The Life of Reason Part 37

GEORGE SANTAYANA

he gar noy enhergeia zohe

This Dover edition, first published in 1982, is an unabridged republication of volume four of _The Life of Reason; or The Phases of Human Progress_, originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons, N.Y., in 1905.

CONTENTS

REASON IN ART

CHAPTER I

THE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE

Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.--Art is plastic instinct conscious of its aims.--It is automatic.--So are the ideas it expresses.--We are said to control whatever obeys us.--Utility is a result.--The useful naturally stable.--Intelligence is docility.--Art is reason propagating itself.--Beauty an incident in rational art, inseparable from the others. Pages 3-17

CHAPTER II

RATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART

Utility is ultimately ideal.--Work wasted and chances missed.--Ideals must be interpreted, not prescribed.--The aim of industry is to live well.--Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature.--Servile arts may grow spontaneous or their products may be renounced.--Art starts from two potentialities: its material and its problem.--Each must be definite and congruous with the other.--A sophism exposed.--Industry prepares matter for the liberal arts.--Each partakes of the other. Pages 18-33

CHAPTER III

EMERGENCE OF FINE ART

Art is spontaneous action made stable by success.--It combines utility and automatism.--Automatism fundamental and irresponsible.--It is tamed by contact with the world.--The dance.--Functions of gesture.--Automatic music. Pages 34-43

CHAPTER IV

MUSIC

Music is a world apart.--It justifies itself.--It is vital and transient.--Its physical affinities.--Physiology of music.--Limits of musical sensibility.--The value of music is relative to them.--Wonders of musical structure.--Its inherent emotions.--In growing specific they remain unearthly.--They merge with common emotions, and express such as find no object in nature.--Music lends elementary feelings an intellectual communicable form.--All essences are in themselves good, even the pa.s.sions.--Each impulse calls for a possible congenial world.--Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings.--Music may do so.--Instability the soul of matter.--- Peace the triumph of spirit.--Refinement is true strength. Pages 44-67

CHAPTER V

SPEECH AND SIGNIFICATION

Sounds well fitted to be symbols.--Language has a structure independent of things.--Words, remaining identical, serve to identify things that change.--Language the dialectical garment of facts.--Words are wise men's counters.--Nominalism right in psychology and realism in logic.--Literature moves between the extremes of music and denotation.--Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may have affinity.--Syntax positively representative.--Yet it vitiates what it represents.--Difficulty in subduing a living medium.--Language foreshortens experience.--It is a perpetual mythology.--It may be apt or inapt, with equal richness.--Absolute language a possible but foolish art Pages 68-86

CHAPTER VI

POETRY AND PROSE

Force of primary expressions.--Its exclusiveness and narrowness.--Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm.--Inspiration irresponsible.--Plato's discriminating view.--Explosive and pregnant expression.--Natural history of inspiration.--Expressions to be understood must be recreated, and so changed.--Expressions may be recast perversely, humourously, or sublimely.--The nature of prose.--It is more advanced and responsible than poetry.--Maturity brings love of practical truth.--Pure prose would tend to efface itself.--Form alone, or substance alone, may be poetical.--Poetry has its place in the medium.--It is the best medium possible.--Might it not convey what it is best to know?--A rational poetry would exclude much now thought poetical.--All apperception modifies its object.--Reason has its own bias and method.--Rational poetry would envelop exact knowledge in ultimate emotions.--An ill.u.s.tration.--Volume can be found in scope better than in suggestion Pages 87-115

CHAPTER VII

PLASTIC CONSTRUCTION

Automatic expression often leaves traces in the outer world.--Such effects fruitful.--Magic authority of man's first creations.--Art brings relief from idolatry.--Inertia in technique.--Inertia in appreciation.--Advent.i.tious effects appreciated first.--Approach to beauty through useful structure.--Failure of adapted styles.--Not all structure beautiful, nor all beauty structural.--Structures designed for display.--Appeal made by decoration.--Its natural rights.--Its alliance with structure in Greek architecture.--Relations of the two in Gothic art.--The result here romantic.--The mediaeval artist.--Representation introduced.--Transition to ill.u.s.tration. Pages 116-143

CHAPTER VIII

PLASTIC REPRESENTATION

Psychology of imitation.--Sustained sensation involves reproduction.--Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a new material.--Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge.--How the artist is inspired and irresponsible.--Need of knowing and loving the subject rendered.--Public interests determine the subject of art, and the subject the medium.--Reproduction by acting ephemeral.--demands of sculpture.--It is essentially obsolete.--When men see groups and backgrounds they are natural painters.--Evolution of painting.--Sensuous and dramatic adequacy approached.--Essence of landscape-painting.--Its threatened dissolution.--Reversion to pure decorative design.--Sensuous values are primordial and so indispensable Pages 144-165

CHAPTER IX

JUSTIFICATION OF ART

Art is subject to moral censorship.--Its initial or specific excellence is not enough.--All satisfactions, however hurtful, have an initial worth.--But, on the whole, artistic activity is innocent.--It is liberal, and typical of perfect activity.--The ideal, when incarnate, becomes subject to civil society.--Plato's strictures: he exaggerates the effect of myths.--His deeper moral objections.--Their lightness.--Importance of aesthetic alternatives.--The importance of aesthetic goods varies with temperaments.--The aesthetic temperament requires tutelage.--Aesthetic values everywhere interfused.--They are primordial.--To superpose them advent.i.tiously is to destroy them.--They flow naturally from perfect function.--Even inhibited functions, when they fall into a new rhythm, yield new beauties.--He who loves beauty must chasten it Pages 166-190

CHAPTER X

THE CRITERION OF TASTE

Dogmatism is inevitable but may be enlightened.--Taste gains in authority as it is more and more widely based.--Different aesthetic endowments may be compared in quant.i.ty or force.--Authority of vital over verbal judgments.--Tastes differ also in purity or consistency.--They differ, finally, in pertinence, and in width of appeal.--Art may grow cla.s.sic by idealising the familiar, or by reporting the ultimate.--Good taste demands that art should be rational, _i.e._, harmonious with all other interests.--A mere "work of art" a baseless artifice.--Human uses give to works of art their highest expression and charm.--The sad values of appearance.--They need to be made prophetic of practical goods, which in turn would be suffused with beauty Pages 191-215

CHAPTER XI

ART AND HAPPINESS

Aesthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones, which in turn would be suffused with beauty, yet prototypes of true perfections.--Pros and cons of detached indulgences.--The happy imagination is one initially in line with things, and brought always closer to them by experience.--Reason is the principle of both art and happiness.--Only a rational society can have sure and perfect arts.--Why art is now empty and unstable.--Anomalous character of the irrational artist.--True art measures and completes happiness. Pages 216-230

REASON IN ART