The Work of Art and the Promise of Happiness in Adorno James Gordon Finlayson I. One of the most striking and intriguing theses of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is that art is the promise of happiness. Stendhal's dictum about the promesse du bonheur says that art thanks existence by accentuating what in existence prefigures utopia. This is a diminishing resource, since existence increasingly mirrors only itself. Consequently art is ever less able to mirror existence. Because any happiness that one might take from or find in what exists is false, a mere substitute, art has to break its promise in order to keep it. 1 Nothing about this dictum is self-evident, not least its attribution to Stendhal, who wrote not that art is the promise of happiness, but that “beauty is but the promise of happiness” (la beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur). 2 Stendhal’s saying about beauty occurs in a footnote to a passage in De l'Amour in which he states that it is possible to love the ugly. He illustrates the point with an anecdote about a man who, in the presence of two women, one beautiful and the other thin, ugly and scarred with smallpox, falls for the latter, who quite by chance reminds him of a former love. The moral of the story is that beauty has little or nothing to do with physical perfection. 3 Stendhal’s definition of beauty, and his thought that the idea of beauty lies far from nature and from the physical form of the object of desire, impressed Baudelaire. 4 He comments in Le Peintre de La Vie Moderne that, although it “submits the beautiful too much to the infinitely variable ideal of happiness and divests the beautiful too quickly of its aristocratic character,” Stendhal’s idea nonetheless has the considerable merit of “breaking decisively with the mistakes of the academicians.” 5 The mistakes to which Baudelaire refers are presumably those of taking nature as the ideal of beauty, and of having a misguided moral conception of nature. Baudelaire, under Stendhal’s influence, works up a theory of the beautiful, a theory reminiscent of Platonism. 6 The beautiful is made of an eternal, immutable element the quantity of which is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative and circumstantial element which will be in turn or at once, the era, the fashion, morality or passion. Without this second element...the first element would be indigestible, inappreciable, maladapted and inappropriate to human nature...Consider, if you please, the eternally substantial element as the soul, and the variable element as its body. 7 The main lesson Baudelaire takes from Stendhal is that the beautiful is an idea that can and must take on a myriad of historical guises, just as the lure of happiness can entice the flâneur into a thousand different alleys and arcades. Adorno’s dictum that art is a promesse du bonheur, then, though it draws on Stendhal and Baudelaire, is in an important sense his own. The dictum is a recurrent motif in Adorno, suggesting not just that he was fond of it, but that it is also a central thought, or at least that we can regard it as central, provided that we disregard Adorno's programmatic claim that in philosophical texts all propositions should stand equally close to the centre. 8 We can put aside that startling prescription, I believe, since it does not apply even to his own work: some propositions stand much closer to its center than others. The thesis that art is a promise of happiness is one of them and it radiates out in different directions. To understand it properly, is to understand