August 25, 2024
Answering an application question because it was good...
(2) Elaine Scarry: “Beauty comes out to greet us and prepares us for the other undertakings, for finding out about truth and committing ourselves to justice.” Agree or disagree?
I think of beauty and I first think of beautiful people: they’re attractive and easy on the eyes. This kind of beauty is the substrate of lust, an ephemeral feeling, but one that invokes the chase—a chase that also evokes beauty; a deeper kind, and maybe a more important one.
How? Well, if we find that the person is easy on the soul, then maybe they call for something more than a glance; their beauty is not only topical, but it’s a beauty that gets more beautiful because it’s hidden.
This beauty, that is to be found, calls for a pursuit, a quest that I embark on to find out about their truth, and in that quest, perhaps I learn things about myself, and maybe I learn some things about the world: beautiful things. Their quirks that make me smile, the things I can do to make them smile: the things to find, make them more beautiful. So once again we understand that beauty is in discovery.
With that, let’s look beyond people…
Instead, let’s look at math. Math is a subject that I’d heard was called beautiful, but it was always just a subject. Get the right answer, vindicate your solution with a calculator, or a jury of textbook pages.
The numbers are pretty I guess, and an integral looks like a paper scroll, and that’s beautiful I guess. But let’s dig deeper. Take deriving a proof. Here we have some propositions, some claims, and it exists in abstraction—it’s clever, it’s like a trick, I have to figure it out—same with that beautiful person.
And it’s beautiful not only because it’s correct, easy on the eyes, but because I know it’s correct, and the degree and ease to which I can understand intensifies its beauty, but by Scarry’s definition, once again we have something that is topically beautiful, but whose beauty goes beyond what can be seen, and is beautiful because it has to be found.