Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 34 Fall 2016

              Santayana and the Arts1
Differences of opinion
He got so much wrong: dance is ridiculous; cubism is what the eye would
produce if it were unceremoniously cut off from the brain; photography
can never be a fine art; savage music is unrefined and impersonal, and those
who engage in it take little pleasure in it; Shakespeare had no sense of man's place
in the cosmos (and was inferior to Homer); the actor's art is inferior in dignity to
the sculptor's—so many judgments that today we would find quaint, old-fashioned,
curmudgeonly, or simply laughable that one question to ask is: What value has a
theory of art that leads to such conclusions?
Should we put stock in such a theory? Would we countenance an ethical theory
that leads to morally repulsive conclusions? I shall defer an answer to that question
for the moment and concentrate on asking whether Santayana's preferences tell us
more about the man or about his philosophy Is there a fundamental inadequacy in
Santayana's theory or are his odd opinions relics of his time, place, and temperament?
Santayana's philosophy as a whole suggests they may well be relics. He certainly
never intended his judgments about art to be dogmatic, because his philosophy is
anti-dogmatic. No human judgment is final. We each view the world from a narrow
and partial perspective filtered through the "lenses and veils" of our senses. Our
material circumstances, our physical being and our social world, condition us to
think the way we do. Half our tastes "come from our first masters," he wrote, "and
the other half from our first loves" (LR4 194).
Dance
The same must be said for our dislikes. Take the case of dance. Here's what
Santayana wrote about it:
[M]ost dances, even the savage ones, are somewhat ridiculous....There are indeed
dances so ugly that, like those of contemporary society, they cannot be enjoyed unless
they are shared; they yield pleasures of exercise only, or at best of movement in
unison. (LR4 401)
There is perhaps something in this of provocation for its own sake—Santayana's
iconoclastic mockery of the social conventions of his day. Taking into account this
possible provocation and also my own exaggeration of Santayana's view of the
genre in my opening remarks, it is still clear that Santayana's enthusiasm for dance
was not high. But what did Santayana have as models? Waltzes and Swan Lake,
perhaps?—ballroom dancing and classical ballet? As for ballet, Martha Graham
would have agreed with him that it is by and large ridiculous. But, in 1905, he did
not have the advantage of her choreography. The Ballet Russe had not yet been
organized and The Rite of Spring was eight years away. Not only did he not yet
1 Portions of this article were presented at the George Santayana Society session at the meeting
of the Society for Advancement of American Philosophy in March 2016. The author thanks
Martin Coleman for his astute and helpful comments, which prompted several revisions in the
current version, and Henry Shapiro for his painstaking review of nearly every phrase.