Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...proposes that we once again talk about beauty as "identical with the spark of desire." -- Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New York Sun

"Every practicing art critic could benefit from reading Nehamas's feeling account." -- Nancy Tousley, Calgary Herald

"Nehamas has done us the service of returning the question of beauty to the center of humanistic attention." -- Joseph Pelan, The Weekly Standard

"We can enjoy this book as we might the conversation of a spirited and quirky friend." -- Michael J. Lewis, Wall Street Journal

"What Nehamas expects from beauty is something more like an expanded sense of the world ... Beauty is Back." -- Christopher Benfey, Slate

Review

Mr. Nehamas sets about reclaiming something of beauty's lost meaning by showing how it is connected to our happiness. . . . That . . . a work could infuriate one age and become an icon to the next fascinates Mr. Nehamas, who is drawn to works where our aesthetic and moral obligations come into conflict. . . . Mr. Nehamas displays an admirable clarity of thought and language. . . . [W]e can enjoy this book as we might the conversation of a spirited and quirky friend whose most irritating pronouncements are the ones we find ourselves mulling over, with some surprise, a week or two later.
(Michael J. Lewis The Wall Street Journal )

Alexander Nehamas seeks to reestablish the connections among art, beauty and desire and to show that the values of art are critical.
(Publishers Weekly )

[A] marvelous book...Nehamas sets out to retrieve beauty on behalf of all those who still use the word 'beautiful' with everyday pleasure: of a child, a landscape, a vase of flowers, an automobile. He does so in a tone of easy familiarity and enviable gracefulness; this is the philosopher not as blunt pragmatist, like the great Richard Rorty, nor as dour sceptic like W. V. Quine, but as winning and witty guide, and genial companion.
(Mike Hulme Times Higher Education Supplement )

Because our most meaningful encounters with beauty unfold over time, we can only ever say in retrospect that a beautiful object has not made our lives--or our culture--better. . . . Beauty is only ever that promise: There is no a priori judgment that might reveal what will prove evanescent and what sustaining. . . . In Mr. Nehamas's vision, the possibility of beauty is well worth the price of uncertainty.
(Gideon Lewis-Kraus New York Sun )

[A] gracious and insightful book. . . . The best parts of the book, which deal with the intimate love of beauty, are gloriously intelligent without being at all difficult and wise without being pompous.
(John Armstrong Sydney Morning Herald )

Nehamas . . . thinks that beauty has been too narrowly defined and that both the pro-beauty camp and the anti-beauty camp have painted us into a tight corner. Only a Promise of Happiness is his attempt to free us from the enclosure. . . . Nehamas feels that beauty deserves a second chance because he thinks that the war on beauty has restricted what we can hope to expect from both art and life. . . . [A] sane and provocative book.
(Christopher Benfey Slate.com )

The power of beauty, its call to our love and its capacity to move us, is the focus of Only a Promise of Happiness, a new and very welcome book by Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas.
(John Armstrong The Australian )

[Nehamas] writes with philosophical depth and great clarity and grace. His thoughts are lively and provocative, and he argues that the question of beauty (what is beautiful to me might not be beautiful to you) and the value of art are not rarefied topics, but part of the fabric of our everyday lives.
(Nancy Tousley Calgary Herald )

Nehamas' language itself is fascinating, often giving rise to thoughts that in themselves are worth contemplating.
(Regis Schilken Blog Critics Magazine )

Every practicing art critic could benefit from reading Nehamas's feeling account. But this shouldn't keep anyone whose curiosity is aroused by the title from picking up this engaging book. Nehamas . . . writes with philosophical depth and great clarity and grace. His thoughts are lively and provocative, and he argues that the question of beauty (what is beautiful to me might not be beautiful to you) and the value of art are not rarefied topics, but part of the fabric of our everyday lives.
(Nancy Tousley Calgary Herald )

If we are to take beauty seriously, Nehamas argues, we have to admit that it is impossible to really understand it without also understanding love.... Nehamas has done us the service of returning the question of beauty to the center of humanistic attention. Only a Promise of Happiness raises important questions about the relationship between knowing and loving.
(Joseph Phelan Weekly Standard )

This book contains material for constructive discussion and may even prompt some of us to reconsider the role beauty could or should play not only in the realm of art but in other aspects of our lives.
(Giles Auty The Australian )

A wonderful, personal, and philosophic essay concerned with the restoration of beauty's place in art . . . a rich conversation of ideas and feelings.
(Reamy Jansen Bloomsbury Review )

Nehamas, who wrote important studies on Plato and Nietzsche, is one of the most brilliant, amazing and amusing philosophers of our day. Though many other thinkers surely are as important as he, few rival his elegance, for he cultivates these almost forgotten qualities among scholars: writing well and wit. From its extrinsic features to the inmost convictions of its author, Only a Promise of Happiness is a notable book.
(Jose Baracat Jr. Consciousness, Literature and the Arts )

Nehamas's argument about beauty in art is beautiful, in the very sense intended by the argument itself.
(Carolyn Wilde Modernism/Modernity )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press; illustrated edition edition (February 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691095213
• ISBN-13: 978-0691095219
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 8.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #472,669 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "To think of beauty as only a promise of happiness is to be willing to live with ineradicable uncertainty" (pg. 130)., March 6, 2007

By	Shaun King.com - See all my reviews

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."

17 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beauty and Ethics, March 14, 2007

By	Rob Allison "Numbers 6:26" (Orange County, Calif.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An incomparable approach to taste, April 5, 2008

A Kid's Review

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.