Alexander Nehamaswas an excellent guest. Thanks so much to Alexander for appearing on the show this week.

I want to respond further to one of Alexander's central claims. He says that beauty has to do with what he calls "the promise of happiness." To find something beautiful is to perceive in it a promise of happiness. He even says that when you have exhausted what a thing has to offer you in the way of happiness, you will no longer find it beautiful. This line does explain a lot about what I'll call positive beauty, for lack of a better term. I'm not sure, however, that it works for what I'll call negative beauty.

There is, I think, such a thing as beauty that haunts. This is the beauty of movies likeRequiem for a Dream. Imagine a work of art dedicated to doing nothing but portraying the psychology of evil, not in such a way as to praise or condemn, not to represent it as other, alien and incomprehensible, but merely to make us see it as it is. In our episode onEvil,Peter Van Inwagenclaimed that the psychology of evil is incomprehensible to us. But I don't think I agree. I wouldn't go so far as to say it lurks in us all, but I do think we overestimate our own distance from it. This is a point well made in Thomas Nagel's beautiful essay on Moral Luck. But to return to our imagined artistic portrayal of pure evil. To get what I'm after you have to imagine a work that does not represent evil as being bound to lose out, in the end, to the good -- as so many representations of evil do. I'm thinking of a work that gives no quarter to the optimism that we all so very much want to experience. Such a work might be truly haunting. If the presence of real evil in the world is a haunting reality, then a beautiful representation of that haunting reality might be at least as haunting as the reality itself.

现在你可能会问，“为什么要诉诸于一件假设的艺术作品?”首先，我不能马上想到一件作品恰好具备我所追求的特征——尽管有很多作品与之接近。但从哲学的角度来说，我自己总是觉得可能性的空间比现实的空间更哲学有趣。现实代表了可能的一些样本，通常是可能中有趣的样本。这无疑是一个深刻而重要的问题:在所有的可能性中，为什么只有这些被实现了?但在这里，我认为答案在很多情况下不会具有深刻的哲学意义或启发性。答案将取决于人类历史和文化的偶发事件，有时只是纯粹的偶然事件或目前正在发挥作用的分配机制。如果我们有自由市场资本主义，我们可能会期待这样或那样的艺术产生。如果我们对艺术有高度的国家干预和补贴，我们可能会期待另一种形式。就负面美而言，我想不出有什么机制能产生这么多负面美。 People just do not enjoy that which haunts in the same way as they do that which promises happiness. We don't seek out the haunting. Indeed, we typically seek to rid ourselves of that which haunts. That's why it can drive us to the therapist's couch.

每个人都同意，我认为有令人困扰的现实。请听比尔·克林顿谈论卢旺达的种族灭绝。他仍为自己不干预的决定耿耿于怀。莱温斯基事件可能也会困扰他的余生。但人们可能会问，是否可以从萦绕不去的现实中创造出美。如果你接受内哈玛斯的说法，即只有在有幸福承诺的地方才有美，那么也许不是。你当然可以在一件美丽的艺术作品中表现出那些有可能被克服的东西。但是，通过这种思考方式，将它表现为能够被克服，将是至关重要的。我们必须打败怪物，黑暗可能会出现，但太阳不会熄灭，即使后来它的光芒会减弱。在某种程度上，《指环王》几乎没有给我们这种喘息的机会。 Though the darkness is overcome, the effects of having confronted it never go away. Frodo never manages of his own will to destroy the Ring of Power. Only accident saves him. He will be haunted for the rest of his days by his inability to give up the Ring when it most needed to be given up. He will never be the self he once was.

I am arguing, in effect, that the connection between happiness and beauty is contingent not necessary, extrinsic, not intrinsic. Beauty may either haunt, promise happiness, or invite us to some mixture of the two. We much prefer positive beauty to negative beauty, but they are species of the same genus.

You could view my line as a friendly amendment to Alexander's own. Much of what he has to say about beauty, style and individuality can still be said. It's just that there are two sides to it. I am defined not just by that in which I find the promise of happiness, but also by that which I find haunting. We may be more disposed to seek out that which promises us happiness, but if we would be fully ourselves and know ourselves fully perhaps we would be well advised to open ourselves as much to the haunting power of negative beauty as to the happiness making power of positive beauty.