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Art, Interpretation, and the Rest of Life: Essays in Aesthetics
Arguing that modern aesthetics has divorced art from beauty and therefore from life itself, a renowned philosopher seeks to reintegrate art and everyday experience.
Supposedly there is a distinction between art and life, such that one can at best imitate the other. Alexander Nehamas, one of most respected philosophers of his age, makes clear just how far we have been led astray by this false dichotomy. He argues that art can only diverge from life when we scorn beauty, which connects and adorns the two.
Art, Interpretation, and the Rest of Life takes as a starting point Plato’s attacks on poetry and drama. Subsequent generations reinforced his contempt, and during the eighteenth century institutionalized it in an asserted distinction between high and low art. It was this elitist move, establishing a realm of cultivated sensibility accessible only to the educated, that resolutely severed art from experience. Instead art was imagined independent of everyday interests and popular concerns, so that aesthetic pleasure was alienated from the hopes and disappointments of life as we generally know it. Central to the conceit of modern aesthetics―and conceit it was, for the trifles of one age are often fine art in the next―was the divorce of art from beauty provokes the desire and discontents that have no place in an intellectualized order of high art.
Attending to the likes of Goya, Proust, Duchamp, Mann, and Nabokov, crime novels and TV shows, Nehamas reintroduces art to beauty so that we may find art everywhere and see it for what it not an esoteric stimulation for the few but an integral and multifaceted component of all people’s lives.
Supposedly there is a distinction between art and life, such that one can at best imitate the other. Alexander Nehamas, one of most respected philosophers of his age, makes clear just how far we have been led astray by this false dichotomy. He argues that art can only diverge from life when we scorn beauty, which connects and adorns the two.
Art, Interpretation, and the Rest of Life takes as a starting point Plato’s attacks on poetry and drama. Subsequent generations reinforced his contempt, and during the eighteenth century institutionalized it in an asserted distinction between high and low art. It was this elitist move, establishing a realm of cultivated sensibility accessible only to the educated, that resolutely severed art from experience. Instead art was imagined independent of everyday interests and popular concerns, so that aesthetic pleasure was alienated from the hopes and disappointments of life as we generally know it. Central to the conceit of modern aesthetics―and conceit it was, for the trifles of one age are often fine art in the next―was the divorce of art from beauty provokes the desire and discontents that have no place in an intellectualized order of high art.
Attending to the likes of Goya, Proust, Duchamp, Mann, and Nabokov, crime novels and TV shows, Nehamas reintroduces art to beauty so that we may find art everywhere and see it for what it not an esoteric stimulation for the few but an integral and multifaceted component of all people’s lives.
376 pages, Hardcover
Published October 1, 2025
6 people want to read
About the author
Alexander Nehamas
29 books77 followersAlexander Nehamas (Greek: Αλέξανδρος Νεχαμάς; born 1946) is Professor of philosophy and Edmund N. Carpenter, II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Nietzsche, Foucault, and literary theory.
He was born in Athens, Greece in 1946. In 1964, he enrolled to Swarthmore College. He graduated in 1967 and completed his doctorate on Predication in Plato's Phaedo under the direction of Gregory Vlastos at Princeton in 1971. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Princeton faculty in 1990.
His early work was on Platonic metaphysics and aesthetics as well as the philosophy of Socrates, but he gained a wider audience with his 1985 book Nietzsche: Life as Literature, which argued that Nietzsche thought of life and the world on the model of a literary text. Nehamas has said, "The virtues of life are comparable to the virtues of good writing—style, connectedness, grace, elegance—and also, we must not forget, sometimes getting it right." More recently, he has become well known for his view that philosophy should provide a form of life, as well as for his endorsement of the artistic value of television. In 2008, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.
He was born in Athens, Greece in 1946. In 1964, he enrolled to Swarthmore College. He graduated in 1967 and completed his doctorate on Predication in Plato's Phaedo under the direction of Gregory Vlastos at Princeton in 1971. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Princeton faculty in 1990.
His early work was on Platonic metaphysics and aesthetics as well as the philosophy of Socrates, but he gained a wider audience with his 1985 book Nietzsche: Life as Literature, which argued that Nietzsche thought of life and the world on the model of a literary text. Nehamas has said, "The virtues of life are comparable to the virtues of good writing—style, connectedness, grace, elegance—and also, we must not forget, sometimes getting it right." More recently, he has become well known for his view that philosophy should provide a form of life, as well as for his endorsement of the artistic value of television. In 2008, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.
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