Reading 5

In this reading titled “On Beauty and Being Just” author Elaine Scarry discusses the ways in which beauty exists in the world, and how we come to recognize and admire it. She notes that there are political complaints about beauty, but that they are unjust. The two political critiques of beauty are that one, beauty distracts from wrong social arrangements, which makes us indifferent to it, and two, that when we attend to something and regard it as beautiful, we destroy it. She notes that these two complaints are easy to discredit because they are fundamentally contradictory to each other. The main argument that Scarry makes is that beauty “far from contributing to social injustice in either of the two ways it stands accused…actually assists us in the work of addressing injustice.”

Scarry states that we are able to make beauty as we wish, and that “People seem to wish there to be beauty even when their own self-interest is not served by it”, that we need beautiful object in the world, even if the object itself does not contribute to our own happiness directly. Another interesting point that she makes is the idea that beautiful objects are placed throughout the world “to serve as small wake-up calls to perception.” Beautiful objects and people wake up our attention, and we cannot help but focus our attention to this perception.