Awe and Shock

...This astonishing assertion is much less well known than the proverb from the Apology that "the unexamined life is not worth living," but it conveys the cen-trality of beauty to Socrates' concept of the good or philosophical life...

...For its part, the pursuit of beauty is intrinsically connected to unpredictability and risk...

...Love is beauty's attendant and constant companion, and it is love (of philosophy) which generates the turning-around of the soul towards the light in Plato and towards God in Christianity...

...For the past half-century, however, contemporary analytic philoso-phy—which is to say, philosophy as Joseph Phelan is editor ofArtcyclopedia.com...

...The two statements taken together give us a much more balanced view of the philosopher...

...But it is Alcibiades who confesses his love for Socrates and not the other way around...

...Thus does the aesthetic experience become the antithesis or neutralization of "eros," or desire for the beautiful...

...He advises us to read one of the most renowned passages in the Platonic corpus, Socrates' speech in the Symposium...

...This is the true meaning of the "artistic experience," in the sense that it makes of me a "new man" and, as such, a resident of a "new world...

...For one thing, "eros" has ceased to play the central role in modern philosophy or psychology that it once did in the thought of Plato and the ancients...

...The disinterested contemplation of beauty in art lifts us from the everyday suffering which this unsatisfied desire entails and liberates us from the disappointments and distracting details of ordinary life...

...To love something is to try to understand what makes it so beautiful and compelling to us that it has the power to take our lives in a new direction...

...In short, I want to devote part of my life to this work, to understand Proust as fully as I can by immersing myself in the record of his life, and to bring that life into comparative perspective with my own...

...Yet the hope that our lives will be better if we can make our beloved object or person a part of us lures us into beauty's dominion even as Dorian Gray exchanged his soul for the chance of eternal youth...

...by Joseph Phelan In one of his poems, Rainer Maria Rilke speaks of walking through an art gallery and suddenly coming upon an archaic statue...

...I might become absorbed in the question of the mceurs of the Belle Epoque in general, and with regard to homosexual practices in particular...

...Following Kant's lead, Arthur Schopenhauer went even further down the same strange philosophical path...

...Academic philosophy's neglect of beauty and the passions it engenders troubles Alexander Nehamas, a distinguished professor of philosophy and comparative literature at Princeton...

...He explains that, although only a fragment, the torso of the god Apollo was so stunning that it somehow conveyed to the viewer with the shock of recognition—"You must change your life...

...Such a philosophical consideration of a revelatory passage from ancient philosophy shows Nehamas's freedom from some of the prejudices prevalent in today's republic of letters...

...It has, instead, been preoccupied with technical questions that are narrow in scope and of very little relevance to the way we live our lives on the most human level...

...Nehamas argues that both art and life are impoverished when we ignore or deny the place of true beauty in both...

...In the Symposium, Socrates affirms that human life is worth living only in the contemplation of beauty...

...What might it mean if this, in fact, happened to me...

...He wants us to seriously entertain the question of whether this statement is merely a dramatic flight of fancy deployed to dazzle Socrates' companions and impress them with his rhetorical skill or is, in fact, a serious effort on the philosopher's part to expound a genuinely phenomenological account of the experience of beauty in the human soul...

...We might add that without love there can be no knowledge...

...I want to import some of the depth and breadth I feel distinguished Proust's existence into my own special circumstances insofar as humanly possible...

...Our response to beauty is determined by who we are, and who we are is determined by our exposure and response to beauty...

...To make something truly one's own, at least for this philosopher, is not to possess it, as a collector does, but rather to come to know it utterly...

...Beauty occupied a central place in both public and private life...

...Nehamas devotes a whole chapter to Manet's Olympia, which he finds "overwhelmingly beautiful...

...If we accept the power of beauty to transfix and transform us, what can explain the neglect of beauty in the contemporary intellectual world...

...It is radically free...

...And it is beauty's connection to "eros" that brings it under ancient philosophy's gaze...

...This capacity of the lure of beauty to upend our lives, to disorient us, to make us "drop everything" and run off to Vegas, reminds us that a similar upheaval is involved in the "conversion" of the philosopher to the love of truth in Plato and of the individual to the love of God in the Christian tradition...

...In this new book he argues that to philosophize about the question of beauty can lead to the beautiful having a life-enhancing, or even a lifetransforming, effect upon us...

...The way he unfolds this statement is worth listening to: I am not just reporting how the painting makes me feel while I am looking at it...

...One can imagine falling in love with Remembrance of Things Past (another of Nehamas's favorite works of art...

...Socrates was not a handsome man, while his young companion and admirer Alcibiades was...

...Over the millennia, poets and visual artists have been aware of the powerful passions that beauty inspires...

...It is exposure to beauty's lure that can be the turning point in the attempt to resist the current of one's life as it has hitherto flowed...

...practiced in most academic departments in the Anglo-Saxon world—has largely turned its back on this kind of investigation...

...A life lived pursuing beauty may be dangerous to oneself and others and can result in the misery of Oscar Wilde's hero, Dorian Gray—or of Wilde himself, for that matter...

...One answer is that philosophy is the opposite of certainty and conventionality...

...The implication here is that, without beauty, there can be no love...

...And it is this power of love which transports us above the material, or "physical," level to what has, over the millennia, come to be called the "Platonic" level of attachment and devotion...

...Reflections on what it is and how it affects our sensibilities were always a part of the philosophical enterprise...

...Could anything be further from Plato's celebration of desire than Schopenhauer's connection of the best life to its cessation...

...Love and beauty, then, are Siamese twins...

...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: "Beauty beckons as love impels...

...As Plotinus observes, all beautiful things produce "awe and a shock of delight, passionate . . . shudder of rapture," and it is unlikely that we can proceed with business as usual after this kind of experience...

...Well, I might wish to learn more about the life of the author, Marcel Proust, and to follow in his footsteps around the boulevards of Paris...

...Only a Promise of Happiness raises important questions about the relationship between knowing and loving...

...This tendency to specialize forces us to question whether the tradition of philosophy can any longer speak to the great concerns of art, creativity, beauty, happiness, and the good life...

...But how is this "cyclical" effect engendered...

...Nehamas offers a brief but acute survey of some of the reasons for this...

...I am saying that I literally want to devote a part of my life to it—not just to look at it . . . but also to come to know it better, to understand it and see what it accomplished...

...The sage of Konigsberg famously taught that beauty is manifest only through disinterested contemplation of form in nature or art and not in a kind of erotic or "sexual" engagement with the object of one's appreciation...

...Nehamas has done us the service of returning the question of beauty to the center of humanistic attention...

...I might wish to study the Dreyfus Affair and its significance in French history and political life...

...How is this possible...

...Socrates's famously ugly countenance conceals his inner beauty, and the handsome and dashing Alcibiades makes it plain that this is, indeed, what is pulling him towards the strange man in his remarkable panegyric to the philosopher at the end of the Symposium...

...The foundations of modern aesthetics were laid by Immanuel Kant in the third of his great Critiques, the Critique of Judgment...

...Socrates and the school that he founded taught that beauty could gradually inspire a life of longing for goodness and truth...

...For him, desire itself is unending torture because it can never be truly satisfied...

...A closely related problem has to do with the modern substitution of the "aesthetic" for the beautiful...