The Sense of Beauty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory Santayana George 9781318907144 Books
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The Sense of Beauty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory Santayana George 9781318907144 Books
Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás (but known as “George Santayana”; 1863–1952), was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. His most famous books are The Life of Reason---which includes Reason in Society,Reason in Religion,Reason in Art,Reason in Science, etc.He wrote in the Preface to this 1896 book, “This little book contains the chief ideas gathered together for a course of lectures on the theory and history of aesthetics given at Harvard College from 1982 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 simpler judgments. My effort throughout has been to recall those fundamental aesthetic feelings the orderly expression of which yields sanity of judgment and distinction of taste.”
He suggests, “There is no explanation, for instance, in calling beauty an adumbration of divine attributes. Such a relation, if it were actual, would not help us at all to understand why the symbols of divinity pleased. But in certain moments of contemplation, when much emotional experience lies behind us, and we have reached very general ideas both of nature and of life, our delight in any particular object may consist in nothing but the thought that this object is a manifestation of universal principles… this expressiveness of the sky is due to certain qualities of the sensation, which bind it to all things happy and pure, and, in a mind in which the essence of purity and happiness is embodied in an idea of God, bind it also to that idea. So it may happen that the most arbitrary and unreal theories, which must be rejected as general explanations of aesthetic life, may be reinstated as particular moments of it.” (Pg. 7)
He acknowledges, ”To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.” (Pg. 8-9)
He states, “By play we are designating, no longer what is done fruitlessly, but whatever is done spontaneously and for its own sake, whether it have or not an ulterior utility. Play, in this sense, may be our most useful occupation.” (Pg. 19)
He argues, “It is unmeaning to say that what is beautiful to one man OUGHT to be beautiful to another. If their senses are the same, their associations and dispositions similar, then the same thing will certainly be beautiful to both. If their natures are different, the form which to one will be entrancing will be to another even invisible, because his classifications and discriminations in perception will be different, and he may see a hideous detached fragment or a shapeless aggregate of things, in what to another is a perfect whole---so entirely are the unities of objects unities of function and use. It is absurd to say that what is invisible to a given being OUGHT to seem beautiful to him. Evidently this obligation of recognizing the same qualities is conditioned by the possession of the same faculties. But no two men have exactly the same faculties, nor can things have for any two exactly the same values.” (Pg. 27)
He says, “We have no reached our definition of beauty, which, in the terms of our successive analysis and narrowing of the conception, is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical language, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.” (Pg. 31)
He contends, “The capacity to love gives our contemplation that glow without which it might often fail to manifest beauty; and the whole sentimental side of our aesthetic sensibility---without which it would be perceptive and mathematical rather than aesthetic---is due to our sexual organization remotely stirred. The attraction of sex could not become efficient unless the senses were first attracted. The eye must be fascinated and the ear charmed by the object which nature intends should be pursued.” (Pg. 38)
He notes, “We have, therefore, to study the various aesthetic, intellectual, and moral compensations by which the mind can be brought to contemplate with pleasure a thing which, if experienced alone, would be the cause of pain. There is, to be sure, a way of avoiding this inquiry. We might assert that since all moderate excitement is pleasant, there is nothing strange in the fact that the representation of evil should please; for the experience is evil by virtue of the pain that it gives; but it gives pain only when felt with great intensity. Observed from afar, it is a pleasing impression; it is vivid enough to interest, but not acute enough to wound. This simple explanation is possible in all those cases where aesthetic effect is gained by the inhibition of sympathy.” (Pg. 137)
He asserts, “no aesthetic value is really founded on the experience or the suggestion of evil. This conclusion will doubtless seem the more interesting if we think of its possible extension to the field of ethics and of the implied vindication of the ideals of moral perfection as something essentially definable and attainable… Expressiveness may be found in any one thing that suggests another, or draws from association with that other any of its emotional colouring. There may, therefore, of course, be an expressiveness of evil; but this expressiveness will not have any aesthetic value. The description or suggestion of suffering may have a worth as science or discipline, but can never in itself enhance any beauty.” (Pg. 158)
He concludes the book with the statement, “Beauty therefore seems to be the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its possibility. If perfection is, as it should be, the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.” (Pg. 164)
This book will be of great interest to anyone studying the philosophy of aesthetics.
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The Sense of Beauty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory Santayana George 9781318907144 Books Reviews
I have owned the Modern Library edition of George Santayana's "The Sense of Beauty" for by far most of my life, having purchased it as a young teenager. Santayana and Kierkegaard early on became my favourite philosophers, but of the two Santayana is by far the easier to read. Of course, I read Kierkegaard's "Either/Or" in English translation; despite being part Scandanavian, my ability to read any Nordic language while still that young was zilch. Years afterwards, I still can only struggle with Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, only when in graduate school at Kent State University having attained enough skill to use it, haltingly but adequately, in my graduate assistant's work! Thus, while I feel confident assessing the quality of Santayana's English, I cannot judge how well a translation into English can render Kierkegaard's Danish. (Neither my undergraduate nor my graduate studies were as a major in philosophy, which in my case is a non-specialist pleasure.)
Santayana, amazingly, wrote his philosophical works in English, even though he was a native Spaniard; atop that, Sanatayana wrote in English that is surpassingly fine, cogent, and outrightly elegant, which makes reading his philosophy a literary pleasure, not just a philosophical chore. Santayana's mastery of the English language and the lucidity of his thinkingwas such that he almost never had to revise his first drafts; he also could lecture in English of equal elegance and cogency, something indeed very remarkable.
Santayana was, essentially, a Catholic humanist, who drifted into secular convictions but who still held to a kind of attenuated Catholic intellectualism and sense of values. That, too, was in the context of Harvard University's then prevailing (late 19th century) "Calvinist hangover" towards which he always felt himself to stand in contrast and antipathy. That discomfort with New England eventually drove him back to his native Spain, onwards after that to Italy. There is a wonderful warmth and nobility to Santayana's aesthetics. Although Santayana rejected all divinely-oriented notions that Beauty is some God-bestowed endowment upon what seems in Creation (natural or man-made) to hold fairly universal appeal for humans as being lovely and appealing, he held that what attracts men and women to what they consider to be beautiful is attributable to any natural or man-crafted object's inherent qualities which so happen to exert such appeal. This contrasts to reductionists of his own and especially of later times who would regard beauty as completely subjective to one's individual mind rather than to the sensibilities of the human species in general.
Santayana partook of the "genteel" mood of his times, but in an intelligent rather than in a merely conformist way. That gentility, it would seem to me, affects his unsatisfying understanding of the comic, the grotesque, and the downright ugly, all of which, to Santayana, evoke pain, which, being disagreeable, limits the aesthetic potention of what is not more serious art, as he views that. In the realm of the comic, Santayana only only regards Wit to be inherently aesthetic, whereas the comic, imbued with elements of discomfort or some degree of pain, even in masterworks of the comic genre, never have the advantage that more elevated, sublime, or, for that matter, merely pleasurable "serious" works of art can be said to have far more fully. That verdict on the comic would seem dubious not only to me but to many others nowadays (or even in the past!). Since Santayana turns his attention to The Comic at the end of his work, compared to the deep insights of what had preceded in the book, his discussion of what is comic (and related thereto) brings the book to an end that does not compare to the pleasures and more valid insights which had preceded. However, READ THIS BOOK! It is wonderful in a way that has become all too rare since Santayana's own times.
Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás (but known as “George Santayana”; 1863–1952), was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. His most famous books are The Life of Reason---which includes Reason in Society,Reason in Religion,Reason in Art,Reason in Science, etc.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1896 book, “This little book contains the chief ideas gathered together for a course of lectures on the theory and history of aesthetics given at Harvard College from 1982 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 simpler judgments. My effort throughout has been to recall those fundamental aesthetic feelings the orderly expression of which yields sanity of judgment and distinction of taste.”
He suggests, “There is no explanation, for instance, in calling beauty an adumbration of divine attributes. Such a relation, if it were actual, would not help us at all to understand why the symbols of divinity pleased. But in certain moments of contemplation, when much emotional experience lies behind us, and we have reached very general ideas both of nature and of life, our delight in any particular object may consist in nothing but the thought that this object is a manifestation of universal principles… this expressiveness of the sky is due to certain qualities of the sensation, which bind it to all things happy and pure, and, in a mind in which the essence of purity and happiness is embodied in an idea of God, bind it also to that idea. So it may happen that the most arbitrary and unreal theories, which must be rejected as general explanations of aesthetic life, may be reinstated as particular moments of it.” (Pg. 7)
He acknowledges, ”To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.” (Pg. 8-9)
He states, “By play we are designating, no longer what is done fruitlessly, but whatever is done spontaneously and for its own sake, whether it have or not an ulterior utility. Play, in this sense, may be our most useful occupation.” (Pg. 19)
He argues, “It is unmeaning to say that what is beautiful to one man OUGHT to be beautiful to another. If their senses are the same, their associations and dispositions similar, then the same thing will certainly be beautiful to both. If their natures are different, the form which to one will be entrancing will be to another even invisible, because his classifications and discriminations in perception will be different, and he may see a hideous detached fragment or a shapeless aggregate of things, in what to another is a perfect whole---so entirely are the unities of objects unities of function and use. It is absurd to say that what is invisible to a given being OUGHT to seem beautiful to him. Evidently this obligation of recognizing the same qualities is conditioned by the possession of the same faculties. But no two men have exactly the same faculties, nor can things have for any two exactly the same values.” (Pg. 27)
He says, “We have no reached our definition of beauty, which, in the terms of our successive analysis and narrowing of the conception, is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical language, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.” (Pg. 31)
He contends, “The capacity to love gives our contemplation that glow without which it might often fail to manifest beauty; and the whole sentimental side of our aesthetic sensibility---without which it would be perceptive and mathematical rather than aesthetic---is due to our sexual organization remotely stirred. The attraction of sex could not become efficient unless the senses were first attracted. The eye must be fascinated and the ear charmed by the object which nature intends should be pursued.” (Pg. 38)
He notes, “We have, therefore, to study the various aesthetic, intellectual, and moral compensations by which the mind can be brought to contemplate with pleasure a thing which, if experienced alone, would be the cause of pain. There is, to be sure, a way of avoiding this inquiry. We might assert that since all moderate excitement is pleasant, there is nothing strange in the fact that the representation of evil should please; for the experience is evil by virtue of the pain that it gives; but it gives pain only when felt with great intensity. Observed from afar, it is a pleasing impression; it is vivid enough to interest, but not acute enough to wound. This simple explanation is possible in all those cases where aesthetic effect is gained by the inhibition of sympathy.” (Pg. 137)
He asserts, “no aesthetic value is really founded on the experience or the suggestion of evil. This conclusion will doubtless seem the more interesting if we think of its possible extension to the field of ethics and of the implied vindication of the ideals of moral perfection as something essentially definable and attainable… Expressiveness may be found in any one thing that suggests another, or draws from association with that other any of its emotional colouring. There may, therefore, of course, be an expressiveness of evil; but this expressiveness will not have any aesthetic value. The description or suggestion of suffering may have a worth as science or discipline, but can never in itself enhance any beauty.” (Pg. 158)
He concludes the book with the statement, “Beauty therefore seems to be the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its possibility. If perfection is, as it should be, the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.” (Pg. 164)
This book will be of great interest to anyone studying the philosophy of aesthetics.
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