Continuing my reflections on Santayana's aesthetics, I've been thinking about the contemplative significance of the arts. It's no surprise that this connection would stand out for me, given the contemplative turn I have been exploring over the last few years. I would never claim that art serves only a contemplative function, for as I mentioned in a paper I wrote twenty years ago art can do many things. Yet I think Santayana identifies something important when he observes that aesthetic experience can settle the soul, enable us to stand outside the confusions of our ephemeral existence, and bring us inner peace.
In addition to passages previously mentioned, I find Santayana's contrast between the beautiful and the sublime to be apropos:
[T]he sublime is not the ugly, as some descriptions of it might lead us to suppose; it is the supremely, the intoxicatingly beautiful. It is the pleasure of contemplation reaching such an intensity that it begins to lose its objectivity, and to declare itself, what it always fundamentally was, an inward passion of the soul. For while in the beautiful we find the perfection of life by sinking into the object, in the sublime we find a purer and more inalienable perfection by defying the object altogether. The surprised enlargement of vision, the sudden escape from our ordinary interests and the identification of ourselves with something permanent and superhuman, something much more abstract and inalienable than our changing personality, all this carries us away from the blurred objects before us, and raises us into a sort of ecstasy.... The object is sublime when we forget our danger, when we escape from ourselves altogether, and live as it were in the object itself, energizing in imitation of its movement, and saying, "Be thou me, impetuous one!" This passage into the object, to live its life, is indeed a characteristic of all perfect contemplation. But when in thus translating ourselves we rise and play a higher personage, feeling the exhilaration of a life freer and wilder than our own, then the experience is one of sublimity. ~ The Sense of Beauty, §60
Earlier in the same section, Santayana wrote as follows:
This is the attitude of all minds to which breadth of interest or length of years has brought balance and dignity. The sacerdotal quality of old age comes from this same sympathy in disinterestedness. Old men full of hurry and passion appear as fools, because we understand that their experience has not left enough mark upon their brain to qualify with the memory of other goods any object that may be now presented. We cannot venerate any one in whom appreciation is not divorced from desire. And this elevation and detachment of the heart need not follow upon any great disappointment; it is finest and sweetest where it is the gradual fruit of many affections now merged and mellowed into a natural piety. Indeed, we are able to frame our idea of the Deity on no other model. ~ The Sense of Beauty, §60
As I explored in an essay I wrote years ago, the great pianist Glenn Gould made some comparable claims when he argued in favor of "ecstasy as the only proper quest for the artist", a notion which he explained this way:
I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity. Through the ministrations of radio and the phonograph, we are rapidly and quite properly learning to appreciate the elements of aesthetic narcissism - and I use that word in its best sense - and are awakening to the challenge that each man contemplatively create his own divinity. ~ The Glenn Gould Reader, p. 246
Is it only the more quiet, meditative works of art that induce this "state of wonder and serenity"? My own experience leads me to think that's not necessarily the case. It's true that, because I am a contemplative sort of person, I happen to be partial to such works (musical examples include Bach's Cello Suites, Erik Satie's Gymnopedies, Billy Strayhorn's Lotus Blossom, and Joni Mitchell's Blue album); however, I experience just as much wonder, albeit of a different sort, in listening to rousing, energetic pieces of music such as Antonin Dvořak's New World Symphony, Duke Ellington's Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue, Yes's Close to the Edge, and the upbeat songs of Aretha Franklin. Similar considerations apply to novels, poems, paintings, and other art forms.
Riffing on Gould, we might say the key is not whether a work of art produces a dramatic explosion or a slow burn, but whether it sparks a fire in the first place; and that depends on the intensity with which it concentrates the light of truth so as to generate a memorably vivid image of the ideal.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION