The Life of Reason by George Santayana (i have read the book TXT) π
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- Author: George Santayana
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Though life, however, is initially experimental and always remains experimental at bottom, yet experiment fortifies certain tendencies and cancels others, so that a gradual sediment of habit and wisdom is formed in the stream of time. Action then ceases to be merely tentative and spontaneous, and becomes art. Foresight begins to accompany practice and, as we say, to guide it. Purpose thus supervenes on useful impulse, and conscious expression on self-sustaining automatism. Art lies between two extremes. On the one side is purely spontaneous fancy, which would never foresee its own works and scarcely recognise or value them after they had been created, since at the next moment the imaginative current would as likely as not have faced about and might be making in the opposite direction; and on the other side is pure utility, which would deprive the work of all inherent ideality, and render it inexpressive of anything in man save his necessities. War, for instance, is an art when, having set itself an ideal end, it devises means of attaining it; but this ideal end has for its chief basis some failure in politics and morals. War marks a weakness and disease in human society, and its best triumphs are glorious evilsβcruel and treacherous remedies, big with new germs of disease. War is accordingly a servile art and not essentially liberal; whatever inherent values its exercise may have would better be realised in another medium. Yet out of the pomp and circumstance of war fine arts may ariseβmusic, armoury, heraldry, and eloquence. So utility leads to art when its vehicle acquires intrinsic value and becomes expressive. On the other hand, spontaneous action leads to art when it acquires a rational function. Thus utterance, which is primarily automatic, becomes the art of speech when it serves to mark crises in experience, making them more memorable and influential through their artificial expression; but expression is never art while it remains expressive to no purpose.
A good way of understanding the fine arts would be to study how they grow, now out of utility, now out of automatism. We should thus see more clearly how they approach their goal, which can be nothing but the complete superposition of these two characters. If all practice were art and all art perfect, no action would remain compulsory and not justified inherently, while no creative impulse would any longer be wasteful or, like the impulse to thrum, symptomatic merely and irrelevant to progress. It is by contributing to the Life of Reason and merging into its substance that art, like religion or science, first becomes worthy of praise. Each element comes from a different quarter, bringing its specific excellence and needing its peculiar purification and enlightenment, by co-ordination with all the others; and this process of enlightenment and purification is what we call development in each department. The meanest arts are those which lie near the limit either of utility or of automatic self-expression. They become nobler and more rational as their utility is rendered spontaneous or their spontaneity beneficent.
The spontaneous arts are older than the useful, since man must live and act before he can devise instruments for living and acting better. Both the power to construct machines and the end which, to be useful, they would have to serve, need to be given in initial impulse. There is accordingly a vast amount of irresponsible play and loose experiment in art, as in consciousness, before these gropings acquire a settled habit and function, and rationality begins. The farther back we go into barbarism the more we find life and mind busied with luxuries; and though these indulgences may repel a cultivated taste and seem in the end cruel and monotonous, their status is really nearer to that of religion and spontaneous art than to that of useful art or of science. Ceremony, for instance, is compulsory in society and sometimes truly oppressive, yet its root lies in self-expression and in a certain ascendency of play which drags all life along into conventional channels originally dug out in irresponsible bursts of action. This occurs inevitably and according to physical analogies. Bodily organs grow automatically and become necessary moulds of life. We must either find a use for them or bear as best we may the idle burden they impose. Of such burdens the barbarian carries the greatest possible sum; and while he paints the heavens with his grotesque mythologies, he encumbers earth with inventions and prescriptions almost as gratuitous. The fiendish dances and shouts, the cruel initiations, mutilations, and sacrifices in which savages indulge, are not planned by them deliberately nor justified in reflection. Men find themselves falling into these practices, driven by a tradition hardly distinguishable from instinct. In its periodic fury the spirit hurries them into wars and orgies, quite as it kindles sudden flaming visions in their brains, habitually so torpid. The spontaneous is the worst of tyrants, for it exercises a needless and fruitless tyranny in the guise of duty and inspiration. Without mitigating in the least the subjection to external forces under which man necessarily labours, it adds a new artificial subjection to his own false steps and childish errors.
This mental vegetation, this fitful nervous groping, is nevertheless a sign of life, out of which art emerges by discipline and by a gradual application to real issues. An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world; he is a highly suggestible mind hypnotised by reality. Even barbaric genius may find points of application in the world. These points will be more numerous the more open the eyes have been, the more docile and intelligent the mind is that gathers and renders back its impressions in a synthetic and ideal form. Intuition will then represent, at least symbolically, an actual situation. Grimace and gesture and ceremony will be modified by a sense of their effect; they will become artful and will transform their automatic expressiveness into ideal expression. They will become significant of what it is intended to communicate and important to know; they will have ceased to be irresponsible exercises and vents for passing feeling, by which feeling is dissipated, as in tears, without being embodied and intellectualised, as in a work of art.
The dance is an early practice that passes after this fashion into an art. A prancing stallion may transfigure his movements more beautifully than man is capable of doing; for the springs and limits of effect are throughout mechanical, and man, in more than one respect, would have to become a centaur before he could rival the horse's prowess. Human instinct is very imperfect in this direction, and grows less happy the more artificial society becomes; most dances, even the savage ones, are somewhat ridiculous. A rudimentary instinct none the less remains, which not only involves a faculty of heightened and rhythmic motion, but also assures a direct appreciation of such motion when seen in others. The conscious agility, fougue, and precision which fill the performer become contagious and delight the spectator as well. There are indeed dances so ugly that, like those of contemporary society, they cannot be enjoyed unless they are shared; they yield pleasures of exercise only, or at best of movement in unison. But when man was nearer to the animal and his body and soul were in happier conjunction, when society, too, was more compulsive over the individual, he could lend himself more willingly and gracefully to being a figure in the general pageant of the world. The dance could then detach itself from its early association with war and courtship and ally itself rather to religion and art. From being a spontaneous vent for excitement, or a blind means of producing it, the dance became a form of discipline and conscious social controlβa cathartic for the soul; and this by a quite intelligible transition. Gesture, of which the dance is merely a pervasive use, is an incipient action. It is conduct in the groping stage, before it has lit on its purpose, as can be seen unmistakably in all the gesticulation of love and defiance. In this way the dance is attached to life initially by its physiological origin. Being an incipient act, it naturally leads to its own completion and may arouse in others the beginnings of an appropriate response. Gesture is only less catching and less eloquent than action itself. But gesture, while it has this power of suggesting action and stimulating the response which would be appropriate if the action took place, may be arrested in the process of execution, since it is incipient only; it will then have revealed an intention and betrayed a state of mind. Thus it will have found a function which action itself can seldom fulfil. When an act is done, indications of what it was to be are superfluous; but indications of possible acts are in the highest degree useful and interesting. In this way gesture assumes the rΓ΄le of language and becomes a means of rational expression. It remains suggestive and imitable enough to convey an idea, but not enough to precipitate a full reaction; it feeds that sphere of merely potential action which we call thought; it becomes a vehicle for intuition.
Under these circumstances, to tread the measures of a sacred dance, to march with an army, to bear one's share in any universal act, fills the heart with a voluminous silent emotion. The massive suggestion, the pressure of the ambient will, is out of all proportion to the present call for action. Infinite resources and definite premonitions are thus stored up in the soul; and merely to have moved solemnly together is the best possible preparation for living afterwards, even if apart, in the consciousness of a general monition and authority.
Parallel to this is the genesis and destiny of music, an art originally closely intertwined with the dance. The same explosive forces that agitate the limbs loosen the voice; hand, foot, and throat mark their wild rhythm together. Birds probably enjoy the pulsation of their singing rather than its sound. Even human music is performed long before it is listened to, and is at first no more an art than sighing. The original emotions connected with it are felt by participation in the performanceβa participation which can become ideal only because, at bottom, it is always actual. The need of exercise and self-expression, the force of contagion and unison, bears the soul along before an artistic appreciation of music arises; and we may still observe among civilised races how music asserts itself without any Γ¦sthetic intent, as when the pious sing hymns in common, or the sentimental, at sea, cannot refrain from whining their whole homely repertory in the moonlight. Here as elsewhere, instinct and habit are phases of the same inner disposition. What has once occurred automatically on a given occasion will be repeated in much the same form when a similar occasion recurs. Thus impulse, reinforced by its own remembered expression, passes into convention. Savages have a music singularly monotonous, automatic, and impersonal; they cannot resist the indulgence, though they probably have little pleasure in it. The same thing happens with customary sounds as with other prescribed ceremonies; to omit them would be
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