Dwelling with Beauty

Abstract

Criticizing the interpretation of beauty as a form of disinterested contemplation, Nietzsche famously cites Stendahl’s statement that beauty is “a promise of happiness.” In the context of his own philosophy, however, the promise is a lie, as beauty speaks of stability and perfection in a world that is constantly changing and very far from perfect. This sense that beauty falsifies continues to be reflected in the suspicion of beauty that informs so much of the theory and practice of art within the ethos of late modernity. Representations of beauty are thought to obscure the human condition, and may also function as repressive political tools, painting the idylls of privileged classes while dulling sensitivity and resistance to injustice. Acknowledging the partial legitimacy of such interpretations of the uses and abuses of beauty, one can ask whether they rightly apply to all types of produced beauty, and to all promises of happiness symbolized in beautiful images and figures. Are there no ways in which beauty can still serve a healing and redemptive purpose, at both the individual and the social levels, without falsification or the evocation of unfulfillable desire? And is there not a telling relation to beauty, in its connection with goodness, expressed even in the depiction of the ugly as needing redress? These questions are explored through an analysis of everyday artefacts and varieties of adornment, drawing on the later Heidegger’s analysis of making, dwelling and “things.”