Abstract
Criticizing the interpretation of beauty as a form of disinterested contemplation, Nietzsche famously cites Stendahl’s statement that beauty is “a promise of happiness.” In the context of his own philosophy, however, the promise is a lie, as beauty speaks of stability and perfection in a world that is constantly changing and very far from perfect. This sense that beauty falsifies continues to be reflected in the suspicion of beauty that informs so much of the theory and practice of art within the ethos of late modernity. Representations of beauty are thought to obscure the human condition, and may also function as repressive political tools, painting the idylls of privileged classes while dulling sensitivity and resistance to injustice.
Acknowledging the partial legitimacy of such interpretations of the uses and abuses of beauty, one can ask whether they rightly apply to all types of produced beauty, and to all promises of happiness symbolized in beautiful images and figures. Are there no ways in which beauty can still serve a healing and redemptive purpose, at both the individual and the social levels, without falsification or the evocation of unfulfillable desire? And is there not a telling relation to beauty, in its connection with goodness, expressed even in the depiction of the ugly as needing redress? These questions are explored through an analysis of everyday artefacts and varieties of adornment, drawing on the later Heidegger’s analysis of making, dwelling and “things.”
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- 1.
See The Critique of Judgement, Part 1: Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, Book 1: “Analytic of the Beautiful,” Kant 2007, 35–42.
- 2.
It is questionable whether the negatively defined condition of non-willing is really the ultimate goal of these traditions, rather than being a means for achieving something else, but I leave this question aside as peripheral to my topic.
- 3.
For a full account of the relation between the two, see Le Rider 1992.
- 4.
For instance, in Ecce Homo, where he complains that “one taught men to despise the very first instincts of life; that one mendaciously invented a ‘soul,’ a ‘spirit’ to ruin the body; that one taught men to experience the presupposition of life, sexuality, as something unclean” (Nietzsche 1967b, 332).
- 5.
By “goodness,” I mean here living and faring well at an individual level, as well as virtue and justice, understood as goods pertaining to relations between people.
- 6.
For a summary and analysis of the debate on this question, see Barnes 2010.
- 7.
Though he does refer back to the painting as an example later, when he claims that “Beauty is one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness” (Heidegger 1971, 56).
- 8.
See Sikka 1994.
- 9.
Indeed, one should not suppose that Heidegger’s analyses mean to celebrate upper class lives. His reflections on the Greek temple may be blind to certain issues, but he was by no means drawn to works representing leisured or privileged classes, as one can see from his remarks on the peasant shoes in van Gogh’s painting. On the contrary, part of Heidegger’ attraction to National Socialism had to do with what he saw as its validation of the life and work of the rural peasantry. Cf. David Cooper’s discussion of Heidegger’s poem on Cezanne’s painting, The Gardener Vallier, in Cooper 2006, 158–60.
- 10.
I therefore disagree fundamentally with Julian Young’s interpretation, which makes communal appreciation an essential feature of great art on Heidegger’s account (Young 2001, 50–51). As a result of this interpretation, Young has to judge Heidegger’s analysis of van Gogh’s painting in “The Origin of the Work of Art” as “completely irrelevant to, indeed…inconsistent with, the real thrust of the essay” (Young 2001, 5), a judgment I find highly implausible.
- 11.
Wohnen is a very ordinary verb in German, the verb one uses to ask someone where she lives, for instance. The noun Wohnung just means “apartment” or “home.” One way to understand Heidegger’s reflections on the word is to see them as exploring what it truly means to be at home somewhere.
- 12.
My reference here is to Heidegger’s essay “… Poetically Man Dwells…” which uses this line from a poem by Hölderlin to reflect on the nature of poetry and dwelling. Heidegger 1971, 211–29.
- 13.
It should be noted, though, that there is something slightly odd and dislocated in Heidegger’s treatment of both of these figures, an awkward and politically suspect fusion of the cultures of ancient Greece and his own Catholic Swabia.
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Sikka, S. (2017). Dwelling with Beauty. In: Higgins, K., Maira, S., Sikka, S. (eds) Artistic Visions and the Promise of Beauty. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43893-1_12
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