On Beauty and Being Just

Prior to reading Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, I never really thought about the arguments against beauty. I suppose it hadn't occurred to me that there are opponents of beauty or that beauty could create injustice, but Scarry's depiction of these arguments in her article helped me identify them within society. In either case, Scarry makes an excellent rebuttal to the political and nonpolitical arguments against beauty and makes the case that attention to beauty can, in fact, increase social justice.

One point that particularly interested me was Scarry's assertion that"beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level. Through its beauty, the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care; if we do not search it out, it comes and finds us." The beauty of a person or object not only draws our attention to the object, but increases our alertness to the rest of our surroundings. It can be inferred that this kind of perceptual care increases our care of the object in itself. Perhaps as observers to beauty, we are impelled to preserve it and to go to lengths to perpetuate it.

Scarry strengthens this point in the section titled Beauty assists us in our attention to justice. She provides three assertions for ways in which observers of beauty engage with it and espouse it. For one, observers of beauty often deliberately attempt to create beauty themselves. An example of this could be artists making beautiful art to interpret the world around them. Secondly, beholders of beauty may become internally beautiful in the act of observation. As beauty is largely accepted as a primarily external quality, this argument is somewhat dissatisfying. Scarry also suggests that by observing an object as beautiful, we instill it with lifelike qualities. For me, this point speaks most loudly to justice. She says that we often perceive objects as beautiful and treat them with the attentiveness that we would pay to a human. For instance, we protect the surfaces of paintings with fervor, memorize poems and struggle to familiarize ourselves with them, and dote upon art objects like friends or idols. This care seems to me to promote an attitude of justice and care for the objects; an attentiveness to their wellbeing. It doesn't seem like too far a stretch to me that this kind of attentiveness would translate to an attention to justice in other areas of life and society.