[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford. Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Joshua
Randy and I'm sitting in for Robert Harrison.
Mention the word beauty and people tend to go a little overboard.
To Iris Murdoch the love of beauty was nothing short of a direct conduit to moral perfection.
To John Keats the love of beauty was synonymous with the love of truth.
And to the dataists the love of beauty helped bring about the slaughter of millions in World
War I.
Is the love of beauty the greatest thing we can aspire to then?
For the worst calamity ever to before our species.
What is the role of beauty in our lives?
♪ Praying at disease ♪
♪ We're leaving the ones we love ♪
♪ And never coming again ♪
♪ Long the radio ♪
♪ We heard November rain ♪
♪ That songs real long ♪
♪ But it's a pretty sound ♪
♪ We listened to the twice ♪
♪ 'Cause the day was asleep ♪
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It's a little tricky these days to talk about beauty.
♪ But beauty can easily seem like a bit of a luxury ♪
One we can scarcely afford in a world full of poverty, suffering and violence.
It can easily seem like the frivolous pastime of the leasured classes,
keeping them closely insulated from the injustices all around them.
We're still a fascination with beauty may feel like a form of denial,
a way to pretend that all those problems are simply not there.
Bertolt Brecht, for example, believe there's a certain kind of art
that's just a little too comfortable, just a little too welcoming.
It risks making you feel content with the status quo.
At the very least, it risks making you feel powerless to change it.
There is, of course, still another reason to feel a little suspicious about the love of beauty.
The love of beauty involves the making of distinctions, some of which are decidedly invidious.
If some things are beautiful after all, then presumably others are not.
And as long as we're paying attention to things in the first category,
we're going to be paying less attention to things in a second.
Take the environment, for example.
It's easy to raise money for cuddly pandas and majestic gorillas.
But not so easy to get people excited about the Dracula Ant,
the Worti-back muscle, and the Dromoduri jumping slug,
those unfortunate poor relations of the endangered species family.
Needless to say, alas, the same is true for people.
Studies repeatedly show that men and women consider attractive,
do better in life than men and women not considered attractive.
They are, according to some studies, twice as likely to get hired,
twice as likely not to get fired, and liable to earn 10 to 15% more than everyone else.
The only exception seems to be in jobs like truck driver or security guard,
where interestingly enough, women considered attractive,
fight it harder to get hired.
In certain circles, then beauty has become a bit of a dirty word these days,
and some of the criticism is clearly justified.
Still, not all of it is.
It's true that distinguishing among people on the grounds of their looks is a terrible idea.
But distinguishing among artworks on the basis of their aesthetic properties
may not be so bad, and distinguishing among times of scenery in this way may be downright important.
A study conducted in 2008 showed that quieter, greener, more open spaces
significantly reduce the rates of depression in people living in them.
There's also some indication that aesthetically pleasing environments may help in reducing crime.
And a really fascinating study has shown that when we're in the presence of beauty,
looking at a painting we like, for example, our tolerance for pain increases.
Good news for dentists.
Beauty has its problems then, but it's not all bad.
And once more, it's not a luxury either.
All of us need to dwell in the presence of beauty, for fear of slowly losing the hope that sustains life.
Does that mean Irish modic was right, that beauty is the path to goodness?
Try telling that to hell and of trolley.
Beauty can just as easily be associated with destructive tendencies as with constructive ones.
Does it mean Keats was right, the beauty is the path to truth?
Not a chance.
Dante's divine comedy is full of egregious errors such as the notion that extramarital
sex and homosexuality are mortal sense, or that Brutus and Cassius are two of the three worst
people of all time.
Yet it's also a poem of great beauty.
Does they ask Keats novels make it seem as though criminals are always desperate to confess,
and women always desperate to sacrifice themselves to save said criminals,
but they're still great works of fiction.
And while it's not quite true that all you need is love, it's still a pretty good song.
No, beauty is not the path to goodness and it's not the path to truth, but it can, at least,
be the path to happiness.
A happiness that can coexist perfectly well with the recognition of the world's problems,
and with the proper treatment of other human beings.
Beauty can be a path to happiness, and it can, in addition, be the path to ourselves.
For as proof understood, what we find beautiful is a powerful indicator of who we are at a very
deep level.
And then again, in the midst of our relentless breakneck rush to achievement,
beauty is also there to slow us down, to stop us in our tracks,
to create a pregnant silence against the background of which our truest self may once again emerge.
My guest today knows a thing or two about beauty.
In fact, it's no exaggeration to say he's the world's foremost authority on the subject,
having written somewhere between three and five books devoted to it, depending on how
I'm on Councilman. His name is Alexander Nehemas. He teaches philosophy and comparative literature
at Princeton University, and he's been enormously influential through his long career in a wide
variety of fields. He's written a book many consider the definitive study of Nietzsche.
He's written books that have reinvigorated the field of Plato's studies. He's settled once
and for all what literary scholars call the authorship question, and of course he's written an
entire book devoted to the subject of beauty, a book called "Oney, a Promise of Happiness."
Alexander, welcome to a entitled opinion. It's a great pleasure to be here with you, Josh.
What's really an honor for us to have you here?
Alexander, you've written very widely about beauty in many of its aspects. For the sake of
today's conversation, I thought it might be helpful to focus on three, the beauty of artworks,
the beauty of friends, and the beauty of a human life, but let's start with the beauty of artworks.
What about this very widespread tendency on a part of people like Iris Mohr-Dok and others to
associate the beauty of artworks with moral improvement? What's your take on that?
The idea goes back actually all the way to Plato and the Greeks in general. Ironically, however,
we need to remind ourselves that for Plato and the Greeks in general, it wasn't works of art
that were the primary objects of beauty. It was human beings. And Plato's discussion generally
deals with the beauty of human beings. For him, it was extraordinarily important precisely because
he thought that the love of beauty ultimately leads, or in fact is almost identical with, the love of
goodness and the love of truth. He established a huge philosophical system around these ideas,
a system that actually has seduced or convinced, however you want to look at it. Countless
people still then in a sense, a system that we still use today, appeal to today, live within today,
if you want, whether we know it or not, scratch the surface of many, many, many above views,
and you'll see Plato peeking out on not really peeking out, but standing large behind them.
Now, why is it that Plato and others have connected the love of beauty with a love of truth and
beauty in goodness? The main idea is I think the following. It's quite obvious to people that goodness
and truth are valuable. Now, beauty also seems valuable, but as you were saying in your introductory
comments, very often it can be associated with very unpleasant situations. So people try to make a
distinction between, so to speak, vulgar beauty on the one hand and true beauty on the other,
and accordingly believe that true beauty is distinguished from vulgar beauty or popular beauty,
whatever one you call it, precisely because of that connection. Being devoted to beauty,
and again, you alluded to that in your comments, very often gives the impression that one is
too precious or too, as they say, a state or too rich. Someone who has the luxury of being able to
follow in aspects of life that for most people seem to be inaccessible because most people
spend most of their lives trying to procure the basic elements to survive, food, small family,
some sort of security, whereas it's clear that richer people, richer countries, richer individuals
have the leisure and the time to divert themselves to beauty. It seems, I say, because I hope
we'll be able to discuss eventually the idea that beauty is not the kind of luxury that it seems to
many people to be, but it does look that way. And accordingly, in order to justify it, in order to
give it, so to speak, a more serious aspect, people have tried to connect it with truth and beauty,
which seem not to need them to justify it. But it was then that leads you to a kind of double bind,
because either you seem not to be justifying the pursuit of the beautiful atoll, and it looks
useless at worst and damaging, it uses a best in damaging at worst, or you give it a justification
in terms of something extrinsed to it like truth, in which case somebody could turn around and say,
"But I have a much better way of getting truth. I have science. I have a much better way of making
people moral." It's called certain kinds of instruction, at which point do you risk rendering
beauty OTO? Do you agree with that? That essentially, justifications of beauty risk this double bind?
Absolutely. And one of the ways that the admirers of beauty have tried to counter this
submerging or sort of demoting of beauty has been, in my view, something that really doesn't work at
all, but nevertheless the procedure is a following. He says, "Well, yes, science is a very, very good
truth lead a guy to truth, but not the kind of truth that beauty leads a special kind of truth."
Exactly. It's a special kind, and then I think you justify, you sort of confirm the suspicions of,
let's call them the anti-beauty crowd, because this special kind of truth that beauty leads to is a
truth that only a few people with very special abilities and sensitivities and sensitivities are
able to appreciate a very bad kind of a litithm. Exactly. Whereas with science, there's a method by
which people can become scientists. We know how do you teach people how to appreciate beauty?
Well, you improve their taste, but taste is one of those horrible terms in a way that, again,
repeats and replicates all the problems of elitism, difficulty, leisure,
aestheticism, and staticism, and so on. So it's a real bind, I think, that people have had,
especially when you see that terrible things have been done in the name of the beauty.
And then you get into a kind of cynicism that says that beauty is just a mask of evil and injustice,
that it's purpose is purely ideological and propagandizing. And I think if you do believe that,
you're losing out on an incredibly important aspect of life. In fact, I think that a life without
beauty is not a human life. So we could say that the unbeautified life is not worth living,
in a way. So somehow we have to find a middle path where we can acknowledge
the many propagandistic ideological uses to which beauty is being put on the one hand,
and be fully aware of them, straighten the face. But on the other hand, still manage to rescue
the parts of beauty that are necessary and maybe even universal. And so maybe not just restricted to
this precious, aesthetically. One thing we need to keep in mind is that the assumption, of course,
here, is that beauty is at least sometimes a dangerous thing leading to all the bad things that
we're talking about. But truth and goodness are not. They're absolutely and always good. But it's
easy to show that that's not true about truth, because very often learning that truth can be very,
very bad for somebody. Goodness is a bit more difficult, but there have been philosophers,
like Nietzsche, who have had their serious doubts about goodness of goodness. So to speak
or their value of virtue or the virtue of virtue, if you want. So let's leave that aside for
the moment, because I think it complicates matters. Though it's important to keep in mind that
nothing really in the world is one way only. And everything has to aspect. Janus is not just the god of
the Roman, he's the god of the world altogether. And let's stay with the idea that beauty
actually is a dangerous object. It is easy to be seduced by beauty and convinced to do things that
you might not do otherwise or you might want to not want to do otherwise and correctly so.
So how do we justify it? How do we say it's worthwhile to include beauty in one's life?
Well, look, let me play devil's advocate for a moment. And re-advanced a couple of the moralizing
position. So there is the Irish Motor position, which I agree goes all the way back to Plato.
There's also a more recent position, according to which beautiful objects show a kind of
symmetry. So for example, beautiful faces, according to some studies, are beautiful in part
because there's a matricle on so on. And so the argument goes, justice is a matter of symmetry.
It's a matter of distributing things properly, appropriately, giving the person over here on the
left, so to speak, the same as the person over here on the right. Impushingality, impartiality.
So according to this argument, encountering beauty, loving beauty predisposes us to being more
just and wanting to treat the world as a whole equitably. Another argument, so Kant's argument
famously, and particularly in its re-appropriation by Schopenhauer, suggests that maybe we've become
hesitate to use the word better people, but maybe we'll say less selfish by virtue of our
experiences with the aesthetic, because the aesthetic experiences and experience of disinterested
contemplation. So we're looking in our everyday lives, we look at, say, a basket of fruit as
something that we want to eat, we want to possess in some kind of way. Whereas if we look at a
still life, a basket of fruit, all of a sudden our desires are disengaged. And so again,
so here are two arguments, one of which says beauty is all about the symmetrical,
and so predisposes us to love the symmetrical and just that's what justice is. And the other
argument says beauty is all about being disinterested, it's turning off our desire and being an ethical
person is all about turning off our desire. Good, there's a two very complex argument, so let's
take them one at a time, let's start with the symmetry. The idea of symmetry again goes all the way
back to Plato, Aristotle, and especially Sintergustin, who makes a very, who has a very serious
discussion of the connection between beauty and symmetry. Now the trouble in my view is that
symmetry is a very peculiar concept. What counts as symmetrical changes with a context.
We generally, when we think of symmetry, we think of a purely geometrical or mathematical
symmetry, so that if you have three inches on the left of a figure, you have three inches on
the right, two inches on top, two inches on the bottom, and that is perfectly fine. If you're
interested in having something that exhibits this kind of mathematical geometrical symmetry.
And extremely influential in this regard has been the painting of the Renaissance,
and generally speaking, representational painting from the Renaissance on, which began, of course,
with the fascination of Renaissance paintings with geometry of all things, so that the great
paintings of the Renaissance, the Baptism of Christ, or all kinds of other, if you do an analysis of them,
you'll see that everything is balanced in the way that we're saying before. But that's not the
only axis along which we can be symmetrical. For example, and that's an example I've used before,
if you look at a sort of a late middle-aged painter of various Renaissance like Duchyau or
a chima bouet. What you see and also isn't in painting, what you see, for example, is that when they do
a religious painting, suppose that it's about Madonna and the child, the Madonna and the child are
immensely larger than the lay figures or the angels or the saints at us around them.
Now that seems perfectly asymmetrical from a later Renaissance point of view, but in fact,
what they are trying to suggest is not so much the arrangement of the figures in the painting,
but the importance of the figures in the painting. So it is symmetrical to have a larger
version, Mary, than a saint or in particular a lay, a sort of a mortal person, because that's what
you're measuring it. So to say that beauty is symmetry, maybe correct if we think that symmetry does
not specify a specific feature. If it does specify a specific feature, then it'll turn out that many
things that we consider beautiful will turn out to be not beautiful by that argument. Maybe another
way of saying this would be to say that in fact not all things that we consider beautiful exhibit
that kind of symmetry. I mean, maybe it's something more like harmony in which, so to take your
example of these paintings, maybe one shouldn't say that there's supposed to be a symmetry
between the Virgin Mary and the other figures. But they're supposed to rather to be an asymmetry
between them, which then comes together in a greater harmony. Here's another example, if you don't
like this one, I have the formé reproduction of Magritt's The Traveler from 1937, one of my
figures. Magritt's a very striking and weird image in which you have some kind of odd floating balls
floating above the sea, maybe a little meteor or planetoid or something, which seems to be made up of an
armchair and torso, sculpture, and a lion and a tuba and some other stuff. And one doesn't want to
say, I assume that somehow the tuba and the armchair and some symmetrical relationship with each
other, but there might be some kind of harmony, some kind of quasi musical chord that's produced
out of them. If that's the case, then maybe we should hesitate before applying this to the world in
front of us, before trying to legislate on the basis of this, or act morally on the basis of this,
because that might lead to disastrous results in which you think, for example, it would produce a
beautiful harmony if we had certain people with red hair treated very differently, people with dark hair.
Sure. Actually, I think that we could say that beauty is connected or even if we don't identical with
symmetry, if we realize that symmetry changes depending on the context, and that thing the same
thing could be said about harmony in a way, because what counts as harmonious in one situation
is not harmonious in another. And that's a trouble with taking a specific expression of symmetry
or harmony and saying that's the way to go. Yes, lots of modern music is not harmonious by
baroque standards, but that doesn't mean that all of it is ugly or indifferent or whatever.
I want to say something else about symmetry, and because you started out with saying that
symmetrical faces are judged beautiful, and that's in a sense very true. There's a series of
experiments, many, many experiments, where you show people photographs of faces and ask them to
judge them for attractiveness or beauty or something like that. Well, it turns out that they can
digitize their photographs, and the more photographs of different faces you superimpose on each other,
the more people that tend to agree on who is attractive and who isn't. If you show them, say,
eight individual pictures, each one of one face, people will have all kinds of different views.
Show them each one being true, it compons it. Yeah, there's more agreement for, more,
eight, even more, and so on and so forth. And it turns out, of course, that the more faces you superimpose
upon on another, the more average the face becomes. Averageness is attractive. Averageness is
attractive. Why? Because average is symmetrical. Right. And why is symmetry attractive? Well,
here, evolutionary psychologists come in and they say, "symmetry is health," because if one part of
the body or the face grows at a different speed than another, it shows that something was wrong.
And so what we look for is health, the namely reproductive fitness, and that's what beauty really is.
I think much as I agree with the basic conclusions that they reach about, when is it that people
agree about beauty, I think the inference that that's what really, that's beauty really is.
Namely, simply, reproductive fitness is absolutely unjustified by the conclusion.
To ask you to judge whether something is attractive or not, or especially a person is attractive or
not, on the basis of a photograph of usually an expressionless face, is like the following.
You, I know, like a resort, correct. Right. So I feed you your favorite resort. And then I
shut you up in a room where I don't feed you anything for 30 days or so. After 30 days,
you will eat just about anything. That doesn't mean that what you really like to eat is the
cockroach that was running around yourself and that the resort is just something that you'll have
if and only if you have the chance to eat it and that what human beings really like to eat is cockroach.
What it shows is that in extremely outlying situations, extremely unusual situations,
we resort to our most basic instincts and abilities. Right. So if you're seeing, if you're supposed to
judge a person from this expressionless photograph, it's quite likely that you will fall back to your
most primitive abilities. But your most primitive abilities are not the abilities that are
exhibited when you're in a normal situation. And the idea that they represent the core, the essence of
reality of our attitudes is I think very, very wrong one. What we're showing is that those
abilities express themselves when we are in totally unusual situations from the total ones.
When I judge a person's beauty, I don't, I look at their movement. I look at their expressions.
It takes time. I don't do it instantaneously the way that these experiments presuppose.
And I judge the whole person, not just the face. Right. So it's a very different approach.
And explains perfectly well where some of the most beautiful people are also highly asymmetrical indeed.
Which is a bit of a problem for that. Well, what they try to say is that well, it turns out that
a beauty is not the only thing that matters. There's also kindness and intelligence and interest.
But they have what I would call a layer cake view of the person. There's the fundamental beauty and
then there's something else called intelligence, something else called kindness and something else called
sensitivity. And so I don't think that's true at all because I think that when we judge somebody's
beauty, we involve all these things at the same time. If somebody's intelligent, we see it in their
face and their faces animated by them intelligence and accordingly, more beautiful. That's right.
And the converse. And exactly in the converse. That's very interesting. I mean, well, for many reasons,
partly because it seems to know what you were saying in your risotto remarks is a kind of overturning
of the kind of criticism we were mentioning earlier about elitism, east-feet, preciousness.
Because it seems to me that what you're saying is that in fact, that's the default case.
The default case is that we human beings pay attention to beauty around us. We human beings
value beauty around us. And it's only under extreme circumstances that we don't. I wonder if this
goes along with some of the work that Ellen DeSoneiake has done in which she's shown that across the world,
any culture that we know anything about, there's always something that she calls making special.
Absolutely. There's always an activity we would call aesthetic. That makes it sound too narrow.
So she's quite rightly used as the term making special. They're always
certain objects, for example. They're singled out, sometimes for devotional uses, and they're heavily
decorated. So it seems as though everywhere you turn, human beings are engaged in separating out
one kind of thing from another kind of thing. In ways that we Westerners would associate with
making a distinction between more beautiful and less beautiful.
I'm really at my deSoneiake as well. I don't at my the fact that she tries to use that
extraordinary interesting research to bash what she calls postmodernism. I think that very little
follows from evolutionary psychology about specific art forms. There's a recent book by Dennis
Dutton who tries to do similar things that I think really don't work at all that way. Much as
the original research may be interesting. The specific way of the specific strategy of using that
that's up to bash or to support certain particular artistic movements or whatever that doesn't work.
But the idea of making special I think is extremely, extremely important and interesting.
Whenever we see objects that have a very common form, we will always find some features that
differentiate one from the other. What are those features do? Those features give the object
a character, an individuality if you want, that allows us to say it stands out from the rest or not
to say that, but when we look at a whole bunch of pots that say ancient Athenians made,
there are some that stand out. We say, "Ah, look at that one." And to a very great extent,
I think that beauty can be associated with distinction in both senses of the term in a way.
But you see how important that is on a very basic elementary sort of bio-psychological case,
it allows us to focus attention. Now, and he comes to a whole notion of taste that we're saying before,
people are likely to focus on different things. With the vase or the pot that you choose need not
be the pot that I choose, nevertheless, we each choose the pot that we choose because we see in it
something that we don't see in other things, and very interestingly, something that other people don't see in it.
In so far as I see something in the object that other things don't have, and that other people don't see,
I become distinct from the other people, you see. And the idea of focusing on beauty and focusing
distinction in the sense reflects back on the person who's doing the focusing and makes that particular
person distinct in a similar way, which goes back exactly to what you said about what you mentioned
in connection with proof before that in focusing on beauty we reveal our deepest self.
You're listening to KZSU Stanford, I'm Joshua Landy, sitting in Robert Harrison,
and I'm talking with Alexander Nahamas, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University about the
beauty of artworks, friendship, and lives. We're in the middle of talking about the value of beauty.
I think we've reasonably dismissed the Keats claim that it's all about truth and also the
Murdoch slash, if not dismissed, at least put them aside for the moment.
We'll put aside for the moment. The very important challenges from those who want to connect to
the truth and those who want to connect it. With the moral, maybe if we have time we can come back to
KANS objection, but let's pursue this idea that you just brought up that
one of the important effects for our life of engaging with beautiful objects and people
is that it somehow brings out our own distinctness. Can you say a little bit more about that?
What do the things that you like that you love, say, which is even more appropriate, I think in
this question, what are the things that you find beautiful? What do the things that you find beautiful
show about yourself? Well, let's put it that way. I go to the museum.
Actually, let me give you an actual example. I was at the opera, some years ago, and I was watching
the Strauss opera, the woman without chatter. At the end, of course, this is a very peculiar
opera. It involves spirits and human beings and interactions between the two and all that. It's a
kind of weird, actually weird story. At the end of the show, of the opera, the king, one of the
characters, sings something to the audience saying, "If you look carefully, if you look closely,
you will see that all these things are humans and that we're all brothers, something like that."
The staging of the opera at that point did the following. It took the set away. It showed all
these stage mechanisms that were behind this, all the lighting and the pulleys and the
various machines that they have to use. It also raised the lights in the house. All of a sudden,
you realize that this artistic creation that tells you that the content of it is all human,
is also produced only by humans and that the characters on the stage, this stage hands and the
machines that made the illusion possible and the audience that is observing it are all on the same
level. That's a brilliant, absolutely brilliant, cool. What did I say about you?
Where does this make you distinct? But there are a lover of this kind. But first, before we go to that,
what did I want to do when I felt that? I want to tell people about it.
It's not that I just said, "Oh, it's wonderful and I'm going to sit here and one low in it."
I wanted to discuss it and I wanted some at least of my friends to agree with me, not all of them
because I have friends who don't like opera and who think that it's ridiculous that I even
pay money to go see such things. But I wanted to now. Why is it important that I wanted to
tell those friends that might even enjoy risotto? Well, then they may not be such good things.
I take that. So why did I want to talk about it? Because when I judge at something
is beautiful, I find something beautiful. I am not simply saying I like it. I'm saying it's
something that others ought in some sense of another of ought, ought to find beautiful.
Now that's where Kant may come into the picture of it because Kant noticed this fact about it,
but he thought that the ought applies to absolutely everyone. So he thought that when you say that
something is beautiful, although that's not, and we no need to go into that, an objective judgment,
the way that say the judgment is wet. Let's see. Well, I'm not sure about that.
The she's water is water wet. Another question, a platonic question. If you went to it,
if you say the table is brown or any other seas wet for that matter could be either right or
wrong after all, if correct, everyone should in fact agree with you that the table is brown.
It's clear to me that that doesn't happen with beauty. Right. Kant thought that that's
if he thought that was due to very different reasons, but it's not that ideally everybody should
agree. I don't think so. Because we don't say this is beautiful for me. Exactly. Exactly.
I find this beautiful in the way that we say his famous example is Canary wine.
Canary wine can every way unpleasant, but you may not. We don't say that about things we find
beautiful. So it's a subjective judgment that nonetheless commands according to him a certain kind
of universality of agreement. Yeah, a universal agreement. I think that he's right about the fact
that it's not like Canary wine or the traditional philosophical modern ice cream. I say strawberry
or vanilla. I think depends on your taste. I think it applies to a smaller group of people.
And I think that explains a phenomenon that in fact people, some people agree about some things and
they disagree about others. And yet, there's other people who agree with them about these
agree about still others and so on. In other words, I think that when you say that something is
beautiful, you're envisaging a community, which will not necessarily be incomplete agreement about it
and very often will not even agree on the reasons why the object is beautiful, but will engage with
you on the assumption that the object is. What's very interesting about this kind of this approach to
the sort of the universality or the generality of beauty is that it allows us to explain why it is
that very often I can disagree with somebody about a judgment of beauty and yet not think that I
need to change a mind about it. The classic example, of course, is the following.
We Westerners by and large think that Rembrandt is a great painter. Now, it's quite clear that somebody
living in the northwest of China has never heard of Rembrandt and probably would not know what to make
of a Rembrandt self-portrait if he or she ever saw it. Now, should we convince that person that they
should like Rembrandt? Well, there's one sense in which we could say yes, why not. There's another sense
though in which when you think about it, you see, it's not as simple as that. You can't take somebody
like that and introduce them to Rembrandt. In order for them to like, so to speak, Rembrandt,
they have to be socialized into Western culture in general. And it's not at all clear to me
that it's always a good thing for somebody to be. So it's not clear to me that their life is going
to be necessarily better if they become a Western museum goer than if they are whatever it is that they
are at a time. So differences in social, intellectual, economic, even psychological makeup, I think,
justify aesthetic disagreements that don't involve trying to convince the others. And my
way of thinking about that has to do, my model is ancient Greek religion, polytheism, where you
are a follower of Aphrodite and you're a follower of Apollo. Exactly. Artemis, say, that's a better
country. That's a better country. I don't know who should be who. And we can recognize each other
as religious. We are both religious, but there's no sense of obligation that I need to convince you
that you should have Artemis or Aphrodite and you conversely. And yet, isn't there something
there's a strange phenomenon that happens when somebody you know and love turns out to have a radically
different reaction to something. So linear Anderson is one of my favorite people in the entire world.
He and I went to see a film called Next.Wanderland. Have you been subjected to this?
Subjective. Well, then, the same line to you. We sat through this film. That's the
verb I would use. And then at the end, I was thinking thank goodness. Now we can rush out and start making
fun of this film. But no, linear was sitting there through all of the credits deeply moved by
the entire experience. And the converse happened. This was a plumber, right? Yes, in Boston. Yes,
yes. Yeah, I'm kind of horrified at how well you remember this film. Then the converse, of course,
happened with Charlie Kaufman's adaptation, which is one of my favorite films and linear
things is that's one of the old audiences with the orchestra and Floyd adaptation of Susan or
Lean's. Yeah, or anything. And that's, you know, those situations are very interesting because obviously
you're not going to fall out over this. And you're not going to think the other person is
somehow wicked as if they committed a crime. And yet, you wonder whether you really know that.
So I guess what I'm curious about is what's the function of these micro communities? What do you
do for us? And what does it mean for us if it turns out that we, you know, I and some other person
don't belong quite the same micro we never belong completed to any micro community. That's part
of the point. It's that they're always going to be differences. Thank goodness because if there
weren't differences that way, we would become carbon copies of one another. And that's exactly what
at least we in the West think and I think everybody actually does as well. We shouldn't, we shouldn't be,
we should not, we're not ants. And I think the idea that everyone would have the same taste ultimately
reduces to the ant colony. Now that's of course an exaggeration, but this is where the idea
tends now about about your disagreements. There is a kind of disappointment. One of my best
friends for example, who is in fact a great opera lover doesn't like proves and it is a very
that's shocking. It's actually an immoral. But you know, I can live with it because I can see
how it fits with other things about him. And I can also live with it because I know that
there isn't a single right way to be at the same time. And I think you're absolutely right about
that. There is a sense that you realize I don't know that person exactly as I thought I did,
but that's okay too. There is no reason that we should know everyone as deeply as all that
shows to predict their taste. In fact, if you can predict somebody's taste, namely if you assume
that they will like exactly what you would like and for the same reasons, then you've reduced them to
an non-human being anymore. They're now going to have an algorithm. They can use, I mean,
they're a clone or a computer or whatever it is. By the same token, you can be deeply disappointed
if a friend of yours, but seriously is appointed. And in some cases, you can consider aesthetic
disagreements as fatal to a relation. I'll give you two examples. Not from fiction, one from
reality. The fictional one is the play by Jasmine Reza Art, where one of the three friends buys
a minimalist white painting and the other friend thinks it's a ridiculous thing. And they start
having arguments about it. At one point, the fellow who doesn't like the painting says,
"I could not love Sairz," let's see, man's name. "I couldn't love Sairz, who loves this painting?"
You see, because what he thinks it shows about Sairz is something very deeply wrong with him.
And the friendship begins to unravel in every which way they end up hating each other's
taste in food, each other's taste in women and so on and so forth. Now, fortunately, the story I'm
going to tell you did not have the same end, but a friend of mine who many, many years ago,
moved from an intellectual academic background to a business background in Palo Alto, as a matter of fact,
I started working there and I went to visit a year later and I arrived there and I saw that this man
was completely immersed in what I would call a kind of business culture. Money, cars,
vacations and one night we're having dinner. We're having some tension about that. And one night
at dinner, we're as restaurant together and there was a picture on the wall. And he said,
"I don't understand why anybody bothers with originals. What's the point about originals? If you
have a copy that looks the same, then it says good as the original." And at that point, I felt that
we had drawn so far apart that our friendship would not survive. And in fact, I left early,
I went back and fortunately the whole thing worked out perfectly well in the end and
I guess that doesn't fit perfectly what I said before, but he ended up agreeing with me.
But this is where you realize that sometimes aesthetic differences express really fundamental differences.
So maybe we can summarize by saying the following. First of all, there can be such a thing as bad taste,
which is not to say that there's a universal standard of taste. Everyone should like the same things,
but there could be a case in which your various tastes don't hang together as you would just say.
And that can be a mark of it. You somehow haven't done the work required to put your soul
in order so that you would... Well, nice to put. So that's one thing one could say. A second thing
one could say is, "A version of the Christian point, your friend had changed and his change nature
was expressed in his aesthetic taste." Exactly. And so we can actually infer things about the people
that we know and care about on the basis and we can know things about ourselves, in fact,
on the basis of the kinds of things we find beautiful and cherished. But you can't always
infer things especially about people you don't know from their taste. You need to understand
how things, if and how things hang together before you can make the judgment. I like the way you're
saying it earlier, you have to understand how this aesthetic judgment hangs together with the rest
of what you know about them. You don't just take it in isolation. And to some extent, I think that
a lot of people who pay a lot of attention to aesthetics and beauty tend often to make,
so to speak, ethical judgments about in bi-ethical, I mean, just judgment about how good they are,
not just necessarily, but in every other way. Simply by looking... Well, they like football.
I like opera. So, they're terrible people. They're low-class or whatever it is. And it turns out, of
course, that could be right, that generally isn't. And there's much more to it than that. In other
words, it's not... it's important not to rush to judgment in cases like that. We generally think
that aesthetics and the rush to judgment go together, because many people think that, well, you look
at something beautiful, or hear something beautiful, and there it is. You've got it all.
Whereas I really think, and that may be an intellectual approach in a way, but...
Well, can I say that understanding and appreciating and loving the beauty of something
always involves you into trying to understand it better. And accordingly, beauty is a property,
so to speak, of objects, that appears and is sort of, speak, deployed over time. Of course,
there is that magic moment of love at first sight and all that, but it's a bit more complicated than
that. And that could be love at first sight, but love that first sight that lasts for 10 years,
is not the same thing. It really develops, gets complicated, applies to other aspects of your life,
and so on. And I think that that's where one can and should return to Plato, and say that love and
knowledge are not completely separate at all, that to love something is essentially also involves
the effort to come to know it better. Now, I don't think that knowledge necessarily makes you
more, more person, either. So the idea is that even... I know you're claiming I take it. This is the
avenue to truth, generally speaking. No, absolutely. You're talking about it as the knowledge of the
artwork. Of course, knowledge of the artwork often involves other things as well, because what is it
to understand something, to understand something, in my view, is to try to establish exactly what it is,
and how, like the ports that we're talking about before, it differs from the other ports.
So in order to understand it, you need to see how it is similar to a different from all the other
things of its kind. So in order to understand this, to understand exactly this port, you need to
understand ports. Alexander, we're coming towards the end of our first hour together.
Listeners may... I hope we have. We did know that we have another hour of conversation coming.
And let's return in that other hour to these questions about coming to know the artwork and
distinguishing it from other things. And also to the vital question of what it is that these
artworks do for us, these unpredictable bonus they confer upon our lives. But I want to return
briefly to something you were saying earlier about certain kinds of unfortunate judgments against,
for example, people who enjoy watching football. I'm hoping that by football you mean soccer,
in which case I'm fully included in that category.
Well, I didn't at the time, but I wouldn't have any kind of contempt for people who like what
people will soccer. I don't have a contempt either for people who like football either, but yes,
I was wonderful. Yeah. This was just a pretext for me to get you to talk about television,
because I know that you've written very eloquently about television.
You've confessed to being a fan of Frazier, which I find inexplicable, but...
Well, you also didn't like Wonderland, so... Yes, this is a good point.
Could you say something a bit about that? I mean, I have two questions about one of which is,
what should one say in defense of television? Obviously, television is eminently
defendable, but at the same time it clearly needs a defense against certain kinds of critique.
And secondly, how on earth does your love of television, a passionate love of television,
which has even had you writing articles about television go along with your love of opera?
Well, I mean, are you supposed to be coherent in your tastes, too?
Yes, but it takes a while to see it.
Now, what was your first question?
How should we defend television?
Well, defend television.
And indeed, I mean, one of the things I love about your work is that you haven't merely defended it.
You even explain how in some contexts it's superior as a media.
There are certain things that television can do that other media can't.
Well, actually, I think it's not right to speak of defending television.
Could I defend writing?
There is a myth by Isop where the Master Sense Isop to the market,
and he says, "Bring me the best thing that they have in the market."
And Isop brings his Master a tongue.
And he says, "Pant-wise, what's better than the tongue? Aren't the greatest achievements of people
established by speech and so on and so forth?" And he says, "Okay, now go bring me the worst thing."
And he comes back with the tongue.
And you see where this is going.
So, the same thing with writing, some of the worst things in the world have happened because of
writing and some of the very best things in the world.
So, it's not a medium is not to be defended in itself.
A medium, and that applies also to genres, I think.
A medium or a genre is to be defended for the good things that it does,
because it's always possible to do something terrible.
The genre, as we're saying before, nothing is absolutely one way or the other.
So, when I try to, so to speak, defend television, what I like to try to do is to say,
look, very many criticism of television as a medium.
Proceed from the fact that people take the achievements of another medium
that they are used to, that they consider pedagmatic, and apply them to television,
or to any other medium for that matter.
And since, of course, media can accomplish different things and say,
television, can't accomplish exactly what writing does, then they infer that television is
inferior to writing.
Well, my point is that, well, it's inferior to writing insofar as writing's accomplishments
are concerned, but writing is also inferior to television,
insofar as televisions are accomplishments.
In other words, each medium can do things that the other medium can't.
And what I'm interested in is finding out what it is about television in particular.
That makes it worthwhile.
Not for a moment denying that 99.8% of what we see on television is terrible,
which I think is also true of 99.8% of all the writing in the world, probably more.
Or 99.8% of novels that have been written, or of sonatas that have been written,
so on and so on and so forth.
We forget that, especially with established media and genres.
We think, well, the novel is a great job because we think of Ulysses and Prus and Thomas
Mann and Jane Austen not forgetting, I mean, forgetting that, apart from all the novels that have
been published and have been consigned to complete oblivion.
Millions that haven't even been published because they were too bad to publish.
Whereas with television, of course, we also--
So what does that television can do at its best?
Well, it changed one of the things about television, of course,
is that being a new medium, relatively speaking,
though it now is becoming old enough so that everybody's more willing to consider it as
interesting an art and it's no longer-- and you don't know a long and need to apologize for watching it.
The still people say, I don't watch television.
Well, there were people I'm sure in Plato's time who said I don't read.
I only listened.
Well, what do you say that I don't go to tragedies?
Well, most of them did, but the best among us, exactly, knew how bad they were.
Sure, of course.
And all that again goes back to Plato because his famous prescription of poetry
from the ideal state of the republic is the quintessential argument against popular culture,
which was tragedy at the time.
Just open up an entity and talk about that for a minute.
He has three reasons that he sort of is very suspicious of poetry, tragic and epic mostly,
but others as well.
It conflates the authentic and the fake.
It suited only for representing or best suited for representing violent and sexual subjects.
And it has the capacity of perverting even the best among us into acting in life
as we would have been ashamed to act had we not been exposed to it, which is, I think, the core,
the kernel, expressing one's emotions excessively, for example.
That's right.
And generally speaking, moving away from the path to not a genetic,
and that's another way in which beauty, of course, is considered to be dangerous, seductive.
Now, here are some things that some kind of television can do because, again,
you don't want to generalize in this case.
It allows us to see aspects of character that the novel can't quite do.
Television A up to now when the screens were slightly smaller was extremely intimate.
It's always close shooting, right?
It's always very narrow shots.
So you're always seeing faces very, very close, much closer than you see them either in cinema
or especially in the theater, where you're at a very, very great distance.
So you see people very intimately in ways that you can't see them in film or theater,
where it's much more important to project.
And one of the reasons that I've noticed that theater actors are very often not particularly good
in television is that theater actors are trained to shout, but seem as if they're speaking.
If you try to do that on television with a microphone in front of your mouth,
in a camera that's focusing on every little move in your very, every movement in your face,
you will seem ridiculous.
So you need to change.
So here it is acting is a different practice in theater, in film and in television.
So intimacy is something that television does.
Another thing that it does, and I think it's no accident that so many shows on television have to do
with the working place, is that it shows people in routine situations in sort of a background
which remains the same from week to week, but in very different specific quandaries,
such as every week.
The way that it portrays character is very different from the way that the novel portrays character,
the novel aims at showing you the essence of what a person is,
finding out what makes Anaka Renina work.
So to speak, what kind of person is it?
Is she?
And everything that Anaka Renina does springs from a certain complex of features that ultimately fit
together in a, I mean, it has to fit together, she's not a good character.
Now, what happens with television characters is that you see them in different situations every week,
and you end up seeing how many different aspects of fasts as a situation their character has,
without necessarily being able to make a simple overall judgment about them,
which is when you think about it very much the way we know most of the people that we're not
intimately acquainted with.
Right.
My colleagues, I mean, I know this colleague of mine is extremely bright, but it doesn't have
very good taste or this other has this very positive feature, but this other negative feature.
I don't try to say good or bad in general, what is in the novel? We do that.
And television gives us what I think is a highly realistic and very accurate picture of one aspect
of our relationship to the world and to other people.
We will have more from Alexander Nehemas in the second half of this conversation.
For now, I hope you'll agree with me that we've established the following.
First, a love of beauty is something more or less universal.
Second, it cuts across so-called high and low aesthetic genres.
Television shows can be just as beautiful and gripping and powerful and meaningful in our lives
as operas. Third, it doesn't yield knowledge necessarily anyway,
unless it's knowledge of the artwork itself, and it doesn't yield moral improvement.
But what it does yield, if I understand you correctly, is first of all,
some kind of distinctiveness in myself. And secondly,
a pertinent and a micro-community, a kind of utopian community where they're formed,
not on the basis of contingent features like one's origins, or one's class, or something like that,
but something much deeper about us. And finally, and this is something that we'll get to in the
second half that they have just an unpredictable way of changing our lives.
Very good. I agree with almost everything. Wonderful. So, Alexander, thank you very much.
Thank you.
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