On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry

(Previous lecturers have included Michel Foucault and John Rawls.

In 1998, Elaine Scarry, a professor of aesthetics at Harvard University, was invited to give the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Published in 1999 by Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry Peter Benson applauds a beautiful book on beauty by Elaine Scarry. In this way, we start to view the spiritual education as a kind of aesthetic education: acquainting the student with “truer” sources of beauty and affording them the more sublime responses outlined in these notes.

She is the author of The Body in Pain, Resisting Representation, Dreaming by the Book, and many articles on war and social contract. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value. However, I find it a useful corollary or even corrective to the standard Buddhist “rejection” of aesthetics, explaining how beauty can condition becoming’s wholesome forms. Elaine Scarry teaches in the English department at Harvard University, where she is Walter M. Not written from the Buddhist perspective, these essays dismiss (too?) casually the ugly failure modes of beauty: the acquisitiveness, possessiveness, and jealousy which consume many the beholder. …beauty is a starting place for education.Ī thorough defense of beauty and of its power to push the boundaries of our concern outward.

The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction–to locate what is true. In 1998, she delivered the essay On Beauty and Being Just, for the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, an inquiry into the disparagement of beauty in western.