Nehamas on Beauty and Love

Berys Gaut

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In Only a Promise of Happiness Alexander Nehamas holds that beauty is the object of love. I
raise three objections to this claim when formulated in terms of personal love: love is too narrow in
scope to be the attitude whose formal object is beauty; one can experience a person’s beauty but have
no love for her; and love is of particulars, not of attributes, however specific, such as beauty. A second
kind of love, hedonic love, is too broad in scope to be the attitude whose formal object is beauty. I
also argue, contra Nehamas, that inner beauty exists.

Alexander Nehamas’s Only a Promise of Happiness is a beautiful book about beauty, a passion-
ate book about passion.1 Firmly setting its face against the Kantian conception of beauty as
the object of disinterested pleasure, it skilfully defends a Platonic view of beauty as the
object of erō s, of love, where love is the desire to possess some object, rather than merely
to contemplate it. From this central core it spins out an elegant web of connecting claims
that include: a critique of Danto’s disavowal of the centrality of beauty to art in general and
modern art in particular; the futility and indeed disastrousness of any conception of beauty
that aims at universal assent; the sensitivity of interpretation to attributions of beauty and
value to a work; the denial of the existence of aesthetic principles; a defence of the view
that beauty and virtue can conflict; and many other claims. To address them all would be
impossible in the space available, so I will focus here on the central view, the conceptual
connection of beauty with love, and will examine what sort of progeny that coupling
produces.

Two Conceptions of Love

Nehamas holds that beauty is the object of love. Love, we might say, is the attitude (in the
broad sense of that term) that has beauty as its formal object. He takes as the paradigm of
love the love of one person for another, and characterizes love as ‘the desire to possess’
something (p. 6). Talk of ‘possession’ is apt to connote ownership, suggesting that the lover
of beauty is a mere collector of beautiful people and things. But possession, notes
Nehamas, is distinct from ownership: in love and friendship ‘my desire to possess you is
sometimes inseparable from my desire to be possessed by you. . . . You are no longer merely
a means to my own ends. . . but someone whose ends can become mine—an end in your-
self’ (p. 57). So this conception of the love of persons for each other (call it personal love)
requires one to take others’ ends as one’s own, rather than to own that person. As Nehamas
notes against Aristotle, this does not require that only the virtuous can be friends.

1  Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2007). Page numbers in the text refer to this book.

British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 50 | Number 2 | April 2010 | pp. 199–204 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayq003
© British Society of Aesthetics 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics.
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200 | berys gaut

A problem arises because the scope of this kind of love is limited to beings that possess
ends: persons, animals, and (if we agree that they can have goals) plants. If we think of
artworks as manifesting authors, we could perhaps make sense of taking an artwork’s ends
as one’s own, for one would be embracing the goals of its authors as manifested in the
work. But, however generous we are in its construal, this conception of love cannot take as

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its object inanimate things that lack ends. Since beauty on this view is the formal object of
love, this conception of love can apply to the beauty of persons, animals, and (perhaps)
plants and artworks, but it cannot apply to the beauty of mountains, the sea, and the sky.
So the paradigm conception of love has too narrow a scope for it to be the attitude that has
beauty as its formal object: more things are beautiful than can coherently be the objects of
personal love.
There is a distinct conception of love, the sense in which I really love, say, ice-cream: I
take enormous pleasure in it and my pleasure grounds desires to consume it, to make it my
own. Call this kind of love hedonic love. It is a kind of pleasure, compatible with great
passion; and it is not limited to mere contemplation—contemplating the ice-cream with-
out being able to do something to it, namely consume it, would be sweet torture. The
scope of this conception of love is far broader than personal love, and is compatible with
the denial of Kantian contemplation. But it is also too broad to be the attitude whose for-
mal object is love. People take intense pleasure in all sorts of things without necessarily
regarding the object of their pleasure as beautiful, from the pleasures of accumulating
money, telling disgusting jokes, and humiliating a hated rival. The beautiful is one of the
objects of pleasure; it is not the only one, however intensely that pleasure is felt. So this
alternative conception of love is also not a satisfactory correlative attitude to beauty.
Nehamas also remarks that we call attractiveness ‘beauty’ when ‘what we already know
about an individual. . . seems too complex for us to be able to describe what it is and valu-
able enough to promise that what we haven’t yet learned is worth even more’ (p. 70). One
could recruit these remarks about complexity and the promise of future value as further
specifications of the kind of love whose object is beauty: love that takes a complex object
that promises greater value has beauty as its object. So understood, these restrictions make
the problem for personal love more acute, since the objection was that this kind of love is
already too narrow in scope, and the conditions narrow that scope further. Taken as restric-
tions on hedonic love, they at least tend in the correct direction, narrowing the scope of
the attitude. But that scope is still too broad: the pleasure I take in something funny can
have as its object something too complex to describe (theories of humour abound and they
are all false); and a good piece of humour can promise more than it has yet delivered. Yet
the funny is different from the beautiful.
So personal love is too narrow in scope to be the correlative attitude to beauty; hedonic
love, even with the mooted restrictions, too broad.

Beauty and Appearance

In defending the claim that beauty is the object of love, Nehamas considers an objection that
leads him into a fascinating discussion of the relation of beauty to appearance. The objection
is simple: even the ugliest people have friends and are often loved; but that looks impossible
 Nehamas on Beauty and Love | 201

if beauty is the object of love (pp. 58–59). His reply is that it is impossible to love someone
we find, that is, experience, as ugly. Lovers always experience each other as beautiful, even
when they know that they are not. We always find something attractive about our friends,
be it their eyes, smiles, gestures. Consider David Lynch’s film, The Elephant Man, which is
about John Merrick, a Victorian who suffered a startlingly disfiguring disease; in the course

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of the film, his physician, and we as viewers, come to see him differently, as no longer gro-
tesque, as our perception of his appearance is conditioned by our knowledge of his kind-
ness, sensitivity, and intelligence. Contra Danto, beauty is never a matter of mere appearance;
contra (a popular interpretation of) Plato, beauty is not correctly predicated of the mind or
soul; rather, beauty applies to appearances conditioned by our knowledge of a person’s in-
ner life: ‘Not limited to appearance, beauty is neither detached from it nor a characteristic
of something else—a mind, a soul, an inner self—instead’ (p. 72).
A great deal of Nehamas’s discussion here is entirely correct and insightful: in particular,
his critique of evolutionary views of beauty is very powerful. Several studies purport to
find universal shared characteristics of beauty, such as symmetry and youthful features, and
explain their attractiveness as signs of reproductive fertility; but these results, notes
Nehamas, are based on exhibiting photographs of people with neutral expressions on their
faces, so that one cannot see how their faces express any inner life. And there is no doubt
that part of our judgement of people’s beauty is grounded on this expressive dimension—
think for instance of how Rembrandt could show a kind of beauty in faces that would,
considered independently of the mental life expressed, not even be attractive. So the judge-
ment of appearances is conditioned by one’s knowledge of mental states. My reservation,
however, concerns the other part of the claim: that beauty always qualifies appearances and
not inner states directly, that there is in this sense no such thing as ‘inner’ beauty.
Much here depends on what counts as an appearance. The mechanism by which one is
supposed to experience one’s friends and lovers as beautiful is the conditioning of their ap-
pearances by their inner states, as witness our experience of Merrick in The Elephant Man.
But consider another case, that of Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby suffered a devastating
stroke, which left him with locked-in syndrome, completely paralysed except for his left
eyelid, which he was able to blink to dictate the famous book that records his experience.2
We could not see Bauby’s gestures or facial expressions as transformed by his inner life, since
he was incapable of moving his face or gesturing; and the blinking of his eyelid does not have
the kind of complexity that could sustain a transformative experience of him. So his sensory
appearance was not capable of the kind of transformation in our experience that Merrick’s
appearance can sustain as we come to know him better. Had Bauby been hideously scarred
in a fire, no awareness of his inner life could transform the ugliness of his appearance. So, it
seems, it cannot be impossible for one to experience one’s friends and lovers as ugly.
However, though his examples of transformation are of sensory appearance, Nehamas
denies that aesthetic qualities are all perceptual; rather, a feature is aesthetic ‘because we

2  Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly, trans Jeremy Leggatt (London: Fourth Estate, 1997).
202 | berys gaut

can’t be aware of it unless we perceive or experience directly (in a sense broad enough to
include reading) the object whose feature it is’ (p. 94). So, though beauty is always a prop-
erty of appearance, appearance is not only a matter of perceptual appearance, but also the
object of direct experience. This denial of a necessary link between beauty and perception
seems to me exactly correct and to be an important point in aesthetics, even though a sur-

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prising number of contemporary philosophers are resistant to it. It would also allow
Nehamas to hold that an aspect of Bauby’s appearance is how he appears in his memoir, and
that it is this aspect of his appearance that we come to think of as beautiful.
However, such a move leads me to wonder why the notion of inner beauty should then
be rejected. ‘Direct experience’ seems to be a matter of direct acquaintance with an object,
as distinct from testimonial knowledge of it (pp. 99–100). I am not convinced by Nehamas’s
scepticism about testimonial knowledge in aesthetics: if the great majority of critics
across the centuries have held that some literary work is beautiful, that gives me some
reason to think that it is so, even if I have not read it myself. That is of course a defeasible
reason, but what other kind of reason is there in aesthetics? Even our judgements of beauty
based on direct experience are defeasible. But set that worry aside. Take direct experience
to be a matter of acquaintance; now consider the beauty of some mathematical theorems.
If I read and understand them, as opposed to merely having their features described to me,
I have direct experience of them. But is their beauty ascribed to their appearance? What
would count as their appearance in such cases, for their sensory properties are entirely
unimportant? The only use of ‘appearance’ in such contexts is to contrast how a theorem
appears to me at some point as distinct from how it really is. So I may say, for instance, that
a theorem appeared at first to be complex and messy, but that as I came to understand it
better, I realized that it was elegantly simple and beautiful. In such contexts, ‘beautiful’ is
properly predicated of how the theorem really is, not only of how it appears to be. So even
when we have direct, non-testimonial experience, we can still draw a distinction between
how something appears and how it really is, and in such cases we can predicate beauty of
the latter. In the same way, I can have direct (non-testimonial) knowledge of someone’s
moral character and predicate beauty of how that character really is, as opposed to how it
appears (or appeared at some earlier time) to me. The upshot is that once we correctly
deny that beauty is a perceptual property, we should allow that it can properly be predi-
cated of abstract objects and of a person’s character. There is the outer beauty of appear-
ance; there is outer beauty informed by knowledge of inner states; but there is also inner
beauty, beauty directly attributable to inner states.3
So understood, the plausibility of Nehamas’s claim that we must find our friends and
lovers in some respect beautiful is enhanced. It is still hard to assess whether it is true,
however, given that the claim must be in terms of what is psychologically possible (it is
certainly logically possible that someone should befriend and love a person she experiences
as completely ugly). But we need not attempt to assess its truth here, for the loved but ugly
person is not the only threat posed to the claim that beauty is the object of love. For it
follows from this claim that the beautiful person will be loved, if anyone is directly aware

3  For a defence of the inner beauty view, see my Art, Emotion and Ethics (Oxford: OUP, 2007), chap. 6.
 Nehamas on Beauty and Love | 203

of her. But in terms of personal love, that is not true: I may appreciate her beauty, but I may
not take her ends as my own. And, though it follows on the notion of hedonic love (taking
pleasure in something) that I love her, that notion, as we have seen, is too general to con-
stitute the correlative attitude to beauty.

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Love and the Particular
There is a third reason for denying that beauty is the object of love, and this is perhaps the
deepest. When we love a person it is a particular person we love: loving that person has its
origin in the appreciation of some of his properties, say his beauty, but it can survive his loss
of those properties. Nor would we agree, if we really love someone, to abandon our love for
him because we have found someone else who possesses his attractive qualities to a higher
degree. In contrast, when we appreciate someone’s beauty, it is not the particular person per
se that we appreciate, but a (possibly highly specific) attribute of that person. And if it is
beauty I seek, then the substitution of a more beautiful thing for my current object of appre-
ciation cannot be the source of rational regret. So personal love, love of particulars, cannot
be the correlative attitude to beauty, which is a property of particulars but not a particular
itself. The loved person is in this sense irreplaceable to his lover, but his beauty is not.
Nehamas defends a notion of the aesthetic that is in part designed to defuse this kind of
worry. Following Mary Mothersill, he holds that aesthetic features are ‘the features an
object shares only with other objects from which it can’t be distinguished’ (p. 92). Aes-
thetic features of an object are shared only with its indistinguishable copies. The object that
possesses a particular aesthetic feature is in this sense irreplaceable: substituting for it
something distinguishable no longer instantiates the aesthetic properties for which I appre-
ciate it. And for that reason aesthetic objects are appreciated in their full particularity, just
as are lovers. So the beauty of something has those features of irreplaceability and particu-
larity that the beloved has for the lover.
Is this notion of the aesthetic tenable? Mothersill discusses in this context the steeply rising
and falling curve in El Greco’s painting, The Burial of Count Orgaz. In that painting the curve is
beautiful, but considered in itself (drawn on graph paper) it is not beautiful, nor is it in other
contexts.4 Her claim is about the conditions under which some feature is beautiful, that is, the
conditions for being a bearer of beauty: a feature (such as that particularly shaped curve) of
an object (such as El Greco’s painting) is beautiful if and only if that feature is beautiful only
in objects from which that object cannot be distinguished. This is a very strong holism about
the conditions under which features are beautiful, and it should, I think, be rejected
(Nehamas himself expresses some reservations about it in an endnote at p. 159). Suppose that
in the background of the El Greco painting we changed the colour of the smallest discrimina-
ble area of the canvas by the smallest discriminable tonal degree. We could now distinguish
the original El Greco from the fractionally altered copy. Is it plausible that the steeply rising
and falling curve will cease to be beautiful? It is true that there are some areas of a canvas

4  Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 342–343. Her view concerns aesthetic
features in general: I focus on beauty as an example.
204 | berys gaut

whose slightest alteration might radically shift its aesthetic features (fractionally altering the
eyes of Manet’s Olympia might be one such case). But the indistinguishability condition re-
quires that altering any feature that allows us to distinguish one canvas from another must
shift the aesthetic properties of all the canvas’s features. And that just looks false.
More importantly for our purposes, suppose that the indistinguishability condition were

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correct. It would still not solve the difficulty that love is directed towards particulars and
beauty is a property. For consider the beauty of your partner. According to the condition,
the features that make him beautiful are beautiful only in indistinguishable copies of him.
Your partner and a molecule-by-molecule copy of him are indistinguishable: if one is beau-
tiful, the other must be (that follows in fact merely from the supervenience of beauty on
non-aesthetic properties). So should you be indifferent about which of them you give your
love to? No: your love is owed to the original, however happy (or alarmed) you may be by
the existence of the copy. In the same way, were someone to make an exact copy of you,
and you were told that either you or your copy had to die, you would not be indifferent on
grounds of self-love about which of them was killed: self-love is directed to the particular
individual that you are, not to indistinguishable counterparts of yourself. So having a very
highly specific property (one shared only between you and your exact duplicates) is differ-
ent from being a particular; and love is directed at particulars, not even at very highly
specific properties, including those that are, perhaps, the bearers of beauty. Likewise, the
sense in which one beautiful object is irreplaceable is that it is replaceable only by an indis-
tinguisable copy; but the sense in which your beloved is irreplaceable is stronger: only he,
that particular person, is the object of your love. There is a further difficulty. Suppose
someone offered you a more beautiful person than your partner as a substitute. Here the
indistinguishability condition gets no grip, since the situation allows that very different
features make the substitute more beautiful than your partner. If you love your partner, you
would resist the substitution. Love, personal love, is of particulars; substituting identical
copies preserves beauty but not love, and substituting more beautiful people does not pro-
vide grounds for the transference of love.

Conclusion
I have argued, then, that neither personal love nor hedonic love serves as the attitude
whose formal object is beauty. Beauty remains a conceptual enigma. But I have probed only
a single, albeit important, point defended in Nehamas’s almost indecently rich book.There
is much of interest and importance on which I have perforce been silent. Nehamas stresses
the inexhaustibility of beauty—the incessant desire to know more about the beautiful
object. I remarked at the start that Only a Promise of Happiness is a beautiful book about
beauty. Given the richness of its themes and examples, it may well be, appropriately
enough, an inexhaustible one too.

Berys Gaut
University of St Andrews
[email protected]