Une Promesse de Bonheur?

Abstract This essay investigates Nietzsche’s not-quite-agreement with Stendhal, that ‘beauty is only a promise of happiness’. The issue swings on Nietzsche’s distinction between noble and slavish modes of valuation, where the former starts with a self-directed Yes, the latter with an other-directed No. As the author reads him, Nietzsche’s quarrel with his main interlocutors (Kant, Schopenhauer, Stendhal) is that all of them offer accounts of beauty that are in one way or another slavish: Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s valuations begin with a No, Stendhal’s with an other-directed Yes. Nietzsche himself, it seems, wants a fully noble conception of beauty; but the argument of the present essay is that nothing could really answer to that, and that, as Nietzscheans, we almost certainly have better reason to line up behind Stendhal and the ‘promise of happiness’ that, for him, beauty holds out.