On Beauty and Being Just

Elaine Scarry

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400847358
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

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.

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 much more difficult to say what “Beauty” unattached to any object is. At no point will there be any aspiration to speak in these pages of unattached Beauty, or of the attributes of unattached Beauty. But there are attributes that are, without exception, present across different objects (faces, flowers, birdsongs, men, horses, pots, and poems), one of which is this impulse toward begetting. It is impossible to conceive of a beautiful thing that does not have this attribute. The homely word “replication” has been used here because it reminds us that the benign impulse toward creation results not just in famous paintings but in everyday acts of staring; it also reminds us that the generative object continues, in some sense, to be present in the newly begotten object. It may be startling to speak of the Divine Comedy or the Mona Lisa as “a replication” since they are so unprecedented, but the word recalls the fact that something, or someone, gave rise to their creation and remains silently present in the newborn object.

In the case just looked at, then, the attribute was one common across all sites, and the error, when it briefly arose, involved seeing an imperfect version of the attribute (imitation of starlets or, more seriously, material greed) and correctly spotting the association with beauty, but failing to recognize the thousands of good outcomes of which this is a deteriorated version. Rejecting the imperfect version of the phenomenon of begetting makes sense; what does not make sense is rejecting the general impulse toward begetting, or rejecting the beautiful things for giving rise to false, as well as true, versions of begetting. To disparage beauty for the sake not of one of its attributes but simply for a misguided version of one of its otherwise beneficent attributes is a common error made about beauty.

But we will also see that many errors made about beauty arise not in relation to an attribute that is, without exception, common across all sites, but precisely in relation to attributes that are site-specific—that come up, for example, in relation to a beautiful garden but not in relation, say, to a beautiful poem; or come up in relation to beautiful persons but not in relation to the beauty of gods. The discontinuities across sites are the source of many confusions, one of which will be looked at in detail in Part Two. But the most familiar encounter with error occurs within any one site.

Errors within Any One Site

It seems a strange feature of intellectual life that if you question people—“What is an instance of an intellectual error you have made in your life?”—no answer seems to come readily to mind. Somewhat better luck is achieved if you ask people (friends, students) to describe an error they have made about beauty. It may be helpful if, before proceeding, the reader stops and recalls—in as much detail as possible—an error he or she has made so that another instance can be placed on the page in conjunction with the few about to be described. It may be useful to record the error, or the revision, in as much detail as is possible because I want to make claims here about the way an error presents itself to the mind, and the accuracy of what I say needs alternative instances to be tested against. The error may be a misunderstanding in the reading of Schiller’s “Ninth Letter” in his Aesthetic Education of Man, or a misreading of page eleven in Kant’s Third Critique. But the question is more directly aimed at errors, and revisions, that have arisen in day-to-day life. In my own case, for example, I had ruled out palm trees as objects of beauty and then one day discovered I had made a mistake.

Those who remember making an error about beauty usually also recall the exact second when they first realized they had made an error. The revisionary moment comes as a perceptual slap or slam that itself has emphatic sensory properties. Emily Dickinson’s poem—

It dropped so low—in my Regard—

I heard it hit the Ground—

is an instance. A correction in perception takes place as an abrasive crash. Though it has the sound of breaking plates, what is shattering loudly is the perception itself:

It dropped so low—in my Regard—

I heard it hit the Ground—

And go to pieces on the Stones

At bottom of my mind—⁴

The concussion is not just acoustic but kinesthetic. Her own brain is the floor against which the felt impact takes place.

The same is true of Shakespeare’s “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” The correction, the alteration in the perception, is so palpable that it is as though the perception itself (rather than its object) lies rotting in the brain. In both cases, the perception has undergone a radical alteration—it breaks apart (as in breaking plates) or disintegrates (as in the festering flower); and in both cases, the alteration is announced by a striking sensory event, a loud sound, an awful smell. Even if the alteration in perception were registered not as the sudden introduction of a negative sensation but as the disappearance of the positive sensory attributes the thing had when it was beautiful, the moment might be equally stark and highly etched. Gerard Manley Hopkins confides calmly, cruelly, to someone he once loved that his love has now almost disappeared. He offers as a final clarifying analogy what happens when a poem, once held to be beautiful, ceases to be so:

Is this made plain? What have I come across

That here will serve me for comparison?

The sceptic disappointment and the loss

A boy feels when the poet he pores upon

Grows less and less sweet to him, and knows no cause.

No loud sound or bad smell could make this more devastating. But why? In part, because what is so positive is here being taken away: sweet is a taste, a smell, a sound—the word, of all words, closest to the fresh and easy call of a bird; and conveying a belovedness, an acuity of regard, as effortless and unasked-for as honeysuckle or sweet william. Fading (one might hope) could conceivably take place as a merciful numbing, a dulling, of perception, or a turning away to other objects of attention. But the shades of fading here take place under the scrutiny of bright consciousness, the mind registering in technicolor each successive nuance of its own bereavement. Hopkins’s boy, with full acuity, leans into, pores upon, the lesson and the lessening.

Those who recall making an error in beauty inevitably describe one of two genres of mistake. The first, as in the lines by Dickinson, Shakespeare, and Hopkins, is the recognition that something formerly held to be beautiful no longer deserves to be so regarded. The second is the sudden recognition that something from which the attribution of beauty had been withheld deserved all along to be so denominated. Of these two genres of error, the second seems more grave: in the first (the error of overcrediting), the mistake occurs on the side of perceptual generosity, in the second (th...