Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 16 Fall 1998

              Santayana's Troubled Distinction:
Aesthetics and Ethics
in The Sense of Beauty
Santayana develops what he considers to be an architectonic based on naturalistic
principles; as such, his normative philosophies are loosely grounded in
physiological well-being.1 In The Sense of Beauty, then, Santayana distinguishes
between aesthetics and ethics not according to their different grounds of justification but
their different ways of achieving the same material goods: aesthetics deals with "value
positive, intrinsic, and objectified," while ethical judgments recognize value negative,
extrinsic, and subjective.2 Despite his attempt to maintain meaningful differences
between the two disciplines, however, the distinction is blurred in Santayana's early
writings: neither is fundamentally intrinsic or extrinsic, both are objective, and aesthetics
is primarily neither positive or negative. Because he cannot justifiably maintain the
differences that he outlines in The Sense of Beauty, Santayana must abandon this
artificial distinction and ultimately classify aesthetics as a mere subdivision of ethics.
I. Santayana's Moral Theory
Vowing to treat life as a "practical predicament," Santayana formulates a
Hobbeslan metaethics based on self-preservation as a primal drive underlying all morally
relevant action.3 Instinctual demands determine what the individual ought to do in order
to achieve the greatest possible good, which according to Santayana is the orchestration
of desires rationally prioritized. Individual happiness as the end of all moral actions
results from the harmonious balance among opposed desires and between internal
demands and external constraints on desire-satisfaction.4 The most rational life is thus
the maximal achievement of desired ends both individually and within a community of
like persons; a being's rational capabilities "function in rendering that body's volatile
instincts and sensations harmonious with one another and with the outer world on which
they depend."5 This relation of man to his environment and of man to himself, when
fully realized, occasions what Santayana calls spirit,6 the state of human development
1 The author is indebted to Ted Cohen and Cynthia Coe for helpful comments on drafts of this
paper.
2 The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Dover Publications,
1955), 31. To be cited as SB.
3 "rjewey's Naturalistic Metaphysics/* in Obiter Scripta; Lectures, Essays and Reviews, ed.
Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz, 213-40 (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1936), 228. TTie paper
was originally published in The Journal of Philosophy 22, no. 25 (3 December 1925): 673-88.
"Dewey's Naturalistic Metaphysics" will be cited as DNM. Obiter Scripta will be cited as OS.
4 Santayana never folly explores the difficult relationship between pleasure, happiness, and self-
preservation, except to assume that some measure of survival is evidenced by more immediate feeling.
5 Reason in Common Sense f vol. 1 of The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress
(New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1905), 40. The former is cited as ml, the latter as lit
6 This ultimate expression of practical maneuvering, this balancing of internal forces and outer
impositions, Santayana calls spirit "spirituality marks a devotion to selected ideal ends, guided by and
based on piety or a recognition of and loyalty to the necessary material forces of life and nature" (Milton