Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.

Finished! this one, at long last. Now that the semester is done, I'm quite glad not to be reading any books. Quite glad. You'll just have to be patient until I miss books again.

At any rate, because I'm such a sucker for what I think is Aristotelian categorization, and because I like to see connections between the purely aesthetic and the practical, this part of the second half of the book I found pretty great:

John Rawls differentiates [among] three forms of justice: in "perfect justice" we know the outcome we aspire to achieve as well as the procedure by which that outcome can be brought about (food should be shared equally, and we can ensure this outcome by arranging that the person who slices the cake is also the last to select his own slice); in "imperfect justice" we know the outcome we aspire to achieve, and we know the procedure that gives us the best chance of approximating this outcome (persons guilty of a crime should be convicted and innocent persons should go free; a free jury trial gives us the best hope of achieving this outcome, though it by no means guarantees it); in "pure procedural justice," finally, we have no picture of the best outcome, and we must trust wholly in the fairness of the procedures to ensure that the outcome is fair (here equality of opportunity is Rawls's illustration). Aesthetic creation, too, has this same variation: one may have a vision of the object to be created and the path by which to bring it into being; one may instead have a vision of the object to be created and a technique that brings only its approximation into being; or one may have no prior vision and may simply entrust oneself to the action of creating (as in Richard Wollheim's account of the way one learns what one has been drawing only when the drawing is done).

What's nice about it is that while perhaps the variations of justice are set in a hierarchy (perfect justice is assuredly "better" than imperfect justice) aesthetic variation is not.

I for so long thought and probably continue to think that the first variety of aesthetic creation—knowing what I wanted to make and having all the tools in front of me to make it—was the only way writing worked. Or, like, was the way good writers worked. Right now I operate mainly in the second variety: I have the tools to make an approximation of what I originally designed. Revision helps to push this approximation closer toward its model, but never right up to it. What I need to do is get to that third variety: trusting myself that I'm creating well and that what will result will be beautiful and just. Maybe, then, these are set in a hierarchy after all; interesting how it's oriented in the opposite direction from the other.

I always thought that an art-for-art's-sake mentality was at complete odds with a mentality that sought justice in the world. No one was more of an aesthete than Oscar Wilde, and surely he wasn't doing anything to help the misfortunate. Scarry's book, though, does a pretty convincing job of showing that the pursuit of beauty can aid us in the pursuit of justice. In short: beautiful things decenter us. They take us out of ourselves and make us want to work in the service of somebody or something else.