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 | | Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art by Alexander Nehamas ISBN-10: 9780691095219 ISBN-10: 0-691-09521-3 ISBN-13: 9780691095219 ISBN-13: 978-0-691-09521-9 Hardcover 2007-02-05 Princeton University Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and desire, and to show that the values of art, independently of their moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life. Nehamas makes his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Manet's Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of artworks is generously illustrated. Beauty, Nehamas concludes, may depend on appearance, but this does not make it superficial. The perception of beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it. This hope can shape and direct our lives for better or worse. We may discover misery in pursuit of beauty, or find that beauty offers no more than a tantalizing promise of happiness. But if beauty is always dangerous, it is also a pressing human concern that we must seek to understand, and not suppress. | ||
Reviews | ||
Apophatic Beauty (This review first appeared at firstthings.com) In 1948, the abstract artist Barnett Newman wrote, "The impulse of modern art was to destroy beauty." One among many impulses of recent art has been to piece it together again. It is a beleaguered movement, but promoted by a wide range of figures, from democratic populist Dave Hickey to the late Susan Sontag. Several books have been written on the subject, a recent one being the Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas' Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in World of Art. Nehamas' book begins with Plato and ends with Nietzsche, and is guided throughout by the author's fascination with Edouard Manet's provocative 1863 nude, Olympia. Nehamas provides a potpourri of critical observations on anything from Marcel Proust to evolutionary biology or modern television. As with so many philosophers of aesthetics today, we find Immanuel Kant's take on beauty in the crosshairs. In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant developed a notion of beauty as "disinterested contemplation." (A notion famously dismantled by Nicholas Wolterstorff's unflinchingly Christian Art in Action). Kant's philosophy divorced beauty from desire, claimed beauty to be universal, distanced beauty from everyday life, and--perhaps most problematically--presumed to be able to identify beauty in the first place. Whether or not my summation does justice to Kant, one way of organizing Nehamas' book (there are perhaps many) is as an attack on these four propositions. First is beauty's divorce from desire. Nehamas contrasts Plato's rapturous love for beauty to the cool, non-possessive detachment of Arthur Schopenhauer. "Nothing could be farther from Plato's celebration of desire in the Symposium than Schopenhauer's hymn to its cessation." As if to reunite beauty and eros once again, the book displays a plethora of nudes. Some of Nehamas' inclusions "hover near the pornographic"; but this is to show that the author is aware of the difficulties the beauty-eros connection involves. "Sometimes, a single taste and a moral virtue may pull in different directions and we may simply have to live with the tension between them: Ask any Wagner fan." Second, Nehamas criticizes the distinction of art and beauty from life. Prompted by Hal Foster, Nehamas suggests that beauty is part of the "the everyday world of purpose and desire, history and contingency, subjectivity and incompleteness." Following Arthur Danto, Nehamas suggests that art need not even contain an aesthetic element. In fact, the question "What is art?" or "Why is this a work of art?" may not be worth pursuing at all. These questions had never been urgent as long as the arts were taken for granted; they were raised only when the radical innovations of the nineteenth century began to erode the public's confidence in traditional certainties. The first work to address them systematically, Leo Tolstoy's What is Art?, did not appear until 1896. . . . Nehamas, then, is aware of art's fractured contemporary condition. Art is a wineskin incapable of containing what ferments in this author's reflection on beauty. Nehamas then moves to universalism. The notion that there are universal criteria for anything is far from welcome in contemporary academe, and the aesthetics of Nehamas is no exception. But, beyond fashion, the author makes a nuanced case for his position against any universal criteria for beauty: Aesthetic judgment must move away from a dogmatism that detects a difference in quality in every divergence in taste without, at the same time, falling into a relativism that refuses to make any judgment at all. There are, then, many kinds of taste, and "in most cases, bad taste is literally the lack of taste, the absence of style--dull randomness or drab uniformity." The book's most fruitful line of inquiry comes when Nehamas attacks Kant's notion that what is beautiful can be determined. We could call this Nehams' critique of the judgment in Kant's Critique of Judgment. Nehamas suggests that art critics or film reviewers cannot define what makes something beautiful as much as they can recommend, or not recommend, that we make the effort to find out for ourselves. Such evaluations "are not conclusions but spurs." True beauty cannot be defined. "The passion for ranking, the fervor for verdicts . . . has deformed our attitude toward the arts. . . ." It was on this subject--in a talk Nehamas gave at Princeton to promote the book--that he grew most passionate, and most convincing. "The art we love is the art we don't yet fully understand." Such "apophatic" beauty holds promising potential for a theological engagement with Nehamas' very open philosophy of beauty. Michelangelo's sonnets, for example, repeatedly betray the sculptor's belief that an experience of beauty prompts a longing for God, beauty's ultimate source. Unfortunately, however, this is an avenue of exchange that Nehamas securely closes off. Nehamas explains that beauty's dangerous, deceptive side was addressed by Plato and his followers with "a vast philosophical picture, eventually appropriated by a current within Christian thought, according to which beauty, when it is properly pursued, provides a path to moral perfection and is aligned with goodness and virtue." So far, so good. Yet secularization, for Nehamas, is a given: "The sense that a higher authority--reason or God--secured that alignment was gradually lost and the picture gradually faded, only the dangers of beauty remaining in the traces it left behind." Not only is beauty disconnected from God, it is disconnected from the good. Nehamas does concede Montesquieu's notion that "the pleasure given us by one object inclines us toward another. . . ." There is then an expansive quality to appreciating beauty, one that Nehamas even suggests he cannot live without. But to call this expansion necessarily benevolent is too much. Plato may have believed that beauty and goodness converge. "I believe, on the contrary, that there is no clear answer to such questions and no reason to expect one. To think of beauty as only a promise of happiness is to be willing to live with ineradicable uncertainty." Nehamas' work is a beauty that is "stripped of its moral connotations." This is not to say that those who disagree on the relation of beauty to goodness can write each other off. Nehamas spots a fascinating convergence between Plato and Nietzsche: Plato writes that "only in the contemplation of beauty is human life worth living" because he saw nothing of value in beauty, or anywhere else, that was not already moral; Nietzsche declares that "only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world eternally justified" because he believed there are no moral values at all. Nehamas, then, shows how people with faith in a transcendent order and people with no such faith can both meet in appreciation of beauty; but the former group may leave the book feeling perplexed. It is a worthwhile text, having indicated beauty's elusive, apophatic dimension to a contemporary audience. "Beauty always remains a bit of a mystery," writes Nehamas, "forever a step beyond anything I can say about it, more like something calling me without showing exactly what it is calling me to." Nehamas flirts with the mystery, but then curtails it in a way that might make Kant blush. After repeatedly touting uncertainty, Only a Promise of Happiness arrives at an abruptly certain conclusion: "The value of beauty lies no further than itself." | ||
An incomparable approach to taste I am so glad I came across this book and other writings [e.g. The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Sather Classical Lectures, 61)] of Professor Nehamas. I consider it a 21st century philosophy classic! You cannot take my word, but you can surely read and possibly find it very, very beautiful. | ||
A Broken Promise I kept on reading through this book hoping to find the message, but, except for the early implication that beauty was but a vapor in the vision of the beholder and real art was for those critics qualified to go on endlessly about the hidden meaning of the work, it was not there. Tom Wolfe nailed this in The Painted Word, and I should have been warned. I wonder if this book had an editor. If so, he or she might have noticed that while many of the paintings, especially Manet's, were repeated several times, many obscure ones critical to appreciation of the text, were left to the reader's imagination. The book was too wordy and lacked organization, which might be consistent with its message. Worse, it exuded the sniffy attitude of an academician anxious for you to know the extent of his knowledge while demeaning yours. If beauty, as the ancient philosopher once wrote, is the good so good it leads to nothing better, then we are not decived in the contemplation of it for its own sake, even if it be, as Plato described it, but the shadow of pure Beauty. Some of the art here, was, indeed, beautiful, but none of the writing, and the promise broken was that of the reviewer who implied the book was a good read. | ||
Beauty and Ethics With so much of today's art having been reduced to silly and trite political statements, it is refreshing to be reminded that the greatest of artists, and the greatest of thinkers, have always consider genuine art to serve the purpose of elevating the human spirit. Alexander Nehamas masterfully reminds us of the profound philosophical tradition that understands the concept and experience of beauty to be essential to moving one toward a fuller life, a life that is centered on its concern for the well-being of the other. Along with rich philosophical reflections of thinkers ranging from Plato to Mann, Nehamas leads his reader on a journey of discovery: a journey that helps one discover what Plato considered to be the one basic human instinct: the instinct to respond to beauty. After reading this text, take a look at E. Scarry's work: Beauty and the Just, or some of the essays by I. Murdoch. You will, in the end, no longer be taken-in by today's artists who pose as poets, painters, or musicians, but who in fact simply use the aesthetic medium to propagate some sort of shallow and thoughtless political agenda. | ||
"To think of beauty as only a promise of happiness is to be willing to live with ineradicable uncertainty" (pg. 130). This book mixes the philosophy of art, ethics, and language in a very creative way. Although Nehamas covers much ground, he pursues throughout a creative discovery of the meaning of Edouard Manet's "Olympia" painting. He chases the inscrutable Olympia with the same fervor that Langdon chases Leonardo in "The Da Vinci Code" and the same intensity that Paul Harris chases the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in "The Rule of Four." Nehamas pursues Olympia as the moral virtue of happiness against a historical background where, "For Socrates, virtue was nothing but its own pursuit. And only the promise of happiness is happiness itself" (pg. 138). Beauty, for Nehamas, is the promise. Modern art, as in modern Anglican philosophy, has placed "beauty" in a relegated, unimportant position. Instead, aesthetics, and objectivity, have become the marks of modern art criticism and modern philosophy (and science). Nehamas wants to restore beauty without giving transcendent features to it. He begins by posing 2 alternatives: Plato or Schopenhauer. Without agreeing with Plato all the way through the argument for the Forms and Pythagorean style objectivity, Nehamas does see in Plato an articulated expression of the power of beauty. In Plato's "Phaedrus" Nehamas sees the homosexual words of Plotinus as a muse on beauty. Nehamas connects the sexual nature of the philosophical ascent towards the form to arete (Greek word for moral virtue; but Nehamas sees the word fitting a context where the "older man was expected to provide him with the motivation and knowledge necessary for success and distinction in life" pg. 6). But Schopenhauer wants to "exclude passion and desire from the serious," according to Nehamas, who quotes Schopenhauer saying, "All amorousness is rooted in the sexual impulse alone" (pg. 8). Schopenhauer is following Kant's notion of the beautiful as what is known through contemplation or art that produces "a satisfaction without any interest" (pg. 3). And although the word aesthetics is from the Greek word "aesthesis," which means "perception," Kant's notion of a satisfaction without interest seems to separate the perceptual experience from aesthetics. Nehamas sides with Plato against Kant and Schopenhauer. "Beauty...is part of the everyday world of purpose and desire, history and contingency, subjectivity and incompleteness" (pg. 35). As for progress in the arts, new art is not somehow closer to Truth than other art, according to Nehamas who almost likens period changes in art to Kuhnian science paradigm shifts: "No theoretical proof...will do: the only way to show that new and better art is possible is to create a work that some, at least, among its audience will at some time accept as new and better art" (pg. 40). Unlike Kant who denies interest as part of the mark of beauty, Nehamas invokes Plato again, "Our reaction to beautiful things is the urge to make them our own, which is why Plato called eros the desire to possess beauty" (pg. 55). "Beauty points to the future, and we pursue it without knowing what it will yield, and that makes it as difficult to say why we love someone as it is to say why someone else is our friend. My reasons for finding you beautiful include characteristics I feel you have not yet disclosed, features that may take me in directions I can't now foresee. Beauty inspires desires without letting me known what they are for, and a readiness to refashion what I already desire without telling me what will replace it. When I say...that what I want is you, not anything from you, I am putting myself in your hands, assuring us both that I will be happy no matter what happens to me, if it is due to you. It is an overwhelming feeling, that sweeping sense that all will be well - and it is often wrong. Stendhal was right: beauty is only a promise of happiness" (pg. 63). We do not know what beauty will yield because beauty is "the emblem of what we lack" which "so frightened Schopenhauer instead of calming him" (pg. 76). As far as agreement on art is concerned, "Aesthetic judgment must move away from a dogmatism that detects a difference in quality in ever divergence in taste without, at the same time, falling into a relativism that refuses to make any judgment at all" (pg. 84). Nehamas begins this difficult task by making distinctions between the value of morality, aesthetics, beauty, and style; "while the values of morality are the emblems of our commonalities, the values of aesthetics are the badges of our particularities" (pg. 86). "Universal aesthetic agreement would mark the end of aesthetics. Distinctions always denotes a necessity and, sometimes, a value" (Ibid). Thus good aesthetics carries varying styles along for the ride (Nietzsche says "To `give style' to one's character - a great and rare art!"). But since universality is the end of aesthetics, descriptions, and interpretations "depends in each case on how well we and our audience know a work of art and our purposes on that particular occasion" (pg. 123). Again, as far as interpretation is concerned, "there are no unexplained explainers" (pg. 124). Nehamas has already written on Plato (in "The Art of Living") and Nietzsche (in Nietzsche: Life as Literature). Richard Rorty thinks that Nehamas is trying to bring Plato and Nietzsche's conception of beauty together in "Only a Promise of Happiness." | ||