Philosophy and the Arts: Lecture 5

1. Philosophy and the Arts:Lecture 5 “Art as Pleasure Objectified”

2. George Santayana (1863-1952) • For the next few sessions, we will be discussing some historical figures…perhaps not at the heart of current discussions, but still important. The first must be George Santayana.

3. Santayana is hard to classify • His father was Spanish, and the philosopher was born in Madrid. His mother was born in Scotland. • She had been married, earlier, to a member of Boston’s Sturgis family, and promised to have the children educated in the U.S.

4. So his background was…?? • Actually, he grew up in Avila, in Spain, but his mother took him to Boston, then to Harvard, where he took classes from Josiah Royce and William James.

5. “There is no God, and Mary is His Mother”

6. What?? • First, I digress, but art majors will recognize that the previous slide is a window at Chartres Cathedral. Note the treatment of Mary, clearly not “Gentle Mary, Meek and Mild!” This lady is the Queen of Heaven. • But what about Santayana? I added the quote (from somebody), because it is so typical of Santayana. He was a complete naturalist, but also remained a Catholic his entire life. He thought religion was like poetry; it is about ideals, not facts. He hated what he saw as the overly stern New England Protestantism. • All of his books were published in English, in America, but he left teaching (at Harvard, yet!!) here as soon as he could afford it. He remained in Europe the last 40 years of his life, living among the “Blue Nuns” in Rome during his last years. He never felt at home in America.

7. More contradictions… • Some say he was too much of a poet to be a philosopher, or too much of a philosopher to be a poet. • He himself said: “I was a kind of poet, I was alive to architecture and the other arts..” We know he liked the Eiffel Tower.

8. He did write Poetry, did a novel, Acted in plays. Did Cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon. As a teacher, He once gave a Lecture on Angels! He loved all the Arts!

9. “Publish or Perish”-1896-The Sense of Beauty • Note that Santayana is giving us a Psychology of art appreciation. He did not like the word ‘Aesthetics,’ or ‘Criticism.’ He preferred to talk about Beauty. What makes something beautiful? What, indeed, do we mean when we say, “This is beautiful?” • First, this is to value something, and beauty is surely a positive value. • (Santayana thought this is the way aesthetics differs from ethics; of course, there are hedonistic theories of ethics, but it is difficult to convince us we have a duty to enjoy ourselves). • Beauty is also an intrinsic value; it is not sought for the sake of something else, as we might exercise—enjoy it or not—for the sake of better health. • Beauty clearly has to do with pleasure, with being pleased by something. Beauty is obviously a major concern of artists; wouldn’t that mean that pornography is the highest art form??

10. Pleasure Objectified?Why not? • Santayana would have claimed the trouble with porn—or ads for Dr.Pepper, or for a local steak house—is that all these call attention to ourselves, and our bodies (our sex drives, our thirst, our hunger). • But in the presence of a great art work, we forget ourselves, and gladly lose ourselves in the work. It is as if the pleasure were part of the work…it is pleasure objectified. • So what’s wrong with that? I think there’s a lot that’s right about it. A problem is much of today’s art is meant to shock us, not to please us. • Finally, Santayana’s free-wheeling (but great) prose fell out of favor with an analytic style of Philosophy that insisted we precisely define every word, and when he died in 1952, he was nearly forgotten. • Pity. It is great prose, and neglecting Santayana is our loss.