On Beauty and Being Just. (Paperback)

~ (Author) "WHAT IS THE felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird?..." (more)
Key Phrases: lateral disregard, clear discernibility, immortal realm, John Rawls, Seated Woman, Tart One (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Best known for her 1985 study of torture and physical pain, The Body in Pain, and for her much-publicized contention, first expressed in the New York Review of Books, that electromagnetic interference caused the crash of TWA Flight 800, Harvard English professor Scarry turns her critical lights on the question of how we transform literature into compelling mental imagery. Given that imagination is, by definition, less vivid than actual perception, she asks, why should a poem by Wordsworth, say, or a novel by Charlotte Bront?, bring the material world to life so palpably? Although Scarry bases her argument largely on close literary readings, her approach often recalls that of such Enlightenment philosophers as Descartes and Hume as she attempts to solve the riddle of how the mind works. Scarry is an original, interdisciplinary thinker. She writes like someone enraptured by both the natural worldAespecially flowersAand by language. Unfortunately, Scarry takes for granted that her reader is as obsessive a gardener as she. Is it really universally the case that "people seem to have long languorous conversations describing to each other the flower they most love that morning?" And is this observation a useful basis for a universal theory of the mind? In the long sections of the book devoted to the habits of a certain sparrow in Scarry's garden, or to charting every reference to vegetation in the works of Homer, Flaubert and Wordsworth, Scarry appears lost in her own lush imaginative world. (Oct.). FYI: In September, Princeton Univ. will publish Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just ($15.95 134p ISBN 0-691-04875-4), a pair of lectures intended to rescue the idea of beauty from academic neglect.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Scarry (English, Harvard Univ.), the author of the powerful and important The Body in Pain, has long been interested in ideas about creativity, imagination, and justice. In her groundbreaking earlier work, those themes were tied to the human experiences of pain and embodiment in strikingly original ways. In these two new works, she continues her explorations, using her formidable analytic talents to understand the function of the imagination in reading literature and to investigate the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, especially in contemporary academic discourse. In Dreaming by the Book, Scarry wonders how the best writing enables us to produce images and scenes in our minds that carry something of the force of reality. She deftly unfolds an answer by identifying and explicating several general principles and five formal practices by which authors invisibly command us to manipulate the objects of our imagination. While not everyone will be convinced by all of her conclusions, her analyses are always original and illuminating. The book is valuable not only for its insights but also for the pleasure of simply following Scarry through her explorations. Part 1 of the shorter On Beauty and Being Just is similarly engaging. Here, Scarry examines the experience of apprehending or misapprehending beauty in art, literature, or the world around us. But in the second half of the book, which builds to a claim about the relationship between beauty and justice, she casts her argument against an ill-defined set of "opponents of beauty" who are so generalized and obscure as to be straw men. Also, because of the reflective nature of her text (some of which was apparently presented in public lectures), she offers no citations or specific references to the individuals or philosophies she means to critique. The result is tiresome, misleading, and unfortunate, since the ideas she is exploring are important and provocative ones.AJulia Burch, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (November 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691089590
• ISBN-13: 978-0691089591
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #140,027 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Proposition Mysterious and Brave, April 23, 2006

By	Vince Leo (minneapolis, mn USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Though it's easy to critique Elaine Scarry's logic and the completeness of her argument, that would miss this book's true importance. As a matter of fact, what's important about On Beauty is that it stood in the face of 20 years of literary and aesthetic criticism, a howling wind into which Scarry makes a simple claim: that the appreciation of beauty presses us toward justice and not away from it. In its simplicity, Scarry's proposition is as brilliant and unprovable now as it was then. But propositions are not the truth; they stake a claim to right action, and Scarry's courageous stand has liberated artists and writers to pursue right action as it resonates with what their eyes and ears hold to be a good and true beyond logic. Scarry uses arguments and descriptions from fellow travellers as various as Homer, Simone Weil. and John Rawls. It's a tour de force ending with a vision of the trireme as the birthplace of athenian democratic values. The logic that connects that vision to the political possibiities immanent in the visual world are as profound and mysterious as any attempt to defend beauty could ever be. Somehow, Scarry manages exactly what she claims for beauty: pressing us toward the good without suspending our desire for all things pleasurable.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Why Beauty goes deeper than you may like to think, February 7, 2005

By	N. Kiser "NGK" (Gull Lake, MI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Elaine Scarry presents a beautiful, thought-provoking and in the end, not altogether convincing (but still convincing nonetheless) that beauty is connected to justice, and shouldn't be tossed out of academic circles in the name of political correctedness.

Scarry approaches the subject of beauty and the nature of beauty by first telling the world where people go wrong when it comes to aesthetics. She gets personal, yes, but she remains philosophically on the mark as long as the reader is willing to stay focussed on the central point of her entire book. Beauty is not some silly thing we humans should discard and treat as unimportant or not valuable. On the contrary, beauty is something that tells us much about ourselves and the world in which we live in so it cannot be ignored any longer! Kudos to Scarry for bringing it back into the discussion limelight.

However, having said this, my only problem philosophically with the book was the way Scarry attempted to tell readers how the idea of justice is something ingrained within human beings and found consciously in human nature yet, the idea of beauty is not. She is not equating the two as the same, yes, but she is equating the two as being interdependent and so it seemed peculiar to me that she would make such a strong case for the root of justice and act as though beauty is some autonomous thing out there by itself. A sense of justice and a sense to experience and see and seek out beauty are both things we humans possess. It's in our nature and I wish Scarry would've made that a little more clearer to the readers. If she would've done that, her argument would've been so much stronger.

Let the aesthetic discussion thrive on!

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A gorgeous rehabilitation of an neglected philosophical idea, October 9, 1999

By	Kurt Jensen ([e-mail]) (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On Beauty and Being Just. (Hardcover)

Scarry is to philosophy what James Woods is to criticism: a robustly poetic thinker. Her ambition is to talk about ways our experiences of beauty mingle with those of fairness, and when she contemplates her own experiences of these things, she is entirely original and provocative. The larger philosophical ideas within it are easy to argue with--but that is always the way with original claims briefly stated, as are these. Highlight: her discusson of Cezanne's palm trees is an exquisite rendering of an aesthetic inspiration--Cezanne's, hers, those in the paintings and those in the world.