Beautiful Day: Awakening to Responsibility

Recently published works, such Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, have suggested the natural confederacy of the sensory appreciation of beauty and the achievement of social justice. Scarry (amongst others) has proposed that the opiated moment in which one is arrested by beauty's spell results in a ‘radical decentrification’, where under they who behold beauty are awakened to alterity and, consequentially, encouraged to realize an ethical agenda based upon just (sic) relations between people. The present article refutes the adequacy of the beauty - ethics - justice triptych and, instead, proposes that the entire variegated aesthetic quantum operates as the medium through which recognition of (in)justice reminds us of our responsibility to the other. As essentially inarticulate concepts, justice and responsibility are capable of ‘speaking’ to us through the channel of the aesthetic. The aesthetic is the plane of dialogue on which our felt appreciation of (in)justice prompts us to responsibility. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.