The eternal problem of beauty's return - Book Review

For Hegel, there are three hierarchically ordered categories of beauty. These include: natural beauty, artistic beauty (behind which lie intentions), and the beauty one finds in decoration and adornment (which is meant to enhance). If we use Danto's text to navigate the rest of the book, by the time we get to reading "Beauty (re) Discovers the Male Body" by Susan Bordo, or "Whose Beauty? Woman, Art, and Intersubjectivity in Luce Irigary's Writings" by Hillary Robinson, it becomes obvious that the actual subject of Beauty Matters is the conditions and objectives of beauty's representation. This in turn explains why despite their differing subjects Kathleen Higgins's "Beauty and Its Kitsch Competitor" and Noel Carroll's "Ethnicity, Race, and Monstrosity: The Rhetoric of Horror and Humor" both address the suspect power and economy of beauty as the measure of all things "other."

While Beauty Matters develops its one-sided argument against beauty. Elaine Scarry's small and elegant volume On Beauty and Being Just sets out to redeem beauty's reputation. Her subject is aesthetic beauty, forever tied to perception and judgment. Scarry believes that beauty intrudes upon and alters our consciousness. Within this context, the failure to recognize beauty or to attribute it to an unworthy object is the result of our generosity or lack of it. For Scarry, both scenarios constitute personal loss. In her book consisting of two chapters, "On Beauty and Being Wrong" and "On Beauty and Being Fair," she explores beauty as the ideal that underwrites the realms of (high) culture, judgment, sensitivity, and pleasure. Her model of beauty resides in a Platonic ideal and is the source of all things good and humane.

Premised on the view that beauty is generative, Scarry proposes that it stimulates rite senses, provoking a desire to sustain not only the sensation, but also its source. For the author, our negative associations with beauty are merely examples of "imperfect versions of an otherwise beneficent momentum toward replication" or simply "imperfect instances of an otherwise positive outcome" (6). Obviously, this vision of beauty contrasts sharply with the views of the writers in Beauty Matters, whom she would include among those who "disparage beauty lot the sake not of one of its attributes, but simply for a misguided version of its otherwise beneficent attributes...." (10).

As for beauty being a cultural construct, Scarry observes, "Beauty always rakes place in the particular, and if there is no particular, the chances of seeing it go down...." (18). In other words, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and its environment and culture inform that eye. The author confirms this by giving us an account of her own error of judgment, which was her failure to recognize the beauty of the palm tree. After a lengthy examination of this joyful motif as depicted by Matisse, to and behold, she was convinced not only of its iconic significance, but also of the beauty of the palm. Consequently, beauty is an act not only of perception and judgment but also of reflection. In this, Scarry acknowledges the subjectivity associated with the appreciation of beauty.