Wrapping up Beauty, and Unwrapping Our Personal Theories of Value

Today we tackled what many students found to be a dense and confusing text… George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty. I encouraged members to consider Santayana’s first two principles, that (1) the philosophy of beauty is a theory of values, and (2) preference is ultimately irrational. Here are two excerpts:

"A definition [of beauty] that should really define must be nothing less than the exposition of the origin, place3, and elements of beauty as an object of human experience. We must learn from it, as far as possible, why, when, and how beauty appears, what conditions an object must fulfill to be beautiful, what elements of our nature make us sensible to beauty, and what the relation is between the constitution of the object and the excitement of our susceptibility. Nothing less will really define beauty or make us understand what aesthetic appreciation is (p19-20)."

"We may therefore at once assert this axiom, important for all moral philosophy and fatal to certain stubborn incoherences of thought, that there is no value apart from some appreciation of it, and no good apart from some preference of it before its absence or its opposite. In appreciation, in preference, lies the root and essence of all excellence. Or, as Spinoza clearly expresses it, we desire nothing because it is good, but it is good only because we desire it (p23)."

Open responses are welcome… but I’m particularly interested in whether our discussion on the topic has helped you begin to understand the personal values that are manifest in your own sense of beauty.