Philosophical Review
What is Aesthetics?
Author(s): G. Santayana
Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 13, No. 3 (May, 1904), pp. 320-327
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
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WHAT IS AESTHETICS?
AN accomplished mathematician, who is certainly free from
those prejudices which his science might be expected to
foster, once said that all problems are divided into two classes,
soluble questions, which are trivial, and important questions, which
are insoluble. This epigram, if we chose for the moment to take
it seriously, might help us to deal in a quick and trenchant
fashion with the topic before us. Our problem would indeed be
soluble and trivial, if we wished merely to fix the relation of an
aesthetics arbitrarily defined to other sciences of our own delimination.
It would be all a question of dragooning reality into a
fresh verbal uniform. We should have on our hands, if we were
successful, a regiment of ideal and non-existent sciences, to which
we should be applying titles more or less pre-empted by actual
human studies; but in its flawless articulation and symmetry our
classification would absolve itself from any subservience to usage,
and would ignore the historic grouping and genealogy of existing
pursuits.
Thus, for instance, in the recent Estetica, by Benedetto Croce,
we learn that aesthetics is purely and simply the science of expression;
expression being itself so defined as to be identical with
every form of apperception, intuition, or imaginative synthesis.
This imagined aesthetics includes the theory of speech and of all
attentive perception, while it has nothing in particular to do with
art or with beauty or with any kind of preference. Such system-making
may be a most learned game, but it contributes
nothing to knowledge. The inventor of Volapiik might exhibit
considerable acquaintance with current languages, and much
acumen in comparing and criticizing their grammar, but his own
grammar would not on that account describe any living speech.
So the author of some new and ideal articulation of the sciences
merely tells us how knowledge might have fallen together, if it
had prophetically conformed to a scheme now suggesting itself
to his verbal fancy; much as if a man fond by nature of archi-
320
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WHA T IS ESTHETICS? 321
tectural magnificence, but living by chance in a house built of
mud and rubble, should plaster it on the outside, and, by the aid
of a little paint, should divide it into huge blocks conjoined with
masterly precision and apparently fit to outlast the ages. When
this brilliant effect was achieved, and the speculative eye had
gloated sufficiently on its masterpiece, the truly important question
would still remain; namely, what the structure of that house
really was and how long it could be expected to retain traces of
the unmeaning checkerwork with which its owner's caprice had
overlaid it.
Perhaps we may pursue our subject to better advantage if we
revert to our mathematical friend, and try to turn his satirical
dictum into something like a sober truth. Some questions, let
us say, are important and soluble, because the subject-matter can
control the answer we give to them; others are insoluble and
merely vexatious, because the terms they are stated in already
traduce and dislocate the constitution of things. Now the word
' aesthetics' is nothing but a loose term lately applied in academic
circles to everything that has to do with works of art or with the
sense of beauty. The man who studies Venetian painting is
aesthetically employed; so is he who experiments in a laboratory
about the most pleasing division of a strip of white paper. The
latter person is undoubtedly a psychologist; the former is nothing
but a miserable amateur, or at best a historian of art. iEsthetic
too would be any speculation about the dialectical relation of the
beautiful to the rational or to the absolutely good; so that a
theologian, excogitating the emanation of the Holy Ghost from
the Son 'and from the Father, might be an aesthetician into the
bargain, if only the Holy Ghost turned out to mean the fulness
of life realized in beauty, when deep emotion suffuses luminous
and complex ideas.
The truth is that the group of activities we can call aesthetic is
a motley one, created by certain historic and literary accidents.
Wherever consciousness becomes at all imaginative and finds a
flattering unction in its p/1anlasmagoria, or whenever a work
whatever purpose constructed, happens to have notable intrinsic
values for perception, we utter the word ' Esthetic'; but these occaThis
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322 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW [VOL. XIII.
sions are miscellaneous, and there is no single agency in nature,
no specific organ in sense, and no separable task in spirit, to
which the aesthetic quality can be attributed. iEsthetic experience
is so broad and so incidental, it is spread so thin over all
life, that like life itself it opens out for reflection into divergent
vistas. The most important natural division in the field of reflection
is that between the vista of things found and the vista of
things only conceived or desired. These are two opposite and
centrifugal directions in which reasoned knowledge may expand;
both diverge from the common root furnished by practical knowledge,
memory, and history; one, proceeding by observation,
yields natural science, and the other yields ideal science, which
proceeds by dialectic. Yet even these two regions, the most disparate
possible in speculation, covered respectively by pre-Socratic
and by Socratic philosophy, are themselves far from separable,
since before external facts can be studied they have to be
arrested by attention and translated into terms having a fixed intent,
so that relations and propositions may be asserted about
them; while these terms in discourse, these goals of intent or
attention, must in turn be borne along in the flux of existence,
and must interpret its incidental formations.
Now, much that is aesthetic is factual, for instance the phenomena
of art and taste; and all this is an object for natural history
and natural philosophy; but much also is ideal, like the
effort and intent of poetic composition, or the interpretation of
music, all of which is concerned only with fulfilling intent and
establishing values. That psychology may occasionally deal
with aesthetic questions is undeniable. No matter how clearly
objects may originally stand out in their own proper and natural
medium, in retrospect they may be made to retreat into the experience
which discovered them. Now, to reduce everything to
the experience which discloses it is doubtless the mission of psychology,-a
feat on which current idealism is founded; so that
the subject-matter of Esthetics, however various in itself, may be
swallowed up in the psychological vortex, together with everything
else that exists. But mathematics or history or judgments
of taste can fall within the psychological field only adventitiously
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No. 3.] WHA T IS ,ESTHETICS? 323
and for a third person. An eventual subsumption of the whole
universe under psychological categories would still leave every
human pursuit standing and every field of experience or faith
distinct in its native and persisting hypostasis. Intelligence is
centrifugal. Every part of rational life, in spite of all afterthoughts
and criticisms, remains in the presence of its own ideal,
conscious of the objects it itself envisages, rather than of the
process imputed to it by another. LEAsthetic experience will
therefore continue to elude and overflow psychology in a hundred
ways, although in its own way psychology might eventually
survey and represent all esthetic experience.
If psychology must sometimes consider aesthetic facts, so
must moral philosophy sometimes consider aesthetic values.
As mathematical dialectic, starting with simple intuitions, develops
their import, so moral dialectic, starting with an animal
will, develops its ideals. Now a part of man's ideal, an ingredient
in his ultimate happiness, is to find satisfaction for his eyes,
for his imagination, for his hand or voice aching to embody
latent tendencies in explicit forms. Perfect success in this vital,
aesthetic undertaking is possible, however, only when artistic impulse
is quite healthy and representative, that is, when it is
favorable to all other interests and is in turn supported by them
all. If this harmony fails, the aesthetic activity collapses inwardly
by inanition, since every other impulse is fighting against it,while
for the same reason its external products are rendered trivial,
meretricious, and mean. They will still remain symptomatic,
as excrements are, but they will cease to be works of rational
art, because they will have no further vital function, no human
use. It will become impossible for a mind with the least scope
to relish them, or to find them even initially beautiful. iEsthetic
good is accordingly no separable value; it is not realizable by itself
in a set of objects not otherwise interesting. Anything which
is to entertain the imagination must first have exercised the
senses; it must first have stimulated some animal reaction, engaged
attention, and intertwined itself in the vital process; and
later this aesthetic good, with animal and sensuous values imbedded
in it and making its very substance, must be swallowed
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324 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [VOL. XIII.
up in a rational life; for reason will immediately feel itself called
upon to synthesize those imaginative activities with whatever else
is valuable. As the underlying sensuous good must be necessarily
merged in the imaginative (their product being what we
call aesthetic charm), so in a cultivated mind ulterior rational
interests, never being out of sight, will merge in the same total
and immediate appreciation. It will be as impossible wholly to
welcome what is cruel or silly, what is groundless, mindless,
and purely aesthetical, as wholly to welcome what gives physical
pain. Reason suffers us to approve with no part of our nature
what is offensive to any other part; and even mathematical
cogency, for instance, becomes trivial, in so far as mathematical
being is irrelevant to human good. The whole of wisdom must
color a judgment which is to be truly imaginative and is to express
adequately an enlightened and quick sensibility.
The question whether aesthetics is a part of psychology or a
philosophic discipline apart is therefore an insoluble question,
because esthetics is neither. The terms of the problem do violence
to the structure of things. The lines of cleavage in human
history and art do not isolate any such block of experience as
aesthetics is supposed to describe. The realm of the beautiful is
no scientific enclosure; like religion it is a field of sublimated experience
which various sciences may partly traverse and which is
wholly covered by none. Nor can we say that, because to
analyze the sense of beauty is a psychological task, this analysis
constitutes a special science. For then astronomy too would
have a psychology of its own, and even its special aesthetics, and
a fresh science would spring into being whenever a new object
offered itself to any observer.
What exists in the ideal region in lieu of an aesthetic science
is the art and function of criticism. This is a reasoned appreciation
of human works by a mind not wholly ignorant of their
subject or occasion, their school, and their process of manufacture.
Good criticism leans on a great variety of considerations,
more numerous in proportion to the critic's competence and
maturity. Nothing relevant to the object's efficacy should be
ignored, and an intelligent critic must look impartially to beauty,
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No. 3.1 WHAT IS SESTHETICS? 325
propriety, difficulty, originality, truth, and moral significance in
the work he judges. In other words, as each thing, by its existence
and influence, radiates effects over human life, it acquires
various functions and values, sometimes cumulative, sometimes
alternative. These values it is the moral philosopher's business
to perceive and to combine as best he can in a harmonious ideal,
to be the goal of human effort and a standard for the relative estimation
of things. Under the authority of such a standard arts
and their products fall of necessity, together with everything else
that heaven or earth may contain. Towards the rational framing
of this standard must go, together with every other interest and
delight, the interest and delight which men find in the beautiful,
either to watch it or to conceive and to produce it. Aesthetic
sensibility and artistic impulse are two gifts distinguishable from
each other and from other human gifts; the pleasures that accompany
them may of course be separated artificially from the massive
pleasures and fluid energies of life. But to pride oneself on
holding a single interest free from all others, and on being lost
in that specific sensation to the exclusion of all its affinities and
effects, would be to pride oneself on being a voluntary fool.
Isolated, local sensibility, helplessness before each successive
stimulus, is precisely what foolishness consists in. To attempt,
then, to abstract a so-called aesthetic interest from all other interests,
and a so-called work of art from whatever work ministers,
in one way or another, to all human good, is to make the
aesthetic sphere contemptible. There has never been any art
worthy of notice without a practical basis and occasion, or without
some intellectual or religious function. To divorce in a
schematic fashion one phase of rational activity from the rest is
to render each part and the whole again irrational; such a course
would lead in the arts, if it led to anything, to works with no subject
or meaning or moral glow. It would lead in other fields to
a mathematics without application in nature, to a morality without
roots in life, and to other fantastic abstractions wholly irrelevant
to one another and useless for judging the world.
Nor would such an insulation of the esthetic ideal secure any
permanent division of functions, nor even attain an ultimate techThis
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326 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [VOL. XIII.
nical analysis. For after the alleged Esthetic sphere had been
abstracted, at the cost of making it a region of pure idiocy, it
would turn out that an Esthetic element had remained imbedded
in men's other thoughts and actions. Their steam-engines, their
games, their prose, and their religion would prove incorrigibly,
inherently, beautiful or ugly. So that side by side with pure
estheticism, - something so dubious and inhuman, - we should
have to admit the undeniable beauties of the non-afxsthetic, of
everything that was fit, lucid, beneficent, or profound. For what
is practically helpful soon acquires a gracious presence; the eye
learns to trace its form, to piece out its characteristics with a
latent consciousness of their function, and, if possible, to remodel
the object itself so as to fit it better to the abstract requirements
of vision, that so excellent a thing may become altogether congenial.
iEsthetic satisfaction thus comes to perfect all other
values; they would remain imperfect if beauty did not supervene
upon them, but beauty would be absolutely impossible if they
did not underlie it. For perception, while in itself a process, is
not perception if it means nothing or has no ulterior function;
and so the pleasures of perception are not beauties, if they are
attached to nothing substantial and rational, to nothing with a
right of citizenship in the natural or in the moral world. But
happily the merit of immediate pleasantness tends to diffuse itself
over what otherwise is good, and to become, for refined minds, a
symbol of total excellence. And simultaneously, knowledge of
what things are, of what skill means, of what man has endured
and desired, renters like a flood that no man's land of mere
aestheticism; and what we were asked to call beautiful out of
pure affectation and pedantry, now becomes beautiful indeed.
In moral philosophy, then, there is as little room for a special
discipline called Iaesthetics' as there is among the natural sciences.
Just as we may consider, among other natural facts, the
pleasures incident to imagination and art, as we may describe
their occasions and detail their varieties, so in moral philosophy
we may train ourselves to articulate the judgments vaguely
called Esthetic, to enlarge and clarify them, to estimate their
weight, catch their varying message, and find their congruity or
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No. 3.] WI/AT IS zESTHETICS? 327
incongruity with other interests. This will be an exercise of
moral judgment, of idealizing reason; and its very function of
attributing worth reflectively and with comprehensive justice,
will forbid its arrest at the face value of dumb sensation, or of
abstract skill, or of automatic self-expression; whatever distinguishable
interests may be covered by these terms will be only
ingredients in the total appreciation our criticism is to reach. The
critic's function is precisely to feel and to confront all values,
bringing them into relation, and if possible into harmony.
Accordingly, the question whether aesthetics is a part of psychology
or a separate discipline is, I repeat, an insoluble question,
because it creates a dilemma which does not exist in the
facts. A part of psychology deals with aesthetic matters, but
cannot exhaust them; parts of other sciences also deal with the
same. A single and complete aesthetic science, natural or ideal,
is an idol of the cave and a scholastic chimera. As art has
hardly prospered where men were barbarous or unintelligent, or
where wealth and freedom did not exist, so the theory of aesthetic
sensibility cannot advance except by an advance in history and
psychology; while to produce a just and fruitful appreciation of
beauty it is first requisite to ennoble life, to purify the mind with
a high education, with much discipline of thought and desire.
Creative genius would otherwise find no materials fit to interpret;
nor could art otherwise divine what direction its idealizations
should take, so as to make then, what true beauties are, so
many premonitions of benefit or so many echoes of happiness.
G. SANTAYANA.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
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