Art and morality : essays in the spirit of George Santayana /
Morris Grossman ; edited by Martin A. Coleman.
- First edition.
- New York : Fordham University Press, (c)2014.
- 1 online resource (334 pages).
- American Philosophy .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Cover; Contents; Acknowledgments; Editor's Preface; Introduction; PART I. ART AND MORALITY; 1 Art and Morality: On the Ambiguity of a Distinction; 2 Morality Bound and Unbound: Some Parameters of Literary Art; 3 Music, Modulation, and Metaphor; 4 Performance and Obligation: Musical Variations on Art and Morality; 5 A Mozartian Recognition Scene; 6 A Note on Economy and Art; 7 An Aesthetic Glance at the Constitution: Style, Intention, Performance; 8 Human Rights and Artistic Appreciations; PART II. ARTISTIC PHILOSOPHERS AND PHILOSOPHICAL ARTISTS; 9 Interpreting Peirce. 10 On Ruf's The Creation of Chaos: William James and the Stylistic Making of a Disorderly World11 How Sartre Must Be Read: An Examination of a Philosophic Method; 12 On Beardsley's "An Aesthetic Definition of Art"; 13 Lessing as Philosophical Dramatist: On Nathan the Wise; 14 Lewis Carroll: Pedophile and/or Platonist?; 15 Art and Death: A Sermon in the Form of an Essay; 16 Brancusi: Some Changing and Changeless Perspectives; PART III. SANTAYANA; 17 Drama and Dialectic: Ways of Philosophizing; 18 Ontology and Morality: Santayana on the "Really Real"; 19 Spirited Spirituality. 20 Interpreting Interpretations21 Santayana's Aesthetics; 22 Santayana's The Last Puritan; 23 Santayana in California: The Environment, Transcendentalism, and Nature; 24 Ultimate Santayana; Notes; Index; A; B; C; D; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; P; R; S; T; W; Y; Z.
The guiding theme of these essays by aesthetician, musician, and Santayana scholar Morris Grossman is the importance of preserving the tension between what can be unified and what is disorganized, random, and miscellaneous. Grossman described this 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 bus.