On Beauty and Being Just

Elaine Scarry

This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences, like Plato's dialogues, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity on what originally has none. They are a key mechanism in what Diotima called begetting and what Tocqueville called distribution. By perpetuating beauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward continual creation.

Before leaving the site of persons, we must recall that we were here looking at only one complaint, the complaint that we might, by looking at such persons, bring them harm. But there are, of course, other arguments less political but equally antagonistic to the site of persons, such as the notion that beautiful persons do not deserve to be attended to for their beauty. Sometimes this idea of undeservingness is urged on the grounds that their beauty is natural: such persons were born with it, lazily inheriting it through no labor or merit of their own. (This argument is not very strong since so many things we unembarrassedly admire--great math skill, a capacity for musical composition, the physical agility of a dancer or speed of an athlete--entail luck at birth.) With equal energy the idea of undeservingness is urged on the grounds that such beauty is artifactual: such persons spend hours running along the beach, plaiting their hair into tiny braids, adorning themselves with beads, bracelets, oil, arrays of color. (This argument is also not very strong since we normally admire feats of artifactual labor, the formation of good government, a well-run newspaper, a twelve-year labor of self-education.) The two complaints contradict one another--one proposing that it is not the natural but the artifactual that should be honored, and the other proposing that it is not the artifactual but the natural that should be honored. More important, they together contradict the complaint we were considering: they say beautiful persons do not deserve to be looked at, whereas the complaint we were wrestling with says beautiful persons deserve not to be looked at (for their own safety). Although, therefore, we have limited ourselves to political arguments, we find--when we step off the straight and narrow path of our present inquiry--an incoherence equal to the one that lies straight ahead. 

Through its beauty, the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care: if we do not search it out, it comes and finds us.

It is as though one has ceased to be the hero or the heroine in one's own story and has become what in a folktale is called the 'lateral figure' or 'donor figure'. It may sound not as though one's participation in a state of overall equality has been brought about, but as though one has just suffered a demotion. But at moments when we believe we are conducting ourselves with equality, we are usually instead conducting ourselves as the central figure in our own private story; and when we feel ourselves to be merely adjacent, or lateral (or even subordinate), we are probably more closely approaching a state of equality.

Radical decentering might also be called an opiated adjacency. A beautiful thing is not the only thing in the world that can make us feel adjacent; nor is it the only thing in the world that brings a state of acute pleasure. But it appears to be one of the few phenomena in the world that brings about both simultaneously: it permits us to be adjacent while also permitting us to experience extreme pleasure, thereby creating the sense that it is our own adjacency that is pleasure-bearing. This seems a gift in its own right, and a gift as a prelude to or precondition of enjoying fair relations with others. It is clear that an ehtical fairness which requires 'a symmetry of everyone's relation' will be greatly assisted by an aesthetic fairness that creates in all participants a state of delight in their own lateralness.