Can Beauty Make Us Good?

What is beauty? Is it really “in the eye of the beholder,” or is it an objective quality that exists in the world? Is it a mere decorative feature of life, or does it have something important to tell us? These are enduring human questions, but ones that the art world and the academic humanities—the natural custodians of beauty—gave up answering for a long time. In this episode, David Brooks talks to the Harvard professor Elaine Scarry, whose now-classic book On Beauty and Being Just brought the subject back to serious attention 25 years ago. David and Scarry discuss the ladder of loves, the universal appeal of symmetry, and why even prisoners at Guantánamo want to look at pretty pictures.

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