The Sense of Beauty (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By George Santayana and Marc Lucht

George Santayana is an unequaled champion of emotional life and the value of pure contemplation and imaginative play. In his first philosophical book, The Sense of Beauty, Santayana elucidates how the contemplation of beautiful ideals invests our lives with meaning. His great achievement is to offer a way of retaining the significance of spiritual and moral values in the context of a predominantly materialist and scientific world. This seminal work explores aesthetics, the psychological and cultural importance of art, and the relationship between the humanities and the sciences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411430969

George Santayana

George Santayana, born Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana (1863–1952), was a Spanish-American philosopher, novelist, poet, and essayist. He is best known for his witty aphorisms, especially the phrase, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Santayana was born in Spain, but was raised and educated in the United States. He attended Harvard College and later taught philosophy there. During this time he wrote many of his seminal philosophical works, including The Sense of Beauty, The Life of Reason, and The Realms of Being. In 1912, Santayana moved to Europe, where he devoted his life to writing both fiction and nonfiction.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

GEORGE Santayana is an unequaled champion of emotional life and the value of pure contemplation and imaginative play. The Sense of Beauty is his first philosophical book. In it, Santayana explores the psychological and physiological origins of our aesthetic sensibilities, and elucidates the manner in which the contemplation of beautiful ideals invests our lives with meaning and offers consolation for our suffering. His great achievement is to offer a way of retaining the significance of spiritual and moral values in the context of the success and predominance of a strictly materialist scientific view of the world. The literary and richly imagistic quality of Santayana’s writing helps to render his philosophical ideas and arguments uniquely accessible to non-specialists. This seminal work by one of history’s finest humanist thinkers will be of great interest to anyone interested in aesthetics, the psychological and cultural importance of art, and the relationship between the humanities and the sciences.

George Santayana was born in Madrid in 1863. When he was five years old, his mother moved to Boston to raise her four children from an earlier marriage, thereby fulfilling a promise made to their late father, a wealthy American merchant. Three years later, his father took Santayana to Boston to rejoin his mother, where he attended the Boston Latin School and then Harvard University. While at Harvard, Santayana was one of the founders of Lampoon, a much emulated satirical magazine that is still in existence. He was also one of the founding editors of the Harvard Monthly. After graduating in 1886, he spent two years studying philosophy in Berlin before returning to Harvard to take his Ph.D. Among his teachers were the great American philosophers Josiah Royce and William James, and James evidently went to great lengths to persuade Harvard’s president that Santayana should be offered a place on the faculty. In 1896, Santayana took a sabbatical at Cambridge University, England, where he developed a close professional relationship with Bertrand Russell. Upon the death of his mother in 1911, Santayana received a modest inheritance, and much to the surprise and chagrin of his colleagues at Harvard he took early retirement and left the United States for Europe to travel, visit friends and family, and write. For some time he lived in England and then Paris, but soon settled down in Rome, where he spent much of the rest of his life occupying a room in the Hotel Bristol. With the outbreak of the Second World War his royalties became inaccessible, causing Santayana to move to a convent, where he died in 1952.

Santayana retained his Spanish citizenship throughout his life, but nevertheless is considered to be a quintessentially American philosopher and all of his published works were written in English. Santayana is one of the masters of English prose, and his elegant style distinguishes his work from the dry, technical, and jargon-filled prose of most of the academic philosophers writing in English at the time. In 1894, Santayana published his first book, a collection of poetry titled Sonnets and Other Verse. The Sense of Beauty was his first work of philosophy and appeared in 1896. In 1900, Santayana published a book titled Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, in which he develops an illuminating exploration of the affinities between poetry and religion. Each enriches our lives by speaking to the felt rather than purely intellectual dimensions of experience and each helps to make life bearable by depicting ideals for us to admire, reflect upon, and strive for. Another book of poetry, A Hermit of Carmel, and Other Poems, appeared in 1901, and from 1905 to 1906 Santayana published the five volumes of The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, the initial formulation of his philosophical system. The Life of Reason is one of the very few attempts in American philosophy to construct a systematic account of the entirety of human existence, and it investigates the manifold ways in which various human enterprises such as social organization, science, religion, and art contribute to happiness and spiritual fulfillment. (The fourth volume, Reason in Art, develops further many of the ideas presented initially in The Sense of Beauty.) Santayana wrote Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (1910), Winds of Doctrine (1913), Egotism in German Philosophy (1916), and Character and Opinion in the United States (1920), before publishing Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), which serves as a kind of summary of and initial orientation to his mature system. Particularly interesting in this book is Santayana’s response to the traditional philosophical problem of proving the existence of the external world. Anticipating Martin Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time, Santayana suggests that philosophers encounter great difficulties overcoming sceptical doubts about the existence of the world because of their attempts to base their investigations on data known with absolute rational certitude; instead, we ought to recognize that such a foundation is not forthcoming, and that the ordinary practice of all animal life, which merely presupposes the existence of the world, has its own kind of authority and insights that can guide our philosophical reflection. The rest of the system is elaborated in Realms of Being, the four volumes of which were published between 1927 and 1940. Here Santayana attempts to show that the totality of human experience arises out of the ontological categories of essence, matter, truth, and spirit. In The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (1946), Santayana returns to the issues dealt with in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, and explores the value of a religion stripped of its supernatural and dogmatic commitments; influenced throughout his life by Arthur Schopenhauer, Santayana thinks that religion -- as does art -- can help ease life’s suffering by cultivating an attitude of resignation and presenting us with an imaginative world of ideal goods, contemplation of which provides us with delight.

Santayana was incredibly prolific. He published more than thirty books, numerous essays and articles, a novel titled The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1936), and a three-volume autobiography. Although recognized as an important philosopher during his own lifetime, his works were neglected after his death. Part of the reason for this may be that his thought was out of step with the prevailing spirit of Anglo-American philosophy, which for most of the twentieth century was focused on logical analysis of language and the concepts deployed within the theories of the natural sciences. Philosophy for Santayana, however, is essentially a humanistic enterprise, and has as its goal a synthetic vision of the world and of one’s own place in it, at once intellectual and aesthetic, which may inform the character of one’s life and thought as a whole.¹

In spite of its having been overlooked by the philosophical mainstream, Santayana’s thought makes important contributions to philosophical debates about scepticism, epistemology, the nature of truth, time, the problem of the existence of universals, the theory of value, and questions about the relationship between minds and bodies. He develops an unusually robust defense of moral relativism. He offers an important critique of what he saw as too high a regard for practical utility in the pragmatism of his contemporaries John Dewey and William James. Santayana was troubled by what he regarded as undue preoccupation with commercial considerations in modern industrial society; for him, life is about much more than mere busyness or practical activity, and some of the more delightful aspects of his work are to be found in his descriptions of the ways in which art, pure contemplation, and mental play can enrich our lives. Perhaps most excitingly, however, Santayana attempts to combine philosophical naturalism, that is, the idea that everything that exists has a physical basis and is describable by the natural sciences, with idealism, the view that essences and ideals play an important role in human thought and conduct. As T. L. S. Sprigge puts it, Santayana combines the entirely naturalistic, or in a broad sense materialist, philosophy with a celebration of those ideals of rationality and spirituality the validity of which materialism often seems to threaten.² This attempt to combine what may seem to be odd philosophical bed-fellows is particularly evident in The Sense of Beauty and is part of what makes it such a remarkable book.

A word about an influential naturalist position may help clarify this distinctive feature of Santayana’s work. According to logical positivists such as A. J. Ayer, for instance, all meaningful statements are either statements of logic or statements about empirical matters of fact, most typically made by the sciences. Normative claims such as ethical and aesthetic judgments cannot be verified by reference to some factual and objective state of affairs -- we could never use our microscopes to demonstrate that some painting is beautiful -- thus refer to nothing real and can be neither true nor false. For Ayer, normative statements therefore should be rejected as meaningless or fictional. The threat posed by views such as logical positivism to the discourses of ethics and aesthetics is that since they deprive those discourses of any truth-value, language about some of the most important issues in our lives begins to break down as irrelevant and even comes to be seen as deceptive.

The Sense of Beauty is in part an attempt to perform a naturalistic aesthetics, that is, an investigation of the evolutionary, physiological, and psychological roots of taste. Santayana explores the origins of our aesthetic sensibility in various psychological and even physiological functions such as breathing, sex drive, and eye movement. As does logical positivism, Santayana holds that all value, including aesthetic and moral value, is based not on objective properties but arises merely from our idiosyncratic psychological preferences. Yet instead of dismissing aesthetic taste as an idle endeavor because it originates in the mere subjectivity of emotional life, instead of condemning aesthetic judgments as meaningless because they fail to be objective, he holds that triviality actually follows from abstraction from our subjective human interests and preferences. Indeed, the objective world described for us by the sciences matters to us at all only because of our (subjective) feelings about it. What is more, far from denigrating art on the ground of its incapacity to help us meet our practical or utilitarian needs, it is here that Santayana finds art’s supreme value: It is because we do not value beautiful objects because of their utility, he says, that we treasure them for their own sake. Aesthetic pleasure is a kind of ornamentation decorating our lives, and to condemn it as useless is to value life irrespective of its content or quality. If all of our energy was spent on the practical needs of survival, we would be essentially slaves; when we are free from our work, when we find relief from hardship, our minds enjoy their freedom by turning to the more dignified aesthetic play of the imagination and emotions. Certainly this creative play does not make life possible, Santayana admits, but its pleasure enriches life and helps to make it worth living.

Equally as intriguing as his defense of the subjective is Santayana’s claim that the consciousness of the beautiful is a kind of felt harmony between the self and what we experience. The sense that a landscape, for instance, is beautiful, is tantamount to the feeling that what we see looks right to us, that the world around us is amenable to our reflection and meets our inward standards. Santayana therefore tells us the experience of the beautiful is a hint of the possible conformity between the soul and nature. This idea that aesthetic pleasure subverts the distinction we typically experience between self and world lies at the core of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German aesthetic tradition. Yet the thinkers belonging to that tradition, such as Immanuel Kant and Schopenhauer, are notorious for metaphysical commitments quite alien to the common sense of most Western thinkers today; Schopenhauer, for example, holds that the distinctions among things are merely illusory, that the world of human experience is little more than a dream, and that in reality only one thing exists: a unitary, irrational drive he entitles the Will. Thus Santayana hints at a way of retaining one of the more important insights of the German tradition, yet because of his thoroughgoing commitment to the physical structure of reality he contextualizes that insight in a way that may well be more plausible to most readers today.

Another very suggestive aspect of The Sense of Beauty is its claim about the psychological origins of aesthetic sensibility. Beauty is objectified pleasure, pleasure apprehended as if it were a quality of a thing. Although beauty is nothing like a property existing objectively in objects, for it is merely our perception when the process of perception is pleasurable, we talk as if objects -- or symphonies, or ideas -- are beautiful. Santayana thinks that this sense of beauty is a psychological residue of a primitive drive animating mythological world views, that is, the tendency to attribute the effects that things have on our sensations to the things that cause our sensations -- a drive, he says, that for a primitive consciousness fills the world with ghosts of its own terrors and passions. If he is right, then the consciousness of the beautiful may be a way of getting in touch with something primal within ourselves, a way of recapturing a more magical and primordial kind of experience.

Santayana’s traditional tastes, his preference for the aesthetic qualities of ancient Latin and Greek and his disdain for abstract art, his emphasis on the importance of form in art and on the aesthetic value of the ideal, may strike some as old fashioned. But Santayana develops a rousing defense of classicism that should intrigue and challenge anyone interested in aesthetics. He offers an important criticism of mimetic theories of art, and valuable analyses of the notion of aesthetic standards as well as the categories of the sublime, wit, humor, the ugly, and the grotesque. He develops important arguments for the therapeutic value of art, which provides respite from the rigors of our daily toil and offers up images of a more perfect existence for our contemplation, inspiration, and emulation. And his classical tastes do not keep him from anticipating by two decades the work of a revolutionary abstract painter such as Wassily Kandinsky; Santayana awaits, as he puts it, an abstract art dealing with colours as music does with sound. His exploration of the nature and function of the central aesthetic concept of form is unparalleled in its lucidity. What is more, Santayana is acutely sensitive to the vital role played by moods in constituting the background of human-conscious life, and to the contribution made by the emotions to modes of consciousness often assumed to be purely intellectual. He thus anticipates as well the work of Edmund Husserl and Heidegger, and The Sense of Beauty should be of great benefit to people interested in the insights of the philosophical tradition of phenomenology.

Combining a commitment to scientific naturalism with recognition of the spiritual significance of reflection on ideal standards and beautiful forms, Santayana’s thought is a stirring rejoinder both to those convinced that nihilistic consequences necessarily follow from what Max Weber called the modern disenchantment of the world,³ and to those unconvinced that art offers anything of real import to modern life. At a time when art is derided as an impractical waste of time and financial resources, The Sense of Beauty can be of enormous value to the project of rethinking its role in society and for recalling its capacity to speak to our highest aspirations.

Marc Lucht holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University. He has taught at Kenyon College, the University of Maine, and Rocky Mountain College and is now Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Alvernia College. He writes frequently on the history of modern philosophy, continental philosophy, aesthetics, and environmental ethics.

PREFACE

THIS little work contains the chief ideas gathered together for a course of lectures on the theory and history of æsthetics given at Harvard College from 1892 to 1895. The only originality I can claim is that which may result from the attempt to put together the scattered commonplaces of criticism into a system, under the inspiration of a naturalistic psychology. I have studied sincerity rather than novelty, and if any subject, as for instance the excellence of tragedy, is presented in a new light, the change consists only in the stricter application to a complex subject of the principles acknowledged to obtain in our simple judgments. My effort throughout has been to recall those fundamental æsthetic feelings the orderly extension of which yields sanity of judgment and distinction of taste.

The influences under which the book has been written are rather too general and pervasive to admit of specification; yet the student of philosophy will not fail to perceive how much I owe to writers, both, living and dead, to whom no honour could be added by my acknowledgments. I have usually omitted any reference to them in foot-notes or in the text, in order that the air of controversy might be avoided, and the reader might be enabled to compare what is said more directly with the reality of his own experience.

G. S.

SEPTEMBER, 1896.

INTRODUCTION

THE sense of beauty has a more important place in life than æsthetic theory has ever taken in philosophy. The plastic arts, with poetry and music, are the most conspicuous monuments of this human interest, because they appeal only to contemplation, and yet have attracted to their service, in all civilized ages, an amount of effort, genius, and honour, little inferior to that given to industry, war, or religion. The fine arts, however, where æsthetic feeling appears almost pure, are by no means the only sphere in which men show their susceptibility to beauty. In all products of human industry we notice the keenness with which the eye is attracted to the mere appearance of things: great sacrifices of time and labour are made to it in the most vulgar manufactures; nor does man select his dwelling, his clothes, or his companions without reference to their effect on his æsthetic senses. Of late we have even learned that the forms of many animals are due to the survival by sexual selection of the colours and forms most attractive to the eye. There must therefore be in our nature a very radical and wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.

That æsthetic theory has received so little attention from the world is not due to the unimportance of the subject of which it treats, but rather to lack of an adequate motive for speculating upon it, and to the small success of the occasional efforts to deal with it. Absolute curiosity, and love of comprehension for its own sake, are not passions we have much leisure to indulge: they require not only freedom from affairs but, what is more rare, freedom from prepossessions and from the hatred of all ideas that do not make for the habitual goal of our thought.

Now, what has chiefly maintained such speculation as the world has seen has been either theological passion or practical use. All we find, for example, written about beauty may be divided into two groups: that group of writings in which philosophers have interpreted æsthetic facts in the light of their metaphysical principles, and made of their theory of taste a corollary or footnote to their systems; and that group in which artists and critics have ventured into philosophic ground, by generalizing somewhat the maxims of the craft or the comments of the sensitive observer. A treatment of the subject at once direct and theoretic has been very rare: the problems of nature and morals have attracted the reasoners, and the description and creation of beauty have absorbed the artists; between the two reflection upon æsthetic experience has remained abortive or incoherent.

A circumstance that has also contributed to the absence or to the failure of æsthetic speculation is the subjectivity of the phenomenon with which it deals. Man has a prejudice against himself: anything which is a product of his mind seems to him to be unreal or comparatively insignificant. We are satisfied only when we fancy ourselves surrounded by objects and laws independent of our nature. The ancients long speculated about the constitution of the universe before they became aware of that mind which is the instrument of all speculation. The moderns, also, even within the field of psychology, have studied first the function of perception and the theory of knowledge, by which we seem to be informed about external things; they have in comparison neglected the exclusively subjective and human department of imagination and emotion. We have still to recognize in practice the truth that from these despised feelings of ours the great world of perception derives all its value, if not also its existence. Things are interesting because we care about them, and important because we need them. Had our perceptions no connexion with our pleasures, we should soon close our eyes on this world; if our intelligence were of no service to our passions, we should come to doubt, in the lazy freedom of reverie, whether two and two make four.

Yet so strong is the popular sense of the unworthiness and insignificance of things purely emotional, that those who have taken moral problems to heart and felt their dignity have often been led into attempts to discover some external right and beauty of which our moral