Scarry Argues Beauty Pushes Us Toward Justice
Author Elaine Scarry says beautiful things let us sense fairness and turn our attention to others.
For two decades or more, a line of argument in the humanities treated beauty with suspicion. The claim was that it pulled focus from more important issues, favored the privileged, and hid political motives.
Elaine Scarry, the author of The Body in Pain, answered with a different claim. She contends that beauty pulls us toward caring more about what is just.
In her view, how we respond to lovely things reaches beyond private pleasure. Those responses shape how we live alongside other people.
She treats an encounter with beauty as a moment when fairness can be sensed rather than only pondered. Instead of holding fairness as a distant idea, we meet it through the senses.
That meeting matters because beauty brings us to a halt. We feel more awake, and the usual grip of self-concern loosens.
With that loosening, Scarry contends, attention shifts toward other people. That wider attention opens toward care for what is fair.
So she urges a larger place for beauty in the places where we think and live, from study to home to gallery to school. Changing how we think about beauty, she suggests, can change how we attend to justice.
Questions people ask
What does Scarry mean by fairness in a beautiful object?
The summary does not spell out a definition. It says only that Scarry treats a beautiful thing as a way to feel what fairness is like, rather than meeting it only as an idea.
Is there evidence that seeing beauty makes people act more justly?
She is making a philosophical claim about attention, not reporting a laboratory finding that museum visits raise charity. Later psychologists have studied awe and prosocial behavior, but her argument is that beauty prepares the mind for justice by moving attention outward.
Why did beauty fall out of favor with scholars?
According to the summary, critics in the humanities argued that talk of beauty ignored more important issues and served privilege. Scarry answers that view by defending beauty and saying it deserves a larger place in how we think and live.