Customer Reviews

On Beauty and Being Just.

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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!

... the great pleasure of this book comes from absorbing its overall effect rather than its component points. Scarry's specific arguments can be incomplete at crucial moments, but the author scatters sparkles that do not stop glittering when one puts the book down. Her enchanting enthusiasm for beauty of all kinds is (to use a less than beautiful word) infectious. The central argument of the book -- that beauty spurs the reproduction and perpetuation of itself -- is mirrored in the way "On Beauty and Being Just" helps the reader see the world through Scarry's rose-colored eyes.

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.

You know it when you see it--but if you don't see it, you don't get it. Reactions to this book, like attitudes about its subject, tend to polarize according to right- and left-brained modes of perception. Either you like this very much, or you regard it as fluffy nonsense. I share the former view. Many aestheticians and critics are non-artists, who evidence little empathy with the motivation of artists. Elaine Scarry is an artist. It may take one to know one. Other artists will will get it--striking sharply with that visceral shock of recognition.

This is certainly an impassioned defence of beauty, and a 'feel-good' book, but it is so lacking in substance is barely counts as a contribution to the debate. It's incoherent at many levels, most notably concerning the switch from the accepted idea in part one that beauty is always particular, to the claims in part two that it is a function of certain qualities, especially symmetry. Asthetic symmetry promotes ethical justice? The idea of beauty as enlivening is also too simple. This is not good enough as a theory of the link between aesthetics and ethics. The account of the so called 'political complaints' against beauty is a set of caricatures. There is also a very weak accounts of Matisse, whose Nice paintings are regarded by Scarry as stand ins for real windows and real palm trees; some sense of what modernist art has done to the concept of beauty and why is needed here. There are many better books on the topic.

This book may change your entire outlook on beauty and justice. By reading authors such is Elaine Scarry, one began to truly understand history and roots of democracy and reasons for developments of the justice systems.Everybody should own copy of this book, this as a remarkable scholarly pursuit.

The reviewer below clearly has a problem with Scarry: after all, enough scathing articles have certainly been written about Peter Singer. The reviewer equally clearly has a problem with the English language, since Scarry's tiny book -- 8 oz., 5" by 7 1/2" -- is by no stretch of the imagination a "tome." Now, stretching the imagination is what "On Beauty" is all about -- how beauty can, among other things, inspire us to creation. Connect-the-dots logicians, quite naturally, will not approve, but they can't see the point for the dots. One may agree or disagree with Scarry's thesis, but wholesale dismissal of the kind below simply smacks of bad faith. Fitting that a book about beauty should so clearly expose the ugliest in its detractors.

Scarry doesn't quite get the job done. That's disappointing because I couldn't be more receptive or sympathetic to the case she is trying to make: namely that beauty seeks to replicate itself, and as such leads to absolute truth and the quest for justice. Since I already believe those things, she would not have had to do much to win me.

But, for me, that's the problem: she doesn't do much. Although deeply personal and obviously heartfelt, her case for beauty in Part One was not as strong as it could be. One might be better off going back to read the original inspirations behind her argument, Homer, Dante, and Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus.

Part two is no better. Scarry tries to defend the aesthetic movement (and case for beauty) from recent claims in humanities that there are no absolute truth and that the contemplation of beauty may actually be destructive. Again, I could hardly be more sympathetic to her cause, but she doesn't make a strong enough case. I think she argues against a straw man, and thus doesn't really face the true arguments behind such movements as historicism, deconstruction, egalitarianism.

My stars are just a guess, but I feel compelled to comment on the snitty quality of many of these reviews, and note the fact that those who are most generous toward this book are themselves creative writers.

It says something about the state of humanistic learning that such a book needs writing. Having taught literature for a number of years and had some interest in theory, I was still not ever smitten by the anti-beauty virus that seems to have caught on. Thinkers like Arendt, Heidegger, Gadamer and Wittgenstein invite us to think about beauty and move me in ways that the likes of Derrida (who will probably be consigned to some sort of dustbin and justifiably reviled for having infected literary study) can't. So I look forward to reading this text, even if, based on the excerpts, it seems an echo of thinkers like Kant on beauty. It strikes me that Scarry may be praised for reviving conversation about the aesthetic instead of regarding it as merely a figleaf covering a hidden agenda. One tires of the hermeneutics of suspicion which these days is mistaken for critical reading.