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...

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...

I did not know that Kant created the distinction between the concepts wonder and beauty, thus defining beautiful as something feminine, small and wanted it or not, inferior. Because of this, and the lack of appreciation of beauty in social sciences, philosopher Elaine Scarry claims that we have become beauty-blind. That is silly of us. Scarry argues that beauty is a vehicle for truth and justice.

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

“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).

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...

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...

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 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...

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

I feel like Oscar Wilde said it better in "The Picture of Dorian Gray", “Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.”. However the similarities with justice and the differences in continuity of goodness, jus...

Thought-provoking examination and defense of Beauty (currently frowned on in much of the art world). Scarry proposes that enjoyment of Beauty aids in the formation of a sense of social justice in this deeply felt polemic. Though there are issues she skirts (the lust for possession which beautiful objects can inspire comes to mind), one can only admire her engagement with her subject and the breadth of her arguments.

I think I give this one 3.5 stars. First off, her writing style felt funny to me. She used academic prose for most of the book but often interwove sentences that were more poetic and artistic - I enjoyed both styles but felt like they didn't flow together well. I think I mostly agree with her thesis but I'm not sure I agree with how she arrives at it.

Elaine Scarry's book on the benefits and pleasures of beauty is beautiful in itself. In saying so however, does not entail that the arguments behind beautys influence in justice are not flawed.

Rambling thoughts of nonsense with small moments of clarity and actual concepts.You come away after reading the book with no real knowledge or information which leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Scarry’s book is an apologia for beauty and in some ways for secular humanism at large. Sometimes her specific arguments fail to convince, and while it can’t be true that beauty necessarily begets justice (as Scarry herself notes, the beautiful exists both before justice and after its removal), the book succeeds in dismantling the arguments against beauty, in part through its own skillful evocation of beauty. What is most difficult for me to swallow in the book is the leap not from beauty to jus...