university will tell you i can’t find a thesis to save my live, and generally, i don’t mind when a text doesn’t have a real thesis and is more about meandering, but this felt like Scarry was trying to be academic and had written her thesis over and over again on the wall (bart simpson chalkboard style) and then thrown a plate of spaghetti at it to see if it was cooked - you can see the grease marks where they slid down the wall and the thesis is still pretty plain to see - if slightly smudged by the pasta… perhaps a noodle or two stuck to it but overwhelmingly, the quality of the pasta would have made an old italian woman say some fantastic swear words (things of beauty dare i say?) — even immediately upon finishing the book one doesn’t remember a single argument she has made - disappointing as there really were some rather beautiful moments

[Elena Forsythe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Scarry’s case for how meditating on beauty leads us to have a heightened moral sensitivity to justice, but her approach seemed very limiting. I loved many of her insights—beauty makes us more alive, beauty is powerful, beauty has been all but banished from conversations in the humanities, etc. Yet her final argument—that justice and beauty both celebrate equality/symmetry—felt both a stretch and seemed to fall short at the same time. Is equality (in the sense of a well-balanced scale) really the highest form of beauty? And isn’t equality only necessary but not sufficient for a really flourishing i.e. beautiful society? Isn’t grace more beautiful than justice? Does her argument allow for grace? This is one I’ll keep thinking about for a while and I hope others read it!

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver. As the beautiful being confers on the perceiver the gift of life, so the perceiver confers on the beautiful being the gift of life. Each ‘welcomes’ the other: each—to return to the word’s original meaning—‘comes in accordance with [the] other’s will.’”

Obsessed with this beautiful (!) little book: A professor of aesthetics makes the case for the alignment between beauty and justice, beauty and truth, beauty and a radically de-centering way of living and encountering the world. I love Scarry’s direct way of writing: She jumps into the flow and takes you along for the ride: no preamble, no subtext, no boring introductions. It is a delight, from start to finish, and one that has reordered my way of thinking of aesthetics, desire, and art.

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and thought provoking read.
I was especially intrigued by the point Scarry made on lateral disregard-- beautiful things prompt the viewer to become more aware of the ordinary as well.
"It is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perceptions, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level."

[✨ Aaron Jeffery ✨]

DNF around 50%. Only the first half is relevant to my essay so I cannot be bothered continuing

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointed by this lecture-converted-to-a-book by a very smart, well-read, long-tenured Harvard English prof that came recommended by two friends for whom this was an influential tract (and also after reading Scarry's masterful 1985 articulation that "To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt").

Scarry, in On Beauty and Being Just, seems to me to advance various straw man arguments to advance her proposition that beauty is valuable and that it draws us toward justice.

For the record, I agree that beauty is valuable. I don't disagree it can draw us toward justice.

I would have preferred a more beautiful work of words in beauty's defense, should one on this order actually be merited, which Scarry here has not convinced me is the case, in that she suggests that beauty had been disregarded for decades and she must somehow restore its quasi-Platonic status.

I'm pretty sure she never defines or attempts to define beauty, yet invests it mainly in external objects in ways that seem to me overly simplistic and not all that illuminating in that she never asks why a thing should be beautiful, starting only from the assertion that it is. It's difficult to extend a rational argument from this kind of premise if we do not hold such a premise to be true or unassailable (even if we might agree with some of the case studies Scarry happens to find beautiful).

As an aside, after the first few dozen pages, her prose style also began to wear on me. Her voice felt haughty (perhaps as mine does in this review!) and her thought experiments somewhat indulgent. She also seems to use the word "capacious" more than seems called for. She also spends considerable words asserting questionable connections between her personal epiphany that she actually finds palm trees beautiful and the works of Matisse, which she has apparently plastered around her kitchen to keep her from despair when she cannot see her garden.

It is fortunate the biosphere that evolved during Earth's Cretaceous period persists, for Scarry also spends inordinate time making beauty comparisons and analogs to birds and flowers. (For the record, I, too, find many birds, which are dinosaurs, and flowers beautiful, but this in itself does not make an argument befitting the title of this volume.)

I found her most compelling pseudo-arguments in the back quarter of this book, when drawing out familiar-trodden arguments comparing beauty's characteristic of symmetry to societal justice and a harmony of relations (basically what Confucius said) or a desire to move toward such a state of more justice (been a while, but basically Plato). In this case, however, she cites most heavily the work of other philosophers and historians, while to bolster her earlier passages she cites mainly classical literary references, leaning on Homer and Dante, or her own personal observations. This approach makes for an overall asymmetric approach to Scarry's subject, ironic considering the potential *capaciousness* such a topic affords.

This book, published in 1999, also has not aged well in my view. Considering the polarization of the body politick, the radicalization and sexualization of the internet, the collective failure of nations to rally in confronting climate change, and many unfavorable facets of capitalism seem to make the thought experiments Scarry advances about whether people would *want* the world to have various forms of beauty in it, whether or not they personally experience it, as pollyannish.

I do agree with Scarry when she argues against the politicization of one's "gaze" in terms of the potential for effect on the perceiver and the perceived. Interestingly, the one page in the library copy of this book that had a margin note in pen objected to Scarry's emphasis on this point. The offended margin note states: "But not vulnerable in the same way" in response to Scarry's claim that "...if anything, the perceiver [of beauty] is as vulnerable as, or more vulnerable than, the person looked at." I give Scarry credit for being bold enough to assert this, safely ensconced though she is in the East Coast academic stratosphere and therefore risking little reputational damage from her late-20th-century perch. Were she to make such a claim today, in 2022, her reputational damage might be much greater. Essentially, I think she's correct and that criticism of the "male gaze" has grown overwrought. Whoever penned the margin note had a different view.

On the whole, this book is a bit extraneous, in my view (and I've spent too much of my life reviewing it!). To appreciate fundamentally the same sense of beauty Scarry advances, we could just read Plato and go listen to some bird song in the woods (neither a bad idea!). The fact that this book doesn't do more for me makes me react more strongly against it, however, especially as it flows from such an obviously rigorous intellect as Scarry wields. It really does feel like someone just told her, hey, we need you to write a lecture, and she wandered around for a semester organizing her notes about what to say; greater constraint of mission may have led to greater focus on her part, but this criticism is speculative on my part.

What I think she misses, or omits, (and which also offends, considering her intellect) is the role of biology, physics, and evolution in any accounting of beauty. The two brief walk-and-talks she cites with her political philosopher colleagues asking her what she's doing do not in my view constitute interdisciplinary inquiry. Had she further pursued the consideration of symmetry's role in what is perceived as beautiful, much of her earlier rhetorical house of cards may be seen to collapse as unnecessary. (Her early arguments aren't necessarily wrong; they're just not solving any real problem. And they miss the gap--perhaps the gulf--between her just-so rhetoric that matches with literary, classical, and her personal experience, and a framework that makes sense from the perspective of the evolution of life itself.) For example, it can fairly easily be argued that much of what Scarry regards as beautiful flows from biological survival value of one form or another: symmetry of forms facilitating movement or reproductive fitness, appreciation of patterns key to navigating or manipulating one's environment, attention to faces in mammals--particularly primates--critical to social survival, reaction to or memory of surprise and newness similarly valuable for resource extraction or risk aversion. But she doesn't face this--which I suspect a Harvard undergrad would encounter in any intro to anthropology course--as a plausible alternative to her hand-waving.

If there's a contemporary philosopher out there who can fully and honestly face biological and evolutionary science and still articulate or reconcile a theory of aesthetics beyond the biological, I'd like to read them. But to simply ignore these spheres of truth actually weakens the defense of the humanities, in my view, by not subjecting it to nuanced scrutiny. The humanities, in my view, are not a "sacred cow." They do not need to be isolated to be protected. To adopt Scarry's parlance, they may be considered an object of beauty worthy of one's gaze. The humanities are deeply valuable, but this doesn't mean we can or should exclude what has been learned from centuries of scientific inquiry in articulating their defense. (Indeed, a just argument demands that we must seek further integration rather than impose the fields' rarified isolation.) The realms are nested and deeply complementary if appreciated as such, but arguments such as Scarry's, in my view, do this deeper unity a disservice.

[Anand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Crispin Sartwell’s Six Names of Beauty, this work is one of my favorite modern intellectual works of any sort, particularly on the subject of beauty.

Ranging from Homer to Plato to Augustine to Simone Weil and more, Scarry’s connection of beauty and justice (and goodness) is a compelling, beautifully written study.

One particular passage must itself be looked at and heard for its beauty:

Euripides gives a visionary account of oarsmen striking and sweeping the silver surface of the sea, according to the pace of the aulete’s piped song, the dolphins cresting and diving to the same flashing meter, as in fraternal salute.

I also loved her interpretation of Odysseus’ speech to Nausicaa. Calculated and over-the-top though it was, I always did think that Odysseus, speaking as he did to the teenage princess, probably did feel, to a good extent, what he expressed to the princess. Scarry sees in Odysseus’ response a typical and true example of the heart’s response to beauty.

Elsewhere, I have learned of Scarry’s other fascinating philosophical work on war and the social contract, pain, creativity, and Homer’s Iliad (mentioned once here alongside the Mona Lisa as a beautiful creation, and elsewhere in more detail).

Another striking aspect of her argument is her critique of the anti-beauty polemic; she shows that beauty leads to a greater appreciation and possible realization of justice in the world, and this connection is implied both by the symmetry of beauty and justice, and “fairness” as just distribution and beauty.

[Ruth Lahti · Rating 4 out of 5]

this brief defense of beauty and its relationship to justice was a pleasurable read. i think it lacks in the theoretically sound department, as some of the conclusions she makes, while having a logical set ups, don't seem to be quite founded. however, the writing was true to its topic and the subject brings up many points for meditation. scarry has a very positive view of human nature which i find refreshing, and it's great to read an academic who values beauty and believes that it has transformative potential for society.

[Kenny Kidd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heya Goodreads!! Been too too long, so sorry for the delay 😬 I am now properly medicated for ADHD, so I think that I’ll be able to keep up on these lil social media things more consistently and do fewer binge-reviews every 3-6 months :-D

Anyways, this is the last book I read for my independent study on the possibility of a distinctly ~Christian~ hermeneutic, which both expanded my view of Christianity and ideas of “what it means” to engage with a literary text. This is less related to hermeneutics per se, and more presents a fascinating philosophical argument for the social and ethical value of beauty? Which is MAD interesting to me! And it’s a beautifully written, blissfully short book (I appreciate when people present arguments without much superfluity), so I enjoyed reading it a lot but found myself picking apart the argument a great deal and recognizing more than a few inconsistencies and a groundless assumptions :/ So as an aesthetic work I dug it, but as an argument I found it pretty weak (which is a shame because I LOVE the thesis—“Experiencing beauty trains someone to pursue justice” is such a cool idea, but Hitler was an artist and many artists commit domestic abuse, so 🤷‍♂️)

[Kristen Helm · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling idea: beauty in its connection to symmetry is not only analogous to fairness, and thereby Justice, but it promotes it. For the love of beauty leads one to a “radical de-centering,” in which one is brought outside of selfishness and can therefore pursue equality.

[jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally something on the beauty-morality equation that doesn't get weirdly right-wing about it

[Ella Edelman · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When we come upon beautiful things...they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space...letting the ground rotate beneath us several inches, so that when we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world. We willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us" (112).

A beautiful, clear, convincing little book about the relationship between beauty and justice and how the one both prompts and clarifies the other, not only theoretically, but practically. I noticed that much of Scarry's argument holds deep implications for education; beholding beauty and spending time with it cannot help but produce the impulse to protect and conserve it in a thoroughly "unselfing" (I loved the Iris Murdoch shoutout!) way. A gem of a book.

[Lydia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elaine Scarry is a professor of Esthetics in the English Department at Harvard. I enjoy her lectures on YouTube. And I especially like that she has decided to write a book proclaiming the power and usefulness of Beauty. As she says, "beauty is so often disparaged because it gives rise to material cupidity..." But still we want to capture it. This is especially true if you're my kind of artist. Wittgenstein says, when the eye sees something beautiful, the eye wants to draw it. I like this book because no one talks about beauty anymore. To me, it is the best reason to live: to experience beauty whether in nature, in poetry, in thought, in invention. Scarry goes further and says, beauty has four main features: it is sacred, it is unprecedented, it is lifesaving, and it incites deliberation. Most of her examples go back to the Greeks or other philosophical authors, perhaps since this is an academic view.

The first half of the book was very useful when describing the value of beauty. The second half is concerned with how beauty has been misaligned, and how society is not being fair or just toward beauty. Scarry seems to get lost here and tries to link the usefulness of justice to beauty when faced with "radical decentering" and other problems. She uses about twenty other tacts or circles, in an effort to get us to look at the problem in other ways, but in the last paragraph, she just says, beauty is why people care about museums, schools, and "kelp forests." I am unsure if this type of writing is required of a Cabot Professor, of if she just imbibed a little too much wine while writing. Maybe I'm just missing her sense of humor.

[Kurtis Kozel · Rating 2 out of 5]

The prose is okay, but the points were lacking.

I don't think she is completely wrong, but her view is too narrow (ie., non-expansive) and doesn't anticipate the myriad of attacks that can be made against her argument. Her prose, as well, was bloated and she failed to ever really define or circumscribe what beauty is, even though she uses some definitions later on to bolster her case.

There is a fascinating impulse to compare-contrast this with The Law (which focuses on a crappy argument about why laws are all bad... Except some mysterious, I'll defined "Justice" concept) or addend it with Sexual Personae (which focuses more on aesthetics and entertainment than what I'd call "beauty"), but that'd be too long. Suffice to say, there is an element of Beauty to Justice, but I think it has more to do with the blood curdling severity of beauty we see in the dark, jagged caves; the bear eating foolish men to protect her cubs; and bloody, shit-stained childbirth than the flowers we see in spring, or the palm reaching to the sky.

I think focusing on the delicacy and symmetry of some beautiful things was an absolute mistake to go about protecting the idea of Beauty-Justice and it floundered this work terribly.

[Jackson Ford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely a book I will benefit from reading again, and a book that I will go back to several times to meditate on some of her reflections. It’s a wonderful book for stimulating thoughts around the connections between beauty and justice. Short, inspiring, and spanning a vast array of literature. Would recommend for artists and philosophers/theologians alike.

[Grant Klinefelter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the first chapter of this book. Scarry’s way of weaving the words of artists, philosophers, mystics, and theologians together to write about the self-generating power of Beauty is, well, beautiful.

The second chapter was harder to follow. It felt less polished and more scatter-brained.

I would rank it lower, but chapter one was just so good.

“Beauty prompts a copy of itself.”

[Knar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather than addressing Scarry's argument explicitly, I will mention a selection of premises that I found useful and provide an overall rating.

In Part I:

Addressing beauty and truth, Scarry writes "The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction." She goes on to argue that experiences of "clear discernibility" and self-evidence, as well as those of "state(s) of certainty" provide pleasure that compels a person to engage and labor in the world--to progress in some sense or another (again, for the purposes of this review, I will let the argument rest).

Reminding us that most "human desires are coterminous with their object(s)," Scarry recalls Kant's observation that our ability to consume beauty is inexhaustible. I appreciate these reminders--myself, I do indeed MOAR-roar for beauty, as my purchase and ingestion of this book might suggest.

In Part II:

A general premise in II is that the presence of (and/or adjacency to) a beauty-obj. encourages careful handling and, perhaps, a general disposition toward care. This circles back around to the convergence of beauty and justice--of how the presence of "fair" objects might produce "fair" arrangements/equity/justice.

"Ethical fairness" and "aesthetic fairness" are sutured further following a discussion of the decentering capacity of the Beautiful Thing--citing Simone Weil, beauty "forces us to give up our imaginary position as the center."

Despite a handful of somewhat tenuous claims, I enjoyed this little book and would certainly recommend it, especially for audiences seeking a conversation-grade discussion of Beauty as relates to issues of justice.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought-provoking, but rather misguided, I thought. The author's goal is to oppose those in the humanities who see beauty as being unfair by showing that not only is this false, but that it is central to fairness. It is the second part of her argument that, I think, fails, primarily because she gives people (except those who oppose beauty) too much credit. I don't think, as Scarry does, that beauty necessarily makes someone more beautiful, observant, unselfish. I think that people very often approach beauty very selfishly, and see nothing but the beautiful object, ignoring not only not quite so beautiful objects, but also objects that are more beautiful or that are beautiful in different ways. Scarry is open not only to different sorts of beauty, but to constantly seeing the beauty in things she has "mistakenly" not considered beautiful before. But I don't think this is the case for most people.

What she should have said, I think, is that for people who are open to various sorts of beauty, most of them also more inclined to valuing equality, beauty is in many ways related to justice. But that itself is a view that sees people as unequal. And even these people do not always, or perhaps even most of the time, approach beauty so openly.

Like many arguments, this one comes down to one's view of human nature, and the generalizing of one's own views. In this case, I think Scarry's logical and sometimes beautiful (although too often straining for beauty) arguments are undermined by the myriad exceptions.

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, but I didn’t believe in its purpose. I don’t think the author did either, for that matter. I’m convinced this book is secretly intended to be a beautiful thing, a piece of art, more than it is intended to philosophically argue the nature/virtue of beauty (if I’m wrong about that, then it’s a terrible piece of philosophy based on a plainly false issue with academia and it ought to be chucked, because it misses so many enormous and obvious points, repeatedly and with alarming insistence, that I wouldn’t know where to begin explaining them to Scarry. For instance, her gravely misguided representation of subject/object relations of persons. What. What are you even. No. Stop.).

Also, no, Rilke didn’t “die for beauty” by cutting his hand on a rose thorn. He had leukemia. I know (I hope) this is artistic license but that is just nauseating. Please.

So I give it 3 stars as a prose-poem-thought-experiment-thingy; as a philosophy essay, I give it 1 star; therefore an average of 2. Plus 1 extra star, just for the title, which might be one of my favourite titles of any book, actually. It’s simple, but poetic, and it echoes in your mind long after you hear it.

[rita · Rating 2 out of 5]

beautifully written. couldn't figure out what the freak she was trying to get at, though -- i feel like beauty is such a dense, complex concept and she did not even attempt to break it down at all. why did it take 90 pages for "beauty" to even be defined? maybe i'm just not smart enough for this book.. :(

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to love this book. So many people that I adore, and whose opinions I respect, love this book! But I do not. Even the second time around. For some reason, it annoys me pretty much from the get-go, for reasons both significant and petty (how can you not appreciate palm trees??). And although I want to agree with the main argument, and I might even believe it on some level, I don't find it at all convincing in the way it's presented here (it probably doesn't help to be thinking about it alongside Picture of Dorian Gray). Both the steps in reasoning and the transitions between them frequently lose me, though there are also plenty of moments that I agree with, and some I really like. Maybe I'm just being grumpy. I wish I could like it more. January 2017

[Ben Smitthimedhin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Argument is a little convoluted. Scarry is trying to do too many things at once here.

[Janine Colon-Vazquez · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rambling thoughts of nonsense with small moments of clarity and actual concepts.
You come away after reading the book with no real knowledge or information which leaves a bitter aftertaste.

[Archie Hamerton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rereading this is the closest I get to doing George Emerson’s creed. Truth! Beauty! The eternal yes!!

[Cate Tedford]

This was fun--an academic read without being too heady, ya know. Also fun because I didn't come into this book with any super established ideas or beliefs about beauty (I've got a few, but nothing to write home about), so I didn't have to expend so much energy measuring this text against my own conclusions or previous research--I could just let it wash over me. This text did reveal to me, however, how beauty, in its requirement of our attention and "pressure toward distribution" can yield a "radical decentering" of the self, the freed mental space to be in service of something else, and thus a greater possibility of justice. Maybe? Still thinking on it.

It's wonderful to think about beauty as this transcendent thing that emerges from all else to captivate our attention, but in our world of what Jennie Odell calls the "attention economy" (all the glorious forces of capitalism vying for our attention), I am curious about what is required by us, the perceivers, to not only put ourselves in the way of beauty, but to actually be able to notice and experience and be changed by it. I think this requires much exercise in attention about which Simone Weil writes in Waiting for God: "Attention is an effort, the greatest of all efforts perhaps, but it is a negative effort … Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of”. And William James writes that attention "is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought."

I do believe that beauty is everywhere, and I do feel deeply concerned about the attention economy's/capitalism's corruption of our capacity to perceive and experience it. #scary!!! Alas, we persist. And perhaps take a note from Mary Oliver, whose writing embodies the practice of attention and the experience of beauty like nothing else. For example, the way she intricately details a grasshopper in "The Summer Day": "This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away."

To then reveal how prayer is paying attention (or paying attention is prayer), and that it's kind of the point of this one wild and precious life.

Hmm. Well now I've just written an essay:/

"This willingness to continually revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education."

"Beauty seems to place requirements on us for attending to the aliveness or (in the case of objects) quasi-aliveness of our world, and for entering into its protection."

"... beautiful things give rise to the notion of distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect, but in the sense of 'a symmetry of everyone's relation to one another.'"

"People seem to wish there to be beauty, even when their own self-interest is not served by it; or perhaps more accurately, people seem to intuit that their own self-interest is served by distant peoples' having the benefit of beauty."

[Danny Druid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scarry's prose is very easy to digest and very down-to-earth, such that even someone who is not accustomed to reading essays could read it. This is one of the book's greatest strengths. The arguments are expressed with great clarity and they usually point out things about Beauty which strike the reader as always having been true.

The book can be at times downright delightful, since thinking about Beauty, and what is True about it, is of course itself a very beautiful experience, since the Beautiful and the True are so often linked together, and the one tends to amplify the other.

However, the argument of the book suffers from some major flaws. Scarry, like a lot of other writers whose minds are nurtured in academic environments, stumbles in her pursuit of the truth because she is unwilling to cast aside certain modernist presuppositions into the dust. Ultimately, the most unadulterated truths will come out of the outcasts of society, not professors at Harvard.

What makes her stumble is her consistent belief in the inherent goodness of the socio-political ideal of Equality. She argues that Beauty always necessarily carries with it the push of egalitarian causes. I find it hard to understand how anyone could possibly believe this unless their minds had dogmatically crystallized the idea that egalitarianism is inherently good, as is so often the case. Beauty is clearly inegalitarian, and carries with it no traces of equality whatsoever. What makes something beautiful is that it appears superior to us. The sky, the ocean, a beautiful painting or poem, a beautiful woman or handsome man, are all superior to us mere mortals. Whereas we as mere mortals will pass away, the art or the beautiful natural object will endure. When something is beautiful but inherently transient like a flower or a young woman, these things appear more precious than all of the other transient things in life because of their superior status. It is this preciousness caused by superiority that leads to the drive to eternalize flowers and young women through poetry, painting, and the like.

This understanding of Beauty as inegalitarian clarifies a lot of the other points that Scarry makes, such as the idea that Beauty is de-centralizing. The reason why being consistently exposed to Beauty makes our consciousness less liable to selfishly hover around itself constantly is because we realize that Beauty is greater than we could ever hope to be, for example.

Insofar as someone worships Equality as the ultimate socio-political ideal and seek to find it everywhere in order to re-enforce its strength, they will not be able to understand the world, let alone something as deeply "anti-equal" as Beauty.

[meggggg · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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" (7).

"By perpetuating beauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward continual creation" (8).

"A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed" (8).

"How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things" (15).

Beauty is life-saving; beauty is a greeting; beauty is a call; beauty is life-affirming, life-giving; it incites deliberation and a sense of conviction; "to move forward into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring things into relation" (30); it brings us into contact with our errors (believing something to be ugly when it is really beautiful).

Beauty is pretty "taboo" in institutions of learning, ironically enough. Poets and painters don't talk about the beauty of a poem or image because it is considered cringe (I agree with this observation and find it, as does Scarry, depressing).

Beautiful objects "[introduce us] to a standard of care that [we] then [begin] to extend to more ordinary objects" (66); we may even begin to see that the ordinary objects are not as ordinary as we once thought they were.

In the case of beautiful persons, it is the beholder who is sometimes more vulnerable than the beheld beautiful person.

Beauty prepares us for justice - something is beautiful, it compels us to act and preserve it for ourselves/others. This, I think, is linked to environmental science. Giving students meaningful encounters with nature makes them feel a personal connection to, say, redwoods, which in turn prompts them to see their beauty and act (vote/protest/legislate/etc.) to preserve that beauty and replicate that meaningful encounter for subsequent generations.

"Through its beauty, the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care: if we do not search it out, it comes and finds us" (81).

Enjoyed Scarry's summary of the sublime and the beautiful - misogyny is everywhere, folks.

"[T]he absence of beauty is a profound form of deprivation" (118) - YES!

All of this to say, I adore Scarry. Please accept me into Harvard.