Aping Plato, in addition to engaging with twentieth-century aesthetics only in the most superficial of terms, Scarry offers scant evidence in On Beauty and Being Just to validate her thesis that people are oriented to justice through beauty, which she strangely frames here as eternal and universally recognizable. Scarry's style of writing is poetic, but her two-part essay is obviously based on faulty premises and fallacies.

A poor copy of a Platonic argument, taking the profound and making it superficial. Essentially, take the word beauty, substitute it with ideal and you have the original argument. Here Scarry attempts to make the argument with quotes from literature on the ideal beauty, art masterpieces, and the author's own florid descriptions to fill a book whose argument could be made in less than ten pages. Throw in a few Kantian references and Seamus Heaney(?) and the argument is considered cogent. Frankly,

Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just is the sort of book that ought to have been very good. Its author is a major cultural critic whose early books--including The Body in Pain and Dreaming by the Book have been exceptional guides to the topics they explore. And she has incontestable academic credentials in the field of aesthetic theory. And then there is the fact that she is writing about beauty and, hey, who doesn't like beauty?Well, according to Scarry, modern academics don't like beauty--...

this brief defense of beauty and its relationship to justice was a pleasurable read. i think it lacks in the theoretically sound department, as some of the conclusions she makes, while having a logical set ups, don't seem to be quite founded. however, the writing was true to its topic and the subject brings up many points for meditation. scarry has a very positive view of human nature which i find refreshing, and it's great to read an academic who values beauty and believes that it has transform...

I once overheard two young people (I was associated with them) in a museum suggest that the art should just be burned because it was such a waste of money. This is not an original or modern argument; Mozi said much the same thing thousands of years ago. Mozi at least had the intelligence to say that art should be burned if its production directly leads to suffering by depriving people of food and so on. My associates did not say that. They are the target of this book. I heard that in about 2002...

Elaine Scarry is a professor of Esthetics in the English Department at Harvard. I enjoy her lectures on YouTube. And I especially like that she has decided to write a book proclaiming the power and usefulness of Beauty. As she says, "beauty is so often disparaged because it gives rise to material cupidity..." But still we want to capture it. This is especially true if you're my kind of artist. Wittgenstein says, when the eye sees something beautiful, the eye wants to draw it. I like this book be...

Thought-provoking, but rather misguided, I thought. The author's goal is to oppose those in the humanities who see beauty as being unfair by showing that not only is this false, but that it is central to fairness. It is the second part of her argument that, I think, fails, primarily because she gives people (except those who oppose beauty) too much credit. I don't think, as Scarry does, that beauty necessarily makes someone more beautiful, observant, unselfish. I think that people very often app...

I enjoyed this book, but I didn’t believe in its purpose. I don’t think the author did either, for that matter. I’m convinced this book is secretly intended to be a beautiful thing, a piece of art, more than it is intended to philosophically argue the nature/virtue of beauty (if I’m wrong about that, then it’s a terrible piece of philosophy based on a plainly false issue with academia and it ought to be chucked, because it misses so many enormous and obvious points, repeatedly and with alarming

I want to love this book. So many people that I adore, and whose opinions I respect, love this book! But I do not. Even the second time around. For some reason, it annoys me pretty much from the get-go, for reasons both significant and petty (how can you not appreciate palm trees??). And although I want to agree with the main argument, and I might even believe it on some level, I don't find it at all convincing in the way it's presented here (it probably doesn't help to be thinking about it alon...

What a bunch of pointless babble that went on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, for 100ish pages. If I didn't have to read it for a class (still didn't understand it), I would have Fahrenheit 451 style burned this piece of shit.

Argument is a little convoluted. Scarry is trying to do too many things at once here.

Scarry's prose is very easy to digest and very down-to-earth, such that even someone who is not accustomed to reading essays could read it. This is one of the book's greatest strengths. The arguments are expressed with great clarity and they usually point out things about Beauty which strike the reader as always having been true. The book can be at times downright delightful, since thinking about Beauty, and what is True about it, is of course itself a very beautiful experience, since the Beauti...

I read this as part of my final research paper for my Shakespeare class. Philosophical as heck and most of it went over my head. But a lot of it made me emotional in a beautiful, meditative, refreshing way. I was fascinated by this idea: “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original...

Scarry’s defense of aesthetics is intriguing and beautifully written, especially the section about Matisse’s palm lighting. I did, however, find that she makes big leaps, citing anecdotes as universal in order to support her thesis. It feels sort of...dramatic? overwrought? On the one hand, I enjoyed wading into Scarry’s thoughts—even though I disagree with the big connections she makes, what she presents is meaningful and interesting—though I doubt I’ll be thinking about this book for a long ti...

As ravishing as it is revelatory. I was moved, both by Scarry's conception of and meditations on beauty (Part I), and her careful, thoughtful argumentation on the parallels and connections between beauty and justice (Part II). This is a book I'll be coming back to.

fair enough, I guess. some good defense of beauty (lay-up) and some weak correlation with justice. the precision and enumeration of arguments works against her in a case as multiple as this. can’t ever really feel incomplete. First essay much better than second. 3.7 stars.

The first 33 pages of are worthwhile. The rest just ok , and suffers from a low-energy (Rawlsian) understanding of justice.

made me reconsider my hatred of palm trees

Clever syllogisms. Proverbial? Elegant, elongated arguments expounded upon in original thought and grace.

“People seem to wish there to be beauty even when their own self-interest is not served by it; or perhaps more accurately, people seem to intuit that their own self-interest is served by distant peoples’ having the benefit of beauty” (123).

This book is a pair of essays. The first essay is a meandering exposition on the nature of beauty, and there are some interesting suppositions in this section: Beauty takes place in the particular, is generative, offers a greeting, scares you with your own inadequacy, is allied with (though not identical to) truth, and is worth talking about more. The second essay takes a philosophical stance on the relationship between beauty and justice and was much less interesting to me.

Like Crispin Sartwell’s Six Names of Beauty, this work is one of my favorite modern intellectual works of any sort, particularly on the subject of beauty.Ranging from Homer to Plato to Augustine to Simone Weil and more, Scarry’s connection of beauty and justice (and goodness) is a compelling, beautifully written study.One particular passage must itself be looked at and heard for its beauty:Euripides gives a visionary account of oarsmen striking and sweeping the silver surface of the sea, accordi...

Beautifully written - something I’d want to read and savor over and over again.

There are some really lovely moments in this book, but overall it fell pretty flat for me.This book is, generally speaking, an argument in favor of appreciating the beautiful and accepting that a beautiful thing has its own agency and power. Scarry opens the book with a brief discussion about the possible errors people can make about beauty. These are 1) a person not realizing that a beautiful thing is beautiful and then suddenly being struck by how wrong they were, and 2) a person slowly realiz...

Rather than addressing Scarry's argument explicitly, I will mention a selection of premises that I found useful and provide an overall rating. In Part I: Addressing beauty and truth, Scarry writes "The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction." She goes on to argue that experiences of "clear discernibility" and self-evidence, as well as those of "state(s) of certainty" provide pleasure that compels a person to engage and labor in the world...

I found the basic foundational premise to be flawed. She's essentially attempting to equate beauty with justice. Leaving aside the myriad complexities of subjective/objective distinctions and other philosophical disputes, it seems clear enough on its face that some things that people consider to be ethically justified are not also going to be what they would consider to be beautiful. E.g., winning the war against Hitler, Mussolini and Imperial Japan (something many will call ethically justified

Scarry has many beautiful and insightful moments, but the first part of the essay is stronger than the second, as on the whole it becomes less and less concrete when it needs to be more and more concrete (when talking about beauty's relation to justice). The logic in general is not very sound. I secretly got mad when 99.9% of her examples were from Western literature and culture and when there was an overemphasis on visually-perceived beauty. That said, I enjoyed her palm tree passages, poetic l...

This is my second reading of Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just. It's some of the most accessible (and appropriately beautiful) prose on aesthetics I've encountered. Though it's not exactly my field (yet??), so what do I know. Hopefully I'll know plenty once I've discussed it with a roomful of bright undergrads. Speaking of undergrads, here's one of my favorite lines from the beginning of the book. I'll be curious to hear people's thoughts about this: "This willingness continually to revis...

Interesting essay on our experience of perceiving beauty.Here are some notes (covering the first half).- Beauty begets beauty- We want to replicate beautiful thingsScarry argues that beauty should not be judged by looking at "imperfect replication" (e.g. people imitating starlets, collecting all the Gallé vases).> In the case just looked at, then, the attribute was one commonacross all sites, and the error, when it briešy arose, involved seeingan imperfect version of the attribute (imitation of

I wouldn't say that this was the defining book that changed how I see beauty or justice, but it was interesting, and I'm glad I read it. I found some of her concluding arguments to be interesting and compelling, though I'm not sure I'm fully persuaded. Scarry talks about how the balance/symmetry of beauty encourages us to look for social balance and equality. She also talks about how beauty can take us outside of yourselves to see more than our limited perspective of the world and our obsession