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WorkGeorge Santayana

The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory

Beauty explained as pleasure we feel as if it belonged to the thing itself, written by a young Harvard instructor who needed a book.

by George Santayana257 passages held

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First published
(aged 33)
Original language
English

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Overview

In the mid-1890s Santayana was still an instructor at Harvard, where he had taught since 1889, and advancement called for a book. He shaped one out of the lectures on aesthetics he had been giving since 1892; Scribner's published it in 1896, and the promotion followed in 1898, though not easily: Harvard's president, Charles Eliot, had doubts about a man he found withdrawn, and William James, Josiah Royce and the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg spoke up for him. The book's claim is that beauty is pleasure experienced as a quality of the object: the delight belongs to the person looking, but it is felt as though it lay in the thing seen. That places beauty inside psychology rather than above it. Setting aside the older view that beauty reveals something divine or eternal, the book treats it as a fact about living creatures and what holds their attention, so that almost anything can be beautiful in some degree, while things differ enormously in how much. It outlasted the circumstances that produced it and became, by one reckoning, the most widely read of his philosophical works. It also drew a lasting objection: the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer called its position aesthetic hedonism and rejected the idea that great artists had worked to entertain. Santayana's own verdict was the harshest. The philosopher and critic Arthur Danto reported that when he met Santayana in 1950, the old man called it a potboiler, written because word had reached him, by a roundabout way, that he had better publish a book, and on art.

Key concepts

What do ‘positive’, ‘intrinsic’ and ‘objectified’ each mean in the definition of beauty?

They are the narrowings that lead to Santayana’s formula: beauty is value positive, intrinsic and objectified. As a value, beauty is an emotion, not the perception of a fact, so a beauty nobody could enjoy is a contradiction. Positive: it is the sense of something good present, not relief from an evil. Intrinsic: it is enjoyed for itself, not as a means. Objectified: the pleasure is felt as a quality of the thing.

Why does beauty feel as if it belonged to the object?

Because it is the survival of an old habit of mind. People once made every effect a thing had on them part of its conceived nature. Science abstracted those effects away; the aesthetic idea is less abstract, keeping the pleasure of perception as part of the object. Beauty, Santayana argues, is the one place where that objectification of feeling, extinct elsewhere, still survives.

What are the book’s three sources of beauty: material, form and expression?

Material is the beauty of sensations themselves, a colour, a tone, the blue sky; form is the pleasure of perceiving things ordered; expression is beauty borrowed from what an object calls to mind. They can come apart: a discourse may delight by its structure though its sounds are harsh. Perfection would join beautiful elements in beautiful forms, and where that fails, different natures sacrifice one or the other.

Where does an object’s expressiveness come from, if not from the object?

From the circle of thoughts it arouses in a particular mind. If expression were an external relation between one object and another, Santayana argues, everything would express everything equally, and the flower in the crannied wall would say what the bust of Caesar says. His own words, he notes, express only the thoughts they actually rouse in a reader, and may express more to one reader than to another.

Why does the book class the things of imagination as ‘play’?

Because play names activity whose value is intrinsic, and Santayana means it as praise. In the sense he uses, work is the disparaging term and play the eulogistic one. The useful is good only for its consequences, and those must somewhere be good in themselves, or all utility is illusory. Calling imagination play places it among the sources of all worth, not among idle pastimes.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Beauty as Pleasure Felt in the Thing

Where does beauty live, in the object or in the person looking? In the person, Santayana answers, though the pleasure is felt as if it belonged to the thing seen.

Beauty, on this account, is pleasure objectified: a delight that is ours but is experienced as a quality of the object. That places it inside psychology rather than above it, a fact about living creatures and what holds their attention rather than a glimpse of something divine or eternal. Almost anything can then be beautiful in some degree, while things differ enormously in how much. Ernst Cassirer rejected the result as aesthetic hedonism, doubting that great artists had worked to give pleasure; Santayana himself later called the book a potboiler.

  • beauty
  • aesthetics
  • aesthetic pleasure
  • aesthetic value
  • aesthetic experience
  • aesthetic judgment
  • psychology
  • value
  • taste
  • human nature
  • utility
  • happiness

Enter a dialogue

Form: The Pleasure of Seeing Things Ordered

Why does one arrangement of lines, sounds or parts please and another not? Santayana looks for the answer in how perception works, not in the object alone.

Between the raw pleasure of colour or sound and the associations a thing carries lies the beauty of form, and here the argument is at its most psychological. The eye and the mind take pleasure in unifying what they perceive, so symmetry, proportion and type please because they make perception easy and complete. Too much uniformity bores, too little order baffles. Beauty of form is thus the pleasure of an imagination at work, and even nature’s forms are beautiful to the extent that a perceiver can take them in.

  • form
  • aesthetic form
  • perception
  • aesthetic perception
  • imagination
  • nature
  • embodiment

Enter a dialogue

Expression: Why Tragedy and the Sublime Please

If beauty is pleasure, how can anyone delight in a tragedy, or in a sublime scene that threatens to overwhelm? The answer turns on what an object expresses rather than what it presents.

Expression is beauty borrowed from association: an object pleases because of what it calls to mind, and the value of the thing suggested flows into the thing seen. That lets Santayana account for pleasures that seem to contradict his theory. In tragedy, painful matter is held at a distance and given form, so the pain becomes the occasion for a larger beauty; in the sublime, a sense of our own smallness turns into a release from ourselves. Comedy, too, pleases by the play it lets the mind take with what would otherwise vex it.

  • expression
  • association
  • emotion
  • tragedy
  • comedy
  • sublime
  • poetry
  • art

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
257
distinct concepts
439
by passages held, corpus-wide
#291

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “aesthetics” and “beauty”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
aestheticsbeauty13
aestheticsperception13
aestheticsform12
aestheticsimagination10
beautyperception10
aestheticsemotion8
beautyimagination6
aesthetic judgmentbeauty5
formimagination5
formperception5
imaginationperception5
aesthetic valuebeauty4
beautyemotion3
beautyform3
emotionperception3
aesthetic judgmentaesthetics2
aesthetic judgmentimagination2
aesthetic valueimagination2
emotionform2
emotionimagination2
aesthetic judgmentperception1
aesthetic valueemotion1
aesthetic valueform1
aesthetic valueperception1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1896 The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory you are here EN
  2. 1900 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

    Essays that carry the approach of The Sense of Beauty over from art to religion, and first set out the reading of religion as imaginative truth that The Life of Reason would develop at length.

     EN
  3. 1905 The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress

    His chief work from the Harvard years and the fullest statement of his moral philosophy; the Realms of Being, published two decades later, supply the account of knowledge and existence that lies beneath it.

     EN
  4. 1910 Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe

    Lecture-hall criticism from his last Harvard years, testing on three poets the claim of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion that poetry at its height is philosophy made vivid.

     EN
  5. 1913 Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion

    A companion to Character and Opinion in the United States, which returns to the American subject of its closing essay; the rest of the book weighs the philosophies then in fashion, from Bergson to Russell.

     EN
  6. 1915 Egotism in German Philosophy

    Written in Oxford during the First World War, it turns Santayana's long quarrel with idealism into a charge against a national tradition; the realism behind it gets its full statement in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
  7. 1920 Character and Opinion in the United States

    The American sequel to "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" in Winds of Doctrine, and the fullest record Santayana left of his Harvard teachers before his memoirs.

     EN
  8. 1922 Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies

    The short pieces of the English years, standing between the wartime Egotism in German Philosophy and the system that begins the next year with Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
  9. 1923 Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy

    Announced by its subtitle as the doorway to the late system, it sets out the two terms that the four Realms of Being then build on: essence and animal faith.

     EN
  10. 1923 The Unknowable

    One short lecture, given in the year Scepticism and Animal Faith appeared, that carries the book's theory of knowledge into an argument with Herbert Spencer.

     EN
  11. 1925 Dialogues in Limbo

    His philosophy in dialogue form, published in the years between the introduction to his late system and its first volume.

     EN
  12. 1927 Platonism and the Spiritual Life

    Published seven months before the system's first volume, a first sketch of the spiritual life that The Realm of Spirit would treat at length in 1940.

     EN
  13. 1927 The Realm of Essence

    Here the late system proper begins: the first of the four Realms of Being, giving full treatment to the vocabulary introduced in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
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