Alexander Nehamas

To study the art of living is to engage in one of its forms.

Alexander Nehamas (born 22 March 1946 in Athens, Greece) is Professor of philosophy and Edmund N. Carpenter, II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Nietzsche, Foucault, and literary theory.

Quotes

• All we are now concerned with is the search for “new and improved” version of whatever means are already available for attaining goals such means make possible. The value of the goals themselves is irrelevant … What counts is doing things better than before. Whether such things are worth doing in the first place is no longer a question.
  • Foreword to Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual (1999), p. xi.

• According to Heidegger, the blind desire for manipulation [of nature] came about because modernity turned reason—which was, for the ancients, and even for the medievals, a source of valuable goals—into a purely instrumental faculty.
  • Foreword to Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual (1999), p. xi.

• For Socrates, virtue was nothing but its own pursuit. And only the promise of happiness is happiness itself.
  • Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2010), p. 138.

Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985)

• Irony, which in Socrates’ case consists of saying “too little,” functions for him just as hyperbole, which is saying “too much,” functions for Nietzsche.
  • p. 26.

• The one reaction Nietzsche cannot tolerate is indifference, and this is what his use of hyperbole is designed to eliminate.
  • p. 28.

• Both dogmatism and metaphysics … are attempts to project one’s own views on the world, and they are just as much attempts to hide precisely this projection from themselves as well as from their audience.
  • pp. 33-34.

The Art of Living (1998)

• To study the art of living is to engage in one of its forms.
  • p. 15.