"With exemplary clarity, Elaine Scarry argues that admiring the beautiful is nothing to be ashamed of; that on the contrary beauty fosters the spirit of justice. A brave and timely book."--J.M.Coetzee

"Here is a writer almost magically summoning up the world through words and ideas, in a new way, and so guiding the reader, lovingly, to receive the treasures and accept the pleasures of this book as naturally as breathing. Here is a book so measured in words and yet so exciting in ideas, a book that explains the world, even as it is explaining itself. This writer, Elaine Scarry, always leading us to consider justice, has given us a book that is beautiful and inspiring to such a degree that after truly reading it, the reader cannot help but be changed."--Jamaica Kincaid

"Among a restorer's solvents, imagine one so marvelous that what it repaired, what it returned to sparkling freshness, was not some beautiful object, but our damaged perception of Beauty itself. Elaine Scarry's imagination works just this wonder: potent enough to dissolve our every grimy resentment, yet so delicate that in Beauty's renewed radiance we discern, long invisible, the subtle outline of an ethics."--D. A. Miller, Columbia University

On Beauty AND BEING JUST

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

PART ONE

On Beauty andBeing Wrong

What is the felt experience of cognition at the momentone stands in the presence of a beautiful boyor flower or bird? It seems to incite, even to require,the act of replication. Wittgenstein says that whenthe eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants todraw it.

Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makesus draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it toother people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replicationand other times to resemblances and still othertimes to things whose connection to the original siteof inspiration is unrecognizable. A beautiful facedrawn by Verrocchio suddenly glides into the perceptualfield of a young boy named Leonardo. Theboy copies the face, then copies the face again. Thenagain and again and again. He does the same thingwhen a beautiful living plant—a violet, a wildrose—glides into his field of vision, or a living face:he makes a first copy, a second copy, a third, afourth, a fifth. He draws it over and over, just asPater (who tells us all this about Leonardo) replicates—now in sentences—Leonardo's acts, so thatthe essay reenacts its subject, becoming a sequence offaces: an angel, a Medusa, a woman and child, a Madonna,John the Baptist, St. Anne, La Gioconda. Beforelong the means are found to replicate, thousandsof times over, both the sentences and the faces, sothat traces of Pater's paragraphs and Leonardo'sdrawings inhabit all the pockets of the world (aspieces of them float in the paragraph now beforeyou).

A visual event may reproduce itself in the realm oftouch (as when the seen face incites an ache of longingin the hand, and the hand then presses pencil topaper), which may in turn then reappear in a secondvisual event, the finished drawing. This crisscrossingof the senses may happen in any direction. Wittgensteinspeaks not only about beautiful visual eventsprompting motions in the hand but, elsewhere,about heard music that later prompts a ghostly sub-anatomicalevent in his teeth and gums. So, too, anact of touch may reproduce itself as an acousticalevent or even an abstract idea, the way whenever Augustinetouches something smooth, he begins tothink of music and of God.

Beauty Prompts a Copy of Itself

The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato'sSymposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begettingof children: when the eye sees someone beautiful,the whole body wants to reproduce the person.But it also—as Diotima tells Socrates—prompts thebegetting of poems and laws, the works of Homer,Hesiod, and Lycurgus. The poem and the law maythen prompt descriptions of themselves—literaryand legal commentaries—that seek to make thebeauty of the prior thing more evident, to make, inother words, the poem's or law's "clear discernibility"even more "clearly discernible." Thus the beautyof Beatrice in La vita nuova requires of Dante the writingof a sonnet, and the writing of that one sonnetprompts the writing of another: "After completingthis last sonnet I was moved by a desire to writemore poetry." The sonnets, in turn, place on Dantea new pressure, for as soon as his ear hears what hehas made in meter, his hand wants to draw a sketchof it in prose: "This sonnet is divided into two parts..."; "This sonnet is divided into four parts...."

This phenomenon of unceasing begetting sponsorsin people like Plato, Aquinas, Dante the idea ofeternity, the perpetual duplicating of a moment thatnever stops. But it also sponsors the idea of terrestrialplenitude and distribution, the will to make "moreand more" so that there will eventually be "enough."Although very great cultural outcomes such as theIliad or the Mona Lisa or the idea of distribution ariseout of the requirement beauty places on us to replicate,the simplest manifestation of the phenomenonis the everyday fact of staring. The first flash of thebird incites the desire to duplicate not by translatingthe glimpsed image into a drawing or a poem or aphotograph but simply by continuing to see herfive seconds, twenty-five seconds, forty-five secondslater—as long as the bird is there to be beheld. Peoplefollow the paths of migrating birds, movingstrangers, and lost manuscripts, trying to keep thething sensorily present to them. Pater tells us thatLeonardo, as though half-crazed, used to followpeople around the streets of Florence once he got"glimpses of it [beauty] in the strange eyes or hair ofchance people." Sometimes he persisted until sundown.This replication in the realm of sensation canbe carried out by a single perceiver across time (oneperson staring at a face or listening to the unceasingsong of a mockingbird) or can instead entail a briefact of perception distributed across many people.When Leonardo drew a cartoon of St. Anne, for"two days a crowd of people of all qualities passedin naive excitement through the chamber where ithung." This impulse toward a distribution acrossperceivers is, as both museums and postcards verify,the most common response to beauty: "Addis is fullof blossoms. Wish you were here." "The nightingalesang again last night. Come here as soon as you can."

Beauty is sometimes disparaged on the groundthat it causes a contagion of imitation, as when alegion of people begin to style themselves after aparticular movie starlet, but this is just an imperfectversion of a deeply beneficent momentum towardreplication. Again beauty is sometimes disparagedbecause it gives rise to material cupidity and possessiveness;but here, too, we may come to feel we aresimply encountering an imperfect instance of anotherwise positive outcome. If someone wishes allthe Gallé vases of the world to sit on his own windowsills,it is just a miseducated version of the typicallygenerous-hearted impulse we see when Prouststares at the face of the girl serving milk at a trainstop:

I could not take my eyes from her face whichgrew larger as she approached, like a sun whichit was somehow possible to stare at andwhich was coming nearer and nearer, lettingitself be seen at close quarters, dazzling youwith its blaze of red and gold.

Proust wishes her to remain forever in his perceptualfield and will alter his own location to bring thatabout: "to go with her to the stream, to the cow, tothe train, to be always at her side."

This willingness continually to revise one's ownlocation in order to place oneself in the path ofbeauty is the basic impulse underlying education.One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) inorder to increase the chance that one will be lookingin the right direction when a comet makes its sweepthrough a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences,like Plato's dialogues, have at their center the driveto confer greater clarity on what already has cleardiscernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity onwhat originally has none. They are a key mechanismin what Diotima called begetting and what Tocquevillecalled distribution. By perpetuating beauty, institutionsof education help incite the will towardcontinual creation. Sometimes their institutionalgravity and awkwardness can seem tonally out ofregister with beauty, which, like a small bird, has anaura of fragility, as when Simone Weil in Waiting forGod writes:

The love of the beauty of the world ... involves... the love of all the truly preciousthings that bad fortune can destroy. The trulyprecious things are those forming laddersreaching toward the beauty of the world, openingsonto it.

But Weil's list of precious things, openings into theworld, begins not with a flight of a bird but witheducation: "Numbered among them are the pure andauthentic achievements of art and sciences." Tomisstate, or even merely understate, the relation ofthe universities to beauty is one kind of error thatcan be made. A university is among the preciousthings that can be destroyed.

Errors in Beauty:Attributes Evenly and Unevenly Presentacross Beautiful Things

The author of the Greater Hippias, widely believed tohave been Plato, points out that while we know withrelative ease what a beautiful horse or a beautifulman or possibly even a beautiful pot is (this last oneis a matter of some dispute in the dialogue), it ismuch more difficult to say what "Beauty" unattachedto any object is. At no point will there beany aspiration to speak in these pages of unattachedBeauty, or of the attributes of unattached Beauty. Butthere are attributes that are, without exception,present across different objects (faces, flowers, birdsongs,men, horses, pots, and poems), one of whichis this impulse toward begetting. It is impossible toconceive of a beautiful thing that does not have thisattribute. The homely word "replication" has beenused here because it reminds us that the benign impulsetoward creation results not just in famouspaintings but in everyday acts of staring; it also remindsus that the generative object continues, insome sense, to be present in the newly begotten object.It may be startling to speak of the Divine Comedyor the Mona Lisa as "a replication" since they are sounprecedented, but the word recalls the fact thatsomething, or someone, gave rise to their creationand remains silently present in the newborn object.

In the case just looked at, then, the attribute wasone common across all sites, and the error, when itbriefly arose, involved seeing an imperfect version ofthe attribute (imitation of starlets or, more seriously,material greed) and correctly spotting the associationwith beauty, but failing to recognize the thousandsof good outcomes of which this is a deterioratedversion. Rejecting the imperfect version of thephenomenon of begetting makes sense; what doesnot make sense is rejecting the general impulse towardbegetting, or rejecting the beautiful things forgiving rise to false, as well as true, versions of begetting.To disparage beauty for the sake not of one ofits attributes but simply for a misguided version ofone of its otherwise beneficent attributes is a commonerror made about beauty.

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

Errors within Any One Site

It seems a strange feature of intellectual life that ifyou question people—"What is an instance of anintellectual error you have made in your life?"—noanswer seems to come readily to mind. Somewhatbetter luck is achieved if you ask people (friends,students) to describe an error they have made aboutbeauty. It may be helpful if, before proceeding, thereader stops and recalls—in as much detail as possible—an error he or she has made so that anotherinstance can be placed on the page in conjunctionwith the few about to be described. It may be usefulto record the error, or the revision, in as much detailas is possible because I want to make claims hereabout the way an error presents itself to the mind,and the accuracy of what I say needs alternative instancesto be tested against. The error may be a misunderstandingin the reading of Schiller's "NinthLetter" in his Aesthetic Education of Man, or amisreadingof page eleven in Kant's Third Critique. But the questionis 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 ofbeauty and then one day discovered I had made amistake.

* * *

Those who remember making an error about beautyusually also recall the exact second when they firstrealized they had made an error. The revisionary momentcomes as a perceptual slap or slam that itselfhas emphatic sensory properties. Emily Dickinson'spoem—

    It dropped so low—in my Regard—
    I heard it hit the Ground—

is an instance. A correction in perception takes placeas an abrasive crash. Though it has the sound ofbreaking plates, what is shattering loudly is the perceptionitself:

    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—

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

The same is true of Shakespeare's "Lilies that festersmell far worse than weeds." The correction, thealteration in the perception, is so palpable that it isas though the perception itself (rather than its object)lies rotting in the brain. In both cases, the perceptionhas undergone a radical alteration—it breaksapart (as in breaking plates) or disintegrates (as inthe festering flower); and in both cases, the alterationis announced by a striking sensory event, a loudsound, an awful smell. Even if the alteration in perceptionwere registered not as the sudden introductionof a negative sensation but as the disappearanceof the positive sensory attributes the thing had whenit was beautiful, the moment might be equally starkand highly etched. Gerard Manley Hopkins confidescalmly, cruelly, to someone he once loved that hislove has now almost disappeared. He offers as a finalclarifying analogy what happens when a poem, onceheld 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 moredevastating. But why? In part, because what is sopositive is here being taken away: sweet is a taste, asmell, a sound—the word, of all words, closest to thefresh and easy call of a bird; and conveying a belovedness,an acuity of regard, as effortless and unaskedforas honeysuckle or sweet william. Fading(one might hope) could conceivably take place as amerciful numbing, a dulling, of perception, or aturning away to other objects of attention. But theshades of fading here take place under the scrutiny ofbright consciousness, the mind registering in technicoloreach successive nuance of its own bereavement.Hopkins's boy, with full acuity, leans into, poresupon, the lesson and the lessening.

Those who recall making an error in beauty inevitablydescribe one of two genres of mistake. Thefirst, as in the lines by Dickinson, Shakespeare, andHopkins, is the recognition that something formerlyheld to be beautiful no longer deserves to be so regarded.The second is the sudden recognition thatsomething from which the attribution of beauty hadbeen withheld deserved all along to be so denominated.Of these two genres of error, the second seemsmore grave: in the first (the error of overcrediting),the mistake occurs on the side of perceptual generosity,in the second (the error of undercrediting) onthe side of a failed generosity. Doubting the severityof the first genre of error does not entail calling intoquestion the pain the person feels in discovering hermistake: she has lost the beautiful object in the sameway as if it had remained beautiful but had suddenlymoved out of her reach, leaving her stranded, betrayed;in actuality, the faithful object has remainedwithin reach but with the subtraction of all attributesthat would ignite the desire to lay hold of it. Byeither path the desirable object has vanished, leavingthe brain bereft.

The uncompromising way in which errors inbeauty make themselves felt is equally visible in thesecond, more severe genre of intellectual error, wheresomething not regarded as beautiful suddenly alertsyou to your error. A better description of the momentof instruction might be to say—"Somethingyou did not hold to be beautiful suddenly turns upin your arms arrayed in full beauty"—because theforce and pressure of the revision is exactly as thoughit is happening one-quarter inch from your eyes. Onelets things into one's midst without accurately calculatingthe degree of consciousness required by them.It is as though, when you were about to walk outonto a ledge, you had contracted to carry something,and only once out on the precipice did you realizethat the object weighed one hundred pounds.

How one walks through the world, the endlesssmall adjustments of balance, is affected by the shiftingweights of beautiful things. Here the alternativesposed a moment ago about the first genre of error—where the beautiful object vanished, not because thestill-beloved object itself disappeared carrying itsbeauty with it, but because the object stayed behindwith its beauty newly gone—are reversed. In the secondgenre of error a beautiful object is suddenlypresent, not because a new object has entered thesensory horizon bringing its beauty with it (as whena new poem is written or a new student arrives or awillow tree, unleafed by winter, becomes electric—amaze of yellow wands lifting against lavender clapboardsand skies) but because an object, alreadywithin the horizon, has its beauty, like late luggage,suddenly placed in your hands. This second genre oferror entails neither the arrival of a new beautifulobject, nor an object present but previously unnoticed,but an object present and confidently repudiatedas an object of beauty.

(Continues...)
(Continues...)Excerpted from On Beauty AND BEING JUST by ELAINE SCARRY. Copyright © 1999 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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