TEHRAN (IBNA) -- Persian translation of ‘Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a ‎World of Art’ (2010), a book on art criticism and theory by Greek-born American ‎philosopher Alexander Nehamas has been published. ‎
Winner of the Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Philosophy, Association of American Publishers, the book has been translated into Persian by Mas’oud Hosseini. Tehran-based Qoqnoos Publishing in Tehran has released ‘Only a Promise of Happiness’ in 224 pages.
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.
Nehamas makes his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Manet’s Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of artworks is generously illustrated.
Eminent Richard Rorty, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University comments on this work: “Alexander Nehamas is one of the most imaginative philosophers of our day, as well as one of the most learned. In the past, he has written brilliantly about both Plato and Nietzsche. In ‘Only a Promise of Happiness’ he tries to reconcile the two by showing how their accounts of beauty complement each another. His attempt is novel and very ambitious. It seems to me almost completely successful.”
Nehamas is a professor of philosophy and comparative literature and the Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1990.