INCHOATE THOUGHTS
Remarks on Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of
Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton University Press, 2007)
Alexander Nehamas is one of the most
creative and stimulating philosophers working today. Only a Promise of Happiness is truly an exacting and thrilling book.
It contains the most carefully argued contemporary case for beauty as value (or
the beautiful as valuable) that I can recall reading. Furthermore, the author’s
literary elegance enhances the philosophical precision of the text.
One of the reasons I find the book so
compelling is that the author bases so many of his claims on specific examples.
Just as art historians (even—perhaps especially—those engaged with theory)
generally steer clear of philosophical reasoning, so philosophers usually avoid
serious discussion of individual instances in all their messy and bewildering
peculiarity. Nehamas is different. His pursuit has led him to cross the
boundary from philosophy to art history. I wish more philosophers did so (and I
write this as one who eschews art history for a cultural history that relies on
artworks and other artifacts). Others have done so, of course—Arthur Danto, and
David Carrier—but even there I feel that they usually keep the two areas of
thought separate, in case the untidiness of actuality should intrude upon the
elegance of abstraction.
Even so, while admiring the attempt,
I have to admit to some skepticism regarding the author’s interpretation of
Eduard Manet’s Olympia. He claims it
to be a representation of a moment of photography. I tried to discuss this puzzle
in my book Vermeer’s Wager (and even
reproduced Olympia), but I feel that
Manet did not so much represent a photographic moment, as produce a
representation that could only have been conceived subsequent to the experience
of photography as both process and product, and the emergence of the “scopic
regime” (I hate the phrase, but it serves) proper to the peculiar circumstances
of that medium. This may be a finicky distinction, but in some sense all
important. Olympia is a post-photographic
painting that is, in a sense, about painting in post-photographic
circumstances; yet it is a painting,
as Manet’s choice of size (inevitably lost in any discussion dependent on
reproductions), if nothing else, makes unambiguously and unavoidably clear. I
was left wondering (perhaps obtusely, perhaps impertinently) quite what
experiences lay behind the author’s statement on p. 106, “For over three years,
I have been looking long and hard at this picture.” I would argue (and have
argued) that our knowledge of an artwork is a complex nexus derived from
acquaintance with the thing itself, with reproductions of it, and with
descriptions of it, that is modified with each encounter with any of these
things; yet certain aspects of that artwork can only be known by means of each
of these modes of encounter alone. Sorting out how we know what—from what mode
of encounter each aspect of our knowledge derives—is an important task, but
daunting, given the progressive modification of our impressions. I tried to articulate
this in a discussion of Rembrandt’s painting, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem (Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam):
Memory, therefore, plays a
considerable role in what we might call the individual’s cumulative viewing
experience of such a painting. Every viewer already familiar with this painting
and its image, whether fleetingly or profoundly, whether from the original or
its reproductions, or both, brings memories of it to each new encounter with
either the painting itself, or a reproduction of it. The effect is Heraclitan:
just as we cannot set foot in the same river twice, so we cannot see the same
painting twice. And this is so on two counts. First, the painting changes—the
very site, the wall upon which it hangs, the works beside it, the quality of
light falling upon it, even its state of conservation. Secondly, the viewer
changes, owing to what that viewer has seen since the last encounter with the
painting, its reproductions, and the viewer’s acquisition of other forms of
knowledge or surmise about it from talk or texts. Memory therefore plays a
great part in the constitution of our progressive experience of such a
thing—once there is a memory to evoke or invoke. (“Recollections of Rembrandt’s
Jeremiah,” Art History,
Aesthetics, Visual Studies, ed. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey,
Williamstown, Mass: Clark Art Institute, and New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2002, pp. 175-186.)
And so I wonder in respect of Manet’s
Olympia: What was the author looking
at over those three years? What is the constitution of his knowledge of this
nexus of painting, reproductions, talk, text, and memories? In the context of
his argument I think this really matters:
not so much in its specificities, as in the realization and acknowledgement
that an artwork is not simply a single thing:
even a single thing with both material and immaterial constituents.
I cannot possibly do justice to all
Nehamas’s philosophical claims. I hesitate to pick out any more particular
points for comment or query, but I shall jump in at pp. 62-63, beginning “That
forward-looking element and the risks that attend it are essential to beauty,
which withers when it can promise nothing it has not given already, and signals
the fading of love.” I read this as one of the author’s major claims, and a
profound insight. It makes me ask: How can we sustain love? Through what one might term retrospective prolepsis?
Do we look back as if to anticipate what we do not possess, even though we do?
This is a complex way indeed of trying to understand uncertainty and its
poignancy, the need for trust on a hunch, and the promise of happiness he
presents beauty as conveying.
My pencil, though, really worked
overtime in the margins of Chapter 3. Do we necessarily cease to find something
beautiful once we have grasped it? (Or can we never grasp it? Is enjoyment of
the beautiful endlessly deferred, hence only ever a promise?) Nonetheless,
beauty creates new societies, and is a matter of community, and these are
communities of anticipation (I like this a great deal, if only intuitively).
And then we come to the section “Uniformity, Style, Distinction,” beside which
I noted, “This section important for why aesthetics matters for history,” which is my own preoccupation.
Why? Because aesthetic judgment is not self-contained: it is both personal and social; and then he introduces the
puzzle of the relation of aesthetic to moral values that he explores with such
finesse towards the end of the book. This was truly breath-taking.
This book is a great achievement. (I
have some reservations, although they signify little—the range of reference,
despite its chronological depth, is relentlessly western, but that’s my current prejudice; and television is
intolerable not so much because of the programs, but because of the intrusion
of advertisements.) This is a text to which to return again and again: a
demonstration that humane thinking is still being produced in one of our seats of learning, at least!
Bravo!