Art and Morality: Essays in the Spirit of Santayana by Morris Grossman (review)

Morris Grossman, the author of this captivating collection of essays Art and Morality: Essays in the Spirit of Santayana, was fond of quoting Santayana as saying, “when Peter tells you something about Paul you learn more about Peter than you do Paul.” This aphorism appears several times in this volume, and its emphatic repetition should clue us into Grossman’s approach to expository writing. While the book is ostensibly about figures from the history of philosophy and art in individual essays, its real charm comes from getting a sense for Grossman’s intellectual temperament across the whole volume. One aspect of Grossman’s intellectual character which is favorably displayed portrayed in this book is his ever-present appreciation for the irony in others. This book may be read for insights into canonical American figures--including Peirce, Beardsley, and Santayana--but can be enjoyed as an extended meditation on the delights of irony in philosophy and art.

The collection is composed of mostly reprinted material, including texts previously written for Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society. The previously unpublished material in the volume includes an incisive essay on Lessing as a dramatist and an extended introduction by Grossman. The body of the text is split into three complementary sections of eight essays each. The first section addresses specific topics in the philosophy of art and music. The second section provides essays on individual figures in intellectual and art history. The final section is dedicated to Grossman’s commentary on Santayana. The editor, Martin A. Coleman, has done commendable work by organizing this diverse material into this unified volume that flows well from start to finish.

Grossman’s interest in irony runs throughout the three sections. In an essay entitled “Drama and Dialectic,” Grossman offers an idiosyncratic working definition of irony as an internally dialectical experience. Grossman further suggests that it functions “dialogically” in the way that a drama is scripted as a dialogue among many voices. He compares Socratic irony to the structure of the Platonic dialogues themselves. In the dialogues, opposing views are each given voice, maintaining a conflicting relationship to one another without any one superseding another. Grossman suggests this suspension of multiple conflicting perspectives can occur simultaneously in a momentary experience of irony. It is these kinds of complex ironical moments that Grossman identifies and highlights and that constitute his unique perspective on art and philosophy.

This kind of moment is clear in Grossman’s introduction when he recounts his mischievous delight in a CSPAN broadcast which played a melodramatic strain of Mozart over the dry proceedings of Senate. Although Robert’s Rules of Order are not insignificant, they also fail to inspire romantic concertos. This unintended pairing of ethical formality with aesthetic sentimentality captures the ironic quality that Grossman sees in many experiences of value. It is moments like these that Grossman isolates and takes up from many angles throughout the volume.

An early essay, “Performance and Obligation,” illustrates this point from within the philosophy of music. Here Grossman considers the particular and often peculiar moral strictures applied to live musical performance. He shows, using a variety of examples from music history, that when a musician prepares to play a score he or she must wrestle with multiple conflicting ethical concerns about fidelity to the composer’s intention and the score. For example, he asks us to consider the fact that Gershwin insisted that only black performers should sing the score of Porgy and Bess. How is any performer of Porgy and Bess, black or otherwise, supposed to process that information? Uncomfortably is Grossman’s answer. One cannot simply dismiss ethical obligation in the interest of aesthetic action nor lose sight of aesthetic delight in the face of moral principles. Both demands are experienced simultaneously. For Grossman this irresolvable tension between the aesthetic and the ethical becomes its own object of enjoyment.

There is an underlying intensity...