WORK
On Beauty and Being Just
Elaine Scarry's 1999 Princeton University Press volume — expanded from her 1998 Tanner Lectures at Yale — arguing that beauty and justice are structurally allied rather than opposed, and that the dismissal of beauty is dismissal of justice's perceptual foundation.
On Beauty and Being Just is the short, concentrated book in which Elaine Scarry mounts the philosophical defense of beauty that a generation of political theorists had deemed unnecessary or reactionary. The argument runs in two essays — 'On Beauty and Being Wrong' and 'On Beauty and Being Fair' — and culminates in the structural identification of beauty's effects with justice's requirements. Beauty decenters the self. Justice requires a decentered self. Beauty teaches lateral precision. Justice demands lateral precision. The training beauty provides is therefore not ornamental but foundational: it is the perceptual preparation without which justice-apt cognition cannot operate. The book has become the canonical reference for any serious engagement with aesthetics and ethics, and its framework is now being applied — as this volume demonstrates — to the question of what beauty means in the age of machine-generated surfaces.
