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Lawrence Rothfield Being There with Elaine Scarry (on Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just [Princeton, 1999]) Elaine Scarry's unblinking, extended look at torture in The Body in Pain, and her more recent exhaustingly detailed arguments in the pages of The New York Review ofBooks about the cause of recent airline crashes, have earned hera well-deserved reputation as an intellectual devoted to battling evil. Readers acquainted with her from these weightier tomes are likely to react with some astonishment to On Beauty. For in this slim volume she writes in what seems an entirely different persona. The Elaine Scarry of On Beauty is what used to be called a beautiful soul. She flaunts for us her sensitivity to Gallé vases, morning glory blossoms, and the unceasing song of a mockingbird. Lovingly and generously, she shares her view ofa palm tree from her window, along with catalogues of flowers, doodles of prints by Matisse, and her very own description of the sky: rivulets of air moving vertically up in streams that wash sideways, so that the black ravens and red-tailed hawks tumble in it all day, somersaulting and ferris-wheeling through the air, placing themselves in invisible fountains that lift them up until suddenly, tucking in their wings, they plunge rapidly down, spinning head over tail until out come their wings and the slow float upwards starts over again. I must admit that my first reaction in reading passages like this was: Say what? But then I felt somewhat ashamed for being so irritated . So gratuitous is this kind of writing that it seems churlish to question its value. As a sincere effort on Scarry's part to convey her experience of beauty, it disarms criticism. If that is what she sees, well then, it is charitable of her to want to share this with us, even if her ability to do so leaves something to be desired, at least to my taste. But the problem with this book is not just, or even primarily, that as a stylist, Scarry is no Pater, and doesn't convey very effectively the experience of beauty she so kindly wants to communicate . What makes this book a disaster is Scarry's tendentious attempt to yoke her experiences of beauty, such as they are, to a weakkneed argument about "the beautiful" and "the just." That argument turns what would otherwise be merely a foray in belletrism into an ideological sally of extraordinary disingenuousness, against anyone on the left who has ever criticized the objectification of 310 the minnesota review women as objects of desire, or the star system, or aestheticism. Here's the gist of the argument, as I understand it: There is such a thing as "the felt experience ofcognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful" thing. Whatever the thing is, if we experience it as beautiful we also feel impelled to replicate, reproduce , amplify upon, reenact, imitate, copy, or otherwise respond to the beautiful object. We look back for parallels, forward to create new things, and conceptually sideways for relations, as if our lives depended on it. Beauty's attributes—the mental acts it incites, which include a quest to recover mentally the sense beautiful objects gave us of certainty-in-perception, an urge to protect the beautiful thing as if it were alive, a "pressure toward distribution," a radical decentering of self, and the will to create other beautiful objects— are "beneficent," because they help us seek both truth and justice. Beauty is not exactly truth, nor truth beauty, and neither is exactly justice, but in good old-fashioned Platonic fashion, complete with appeals to authorities from Homer, Aquinas, Dante, and Augustine to Simone Weil and Amartya Sen, Scarry pursues the claim that the first step to truth and justice is the experience of beauty. To sustain this claim, Scarry needs first to be able to prove that there is such a thing as a felt experience of beauty that has certain essential attributes no matter who is having the experience or what different cultures make of it. Referring to authorities on beauty and analyzing her own experience, as Scarry does repeatedly, don't...

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