Nehamas: Awakening the
sleeping artist
BY DIANE MANUEL
As the final speaker in
the winter quarter series of Presidential Lectures and
Symposia in the Humanities and Arts, philosopher
Alexander Nehamas said he found himself in distinguished
company.
"Sandwiched between
Harold Bloom and Jacques Derrida," he said, with an
almost perceptible wink, "I feel that I can just
offer you a very, very, very thin slice of turkey."
In fact, the Edmund N.
Carpenter II Professor in Humanities at Princeton
University went on to deliver an eloquent defense of
aesthetic judgment, imagination and the pursuit of
beauty.
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Speaking to an overflow
audience in room 290 of the School of Law, Nehamas seemed
suitably attired for the auditorium in buttoned charcoal
suit, light gray shirt and striped gray tie. But his
references to such works of art as TV's Frasier and
Seinfeld drew frequent laughter and suggested that
the life of a philosopher is not all staid dialogues or
impenetrable tomes. Nehamas is the author of the classic
and popular Nietzsche, Life as Literature, and the
most recently published Virtues of Authenticity:
Essays on Plato and Socrates.
Drafting a "very
rough picture of aesthetic judgment," Nehamas said
he might be exposed to a three-minute heavy metal rock
song, a two-stanza lyric poem, a 30-minute episode of Seinfeld,
or a work as long and complex as Goya's Los
Caprichos, Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective,
Wagner's Ring or Proust's Remembrance of Things
Past.
"I may wallow in the
work, allow it to sweep over me, take me over, or study
and analyze it carefully over a long time," he said.
"At some point, in some cases, the features of the
work, which can range from the simplest elements of beat,
meter or color to the most complex combinations of
structures, depictions of character or views of the
world, produce in me a feeling which, for lack of a
better name, I call pleasure. That pleasure is the basis
on which I say that the work is funny, moving, elegant,
sweeping, passionate, unprecedented in a word, or two,
beautiful or aesthetically valuable."
Nehamas began the evening
with an examination of Goya's Los Caprichos, a
series of 80 etchings, the most famous of which,
"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters," he
borrowed for the title of his lecture. Projecting a slide
of the etching on a screen, he described the scene, which
portrays a sleeping artist surrounded by bats, owls and a
particularly menacing cat. The only calm presence, he
suggested, is the lynx in the bottom right corner.
"Reason is asleep
when only the lynx, which is pure rationality, is awake,
as alert as it is impervious to the shadows that surround
it," Nehamas said, arguing that the sleeping artist
and the watchful lynx are one and the same.
What is missing from the
etching, Nehamas argued, is the imagination.
"The sleep of reason
produces monsters, but the sleep of reason does not
represent the takeover of the imagination," he said.
"On the contrary, the sleep of reason is the absence
of the imagination."
Nehamas then linked his
discussion of Goya to the state of the arts and
humanities.
"In teaching the
humanities today we have forsaken the imagination as
surely as Goya's sleeping artist did," he argued.
"Our picture of the world and ourselves is as
incomplete and full of ugliness as his."
After dwelling at some
length on Goya's goblins and monsters, Nehamas said his
comments were probably "too pessimistic not at
all the sort of thing to say in a presidential lecture,
which should be an occasion for celebrating the power of
the arts and humanities for truth and goodness."
"The fact is that if
such power were demonstrable, and if it was felt that
universities and the world at large acknowledged it and
gave the arts and the humanities their due, there would
be no need for presidential lectures," he added, to
prolonged laughter. "This series is a compromise, a
mutual accommodation, an effort to show that Stanford is
taking the arts and the humanities seriously by offering
them an opportunity to show Stanford why it should."
Nehamas then suggested
that the humanities should lay claim to imagination and
beauty, for their own sake.
"We must not blink at
the stare of the lynx, which countenances nothing besides
usefulness and moral improvement," he said. "We
need not defend imagination and beauty by claiming that
they produce better neurosurgeons or more honorable
citizens."
Nehamas worked his way
through a critique of Kant's Critique of Judgment, arguing
that it was "the work to which all modern philosophy
of art is a response," but also proclaiming it
"a magnificent effort, and totally flawed."
Beauty, Nehamas argued,
"is a guess, a suspicion, a dim awareness that there
is more in the work that it would be valuable to
learn."
"Beauty, just as
Stendhal said, is the promise of happiness," he
added. "A piece that has no more surprises left, a
piece you really feel you know 'inside and out,' has no
more claim on you. You may still call it beautiful
because it once gave you the pleasure of its promise or
because you think that it may have something to give to
someone else. But it will have lost its hold on you.
Beauty beckons."
Arguing that aesthetic
features are so specific that they only belong to one
work, and that moral features of art are irrelevant to
its aesthetic value, Nehamas lobbied for the pursuit of
beauty "in a never-ending conversation."
"American higher
education, in contrast to the obsession with the
professions in much of the rest of the world, gives many
students the chance to spend part of their lives looking
for beauty and perhaps trying to make something beautiful
of themselves," Nehamas said.
"The rewards of the
arts are the arts themselves. The promise of happiness is
happiness enough." SR
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