Comparing Elaine Scarry's On Beauty And Being Just

To gaze upon beauty leads one to create something beautiful, whether it is a work of art such as a painting, music, a poem, a sculpture or to become attentive to injustice. When one notices the beautiful, one is distracted from the idea that one is the center of the universe, thus one is becoming unselfish, and begins to see beauty in more ordinary things, realizing they are not so ordinary, therefore offering those things protection. Elaine Scarry in her work On Beauty and Being Just supports this notion. Scarry writes: The beholder, in response to seeing beauty, often seeks to bring new beauty into the world and may be successful in this endeavor... beholders of beautiful things become beautiful in their interior lives: if the contents of consciousness are full of the calls of birds, mental pictures of the way dancers move, fragments of jazz pieces for piano and flute, remembered glimpses of ravishing faces, a sentence of incredible tact and delicacy spoken by a friend, then we have been made intensely beautiful (Scarry, 88-89) Not only does gazing upon beauty cause the desire to create something beautiful but it also makes one beautiful by making one less self-centered. Essentially, goodness in, goodness out. However, it is possible to become stuck in the sensuous gaze and obsessed with physical beauty which causes one to not move

and if they are subject to our willful alteration then we are at liberty to make beauty what we wish. And surely what we should wish is a world where the vulnerability of the beholder is equal to or greater than the vulnerability of the person beheld, a world where pleasure filled tumult of staring is a prelude to acts that will add beauty already in the world - acts like making a poem, or a philosophic dialogue, or a divine comedy; or acts like repairing and injury or a social injustice (Scarry,