Art and Morality

In this collection of essays by aesthetician, musician, and Santayana scholar Morris Grossman, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Fairfield University, the guiding theme is the importance of preserving the tension between that which may be unified and that which is disorganized, random, and miscellaneous. Grossman described this theme as the tension between art and morality: Art arrests a sense of change and yields moments of unguarded enjoyment and peace; but soon shifting circumstances compel evaluation, decision, and action. According to Grossman, the best art preserves the tension between the aesthetic consummation of experience and the press of morality understood as the business of navigating conflicts, making choices, and meeting needs. Grossman's concern with the tension between art and morality was intimately related to his reading of George Santayana. The best philosophy like the best art preserves the tension between what can be ordered and what resists assimilation, and Grossman read Santayana as exemplifying this virtue in his embrace of multiple perspectives and his employment of "logic and art, dialogue and analysis, irony and seriousness, with interchangeable abandon." Of course, other scholars have noted similar multiplicity or irony in Santayana's work, but in taking these as substantive Grossman differed from other scholars. Grossman held "we cannot understand [Santayana] if we approach him dialectically, if we attend to his words for their coherence and consistency only. There is no substance to Santayana apart from his style, and his style (to put it another way) is no mere gloss upon a substance." Grossman examined this theme in literature, artistic performance, economics, statecraft, and human rights; in religion, drama, sculpture, philosophical methodology, biography, and attitudes toward mortality; in the work of Gotthold Lessing, Lewis Carroll, Peirce, Tolstoy, James, Sartre, and Beardsley; and most often in the work of George Santayana.