Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 11 Fall 1993

              A Sometime Companion
Insightful and deft are die words that come to mind as one reads the foregoing
essay by Thomas Alexander on Santayana's aesthetics. Alexander's paper can be
seen as a seminal piece, for it has hints and leads that send us in helpful new
directions and intriguing byways. Approached otherwise, Alexander's essay can be
viewed as a revisiting of the antique and never-to-be-resolved philosophical tension in
the comparative positions of Heraclitus and Parmenides, played out by Alexander,
mutatis mutandis, between Santayana and John Dewey.1
As is well known, we have a surface conflict as well as some acrimonious attitudes
operative in the long-standing relationship between die persons and thought of
Santayana and Dewey. Yet, given reflection on Alexander's version of the apparent
conflict between the positions of Santayana and Dewey, I offer the possibility of a
helpful rescue mission, that is, one which takes their respective contentions as due to
focus, personal style and the consequent aesthetic sensibility. Put differently, perhaps
what we find in this comparison is a difference in 'shading' rather than in 'ground'.
We can say of Santayana's aesthetics, as we can say of his person, that they evoke
a response which points to die fey, the effete and a style that reaches for the luminous,
and, on occasion, the numinous. For me, these are not to be construed as negative
terms or as an unwelcome search. It is so, nonetheless, that the mode of discourse and
personal presence effected by Santayana is characteristic of 'high culture'. In this
fundamental approach to the aesthetic, Santayana's work and person is quite traditional
and one which draws intense opposition from both Marx and Dewey. The latter,
Dewey, decries the separation of die <fme arts* from the affairs of the ordinary, holding
that the task of an aesthetic " ... is to restore continuity between the refined and
intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings,
and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience."2 The politics
of such an aesthetic constitute an extremely important and controverted dimension in
our evaluation of both the meaning and function of art The question before us is
whether the savage critique of fine art by Marx as a baleful manifestation of 'class
consciousness* and Dewey's equally strident opposition to the granting of special;
separate status to the works of high culture should result in a deprecation and
depreciation of Santayana's aesthetics. I think not
In personal terms, I do have a fascination, proletarian though it be, for Santayana's
sensibility as to the luminous and the sublime. Both experiences, however, are rarely
within my reach. Yet, the ecstatic and the revelatory, each of which are possible
eruptions from the aesthetic of the ordinary, are occasional occurrences for me.
My drift here is that although, post-mortem, this may distress Santayana, and
Dewey as well* I believe that Santayana's aesthetics can be found as resonant in
Dewey's version of the *felt-horizon*.   FoEowing Alexander, elsewhere on Dewey,
1 This paper was read to the Santayana Society in Washington, D.C. on December 28,
1992, as a response to Thomas Alexander's paper printed above.
2 John Dewey, Art as Experience (The Later Works - 10,1934), ed. Jo Ann Boydston,
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), p. 8.