Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just | Review by Catherine Enwright

Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just. Fifth printing, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 134pp.

“Beautiful things always carry greetings from other worlds within them.” (47)

Beauty, according to Elaine Scarry, “incites deliberation” (28). Therefore, in reflecting over On Beauty and Being Just, I wish to be deliberate in expressing why I cherish this beautiful book and to be clear in describing what it may offer to others.

To start from the outside and enter in, Scarry’s book is a delight of visual and formal symmetry. The Princeton University Press edition is small and compact, with a cover adorned by ornithologist Gilbert Pearson’s meticulous illustration Eggs of American Birds, in which a pale rainbow of five rows of five eggs are delicately portrayed, arranged in a perfect grid, gently glowing against a tan background. A visual meditation on particular beauty and collective aesthetic harmony, the array of eggs on the cover is not just charming to look at, but also a carefully framed image of new life, which introduces and recapitulates Scarry’s first and defining attribute of beauty: beauty prompts the desire for its own replication. Beauty begets.

Scarry goes further; beauty “brings copies of itself into being” but does not fashion facsimiles. Instead, each new perception of beauty, each begetting, is particular and utterly unique. The eggs on the cover are all eggs, but each is individually marked, of a different size then the others, having a slightly different shade, etc. So for each instance of beauty. Scarry writes, “The beautiful thing seems–is–incomparable, unprecedented; and that sense of being without precedent conveys a sense of the “newness” or “newbornness” of the entire world.” (22). For Scarry, the experience of perceiving beauty is frame-breaking, like the hatching of an egg. The instant of perceiving beauty is both a moment of particular renewal, the recognition of beauty within a unique object or person, and also a reawakening of a universal and “inexhaustible” desire for beauty (50).

Beauty, then, is an aspirational relationship, which mutually affirms the life of the beheld and of the beholder.

Scarry is a consummately clear writer, able to state strong conclusions about abstract subject matter with neither defensiveness nor dogmatism. Despite the strength of her prose, one reads her theses as descriptions rather than arguments because her writing is meditative and literary, drawing from visual art, literature, and philosophy. On Beauty and Being Just is not an exegesis but a closely observed phenomenological reflection on perceiving beauty, more akin to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead than a dense work of aesthetic philosophy.

The text itself is symmetrical, divided into two roughly equal parts: “On Beauty and Being Wrong” and “On Beauty and Being Fair”. The first part deals with accurately describing the experience of perceiving beauty and unpacking the implications of that experience. Scarry writes that the recognition of beauty, in its clarity and immediacy, “acquaints us with the mental event of conviction” (31). The corollary effects of that experience of conviction are pleasure in our “introduction to the state of certainty” (31), “a search for a precedent”, or source for beauty, so that our desire for beauty can be dependably satiated, and, remarkably, the simultaneous recognition of “our own capacity for making errors” (31). Beauty, then, is not simply a pleasing visual arrangement but a perceptual event that spurs our deepest desires for clarity, conviction and integration- which is why, Scarry says, one feels that beautiful things hold a promise beyond themselves, some intimation of how things ought to be, a promise of a graspable and pleasing clarity.

Thus, elegantly, through meditations on the light that filters through Matisse paintings and the leaves of palm trees, Scarry brings the desire for beauty into its historically analogous relation to the desire for truth: as twin aspirations for a state of certainty, of integration, in which we evade our propensity for error and misrecognition. Beauty “creates, without itself fulfilling, the aspiration for enduring certitude” (52). Beauty’s provocation towards truth, its glimpses of another world, undergird the project of education. In Scarry’s words, “This willingness to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education” (7). The desire to stare at a beautiful person is continuous with the desire to pursue knowledge: both reflect an interior drive for a place of conviction and integration; a place of rest.

At once light and profound, On Beauty and Being Just considers beauty as “a call” to moral imagination, in which the root of our eros, our desire to pursue beauty, is our desire for caritas, for a true caring that notices and perpetuates the beauty of all life.

The second section, “On Beauty and Being Fair” takes up the relationship between beauty and justice as a transition from eros to caritas. Beginning with an examination of the pitfalls of eros and the attendant suspicion undeservedly thrown on beauty, Scarry then embarks on an argument that beauty leads towards caritas based on two core attributes: that beauty prompts the desire for its own protection, and that beauty prompts the desire for its own distribution. These hallmarks of beauty lead to Scarry’s remarkable definition of the concept:

“Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being…and the perceiver. As the beautiful being confers on the perceiver the gift of life, so the perceiver confers on the beautiful being the gift of life. Each “welcomes”' the other: each–to return to the word’s original meaning – “comes in accordance with [the] other’s will” (90).

Beauty, then, is an aspirational relationship, which mutually affirms the life of the beheld and of the beholder. From this splendid definition, Scarry leads the reader through its implications: the pull of the pact of beauty towards peace, the moral pleasure of being adjacent and decentered in beholding beauty, and the relationship between three methods of creating beauty and three methods of establishing justice. The section ends with a reflection on people’s desire that other people should have beauty “even when their own self-interest is not served by it” (123). At once light and profound, On Beauty and Being Just considers beauty as “a call” to moral imagination, in which the root of our eros, our desire to pursue beauty, is our desire for caritas, for a true caring that notices and perpetuates the beauty of all life.

Any book with such stakes is likely worth investigating but On Beauty and Being Just is notable for its simplicity, its symmetry, and its exquisite clarity. Scarry has a rare gift for illumination, the ability to both embellish and clarify deep philosophical concerns in a way that brings pleasure, is straightforward, and provokes both the intellect and the imagination. Her writing has both gravity and grace, to borrow from Simone Weil, one of Scarry’s beacons of justice, and On Beauty and Being Just deserves more than one careful reading.

Catherine Enwright, Boston College.