Name: On Beauty and Being Just
ISBN: 9780691089591

Elaine Scarry

Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch, as well as her own experiences, Scarry writes an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms. 7 line illustrations.

On Beauty and Being Just

Xiang

When aesthetic fairness and ethical fairness are both present to perception, their shared commitment to equality can be seen as merely an analogy, for it may truly be said that when both terms of analogy are present, the analogy is inert. It asks nothing more of us than that we occasionally notice it. But when one term ceases to be visible (either because it is not present, or because it is present but dispersed beyond our sensory field), then the analogy ceases to be inert: the term that is present becomes pressing, active, insistent, calling out for, directing our attention toward, what is absent. I describe this, focusing on touch, as a weight or lever, but ancient and medieval philosophers always referred to it acoustically: beauty is a call. 

Elaine Scarry builds an argument for beauty in two parts — a negative defence against detractors who claim beauty distracts from what is actually important or destroys the object of beauty, and a positive argument that beauty leads us to justice. Scarry presents the incoherence of the objections to beauty (does the gaze destroy, or is it valuable?) and talks about varying objects of beauty (gardens, gods, poems, persons). I love how she draws on various sources of both beauty and justice, from Keat’s poems, Odysseus meeting Nausicaa, the composition of Matisse’s paintings, Plato, Simone Weil, Rawls, and Iris Murdoch. Persuasive philosophical argumentation and beautiful writing too, as expected from a philosopher of aesthetics.  

Elena Kuran

In law school I've been thinking about how beauty fits into the life of a lawyer (drab..) and this book captures something so nicely; seeing something beautiful out in the world ignites the desire for truth and moves us to correct errors