scarry

Attention, in the sense that runs through the wiki's philosophical frame, is the capacity to be genuinely present to what is before you — without immediately translating it into what it resembles, what it costs, or what you already think of it. It is the capacity to let the thing speak before you respond.

Beauty is not decoration. It is not subjective preference. It is a form of judgement — a quiet act of recognition in which a particular thing is permitted to stand for the order it belongs to. The disciplined exercise of that judgement — the willingness to call one thing beautiful and another not and to mean it seriously, to defend the judgement, to hold it against fashion, and to revise it only when given reason — is the condition under which beauty survives.

Author of On Beauty and Being Just, who argues that beauty is an apprenticeship in justice.

The argument that beauty is not a distraction from justice but a training in it — that to be stopped by a beautiful thing is to practise recognising what stands, and makes a claim, independently of us.