The Happiness of Promise: Ferdinand Hodler and Alexander Nehamas on Love and Care

Abstract

Alexander Nehamas’s work on beauty offers a possible framework for understanding a lover’s relationship to the value of the beloved, defined by the want to spend more time with the beloved and a “promise of happiness” in that prospect. The indeterminacy of the time to come strikes the lover as promising, in this arrangement. But relationships are often determined in many less delightful ways, and might be structured by the transformation of the “promising” into promises to care through a deeply unhappy future. This essay considers the relationship between love and care in these ways through the development of an account of love from Nehamas’s work on beauty in dialogue with a series of portraits painted by Swiss symbolist Ferdinand Hodler of his lover as she was dying.