"On Beauty and Being Just"

I picked up On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry with some trepidation, because one of the first books I struggled through in graduate school, almost ten years ago, was Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. But I had no such struggle here. In fact, I was so excited reading the book that I decided (although this is not a Book Review Website) to write about it.

I wanted to read this book because I’ve been feeling a lack of aesthetic beauty recently. A sense that my life was leeching color. When I thought about what I “wanted,” what my desires were, I could not name concrete, material things — new job, new house, new partner — just a feeling, that I wanted life to have more beauty. Not for myself to be more beautiful, but rather to arrange my life in such a way that I could be closer to seeing the beauty I know exists in the world but yet somehow struggle to reach.

On vacation recently in Vancouver Island, I visited the Butchart Gardens outside Victoria. Standing in front of these fountains, overwhelmed with emotion, I thought, I want more of this beauty in my life.

Then, just a few days later, a magazine article referenced Scarry’s book. Serendipity!

It’s a slim book, divided into two parts: “On Beauty and Being Wrong,” which explores how beauty teaches us about finding the truth, and “On Beauty and Being Fair,” which explains why beauty is not incompatible with, but is in fact a prerequisite of, justice.

This is a book written by a literary critic; it’s not a book getting into the neuroscience of “what parts of our brains light up when we see something aesthetic,” nor a historical analysis of why people have found certain things beautiful at different times. I think this is key to interpreting the book’s arguments on its own terms. Personally I found it bracing in a good way, like walking out into a bright, crisp afternoon.

What is beauty?

To make both of the above claims Scarry has to first explain what beauty is, which she arrives at by articulating what beauty does, what it provokes and what effects it creates.  

First, beauty is generative. It compels “replication” and “distribution.” Beautiful objects (poetry, people, art, architecture, nature) make us want to recreate it (replication) and share it (distribution). It’s why reading a great book makes me want to write myself, or why people sketch at museums or draw birds in the field, or why I stand at the souvenir shop and try to find the postcard that best captures the beauty of where I’ve been. This book was written before Instagram, but I suspect Scarry would say it is an “imperfect instance of an otherwise positive outcome.”

Second, beauty is an exchange. Scarry quotes a series of writers (Homer, Dante, etc) who all affirm that beauty is a “greeting” — a dispatch, a waving hand, from a welcoming and “merciful” shore. When we arrive on that shore, we feel more alive. But we are also greeting the object of our perception, seeing it not as a “composite” but as individual, “unprecedented,” “sacred.” This exchange is so powerful, Scarry argues, that it temporarily reshapes how we relate to the world around us.  

What happens when we experience beauty?

Over the first fifty pages of the book, in a section called On Beauty and Being Wrong, Scarry elegantly argues that “beauty really is allied with truth.” Through close readings of poetry (the Odyssey, Dickinson, etc) and visual art (Henri Matisse), she builds a model of “the felt experience” that takes place when we encounter something beautiful. Though beauty can leave us standing still and speechless, Scarry shows that beauty is a generative encounter between our minds and the material world. Key to the generative nature of beauty are two elements in tension:

1) When we perceive something as beautiful, we know it to be so. This clarity, and the pleasure of that clarity, teaches us what it is like to know the truth.

2) But in trying to search for words and precedents to explain the beauty we see, or to explain why we haven’t previously perceived it as beautiful (or why we once perceived it as beautiful and now do not), we also come face to face with our capacity for error. Realizing, as Scarry does, that a palm tree is actually beautiful invites the question of, why did I not know it was beautiful before?

This tension between knowing what truth should be, and also knowing that we do not possess it—is what drives us to seek out education.

The web of terms and concepts that Scarry builds here is watertight. I was diagramming as I read, something I never did in graduate school, and probably should have.

I’ve written before about how I long for truth. Scarry’s model helps me understand why. I trained as a historian, and historians are animated by a similar tension: the knowledge that the archive is filled with silences that prevent us from completely knowing the past, and the hope that we can correct those silences regardless. When I was researching my dissertation, which was now six years ago (!), I was obsessive about reconstructing the world of my historical subjects. I scrolled through reels of microfilm and requested countless files from the National Archives to corroborate the smallest of details. Over and over I encountered manuscripts that showed me where and how my understanding of the past was in fact erroneous. Each pushed me to seek out more details and comb through more files, giving myself over and over to this world of the past, which I found beautiful in its alien strangeness. I was exhausted—but finding the answers, as I sometimes did, was an exquisite and unparalleled pleasure.

Why does beauty matter?

In the second half of the book, “On Beauty and Being Fair,” Scarry argues that beauty’s core qualities—its distributive nature and the reciprocity of exchange—prepare us to appreciate and work towards justice.

To make this argument she must first rescue beauty from two contradictory and “incoherent” criticisms, which are:

1) Beauty distracts us from “the work of addressing injustice“—when our attention is taken up with some beautiful object, then we don’t bring our attention to injustices that need our help.

2) The attention we pay to beautiful objects (and particularly people) harms the people we are looking at.

These beliefs point to unresolved ambivalence about attention itself. Either attention is a net positive, so those who do not receive it are harmed, or attention is a net negative, and those who do receive it are harmed.

But beauty, Scarry argues, “is an invitation to ethical fairness,” not disregard. First, it prepares us for redistributive acts. Encountering something beautiful is an exchange with something that, in the moment of our perceiving it, both comes alive and makes us come alive. This reciprocity, this moment of recognizing “the equality of aliveness,” is what we are compelled to distribute when we encounter something beautiful.

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….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.

Second, beauty teaches us what we are working towards. Scarry notes the analogy between aesthetic beauty as a function of symmetry and proportion, and fairness as “a symmetry of everyone’s relation to one another.” But she takes the argument a step further by instead arguing that the two are linked causally. In the absence of justice systems that encode fairness into our daily lives, then the symmetry, fairness, and proportion already present in the world, show us what we must build.

We can perceive that ongoing work is actively carried out by the locus of aspiration: the evening skies, the dawn chorus of roosters and mourning doves, the wild rose that, with the sweet pea, uses even prison walls to climb on...  For the symmetry, equality, and self-sameness of the sky are present to the senses, whereas the symmetry, equality, and self-sameness of the just social arrangements are not.

Even if we do have those systems, we can’t comprehend them in a material sense; we can’t see or touch a justice system. But occasionally, in an illustration or a speech or an artifact, that immaterial social contract “comes to be compressed down into a small enough space to be directly available to sensory perception.”

And third, beauty gives us the ability to create justice, to create those symmetrical relationships and arrangements between ourselves and others. Earlier in the text Scarry wrote that beauty generates creative acts—“one acts to protect or perpetuate a fragment of beauty already in the world or to supplement it by bringing into being a new object.” Justice, too, is a creative act. We have to either protect the just social arrangements we have, or create new ones where they do not exist. Beauty “leaves us prepared to undergo [this] giant labor.”

Bonus: replication

I didn't bring my notebook to Butchart Gardens (too small a purse) but I knew I wanted to draw. I've been slowly trying to create a visual art practice, so when I got home, I spent an evening replicating this view:

My final result is not Good, certainly not Beautiful, but as a record of my encounter with beauty - not bad, either. I had fun drawing it.

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