The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings

Justification of Art (1905)

Justification of Art Reason in Art. Volume 4 of The Life of Reason: or, the Phases of Human Progress. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1905, 166–90. Volume seven of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. This selection appeared as Chapter IX of Reason in Art. Art is concerned mainly with the ideal and not with material nature. It makes matter more congenial to spirit by harmonizing impulses with nature and rendering nature more ideal. Santayana conceived art as “a rehearsal of rational living” in that it recasts the world imaginatively. He held such imaginative rehearsal superior to “miserable experiments” in reality because it better revealed the wonderful possibilities of what could be ( ES, 312). He thought that, “[w]hat nature does with existence, art does with appearance; and while the achievement leaves us, unhappily, much where we were before in all our efficacious relations, it entirely renews our vision and breeds a fresh world in fancy, where all form has the same inner justification that all life has in the real world” ( ES, 312). Art perpetuates itself by reshaping nature such that it better disciplines and enriches imagination, and this increases appreciation for ideals. It is no longer the fashion among philosophers to decry art. Either its influence seems to them too slight to excite alarm, or their systems are too lax to subject anything to censure which has the least glamour or ideality about it. Tired, perhaps, of daily resolving the conflict between science and religion, they prefer to assume silently a harmony between morals and art. Moral harmonies, however, are not given; they have to be made. The curse of superstition is that it justifies and protracts their absence by proclaiming their invisible presence. Of course a rational religion could not conflict with a rational science; and similarly an art that was wholly admirable would necessarily play into the hands of progress. But as the real difficulty in the former case lies in saying what religion and what science would be truly rational, so here the problem is how far extant art is a benefit to mankind, and how far, perhaps, a vice or a burden. That art is prima facie and in itself a good cannot be doubted. It is a spontaneous activity, and that settles the question. Yet the function of ethics is precisely to revise prima facie judgments of this kind and to fix the ultimate resultant of all given interests, in so far as they can be combined. In the actual disarray of human life and desire, wisdom consists in knowing what goods to sacrifice and what simples to pour into the supreme mixture. The extent to which æsthetic values are allowed to colour the resultant or highest good is a point of great theoretic importance, not only for art but for general philosophy. If art is excluded altogether or given only a trivial rôle, perhaps as a necessary relaxation, we feel at once that a philosophy so judging human arts is ascetic or post-rational. It pretends to guide life from above and from without; it has discredited human nature and mortal interests, and has Art is subject to moral censorship. Its initial or specific excellence is not enough. The Essential Santayana 310 thereby undermined itself, since it is at best but a partial expression of that humanity which it strives to transcend. If, on the contrary, art is prized as something supreme and irresponsible, if the poetic and mystic glow which it may bring seems its own complete justification, then philosophy is evidently still prerational or, rather, non-existent; for the beasts that listened to Orpheus belong to this school. To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and æsthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so. Intoxication is a sad business, at least for a philosopher; for you must either drown yourself altogether, or else when sober again you will feel somewhat fooled by yesterday’s joys and somewhat lost in today ’s vacancy. The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence. He is vexed at conditions of excellence that make him conscious of his own incompetence and failure. Rather than consider his function, he proclaims his self-sufficiency. A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world. It is in the world, however, that art...