3rd Delphi Dialogues: Elaine Scarry speaks to ANA-MPA on 'helping Shakespeare keep his promise'

American essayist and professor Elaine Scarry teaches at Harvard University, where she is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value, and stands out for several reasons: she has written many books and given a lot of lectures on a wide range of themes, including nuclear war, justice, literature, and medicine, while she has shed light on our world with her views. As she says to Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA-MPA), "Powerful intelligence requires that we constantly practice not only perceptual acuity but also imagemaking acuity, and reading literature is the best way to do the second." She also notes that "Beautiful things encourage us, even when we’re disheartened, to keep up this effort to achieve justice." In addition, talking about her book where she reveals the secret recipient of Shakespeare's sonnets, she says, "Shakespeare promises his beloved he’ll be known to all future peoples. I felt obligated to help him keep his promise."
Professor Scarry was elected to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her awards include honorary degrees from Northwestern University and Uppsala University in Sweden, as well as the Truman Capote Prize for literary criticism, and most recently, the Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for a writer "of progressive, original, and experimental tendencies." In 2005, Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy named her one of the world’s100 leading intellectuals.
On Friday (June 20), Scarry will address the 3rd Delphi Dialogues 2025, an initiative by Harvard professor and president of the European Cultural Center of Delphi Panagiotis Roilos that examines complex contemporary questions. This year's theme is "Biopolitics, Bioethics, and Democracy", and the two-day event will open on Friday afternoon (17:30) at Delphi. Professor Scarry's lecture will be on "Thermonuclear monarchy: can a single speech act destroy all civilization?".
Below, she answers questions by Athens-Macedonian News Agency journalist Eleni Markou, focusing on the two central subjects of her research, the nature of physical injury and the nature of human creation.
Q: You are a Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value at Harvard University. What is your teaching about, according the above terms?
A: My PhD Seminar entitled "On Beauty" brings together students from many different fields (literature, art history, biology, math, physics, theology, philosophy, architecture). It is designed for graduate students but open to undergraduates with an application. The first five weeks of the course look at classic investigations of beauty by Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Spenser, Kant, Burke, Schiller, Shelley. In the next four weeks we take four objects of beauty - gods, gardens, persons, and poems - and see if the features of beauty at one site co-incide with those at another site: is Rilke’s account of beauty in his poem "Blue Hyrangea" or "Bowl of Roses" the same as Homer’s account of Helen’s beauty in the Iliad or Dante’s account of Beatrice’s in Vita Nuova? In the last four weeks of the course, we wrestle with recent critiques of beauty based on their erroneous moral and political objections.
Q: How do you feel about coming to Greece - is this your first time? And what about participating in the 3rd Delphic Dialogues?
A: I am thrilled to be visiting Delphi for the first time and to be returning to Athens for the third time.
Q: What are the main points of your speech, "Thermonuclear Monarchy: Can a Single Speech Act Destroy an Entire Civilization?", that you will deliver at the Delphic Dialogues?
A: The nuclear architecture in all nine nuclear states arranges for one person (the president or prime minister) to launch a weapon that will kill millions. There is no brake in place. My lecture looks at the obscenity of this arrangement and our obligation to dismantle it. Nuclear weapons will destroy our species, our civilization, and all our sister species if we don’t very soon eliminate those weapons. We have the means to eliminate them through both international and national (constitutional) law.
Q: How relevant is the issue of your book "Thermonuclear Monarchy" (2014) today?
A: Highly relevant. One Australian veteran, John Hallam, notes that "Global warming may destroy civilization over the next hundred years; nuclear war may destroy civilization over the next 100 minutes." Many observers - even those who lived comfortably with the nuclear danger in the 20th century, such as former US Secretary of Defense William Perry and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger - acknowledge that the dangers are greater today than during the Cold War. In the 1950s there were two nuclear powers; now there are nine. Back then we had populations highly alert to and continually warning against the use of these weapons; now (in a phrase coined by Hans Kristensen) the world’s nuclear IQ is very low, especially in the nuclear states themselves. Kissinger noted that developments in fields such as AI have also increased the danger.
Q: You have also dealt with the nature of physical pain. In your book "The body in pain" (1985), you survey the relationship between language/vocabulary and a body subjected to torture or injury in wartime. What do you demonstrate with this research?
A: The difficulty of expressing physical pain makes the person in pain invisible, even to someone in the same room. This inexpressibility not only increases the person’s suffering but deforms our ability to make accurate political and moral judgments. The preposterous mistake of calling the torturer’s act "intelligence gathering" is an example of the way pain turns moral perception upside down.
Q: In "Dreaming by the book" (2001) you wrote about the value of literature in creating images and perceptions in the human mind. You also gave examples in a recent interview, such as that Newton dealt with physics and mathematics when he took a break from his real work, which was studying the Bible! Are we reading literature today - at least as much as our brains need, to build images and theories? How has the modern era (Internet, artificial intelligence, overflow of information) influenced our readings?
A: Novels and poems require us to make images in our minds that are not perceptually present. When a writer asks me to picture a tree, it is not present in the physical world the way the tree outside my window, the tree in a painting, and the tree in a film, and the tree on the computer screen are all perceptually present. Powerful intelligence requires that we constantly practice not only perceptual acuity but also imagemaking acuity, and reading literature is the best way to do the second.
Q: In your book "On Beauty and Being Just" (1999), you explore the ways beauty leads to social justice. Can you give us an example that explains the above?
A: Beautiful things have features that are also present in the realm of justice but there those features are much rarer and more difficult to attain. For example, symmetry is immediately available - naturally occurring - in the petals of flowers, the wings of birds, the facets of crystals, the faces of a children. These make us eager to find that same symmetry in "fair political arrangements," but "fair political arrangements" aren’t naturally occurring. They require endless work to bring into the world and to keep in the world. Beautiful things encourage us, even when we’re disheartened, to keep up this effort to achieve justice.
Q: Much has been written about the identity of the handsome young man to whom most of Shakespeare's famous sonnets are addressed. However, in your book "Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare's Sonnets" (2016), you propose a completely different one: the English poet Henry Constable (1562 - 1613), also known for his sonnets. How did you come to this conclusion?
A: The conclusion came to me, rather than I to it. I was reading many passages in Shakespeare about flowers (and was not thinking about people he loved). One of Shakespeare’s sonnets - number 99 - suddenly announced to me that his beloved was the poet Henry Constable, because the sonnet is about the way flowers steal their beauty from the beloved and at that very moment Shakespeare was in the act of stealing one of Henry Constable’s poems. For many, many years after that electric moment I researched the question, and each path I walked down led to the same answer. I felt I had been given the assignment to "report" this matter to the public. Shakespeare promises his beloved he’ll be known to all future peoples. I felt obligated to help him keep his promise.
(Photo courtesy of European Cultural Center of Delphi )