Friendship, Beauty, Judgment

Nehamas offers parallel accounts of friendship on the one hand and engagement with beautiful objects on the other. At the heart of both relationships is hopeful submission to an appeal I don't fully understand that will take me places I can't fully foresee. Yet while friendship resists judgment on a permanent basis, beauty demands it from the very start. We can and often should keep our friends to ourselves, but beauty calls on us to analyze and evangelize. The time to make up our minds about friends is never, while the time to make up our minds about beauty is always right now. I confirm and account for these differences with the help of lessons from Kant (about communities of taste and communities of inquiry), lessons from Montaigne (about the place of freedom in what he calls loving friendship), and lessons from The Philadelphia Story (about the dangers of confusing love and mutual admiration).