Last week I went to this discussion at Columbia:

Beauty and Morals: Some Literary Perspectives
With John Hollander, Alexander Nehamas, Marie Ponsot & Elaine Scarry

I came very close to not going: I was weary and hungry, and, I thought, "Will anything get resolved? Not likely." But I went anyway, and didn't really regret it. Naturally, I got there very late, and Elaine Scarry and Alexander Nehamas did much of the talking while I was there.

You have to admire Scarry's boldness, her lack of concern at seeming sentimental. (Although part of me chafes: one should take it for granted, and regard the opposite as grotesque.) One would like one's favorite people to hit it off; one would like one's favorite ideas to reinforce one another. And instead of shrugging her shoulders and saying, "Sometimes it just doesn't work out," Scarry pours all her energy and her intelligence into arguing that beauty and justice are two sides of the same coin. Like her, I never understood what the fuss over The Triumph of the Will was all about, and yes, the notion that fascism has first dibs on beauty is grotesque. I was also half convinced by her idea that the opposite of beauty is injury. (When I'm nauseous, which almost never happens, the mere thought of suffering or injustice can make me throw up; beautiful things, especially music and spaces, on the other hand, are a great curative.)
On the other hand, I'm not sure I understand her idea that what links beauty and justice is the ideal of symmetry. I can see that for some things — faces, for example, or façades. (Later, I remembered the biggest example of symmetry in music: Brahms's German Requiem, which is so symmetrical that you can pair up the movements: 1-7, 2-6, 3-5, and 4 in the middle. After 7 your ear half expects 2.) But there's plenty of art that plays with the idea of imbalance. Later she specified that she didn't mean anything so crude as bilateral symmetry — more "balance." But this seems awfully close to lifting the boundaries from a word, undefining it. (For example, can't you argue that local imbalances are part of a grand symmetry? Yes, in art; but not in justice.) Moreover, aesthetic experience is often painful — and I have in mind Keats and Mozart, not Bunuel's knife-in-an-eye scene.
Alexander Nehamas asked if there wasn't something unjust about the way that beautiful things and people stand out. I was reminded of this wonderful passage from The House of Mirth:

They turned into Madison Avenue and began to stroll northward. As she moved beside him, with her long light step, Selden was conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness: in the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair—was it ever so slightly brightened by art?—and the thick planting of her straight black lashes. Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?

Elaine Scarry said, "But perhaps seeing a beautiful thing leads us to pay more attention to everything else." Perhaps; and often enough, to be disappointed, if beauty is what we're after. But then, beauty isn't everything.

Nehamas was effective because he wasn't posing as a bad boy; he wasn't championing the theatre of cruelty, for example. He was simply saying that there were exceptions. And that's the way I like to see it. Scarry's arguments are very appealing; but I need an escape clause.

Here's a good article: "In from the Cold: the Return of Knut Hamsun"