In past ages, artists and philosophers regarded the passion for virtue and wisdom as the catalyst for an educated, honorable, if not heroic life. In Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in the World of Art, Alexander Nehamas explains how this passion, this eros (Plato), often erupted into vivid, intense, and beautiful art forms.
Nehamas, like Plato, sees the object of passion or desire as beauty. Desire begins in the senses. To give an example, he speaks of a man in ancient Greece who becomes obsessed with the Adonis-like appearance of a young boy. The man is unable to quench his desire for the youth. Still, safely distant, he continues to delight in the boy's bodily features at every chance. Upon reflection, this man will discover the truth about his passionate longing. It is a deep sexual desire – a love for the beauty of the ideal human body the boy represents.
In his example, Nehamas points out that although the man cannot possess the boy in spite of his erotic desire, it is the longing for possession that makes the boy beautiful in the man’s eyes. And so it is with art. A painting, a photograph, a sculpture that provokes this same desire to possess and enjoy, contains authentic beauty.
In a deeper sense, one wonders if what a person craves is not the perfection of that form, which Plato claimed existed in his ideal world. He believed that after birth, we long to return to this ideal world where every shadowy form on earth exists as a perfect object. Thus the boy in Nehamas’ example above could also represent male perfection in Plato’s ideal world.
In Only a Promise of Happiness, the author draws a similar parallel to various representations of nudes or semi-nude art media. In particular, he mentions how, for several years, Edward Manet’s reclining nude, Olympia, has continued to obsess him. He has tried in vain to find a meaningful gestalt for the entire painting but it eludes him as it has other art lovers and critics. Yet he is drawn to it. Olympia is his enigma. He cannot understand the work yet he desires to possess it, to look at it, to contemplate it, to continue hunting for meaning, knowing that eros drives him to seek what he cannot have or figure out.
Article comments