On Beauty and Being Wrong Summary and Analysis

On Beauty and Being Just is a philosophical argument leading to the conclusion that beauty produces equality and social good. More generally, it is a defense of beauty (both in objects and in people) written in the mid-1990s, when beauty was disavowed as an important quality in the humanities, which focused on different theoretical approaches like feminism, Marxism, and post-colonialism.

Scarry begins her argument by discussing Wittgenstein, who argues that beauty requires replication; she gives the example of Leonardo Da Vinci, who copied the works of Verrocio. As a visual event, she writes, art is replicated first by touch and then by vision. In the section entitled "Beauty Prompts a Copy of Itself," she refers to Plato, who discussed the desire to replicate beauty as leading to children, and analyzes a sonnet...