A discussion with Prof. Alexander Nehamas (Department of Philosophy and Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University)

This chapter explores a surprising analogy connecting friendship, beauty, and humanistic interpretation. Expanding on earlier accounts of friendship (Nehamas 2016) and beauty (Nehamas 2007), the chapter points out that both our love for our friends and our attachment to beautiful objects focus on their unique and irreplaceable features. This impels us to engage and try to know them better, which ensures in turn that our attachment to them orients us toward the future we might share with them. Precisely that future orientation explains the risk in such love; we hope it will add value to our lives, but of course, some friends lead people astray and some beautiful art is immoral. All these key features also characterize our engagement with the targets of humanistic interpretation. Our interpretations focus on individual artifacts, or perhaps even on the genres to which they belong, and lead us to want to know them better. Their interesting features seem boundless, orienting us toward a future where there is always more to understand. Interpreting such objects not only attaches us to them. It also reveals to us the distinctive point of view that makes them unique and irreplaceable—a point of view that is also distinctively our own and distinguishes us, to that extent, from those around us.  Humanistic interpretation is not guaranteed to make us either better citizens or more moral, but it does individualize us: It makes us more ourselves. The humanities are valuable because, among other things, they are a mechanism of individuality.

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