Bonito Living

Elaine Scarry. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton University Press. 1999

By Beatriz Acevedo 

Elaine Scarry takes on a banished, almost forbidden topic: beauty. Exiled from humanities and political discussions, beauty is either too superficial, or too abstract and irrelevant. However, as the author demonstrates in this book, beauty is essential for human life: it is life-saving, it is at the root of our ways of learning and education; and it can be a way to start thinking about social and economic justice.

The author clarifies that beauty needs to be understood in relation to things, feelings, people or landscapes, as it is difficult to talk about “beauty” in general. She also questions why beauty was banished from the original triad of beauty, truth and goodness. The book is based on a series of lectures as a Professor of Aesthetics at Harvard University, and it is divided in two parts:

In the first part, she interrogates our experience of beauty. She asks the readers (and the students): “when was the last time that you failed in relation to beauty?”. This is to think whether you thought something beautiful to find out later that it was not. Or, when did you exclude something as not beautiful only to realise how beautiful it can be. She talks about her experience with a “palm tree”. She thought the palm was just another tree, rather insignificant when you compare it with oaks or cedars. But one day she looked closer and realised how beautiful a palm tree really is. She began to wonder, why did she exclude it from her list of beautiful things? Is this about ideals of beauty linked to a political, racial or social agenda? Questions about human beauty and exclusion are subtly suggested here, which also resonates with what we consider beautiful or not -or politically viable or not-  in our contemporary society.   

Following this, the author identifies four properties of beauty: first, beauty is sacred, it belongs to the realm of divinity, of goodness, of our quest for perfection; second, beauty is unprecedented, in the sense that it is a novel experience for the subject; thirdly, beauty is life-saving; and finally, beauty incites deliberation.  

In the second part, the author responds to the political arguments against beauty. For example, beauty is accused of being a distractor from urgent social and political problems. This has a moral coda, implying that beauty as a pleasurable activity is morally bad. The author’s argument is that beauty, far from contributing to social injustice by distracting or remaining neutral to injustice, “actually assist us in the work of addressing injustice, not only by requiring of us constant perceptual acuity -high dives of seeing, hearing, touching, but by more directs forms of instruction and action.” (p. 62)

Beauty has an etymological relationship with words like “fair” or “just”. Something can be fair, therefore it is beautiful. This takes us to the original perception of beauty from the Greek philosophy and highlighted in Tomas of Aquina view of the triad of goodness, truth and beauty. She goes on claiming that “the aspiration to political, social, and economic equality has already entered the world in the beauty loving treatises of the classical and Christian periods, as has the readiness to recognise it as beautiful if and when it should arrive in the world.” (p.99) 

The author locates the break in the  bifurcation between beauty and the sublime in the Eighteenth Century discussions of Burke’s and Kant. Beauty was held captive  in the gendered aspects of the feminine, while the sublime, in the new area of aesthetics, represents the masculine, in the majestic image of nature and men. She says:  “the sublime (an aesthetic of power) rejects beauty on the grounds that it is diminutive, dismissible, not powerful enough. The political rejects beauty on the grounds that it is too powerful, a power expressed both in its ability to visit harm on objects looked at and also in its capacity to so overwhelm our attention that we cannot free our eyes from it long enough to look at injustice. Berated for its power, beauty is simultaneously belittled for its powerlessness.” (p.85)

Although the artificial division of aesthetics in philosophy which separates beauty from ethics has remained in its consideration, it is worth to note that modern philosophers like Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil have reignited the link between fairness, solidarity and beauty. Beauty, according to Weil, requires us “to give up our imaginary positions as the centre. .. a transformation that takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions” (Weil, S. “Love of the Other World”, in Writing for God, p. 159), hence, preparing us to look at the Other in fairness and equality. 

The author suggests understanding “fairness” as an ethical principle, applied not only to beauty but social arrangements. Even more, if beauty is related with symmetry and balance, it leads to think about John Rawls idea of fairness as a “symmetry in everyone’s relations to each other.” Taking this idea further, the author recalls the writings of Amartya Sen to state that: “beautiful things give rise to the notion of distribution, to a life saving reciprocity to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense of an economic fairness, social justice and the desire for political transformations that bring in such beauty and fairness.”

This is a very well thought argument about the role of beauty in social justice, and the author skillfully proposes a dialogue between the original considerations of beauty and modern philosophy. For her, the relevance of beauty connects with the notions of fairness and indeed, the possibility of wanting to have a beautiful, fair, peaceful, sustainable world. Is this too silly to ask?  I think not!