Santayana's Troubled Distinction:
Aesthetics and Ethics
in The Sense of Beauty
Santayana develops what he considers to be an architectonic based on naturalistic principles; as such, his normative philosophies are loosely grounded in physiological well-being.(1) In The Sense of Beauty, then, Santayana distinguishes between aesthetics and ethics not according to their different grounds of justification but their different ways of achieving the same material goods: aesthetics deals with "value positive, intrinsic, and objectified," while ethical judgments recognize value negative, extrinsic, and subjective.(2) Despite his attempt to maintain meaningful differences between the two disciplines, however, the distinction is blurred in Santayana's early writings: neither is fundamentally intrinsic or extrinsic, both are objective, and aesthetics is primarily neither positive or negative. Because he cannot justifiably maintain the differences that he outlines in The Sense of Beauty, Santayana must abandon this artificial distinction and ultimately classify aesthetics as a mere subdivision of ethics.
Vowing to treat life as a "practical predicament," Santayana formulates a Hobbesian metaethics based on self-preservation as a primal drive underlying all morally relevant action.(3) Instinctual demands determine what the individual ought to do in order to achieve the greatest possible good, which according to Santayana is the orchestration of desires rationally prioritized. Individual happiness as the end of all moral actions results from the harmonious balance among opposed desires and between internal demands and external constraints on desire-satisfaction.(4) The most rational life is thus the maximal achievement of desired ends both individually and within a community of like persons; a being's rational capabilities "function in rendering that body's volatile instincts and sensations harmonious with one another and with the outer world on which they depend."(5) This relation of man to his environment and of man to himself, when fully realized, occasions what Santayana calls spirit,(6) the state of human development that marks the balance of personal interests and a world of limitations. Patterns of such advantageous behavior establish themselves spiritually -- as moral ideals for the individual and religious commands generally:
When the natural basis of moral life is not understood, myth is the only way of expressing it theoretically, as eyes too weak to see the sun face to face may, as Plato says, for a time study its image mirrored in pools, and, as we may add, inverted there.(7)
Religion "theoretically" portrays moral dictates that are "inverted" when understood literally instead of metaphorically. The conditions for happiness, when shared by members of a community, may be calcified into general beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of actions.
What is useful for well-being becomes a moral code -- for the individual or the group -- by which patterns of life-preserving behavior are endorsed and other, detrimental behaviors are forbidden. The propositional content of moral beliefs can be understood in terms of their being impetuses hypostatized as moral ideals, and their prescriptive nature can be understood in terms of their beginning in the primal drive to happiness. Thus Santayana blurs the is/ought distinction:
What he really esteems is what ought to guide his conduct; for to suggest that a rational being ought to do what he feels to be wrong, or ought to pursue what he genuinely thinks is worthless, would be to impugn that man's rationality and to discredit one's own.(8)
Because reason's guide to action is instinctual self-preservation, the body determines what ought to be achieved. So, because "we must dress in our own clothes, if we do not wish to substitute a masquerade for practical existence," and because our nature is distinctly animal, physical conditions determine morality (lr1 22-23). Self-preservation is only possible considering the needs of the body, the gauge to what is necessary in order to prolong living. By recognizing this "leadership of instinct in moral life," the goal of man's efforts is determined insofar as his body and its biological demands are physically necessitated (lr3 183). "The force of animal necessity and of natural circumstances" structures the conditions under which one's life can continue and the demands requisite for happiness, and sanctions the full expression of those instincts.(9)
Santayana includes artistic expression and appreciation as essential aspects of the life of reason on pragmatic grounds, because of their contribution to the moral life: "art, when successful, clings to the life of the world and sucks in strength parasitically through its practical functions."(10) This is not a corruption of aesthetic judgments, but its "successful" form as crowning moral utility. To this end, art practically applies itself to the human predicament: art vents animal compulsions, practical arts are used to facilitate self-preservation, and fine arts express human ideals insofar as they foster pleasure in individuals and contribute to their happiness. Art is instrumental to a life founded on rational principles and leading to the actualization of human ideals.
Santayana believes that "arts are no less automatic than instincts," so, because the desire to express oneself in art and to enjoy artistic products are natural compulsions, a moral life must address itself to these desires.(11) Determining the criteria for artistic beauty becomes a moral function insofar as beauty realizes human needs. Art is morally justified because of the benefits it bestows on human beings; specifically, because art renders reality in light of human perspectives, art in many forms humanizes the environment, making it more available to action and facilitating (moral) activity. Art consolidates experience and creates a reality that is amenable to human acting: "If art is that element in the Life of Reason which consists in modifying its environment the better to attain its end, art may be expected to subserve all parts of the human ideal, to increase man's comfort, knowledge, and delight" (lr4 16-17). For Santayana, this ideal moral function embodied in art exists in two fields, the "mechanical" and the "liberal":
Art has accordingly two stages: one mechanical or industrial, in which untoward matter is better prepared, or impeding media are overcome; the other liberal, in which perfectly fit matter is appropriated to ideal uses and endowed with a direct spiritual function (lr4 32).
Through art, then, the relation of people to their surroundings is rationalized, the environment is appropriated, and their sensations are humanly understood. Art signals an underlying pursuit of ideal ends rationally orchestrated to shape earthly resources to animal needs. Such mechanical arts render the environment intelligible, eventually leading to "liberal" arts, which are enjoyed in themselves. Utility breeds beauty:
For what is practically helpful soon acquires a gracious presence ... . Aesthetic satisfaction thus comes to perfect all other values; they would remain imperfect if beauty did not supervene upon them, but beauty would be absolutely impossible if they did not underlie it.(12)
Objects that are conducive to self-preservation -- that are "practically helpful" -- may become beautiful. The healthful existence of a material organism finds beauty in such ideally useful mechanisms by coming to appreciate intrinsically what had merely instrumental value. Mechanical art becomes valued intrinsically when the pleasure generated instrumentally is considered to be a quality of the art object itself. This "well-known psychological phenomenon, viz., the transformation of an element of sensation into the quality of a thing," introduces a beautiful form into nature: the subjective experience of pleasure becomes objective because of its projection onto an object (sb 28-29).
Artistic appreciation is a primal reaction to instinctual demands. Though intellectual to the extent that emotional demonstration appeals to a need, "yet this love and imagination are lodged just as snugly in his private animal heart as is the most sordid instinct."(13) Beauty marks a culmination in the mind whose mental and physical organization projects outward:
The spiritual fruition consists in the activity of turning an apt material into an expressive and delightful form, thus filling the world with objects which by symbolising ideal energies tend to revive them under a favouring influence and therefore to strengthen and refine them. (lr4 33)
Reaching "spiritual fruition," the individual immerses herself in the artistic enterprise in order "to strengthen and refine" the ideal physical state that marks an ideal moral state. Internal regimentation gives rise to artistic production, so the impulse renders visible the moral development of human drives.
While in what Santayana calls intellectual judgments -- or judgments of fact -- the active (quasi-Kantian(14)) mind responds to given sense impressions, classifying them according to regularity developed as scientific principles, in aesthetical and moral judgments such true principles may, but need not, serve as a means to developing principles in accordance with physiological well-being. Beauty and the good are both determined by instinct, and evaluations of goodness and beauty are relative to the physiology that dictates value. Subjective determinations of the good in accordance with natural activity constitute moral activity intended to preserve the moral creature. Aesthetics and ethics are concerned with value grounded in the harmonization of human needs and measured by happiness. Both appeal to the same normative justification but are characterized differently according to the ways in which they are considered. Although both aesthetic and moral judgments are judgments of value, Santayana distinguishes the two according to whether the object of normative judgment is intrinsic or extrinsic to the activity, whether it is considered objective or subjective, and whether it is primarily defined positively or negatively.
Santayana first claims that aesthetic judgments reflect the immediate experience of beauty or lack of beauty, while moral judgments gauge resulting utility. Ethics implies the theoretical quantification of goodness expected to follow from morally relevant actions, but beauty immediately affects the perceiver and, beyond the pleasure felt with the appreciation of beautiful things, no steps need be taken to yield the pleasure experienced:
Whereas, in the perception of beauty, our judgment is necessarily intrinsic and based on the character of the immediate experience, and never consciously on the idea of an eventual utility in the object, judgments about moral worth, on the contrary, are always based, when they are positive, upon the consciousness of benefits probably involved. (sb 16)(15)
Moral goodness is a quality of actions that are predicated on their being a means to happiness, but beauty itself is objectified pleasure. The proper domain of morality thus extends to truth, science, art, and religion as attempts to reach the goodness of a harmony of desires.
Nonetheless, morally relevant activity is "eventually intrinsic" because "the ultimate appeal must be to some irrationally determined need or desire" (Munitz 62). Moral judgments must be grounded in some factual assessment of personal advantage, which itself is an intrinsic good. Beauty without pleasure would not be beauty, and moral goodness without (an eventual) pleasure would not be moral goodness. Moral goods qua goods are intrinsic to the moral agent's nature and are thereby goods that are not beautiful (as an aesthetic positive) but are nonetheless eventually intrinsically good:
The useful is good because of the excellence of its consequences; but these must somewhere cease to be merely useful in their turn, or only excellent as means; somewhere we must reach the good that is good in itself and for its own sake, else the whole process is futile, and the utility of our first object illusory. (sb 19)
Moral goods, though mediated by utility, are intrinsic goods insofar as they aim at happiness, and would not be moral if they did not. Indeed, Santayana claims that moral goodness may become intrinsic through a psychological process that considers an action's utility without consciously considering the ground of the normative assessment in its eventual end. Santayana's differentiation of the intrinsic nature of pleasure in beauty and its non-intrinsic nature in morality rests on "the consciousness of benefits probably involved" (sb 16); in moral activity, however, pleasure may infect the means to pleasure, and recognizing it as a means may be replaced by considering it a pleasure in itself:
For what is practically helpful soon acquires a gracious presence; the eye learns to trace its form, to piece out its characteristics with a latent consciousness of their function, and, if possible, to remodel the object itself so as to fit it better to the abstract requirements of vision, that so excellent a thing may become altogether congenial. (wia 39)
The usefulness of a thing in causing pleasure may itself acquire a moral goodness, an intrinsic good despite its being a mediate good. The mind may not consciously regard it as a means to pleasure, although it remains a means; it rather has intrinsic moral value.
Struggling against this implication, Santayana contends that beauty is properly intrinsic, meaning that, with regard to a beautiful object, one recognizes the immediate experience of beauty without a possible intervening regard for utility. Pleasure is intrinsic to beauty because Santayana defines beauty as pleasure objectified. But in his discussion of the extrinsicality of goodness, Santayana stresses the utility of right actions, whereas the proper intrinsicality of aesthetic judgments depends on the appreciation of beauty itself rather than the objects of aesthetic judgments -- namely, beautiful things. If, as he does in moral judgments, Santayana directs his attention not to a definitionally true statement -- goodness implies pleasure as surely as beauty does -- but to the object of the judgment, the beautiful itself is not properly intrinsic to any form. Beauty is one's positive response to a form in the phenomenal world. The intrinsic beauty of a form requires that mind-dependent form's eliciting pleasure in the viewer:
Beauty -- as the pure aesthetes have discovered -- is not intrinsic to any form: it comes to bathe that form, and to shine forth from it, only by virtue of a secret attraction, agitation, wonder, and joy which that stimulus happens to cause -- not always but on occasion -- in our animal hearts. (as 256)
Because beauty is pleasure objectified, happiness is intrinsic to beauty, but beauty is not intrinsic to particular forms. Just as the good depends for its goodness on its contribution to overarching advantage within the rational life, so too is any form beautiful only insofar as it calls forth pleasure in the perceiver, who objectifies this pleasure. The object's aesthetic value depends on the pleasure it causes in the subject and, like goodness regarding morally good actions, is intrinsic only relative to the happiness of the subject. There is nothing beautiful in itself -- "there is no value apart from some appreciation of it" -- just as there is nothing morally good in itself (sb 13); both are judged to be positive values insofar as they effect pleasure. Beauty is pleasure objectified, but a beautiful thing is a means of eliciting pleasure, and the art work itself is only beautiful insofar as pleasure is objectified in it; the beautiful is extrinsic as far as it is considered practically.
For Santayana, judgments of value -- aesthetic and moral alike -- rest on the intrinsic standard of normative judgments, namely well-being; beauty without pleasure is not beauty, and good with (the net effect of) pain is not good. Both kinds of judgments are intrinsic in one respect and extrinsic in another, and intrinsicality cannot distinguish the two. Beauty is intrinsic insofar as pleasure is immediate to the experience of the beautiful, but pleasure is also intrinsic to goodness insofar as goodness must be eventually intrinsic and such a positive effect may infect one's consideration of the means to achieving it; therefore, Santayana writes: "in finding and declaring a thing good or beautiful, our sentence is categorical, and the standard evoked by our judgment is for that case intrinsic and ultimate" (sb 9, emphasis added). Extrinsicality results from one's conscious expectation of utility, but such an expectation can be transformed into immediately experienced pleasure resulting from the appreciation of a goodness that -- actually, but no longer consciously -- is mediated. Additionally, because both moral and aesthetic judgments must refer to an effected pleasure, measuring the judged action or object with regard to its practical utility, both the beautiful and the morally good are, in another sense, extrinsic. In its examination of beautiful things, the aesthetic judgment gauges utility, for forms become beautiful by their appeal to well-being -- and this is not a moral act, but an aesthetic act.
The intrinsic/extrinsic distinction is problematized by a tenuous differentiation of the eventually intrinsic and the properly intrinsic, but Santayana further characterizes beauty and goodness as objective and subjective, respectively. Whereas The Sense of Beauty identifies moral goodness with relative happiness, the definition of beauty distinguishes it from goodness in its very consideration as object: "beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing" (sb 31). Because beauty is the objectification of pleasure, and because pleasure is a subjective and relative phenomenon, beauty has its basis in the subjective, just as moral goodness does. But "the transformation of an element of sensation into the quality of a thing" introduces beauty into nature (sb 28-29); the subjective experience of pleasure seems objective because of its projection onto an object, and is thus distinguished from moral feeling. However, just as Santayana's first distinction fails due to reconceiving goodness as intrinsically pleasurable and considering beauty as extrinsic with regard to its practical justification, this distinction fails due to a similar reconception: moral goodness may be considered objective despite its basis in subjective response.
Although Santayana claims that aesthetic value is objective and moral value is subjective, a closer examination of Santayana's philosophy of religion reveals that moral value too can be objective. Moral values are subject, just as beauty is, to physiological well-being. The good is what the self strives to achieve in order to attain happiness; as a practical gauge of one's moral activity, Santayana discusses moral ideals as objects of behavior: "everything ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development" (lr1 21). Moral ideals are devised as objectifications of subjective desires (and how they can be fulfilled) most apparently in religion, which Santayana contends metaphorically represents values relative to social and physical requirements: "[Religion] makes absolute moral decisions. It sanctions, unifies, and transforms ethics" (lr3 6-7). Within Santayana's system of naturalized ethics and considering the definition and function he assigns to spirit, moral edicts spring from religion's function "to draw from reality materials for an image of that ideal to which reality ought to conform, and to make us citizens, by anticipation, in the world we crave."(16) Rather than otherworldly pronouncements from an existing god, religions become means to moral perfection, extended and elaborate human myths intended to render a people's own moral ideals intelligible.(17) One's actions are dictated by her own animal instincts, not by removed commandments; such commandments are inventions to understand herself and her environment by explaining in removed terms that which is ever-present. Religion facilitates coordinating otherwise inchoate impulses determined by the "living interest" of the subject (lr1 259); they are subjective, but objectified as religious truths. Religion is the transformation of subjective responses into objective demands -- a moral law instead of mere stimulus-response conditioning. Objectified morality is a subdivision of morally relevant judgments, but nonetheless represents "the transformation of an element of sensation into the quality of a thing" -- namely, the physical well-being effected by right action transformed into moral goodness, religious commands, divine dictates. The spectacle of an impulse transformed into a moral law parallels the objectification of pleasure; religion is the beauty of morality.
In addition to the intrinsic/extrinsic and objective/subjective distinctions, both of which falter, Santayana also attempts to distinguish aesthetics from ethics by the quality of the values invoked. Moral pronouncements are traditionally prohibitions on detrimental actions, and aesthetic judgments are approbative: "while aesthetic judgments are mainly positive, that is, perceptions of good, moral judgments are mainly and fundamentally negative, or perceptions of evil" (sb 16). Judgments of aesthetic value consider pleasure objectified, while moral judgments decree that one ought not to do that which causes displeasure, which is considered evil. However, this distinction between aesthetics and ethics fails because Santayana's own philosophy of art conceives of negative aesthetic value; to understand such genres as tragedy Santayana must invoke a full treatment of negative aesthetical terms. What Santayana calls evil in art can be neither a mere lack of beauty nor a moral evil; to the extent that so-called evil in art effects understanding of truth and sublimity, it instead must be a substantive aesthetic negative.
Santayana contends that, while beauty is pleasure taken as the quality of a thing, ugliness is merely the lack of beauty: "[aesthetic] value is positive, it is the sense of the presence of something good, or (in the case of ugliness) of its absence" (sb 31). An object is ugly only when one has exhausted attempts to consider it beautiful. If the art object has a real negative effect on the perceiver, it is not ugly but evil and a moral concern: "The ugly ... is not the cause of any real pain. In itself it is rather a source of amusement. If its suggestions are vitally repulsive, its presence becomes a real evil towards which we assume a practical and moral attitude" (sb 17). Santayana claims that ugliness is the "absence" of pleasure, yet he also claims that "the absence of aesthetic goods is a moral evil," because moral evaluations are fundamentally negative (sb 32).
Santayana considers not just distasteful or inelegant compositions to be ugly, but also the jarring pathos of tragedy and truth, the overwhelming sublimity of nature, which resist simple enjoyment and evince rather a violent shock followed by contemplative understanding. If such ugliness goes so far as to pain the observer, the observed quality is a moral evil. But not all art aspires to beauty, so, given that evil in art is not of positive aesthetic value (because it is not beauty) and is of negative moral value (because it causes real pain in the observer), Santayana must explain how a value neither beautiful nor pleasurable can be desired in art. He first claims that evil is admissible in art only insofar as it is "balanced and annulled by positive pleasures" (sb 147). As an example, he cites King Lear, claiming that the play is beautiful for its language and the presence of Lear's fool.(18) But for Santayana to claim that evil in art is warranted only when it is outweighed by incidental pleasures is to excuse evil, not to explain it. Santayana then claims that evil in art may be justified by its association with the good or the beautiful, "the continual suggestion of beautiful and happy things" (sb 140). This is a form of expressiveness under which an object or ideal that may cause pleasure in the subject is suggested(19): for example, the suffering body of Christ on the cross elicits joy in Christians. Through continued association, the value of the thing suggested may enter into the value of the thing that suggests it: "this expressiveness becomes an aesthetic value, that is, becomes expression, when the value involved in the associations thus awakened are incorporated in the present object" (sb 122). Evil in tragedy becomes an "aesthetic value," and becomes morally justified in its representation of moral ideals and its role in the spiritual life. Among other things, evil in art may inform truthful beliefs, describing and delineating facets of the world in which one lives. But for Santayana, the often ugly truth is antagonistic toward beauty in art: "truth is thus the excuse which ugliness has for being" (sb 142). While the depiction of truth may be ugly, however, it certainly is not evil, because it subserves a positive moral end: "truth is a moral, not an aesthetic good. The possession of it is not free intuition, but knowledge necessary to a man's moral integrity and intellectual peace."(20) Truth is instrumental to well-being, and, in its depiction of truth, evil in art may have a positive moral function.
Santayana further explains evil in terms of "sympathy" and the sublime (sb 156). He claims that empathizing with evil in art causes one's own emotions to be expressed and emotional health to be sustained. The catharsis engendered by one's association with the tragic may be a means to spiritual health:
Thus a man whose physiological complexion involves more poignant emotion than his ideas can absorb -- one who is sentimental -- will yearn for new objects that may explain, embody, and focus his dumb feelings; and these objects, if art can produce them, will relieve and glorify those feelings in the act of expressing them. Catharsis is nothing more. (lr4 64)
Evil in art may be instrumental to the happiness of those whose "physiological complexion" demands catharsis, and is justified on moral grounds. One may undergo a venting of emotion upon experiencing the evil in tragedy, or may react by engaging one's own consciousness, leading to a sublime release from interaction with the object (sb 149). By creating the conditions for the sublime and the activity of contemplation, evil in art is morally justified in extending the spirit's function to pure contemplation of the realm of truth. Though there is no apparent physical need to apprehend truth for its own sake -- indeed "there is no reason why we should love anything" -- the spirit finds pleasure in striving toward truth (rt 110); the spirit recognizes truth in an effort to fulfill the intellectual desires of the rational being. "Experience of evil is the commonest approach to this attitude of [detachment]," so evil, although given substantive treatment in Santayana's philosophy, cannot be a negative moral term (sb 147-48). If moral values are considered extrinsically good because of their utility, truth in art is a moral good despite being aesthetically negative.
Evil in art cannot have positive aesthetic value, for evil is not objectified pleasure and thus is not beautiful. But evil can have positive moral value because it may be instrumental in instructing a valuable understanding of the world and inducing catharsis leading to contemplation of truth. Evil in art is neither beauty nor moral evil. Evil in art -- qua evil -- can only be reconciled with its moral utility if one conflates what Santayana calls evil with ugliness, which is not incompatible with positive moral effects. Santayana therefore must have a corresponding negative aesthetic of ugliness to explain tragedy and the sublime, among other things. Aesthetics cannot be primarily positive because beauty must be counterbalanced with a substantive negative aesthetic leading to positive moral value.
Given that "the architectonic of his thought, his moral philosophy" structures his metaphysics, philosophy of science, epistemology, and aesthetics, Santayana himself sometimes seems to recognize that his differentiation of ethics and aesthetics is tenuous (Munitz v). Art contributes to a moral life because "an ingredient in [man's] ultimate happiness, is to find satisfaction for his eyes, for his imagination, for his hand or voice aching to embody latent tendencies in explicit forms" (wia 35). Fine art is practically desirable because it speaks to the need to appreciate beauty and allows the individual to express herself. Aesthetics is a kind of ethics distinguished only in trivial ways: "In moral philosophy, then, there is as little room for a special discipline called 'aesthetics' as there is among the natural sciences" (wia 40). With its incorporation into the Life of Reason, aesthetics, like religion, becomes a culmination of morality as a fuller understanding of the relation of man to his environment and of man to himself, the state of development that poetically orchestrates the demands of the individual with the world. This balance marks the goal of Santayana's ethical system as perfected aesthetical activity, but it also characterizes a difficulty for a naturalized philosophical theory under which only a difference in typical emphasis rather than in kind can distinguish the disciplines.
MATTHEW C. ALTMAN
University of Chicago
1. The author is indebted to Ted Cohen and Cynthia Coe for helpful comments on drafts of this paper.
2. The Sense of Beauty; Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 31. To be cited as sb.
3. "Dewey's Naturalistic Metaphysics," in Obiter Scripta; Lectures, Essays and Reviews, ed. Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz, 213-40 (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1936), 228. The paper was originally published in The Journal of Philosophy 22, no. 25 (3 December 1925): 673-88. "Dewey's Naturalistic Metaphysics" will be cited as dnm. Obiter Scripta will be cited as os.
4. Santayana never fully explores the difficult relationship between pleasure, happiness, and self-preservation, except to assume that some measure of survival is evidenced by more immediate feeling.
5. Reason in Common Sense, vol. 1 of The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1905), 40. The former is cited as lr1, the latter as lr.
6. This ultimate expression of practical maneuvering, this balancing of internal forces and outer impositions, Santayana calls spirit: "spirituality marks a devotion to selected ideal ends, guided by and based on piety or a recognition of and loyalty to the necessary material forces of life and nature" (Milton Karl Munitz, The Moral Philosophy of Santayana [New York: Columbia University Press, 1939], 101). To be cited as 'Munitz'.
7. Reason in Religion, vol. 3 of lr, 141. To be cited as lr3.
8. Reason in Science, vol. 5 of lr, 240. To be cited as lr5.
9. "An Æsthetic Soviet," in os, 249-64; 257. The paper was originally published in The Dial 82 (May 1927): 361-70. To be cited as as.
10. "Hamlet," in os, 41-67; 41. The paper was originally published in Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, vol. 15 of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1908), ix-xxxiii.
11. Reason in Art, vol. 4 of lr, 4. To be cited as lr4.
12. "What is Æsthetics?" in os, 30-40; 39. The paper was originally published in The Philosophical Review 13, no. 3 (May 1904): 320-27. To be cited as wia.
13. "The Unit in Ethics Is the Person," in Physical Order and Moral Liberty, ed. John Lachs and Shirley Lachs, 195-97 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969), 196.
14. Santayana proclaims an indebtedness to Kant when he argues that "to discover a physical object is to pack in the same part of space, and fuse in one complex body, primary data like coloured form and tangible surface" (lr1 162).
15. It begs the question to assume that the creation of art objects is not done in order to create something beautiful -- i.e., with regard to an eventual utility that must be aesthetic. In order to maintain with regard to the artist that aesthetics concerns itself with the intrinsic, Santayana must claim that the creative process is intended to produce an object that incidentally happens to be beautiful and that the positive aim of the artist is rather a moral good. But this would already seem to obviate Santayana's distinction. Because Santayana had much more to say about art appreciation than artistic creation, however, I will confine myself to another line of objection.
16. Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1900), vi.
17. Although religion is not involved in ethics as a strict and literal interpretation seems to be when it takes, e.g., the Ten Commandments to be categorical laws of human action, it nonetheless plays an instrumental role in the moral economy of the Life of Reason. Therefore, Bertrand Russell incorrectly interprets Santayana's position on religion when he writes: "Santayana also liked religion, but in a very different way [than William James]. [Santayana] liked it aesthetically and historically, not as a help towards a moral life" ( A History of Western Philosophy [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945], 811).
18. Santayana first claims that the play's horror is alleviated by the sheer number of evils presented; appreciating the play without experiencing the evil of any one of the miseries is possible only because we cannot focus exclusively on any one of them.
19. Santayana analyzes expression into two parts: "In all expression we may thus distinguish two terms: the first is the object actually presented, the word, the image, the expressive thing; the second is the object suggested, the further thought, emotion, or image evoked, the thing expressed" (sb 121). Thus, while the actual object presented may be repugnant, he claims, it may produce a positive emotion. But this begs the question: by the very fact that evil in art is evil it must evoke negative feelings in the observer even though it may also produce a positive affect. To justify evil in art by its positive associations is to disregard the very negative associations that make it evil.
20. The Realm of Truth (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1938), 115. To be cited as rt.