The Life of Reason by George Santayana (i have read the book TXT) π
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Art thus has its casuistry no less than morals, and philosophers in the future, if man should at last have ceased to battle with ghosts, might be called upon to review material civilisation from its beginnings, testing each complication by its known ultimate fruits and reaching in this way a purified and organic ideal of human industry, an ideal which education and political action might help to embody. If nakedness or a single garment were shown to be wholesomer and more agreeable than complicated clothes, weavers and tailors might be notably diminished in number. If, in another quarter, popular fancy should sicken at last of its traditional round of games and fictions, it might discover infinite entertainment in the play of reality and truth, and infinite novelties to be created by fruitful labour; so that many a pleasure might be found which is now clogged by mere apathy and unintelligence. Human genius, like a foolish Endymion, lies fast asleep amid its opportunities, wasting itself in dreams and disinheriting itself by negligence.
Descriptive economy, however, will have to make great progress before the concrete ethics of art can be properly composed. History, conceived hitherto as a barbarous romance, does not furnish sufficient data by which the happiness of life under various conditions may be soberly estimated. Politics has receded into the region of blind impulse and factional interests, and would need to be reconstituted before it could approach again that scientific problem which Socrates and his great disciples would have wished it to solve. Meantime it may not be premature to say something about another factor in practical philosophy, namely, the ultimate interests by which industrial arts and their products have to be estimated. Even before we know the exact effects of an institution we can fix to some extent the purposes which, in order to be beneficent, it will have to subserve, although in truth such antecedent fixing of aims cannot go far, seeing that every operation reacts on the organ that executes it, thereby modifying the ideal involved. Doubtless the most industrial people would still wish to be happy and might accordingly lay down certain principles which its industry should never transgress, as for instance that production should at any price leave room for liberty, leisure, beauty, and a spirit of general co-operation and goodwill. But a people once having become industrial will hardly be happy if sent back to Arcadia; it will have formed busy habits which it cannot relax without tedium; it will have developed a restlessness and avidity which will crave matter, like any other kind of hunger. Every experiment in living qualifies the initial possibilities of life, and the moralist would reckon without his host if he did not allow for the change which forced exercise makes in instinct, adjusting it more or less to extant conditions originally, perhaps, unwelcome. It is too late for the highest good to prescribe flying for quadrupeds or peace for the sea waves.
What antecedent interest does mechanical art subserve? What is the initial and commanding ideal of life by which all industrial developments are to be proved rational or condemned as vain? If we look to the most sordid and instrumental of industries we see that their purpose is to produce a foreordained result with the minimum of effort. They serve, in a word, to cheapen commodities. But the value of such an achievement is clearly not final; it hangs on two underlying ideals, one demanding abundance in the things produced and the other diminution in the toil required to produce them. At least the latter interest may in turn be analysed further, for to diminish toil is itself no absolute good; it is a good only when such diminution in one sphere liberates energies which may be employed in other fields, so that the total human accomplishment may be greater. Doubtless useful labour has its natural limits, for if overdone any activity may impair the power of enjoying both its fruits and its operation. Yet in so far as labour can become spontaneous and in itself delightful it is a positive benefit; and to its intrinsic value must be added all those possessions or useful dispositions which it may secure. Thus one idealβto diminish labourβfalls back into the otherβto diffuse occasions for enjoyment. The aim is not to curtail occupation but rather to render occupation liberal by supplying it with more appropriate objects.
It is then liberal life, fostered by industry and commerce or involved in them, that alone can justify these instrumental pursuits. Those philosophers whose ethics is nothing but sentimental physics like to point out that happiness arises out of work and that compulsory activities, dutifully performed, underlie freedom. Of course matter or force underlies everything; but rationality does not accrue to spirit because mechanism supports it; it accrues to mechanism in so far as spirit is thereby called into existence; so that while values derive existence only from their causes, causes derive value only from their results. Functions cannot be exercised until their organs exist and are in operation, so that what is primary in the order of genesis is always last and most dependent in the order of worth. The primary substance of things is their mere material; their first cause is their lowest instrument. Matter has only the values of the forms which it assumes, and while each stratification may create some intrinsic ideal and achieve some good, these goods are dull and fleeting in proportion to their rudimentary character and their nearness to protoplasmic thrills. Where reason exists life cannot, indeed, be altogether slavish; for any operation, however menial and fragmentary, when it is accompanied by ideal representation of the ends pursued and by felt success in attaining them, becomes a sample and anagram of all freedom. Nevertheless to arrest attention on a means is really illiberal, though not so much by what such an interest contains as by what it ignores. Happiness in a treadmill is far from inconceivable; but for that happiness to be rational the wheel should be nothing less than the whole sky from which influences can descend upon us. There would be meanness of soul in being content with a smaller sphere, so that not everything that was relevant to our welfare should be envisaged in our thoughts and purposes. To be absorbed by the incidental is the animal's portion; to be confined to the instrumental is the slave's. For though within such activity there may be a rational movement, the activity ends in a fog and in mere physical drifting. Happiness has to be begged of fortune or found in mystical indifference: it is not yet subtended by rational art.
The Aristotelian theory of slavery, in making servile action wholly subservient, sins indeed against persons, but not against arts. It sins against persons because there is inconsiderate haste in asserting that whole classes of men are capable of no activities, except the physical, which justify themselves inherently. The lower animals also have physical interests and natural emotions. A man, if he deserves the name, must be credited with some rational capacity: prospect and retrospect, hope and the ideal portraiture of things, must to some extent employ him. Freedom to cultivate these interests is then his inherent right. As the lion vindicates his prerogative to ferocity and dignity, so every rational creature vindicates his prerogative to spiritual freedom. But a too summary classification of individuals covers, in Aristotle, a just discrimination among the arts. In so far as a man's occupation is merely instrumental and justified only externally, he is obviously a slave and his art at best an evil necessity. For the operation is by hypothesis not its own end; and if the product, needful for some ulterior purpose, had been found ready made in nature, the other and self-justifying activities could have gone on unimpeded, without the arrest or dislocation which is involved in first establishing the needful conditions for right action. If air had to be manufactured, as dwellings must be, or breathing to be learned like speech, mankind would start with an even greater handicap and would never have come within sight of such goals as it can now pursue. Thus all instrumental and remedial arts, however indispensable, are pure burdens; and progress consists in abridging them as much as is possible without contracting the basis for moral life.
This needful abridgment can take place in two directions. The art may become instinctive, unconscious of the utility that backs it and conscious only of the solicitation that leads it on. In that measure human nature is adapted to its conditions; lessons long dictated by experience are actually learned and become hereditary habits. So inclination to hunt and fondness for nursing children have passed into instincts in the human race; and what if it were a forced art would be servile, by becoming spontaneous has risen to be an ingredient in ideal life; for sport and maternity are human ideals. In an opposite direction servile arts may be abridged by a lapse of the demand which required them. The servile art of vine-dressers, for instance, would meet such a fate if the course of history, instead of tending to make the vintage an ideal episode and to create worshippers of Bacchus and Priapus, tended rather to bring about a distaste for wine and made the whole industry superfluous. This solution is certainly less happy than the other, insomuch as it suppresses a function instead of taking it up into organic life; yet life to be organic has to be exclusive and finite; it has to work out specific tendencies in a specific environment; and therefore to surrender a particular impeded impulse may involve a clear gain, if only a compensating unimpeded good thereby comes to light elsewhere. If wine disappeared, with all its humane and symbolic consecrations, that loss might bring an ultimate gain, could some less treacherous friend of frankness and merriment be thereby brought into the world.
In practice servile art is usually mitigated by combining these two methods; the demand subserved, being but ill supported, learns to restrain itself and be less importunate; while at the same time habit renders the labour which was once unwilling largely automatic, and even overlays it with ideal associations. Human nature is happily elastic; there is hardly a need that may not be muffled or suspended, and hardly an employment that may not be relieved
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