DEE WILSON CONSULTING
The Portal of Beauty
This article is the first in a series about different types of value embodied in human experience such as experiences of beauty and the sacred, or moral values created by human societies to foster social cohesion and the value of truth seeking through science and in other ways. I begin with the discussion of beauty, in part because the experience of beauty is found in all cultures and times, at least from the period of early cave art from 30,000-40,000 years ago; and, because the experience of beauty is often so immediate that even some philosophers assume that beauty is a feature of the world that humans discover, rather than contribute to perception, imagination or abstract conceptual structures.
I published a lengthy article titled “Why Is the World Beautiful?” in Essays on Polarity: Big Bang to Human Character (2024). Perhaps it will be useful to concisely summarize the main points of this article, before turning to a discussion of George Santayana’s, The Sense of Beauty (1896), one of the few philosophical discussions of beauty that has (as I do) a naturalistic perspective.
The main themes of my article, “Why Is the World Beautiful?” were:
A) Per Antonio Damasio’s discussion in The Strange Order of Things (2018), all sensory experiences have “affective valence,” i.e., either positive or negative, because they are infused with feelings which “represent mentally the state of life within the organism.” And: “valence translates the conditions of life directly in mental terms, moment to moment. It inevitably reveals the condition as good, bad or somewhere in between … Valence is the defining element of feeling and, by extension, of affect.” The aesthetic dimension of human experience has its foundation in the valence of sensory perception.
B) Objects of desire are often described as beautiful, but it is a mistake to conflate desire with beauty, as humans often find beauty in people, things, situations we do not desire. The perception of beauty may be heightened by a lack of desire that makes appreciative awareness possible.
C) Human awareness has (at least) four modalities: 1) instrumental; 2) appreciative; 3) selfless; 4) dream states. Nevertheless, it is possible to combine instrumental awareness in which persons seek to achieve a practical goal with awareness in which elements of experience are appreciated for their own sake. The capacity for experiencing beauty can be enhanced by bringing an appreciative dimension to how one goes about achieving practical goals.
D) In dramatic art, “it’s possible to view with fascination and pleasure repugnant actions and scenes and morally objectionable behavior of all kinds (and) admire the play, movie, novel or story.” In aesthetic experience, the capacity for appreciative awareness is often made feasible because moral judgment is muted in response to imaginative creations in which the viewer is not called upon to act.
E) Beauty is a portal to the world of spirit in which every perception, every act of attention, every action expresses a value or values of various types. In The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chodron, a Tibetan Buddhist, asserts: “Each of us has in our heart a joy that’s accessible to us … Joy is like a soft spring rain that allows us to open up, to enjoy ourselves, and therefore it’s a whole new way of looking at suffering … That sense of wonder and delight is present in every moment, every step, ever movement of our ordinary lives, if we can connect with it.” Appreciative awareness is as much a birthright as the capacity for instrumental action.
F) Per Damasio, the experience of beauty is a feature of homeostasis: “The development of the genetic apparatus, which helps regulate and transmit to descendants, is not conceivable without homeostasis.” And “homeostasis … is about flourishing, not just about survival.” The experience of beauty is, per Damasio, a dimension of human flourishing.
G) The perception of beauty is a signal of homeostatic flourishing that often reflects the congruence between biological conditions and human needs and well-being, e.g. in beautiful days, weather, flowers, vivid colors, natural wonders such as mountains or the oceans.
H) Culture and social learning have a powerful influence on what kinds of natural phenomena, objects, physical characteristics of people, symbols or art are viewed as beautiful by particular social groups and in different historical eras, but the capacity to experience beauty has a genetic basis with a surprising message: humans have the ability to routinely transcend instrumental goals and delight in the world’s aesthetic qualities. Different cultures shape this capacity in a wide variety of ways.
I) “Some of the messages contained in experiences of beauty are not obvious or culture bound; they hint at depth, mystery, the unknown or abstract truths discussed by philosophers or mathematicians.” When the experience of beauty is not a reflection of physical desire or of immediate well-being, it contains information about conditions propitious for human flourishing.
J) “Sacred symbols and great art reveal the human mind at great depths; our unconscious minds have preoccupations, just as our conscious minds do.” One of those preoccupations is about how to achieve unity of purpose and action out of fragments, a formidable challenge for biological beings with central nervous systems that bring together thousands, millions, billions, or trillions of cells into a unified whole.
K) Artistic creation reflects patterns present in the Big Bang, i.e., the opposition of forces, broken symmetries and dramatic change at the tipping point, while usually striving to overcome the main pattern in a creative cosmos: creation/ destruction at all moments and all scales. However, there is one type of art – Tibetan Buddhist sand art – that replicates the cosmic process by destroying intricate sand paintings requiring months of meticulous work by groups of Buddhist monks soon after the work is completed.
The theory of beauty I have outlined and discussed at length in “Why Is the World Beautiful?” is about the foundation and meaning of the human experience of beauty. It contains a few comments regarding the elements of art often experienced as beautiful, but it is not a theory of aesthetics, i.e., a philosophy of art. Rather, I draw attention to the experience of beauty as a common daily phenomenon, not dependent on art or (usually) an aesthetic milieu.
The Sense of Beauty
The creation of art and the elements that make various artistic compositions beautiful is a vast subject that has been discussed by philosophers for thousands of years, with (in my view) under-whelming results. George Santayana’s, The Sense of Beauty
(1896), is one of the few noteworthy attempts to develop a comprehensive perspective beginning with a naturalistic account of the experience of beauty, followed by development of an aesthetic theory. Santayana has much insightful to say about both the human experience of beauty and the common elements found in beautiful art.
Santayana was born in Spain but spent much of his childhood and adult life in the U.S. He attended Harvard where he was a student and later a colleague of William James and other famous pragmatist philosophers. He had many famous students such as T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein and was a close friend of the poet, Wallace Stevens. He was an atheist who described himself as an “aesthetic Catholic”; and was cared for by nuns during the last years of his life.
Santayana was famous for his aphorisms such as his description of fanaticism: “redoubling your efforts after forgetting your goal;” and “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Wikipedia comments that The Sense of Beauty is sometimes described as the first book on aesthetic theory published in the U.S. It continues to be noteworthy because of Santayana’s grasp of the fundamentals of aesthetic experience.
Santayana begins with the assertion: “The philosophy of beauty is a theory of values.” (p.11) Santayana emphasizes the importance of a definition of beauty that sheds light on “why, when and how beauty appears, what conditions and object must fill to be beautiful, and what the relation is between the constitution of the object and the excitement of our susceptibility.” (p. 11) Santayana considers the possibility of “beings of a purely intellectual cast, minds in which the transformations of nature were mirrored without any emotion.” (p. 13) Per my theory outlined above, these intellectual beings might be interested only in the utility of actions, objects or processes, but “all this would happen without a shadow of desire, or pleasure or regret. … In this case, as if consciousness were absent altogether, all value and excellence would be gone. So that for the existence of good in any form it is not merely consciousness but emotional consciousness that is needed. Observation will not do, appreciation is required.” (p. 13)
Santayana goes on to assert that, per Spinoza, “we desire nothing because it is good, but it is good only because we desire it.” (p. 13) I view this contention as false regarding both the experience of beauty and moral values as well. What separates some experiences of beauty from others is that some clearly reflect desire, while others reflect pleasure in the absence of desiring something for oneself. Santayana argues that “the supposed disinterestedness of aesthetic delights is not very fundamental” because appreciation of a picture “is or ought to be closely related and preliminary” to the desire to own it,” (p.25) which leads to the absurd idea that “Every real pleasure is in some sense disinterested.” (p.25)
Santayana’s theory that “pleasure is beauty objectified” does not acknowledge the distinction between selfish desire and disinterested pleasure. He rarely speculates regarding the source of pleasure in the perception of beauty. In his theory, the pleasure of beauty is grounded in well understood human physical, social and emotional desires, leaving him free to focus discussion on the elements of beautiful things and on the relationship between feelings and the experience of beauty.
Santayana maintains that “It is evident that beauty is a species of value” and “Values spring from the immediate and inexplicable reaction of vital impulse, and from the irrational part of our nature.”
(p.14) Aesthetic enjoyment is a type of play; activities humans do for its own sake. In Santayana’s view, all ultimate values are aesthetic in the sense that they are intrinsically good, rather than good because they lead to a good outcome. He writes: “The appreciation of beauty and its embodiment in the arts are activities which belong to our holiday life,” (p. 17) something humans do for its own sake.
And: “For it is in the spontaneous play of his faculties that man finds himself and his happiness.” (p. 19) Santayana insists: “… the representative or practical value of a principle is one thing, and its intrinsic or aesthetic value is another.” (p. 23)
Pleasure in perception, understanding or contemplation “are intrinsic and positive values, but all pleasures are not perceptions of beauty,” (p. 23) Santayana asserts. He continues: “The bodily pleasures are those least resembling perceptions of beauty.” (p. 23) Santayana argues that “there is a very marked distinction between physical and aesthetic pleasure, the organs of the latter … must not intercept our attention but carry it directly to some external object.” (p. 24) For this reason, the pleasure of touch and smell can be wonderful, but they are not amenable to aesthetic creation in the same way as vision and sound. Santayana’s appreciation of the visual arts is greater than his appreciation of music, which has an influence on his aesthetic theory.
To summarize: for Santayana beauty is a species of value that embodies immediate pleasure for its own sake and that leads us to attend carefully to and appreciate an object or objects outside ourselves. Powerful physical pleasures that maintain full attention on the body destroy beauty rather than enhance it, Santayana believes. This is the only type of disinterestedness in aesthetic experience he acknowledges.
Santayana scoffs at claims for the universality of beauty. He asserts:
“Nothing has less to do with the real merit of a work of imagination than the capacity of all men to appreciate it; the true test is the degree and kind of satisfaction it can give to him who appreciates it most.” (p. 28) Santayana returns to the theme that beauty is a value:
“… it cannot be conceived as an independent existence which affects our senses and which we consequently perceive.” (p. 29) He argues: “A beauty not perceived is a beauty not felt, and a contradiction” (p. 28) “Beauty is an emotional element, a pleasure of ours, which nevertheless we regard as a quality of things.” (p. 29) “Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.”
Santayana makes a distinction between the pleasures of sense and the perception of beauty while allowing that “there is no sharp line between them, but it depends on the degree of objectivity my feeling has attained at the moment …” (p. 32) Beauty, Santayana believes,
“is constituted by the objectification of pleasure. It is pleasure objectified.” (p. 32)
The elements of beauty in Santayana’s theory of aesthetics
The Sense of Beauty is only 168 pages in length including the index.
Chapter 3, “Form”, is 64 pages long, more than a third of the book. Santayana asserts: “The most remarkable and characteristic problem of aesthetics is that of beauty of form.” (p. 53) He makes a strict distinction between sensuous beauty “like that of color” which in his view fully explains the “charm we feel” in some objects and form “where sensible elements, by themselves indifferent, are so united as to please in combination.” (p. 53)
Visual art often includes objects represented in space. Santayana discusses the physiology of why some geometric objects, e.g. circles, straight lines, may appear beautiful while others are commonly experienced as ugly.
Santayana discusses the importance of symmetry and broken symmetries in the experience of beauty which I wrote about in “Why Is the World Beautiful?” Santayana asserts that the humans are more sensitive to bilateral symmetry than to vertical symmetry because “the eyes and head do not so readily survey objects from top to bottom as from side to side.” And: “The comfort and economy that comes from muscular balance in the eye, is therefore in some cases the source of the value of symmetry.” (p. 59)
According to Santayana, the beauty of symmetry depends on the individuation of recurring elements: “By the emphasis which it lays upon the recurring elements, it cuts up the field into determinate units.” He asserts: “we choose what symmetrical lines we find to be the boundaries of objects, … their symmetry is the condition of their unity.” (p. 59) Santayana asserts: “Unity would thus appear to be the virtue of forms.” (p. 61)
In his discussion of symmetry, Santayana outlines the underlying principle of the beauty of form: “The parts, thus coalescing, form a single object, the unity and simplicity of which are based on the rhythm and correspondence of its elements.” (p. 59) The experience of beauty in many arts derives, it seems, with bringing discrete elements into a harmonious whole. I have stated above that this is a necessary condition to homeostatic flourishing in living things, i.e., the parts must work together toward a common goal decided by social networks of cells or central nervous systems. (Damasio, 2019)
It is a noteworthy feature of art that groundbreaking original work (in its era) is likely to be a product of broken symmetries, because, per Santayana, after much repetition “it produces monotony in the various views, rather than unity in any one of them.” (p. 60) Great artists motivate viewers, listeners, readers, to look at the world anew, attend to new musical harmonies or listen to a story told in a new way. However, what all great art does is create its themes through careful attention to discrete elements. Interesting ideas in art do not work in the absence of careful and inspired attention to specific objects and details. In my view, it’s more aesthetically interesting to read a short story with memorable characters in a few well described interactions than to read stories or novels with a fascinating big idea or two but flat dull characters whose internal dialogue is conventional and without novelty.
Santayana insists that “Beauty of form …is what specifically appeals to an aesthetic nature.” (p. 60) Furthermore, “The synthesis, then, which constitutes form is an activity of the mind, the unity arises consciously …” unlike sensuous beauty whose “charm” is immediate and not dependent on conscious appreciation. Santayana asserts that form is sometimes considered beautiful because it approximates a cultural ideal, e.g., of a beautiful body. Ideal forms, in his view, do not exist in a Platonic universe but are completely dependent on human experience. He states: “It is enough that a given characteristic should be generally present in our experience, for it to become an indispensable element of the ideal. There is nothing beautiful or necessary in the shape of the human ear, or in the presence of nails on the fingers and toes; but the ideal of man … requires these precise details; without them the human form would be repulsively ugly.” (p. 76)
The form of objects, e.g. tools, which are ideally designed for a specific purpose are sometimes viewed as beautiful by those who use them, Santayana maintains. Machines can be beautiful instances of their type. Athletes in almost every sport perform beautiful actions in competition. In athletics, beautiful actions and entire performances are effective, graceful, often intelligent deployment of difficult to acquire skills. Fans who follow a sport closely marvel at the skills of the outstanding athletes they admire.
Santayana’s most interesting and valuable idea regarding the beauty of form is the extent to which it is often dependent on the knowledge of an observer. Santayana asserts: “… the world is so much more beautiful to a poet or artist than to an ordinary man.” (p. 77) Poets are more discerning and often more critical of specific poems or poets than non-poets, as “only the very best gives him unalloyed satisfaction. … The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things.” Nevertheless, “… the world itself, and the various natures it contains are, to him, unspeakably beautiful.” (p. 77)
Curiously, Santayana does not make the point that one of the rewards of deep knowledge is often an enhanced sense of beauty of the objects of study, i.e., specific animals, plants, ecosystems, bodily organs, the physics of stars, as well as mathematical proofs and scientific theories. Einstein allegedly insisted that he had no worries regarding scientific tests of his General Theory of Relativity because the theory was so beautiful! Deep knowledge of any subject includes an understanding of unifying theory and extensive knowledge regarding a wealth of details and elements known only to experts. There is a strong indication of appreciation of beauty in many books on scientific subjects.
Santayana’s sense of beauty
Santayana states: “Whenever beauty is really seen and loved, it has definite embodiment, the eye has precision, the work has style, and the object has perfection.” (p. 93) He has much critical to say regarding “the indeterminate in form” by which he means art that serves as a projection of audience fantasies, feelings and speculation that draws attention away from the beautiful object. He insists: “a formless object cannot inform the mind” (p. 90) and the indeterminate is by its nature ambiguous.” Santayana maintains: “In literature…: “Indeterminateness of form is fatal to beauty … because words have limited sensuous value. Santayana cites Emerson’s essays, romanticism and some types of landscape painting as examples of indeterminateness of form.
Santayana loved Greek mythology, Greek drama and art and Shakespeare. He asserts that “the highest aesthetic good … is the greatest number and variety of finite perfections.” In his view, to appreciate beauty in art requires careful attention to details and objects. In Santayana’s thinking, pleasure is always in the background of the experience of beauty, but it is conscious appreciative attention to objects that enhances experience of the beautiful i.e. “the slowly enriched apperception of the object.”
(p. 95)
Santayana does not much to say regarding music though he acknowledges its sensuous values. He does not offer an explanation for why sound is so easily combined with many different feelings. Music communicates affect more easily and quickly than any other type of art but why this is so is not clear. Unfortunately, there is no answer in The Sense of Beauty.
Santayana on the literary arts
Santayana was a man of letters with broad philosophical interests and with a deep appreciation of the arts. He wrote extensively about religion. His works include Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante and Goethe (1910) and a novel, The Last Puritan (1935). He was most at home in the literary arts, and so what he has to say about literature in The Sense of Beauty is of special importance in understanding his aesthetic theory.
Santayana asserts that “… language is primarily a sort of music, and the beautiful effects which it produces are due primarily to its own structure …” (p. 104) He divides poets into two classes: the musicians and the psychologists. He states: “The first are masters of significant language as harmony … they can produce, by the marshalling of sounds and images, by the fugue of passion and snap of wit, a thousand brilliant effects out of old materials.” (pp. 104-105) Dramatic poets, on the other hand, depend more on insight into human character and human affairs, he asserts.
Santayana maintains that poetry cannot be reduced to the meaning of words, and that “The character of the tongue a man speaks, and the degree of his skill in speaking it, must always count enormously in the aesthetic value of his compositions.” (p. 109)
Santayana preferred ancient languages to modern ones because of their syntax: “The beauty given to the ancients by the syntax of their language, the moderns can only attain by the combination of their rhymes.” (p. 109) “Our modern languages are not susceptible of great formal beauty,” he believed. And: “Greek is probably the best of all languages in melody, rhythm, elasticity and simplicity…” (p. 106) For reasons that are unclear (at least to me) he questions whether modern writers are capable “of making a gem of every prose sentence” (p. 107) due to the inherent limitations of the languages in which they write.
Santayana has much of interest to say about character in human life and in the dramatic arts, beginning with the observation that “… character can never be observed in the world except as manifested in action. Indeed, it would be more fundamentally accurate to say that character is a symbol and mental abbreviation for a peculiar set of acts, than to say acts are a manifestation of character.” (p. 109)
It is not difficult to imagine Santayana’s disdain for the common perspective of most modern novelists (regardless of talent) that character is a reflection of conscious and unconscious awareness.
Santayana asserts that great writers such as Shakespeare “elaborate and develop … the suggestion of human individuality which that plot contains.” He argues that the great characters of poetry – a Hamlet, Don Quixote, an Achilles – are no averages, they are not even salient traits common to certain classes of men. They seem to be persons, that is their actions and words seem to spring from the inward nature of an individual soul.” Through the creation of such characters, Santayana maintains, “fiction here that is (i.e. becomes) the standard of naturalness,” so that “we may repeat the saying that poetry is truer than history.” (p.110) Perhaps another way of saying what Santayana is suggesting is that the strikingly unforgettable individuality of famous fictional characters suggests a way of being in the world that no description of average behavior can attain. In this view, it is the dramatic arts that have shaped the idea of what it is to be a fully realized person, not the sciences.
Santayana believed that literature flourishes because “From the gods to the characters if comedy, all are, in proportion to their beauty, natural and exhilarating expressions of all human activity.”
He asserts that humans are fascinated with their possibilities. He states: “we constantly dream of new situations, extravagant adventures, and exaggerated passions” (p. 113) though in daily life we are usually stuck in “a narrow channel.” And: “There seems to be a boundless capacity for development in each of us… We are full of sympathy for every manifestation of life.” (p. 113) Regarding great imaginative writers, he states: “And they of course have beauty, because in them is embodied the greatest of our imaginative delights – that of giving body to our latent capacities, and of wandering without the strain and contradiction of actual existence, into all forms of possible being.” (p. 114)
Surprisingly, Santayana has nothing to say regarding the motivating force of conflict - interpersonal, intrapsychic, tribal, national, political – in the dramatic arts. Dramatic works of art are always about some type of human conflict; without this element, stories, novels, plays, movies, cannot hold readers’ attention for longer than a few moments. It is not an exaggeration to say that the goal of dramatic literature is to explore human conflict in its multiple dimensions, and to help readers and viewers come to grips with the ubiquity of conflict and its various resolutions. Yet, Santayana, whose knowledge of ancient literature was encyclopedic, missed this theme entirely.
The aesthetic frame
Toward the end of The Sense of Beauty, Santayana returns to the question of how contemplation of evil and the grotesque can be so
prominent in the dramatic arts without compromising the experience of beauty. How can there actually be great novels and movies about war, the holocaust, murders, crime families, prisons, slavery, mental illness, drug addiction, etc.? He argues that “the spectacle of evil must never be allowed to overpower these pleasures of contemplation …” Contrary to a large body of evidence, he maintains that “Nothing but the good of life enters into the texture of the beautiful.” (p. 159) And: “The description or suggestion of suffering may have a worth as a science or discipline but can never in itself enhance any beauty.” (p. 158) This is breathtakingly false. Much great dramatic art derives its power from the contemplation of suffering and/ or evil, though Santayana is surely right that this exposure must be combined with other elements of beauty.
Aesthetic experience differs from either experience in one major regard, i.e., there is no need to act and even the tendency to moral disapproval is greatly relaxed. Aesthetic experience has a frame, which is to contemplate and imagine, not to take action. There are many great novelists and movie directors whose steady gaze at evil occurs within a clearly implied moral framework. Nevertheless, their depiction of horrific violence (within limits) increases the emotional impact of their work to an extreme degree.
The sense of beauty in art is tied to the aesthetic frame, and so reflects aesthetic values rather than moral values. The employment of appreciative awareness enhances aesthetic values such as bringing discordant elements into a harmonious whole. The question of whether the aesthetic appreciation of evil and suffering harms the moral imagination and moral character is an important one. Plato thought it did, and it seems that Santayana might be in partial agreement with him.
Summary
Santayana maintains that the sense of beauty is enhanced when appreciative attention is drawn out of an awareness of pleasure through careful attention to an object. In his view, great art has an intellectual component embodied in form and strengthened through exquisite details. I doubt that he would have celebrated the exploration of consciousness and of mind as a whole which has become common in fiction since The Sense of Beauty was published. Appreciative attention to detail is Santayana’s version of disinterestedness, though he does not say this directly.
Santayana’s aesthetic theory continues to be of great interest because it is grounded in a naturalistic perspective, recognizes that beauty is a value contributed to perception by the human mind and because his theory is a rare philosophical work that attempts to show how the human mind creates beauty. Unfortunately, he does not discuss the philosophical implications of viewing perception as a creative act and the embodiment of values as a goal and strategy of biological evolution. ©
Dee Wilson
June 2025