THE CALL OF BEAUTY

Review of

ON BEAUTY AND BEING JUST

by Elaine Scarry

Princeton University Press, 1999.

Trying to understand the place of Art and Beauty in human society has been an ongoing task since ancient times, specially when it is being torn apart by civil war and societal collapse. Where do we place that trinity of the artist, the critic and the audience, and the creative artistic process, with its outcome of the art object, in a scenario of death, destruction, disappearances, displacements, poverty, hunger and injustices of many other kinds? This question has lurked for years within a personal unease always felt when enjoying and later discussing and analyzing paintings, sculptures, novels, poetry, films and plays which dealt with the Sri Lankan crisis of the past years. Even when the content of the art objects are not directly about violence, death and destruction, but rather about more benign matters of human life, the unease is there - how to reconcile my enjoyment of their beauty with the human crisis just outside my field of vision?

A bold attempt towards a reconciliation is made by Elanie Scarry. In her book 'On Beauty and Being Just' (1999) she argues that beauty continually renews our search for truth and presses us towards a greater concern for justice. She casts the spectator and the creator of the aesthetic object in one mould and claims that when something is seen as beautiful, "there is an urge to protect it, or act on its behalf" and that while this attention is "involuntarily given to the beautiful person or thing; then, this quality of heightened attention is voluntarily extended out to other persons or things. It is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level. 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." (p 81)

Scarry says that that the enduring phenomenon of beauty pressures us towards 'distribution'. Even Plato required us to "move from 'eros', in which we are seized by the beauty of one person, to 'caritas', in which our care is extended to all people." (ibid) The word 'fairness' refers both to loveliness of countenance and to the ethical requirement of 'being fair', 'playing fair' and 'fair distribution'. Scarry's argument is that "beautiful things give rise to the notion of distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense of 'a symmetry of everyone's relation to one another'." (p 95)
Beauty and justice seem to share the features of symmetry, equality and balance. "Even in periods when a human community is too young to have yet had time to create justice, as well as in periods when justice has been taken away, beautiful things ;holds steadily visible the manifest good of equality and balance." (p 97) Using examples from ancient and medieval writings (like St. Augustine's De Musica for instance), Scarry shows how there was a conviction that equality is the heart of beauty, that it is pleasure-bearing and that equality is the morally highest and best feature of the world:
"All that is claimed is that aspiration to political, social, and economic equality has already entered the world in the beauty-loving treatises of the classical and Christian periods, as has the readiness to recognize it as beautiful if and when it should arrive in the world." (p 98)
