I was looking forward to this book. I read Damasio's "Descartes' Error" 1st, a book that deals with the neuroanatomical and neurophysiological basis for reasoning as well as some thoughts on the origin of self. It was very scientific based yet was dealing with subjects such as emotion, altruism, irrational decisions etc. As I read it I was thinking that reading "On Beauty" right afterward was going to be really interesting.
I didn't love this book - much of the time I found it frustrating but this has often been a good starting point for me reaching a better understanding of some concept. It may be that the book is meant for readers more versed in an academic discussion of beauty but I found myself disagreeing with most of Scarry's propositions or rather her causal connections. She starts out by stating that beauty requires replication which compels distribution which in turn causes people to alter their location to gaze at beauty longer. At this point I wasn't "feeling the love" about her analysis but it seemed reasonable enough to trust her and continue with her for a bit. Scarry then makes a jump to "willingness continually to revise one's location" being 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." p 7 Scarry agrees with Simone Weil that one of the world's 'precious things' is education, "the pure and authentic achievements of art and sciences." pg 8 Education as a means to see beauty is something I'll have to think more about.
Scarry makes a good point that beauty is often disparaged on the basis of imperfect or misguided attempts to respond to beauty (material greed, unbeautiful imitations or causing a "contagion of imitation" as Scarry says on pg 6). I had trouble with her section on people being able to recall "an error they have made about beauty" whereas they are often unable to think of an intellectual error they have made (that is they know they have made one but can't think of any details). This may just reflect the calibre of Scarry's friends and the quality of their conversations vs my circle but with neither question does a detailed answer pop into my mind. The only things I could think of were mundane (for beauty: not liking a song or book upon 1st exposure but then loving it with further attention; for intellectual : much of my education and especially the readings this academic year, jump to mind - where I think I have an understanding upon 1st exposure but find after further work that I had erred.)
Scarry uses a lot of unfamiliar terminology. I don't know whether her phrases are common ones in her field or whether she has coined them herself (I know the word neologism is used when a new word is coined but I don't know what the equivalent would be for a phrase). Scarry uses "the error of overcrediting", "the error of undercrediting", "clear discernibility", "lateral disregard." One of the sections I had the most difficulty with was the one on the 3 key features of beauty:
My argumentative side was continually exercised by this book. Scarry writes about how beauty causes us to gape and suspend all thought. pg 29 I don't know that I agree. If I thought about the experience of beauty - which I have to admit I have not given much thought to before - I would consider that when I am experiencing beauty, I am thinking but not in the same way as if I am trying to diagnose a medical case or understand the instructions on how to put an easel together or rewire an electrical circuit. I do not for a moment think my mind is blank, that my thought is suspended when I am in the presence of beauty.
Scarry speaks about "the temptation against plenitude" pg 50, which is the "temptation to scorn the innocent object for ceasing to be beautiful" pg 49. I'm not sure this represents the feelings I have or would have if something I formerly considered beautiful no longer seemed beautiful. This is a section I'll have to reread and think about.
The second part of Scarry's book is devoted to the relationship between beauty and justice. Earlier Scarry had jumped from beauty prompting the mind to search backwards for precedents, to the mind eventually reaching "something that has no precedent, which may very well be the immortal" and then, for me, she makes a precarious leap to truth because "what is beautiful is in league with what is true because truth abides in the immortal sphere." It's leaps like these that make me frustrated because I'm not convinced. I've found this year though that when I'm frustrated by some thing I've read (by an intelligent, thoughtful writer or philosopher) it's because I'm looking for the quick, easy answer. I'm so used to being able to understand things quickly (not because of any great intelligence on my part but because of the world we have constructed for ourselves in western society) and if I don't agree right away, if I don't get it right away, then I feel frustrated and usually either skip past the sections that bother me, or else abandon the book as not worth my time. What I've had to do in this course is to persevere through these texts, think about them and then, in these journal entries, try to make some sense of them in my own words. This has forced me to go back and try to understand what the writer is saying and often I've achieved better understanding and often agreement once I've done that. What I haven't had enough time to do this year because of the workload and other life commitments, is to go back slowly and thoroughly and often enough to REALLY understand what the writer wanted to communicate. I hope I can do some of that this summer and in the years to come.
The 2nd reason that beauty and truth are connected is that beauty "provides by its compelling 'clear discernibility' an introduction (perhaps even our first introduction) to the state of certainty yet does not itself satiate our desire for certainty since beauty, sooner or later, brings us into contact with our own capacity for making errors." Scarry equates truth with the "mental event of conviction" which is pleasurable enough to make us willing to struggle "to locate what is true." pg 31
Scarry calls this mental state of conviction, 'hymn' and our consciousness of error she calls 'palinode' for short (because we injure the beautiful when we turn our attention to another thing of beauty) - and she says that both hymn and palinode "reside in most daily acts of encountering something beautiful." At this point I'm not convinced but I'm intrigued enough to plan to reread "On Beauty" this summer and try to work through these sections.
Scarry notes (pg 48) that even if one does not believe in the sacred, beauty still leads the perceiver "to a more capacious regard for the world. She put into words what I felt but could not articulate earlier where I agreed with her contention that beauty is sacred without feeling that sacred was the word I would use personally.
Scarry says that beauty does not always equal truth. Beauty "ignites the desire for truth by [according to Scarry] giving us [...] the experience of conviction and the experience, as well, of error." pg 52 I'm not yet convinced.
In Part II Scarry comments that conversation about the beauty of things (poems, films, essays etc) has been banished from the humanities for the last two decades. She says that the criticisms of beauty come from 2 arguments:
I didn't love this book - much of the time I found it frustrating but this has often been a good starting point for me reaching a better understanding of some concept. It may be that the book is meant for readers more versed in an academic discussion of beauty but I found myself disagreeing with most of Scarry's propositions or rather her causal connections. She starts out by stating that beauty requires replication which compels distribution which in turn causes people to alter their location to gaze at beauty longer. At this point I wasn't "feeling the love" about her analysis but it seemed reasonable enough to trust her and continue with her for a bit. Scarry then makes a jump to "willingness continually to revise one's location" being 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." p 7 Scarry agrees with Simone Weil that one of the world's 'precious things' is education, "the pure and authentic achievements of art and sciences." pg 8 Education as a means to see beauty is something I'll have to think more about.
Scarry makes a good point that beauty is often disparaged on the basis of imperfect or misguided attempts to respond to beauty (material greed, unbeautiful imitations or causing a "contagion of imitation" as Scarry says on pg 6). I had trouble with her section on people being able to recall "an error they have made about beauty" whereas they are often unable to think of an intellectual error they have made (that is they know they have made one but can't think of any details). This may just reflect the calibre of Scarry's friends and the quality of their conversations vs my circle but with neither question does a detailed answer pop into my mind. The only things I could think of were mundane (for beauty: not liking a song or book upon 1st exposure but then loving it with further attention; for intellectual : much of my education and especially the readings this academic year, jump to mind - where I think I have an understanding upon 1st exposure but find after further work that I had erred.)
Scarry uses a lot of unfamiliar terminology. I don't know whether her phrases are common ones in her field or whether she has coined them herself (I know the word neologism is used when a new word is coined but I don't know what the equivalent would be for a phrase). Scarry uses "the error of overcrediting", "the error of undercrediting", "clear discernibility", "lateral disregard." One of the sections I had the most difficulty with was the one on the 3 key features of beauty:
- beauty is sacred
- beauty is unprecedented
- beauty is lifesaving
I don't quibble that beauty is sacred. It's not the word I would use for myself but it efficiently sums up the needs that beauty satisfies in the individual. I don't agree with one of the other features. I don't find beauty unprecedented, nor do I need it to be to find it beautiful. I can be mesmerized by the sky or the ocean without feeling that it is the most beautiful sky/ocean I have ever seen. Things that I find beautiful, I can look at over and over again. With groups of things I find beautiful, I can be enthralled with a specific instance that may not be the most beautiful iteration I have seen. She goes on to say that when we encounter beauty our minds immediately search for precedents. I'll have to think about this as it doesn't immediately resonate with me. As far as beauty being lifesaving, while an instance of beauty would not save my life, if my life had no hope of beauty in it, what would be the point, so yes, I agree that beauty is lifesaving.
Scarry speaks about beauty as "greeting," citing Plato, Aquinas, Plotinus, Dante etc as having described it thus, pg 25. Again I'm not sure I agree. This disagreement, on a personal level, goes along with my objection to Scarry's description of having committed an error against beauty, where she says that people tend to remember these because there is such a strong sensory announcement of an error in beauty. This is probably another instance of me living an unexamined life but I don't find that beauty's presence in my life has had such overt and loud notifications. I know that some people have very strong visceral/emotional reactions to beauty. I do feel my reactions to beauty within my body but they don't sweep through me nor overcome me. For me it is often more about becoming quiet and letting beauty suffuse through me, to fill the empty spaces and warm me, quietly exalt me, renew me. I don't know that beauty greets me - I think it is there and I become aware of it or allow myself to become aware of it.
Scarry then postulates a 4th key feature of beauty, "it incites deliberation," and mentions how our reaction to beauty, how it commands our attention, can thus injure other beautiful things by removing or diverting that attention from them. She doesn't discuss this much but instead moves quickly from this feature, which she calls an error, to saying that "The experience of 'being in error' so inevitably accompanies the perception of beauty that it begins to seem one of its abiding structural features." pg 28
My argumentative side was continually exercised by this book. Scarry writes about how beauty causes us to gape and suspend all thought. pg 29 I don't know that I agree. If I thought about the experience of beauty - which I have to admit I have not given much thought to before - I would consider that when I am experiencing beauty, I am thinking but not in the same way as if I am trying to diagnose a medical case or understand the instructions on how to put an easel together or rewire an electrical circuit. I do not for a moment think my mind is blank, that my thought is suspended when I am in the presence of beauty.
Scarry speaks about "the temptation against plenitude" pg 50, which is the "temptation to scorn the innocent object for ceasing to be beautiful" pg 49. I'm not sure this represents the feelings I have or would have if something I formerly considered beautiful no longer seemed beautiful. This is a section I'll have to reread and think about.
The second part of Scarry's book is devoted to the relationship between beauty and justice. Earlier Scarry had jumped from beauty prompting the mind to search backwards for precedents, to the mind eventually reaching "something that has no precedent, which may very well be the immortal" and then, for me, she makes a precarious leap to truth because "what is beautiful is in league with what is true because truth abides in the immortal sphere." It's leaps like these that make me frustrated because I'm not convinced. I've found this year though that when I'm frustrated by some thing I've read (by an intelligent, thoughtful writer or philosopher) it's because I'm looking for the quick, easy answer. I'm so used to being able to understand things quickly (not because of any great intelligence on my part but because of the world we have constructed for ourselves in western society) and if I don't agree right away, if I don't get it right away, then I feel frustrated and usually either skip past the sections that bother me, or else abandon the book as not worth my time. What I've had to do in this course is to persevere through these texts, think about them and then, in these journal entries, try to make some sense of them in my own words. This has forced me to go back and try to understand what the writer is saying and often I've achieved better understanding and often agreement once I've done that. What I haven't had enough time to do this year because of the workload and other life commitments, is to go back slowly and thoroughly and often enough to REALLY understand what the writer wanted to communicate. I hope I can do some of that this summer and in the years to come.
The 2nd reason that beauty and truth are connected is that beauty "provides by its compelling 'clear discernibility' an introduction (perhaps even our first introduction) to the state of certainty yet does not itself satiate our desire for certainty since beauty, sooner or later, brings us into contact with our own capacity for making errors." Scarry equates truth with the "mental event of conviction" which is pleasurable enough to make us willing to struggle "to locate what is true." pg 31
Scarry calls this mental state of conviction, 'hymn' and our consciousness of error she calls 'palinode' for short (because we injure the beautiful when we turn our attention to another thing of beauty) - and she says that both hymn and palinode "reside in most daily acts of encountering something beautiful." At this point I'm not convinced but I'm intrigued enough to plan to reread "On Beauty" this summer and try to work through these sections.
Scarry notes (pg 48) that even if one does not believe in the sacred, beauty still leads the perceiver "to a more capacious regard for the world. She put into words what I felt but could not articulate earlier where I agreed with her contention that beauty is sacred without feeling that sacred was the word I would use personally.
Scarry says that beauty does not always equal truth. Beauty "ignites the desire for truth by [according to Scarry] giving us [...] the experience of conviction and the experience, as well, of error." pg 52 I'm not yet convinced.
In Part II Scarry comments that conversation about the beauty of things (poems, films, essays etc) has been banished from the humanities for the last two decades. She says that the criticisms of beauty come from 2 arguments:
- That beauty distracts us from 'wrong social arrangements'
- That when we stare at something beautiful, our sustained regard harms it
Scarry calls these arguments incoherent and I would agree. The second one is only somewhat true for a small percentage of beautiful objects (human form). Scarry speaks about reifying that which we look at, a term I had never heard before (Make (something abstract) more concrete or real). Scarry comes back here to "the problem of lateral disregard" which she had introduced (though not by this phrase) back in her initial discussion about the attribute's of beauty. This is a problem where a benefit is thought to accrue to an object of beauty through "its being the focus of our attention" but these benefits are "not being equally enjoyed by nearby objects in the same class." pg 65-66. If you like to gaze at palm trees and find them beautiful, you are potentially harming other trees by not noticing them and so not potentially finding them beautiful (Scarry reverses this example where she errs in not initially finding palm trees beautiful being so wrapped up in the local beauty of sycamores etc). pg 17-18.
Scarry moves on, in her argument, to claim that when we find something beautiful and worthy of care, we extend that care to other objects in the same category. She calls this "the pressure beauty exerts toward the distributional." pg 67, 80, 91
Scarry says that "we look at beautiful persons and things without wishing ourselves beautiful" - and I don't know that I agree - and says that this "is one of the key ways in which [...] beauty prepares us for justice." pg 78 This seems to contradict her discussion of "lateral disregard" in the same incoherent way that argument #1 contradicts argument # 2. Either our attention diminishes or harms beauty or it enhances or protects it. I can follow when she claims that beauty can function as small "wake-up calls" to our perception and that this in turn can help us be more aware in general, to pay more attention. pg 81 This is where she feels beauty connects to justice, that we will be more aware of injustice through this increased perception and alertness. She speaks of Plato requiring that "we 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."pg 81.
Scarry moves on to discuss 'the sublime.' She notes that Kant and Burke divided the aesthetic realm into the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime is male, the beautiful, female. She discusses this duality as set out in Kant's work "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime" where everything is divided into male or female (night and day, great and small; principled, noble, righteous vs compassionate and good-hearted - guess which ones are male and which female?) pg 84 Beauty was almost always the diminutive item of the pair. Scarry calls the sublime "an aesthetic of power" and says this categorization cuts beauty off from the meta-physical. pg 85
Scarry loses me again when she discusses beauty as a pact between the beautiful thing and the perceiver, each conferring on the other the gift of life. pg 90 She writes about both beauty and justice being connected to fairness. pg 93 Interestingly, she discusses how justice is not "ordinarily sensorially available [...] because it is dispersed out over too large a field [...] and because it consists of innumerable actions, almost none of which are occurring simultaneously." pg 101 "It is the very exigencies of materiality, the susceptibility of the world to injury, that require justice, yet justice itself is outside the compass of our sensory powers." pg 102 She goes into an interesting summary of the conditions under which democracy was born in Athens. She then moves on to discuss guarantees of peace, the current most workable being "that whatever means of force exist be equally divided among us all, a distribution of force that has often been called the "palladium of civil rights," for it enables each person to stand guard over and secure the nature of the whole." pg 107
Scarry ends by setting out how the live action of perceiving and the act of creation (two of the 5 sites of beauty, the others being: symmetry, sensory availability and pressure against lateral disregard) "reveal the pressure beauty exerts toward ethical equality." pg 109 According to Simone Weil, "at the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering. [...] Beauty ... requires us to give up our imaginary position as the centre." Beautiful things "form ladders reaching toward the beauty of the world." Iris Murdoch called this "unselfing."pg 112-113 Scarry goes on to say that the aesthetic fairness that beauty promotes (by this 'unselfing') assists an 'ethical fairness', or justice. Her connection of justice to the site of beauty of creation is more tenuous for me. "Because beauty repeatedly brings us face-to-face with our own powers to create, we know where and how to locate those powers when a situation of injustice calls on us to create." pg 115
It was a thought-provoking (and sometimes just provoking) book to read but I think it is worth rereading when I have some time - and seeing what more I can get out of it.
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