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Review of Art and Morality: Essays in
the Spirit of George Santayana
Art and Morality: Essays in the Spirit of George Santayana
Morris Grossman, edited by Martin A. Coleman (New York, NY: Fordham University
Press, 2014)
I first met Morris Grossman at an Eastern Division American Society for
Aesthetics conference a few years before his death in 2012. I was a graduate
student in philosophy, and I had attended Columbia College as an undergraduate,
which provided us with a sort of fellowship of shared alumni-ship. He was
interested in the fact that I was leaving the practice of law to go back to school for
philosophy, and wanted my opinion on what he thought was a clear analogy between
Mozart's Don Giovanni and the U.S. Constitution. That proposition was entirely
mysterious to me at the time, viewing the U.S. Constitution with lawyer's eyes. It
would be years before I could begin to soften the legal edges of my thinking and
see it as a philosopher might, and then, later, as what Grossman would call a "poet-
philosopher" might. Grossman wanted to talk further about the idea at some point
and handed me a business card, which had written under his name, "Philosopher
with Soul." I wondered about both this title and about its visible redaction but I
didn't ask him about it. After reading Art and Morality I now believe I know why he
did it: Grossman, in what he would undoubtedly say is "in the spirit of Santayana,"
was large enough, complex enough, and pragmatic enough, to encompass both the
assertion of "with Soul" and its denial (the redacted "with Soul"). I mention this here
not for its anecdotal value (although Grossman would not necessarily see the need
to separate anecdotal or literary value from philosophical or critical) but because it
is relevant to interpretive understanding of Art and Morality.
In short, my claim in this book review is that there are a number of common
threads that run through the diverse and often eclectic essays in this book and that
they include these:
(1) Philosophy and other texts with legal, moral, and practical import that are not
designed to be understood primarily as literature can be viewed and understood
aesthetically;
(2) Artistic events and art objects can be understood structurally, functionally and
with continuity, giving them morality-like features;
(3) Understanding of aesthetically and morally relevant experiences, philosophers,
and artists, requires a holistic rather than piecemeal mode of interpretation
even if to do this is more complex and entails some apparent or real internal
contradictions;
(4) The art/morality distinction is not clearly a distinction between the real and unreal
because there is art in life and life in art; and finally,
(5) To do these things is to enter into the spirit of George Santayana (or, as Grossman
would aver, the spirit of Santayana in the spirit of Morris Grossman).
Object Description
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| Title | page68 |
| Item ID | BulletinSantayana2015-070_page68.tiff |
| Standardized Rights Statement | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/ |
| Transcript | Review of Art and Morality: Essays in the Spirit of George Santayana Art and Morality: Essays in the Spirit of George Santayana Morris Grossman, edited by Martin A. Coleman (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2014) I first met Morris Grossman at an Eastern Division American Society for Aesthetics conference a few years before his death in 2012. I was a graduate student in philosophy, and I had attended Columbia College as an undergraduate, which provided us with a sort of fellowship of shared alumni-ship. He was interested in the fact that I was leaving the practice of law to go back to school for philosophy, and wanted my opinion on what he thought was a clear analogy between Mozart's Don Giovanni and the U.S. Constitution. That proposition was entirely mysterious to me at the time, viewing the U.S. Constitution with lawyer's eyes. It would be years before I could begin to soften the legal edges of my thinking and see it as a philosopher might, and then, later, as what Grossman would call a "poet- philosopher" might. Grossman wanted to talk further about the idea at some point and handed me a business card, which had written under his name, "Philosopher with Soul." I wondered about both this title and about its visible redaction but I didn't ask him about it. After reading Art and Morality I now believe I know why he did it: Grossman, in what he would undoubtedly say is "in the spirit of Santayana," was large enough, complex enough, and pragmatic enough, to encompass both the assertion of "with Soul" and its denial (the redacted "with Soul"). I mention this here not for its anecdotal value (although Grossman would not necessarily see the need to separate anecdotal or literary value from philosophical or critical) but because it is relevant to interpretive understanding of Art and Morality. In short, my claim in this book review is that there are a number of common threads that run through the diverse and often eclectic essays in this book and that they include these: (1) Philosophy and other texts with legal, moral, and practical import that are not designed to be understood primarily as literature can be viewed and understood aesthetically; (2) Artistic events and art objects can be understood structurally, functionally and with continuity, giving them morality-like features; (3) Understanding of aesthetically and morally relevant experiences, philosophers, and artists, requires a holistic rather than piecemeal mode of interpretation even if to do this is more complex and entails some apparent or real internal contradictions; (4) The art/morality distinction is not clearly a distinction between the real and unreal because there is art in life and life in art; and finally, (5) To do these things is to enter into the spirit of George Santayana (or, as Grossman would aver, the spirit of Santayana in the spirit of Morris Grossman). |
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