On Beauty and Being Wrong

I just finished reading Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just and wanted to share a few insights. It’s a pretty quick read at 124 pages and just two parts – the first entitled “On Beauty and Being Wrong” and the second “On Beauty and Being Just.” The latter, a smidge esoteric for an ethics of justice neophyte such as myself, will likely require a second read. So it is on the former section that I will focus here. In these first 50 or so pages, Scarry attempts to defend the claim that beauty is allied with (but not identical to) truth. More specifically, as she puts it, beauty “ignites the desire for truth by giving us, with an electric brightness shared by almost no other uninvited, freely arriving perceptual event, the experience of conviction and the experience, as well, of error.” To better understand how beauty leads us to truth, I want to first examine some other foundational claims that Scarry puts forth.

She opens by asking the reader a question: “what is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird?” This is followed immediately by an answer – the experience of a beautiful object not only encourages, but actively compels replication of that object. We see something beautiful and are moved to capture it through a camera, a paintbrush, a pen, or to simply hold it, transfixed in our gaze. This reproduction is an act of begetting, of creation that gives the object a life beyond itself. It lives preserved in a photograph, a painting, a story, a memory that will likely outlast the thing itself.

In this way, beauty is life-giving because it affords a living, breathing quality to the object. But this life-affirming property is present in the other direction as well, as the object of beauty awakens a greater sense of “aliveness” in the beholder. Scarry actually calls it “lifesaving” and points to older variations of that claim made by Homer, Augustine, and Proust. Think, for a moment, of what you feel upon encountering the dazzling colors of a setting sun or the dizzying shimmer of skyscrapers as clouds part over a silver skyline. Scarry captures the experience as such: “Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living.” In essence, beauty pulls us out of ourselves and into the world so that we experience life viscerally and with greater acuity.

Here’s something else that happens when we are in the presence of beauty. We may feel that it is unsurpassed (the most gorgeous sunset in the history of sunsets) while immediately casting around in our memory for other instances with which to hold it up and compare. On the one hand, “the beauty of the thing at once fills the perceiver with a sense of conviction about that beauty, a wordless certainty.” But on the other, “what is beautiful prompts the mind to move chronologically back in the search for precedents and parallels, to move forward into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring things into relation.” So we have the simultaneous and opposing experience of feeling certain of something’s uncontested beauty while seeking to locate that instance within the hierarchy of our known experience of beauty. It is these processes of begetting and deliberating, Scarry argues, that hone our understanding of the world and lead us to what is true.

If beauty helps us get closer to the truth, it would follow that, in our pursuit to find that which is beautiful, we might sometimes stray. That is, we might err in our judgment of what is (or is not) beautiful. To explore this idea, Scarry asks the reader to recall a time in which they made an error about beauty. Upon first attempting this exercise, I struggled to understand what it was, exactly, that I was being asked to recount. What does it mean to mistake beauty? Can one even truly be “wrong” about so subjective a thing? But Scarry’s own example shed some light on the issue. She confides that, “I had ruled out palm trees as objects of beauty and then one day discovered I had made a mistake.”

This particular illustration resonated with me, as I too have discounted the palm tree as incapable of possessing beauty. But where Scarry has discovered the error in her judgment and repented, I still hold the palm as an object of unfortunate ungainliness and resolutely refuse to acknowledge any error in this determination. But for her part, Scarry describes the moment of realization of this error as a palpable alteration in her perception of the palm. Because I find her account of this reckoning to be far lovelier than any live specimen could ever be, I will quote it at length here:

“Suddenly I am on a balcony and its huge swaying leaves are before me at eye level, arcing, arching, waving, cresting, and breaking in the soft air, throwing the yellow sunlight up over itself and catching it on the other side, running its fingers down its own piano keys, then running them back up again, shuffling and dealing glittering decks of aqua, green, yellow, and white. It is everything I have always loved, fernlike, featherlike, fanlike, open—lustrously in love with air and light.

The vividness of the palm states the acuity with which I feel the error, a kind of dread conveyed by the words ‘How many?’ How many other errors lie like broken plates or flowers on the floor of my mind? I pore over the floor but cannot see much surface since all the space is taken up by the fallen tree trunk, the big clumsy thing with all its leaves stuffed into one shaft.”

While I can’t say that I have ever had such a poignant experience in the presence of a palm, this almost makes me believe that it might be possible. And though I cannot yet share the belief that I have erred in my assessment of the palm tree’s beauty, I have realized that I share Scarry’s experience in making errors regarding the beauty of other things. The most immediate example that comes to mind, because the rupture between the before and the after is so immense, is the this: concrete. That ubiquitous, unloved material. Before, I loathed concrete. Or more specifically, I hated it in the context of architecture and only tolerated it elsewhere in the built environment, like in bridges and roads and other drab utilitarian applications.

Really though what I disliked was anything in the modern vein, for all the usual reasons – too stark, cold, plain, boring – and strictly preferred traditional architectural styles. And while this is often still the case, at some point over the last several years, I have developed a growing appreciation for modern architecture. But for concrete specifically, I have found a real love. Brutalist buildings provide an obvious example. A decade ago I would have shuddered in horror at so naked and hulking a form. No longer. I now find a certain satisfaction in the geometric concrete forms and the monochrome striation of surfaces. But unlike Scarry’s revelation, so memorable because it occurred all at once in a single moment of vivid clarity, my about-face happened gradually over a period of time so that the change, as it was happening, went almost unnoticed. That I have been less conscious of the change has made it harder to pinpoint exactly when or why I started warming up to concrete. There isn’t a specific moment or building or designer that I can credit with my reversal, and yet the change (the gradual awakening to my misjudgement) has been surprising and profound.

But how might such an error have occurred in the first place? How could I have failed to see for years the beauty of concrete that, now, seems so apparent? Scarry discusses a number of reasons for which such errors might arise. In the case of the palm tree, which, as Scarry puts, “was a tree whose most common ground is a hemisphere not my own (southern rather than northern) or a coast not my own (west rather than east), the error may seem to be about the distance between north and south, east and west, about mistakes arising from cultural distance.” She does temper this with a qualification – “nothing I know about perception tells me how my love of the sycamore caused, or contributed to, my failure to love the palm, since there does not appear to be, inside the brain, a finite amount of space given to beautiful things that can be prematurely filled.” But she then goes on to admit that it is likely the case that, had she been “surrounded every day by hundreds of palms, one of them would have sooner called upon me to correct my error.”

But this problem of cultural difference is really a problem of perception, or perhaps more correctly, lack of perception. Scarry argues that the difference in “culture” (i.e. east versus west coast) is not the problem per se, but that the resulting lack of exposure limits the likelihood of regular contact with the object in question. It’s not in being surrounded by “hundreds of palms” everyday that one would suddenly see the beauty of the palm tree, but in such exposure making it more likely that one palm in particular would catch the morning light in a way that is newly lovely. It is in the individual that we find the unprecedented, for “beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down.” A slightly different but related reason for error arises not from failing to see the particulars, but from making a composite of them. That is, substituting the individual for the generic, conceptualized whole. Returning again to Scarry’s palms, she relates:

“When I used to say the sentence (softly and to myself) ‘I hate palms’ or ‘Palms are not beautiful; possibly they are not even trees,’ it was a composite palm that I had somehow succeeded in making without even ever having seen, close up, many particular instances. Conversely, when I now say, ‘Palms are beautiful’ or ‘I love palms,’ it is really individual palms that I have in mind.”

Again her account resonates with me (but I mean, honestly, are palms really even trees?) as I think about my own experience erring in beauty. For it is not Concrete that I love in all its forms and instances, but the use of concrete in particular sites and applications. Specifically, it is the way in which it creates striking contrasts with other materials (think rich woods and polished metals) and how it evokes varying moods through different finishes and treatments. Its surface reads anywhere from soft, dreamy Venetian plaster to high-polish luxe. Really, it is the texture of concrete, on its own and especially with other materials, that I find to be truly captivating.

Of course, it is human to err. We spend our whole lives acquiring knowledge, forming and revising beliefs, and later discovering how we were wrong about one thing or another but doing our best to learn and grow in the process. The realm of the beautiful, or the aesthetic more broadly (what might be widely understood as taste), is perhaps not an area in which many of us spend much time assessing our assumptions and beliefs. Yet it is no less important than any other realm in which we seek to understand that which is good and true and life-improving. In remaining open to the possibility of beauty and challenging our judgments of what is beautiful, we stand a better chance of experiencing beauty – in all it’s life-affirming glory – more often in the world and in a way that is honest and meaningful.