Exit Music (notes)

Unfinished sketch

1. Beauty is an encounter between a subject and an object
2. The beauty of the object is completely dependent on the subject encountering it

Objective beauty is an illusion sustained by some shared context between different subjects leading to somewhat similar encounters (and broad agreement on what is beautiful)

Subjects bring all kinds of contexts to the encounter, everything from the common conditions of survival of the species to a highly-trained intellectual perspective on the object. Thus there are some things that are almost universally held to be beautiful (the shade of a tree by a body of water on a sunny day), and there are some things whose beauty requires advanced expertise to appreciate.

In her book On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry states as the first indication of beauty that it demands replication  —  that is, that it prompts a copy of itself. It is strange, then, that she describes the process of replication mostly in terms of fixation  —  that is, the desire of the subject to fix the beautiful object in their experience. She gives examples of Proust and Leonardo being fixated on beautiful people and having, or exercising, the desire to follow them around.

Scarry then moves on to justify the case that objects such a the Mona Lisa and The Divine Comedy are acts of replication of some prior beauty simply by asserting that “something, or someone, gave rise to their creation and remains silently present in the new-born object”.

This is probably just one of many examples in Western philosophy where a convoluted or absurd argument is required because of the lack of a sufficiently animist metaphysics.

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I think, when Scarry talks about justice, she may actually be referring to a concept I would more comfortably call goodness, or rightness. The goodness or rightness I'm thinking of is a category of conditions that lead to the flourishing of a system of which the subject and object are both participants.

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On apparent beauty: an object can produce encounters with beauty when the subject is unaffected by or unaware of harmful things that are done in order to support the existence of the object. For example...