Descrição
Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century.
Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors.
Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, “aesthetic pleasure.”
In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics.
He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and desire, and to show that the values of art, independently of their moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life.