Understanding Beauty
Home About Blogs Enlightenment Inventions Photography Press Writings Contact X Understanding Beauty By Niazi April 21st, 2024 0 Comments Discussion George Santayana [1863 – 1952] was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. He is popularly known for aphorisms, such as “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” “Only the dead have seen the end of the war” (often misattributed to Plato). The definition of beauty as “pleasure objectified.” Santayana was profoundly influenced by Spinoza’s life and thought of a devoted Spinozist. He wrote books and essays on a wide range of subjects, including philosophy of a less technical sort, literary criticism, the history of ideas, politics, human nature, morals, religion’s influence on culture and social psychology, all with considerable wit and humor. He held racial superiority and eugenic views. He believed superior races should be discouraged from “intermarriage with inferior stock.” Although he declined to become an American citizen, Santayana is usually considered an American writer, resided in Fascist Italy for decades, and said that he was most comfortable, intellectually and aesthetically, at Oxford University. Santayana described himself as an “aesthetic Catholic.” Santayana’s primary philosophical work consists of The Sense of Beauty (1896), his first book-length monograph and perhaps the first major work on aesthetics written in the United States; The Life of Reason five volumes, 1905–6 is his first extended treatment of pragmatism. The high point of his Harvard career; Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923); and The Realms of Being (4 vols., 1927–40). Santayana’s one novel, The Last Puritan, is a bildungsroman, centering on the personal growth of its protagonist, Oliver Alden. His Persons and Places is an autobiography. Like many classical pragmatists, and because he was well-versed in evolutionary theory, Santayana was committed to metaphysical naturalism. He believed that human cognition, cultural practices, and social institutions have evolved to harmonize with the conditions present in their environment. Their value may then be adjudged by the extent to which they facilitate human happiness. Santayana was an early adherent of epiphenomenalism, but also admired the classical materialism of Democritus and Lucretius. In large part, Santayana is remembered for his aphorisms, many of which have been so frequently used as to have become clichéd. His philosophy has not fared quite as well. Santayana’s passing is referenced in the lyrics to singer-songwriter Billy Joel’s 1989 music single, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The Sense of Beauty was published in 1896 and divided into four parts: “The Nature of Beauty,” “The Materials of Beauty,” “Form,” and “Expression.” Beauty, as defined by Santayana, is an “objectified pleasure.” It does not originate from divine inspiration, commonly described by philosophers, but from naturalistic psychology. Santayana objects to God’s role in aesthetics in the metaphysical sense but accepts God’s use as a metaphor. His argument that beauty is a human experience based on the senses is influential in aesthetics. According to Santayana, beauty is linked to pleasure and is fundamental to human purpose and experience. Beauty does not originate from pleasurable experiences, by itself, or from the objects that bring pleasure. It is when the experience and emotion of pleasure intertwine with the object’s qualities that beauty arises. Beauty is a “manifestation of perfection,” and as Santayana writes, “the sense of beauty has a more important place in life than aesthetic theory has ever taken in philosophy.” He describes sight as “perception par excellence” and form as usually visual experience to be almost a synonym of beauty. Santayana claims that pleasures derived from all human functions may become objectified. Hence, the beauty material is most easily done in vision, hearing, memory, and imagination. Form, however, which needs constructive imagination, is preceded by the effects of color in vision. The example of sound serves as an example of the delicate balance between simplicity and variety that leads to the experience of beauty: Discrimination of tones from the chaos of sound is pleasurable, but the pure tone of a tuning-fork is dull. Santayana states that touch, taste, and smell are less likely to lead to “objectified” pleasure because they ″remain normally in the background of consciousness.” Santayana further distinguishes vital (bodily) from social functions with sexual instinct as an intermediate form. The latter is acknowledged to profoundly influence humans’ emotional lives, generating a passion that overflows to other topics if not directed towards another human. However, because of their abstract nature, Santayana regards social objects, such as success or money, as less likely to attract aesthetic pleasure because they are too abstract to be directly imaginable. Santayana notes that sensuous material a) is necessary for finding or creating beauty (how else could one perceive the poem, building, etc. in question?), and b) can add to the experience of beauty as the sensuous material itself may elicit pleasure. He identifies symmetry and a balance between uniformity and diversity as eliciting such a pleasing perceptual experience; as an example, he uses the beauty one finds in the stars. Santayana points out that memories and other predispositions (″mental habits″) contribute to the perception of an object and hence of its value – that may ultimately be beauty. Here, another distinction is made between ″value of a form″ and ″value of the type as such″; in the latter sense, an object also has a value in how well it is an example of its class. ″Everything is beautiful because everything is capable of some degree of excitement and charming our attention. Still, things differ immensely in this capacity to please us in contemplating them, and therefore they vary immensely in beauty. ″ In contrast to Plato and Socrates, Santayana does not necessarily see a relation between beauty and utility. The qualities that an object acquires indirectly using associations (such as with other concepts and memories), he calls “expression.”. The pleasures elicited by such an association are said to yield pleasure just as immediately as the perception of the object itself. However, an expression – which is merely a thought or meaning – cannot elicit beauty in and by itself;