Month: October 2020

Are We Afraid of Beauty? (II)

Ishaan Jajodia
Vesuivus
Pierre-Jacques Volaire, The Eruption of Vesuvius, 1771. At the Art Institute Chicago.

Some time ago, I asked in two successive posts whether we really were afraid of beauty nowadays and whether that had significantly altered our approach to thinking about virtue. I wrote a response that was brief and not as comprehensive as I had imagined; it was merely putting pen to paper for a thought that was begging to be let out. Since then, I have had the opportunity to read more widely on the subject, and a book that has caught my attention is Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, which was delivered as the Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Yale University in 1998.1 Scarry’s lectures are marvellous works, and excised of their drooling over the work of Matisse, asks an important question: how are beauty and justice connected? Can the beautiful be connected to the just? Scarry identifies two roles that beauty takes — first, as the progenitor of wonder; second, as creating what she terms the “pressure toward the distributional,”;2 — that are integral to our understanding and comprehension of the world. Through this essay, I will take some of Scarry’s ideas and apply them to areas of inquiry that I intend to probe further.

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  1. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) ↩
  2. Ibid, 67. ↩

Homeric Beauty

Ishaan Jajodia

In his paper ‘The Terminology for Beauty in the Iliad and the Odyssey,’1 Hugo Shakeshaft makes some interesting observations which are of particular interest to those attempting to find a conception of the good, the beautiful, and the ethical/virtuous in Ancient Greek political thought. If, as is stated, Aristotle did indeed borrow the word wholesale from Homer, it would only be prudent to return to Homer to see where it all started.

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  1. Hugo Shakeshaft, ‘The Terminology for Beauty in the Illiad and the Odyssey’, The Classical Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2019): 1–22. ↩

More and the Nature of Work

Ishaan Jajodia

For someone who complains so regularly about utopias, it is quite the travesty that I have never managed to find the leisure or the inclination to read Thomas More’s Utopia,1 even if small segments and portions have managed to make their way into my thought, perhaps inadvertently. I cannot deny that the text has been immensely influential; it is of primary interest to me because of the spatial and aesthetic sensibilities it embodies. If we had to make a real world anew, what would we include? What would we leave out from the domain of stipulation? These are important questions, but I am already getting ahead of myself. This piece focuses on my impressions and the concerns highlighted in the first book; I shall pick up the next day on issues in the penultimate and ultimate books.

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  1. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson, in Three Early Modern Utopias, ed. Susan Bruce, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). ↩

Are we afraid of beauty?

Ishaan Jajodia

There are two claims in Joe Sach’s article1 that I promised I would return to in my previous piece, but chose not to because it was not wholly relevant to the line of argument it had taken on. However, I did not intend to abandon them. These two themes coalesce around a phenomenon that I have seen when I studied the history of art: that we have become viscerally afraid of beauty. Sachs lays out some of the groundwork:

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  1. Joe Sachs, ‘Three Little Words’, The St. John’s Review XLIV, no. 1 (1997): 1–22. ↩

What is ‘kalon’?

Ishaan Jajodia

Why should the student of politics be apprised of the beautiful? This question is answered perhaps obliquely in the Nicomachean Ethics, where the Aristotle remarks that of the four fundamental questions of the study of politics, one is the enquiry into what is “noble [kalon] and just” (NE 1144a12). But this very word, kalon, is the root of much debate, sometimes with acerbic overtones in academic settings that seem otherwise to be bereft of sharp rivalries and accusations and allegations of utter and complete incomprehension of the object, or in this case, the word being examined. Today, I shall endeavour to write about the word ‘kalon’ despite my utter and total lack of Greek, ancient or modern; with this goes any apologies that must be rendered for coming off as a total tool. The question that we are faced with is simple: why is kalon rendered in translations the way it is: varyingly, as noble, just, or good, or nothing but beautiful? Can we truly remove from the scope of Aristotle’s ethical and political thought any concern with aesthetics, and, if this being the case, is such an artificial separation detrimental to how we conceive of politics in practice and thought?

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