On Beauty and Being Just. by Princeton University Press

	Title: On Beauty and Being Just. Purchase Item Manufacturer: Princeton University Press List Price: $13.95 Our Price: $7.93
Customer Reviews:
On Beauty and Being Just. by Princeton University Press Impressive yet Misunderstood
This is vintage Scarry. The book's purpose seems to be an attempt to create a mental switch in readers' attitudes, toward the recognition that beauty CAN be used to further one's own concern for justice. To this end, it is beautifully written, persuasive, and worth reading. However, it is not an empirical work - it does not attempt to prove that concern for justice is a logical consequence of appreciation for beauty. If you're interested in prose poetry and altering your world-view, this book is for you. If you're interested in more argumentative writing on how to increase people's concern for justice, try some of the work by Peter Singer, who writes extensively on the topic, such as How Are We to Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest
On Beauty and Being Just. by Princeton University Press A powerful book; reread it when you need Beauty & Justice in your life.
As with her earlier book "The Body in Pain," reading this small, powerful book changes the way you see yourself in the world. Scarry is an extraordinary writer, linking together topics that academia separates and revealing the underlying ties that form our social life. The resources of our country and our world are increasingly distributed unequally: a few people earn tens of millions of dollars a year and we do not have the resources to educate our children. For those interested in justice, it is easy to despair. In this book Scarry reveals that the dynamics of beauty draw the observer toward justice. And justice impels towards beauty. This is a centering, challenging book, calming the soul and attuning the senses toward justice, beauty and calm. Scarry is a beautiful architect of words, constructing understandings that sparkle. I find myself reading passages out loud to my spouse, recommending it to friends, and (having finished the book) picking it up again and again, opening it to a random page and being pleasured, reassured and changed.
On Beauty and Being Just. by Princeton University Press Good experiment
Earlier I tried reading 'On Beauty' by Zadie Smith. That was a failure. This time I picked 'On Beauty and being just' by Elaine Scarry to know how beauty and justness are related. I liked statements with clarity like ' Beauty brings copies of itself into being '.. Also, when the author lists why beauty brings the beholder alive with its newness, sacredness, life-saving .. one can see how for some, predominantly one of these attributes itself seems like the whole of beauty.. Some common daily-life references like the feeling that you have for luggage received late are easy to relate to. I didnt like the arguments in trying to look at the point to be proved and its opposite. Somehow each seemed so insufficient in itself that the putting forward of the other never seemed to make things better understood. It is quite an idea to relate beauty and justness through the abstract fairness.
On Beauty and Being Just. by Princeton University Press Diappointing
This is certainly an impassioned defence of beauty, and a 'feel-good' book, but it is so lacking in substance is barely counts as a contribution to the debate. It's incoherent at many levels, most notably concerning the switch from the accepted idea in part one that beauty is always particular, to the claims in part two that it is a function of certain qualities, especially symmetry. Asthetic symmetry promotes ethical justice? The idea of beauty as enlivening is also too simple. This is not good enough as a theory of the link between aesthetics and ethics. The account of the so called 'political complaints' against beauty is a set of caricatures. There is also a very weak accounts of Matisse, whose Nice paintings are regarded by Scarry as stand ins for real windows and real palm trees; some sense of what modernist art has done to the concept of beauty and why is needed here. There are many better books on the topic.
On Beauty and Being Just. by Princeton University Press A Proposition Mysterious and Brave
Though it's easy to critique Elaine Scarry's logic and the completeness of her argument, that would miss this book's true importance. As a matter of fact, what's important about On Beauty is that it stood in the face of 20 years of literary and aesthetic criticism, a howling wind into which Scarry makes a simple claim: that the appreciation of beauty presses us toward justice and not away from it. In its simplicity, Scarry's proposition is as brilliant and unprovable now as it was then. But propositions are not the truth; they stake a claim to right action, and Scarry's courageous stand has liberated artists and writers to pursue right action as it resonates with what their eyes and ears hold to be a good and true beyond logic. Scarry uses arguments and descriptions from fellow travellers as various as Homer, Simone Weil. and John Rawls. It's a tour de force ending with a vision of the trireme as the birthplace of athenian democratic values. The logic that connects that vision to the political possibiities immanent in the visual world are as profound and mysterious as any attempt to defend beauty could ever be. Somehow, Scarry manages exactly what she claims for beauty: pressing us toward the good without suspending our desire for all things pleasurable.
On Beauty and Being Just. by Princeton University Press Product Description
Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political interests. In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch as well as her own experiences, Scarry offers up an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms. Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a "surfeit of aliveness." In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness. Scarry, author of the landmark The Body in Pain and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.