Although Santayana viewed art as vital to human experience, he believed that it contributed to life only if it was the work of the “trained” artist who had ensured that the lines of a poem or the brushstrokes of a painting corresponded to “prescribed” standards of aesthetic form. In Santayana’s estimation, this submission to externally sanctioned ideals was reprehensible to the German philosopher: “To be trained is to be tamed and harnessed, an accession of power detestable to Nietzsche.”
