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Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light but making the darkness conscious.
Carl Gustav Jung
Santayana and The Sense of Beauty
It has been more than 30 years since I read Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty. Yet, even today, when I look long enough, I see with his eyes. “But the eye finds in nature, and in some supreme achievements of art, constant and fuller satisfaction. For the eye is quick, and seems to have been more docile to the education of life than the heart or the reason of man, and able sooner to adapt itself to the reality.” “Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.” OK, he was something of a button-pushing reductionist, but he sure could write. In this same work, he calls the mind a fluid — lights and shadows that flicker with no boundaries or permanence. Impermanent perhaps, but his words still flicker in my increasingly more fluid and less permanent mind.
Much later in life, he confessed that the book was a “wretched potboiler” written to keep his professorship at Harvard — I think I have heard that one before. But, the book’s observations of aesthetic psychology give encouragement to naturalism, and a pragmatic view that beauty resides in us, not the object, though we are never independent from nature. It is no retreat when he says that the sense of beauty has no parts to examine and is an ineffable experience that cannot be fully described. We still attempt to eff the ineffable, of course. If Santayana is right, the sense of beauty is much more than a thing poorly described, it is the human condition.
TJ
