Nehamas - Contra Modernity!

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Nehamas - Contra Modernity! Michael F. Brett X The goal of this paper will be to situate the aesthetic model put forth by Alexander Nehamas, both in his recent Only a Promise of Happiness and in the published research leading up to it over the last decade, against what we can call the “modernist tradition” in aesthetics and philosophy. (While this parlance should be straightforwardly interpretable to those within the discipline, I will offer a brief explication of “modernism” for the uninitiated before explicating Nehamas’ model as such.) My thesis is that Nehamas’ model, while improving on traditional modernist views by restoring the relevance of phenomenal “beauty” experiences to our philosophy of aesthetics, still falls short of a truly post-modern understanding of aesthetic in that it over-emphasizes the prescriptive qualities of the relationship between beauty and interpretation, while underselling the affective qualities of the same. Before progressing, I should explicate (as promised) a preliminary understanding of “modernism.” While a fuller understanding can and ought be gleaned from Martin Heidegger’s Age of the World Picture, with specific regard to the materials presented in Appendix 9, it is my opinion, after repeated attempts to develop these ideas here, that such an attempt would ultimately unbalance the piece tone and pacing, as well as lengthening it to at least a hundred and fifty percent of its present volume. Therefore, the following must and ought to suffice.

The “modern” philosophical epoch, generally and preliminarily, can be understood as the radicalization of Platonism viz-a-vis more recent thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Rene Descartes. More specifically, modernist philosophy can be characterized by an extreme emphasis on rationality and on man as the animal rationale, a specious but historically influential Latinization of Aristotle’s “Zoon Logon Exon.” While the original implies something more like “the animal which speaks, gives voice, or poetizes,” animal rationale is more bound up in the concept of ratio, “weighing,” within the philosophically specific context of cognitive evaluation via the faculty of human reason. Therefore, a “modernist” philosophy of aesthetics entails an understanding which enables us to weight out, in abstracto, a series of rational prescriptions as to what can or ought be beautiful, which would take precedence over our more basic intuitions and the actual phenomenal experiences of beauty in the presence of art. With the advent of such thinkers as Friederich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jackie “Jacques” Derrida, this modernist understanding of art and value has begun to come under fire, and a call is being heard within philosophy for a model of aesthetics which can restore the more integral, phenomenal, and relevant aspects of the artistic experience to the abstract and sterilized understandings heretofore popularized as modernist canon. Renowned aesthetician and Nietzsche scholar Alexander Nehamas tries his hand at formulating just such an interpretation in his recent literary offering Only a Promise of Happiness. The book itself is crafted to entice, printed on glossy paper with exceedingly wide margins, in which a scholar has room to record, annotate, and contrast a multiplicity readings as his work develops. While the first two of Nehamas’ four chapters are informative in their own right, they serve more as an engaging and expertly written overview of art and philosophy

throughout western history than as anything like an organically Nehamasian explanans. The bulk of my endeavor will therefore be concerned with the third and fourth chapters, in which Nehamas details the relationships and meta-relationships between 1) beauty, 2) evaluation, 3) style, and 4) taste. 1) Beauty is the central concern of Nehamas’ aesthetic model; the titulative “promise of happiness” upon which his theory turns. More concretely, he tells us: “Not limited to appearance, beauty is neither detached from it nor a characteristic of something else - a mind, a soul, an inner self - instead. Beauty is, in a word, everything we love in a person, and when that is actually everything, when (as we say) we love not only this or that about a person but the person itself, we are unable to say what that is…the measure of beauty lies not in the past and the present, but most of all in its pledge for the future (OPH 72.)” We have three basic statements in this proclamation. First, we are told that beauty is neither limited to appearance, nor detached from it, nor a characteristic of “something else,” which, given Nehamas’ examples, seems to be something else with a tendency toward something in the general vein of sentience, awareness, consciousness, or agentiality. Second, we are told that beauty is the totality of what we love in a person, in a sense which remains coextensive with our actual love for the person as such and not merely their individual or particular qualities. Third, Nehamas asserts that the “measure of beauty” (whatever that even means) is found predominantly in its “pledge for the future.” Let us examine these assertions one by one before turning our attention to evaluation, style, and taste. 1) Our first statement paints beauty as being located neither in aesthetoi nor in the perceiving consciousness for which such aesthetoi exist as phenomenally present. It is neither what aestheticians have, after John Locke, described as a “secondary quality” inherent to an

object of beauty, such as taste or color, nor a strictly subjective quality, absolutely and inconcussibly inherent in the perceiving consciousness. Rather, features of the beautiful object and features of the perceiving consciousness mingle, overlap, and ultimately merge together in an experience of beauty (more on this under “style” and “taste.”) Whether we respond to this experience of beauty subjectivistically or in a more post-modern fashion, it must exist for us as experience of some kind - it must have what I will call psychophenomenal veridicality, or the quality of being phenomenally present before a perceiving consciousness in such a way that said consciousness’ experiences have become truly, factually, or veridically determined by the presence of said experience and the experience of said present-ation. 2) Nehamas’s second assertion informs us that to truly love something or someone is to find it or them beautiful, and not merely their constitutive qualities. He says later that: “To love you for your kindness is not to love your kindness instead of loving you (whatever that would mean); and if I did love your kindness, I wouldn’t love it instead of loving you, for it is your kindness, your particular kindness, I would love and not kindness in general (OPH 100.)” This parallels our first assertion quite nicely: we love kindness qua X, as opposed to kindness as such, because it is the instantiation of kindness which is psychophenomenally veridical for us, as opposed to the concept of kindness, or the eidetic kindness as it exists merely in abstracto; in the same way that beauty is psychophenomenally veridical just when we experience it as present and not when it exists abstractly as a conceptual appellation to phenomenally present aesthetoi. So far, so good. 3) It is this with this final assertion that we find Nehamas at his most aesthetical, lapsing into the woefully subjectivist parlance of “promise” and “measurement.” While our prior

assertions were concerned with the psychophenomenally veridical (and, therefore, with the phenomenal inform-ation which will later become vital to interpetation), Nehamas here shifts his emphasis to the deductive and propositional (and, therefore, into parlance and perspective of aesthetic modernism.) As we discussed, both of these faculties co-exist in mutually supervening and dialogical tandem; in-forming and re-forming one another in accordance with the truths so generated. Unfortunately, the futural promise which Nehamas takes to be the “measure of beauty” removes us from beauty as present, removes us from the psychophenomenally veridical, in exactly the same way that the conceptual abstraction “kindness as such” removes us from the phenomenal presence of actual and veridical instantiations of the experience of kindness. 2) Interpretation occurs when a perceiving consciousness encounters aesthetoi - that is to say, throughout arguably most to arguably all of our lived experience. Even on models less radically subjectivist than the Cartesian modernism which Heidegger and Nehamas both seem to rally against, most philosophers and philosophies respond in some way to the idea that aesthetoi inform us about the world of which they and we are a part - herein lies the seed of interpretation. In order to orient ourselves in and to the world, we make judgments or inferences based the contents of these aesthetoi, and on the effects of their psychophenomenally veridical affect upon our moods, feelings, or sentiments. Nehamas asserts: “…this is my basic idea: the effects of our interpretations of works of art on the rest of our lives are far-ranging; they shape and color our experience, they give it form and structure, and they are integral to what each one of us is (AI 27.)”

What Nehamas is driving at here is that no aesthetoi or interpretations exist in abstracto anymore than one can love another’s kindness instead of loving said other - they are bound, inextricably, into a singular, ontical, and experiencable unit. Rather, they spill successively into moments as a consciousness continues on its path through time, like water in a fountain’s basins or petals in a blooming flower, pushing themselves unto and into the experiences and interpetations which succeed them temporally. Aesthetoi bring color to our worlds, and interpretations color subsequent aesthetoi, giving our experiences “form and structure…integral to what each one of us is.” Nehamas colors our understanding of beauty and interpretation with following Hickeyan example: “Aesthetic experience is, in fact, inextricably woven into the everyday, so that perhaps no experience is completely unaesthetic. Dave Hickey, who believes that “the live effects of art…inform our every waking hour,” remembers “standing on the corner of 52nd Street and Third Avenue on a spring afternoon, six feet from a large citizen gouging the pavement with a jackhammer, and thinking about the Ramones, amazed at the preconscious acuity with which I had translated the pneumatic slap of the hammer into eighth-notes and wondering what part, if any, of the pleasures and dangers of the ordinary world might be considered “natural.”” Art and beauty can be found everywhere, and therefore so can interpretation, without which they slip unnoticed by while we sail on oblivious of the wax blocking our ears. The issue is only whether we know - or whether it matters to us to learn - how to discern the beauty and engage in its interpretation ((AI 30.)” So, Hickey is walking and hears a sledge-hammer drilling to a particular rhythm, which his previous experiences with and interpretations of musicological theory color as “eighth notes” akin to those used by the Ramones. While I do not KNOW that Hickey was sporting a Mohawk, band jacket, or do-it-yourself safety pin piercing on this particular occasion, it is probably safe to say, if his experience with and interpretation of the Ramones translates

jackhammer-slaps into eighth notes with “preconscious acuity,” that these experiences and interpretations are equally present, in ways both subtle and overt, throughout the rest of “the integral whole which Dave Hickey is.” Understanding the process of interpretation more clearly, Nehamas leaves us with the issue of “how to discern the beauty, and engage in its interpretation.” While I have skipped past much of Nehamas’ book in the interest of space conservation, a good chunk of his first two chapters involve themselves with answering this question a la prior behemoths of occidental thought, such as Plato, Immanuel Kant, and even the less-infamous Arthur Danto. Even thought most of these thinkers were working well before DesCartes, they are by and large concerned with the relegation of aesthetic or psychophenomenal experience to rigorous and logocentric interpretation - exactly the sort of thing which Heidegger levels against modernism as an accusation or charge. Nehamas is sympathetic, I believe, to this contra-modern direction, and explains his stance as follows: “Interpretation, then, does not “push aside” the manifest content in order to reveal the true meaning, the latent content that surfaces hide behind or beneath them. It does not lead from how something seems to what it really is. Interpretation begins from how something seems or is (a difference that hardly matter now) at first to how it seems or is once we have come to know it better (AI 34.)” Let’s return to the matter of the jackhammer. For Hickey, the experience in question is just as bound up in the aesthetoi of the hammer’s drilling as it is in the interpretation of a particular pattern of sound vis-à-vis the Ramones. It is not the case, then, that the jackhammer is really latent in some sense apart from the manifest pattern of its sound, as might have been the case had Hickey been deafened at the time, but that something lay at the inscrutable core of a particular of aesthetoi that brought together and enjoined the realness of both the

jackhammer as a genesthon of sound and the memory of the Ramones under the seemingness of the abstract metrical unit “eighth note.” The difference that matters is not the difference between these things, but the difference between Hickey’s integral wholeness before and after their phenomenal union in the experience as he recounts it. This “integral whole,” which Hickey or any of us simply is, serves to conjoin beauty and interpretation in a loosely substantive model of aesthetics and of aesthesis; but more can be said. To that end, I will refine and nuance this model with a Nehemasian understanding of taste and style, and then show how it can continue to be of use to us without the disastrous and covertly modernist understanding of beauty as a “promise of happiness.” 3) By establishing beauty as a “promise of happiness,” Nehamas attempts to salvage the faculty of interpretation from its modernist history as a device for categorical prescription. In his own words: “For it is the judgment of aesthetic value - the judgment of taste - that is embarrassing (BJ 4.)” “The judgment of taste is prospective, not retrospective; the beginning, the middle, but never the end of criticism (BJ 5.)” What Nehamas intends when making statements like these is that an “aesthetic value,” existing outside and apart from one’s own experience, is an embarrassment both to philosophy and to beauty. One does not look back on an experience and think “I can retrospectively conclude that the Ramones will augment the lives of all those in proximity to jackhammers” although this may be something like the case. Rather, Nehamas is attempting to capture the affective character of taste; the character preserved the colloquial saying that “one must develop a taste for good Scotch” or “one has developed a taste for harsh noise artists.” There is

nothing prescriptive about one’s developing a taste for good Scotch - many lives have been lived well, with comfort and fulfillment, in both the presence and absence of such a taste. Affective taste, however, occurs when one sips a fine or repulsive batch of some quality of Scotch - more powerfully than any abstract prescription, such an experience comes upon us aesthetically and crafts our “integral whole” into the likeness of a proper Scotch-o-phile, or cements our conviction that we prefer and ought to stick with bourbon. The aesthetic presence of “beauty” from our formative Scotch experiences then “promises” to us that we will or will not be happier for pursuing similar experiences as our lives unfold. 4) We can then consider taste as something like an “input phenomenon” - that is, it is concerned with what we intake aesthetically. Conversely, Nehemas’s model must explain an “output phenomenon” of aesthetoi which we can understand as having “tasted” well or badly to our particular faculties. He calls this phenomenon “style,” and binds it to the tiniest minutiae of a particular joining of aesthetoi. “Aesthetic features are so specific that they only belong to one work. That’s what it means to say that it is not any sexual tension that makes Frasier delectable, but the “particular” tension that binds Niles and Daphne to one another…(BJ 6.)” This should require little explication, as it is essentially the logical counterpart to Nehamas’ faculty of taste, save that it concerns the nature of aesthetoi as they become present, as opposed to the affective experience of the same once made present. So, we can succinctly recapitulate the Nehamasian formula as follows: “Beauty occurs when the particular style of an aesthetic experience accords with our tastes in such a way as to produce an experience we can interpret as promising happiness from continued encounters with said style or said experience.”

To conclude, let’s see precisely what is wrong with this, what right, and how it could be made to more radically overcome the limitations of its modernist forebearers. Admirably, Nehamas attempts to restore the role of beauty to art and art criticism, reacting against a centuries-long philosophical trend which has relegated beauty beneath interpretation, creating a series of school-marmish and hoaky-sounding doctrines borne of the wherewithal to prescribe what will or should strike one as beautiful categorically. To circumvent this dilemma, Nehamas brilliantly (if still disastrously) assigns the possibility of interpretation to the experience of beauty; counting on beauty’s “promise of happiness” to inform our interpretations of our experiences, our selves, and our world. This promissory capacity mimics a similiarly disastrous trend in the history of ethics, famously lambasted by Friederich Nietzsche in his On the Genealogy of Morals: “That particular task of breeding an animal with the prerogative to promise includes, as we have already understood, as precondition and preparation, the more immediate task of first making man to a certain degree necessary, uniform, a peer amongst peers, orderly and consequently predictable. The immense amount of labour involved in what I have called the “morality of custom”…the actual labour of man on himself during the longest epoch of the human race, his whole prehistoric labour, is explained and justified on a grand scale, in spite of the hardness, tyranny, stupidity, and idiocy it also contained, by this fact: with the help of the morality of custom and the social straightjacket, man was made truly predictable (GM II/2).”

What Nietzsche is driving at here is that mankind, in an effort to make life interpretable, has developed a pathological thirst for promissory guarantees - in science, in ethics, and even in our philosophical aesthetics. Nietzsche took a notoriously polemical attitude toward such promissory systems, analogizing them to the webs of poisonous spiders and caricaturing the drive toward such systems as the “theologian instinct” upon which he had come to wage war.

The reasons for such adversity were located in 1) in his distrust of systems to be exhaustively or all-inclusively reliable and 2) the tendency of such systems to blind their devotees and adherents to alternative and potentially valuable possibilities for belief - concerns which echo in my distrust of Nehamas’ promissory conception of “beauty.” To begin, the whole argument easily collapses into a reductio ad absurdum - if beauty functions as a “promise of happiness” - rather than as its locus - than mankind would be left in the existential equivalent of an abusive relationship, constantly besieged by promises which may or may not come true in precisely the moments wherein one ought find beauty, securitas, and joy. Nehamas attempts to circumvent this line of reasoning- or, at least, to circumvent our concern for this line of reasoning - with a metrical, poetical, and cadent assertion that “…only the promise of happiness is happiness itself,” but never develops this (superficially convincing) assertion to the point of holding any philosophical water. This, we shall see, is the devious Joker which will set Nehamas’ theoretical house of cards to tumbling. This “promise of happiness” is, en essentia, the same old modernist god that has yoked psychophenomenally veridical beauty since Plato; notwithstanding the polished post-modern coat and spats of Nehamasian good intentions. Anybody who has ever gotten high, slacked off, or clung to a hurtful situation for emotional reasons - i.e., most to all of us should understand that many times beauty is pursued because of its experience in the present, often in direct contrast to the promise of happiness in any significant futural sense! So, how can we reclaim the promise of Nehamas’ model, and the good philosophical intentions which birthed it? I suggest a Germanization of the verb “to promise,” one which

retains and respects the capacities of promises to break their word without derailing our modernist, hyper-calculative expectations. For Nietzsche and Heidegger, the reigning Archpriests of the post-modern religio and cultus, “promise” would be rendered “vorsprechen;” the literal implications of which are “forward-speaking.” This understanding would render the promissory capacities of beauty more prophetic than predictive, invoking a particularly future (with varying degrees of efficacy) rather than counting on a particular future (with varying degrees of efficacy) - let’s see how this holds up when applied less broadly. Nehamas puts forth the contents of his theory in the terms of beauty, interpretation, taste, and style. In any case, we approaching the phenomenal experience of aesthetoi with an eye toward the existential question - namely, what is the meaning of being? On the orthodox Nehamasian understanding, we get a model looking roughly as follows: The psychophenonemally veridical presence of beauty makes a promise, which we necessarily interpret as an assuredness that our tastes will continue to accord with aesthetoi of like or similar style to those from which this beauty experience is emergent. This promissory capacity seems to redeem aesthetic philosophy from the modernist tendency to subjective beauty beneath reason, calculability, and prescription, by elevating it to the very locus thereof; reasonably calculating prescriptive imperatives to pursue aesthetoi whose styles have historically seemed beautiful to our taste. More radically, the Neo-Nehamasian model here put forth answers the existential question not with the reliable calculation of and by promissory prescriptions, but simply by the

affective conjoining of taste and style which grounds intelligibility in any sense. So, when Dave Hickey walks by the jackhammer and hears the Ramones, it is possible and even likely that his appreciation for both or either will be affectively kindled; that he will skip happily homeward to the “ham|mer|ham|mer|ham|mer|ham|MER” cadence and joyfully partake in something like a “turn|up|the|vol|ume|blitz|krieg|BOP!!!” Then again, if Hickey is walking to or from some tragic letdown, he will probably interpret his jackhammer experience in a coextensively tragic light, and opt instead to “for|get|THIS|noise|and|PLAY|a|god|DAMN|waltz|in|STEAD.” In either event, the point is not that he predictively ascertained the what of his beauty, but that such beauty remains both possible and accessible - however subtle, cryptic, or interpretively illegible the affective experiences which render it so. A broader promise, it would seem, and but also surer - for where its predecessor spoke a guarantee, the Neo-Nehamasiam promise is, effectively, guaranteed to speak.

WORKS CITED Only a Promise of Happiness. Nehemas, A. Princeton University Press. Princeton, NJ, 2010. The Age of the World Picture. Heidegger, M. In Off the Beaten Track, Trans. Young, J. and Haynes, K. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK, 2002. On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche, F. Trans. Diethe, C. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK, 2007. Art, Interpretation, and the Rest of Life. Nehamas, A. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 78, No. 2 (Nov., 2004) pp. 25-42. An Essay on Beauty and Judgment. Nehamas, A. The Threepenny Review, No. 80 (Winter, 2000) pp. 4-7

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