The beauty of other people in just relationship, the beauty of the dream of justice in our world reaches into our perception and draws us out of it. Human justice cannot be had by a society of people who are primarily concerned with their own immediate interests. A just world requires that we set aside ourselves and self-interests. This in itself integral to any aspect of human justice. We want to be near beauty and at the same time, we want to be decentered by beauty. When we look upon the face of another, we know that we would set ourselves aside for the sake of this beautiful person. When we look upon a beautiful landscape, we are filled with reverence for God or for the universe. Our universe becomes oriented towards another thing or person or dream. In witnessing beauty, we are removed from our own center. The more we rightly witness beauty, the more beauty we will labor to create, and the more beautiful the world will become. In each case, the ego and the need for power override our sense of beauty and any capacity to enjoy and exult in it. The broken artist may desire to destroy the beauty for the pain of contrast to himself that it causes. The selfish lover may desire only to consume the beautiful thing rather than exalt it. It should be noted that beauty can be wrongly observed: the trophy hunter may see a beautiful animal and desire to conquer it, to kill it, to hang it on his wall. The lover sees a beautiful person and may indulge in them for a time, but eventually is struck by the desire to produce a child with them, to recreate the beautiful person in the body and soul of another. The photographer sees and captures it in a photograph.
The artist sees a beautiful object or landscape or person, and their hand moves to draw it. Witnessing beauty instills in us the desire to recreate it, to spread it. I especially gravitated towards three of them. It is a short, though not particularly easy, read, wherein she offers some valuable ideas. In it, she makes an interesting, though incomplete-feeling argument for the aesthetic basis for human justice and how beauty drives us towards a desire to see justice done. Elaine Scarry is an acclaimed Aesthetics professor at Harvard University and author of the small book, On Beauty and Being Just.
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