Defining Beauty

In defining the experience of beauty, Elaine Scarry argues that beauty “renews our search for truth”⁵ and diminishes injury, which leads to justice.⁶

How does beauty diminish injury and thereby lead us to justice?

Attributes of Beauty

1. Symmetry

According to Scarry, “beautiful things (whether poems, mathematical equations, or faces) have attributes—such as symmetry, vivacity, unity—that anticipate those same, but much more difficult to achieve attributes in the realm of justice.”⁷

Scarry equates justice with fairness, using “the widely accepted definition by John Rawls of fairness as a ‘symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other.’”⁸ Therefore, because beauty precedes fairness or justice, it follows that beauty gives rise to the “symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other.”⁹ One could think of a cube or a sphere as forms of beauty because they are equidistant in all directions.¹⁰

Etymologically, the word fairness as it relates to justice (think fair “jury”) originates from its use in aesthetics, “loveliness of countenance” or “perfection of fit.”¹¹ A shared antonym of these definitions of fairness is “injury.”¹² In the word injury, the prefix “in-” means “not” in the word “injury.”¹³ Moreover, in Caring Matters Most: The Ethical Significance of Nursing, Mark Lazenby references Scarry, explaining that the base of the word “injury” is “jur,” which means right in the sense of justice.¹⁴ An injury is an event that is an injustice that is not right.¹⁵ Lazenby connects the injustice of injury to death, stating that to “die a death that is not peaceful is an injustice; it is not right.”¹⁶ Injury is not only wrong, but morally wrong because injury threatens life.¹⁷ Therefore, “Injury, not ugliness, is the opposite of beauty.”¹⁸

If beauty leads to fairness or justice, then beauty also leads away from injury. Beauty diminishes injury.¹⁹ Afterall, Scarry writes that “beauty is lifesaving.”²⁰ If beauty diminishes injury, beauty heals.

It is no surprise that the landmark study, “View through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery” published in Science magazine in 1948 was the first study to prove that patients heal faster when exposed to views of nature. In a sense, we are genetically wired to need beauty.²¹

2. A Selfless Mind

Next, Scarry describes how the experiences of the beautiful contributes to a mindset that diminishes injury and leads to fairness or justice. When we encounter something beautiful, the beauty of the thing “interrupts and gives us sudden relief from our own minds” through a process of radical decentering or unselfing, which produces a state that Scarry calls an “opiated adjacency.”²²

radical decentering – French Philosopher Simone Weil explains that beauty “requires us ‘to give up our imaginary position as the center’”²³ as “[we] willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us.”²⁴

unselfing – British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch²⁵ describes how in the presence of a beautiful thing, “‘self-preoccupation’ and worries on one’s own behalf abruptly fall away.”²⁶ Unselfing is a “capacious mental act” in which “all the space formerly in the service of protecting, guarding, advancing the self (or its ‘prestige’) is now free to be in the service of something else.”²⁷

opiated adjacency – an awkward term but one which reminds us that there are many things in life that makes us feel acute pleasure (opiated) and many things in life that make us feel sidelined, but there is almost nothing—except beauty—that does the two simultaneously. Feeling acute pleasure at finding oneself on the margins is a first step in working toward fairness.²⁸

What I believe Scarry is getting at is that the experience of the beautiful teaches us that selflessness is a choice for life.²⁹

James Doty, a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and founding director of CCARE (the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education), says that we “cannot have ‘transcendence,’ which is the sense of meaning in your life, unless you take this journey outward. This is a journey of connection to others, because when you connect with others and have an open heart, and you embrace the other as you, your physiology works at its best.”³⁰ Studies on the practice of compassion show that the amygdala, which is the fight-or-flight place in our brains, shrinks in size.³¹

3. Desire for Creation

Finally, Scarry acknowledges that the experience of the beautiful “awakens us to our own power of creation.”³² For example, ancient and modern philosophers agree that contact with the beautiful “gives rise to our desire to bring children into the world,” as well as “the desire to create poems, legal treatises, and works of philosophy.”³³ Beauty is life-giving and life-sustaining.

History has shown that fairness or justice is unnatural and not given. Achieving fairness or justice requires work over time. When we recognize our own capacity to create in response to something beautiful, Scarry argues that this recognition is “a first step in working to eliminate asymmetries and injuries.”³⁴