The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic TheorySantayana, George
Philosophy
The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory
Santayana, George
Aesthetics
Now since these things are, in fact, hideous, the theory that shows
they _ought to be_ beautiful, is vain and ridiculous. But that
theory contains this truth: that had the utility of Socratic features
been so great that men of all other type must have perished,
Socrates would have been beautiful. He would have represented
the human type. The eye would have been then accustomed to that
form, the imagination would have taken it as the basis of its
refinements, and accentuated its naturally effective points. The
beautiful does not depend on the useful; it is constituted by the
imagination in ignorance and contempt of practical advantage; but
it is not independent of the necessary, for the necessary must also
be the habitual and consequently the basis of the type, and of all its
imaginative variations.
There are, moreover, at a late and derivative stage in our aesthetic
judgment, certain cases in which the knowledge of fitness and
utility enters into our sense of beauty. But it does so very indirectly,
rather by convincing us that we should tolerate what practical
conditions have imposed on an artist, by arousing admiration of his
ingenuity, or by suggesting the interesting things themselves with
which the object is known to be connected. Thus a cottage-chimney,
stout and tall, with the smoke floating from it, pleases because
we fancy it to mean a hearth, a rustic meal, and a comfortable
family. But that is all extraneous association. The most
ordinary way in which utility affects us is negatively; if we
know a thing to be useless and fictitious, the uncomfortable
haunting sense of waste and trickery prevents all enjoyment, and
therefore banishes beauty. But this is also an adventitious
complication. The intrinsic value of a form is in no way affected by it.
Opposed to this utilitarian theory stands the metaphysical one that
would make the beauty or intrinsic rightness of things the source of
their efficiency and of their power to survive. Taken literally, as it
is generally meant, this idea must, from our point of view, appear
preposterous. Beauty and rightness are relative to our judgment
and emotion; they in no sense exist in nature or preside over her.
She everywhere appears to move by mechanical law. The types of
things exist by what, in relation to our approbation, is mere chance,
and it is our faculties that must adapt themselves to our
environment and not our environment to our faculties. Such is the
naturalistic point of view which we have adopted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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