Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Santayana, George (1863–1952) Spanish philosopher and novelist; for many years at Harvard University. Santayana somewhere notes that philosophers come to aesthetics through opposite routes – as metaphysicians who need to complete their systems, and as artists who need to generalize about their experiences. He belonged in both camps, with emphasis on the latter. He was an obvious literary artist in his poetry and fiction, but he was a poet-philosopher all the time, even when he was a metaphysician. While he wrote about art intermittently, particularly in The Sense of Beauty and Reason in Art , he sought to be artful in all of his writings, including his ‘theoretical’ ones. His central work in aesthetics is that early and most remarkable book, The Sense of Beauty: its subtitle is Being the outline(s) of aesthetic theory . Santayana reveals his hand, and his approach, when he says at the very outset: ‘The sense of beauty has a more important place in life than aesthetic theory has ever taken in philosophy.’ And, indeed, the stylistic beauty of this treatise is as telling as its philosophical or theoretical side, and must properly be seen as part of its ‘statement’. Santayana also says: ‘To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we came to feel it.’ He certainly feels it, and might even be said to explain how he comes to feel it. But, as always, he explains it ... log in or subscribe to read full text