Since choosing the name Beautiful Wisdom for my Substack earlier this year, I have focused more on wisdom and less on beauty. That might be changing, for several reasons: I've been getting deeper into musical composition, theory, and performance; I've been souring on speculative logorrhea; and in some of my recent readings on aesthetics I've been disappointed with philosophical accounts of beauty.
A case in point regarding the latter is George Santayana's 1896 classic The Sense of Beauty. I hasten to mention that I am just getting started with Santayana's vast oeuvre, so I might be misreading him. Unfortunately, right now I find his underlying account of beauty and the arts to be implausible. To wit, Santayana claims that beauty is (aesthetic) pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing: when a person says that an object or experience is beautiful, all they really mean is that it gives them a purely subjective pleasure - which they then shift, with absolutely no justification, onto the object itself and its perceptually salient features (such as color, symmetry, and form). It's almost a kind of aesthetic emotivism; if I say that Michelangelo's David is beautiful, all I really mean is "David Yum!"
If Santayana's account were true, then I could not call something beautiful if I didn't enjoy it, and I could not enjoy something if it weren't beautiful. However, in my experience both of these paradoxical phenomena are not only possible but quite common.
As an example of the first paradox, I recognize that objectively speaking the music of Mozart is quite beautiful: classically balanced, highly melodic, endlessly inventive, and so on. Yet subjectively speaking I concur with Glenn Gould's assessment that most of Mozart's music is so much musical prattle. You might counter that evidently I must be a musical boor: even though I could converse for hours about the wonders of, say, Bach's Cello Suites or Fauré's Nocturnes, I simply should enjoy Mozart. But this aesthetic imperative is even less legitimate than the moral imperatives of Kant or the Stoics.
As an example of the second paradox, I adore the music and, yes, even the singing of Bob Dylan. More evidence of my boorishness! Objectively speaking Dylan's vocal stylings are, at best, an acquired taste; at worst, they are downright grating. Here again you might assert that I simply shouldn't enjoy Dylan's music because it's not beautiful, whereas I again would simply ignore your aesthetic imperatives.
In line with my thoroughgoing particularism, my aesthetic experience is dependent on the individual work at hand, not some hard-and-fast policy that overrides the evidence of my ears and heart. For instance, I'd rather hear Mozart's horn concertos than Dylan's "Idiot Wind" (which to my ear is a decidedly ugly rant set to music).
Where does this leave Santayana? Even though I am not convinced by the foundations of his aesthetic theory, The Sense of Beauty contains numerous insights into aesthetic experience, which I am eagerly absorbing as I seek to form my own account of what I'm calling philokalia or the love and practice of beauty.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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