[lit-ideas] Re: Beauty, anyone?

  • From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 20:59:30 +0900

On 2/19/07, Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John McCreery quotes from an article, mentioning professional philosophers,
the study of beauty and Alexander Nehamas.


I attended a lecture by Nehamas at U. of Toronto some time ago.  It was a
remarkable lecture because it was a philosophical talk with a slide show of
works of art.  I can't remember the topic, but I remember being impressed by
his passion for thinking about the significance of these works of art.  It
was also his book, "Nietzsche: Life as Literature", that changed how I read
Nietzsche.  I think I will order this most recent book of his.  Thank you
John for mentioning Nehamas.



It is interesting, isn't it, that your reason for recommended Nehamas,
the experience of how reading his book on Nietzsche chanaged how you
read Nietzsche,  fits very well Nehamas' notion of beauty. E.g.,

"I want to turn our common picture around. The judgment of beauty is
not the result of a mysterious inference on the basis of features of a
work which we already know. It is a guess, a suspicion, a dim
awareness that there is more in the work that it would be valuable to
learn. To find something beautiful is to believe that making it a
larger part of our life is worthwhile, that our life will be better if
we spend part of it with that work. But a guess is just that: unlike a
conclusion, it obeys no principles; it is not governed by concepts. It
goes beyond all the evidence, which cannot therefore justify it, and
points to the future. Beauty, just as Stendhal said, is a promise of
happiness. We love, as Plato saw, what we do not possess."

This paragraph is taken, by the way, from "An Essay on Beauty and
Judgment," the full text of which can be found at

http://www.mrbauld.com/beautyheh.html

The book in the review to which Arts& Letters Daily pointed me,
appears from the review to be an elaboration of this argument.

John

--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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