By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY
Santayana, George. The Life of Reason: Reason in Art. A critical edition, co-edited by M.S. Wokeck and M.A. Coleman. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2015. lvi + 276 pp.
The Life of Reason is Volume VII, Book Four, of the Collected Works of George Santayana. Professor James Gouinlock of Emory University provides an insightful introduction to this volume.
Santayana may be a master of the English language, but he is demanding of the reader, given the vast learning and experience he draws upon and his often poetic and somewhat oblique way of expressing his judgments.
“Arts,” he tells us early on, “are instincts bred and reared in the open, creative habits acquired in the light of reason. . . . There is a painful pregnancy in genius, a long incubation and waiting for the spirit…[and] what is ordinarily produced is so base a hybrid, so lame and ridiculous.” But that is not final.
The artist, Santayana believes, is in many ways like a child. “The child seems happy because his life is spontaneous, yet he is not competent to secure his own good. To be truly happy he must be well bred, reared from the cradle, as it were, under propitious influences so that he may learn to love what conduces to his development.” Speaking of the artist, his art will expand as his understanding ripens.
The ideal artist, like the ideal philosopher, has all time and all existence, “being,” some might say, for his sources. Momentous themes beckon. A child plans Towers of Babel, but a mature architect cannot disregard gravity and economy, nor can he ignore a natural order, the way things really are. “The conditions of existence, after they are known and accepted, become conditions for the only pertinent beauty.”
Santayana has no patience with the irrational. Happy results can be secured in art, as in life, only by intelligence. The artist need not go afield in search of the exotic. Poetic beauty can be found in the world whenever it attains some unfeigned harmony with sense or with reason. Art supplies to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience — the union of life and peace.
Without mentioning his target, Santayana writes, “The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to exclude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.”
Art being part of life, any rational judgment on the beautiful must be a moral and political judgment. Critics quarrel with other critics, and that is part of philosophy. What many philosophers have written about art is of minimal importance. Some create artificial problems and address them in a grammatical spirit, seldom giving any evidence of experience or imagination. What painters say about painting and poets about poetry is better than lay or philosophical opinion.
A chapter is devoted to taste and its cultivation. Good taste, Santayana says, needs a material basis, a soil and situation propitious to its growth. Although taste is natural, personal, and autonomous, it must be cultivated. Half of our standards, he believes, come from our first masters, the other half from our first loves. Our perception and appreciation may be guided vicariously, that is, by a gifted friend or mentor, or perhaps by a remark one encounters in a book. Reflection and circumspection may refine taste.
It seems to be a fact that preferences established in youth are likely to govern maturity. Taste varies as cultures vary. Aesthetic feeling in different people may make up different fractions of life and vary greatly in volume.
Human achievement is not equally distributed across the globe. Europe has produced the highest civilization the world has known. As a people it has loved beauty, which gives it the authority to judge and to bequeath its judgments to duller peoples. We may accordingly listen with reverence to the Greeks. Time transcending, the Greek mind is valued for its claim to universality.
“Universality,” Santayana writes, “is achieved in an art that expresses ultimate truths, cosmic laws, and great human ideals. Virgil and Dante are classic poets in this sense, and a similar quality belongs to Greek sculpture and architecture.” Yet, Santayana warns, a complete mastery of existence achieved at one moment gives no warrant for assuming that it will be sustained or be achieved again in the next.
+ + +
(Dr. Dougherty is dean emeritus of The School of Philosophy of The Catholic University of America.)
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress