Elaine Scarry

Author of On Beauty and Being Just. James engages her in his July 2025 sketch (https://exitmusic.world/unfinished-sketch-beauty-is-a-system-perceiving-the-conditions-of-its-own): her first mark of beauty is that it demands replication, yet she describes replication mostly as fixation (Proust and Leonardo following beautiful people), and justifies works like the Mona Lisa as replications of a prior beauty by assertion. He reads this as an argument made convoluted "because of the lack of a sufficiently animist metaphysics", and suggests that what she calls justice he would call goodness or rightness. See beauty-as-perception.

Not yet researched in the wiki.

Provenance: James's published notes at exitmusic.world, read in full 2026-10-26 (raw/notes/exitmusic-world-2026-10-26.md). His statement of his own position; not a sourced claim about the world. Disposition: stated.

Related: beauty-as-perception, relational-ontology