Apologizing for Esthetics

...Nevertheless, Scarry fails to acknowledge that contemplating beauty is as likely to direct one's thoughts to hierarchies of value as it is to promote social equality...

...Not according to Homer, whom she quotes adoringly earlier in the book, or to Shakespeare, or, for that matter, to Akira Kurosawa...

...Only by accepting a rigidly essentialist view—that one set of criteria defines beauty under any circumstances—can Scarry claim these are "errors of beauty...

...Nor does Scarry succeed in establishing such a link, though she tries, frequently by erecting faulty syllogisms: "The two distinguishable forms of creating beauty—perpetuating beauty that already exists...

...Rather, she argues, they are debased versions of the positive urge to replicate or create beauty that moved, say, Dante...

...That sort of weak progression might fly in front of a group of undergraduates— and I shudder to think it does—but ultimately it fails to establish a substantive connection between democracy as a fair deal and "fair" as an adjective describing beauty...

...One of Scarry's most aggravating tactics is her insistence on politicizing her subject even while supposedly defending it from "political critiques...

...Of course, Kant's writing on beauty in his Critique of Judgment is similarly jargonladen, but the comeliness of his logic is a redeeming quality...

...I can only assume she decided to wed beauty to justice because she sees herself as replying to political attacks on it from within the academy...

...In "On Beauty and Being Wrong," the first of the two essays that make up this thin volume, Scarry attempts to bolster her argument by showing how just as we often respond inadequately to the beautiful, we are often wrong about whether something is beautiful...

...Attempts to do so inevitably result in dry, cold dissections, making it seem a pointless way to approach something that once prompted laughter...

...The second Scarry essay begins with a section title stating, "The Political Arguments against Beauty Are Incoherent...

...Why is it that academics so frequently believe "radical" is the only vague intensifier available to them...

...Sad to say, Scarry's effort proves only that beauty needs defending from her...

...originating beauty that does not yet exist—have equivalents within the realm of justice, as one can hear in John Rawls' formulation of what, since the time of Socrates, has been known as the 'duty to justice' argument: We have a duty, says Rawls,'to support'just arrangements where they already exist and to help them into being where they are not yet established...

...We tend to make two kinds of mistakes, she maintains...

...Scarry's cause is not furthered by her language...

...Most humanities scholars probably think beauty is as retrograde as G. E. Moore...

...Simply labeling ways of creating beauty and justice with the same terms is not proof of their having anything to do with each other...

...Apparently she felt the easiest method would be to demonstrate that what is being critiqued as unjust is in fact just...

...Scarry asserts that "Beauty is pacific...

...Then, in a tendentious attempt to link equality with beauty, she indulges in a short etymological excursion: "Here again the meaning of 'fair' in the sense of loveliness of countenance and 'fair' in the sense of distribution converge: for the root 'fegen' means not just 'to sweep' but also 'to strike' or 'to beat,' actions that appear to be connected to the sweeping or striking motion of the oars...

...They knew, however, that the very least one must bring to the topic is a prose style that does it no injury...

...It serves only to prove how poorly the associative sleight-of-hand much loved by recent literary theorists and critics fares in the realm of logical disputation...

...They are indeed incoherent as presented by Scarry, who tells us: "The political critique of beauty is composed of two distinct arguments...

...The second is the sudden recognition that something from which the attribution of beauty had been withheld deserved all along to be so denominated...

...As a rightthinking baby boomer, she desperately wants to show that beauty leads to social equality...

...According to her, its discussion and vocabulary have "been banished or driven underground in the humanities for the last two decades," hence the need for a vigorous defense...

...Much the same can be said of examining beauty: What lives as a specific object or spectacle of intense esthetic pleasure dies as an intellectualized abstraction...

...Defending beauty from ignorance is an admirable pursuit...

...Taste has always been absent from academic discussions, and Scarry believes it has no proper role in her disquisition...

...She is given to using such phrases as "the original site of inspiration' or "the site of persons," and clichés like "the aura of radical vulnerability" or "radical decentering...

...This sounds correct...

...Certainly beauty, and esthetics in general, have an ethical component: Any discussion of whatisbeauti fill involves making choices, deciding why one prefers Goya's satirical etchings, for example, over his court portraiture...

...She merely sets up straw men as targets for her arrows in seeking to demonstrate why responses to beauty that dismay its detractors, such as the superficial imitation of certain movie stars by teenagers, are not proof of beauty's negative effect...

...Yet Scarry's defense is strangely lacking in context and involved in what seem to be peripheral issues...

...Augustine she approvingly finds "a conviction that equality is the heart of beauty...

...She never once identifies exactly who has attacked beauty: she cites no articles or books that have denigrated it...

...Getting herself deeper into a bizarre political quagmire...

...But the important point here is that in choosing to dispute beauty's most simplistic (albeit still faceless) opponents, the author gets precisely what she wants: a one-sided shouting match...

...One "is the recognition that something formerly held to be beautiful no longer deserves to be so regarded...

...Elaine Scarry, a professor of English at Harvard University, has written an apology for beauty...

...The notion is contradicted by the example of numerous 17th-century absolutist princes, who sponsored some of the world's most astonishingly beautiful art and architecture, but who had little use for the idea of equality...

...She goes on to erroneously charge that the two arguments contradict each other...

...Perhaps her taste runs only to a safe, New Age beauty, without conflict or strife...

...In response to beauty's academic banishment, Scarry proposes to show how it leads to justice...

...In St...

...She so defaces her subject that, by the end of her short book, I felt inclined to argue for benign neglect...

...Reviewed by Daniel Kunitz Managing editor, "The Paris Review" It is a truism among comedians and comedy writers that people know what is funny, but it is virtually impossible for anyone to analyze humor...

...all of them glory in the beauty of war...

...beauty always involves us in questions of preference, reverence and rank...

...Surely they are actually evidence of changing tastes...

...The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object...

...True, Edmund Burke, Walter Pater and George Santayana all wrote acutely about beauty...

...Yet that does not mean beauty and justice are inextricably linked...

...Until she provides a fuller explanation of the debate surrounding her subj ect, though, we won't know if hers is a real disagreement with detractors or simply a convenient rhetorical platform for airing her views...

...For instance, at one point she explains how some classicists believe that "out of the spectacle of the trireme ship, Athenian democracy was bom" She constructs a convincing case for the importance of the rower-citizens to the development of democracy in Periclean Athens...

...The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements...

...In fact, beauty and egalitarianism rarely mix well...