page44 |
Previous | 45 of 74 | Next |
|
This page
All
|
Loading content ...
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.
Object Description
Description
Title | page44 |
Item ID | BulletinSantayana2016-046_page44.tif |
Standardized Rights Statement | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/ |
Transcript | 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. |
Tags
Comments
Post a Comment for page44