Only the most apt analogy

If I understand him correctly, Alexander Nehamas (Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art, Princeton University Press, 2007) seems to think that once we understand precisely why we find something beautiful (a woman’s figure promises fertility, her beautiful hair health, a man’s log ring finger economic success, flowers in the meadow alkalinity of soil) – the impression of beauty evaporates.

The experience of beauty is inseparable from interpretation, and just as beauty always promises more than it has given so far, so interpretation, the effort to understand what it promises, is forever work in progress. It is completed only when beauty has nothing more to offer: understanding comes into full blossom as attraction withers, as it always does – unless death comes first. (p. 105)

I find this view common (it is the main reason for the spirited opposition to all evolutionary psychological theories of mind) and idealistically naïve. After all, is the pleasure of a swim erased by the knowledge that it is caused by increased heart action and the cooling of the skin? To know that the meadows’ flowers indicate the alkalinity of its soil makes an afternoon spent lying in it with a book (or just looking up at the sky) no less delightful to me. And why should it? The point of beauty is the pleasure it gives. The pleasure can be treated as an end in itself.

I wonder whether Alexander Nehamas knows it. It is not a low-aimed blow at all when I say it, but a matter of the most apt analogy, I think: if the good professor has ever used birth-control, he should.