The Sense of Beauty (1896)

It comes to mind for no reason except the thought that it has been too long since I've said anything here about either George Santayana or the field of aesthetics. Let us right both wrongs today. Santayana's first book, The Sense of Beauty was also the first major work on aesthetics written in the United States.

What does it tell us? It is remembered chiefly as the source of the definition of beauty as "pleasure objectified," and (although the book says much else of interest) -- let us stay with that. What does that expression mean?

It means, firstly, that "objectified" is not the same as "objective." It is not quite the same as "subjective" either, although "objectified" is a subset of "subjective."

Pleasure, after all, is subjective, and beauty is one specific sort of pleasure. But, secondly, of what sort? Some specific pleasures are called beautiful because they are so closely associated with the external object by which they are caused that, by an act of socially acceptable delusion, we attribute them to that object. "The more remote, interwoven, and inextricable the pleasure is, the more objective it will appear" -- is how Santayana at one point puts it.

A rose scented perfume is not "beautiful," though I may find it pleasant. The perception of the rose itself may give rise to the sense of beauty, because that scent is intermingled with the proximity of flower to thorns, the juxtaposition of red with green, the stubborn particularity of the branching -- all this is interwoven, and no element can be extricated from the whole without loss. So our pleasure in the rose is of the objectified sort. It is ... the sense of beauty.