10 - The naked truth

Summary

“Is it true the natives think the camera steals their souls?” “Some of them. The sensible ones.”

Pat Barker, The Ghost Road

Not so long ago I was discussing aesthetics with the junior faculty of a northern university, when one of them said, as a kind of joke, that whenever she saw a job opening in aesthetics posted, she could not suppress the thought that the department wanted someone who could do nails. She clearly came from a language community in which the term serves as the generic business name of enterprises ministering to the cosmetic requirements of patrons who would, if they lived in the United States, instead have had recourse to what, evidently without thinking it the least odd, we designate as “beauty shops.” And her amusement derived from the appropriation, in one language, of a term that has come to mean, in another language, primarily a branch of philosophy, concerned, as the dictionary tells us, with “a theory of the beautiful and of the fine arts.” It is more than slightly ludicrous to think of cosmetology as applied philosophy, and the permanent wave as an exercise in practical aesthetics, as if one might assure graduate students in aesthetics that they might always find employment in a tight market by trimming hair - or for that matter “doing nails” - just as students of logic are assured that careers in computer programming are fallback options in case academic positions are not to be had. The ludicrousness of applying a discipline almost defined by the contrast between the aesthetic and the practical is given an edge of slight revulsion by the image of the philosopher with clippers and rouge pot.