Under Any Sky : Contemporary Readings of George Santayana [1 ed.] 9781443806466, 9781847181664

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Under Any Sky

Under Any Sky Contemporary Readings of George Santayana

Edited by

Matthew Caleb Flamm and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroñski

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana, edited by Matthew Caleb Flamm and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroñski This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Matthew Caleb Flamm and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroñski and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-166-X; ISBN 13: 9781847181664

In the past or in the future, my language and my borrowed knowledge would have been different, but under whatever sky I had been born, since it is the same sky, I should have had the same philosophy. —George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith, x

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface .................................................................................................................x Editor’s Introduction ............................................................................................1 Part I: Ontology and Naturalism Are We All Materialists or Idealists After All? John Lachs ...........................................................................................................9 The Natural Claims of Spirit Angus Kerr-Lawson...........................................................................................14 Distance From The Truth Glenn Tiller........................................................................................................22 It Depends What the Meaning of ‘Is’ Is: Santayana, Identity Theory, and the Mind-Body Problem Jessica Wahman .................................................................................................34 Animal Faith or Natural Knowledge? Why Dewey and Santayana Can’t Agree About Philosophy Paul Forster ........................................................................................................45 Naturalism and Animal Faith: Santayana’s Meta-Criticism of Scepticism Ángel M. Faerna ................................................................................................62 The Piety of Materialistic Conviction and the Abnormal Madness of Western Idealism Matthew Caleb Flamm.......................................................................................76 Part II: Culture, Society, America Santayana Today. Problems and Hopes Krzysztof Piotr Skowroñski ...............................................................................94

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How can Someone Committed to Social Progress Read Santayana Sympathetically? Richard Marc Rubin.........................................................................................102 George Santayana as a Cultural Critic James Seaton....................................................................................................111 Portrait of an Anxiety: Santayana on William James Ramón del Castillo...........................................................................................121 On the Structure of Santayana’s Dominations and Powers Daniel Moreno Moreno....................................................................................130 Santayana’s Conscious Animality, Experience, and Inevitability: The Parameters Of His Thought Charles L. Padrón.............................................................................................137 Part III: Aesthetics, Poetry, and Spirit Agustin, Jorge, Susana Richard DeTar..................................................................................................152 Santayana, the Absurd and Ultimate Humor Daniel Pinkas ...................................................................................................161 Santayana’s Mediterranean Aesthetics Giuseppe Patella...............................................................................................171 Beauty and the Labyrinth of Evil: Santayana and the Possibility of Naturalistic Mysticism Thomas Alexander ...........................................................................................181 Reflections on George Santayana, Aesthetics, and the Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry Till Kinzel ........................................................................................................202 The Place of Aesthetic Experience in the Conception of Beauty in The Sense of Beauty Lenka Krejsova ................................................................................................213

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Emerson and Santayana on Imagination H.G. Callaway..................................................................................................221 Notes Towards a Supreme Reading of George Santayana Antonio Lastra .................................................................................................231 “To an Old Philosopher in Rome”: Wallace Stevens’s Poetic Meditations on Santayana Jacek Gutorow .................................................................................................241 The Agony of the Spirit in Santayana’s Naturalism Manuel Garrido................................................................................................251 Contributors .....................................................................................................261 Index ................................................................................................................266

PREFACE JOHN LACHS, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

When celebrated philosophers die, their works go into decline. The excitement of observing a living mind struggle with momentous problems is replaced by waiting for the cold hand of history; the achievements of the thinkers come to be measured not against the dwarfs who surround them but such giants as Plato and Kant. Many philosophers who descend into the night of being unknown and unread never re-emerge. Tomes on the history of philosophy are replete with the names of people once famous, such as Norris, the British Cartesian, and Beck, the critic of Kant. But no one knows much about these figures and no one cares much. They had their day and are now forgotten. At some point after his death, it seemed that the same fate would befall George Santayana. Critical realism had run its course, naturalism had turned scientific and even pragmatism had fallen on hard times. Santayana’s literary style and his ontological turn made him appear a throwback to earlier ways of doing philosophy. Although many thinkers famous in those days, from Frankena and Feinberg to Danto, had read him as undergraduates, none of them considered him worthy of a philosophical response. Things started changing in the 1970s. A few books were published, and graduate students began writing dissertations on Santayana’s thought. An ambitious critical edition of his works started receiving support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1991, a large international conference, held in Santayana’s hometown of Avila, Spain, celebrated his contributions to philosophy. The revival continues today; this volume displays its multi-faceted vitality. A new generation of scholars is exploring the depths of Santayana’s work and its rich relations to the thought of leading contemporary figures. What accounts for this striking rebirth of interest? The renewed appreciation of American thinkers connected with the founding and subsequent success of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy was clearly one of the factors. The vigorous revival of pragmatism served as a contributing cause. The dominance of naturalism in the philosophical world and the search for subtler and richer versions of the view must have driven some philosophers

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in Santayana’s direction. But in the end, the central part of the explanation must consist of the permanent attractiveness of Santayana’s philosophical ideas. The clarity and usefulness of his categories, his steadfast vision of human life and his striking reconciliation of the natural and the ideal are nearly without match in the history of thought. This book is the result of the Second International Conference on Santayana’s Thought, convened in 2006. The broad range of participants, the note of critical appreciation they strike and the substantial advances they make in understanding Santayana, and through him this baffling world, signify a great new flowering of attention to his ideas. Having emerged from the abyss of literary death, Santayana now stands ready to assume his rightful place among the truly important philosophers of the last several hundred years.

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

This book is a testament to the cross-cultural relevance of the work of one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century, George Santayana (1863-1952: birth name Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana). A fuller appreciation of Santayana than has been offered to date requires a broad interpretive framework, the relevance of which is hard to measure by the standards of academe which tends for the sake of universal understanding to bleach the hues of a thinker’s larger vision. The partition of knowledge into a multitude of disciplines on the one hand and, on the other, the constant emergence of new inter-disciplinary studies requires a high level of specialization that makes it difficult to assume a holistic interpretive approach towards humans and their world. Santayana is one of those exceptional men of letters, humanists, philosophers, and authors whose work attracts interest from a variety of disciplines; thus, the expanse of his thinking, encompassing aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, history of philosophy, philosophy of politics, anthropology, value inquiry, literary criticism, poetics, cultural criticism, to say nothing of his best-selling novel and biography. Wisdom, to which Santayana can be said to have remained faithful throughout his life “lies not in pronouncing what sort of good is best but in understanding each good within the lives that enjoy it as it actually is in its physical complexion and in its moral essence.”1 Santayana’s wide spectrum of philosophical engagement and more general disinterest in diminishing conflicting tendencies have caused problems for his interpreters, who have never satisfactorily situated him within a single tradition. He is regarded by many American scholars not only as an American thinker, but even as one of the Classical American philosophers along with Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. Meanwhile, in his native Spain, he is predominantly seen as a Spanish philosopher, and, in addition to that, there are some scholars who link him with la Generación del ’98, the climactic intellectual, artistic, and philosophical movement of Nineteenth Century Spain, placing him amongst its greatest figures: Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset. The inability to

1

George Santayana. Dominations and Powers. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951: 466.

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Editor’s Introduction

affix Santayana’s thinking with a single cultural character forces one to search elsewhere—if indeed such a place exists—for a means of characterization. Some scholars have identified alignments of his thinking with pragmatism especially in his early work (The Life of Reason), and still others have focused on his harsh criticisms of pragmatism and his Neo-Platonic metaphysics and accompanying doctrine of essence in his mature work (Realms of Being). This contrast is an outgrowth of the more general difficulties interpreters have had seeing the unity the author saw in his own work; for some, his work is impressionistic and eclectic, while for others, it constitutes a cohesive, although very vast, system of thought that presents itself in various literary and philosophic-artistic modes. For Santayana himself, philosophizing entails synoptic imagination and a self-conscious understanding of the indelibly relative character of philosophic vision: “As for me – Santayana declares – in stretching my canvas and taking up my palette and brush, I am not vexed that masters should have painted before me in styles which I have no power and no occasion to imitate; nor do I expect future generations to be satisfied with always repainting my picture.”2 What then is Santayana’s contribution to modern thought? Santayana was something of an ancient humanist in that he strove to understand the full moral complexity of life rather than be swayed by its sham brilliance. This was expressed by one of his most eminent contemporaries, Bertrand Russell, who writes that “Santayana, like Spinoza, is to be read, not so much on account of his theoretical doctrines, as on account of his view as to what constitutes the good life, and of his standard of values in art and morals.”3 It would be unfortunate, nevertheless, to neglect Santayana’s theoretical contributions. He was both an active participant in and penetrating critic of American philosophical life, which is what makes his criticism of America’s illusory freedoms and, simultaneously, his appreciation of its vigor so unique. Moreover, his reflections can be seen to encapsulate many concerns over the status of science that took place some decades after the appearance of his major publications. Finally, his approach towards religion is exemplary in affirming that a robust naturalism need not preclude an appreciation of spirituality that infuses life with beauty and sense. If the present volume does at least some justice to the breadth and profundity of Santayana’s thought, the editor’s work will have been justified. Certainly the major plots of Santayana’s thinking are articulated here: Platonistic materialism in ontology, scepticism in epistemology, rationality in 2

George Santayana. The Realms of Being: One Volume Edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942: xvi-xvii. 3 Philosophy of George Santayana. Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951: 453-454.

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social philosophy, naturalism in aesthetics, piety in materialism, and literary and poetic expression as a surer means to cosmic understanding – all of these themes are treated. On the other hand, the book displays a panorama of additional stimulations that Santayana’s thinking can provide; twenty-three scholars of various cultural backgrounds united to pay tribute to Santayana’s thought, comment on it and, at the same time, integrate its elements into their own inquiries. Many of the contributions here originated as presentations for the Second Annual International Conference on George Santayana, convening at the University of Opole, Poland June 20th through the 24th, 2006. Besides being asked to elaborate and expand their papers for inclusion in this volume, contributors papers were selected on the basis of their thematic continuity with the book’s major themes. Following this (co)editorial introduction the book is divided into three respective thematic parts—I. Ontology and Naturalism; II. Culture, Society, America; and III. Aesthetics, Poetry, and Spirit. Introductory overviews of the contents of the three parts are provided by Matthew Caleb Flamm. A list of geographic origins of the scholars herein indicates the transatlantic cultural diversity of scholarly representation: scholars variously hailing from Canada, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, and Switzerland, and a number from the United States, representing three of its major regions. The editors would like to acknowledge Andy Nercessian at Cambridge Scholars Press, whose favorable and encouraging reception initiated this book’s production. Matthew Flamm would like to thank Jennifer Anne Rea, who provided much assistance in preparing the book’s index and bibliographies and invaluable sundry feedback along the way towards producing the manuscript; additionally, his colleague Dr. Jeanie Murphy offered timely assistance with correspondence translations of book contributors. As the book epigraph indicates, Santayana believed that philosophic vision transcends the webs of time and history. This view runs afoul of contemporary sensibilities, which are eager to expose any suspected essentialist prejudice against context. But somewhere in the center of this critical divide there is a lost opportunity, for Santayana also wrote: “…just because spirit, at each point, is a centre for all things, no one point, no one phase of spirit is materially a public centre for all the rest.”4 Supposing Santayana’s attitude about philosophy still offends, since he responded approvingly at being characterized as a “Castilian mystic” we can bring this into relief (taking our cue from Tom Alexander) by deferring with authority to William James’ remark about “Mystical classics,” that they “have ... neither birthday nor native land.”5 4

George Santayana. Persons and Places. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963: 132. 5 William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Harvard, 1985: 332.

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Editor’s Introduction

The editors hope that, from whatever irreducible spiritual center their readers view things, and that under any sky they happen to roam, such appreciations as came to Santayana can be found in some of these interpretive essays.

PART I: ONTOLOGY AND NATURALISM

The essays arranged in the first part of this book explore the background features of Santayana’s philosophy—adhering, that is, to his own characterization from the famous debate over naturalism with his contemporary John Dewey. In the exchange Santayana characterizes experience as the “foreground” and the larger cosmos the “background” features of philosophic emphasis. In a span of twenty-five years following his departure from Harvard and the United States in 1912 Santayana’s thinking pivoted between two major works, a novel and his mature system of philosophy. The Last Puritan was published in 1936, serving as a literary counterpoint to the four-volume Realms of Being, itself introduced in 1923 with Scepticism and Animal Faith, and published in the four-volume Realms of Being over the next thirteen years. The simultaneous genesis of these two major works is significant. It is as though the process of systematically framing his philosophical viewpoint (Realms, the “background”) needed genealogical depiction (The Last Puritan, the “foreground”). The novel contains a world of characters whose evolving viewpoints mirror philosophical tendencies and aversions in the author, sometimes seeming as testimonials to key moments of intellectual unfolding in his own life. If The Last Puritan can be said to indirectly chronicle the settling of Santayana’s mature philosophic convictions, Realms of Being directly presents their more or less settled form. When once Santayana had decided on his four ontological realms— essence, matter, truth, and spirit—he never abandoned them and in fact used the concepts with consistency throughout the rest of his life; not, it bears noting, in rigid modes of analysis, but rather as heuristics to articulate an already welldeveloped facility for freeform speculative expression. From the beginning of their inception, the realms of being were for Santayana tools—toys even, if one considers his language in one revealing letter—of interpretation. Santayana never had any use for the sort of systematicity sought after in either of the main traditions—German idealism, and British analysis—presaging Continental and analytic philosophy. Thus, his use of the phrase “system of philosophy” needs to be taken with qualification. As he says from the outset, his “system…differs

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widely in spirit and pretensions from what usually goes by that name.”6 But if so then why call it a “system?” Biography may only complicate this question. The years following his departure from academic life were spent liberating interpretive interests from academic pressures, especially those directly impacting professional advancement; and this was by no means due to Santayana’s inability to advance in academic life. In 1911, the year Santayana first announced his retirement from Harvard, he was encouraged to stay by recently appointed president Abbott Lawrence Lowell. Lowell went so far as to guarantee arrangements that would allow Santayana extended time to travel and write in Europe. Alas, taking advantage of an inheritance from the death of his mother Santayana left the United States permanently in 1912 in pursuit of an intellectual freedom he deemed impossible in academic life. Soliloqueys in England, written during Santayana’s time in England during the First World War, was the first free-form product of his newfound intellectual freedom. At the same time however, Santayana demonstrated a desire to remain intellectually connected with the philosophic moods of his time by continually acquainting himself with his contemporaries, and by making semi-technical contributions to standard-bearing philosophic journals. In all of this there is a definite sense that, after his release from academic life, Santayana wished not simply to retain his status as increasing luminary in the American philosophic tradition, but to transcend that status by reaching a wider intellectual audience. Perhaps then the appellation “system” was a means of challenging the expectations of those conceiving Santayana as one of the main heralds of the American philosophic tradition. Santayana offers remarks in Persons and Places that illuminate this point: “I…have a system of philosophy which I hadn’t dreamt of [in my Harvard years] although the reasons for it lay all in me; but this system is not intended to found a sect and will never do so. It aspires to be only a contribution to the humanities, the expression of a reflective, selective, and free mind.”7 Santayana conceived his mature philosophy as a system in order to enter it for candidacy into the canon of humanist literature certainly not aspired to by his contemporaries—pragmatist and otherwise. This suggests a second, non-biographical explanation for Santayana’s mature turn to a system of philosophy. Being, for better or worse, considered a preeminent American philosopher, Santayana was compelled to weigh in continually on the meaning and significance of the contributions made to that tradition by his Harvard teachers, Royce and James, and contemporary 6

George Santayana. Scepticism and Animal Faith. New York: Dover Publications, 1923: v. 7 George Santayana. Persons and Places. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963: 156.

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pragmatist counterpart, John Dewey. Between 1912 and 1923, Santayana wrote trenchant criticisms of these main figures in both the Journal of Philosophy, and in two key published books: Winds of Doctrine (1913) and Character and Opinion in the United States (1920). Though arguably sharing aspects of the orientation, Santayana was no pragmatist. And, albeit with notably nuanced presentation, he interpreted the philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey as each tainted in some significant way by pragmatist elements traceable in spirit to the cultural shortcomings of their native America. His cutting indictments are legion: Royce’s Hegelianism was in perpetual conflict with a holdover Puritanism, resulting in an agonized conscience whose only recourse was to affirm the right of conscience to be agonized. James’s everyman sympathy and accompanying impressionistic philosophic technique was inadequately and unevenly predicated on a pragmatic view of truth that involves a confusion of its test and meaning. And Dewey, called by Santayana a “half-hearted naturalist” somehow contrives a naturalistic metaphysics (an oxymoron in Santayana’s view), betrayed by an all-too-American spirit of enterprise and progress. Throughout these criticisms there is an undeniable sense that Santayana is echoing the authoritative assessments of Bertrand Russell, and indeed there is no doubt that he read both Russell and G.E. Moore favorably with a particular eye to incorporating elements of their fine-tuned theoretical contributions into his own philosophy. What better way then of distinguishing himself from his American contemporaries, and at the same time potentially garnering greater respect than framing his philosophic inclinations in a concise conceptual framework which luminaries on the other side of the Atlantic could respect? In short, Santayana might well have seen systematic ontology as a means of formalizing his philosophy in ways that insulated it against the formidable objections of, and better commended itself to, the sensibilities of European authorities. Posterity has offered little to vindicate this potential motivation of Santayana’s—his philosophy was never in its time, nor up to the present has it been deeply engaged by major or minor European schools. Nevertheless, as the essays that follow indicate, there are numerous ways in which his philosophy, especially in its stage of mature formalization, can be brought into dialogue with themes dear to the hearts of expounders of the European tradition—including major post-Deweyan American philosophers such as Richard Rorty. The task before Santayana scholars is to adduce features of his broad philosophy that deepen the contemporary conversation. Our opening essay engages Santayana’s thinking in a manner well suited to this task. John Lachs deftly cuts through ensconced confusions and rhetorical grandstanding involving what is probably the perennial philosophic divide: that between materialism and idealism. He asks the disarming question,

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when it comes down to it, are we all materialists and idealists after all? Lachs pivots between Santayana and Hegel in order to highlight the importance of intellectual honesty in one’s choice of emphasis in this entrenched divide. Angus Kerr-Lawson follows with a careful analysis of Santayana’s attention to the “Natural Claims of Spirit.” He focuses on the provocative fact that, despite the break in his early and late published works Santayana never relinquished loyalty to the notion of a life of reason, his abiding conviction being that spirit and nature are in harmony to the extent that there ensues a rational choice between pre-and-post-rational ethical impulses. Glenn Tiller considers the important role of truth in Santayana’s fourfold ontology, the most problematic of the four realms both in terms of its inception and articulation. He brings Santayana into dialogue with Richard Rorty, applies the interpretations of Timothy Sprigge, and brings into relief a difficulty about the “being of truth” by appeal to the role of wonder and acceptance in reconciling the relation between inquiring, living humans and the vast reality of events framed by the realm of truth. Jessica Wahman insightfully engages analytic identity theories of mind by way of Santayana’s most directly technical essay, “Some Meanings of the Word ‘Is’.” She mines this underappreciated essay of Santayana’s in order to sort through ontological difficulties that still haunt debates undertaken by contemporary reductionist, and anti-reductionist philosophers of mind. Paul Forster provides a concise analysis of the famous published debate about naturalism between Santayana and Dewey. He analyzes the debate in order to show that their ultimate disagreement is deeper than it appears. The depth of their disagreement, Forster concludes, is seen in the fact that neither philosopher can agree about the starting point of philosophy. Ángel M. Faerna next takes up Santayana’s “meta-criticism of scepticism.” He argues, specifically, that Santayana’s understanding of scepticism is akin to the metaphorical ladder of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, meant to be discarded once the way has been cleared for philosophic speculation. Finally, the present author examines the connections between Santayana’s “pious” materialism and his larger critique of the madness of Western idealism. I argue that among other virtues Santayana’s materialism achieves a moral depth that is lacking in other historical philosophies.

ARE WE ALL MATERIALISTS OR IDEALISTS AFTER ALL? JOHN LACHS

In the heat of controversy, fighting words tend to lose their meaning. “Christian” and “Muslim,” for example, have come to signify a wide variety of beliefs and activities, as have such words as “communist” and “capitalist.” In philosophy, “idealist” and “materialist,” words with distinguished histories, have similarly lost their ability to designate precisely. Idealists may be of the stripe of Berkeley, maintaining that only perceptions and perceivers are real, or of the persuasion of Leibniz, arguing that the ultimate ingredients of all things are mind-substances or monads. Kantian “critical” idealists, however, assert that all but the sensuous manifold derives from human cognitive faculties, and Hegelian “absolute” idealists think they can show that the history of the world is simply the development of consciousness. There are even those, such as Fichte, who declare that idealism is the affirmation of human freedom and that those who reject it lack a self. Similar, though perhaps less extensive, vagueness and ambiguity beset the word “materialism.” The vast distance between Lucretius’ conviction that atoms and the void exhaust the ingredients of reality and Marx’s notion that ideas are but human reactions to prevailing economic—that is, material— conditions is neither suggested nor adequately traversed by using a single word. “Australian” materialism focusing on mind-brain identity and Santayana’s materialism that takes an epiphenomenalist view of consciousness are incompatible yet called by the same name. To say that Feuerbach, Haeckel and Hobbes are all materialists gives no precise information about their positions. In the light of this terminological Tower of Babel, it is not surprising to find the claim that all materialists are really idealists and the counterclaim that idealists are latent materialists. One may be tempted to disregard such dialectical contortions, but to do so would be an error. A closer examination of the basis for asserting that everybody is a materialist or an idealist may actually help us get straight about what is at stake in making such wide generalizations. In the last chapter of Realm of Matter, Santayana undertakes to show that although in official philosophy idealists differ sharply from materialists,

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tacitly they nevertheless subscribe to the fundamental tenets of their opponents. What are these tenets? Santayana identifies two: belief in the existence of a world independent of us and acknowledgement of the contingency of all things. Concerning the first of these, he says that if idealists were to describe existence as it actually is, “this existence would still, for that very reason, remain outside of his mind and of his description.”8 Intelligent spirit, he asserts, “must assume the presence of an alien universe and must humbly explore its ways.”9 Concerning the second belief, he returns again and again to the “blind fertility”10 of the world and asks “Why, then, is any Idea manifested here and not there, perfectly or imperfectly, once, often, or not at all?”11 The answer, he says must be sought in the “pregnant and unfathomable”12 propensities of material substance. But, of course, there is no ultimate answer to be found: whatever exists does so without reference to reason or the good. These considerations on behalf of obliterating the distinction between idealism and materialism bring into focus Santayana’s rather special conception of matter. His insistence on the centrality of materialism is Lucretian, though without the awkward atomism of that fine poet, in the sense that it is meant to purge the inventory of beings of all supernatural agents. The argument is simple: the material world, Santayana argues, is a spatio-temporal matrix continuous with our bodies. Every agent belongs in this world. If God and the Devil occupy positions of power in the field, they are material agencies who can affect us and who, in turn, are open to our influence. And indeed, God is presented as just such a being in the Old Testament; He tells the Israelites how to make the walls of Jericho come tumbling down and becomes angry and hurt when His orders are disobeyed. Santayana can rightly say that his notion of matter is not any of the usual ones emphasizing atoms or other ultimate spatio-temporal realities. The reason is that matter, for him, is not a kind of being but a process permeating the farthest reaches of time and space that unites our animal bodies with the surrounding field of flux and power. Everyone is a materialist who acknowledges the everyday experience of the power of external events and the flowering of contingencies. The hungry idealist believes, with everyone else, that the food we eat does not cease to exist when it is no longer felt in the mouth, that the tragedies of life cannot be thought away and that there are no magical agencies to change the propensities of the workaday world.

8

George Santayana, Realms of Being, New York, Cooper Square Publishers, 1972, 392. Ibid., 398. 10 Ibid., 390. 11 Ibid., 387. 12 Ibid., 392. 9

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Santayana’s argument to show that even idealists are materialists is counterbalanced by Hegel’s claim that materialists cannot avoid being idealists. He says, “Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle.”13 Idealism, he declares, consists “in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being.”14 Hegel also presents two considerations to support his view. The first is the well-known argument that if we think that atoms or some other ultimate particles constitute the material world, we still only think this: the thought of matter is not matter but a thought.15 This means that, try as we may, we can never escape the magic circle of consciousness. Hegel’s second argument is more complicated and more clearly Hegelian. The finite is the sensuous particular, he maintains, and materialists think they refer to these when they speak about atoms and matter. In reality, however, atoms, matter and the water of Thales are not particulars but universals, because as general concepts referring to a potentially infinite collection of items they are infinite themselves. The hallmark of idealism is exalting the universal over the particular and, unbeknownst to materialists, their theory, simply on account of being a theory stated in universal terms, is therefore a form of idealism. The only way to avoid this conclusion, Hegel avers, is to abjure the use of universals, and that renders philosophers unintelligible and their “philosophies” unworthy of the name.16 What can we make of this remarkable controversy? The most obvious point is that Santayana’s first commitment, that to an independently existing world, is not enough to turn idealists into materialists. Just such steadfast realism characterized Peirce’s system without his ever thinking that he had to give up his idealism. One can hold, quite consistently, that there is a world independent of all knowledge of it and that that world is nevertheless constituted by consciousness or sentience or monads. One can deny that to be is to be known and yet maintain, as Peirce did, that on the last analysis everything that exists is mind. Realism frequently accompanies materialism but does not imply it. Hegel’s first argument also fails to convince. There is no doubt that when we entertain the idea of matter we think, but that does not mean that we can never get near something non-mental in our reflections. The magic of this argument of idealists was broken by G.E. Moore in his famous “Refutation of Idealism,” in which he showed that the object of consciousness does not have to be, and in fact is not, something mental. Santayana rightly adopts this view and 13 14 15 16

G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Amherst, N.Y., Humanity Books, 1969, 154-5. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 155. Ibid.

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Are We All Materialists or Idealists After All?

makes it a centerpiece of his account of essences, arguing that though they serve as the objects of consciousness, nothing about them suggests that they are mental in origin or nature. One may suppose that Santayana’s insistence on the contingency of the world and Hegel’s glorification of the universal address altogether different issues. But, surprisingly perhaps, the two views converge on roughly the same problem and make the choice between idealism and materialism clearer and easier. Hegel maintains that thought and language operate exclusively with universals. The sensuous particular is the first thing sublated in the Phenomenology of Spirit where, in the section on sense certainty, Hegel asserts that no matter how much we want to get to the particular, we can never go beyond the universal. If he is right, the particular in its particularity is of no significance, and it takes only a moment of self-recognition for philosophers to realize that they are, and must be, idealists. To say that only universals are intelligible and real means that in eating I consume food, or more specifically, steak. In the grander scheme of things, I belong to a state that, through its laws, gives structure and meaning to my life. My private dreams are matters of irrelevant contingency; what counts is the development of the human spirit, in the course of which I am likely to perish. But the death of the individual is of little moment so long as the universal aims of reason prevail. The ordinary and the everyday are below the regard of philosophers who must keep their eyes on the grand patterns of history, from the perspective of which most everything seems necessary and the rest is dross. What does such an idealism leave out? First, that the steak I eat was not long ago the living flesh of a particular animal; that the state gives no meaning to anyone’s life; that my private dreams, though contingent, constitute my very being; that the death of the individual is no small matter to that individual who, in life or in death, has little use for the growth of spirit; that everything can seem necessary if we look at it from the standpoint of some chosen outcome; and that philosophers had better keep their eyes on the ground if they don’t want to share the fate of Thales and fall into a pit. One might object, however, that this does not address the fundamental claim that, in philosophy at least, the universal cannot be escaped. Perhaps so, but it points the way to a fuller answer. In fact, nothing is easier than to sidestep the universal; we have only to quit talking. In action, this body crashes into that; in love, this person cares for that; in suffering, these foreign forces threaten me. Even if we think in terms of universals, we live as particulars in a world of particulars, staggering from crisis to crisis. We need no language to communicate our distress: feeling it ourselves and showing our predicament to others is enough for understanding and sympathy. Hegel is so taken with grand schemes and totalities that he forgets who we are.

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Of course, Hegel did not forget who he was. He, like the rest of us, dealt with the details of daily life and weathered personal crises. These do not show up in his philosophy, for he is simply not interested in what we call “the human condition.” Santayana’s call, by contrast, is to attend to precisely this welter of facts. Of course, whether we attend to it or not, we are embroiled in fending off the contingencies of fortune. Santayana’s philosophy of animal faith consists of identifying what we believe on the basis of what we do; that is the only way, he maintains, to stay close to the common sense or the “shrewd orthodoxy” of the human race. This is the foundation of Santayana’s claim of the latent materialism of idealists: since they act, as we do, taking into account the power of an external world in which everything is contingent, they must also believe that the world is just that way. Does this make idealists materialists? Only in the limited sense of thinking of the world as a continuous field of action full of surprising, delightful and dismaying events. The baffling question is why this obvious fact is devalued or denied by so many philosophers. In his daily life, Hegel did not think that sensuous particulars are unreal—he spent his days seeking and dodging them. Why, then, does his official philosophy disdain the world he in fact inhabits? In the end, the question boils down to where philosophers are to cast their glance. Should they attend to the world as it exists in their neighborhood displaying treacherous forces with which they must negotiate their survival, or should they look for the patterns of another world barely adumbrated in the gritty details of individual life? This is the question of honesty in philosophy, a question no one has raised more vividly, more urgently and more eloquently than George Santayana.

THE NATURAL CLAIMS OF SPIRIT ANGUS KERR-LAWSON

Santayana’s readers have raised questions about what he is setting forth as his ideal. In the early years, he wrote five volumes devoted to the life of reason, which seeks to optimize actions over the full range of human activity. The emphasis is on giving to each demand or aspiration its proper place, and only rejecting those which are incompatible with others of more consequence. This comprehensive viewpoint is absent from the ideal of a spiritual life advanced in later works such as The Realm of Spirit,17 which limits itself to what he calls the claims of spirit. From the point of view of the earlier volumes, he is presenting a form of post-rational morality, which is there contrasted with rational ethics. A number of admirers of his conception of the life of reason, as advanced early in the twentieth century, have been disappointed at the retrenchment they find in the late work, with its appeal to ontological realms and its advocacy of detachment. Santayana admits a change in sentiment, but insists that his theories are unchanged, and that he continues to adhere to the life of reason. That his sentiments changed, as he says, is philosophically of no great moment. Of more consequence is the final status of his theory of rational ethics, and especially the place spirit has in his moral thought. I argue below that he does adhere to this ideal, but only through a certain change in his understanding of that ideal. Under the name of the life of reason, Santayana espouses a prudential morality based on an enlightened self interest, in which a choice is made of the most valued among all possible goods. It is rational to maintain good relations with others, often based on natural ties to family and society. This is sometimes not possible and harsh methods may be called for to protect one’s own interests. However, honesty requires us to acknowledge that others’ ideals and interests are equally valid, a recognition that is traced directly to spirit in the later writings. It is of the nature of spirit to see things objectively, and to realize that 17

The Realm of Spirit, (London: Constable, 1940), the fourth and final book of Realms of Being. All four books appear a one-volume edition, Realms of Being (New York: Scribner’s, 1942). Page references are to this edition, using the standard abbreviation RB.

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one’s own preoccupations have no objective priority over those of others. There is a spiritual bond with all sentient animal life. Spirit, then, introduces a welcome softening to a self-interested moral philosophy. However, this objective comparison of one’s interests to those of others, an offspring of spirit, may injure the dedication to one’s rational preference, which is for him the germ of morality. The influence of spirit may go beyond a fruitful softening of ethics and lead to a confusion of purpose. Pure spirit can induce detachment from the concerns both of oneself and of others. The revised notion of the life of reason brings issues like this within its confines, where the various interests are open to comparison. I believe that Santayana adopts but does not fully acknowledge this changed view of reason.

The Texts In the five books of The Life of Reason, published in 1905 and 1906, Santayana deals with a wide range of aspects of a rational ethics.18 It is curious that his much later Realms of Being contains little of moral philosophy, apart from a discussion of moral truth in the third book, and an extensive treatment of spirit in the fourth and final book. However, it is meant to be an account of his systematic philosophy: “Here,” he announces, “is one more system of philosophy.”19 But the several provisos he attaches to this announcement do not include any statement that he plans to cover only a special aspect of moral philosophy. Since he considered himself primarily a moral philosopher, such an omission is peculiar; his readers may be led to believe that he has thrown over the life of reason in favour of a post-rational ideal. However, this is not the case. In the preface to The Realm of Spirit, he makes it clear that his subject is not the whole of moral philosophy: My subject is not experience surveyed impartially, as in a book of descriptive psychology, but experience viewed at a certain angle, in the measure in which it torments or educates the spirit. Nor is my subject the whole of moral philosophy or the life of reason; for there all forms of health and government would need to be appreciated, many of which might be and might be content to remain, purely spontaneous and worldly. (RB 550)

We can only conclude that moral philosophy, seen in its entirety, remains a study of the life of reason; despite certain reservations about the early major 18

George Santayana, The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress, (New York: Scribner's, 1905-06). His notion of a rational ethics is defined in the fifth book, Reason in Science. 19 See page v of Scepticism and Animal Faith (London: Constable 1923), a book that is Santayana’s epistemological introduction to RB.

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study of this theme, it continues to represent his contribution to moral philosophy, something he does not care to go over again at that time. Santayana confirms his continued concern for reason and its application to moral philosophy in his last major work, where he offers “subsequent thoughts on the same subject.” In Dominations and Powers, he returns to political and moral issues going beyond those of a spiritual life.20 With its third and final section concerning “the rational order of society,” he makes clear that he retains his interest in a life of reason. In these further comments, he retreats from some of the earlier positions. Experience has led him to question his competence as a judicial moralist who can legislate its nature, and to be less sanguine about its actually arising somewhere. Santayana’s The Realm of Spirit, then, not meant to encompass the whole of ethics. He gives this account of his aims in this book: A study of the realm of spirit is therefore an exercise in self-knowledge, an effort on the part of spirit to clarify and to discipline itself. … This transformation or conversion would not be necessary if the psyche and the world moved in perfect harmony … but revision grows possible and urgent for the spirit as it gets more and more entangled in all the contrarieties of existence. Being always alive, and suffering more or less, spirit then becomes aware of its natural claims and interests, in contrast to the endless miscellany of events. The world turns into a school [and] life into a pilgrimage. (RB 551)

There would be no special need, no conversion would be necessary, if the psyche and world moved in perfect harmony. No doubt I am stretching his intention here, but I suggest that his early concept of an ideal life of reason was meant to do just this. In a society embracing the life of reason, citizens are required to contribute according to their talents and receive support according to their needs. Issues of religion, art, and science are there treated at the social level. Indeed, the failure of a life of reason signalled by post-rational morality is also considered as a social phenomenon, where citizens as a group feel compelled to retrench from the full exploitation of their potential. They turn to penitent forms of religion in a social movement toward the post-rational. It is only later that he deals with private efforts at some sort of salvation. This coincides with his later doubts about the likelihood of a life of reason arising. In Realms of Being he acknowledges the need for individuals to recognize the claims of spirit on them quite apart from their social setting. Whereas The Life of Reason deals with all forms of health and government, Realms of Being deals only with the claims of spirit; whereas the former deals at a social and political level, the latter is a personal “exercise in self-knowledge, an effort on the part of spirit to clarify and to discipline itself.” 20

George Santayana, Dominations and Powers (New York: Scribner's, 1951).

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The Goal of Reasonableness Santayana claimed that he always retained his allegiance to the life of reason. He resisted any characterisation of himself as an ascetic; indeed, he did not see himself as at all suited for the spiritual life. Early in Realms of Being he introduces a cautionary note, lest readers would make a faulty interpretation: Much as I admire and in a measure emulate spiritual minds, … I think their ambition, though in some sense the most sublime open to man, is a very special one, beyond the powers and contrary to the virtues possible to most men. I frankly cleave to the Greeks and not to the Indians, and I aspire to be a rational animal rather than a pure spirit. (RB 65)

Certainly, Santayana never deserted the main tenets of his moral philosophy: that the determinants of morality are the nature of the person and the opportunities open to that person; and that morality has a biological foundation, with its first principle one of relativity, meaning by this relativity to the above factual determinants. However, he does change his notion of a life of reason, and this change makes it possible for him to retain this allegiance. Indeed, in responding to his critics in The Philosophy of George Santayana, he explicitly suggests a revision in the notion of the life of reason.21 His description of the nature of this change, I believe, is understated, and does not fully capture what is a significant amendment to his doctrine. In his early treatment of pre- and post-rational morality and rational ethics, Santayana says that in the main he had in mind the rational society approached in classical Greece and the post-rational thought that followed among the Hellenistic thinkers. He came to regret the temporal sequence that this brought into the theory, and argues in his response to his critics that the three kinds of morality need not follow any such sequence. However, the change in his thinking is more radical than is suggested by this explanation; for he goes so far as to ask of his critics that they admit into their notion of a good life post-rational as well as pre-rational elements.22 This is a sharp deviation from the doctrines found in The Life of Reason. There, post-rational morality represents a retrenchment and a departure from any forthright life of reason. It is seen as a loss of heart. With the later account, he admits that post-rational interests may be embraced without any departure from rationality. This seems to me a technical improvement, and 21

See pages 564-566 of his essay “Apologia Pro Mente Sua.” in The Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1940). To be cited as PGS. The essay is his response to the papers in the book written by his critics, of which I am concerned mostly with those of Irwin Edman and Milton Munitz. 22 See PGS 565

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yields a sounder notion of the life of reason. The original doctrine already admitted renunciation as an essential ingredient in reason: less important interests are always set aside in favour of the more important. The request he makes to his critics merely puts the claims of pure spirit on the same footing as other claims. With this revision, he can describe the issue raised by his critics as that of reconciling post-rational morality with rational ethics.

Detachment Santayana’s espousal of detachment in The Realm of Spirit has given his readers misgivings. He advocates in the penultimate chapter, for instance, that in expressing our union with the good we should identify ourselves with the totality of all ideals that have been upheld, however evil some might be in our eyes. More precisely, he expresses it somewhat differently: the spirit in us will identify with all ideals. For him, this is an important qualification and indeed it is the crux of the matter. Nonetheless, the critics find it outrageous to entertain any sympathy whatsoever for ideals so opposed to those we believe in.23 Santayana is asking for something that can only dislocate our own ideals. It is surely pernicious to identify ourselves with the thoughts and deeds of wicked persons. Santayana does not deny that his conception of union engenders a genuine conflict, and indeed he points to this frequently. Spiritual sympathy with the ideals of others, if taken too much to heart, can weaken one’s allegiance to a chosen path; it can dissipate basic tenets of one’s chosen life of reason. As his solution to this conflict, Santayana advises that one adhere tenaciously to one’s enlightened self-interest, while at the same time maintain a sort of detached sympathy for the legitimacy of the ideals of others. One’s domestic regimen is to be tough minded, but the foreign policy generous. Thus he calls on persons to maintain a difficult dual approach: one will admit the validity of the aspirations of others, but refuse to allow this to change one’s chosen path. Here the two sides of this position conform to the two aspects of an admitted oscillation in his thought. The domestic regimen is part of the workaday world of action, while the sympathy is more contemplative and detached from that action. We may feel sympathy for a criminal to be punished. Spirit might appreciate that his motives have their own validity or that his unfortunate past had been forced on him. Most would agree that we should not be ashamed of these humanist feelings; but that they should not deter us from endorsing the 23

As well as the papers by Edman and Munitz in PGS, see James Gouinlock’s “Ultimate Religion,” Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society, Fall 1998, pp. 1-12.

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punishment exacted by society. There are of course political voices on either side of the issue; but most of us accept the ambiguity in this position. Santayana is asking for something similar, but in a more difficult case. He is not merely calling for sympathy for a person gone astray, but sympathy for the ideal pursued by someone when this ideal is alien to us. This is surely more difficult and more likely to damage our integrity of purpose. The account Santayana gives of charity in RS is subject to very similar objections. For him, charity reflects a rapport of spirit in each instance to spirit in all others, a sympathy among suffering spirits. With such a broad application of this sympathy, there is little room for action to alleviate this suffering in others. His notion of charity leaves no place for good works; but what could be more hypocritical, ask the critics, than a sentiment of charity without any concrete action expressing that charity? Of course, Santayana does not exclude charity in the accepted sense, which for him would reflect our humanity and would be entirely laudable. Pure spirit, however, leads to something abstract and contemplative, and he applies the term ‘charity’ to this detached sentiment. In his view, contemplative charity in this sense is compatible with charity as usually understood.

The Compatibility of Spirit and Reason It is possible, then, to appreciate others’ ideals without abandoning one’s own. Santayana gives a general formulation of a similar claim: he asserts that there is no contradiction between the spiritual life and the life of reason. He makes this claim in The Philosophy of George Santayana both in an introductory section and in the concluding essay responding to his critics.24 One may attain spiritual discipline and then return to a more normal life with a different state of mind but with little other change. It is noteworthy that this compatibility claim, although he clearly sees it as important, plays little part in either of the two late major works on spirit and politics. Evidently these deal with special aspects of moral philosophy, and do not offer a place for a detailed treatment of this key point. In The Realm of Spirit, as he says, he has ruled out the general consideration of the life of reason. His aim there is to describe how a person might achieve the claims of spirit, and seems in the end to be more directed to those with a bent to the spiritual, rather than to those likely to return to a normal life in society. Dominations and Powers, although it ranges widely over a vast range of topics, is not concerned with non-political impulses. It deals with the rational order of politics, rather than with individual distraction and liberation. He does bring spirit into the picture, and seeks to describe 24

See page 27 and page 571 of PGS.

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The Natural Claims of Spirit

customs and institutions that favour spirit; but these are seen in the political arena. Thus his views about the compatibility issue fall between the two main texts. It is only in the book where he answers criticisms that he deals explicitly with the issue. Santayana’s favourite example illustrating his compatibility claim is the story of the warrior Arjuna taken from the Bhagavad Gita. He finds there “the most eloquent words I have ever read” on the theme of spiritual salvation.25 In this text, Arjuna is a member of the warrior caste, and his duty is to wage a war, even though he must fight against various relatives and friends assembled against him. The God Krishna is there to give him spiritual guidance, and he insists on the duty of Prince Arjuna to pursue his proper worldly task. “The tender prince must live the life appointed to him; he must fight the battle, but with detachment.”26 The right path for Arjuna will differ from the humble life of a begging monk, but will nonetheless be a spiritual life, so long as he carries out his duties in the detached manner which proper understanding permits him. The example with Arjuna and Santayana’s comments about compatibility are directed toward those individuals whose destiny calls for a more active life, but who have a troubled spirit. The notion of caste in the example has an evident symbolic value for him: some are fitted to live a spiritual life, but most are not, and have a more active destiny. The value to the active person of these detached sentiments is perhaps best illustrated by some comments Santayana makes about Spinoza, whose view on pity is hard and almost callous. Pity, says Spinoza, is in itself bad and useless in a man who lives under the guidance of reason.27 Santayana comments on Spinoza’s harsh attitude: We may say with better reason of pain what Spinoza said of remorse and pity, that it is bad and useless. The pain in remorse and pity is futile, but not the spiritual or tragic perception of the evil in question: for this perception indicates no impediment in the psyche now, but on the contrary an enveloping synthesis by which the old calamity and its neutralization in the vast context of truth are present to the spirit, and radically present for ever. Such tragic insight, such pity and remorse, are parts of the highest good. That which is bad and useless is to protract or repeat pain, physical or moral, at its original level, where it still indicates not synthesis but distraction. (RB 680-681))

According to Santayana’s account, individuals who attain spiritual insights like this will return to the exercise of their natural virtues. And these virtues can only be enhanced by the insights. If Santayana is suggesting that there will be 25 26 27

See page 571 of PGS. ibid. See Book 4 of Spinoza’s Ethics.

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no change to this life (and at times he seems to do so), then I find this doubtful. However, his main point here is that the natural virtues and the spiritual moments run together through life. Between the spiritual life and the life of reason there is accordingly no contradiction: they are concomitant: yet there is a difference in temperament and level …. A family quarrel may easily arise between these … but the ethics of this conflict are the same as in other conflicts: to know oneself, and to impose on oneself or on others only the sacrifices requisite to bring one’s chosen life to perfection. (PGS 27)

This is the ethics of the life of reason, where a rational selection is made from among both pre-rational and post-rational impulses.

DISTANCE FROM THE TRUTH GLENN TILLER

Introduction Most philosophers today accept some form of materialism; and many respectfully (for the most part) debate the nature of consciousness, and the status of universals. So it is not too difficult to find in recent discussions connections to Santayana’s ontological categories of matter, spirit, and essence. In contrast, contemporary speculation is very far from the truth, as Santayana understands it. The greatest difference between Santayana’s ontological account of truth and nearly every other account is that it is not defined in terms of beliefs, assertions, sentences, propositions, nor anything else related to human activity.28 As we will see, this does not mean mind has no role in elaborating the nature of truth. But working only from the negative point, Santayana’s notion of truth seems to have no affinity with the accounts typically defended: coherence, correspondence, pragmatic, and deflationary theories. There are of course other philosophers who have parted ways with these accounts. Richard Rorty is one example. But that is because he dismisses the aim of saying anything “philosophically interesting” about truth. Nothing 28

Santayana makes this point repeatedly. For example: The truth is not “anything psychological or human”. Character and Opinion in the United States (New York: George Braziller, [1920] 1955), p.87 (hereafter cited as COUS followed by the page number); “Truth is not an opinion, even an ideally true one.” Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), p.268 (hereafter cited as SAF followed by the page number); “[O]pinions are all incidental to the truth”, Realms of Being (one volume edition which contains Santayana’s four books: The Realm of Essence (1927); The Realm of Matter (1930); The Realm of Truth (1938); and The Realm of Spirit (1940)) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942), p.446 (hereafter cited as “RB” followed by the page number); “In fact the truth has a superhuman status: so that an absence of true opinions or criteria would not in the least abolish it.” RB 529; “Truth...is indifferent to being praised or possessed by anybody.” RB 543. For a discussion of why Santayana would regard propositions as too psychological to pay a part in defining the truth, see Angus Kerr-Lawson, "Truth and Idiomatic Truth in Santayana", Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. XXXIII, no. 1, Winter 1997: 91-111.

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could be further from Santayana’s position. He has a positive account, one that purports to represent clarified common sense. Yet it is altogether different from the standard theories. In what follows I discuss Santayana’s account of truth. I present some of the motivations behind his ontological approach and try to show why he thinks truth deserves a place alongside his other realms. I then raise two objections. I argue that while the first objection reveals some strengths of his position, the second objection is more puzzling.

Truth as an ontological realm What does Santayana mean by calling truth an “ontological realm”? As a roundabout way of answering this question we might ask another. What would Santayana think of Rorty’s assertions that “truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting opinion about”29 and that searching for the truth is “simply the desire for as much intersubjective agreement as possible”?30 These claims express a kind of eliminativism about truth. For Rorty, when it comes to truth there is nothing, or precious little, to say. Santayana places such claims under the heading “Denials of Truth”.31 Significantly, he does not simply dismiss denials of truth. In his typical way of finding a place for all philosophical comers, he holds that a denial of truth might be made in “perfect sincerity”. If it were, it would amount to the “avowal that, in one’s own mind, the notion of truth was absent and needless.”32 To be sure, Santayana scorns such a denial, but he accepts that there were sincere sophists in the past, and it is doubtful he would be surprised to find them in the present.33 Santayana’s position that a denial of truth might be sincere sheds some first light on his ontological approach. For him, the truth is not a “realm of being” in the sense that it is a place or thing. He does not ask anyone to believe 29 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982: p. xiii. 30 Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991: p.23. 31 Chapter XIII of The Realm of Truth, Book Three of RB. 32 RB p.529 33 A sample of Santayana’s scorn: “the denial of truth is something late and artificial, a contorted, confused, and villainous effort to squirm away from one’s intellectual conscience.” RB 529-530. Taken as an assertion, Santayana held that in the denial of truth “[s]elf-contradiction could not be franker.” However, he also held that “a formal refutation of this sort remains rather puerile” and that one must take seriously the “depth of irritation” of one who denies truth. RB 528

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in the realm of truth, as we must believe in the physical world. Commenting on his realms of truth and essence, he states: The smile of the critic who will not be fooled into believing in them is entirely justified. They are not proposed as objects of belief. They are proposed as conceptual distinctions and categories of logic; as one of many languages in 34 which the nature of things may be described.

From this we see that to call “the truth” an “ontological category” is in the first place to make a categorial distinction. That said, Santayana’s position is not Kantian. He does not think all minds must appeal to the same categories. Indeed he considers it a kind of philosophical egotism to assume there must be a universal grammar of thought.35 Far from being compulsory, he holds that “anyone who wishes is free to discard [his] categories and employ others.”36 Now, Rorty is evidently one who has opted to discard truth. Santayana would reply: so be it. But there is a catch. For he writes in some philosophical fine print in allowing for “the optional character of human logics.” If anyone discards a category such as truth: the only question will be how he will get on; what sort of intellectual dominion and intellectual life he will achieve; also whether he will really be using other categories in his spontaneous and successful contacts with the world, or only a different jargon in his professional philosophy. Professional philosophies, sincere and even impassioned enough in controversy, are often but poor 37 hypocrisies in daily life.”

Setting aside the question of whether Rorty’s denial of truth is successful, we may now sum up Santayana’s ontological approach as follows. Truth is a basic categorial distinction present in our thoughts. Since there are no compulsory categories, it is in one sense optional. But it is not really optional for us, and common sense attests to this fact. Thus, while there could be a mind for which the notion of truth is absent, it is doubtful it would be human. To provide support for these claims we need to see how Santayana defines the truth and also how truth is implicated in common sense. The two points are connected.

34

RB 453 See for example Santayana’s criticisms of Kant, SAF 298-304. 36 RB 453 37 RB pp.453-454. “[T]he categories of human discourse, though somewhat variable, are constitutional and limited; they need to be so in order to fulfil their cognitive and imaginative function.” RB 123 35

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The realm of matter and the inevitability of truth In his reply to his critics, Santayana wrote “I ask myself only what are the fundamental presuppositions that I cannot live without making.”38 This statement indicates concisely how Santayana arrives at his categories. His basic position is that since scepticism cannot be defeated and the demand for beliefs with intrinsic warrant terminates in solipsism, the task of philosophy is to articulate as faithfully as possible the “postulates of sanity”.39 For Santayana these postulates are summed up in the word “materialism”.40 At the core of materialism is animal faith in the existence of a dynamic physical world. Although no proof for the existence of matter or a reason why it exists is possible, animal faith in matter is unavoidably implicated in our actions. Unless we deny the reality of action, we cannot honestly deny animal faith. Granting the existence of matter, it is axiomatic that it embodies some properties or “essence”. The reason is that “[a] being without any essence is a contradiction in terms. The existence of something without quality would not differ in its absence nor from the existence of anything else.”41 Furthermore, since material existence implies the reality of more than one thing, whatever exists will also establish relations (also essences) with other things.42 It is at this point that we arrive at the realm of truth, for the totality of embodied essences and external relations is what Santayana means by the truth: it is “that segment of the realm of essence which happens to be illustrated in existence.”43 It is important to note that for Santayana this does not mean the truth is restricted to what currently exists, for the word “illustrated” includes what “has existed, or is destined to exist.”44 The truth is thus an ideal realm of being, “impersonal and super-existential”.45

Truth integral to Santayana’s system Some have questioned the propriety of calling the totality of essences embodied by matter “the truth”. Timothy Sprigge, for one, calls the realm of 38 The Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp. Illinois: Open Court, [1940] 1991: p.505. Hereafter cited at PGS followed by page number. 39 RB 200 40 PGS 505 41 “Literal and Symbolic Knowledge”, Obiter Scripta, ed. Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz, New York: Charles Scribner’ Sons: pp.116-117. 42 RB 202-217 43 RB xv 44 Ibid. 45 RB 485

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truth the “least satisfactory part of [Santayana’s] ontology”. He also gives the impression that the fact truth was a relatively late addition to Santayana’s other realms casts doubt on its status.46 Before turning to objections, I offer some reasons for thinking truth is in no way ad hoc but rather integral to Santayana’s system. Since truth is generated by matter, it is “ontologically secondary”.47 But this does not mean it isn’t a basic category, at least in Santayana’s sense of “basic category”. If it did, then neither spirit nor matter would be an independent realm. If Santayana was concerned with only logical priority, then he should hold there are only two realms: existence and essence.48 Or perhaps only one: essence. But the realms have an organizing function. They are put forward as the most basic categories for “an animal mind in the presence of nature.”49 Santayana writes “the truth posited by animal faith, in action or in curiosity, is posited as unknown, as something to be investigated and discovered; and truth in this transcendent sense can never be denied by an active mind.”50 Thus truth deserves to be a realm since, like the other realms, it is a rudimentary category that frames our total vision of the world. With regard to truth being the last addition to Santayana’s ontology, I don’t think we can infer very much from this fact. Given that Santayana had his materialism in place at a very early age, and given the logical relationship between matter and truth, it is not surprising to find him writing as early as 1887 that “[i]t is impossible to abandon the postulate of one eternal and objective truth.”51 This statement casts doubt on the idea that the truth is a suspiciously late addition to essence, matter, and spirit. There are further important reasons why truth is integral to Santayana’s system. I briefly mention three.

46

Sprigge, T.L.S. Santayana, London: Routledge, 1995 [1974]: pp.163-170 RB 445 48 Santayana states that Royce was prophetic when he told Santayana “the gist of [your] philosophy [is] the separation off essence from existence.” PGS 497. See also Santayana’s statement that “[w]e learn in the Timaeus that the first of all distinctions is that between what is always identical with itself and immutable and what, on the contrary, is in flux and indefinable.” PGS 544 49 RB xxvi (italics added). 50 RB 536 51 The Letters of George Santayana, Volume I, ed. William G. Holzberger, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001-2003: p. 63. 47

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1. Truth is necessary for thinking about change The material world is in flux. And the flux of matter—indeed the flux of anything—can only be conceived by spirit intuiting the essence of change. If I know that an object has changed from one state to another, it is not by perceiving its past and present state at the same time. I must instead appeal to an essence of change, namely, the truth that constitutes “the complete description of an event.”52 The point here is not simply that if we think about some event we assume there is truth. Rather, the idea is that spirit could not think about change if truth did not supervene over events, for “it is only in the realm of truth that events can be unified and divided.”53 Without change ideally recorded in the realm of truth, spirit might be sensual or emotional, but it would not be a mind in the presence of nature.

2. Truth is distinguished from fact by its eternality A related point concerns the eternality of truth. One might ask why Santayana doesn’t give the name “facts” to his realm of truth. The reason is that facts change but the truth about them does not. Santayana reasons as follows: “[t]hough everything in the panorama of history be temporal, the panorama itself is dateless: for evidently the sum and system of events cannot be one of them. It cannot occur after anything else or before anything else. Thus the truth about existence differs altogether in ontological quality from existence itself.”54 The eternality and all-inclusiveness of the realm of truth also explains why the truth cannot be a thing or event such as a judgment, even the judgment of an omniscient being. The truth, thought of as the (ideal) totality of all events, cannot be an event not included in the totality. Since the final judgment of an omniscient being would be a new event in time, it would not be included in the truth.55

52

RB 216 RB 487. “Under the form of truth change and motion become visible.” PGS 575 54 RB 485-486 (italics added). 55 “In order that even a superhuman survey of history should be complete, the last of future events would have had to occur and show its colours. Therefore an actual survey (which would be a fresh event) could not supervene; or if it supervened it could not be all-inclusive, since by arising, this survey itself would have added an important event to history.” RB 485. See also RB 470. 53

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3. Literal and symbolic knowledge requires the realm of truth Santayana claims that we only have symbolic knowledge of matter. He is explicit that the relativity of knowledge is implied by his materialism.56 The material world exists, we are part of it, and knowledge is possible. But given the discrepancy between the boundless complexity of the material universe and our finite cognitive machinery, “[a]n unbiassed and literal understanding of matter [is] incongruous in an animal mind.”57 But if there were no absolute truth, we would lose the contrast with symbolic knowledge.58 Absolute truth, then, is essential to Santayana’s epistemology.

Two objections Even if we accept that truth deserves a place alongside the realms of essence, matter, and spirit, difficulties remain. Below we consider two basic objections to Santayana’s general position.

1. The comparison objection Santayana writes that “[o]pinions are true or false by repeating some part of the truth about the facts which they envisage.”59 This statement suggests, as Sprigge states, that while Santayana did not hold a correspondence account of the truth, we might “call his theory of the true judgement a correspondence theory, since such a judgement or opinion is one which corresponds to the intended facts.”60 Accepting this reading, many philosophers, pragmatists among them, will argue that Santayana’s account of truth is immediately refuted by the comparison objection.61 This objection states that since we have no access to an unconceptualized reality to which we might compare our opinions, we cannot

56

See his comments on the “two kinds of dogmatism”. PGS 511 RB 442 58 “This relativity [of knowledge] does not imply that there is no absolute truth. On the contrary, if there were no absolute truth, all-inclusive and eternal, the desultory views taken from time to time by individuals would themselves be absolute.” RB xv 59 SAF 267. “But an idea or judgment is only true if it reports the truth, and false if it contradicts the truth.” RB 447 60 Sprigge, Santayana, p.168. 61 For a detailed discussion of this objection, see Douglas McDermid, “Pragmatism and Truth: The Comparison Objection to Correspondence,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. LI, no. 4, 1998: 775-811. 57

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know whether or not our opinions are true. We are thus hopelessly cut-off from the truth and Santayana’s claim to represent clarified common sense is vitiated. Santayana’s reply to this fundamental objection is one of the strengths of his position. To begin, he agrees that we cannot expect to form an opinion that somehow captures the truth. There are a number of reasons for this. First, as we have seen, no opinion could capture the truth since it would itself add to the truth. Second, matter is in flux so that even if we somehow knew “the exact formula for everything...the flux might take a new turn” making our “formula” out of date.62 Third, the very conditions of knowledge require a limitation of perspective. The truth is eternal, but we are located in a particular space and time. Thus “a glimpse of [the truth is only] secured by some animal with special organs under special circumstances...[so that] to be partial is, for knowledge, a condition of existing at all.”63 This last reason connects with Santayana’s doctrine of symbolic knowledge, and it also shows how deep it runs. Santayana agrees with the pragmatists that only science gives us knowledge about the world, and he also agrees that the best criterion we have for truth is “pertinence to action”.64 But since our actions spring from our emotional biases and preferences, our actions invariably limit and dramatically color our vision of the truth.65 Thus, to borrow a line from James, “[t]he trail of the human serpent is...over everything.”66 So not only can we not claim to know the whole truth, we should also not expect to form opinions that report literally a portion of the truth. To think otherwise, Santayana writes, is to claim “a plenitude of miraculous illumination such as no prophet ever thought to possess.”67 Although Santayana denies that the mind mirrors nature, his account of truth preserves the common sense notion that, for example, it is objectively true that some event occurred whether or not we know it did. Further, even though the mind does not mirror nature, we are not utterly “cut off” from the truth. We know the truth in the only terms available to us, namely, in non-literal or humanly symbolic terms.68 It is hard not to think that this unequivocal affirmation of an objective truth has an advantage over competing accounts of truth that flirt with 62

RB 444 RB 469 64 RB 442 65 RB pp.60-61. 66 William James, Pragmatism. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981 [1907]: p.33. I owe this reference to Paul Forster. 67 RB 186 68 In Santayana’s estimation non-literal knowledge is not something to bemoan, for it is adequate to the task of guiding us (fallibly) through the material world. 63

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subjectivity, such as the pragmatist account.69 For the pragmatist, a true belief is one permanently settled by inquiry. Thus, if we assert that some belief about the remote past is true, we are committed to the thought that inquiring minds would eventually converge on this belief through inquiry and the force of evidence. But if the evidence for the remote event has dried up and there is no reasonable expectation of convergence, we are forced to say the belief about the past event is neither true nor false. But is that what we want to say? A pragmatist might reply that the belief about the past still has a truth value since the following conditional is true: had we been able to pursue inquiry in the past, then we would have settled on the belief that the event occurred. Apart from the difficulty of justifying conditionals of this kind through inquiry and the force of evidence, this move seems a strained way of preserving our instinctive belief in an objective past. By unhooking truth from inquiry, Santayana avoids such tangles. But this is not the only virtue of Santayana’s position. The notions of absolute truth and symbolic knowledge also bring with them a profound philosophical reorientation. Take two examples: morals and religion. Philosophers have long debated how moral judgments might be (literally) true. For Santayana, this approach to morals is misguided. Rather than agitating about the existence of objective moral facts, the doctrine of symbolic knowledge allows us to emphasize and take seriously the expressive element in moral judgments. For if knowledge is symbolic, our moral beliefs might indicate as much or more about us than they do the rest of the world. Santayana holds that “[o]ur worst difficulties arise from the assumption that knowledge of existences ought to be literal.”70 In the case of our understanding the nature of moral claims, this assumption would appear particularly unproductive, if not positively dangerous.71 These considerations also bear on religious belief. James famously argued that we have a right to believe in God if the evidence is neutral.72 Peirce thought that we might try to argue for the existence of God by appeal to the scientific method.73 Both of these philosophers took seriously the idea that there might be evidence for the (literal) truth of God’s existence (or non-existence), 69

Here I am thinking mainly of a Peircean account which links truth to inquiry. SAF 101 71 The danger is that we fall into absolutist and intolerant thinking. See Santayana’s comments on “moralism” in PGS 502-503. 72 “The Will to Believe”, in The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1897. 73 “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”, in The Essential Peirce, vol. II, ed. The Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. 70

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and the debate continues with little profit. Once again the doctrine of symbolic knowledge suggests an entirely different approach. For Santayana, religious claims, like moral judgments, are essentially expressive of human nature.74 Thus rather than trying to prove that the existence of God is literally true, which for Santayana amounts to trying to justify a delusion, we should instead turn to decoding the expressive force of religious claims. We might not make progress towards the afterlife, but we’ll have a better understanding of this life and the human predicament. In sum, while Santayana requires us to remain sceptical with regard to isomorphic correspondence of human opinion and the truth, this scepticism is cathartic. For complementing this scepticism is a symbolic account of knowledge that inspires a powerful philosophical reorientation.

2. The being of truth A more puzzling difficulty, I believe, arises from the truth being a subset of essence. The difficulty is this: how are the essences that are part of the truth but not presently instantiated distinguished from every other essence? Sprigge points out that it cannot be the eternality truth, for all essences are eternal.75 Santayana tells us that “[e]xistence, as if charged with electricity, turns a whole region of essence into a magnetic field.”76 But, to continue the metaphor, the problem is that once the charge is gone so are all traces of the magnetic field. Shouldn’t we conclude that truth is only “of the existential moment”, obliterated or turned without a trace back into mere essence once the moment is gone? What exactly is it that makes the realm of truth a realm of being? Sprigge replies to this difficulty, but I think questions remain.77 We’ll look at his reply in a moment, but first I offer some general thoughts on the issue.

74

“That is all my message: that morality and religion are expressions of human nature.” PGS 23. Santayana allows, however, that religious beliefs may say something accurate about the general rhythms of nature. “[T]he most poetical or pictorial [perspective] may be as good as the most complicated, the most poetical or the pictorial as good as the most scientific, not only aesthetically but even cognitively; because it may report the things concerned on that human scale on which we need to measure them, and in this relation may report them correctly.” RB xiv 75 T.L.S Sprigge, “Kerr-Lawson on Truth and Santayana,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. XXXIII, no. 1, 1997: 113-130. 76 RB 451 77 T.L.S Sprigge, “Kerr-Lawson on Truth and Santayana,” p.128.

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To begin, it seems fair to say the basic issue here is not peculiar to Santayana’s philosophy. The basic issue is the status of the past (and future) and the truth about it. Santayana’s categories provide a vivid way of framing the issue; and the question is whether answers can be found within his categorial approach. Second, Santayana grants Sprigge’s point about eternality. He writes “in the infinite field [of the realm of essence], no truth would be found distinguishable from pure Being, in which every alternative is equally present.”78 This last claim brings us to the third point, which concerns the role of mind in Santayana’s elaboration of truth. Recall that the truth is something ontologically secondary and so defined relatively. “Facts, however momentous,” Santayana writes, “are transient and local, and truths, however eternal, are relative to these transient facts.”79 Recall also that the truth, considered as the essence of the entire universe, is simply one immeasurably complex essence amongst infinity of others. Taken as a whole, it reveals no sign of existence, and hence of being the truth. In order for truth to “reveal itself”, so to speak, there needs to be a mind. More accurately, there must be a mind surveying its surroundings within the realm of matter. Santayana states that the existence of the universe can only be “posited within its limits.”80 Since truth is subservient to existence, it follows that the truth is discerned only indirectly by a mind amidst the movements of matter. Without mind, truth is indistinguishable from essence. Santayana puts this point by saying the truth is something “addressed essentially to mind” since it is “something only a mind can detach.”81 What do these considerations tell us about the realm of truth? One thing seems clear: for Santayana the truth has stronger ties to spirit than essence or matter. What is not so clear is how this affects the main issue, for we have seen that Santayana also holds that truth is real whether or not there is a mind to know it. But in what sense “real”? In what sense is there a “realm of truth” within the realm of essence? Sprigge’s response to this question is to say that for Santayana “there is an element of illusion in thinking that [things] drop out of existence”82 and he cites Santayana’s statement that “the past is not fading, the future is not empty or unreal.”83 The suggestion here seems to be that the truth is distinguished from mere essence since the existence of things is not really transitory.

78

RB 450 RB 166 80 RB 215 81 RB 471 (italics added). 82 T.L.S Sprigge, “Kerr-Lawson on Truth and Santayana,” p.128 83 RB 128. 79

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Sprigge is right to say that “past”, “present”, and “future” are for Santayana specious essences of sentimental time. These are terms pertinent only to an animal mind caught up in its subjective temporal perspective and not intrinsic to facts themselves.84 But “earlier” and “later” are applicable to the facts insofar as the directional flow of matter is in truth irreversible.85 And the question then is: what kind of being do we attribute to the truth that supervenes on the directional flow of matter? Santayana would not say that matter is forever propping up the truth thus distinguishing it from all other essences. I don’t claim Sprigge suggests otherwise, but it is difficult to make sense of, as he says, the “element of illusion” in thinking that things do drop out of existence. This difficulty about the being of truth disappears when we turn back to the material world in which we live our lives. And the temptation is there to say with Santayana “we must reason, as we must live, by animal faith”, and accept the reality of truth on the grounds of brute animal presumption.86 But even if we admit the reality of truth, in the same way we must admit the inexplicable existence of matter, the manifest presence of spirit, and the being of essence, its ontological status is unclear and our presence in that eternal realm is a wonder.

84

RB 253 For a particularly helpful essay on the eternal truth of the directional flow of matter see “Pictorial Space and Sentimental Time” in Physical Order and Moral Liberty, ed. John and Shirley Lachs, Vanderbilt: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969, pp.68-84. Hereafter cited as POML followed by page number. 86 POML 43 85

IT DEPENDS WHAT THE MEANING OF ‘IS’ IS: SANTAYANA, IDENTITY THEORY, AND THE MINDBODY PROBLEM JESSICA WAHMAN

Introduction One of the most intractable issues in the philosophy of mind is the mind-body problem. Even naturalists–who accept the fact of an organic connection between consciousness and brain activity–cannot seem to come to an agreement over how best to describe that relationship. While there are some substantive disagreements at issue, the more frustrating aspect of these discussions is the sense that naturalist philosophers of mind are talking past one another. Both believe, in some sense, that our mental experiences should be aligned with material events in the brain, but they differ over what it means to say that “consciousness is a brain process.” The crux of the misunderstanding between reductive and non-reductive materialists seems to hinge on this very statement, and the difference in interpretation leads non-reductive naturalists to deny its truth and reductionists to assert that anyone who fails to affirm it is either a closet supernaturalist or unclear about what (s)he means. The position I am taking here is that the main culprit in the confusion between naturalist camps is the word “is.” This little word seems straightforward enough, but the possibilities for equivocation are many. The best way to disentangle the confusion, then, is to disambiguate the ways in which the term may be used by philosophers of mind in their arguments. And when I think of a rich account of the possible connotations of the verb “to be,” no work seems more appropriate than George Santayana’s essay “Some Meanings of the Word ‘Is’.” The variety of connotations that Santayana provides here are an ideal tool kit for making sense out of, if not settling, the trenchant disagreements over the reducibility of mind to matter. By considering the different relationships that the word “is” may indicate, Santayana offers a non-reductive position on the relationship of consciousness to matter that can nonetheless incorporate the materialism that is at stake for the reductionist. Consciousness is located inextricably within the stream of natural events and

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yet, in its essence, is never fully reducible to physical existence.

Identity Theory There are many strains of reductive philosophy of mind in which conscious experience is in some way equated with publicly observable physical events–behaviorism and functionalism, for example–and the arguments I am going to make here will apply in some form to those as well. Identity theory is ideal for my purposes, however, because it specifically claims that a mental state is a brain state. Consciousness and brain processes are not correlative but identical; they are one and the same thing. This may seem counterintuitive at first, for nothing seems more unlike our qualitative experiences than electrical and chemical exchanges taking place within some lumpy grey matter. But many things are not as they seem, and identity theorists assert that, appearances to the contrary, mental states really are just brain states. Modern identity theory originates with U.T. Place (Chalmers 2002, 4), who, in “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” makes an empirical, rather than logical, claim for the identity of mind and brain. In doing so, he distinguishes two different notions of the word “is,” one of definition, the other of composition, and asserts that mind-brain identity is an instance of the latter. This is a far cry from the seven connotations of “is” that Santayana provides,87 but Place’s distinction is clarifying, nonetheless. Place specifically denies that statements about what experience is like are translatable into statements about brain activity (Place 1956, 44-5). Rather, when he claims that mental states are brain states, he means that they are, in a sense, made up of, or composed of, brain behavior. Just as water may be, to our senses, sweet tasting and clear, or blue-green and flecked with sunlight, scientifically, we know that water is really nothing but a compound of hydrogen and oxygen molecules. “Composition,” then, indicates the material substance of any given phenomenon, and it seems reasonable to claim that the physical stuff of consciousness can be nothing other than electrical and chemical discharges in the brain. After all, neuroscience has taught us that very specific areas of the brain are responsible for equally specific aspects of our qualitative states: where those areas are damaged or lacking, our experience is as well. If we are looking for where to locate the stuff responsible for consciousness, brains seem to be a pretty good bet. Place’s means of justifying the reduction of consciousness to brain processes–and this will be important later in reference to Santayana–is to 87

The seven meanings of “is” are identity, equivalence, definition, predication, existence, actuality, and derivation. I will specifically address five of them–identity, definition, predication, derivation, and actuality–in this paper.

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distinguish between two kinds of observations, those based on everyday perceptual awareness and those made from scientific experiment. Place notes that “two sets of observations [are] observations of the same event” when the scientific account provides an “immediate explanation of the observations made by the man in the street” (48). In other words, when the scientist is able to provide a theoretical account of a perceptual experience, the two may be said to be identical. When seeing a red object is explained as the reflection of light waves of certain frequencies onto the rods and cones in the retina of the eye, we mean that this is exactly what is happening when we see red. There are not two experiences, located in space and time, that we correlate; one simply is the explanation for the other. There are limitations to Place’s analogy between scientific explanations of perceptions and scientific accounts of consciousness, however, for it is doubtful whether consciousness is an everyday perception of the brain. It is not our brains that we are perceiving when we are conscious, but our general environment. Even the metaphor of the “inner eye,” or inner sense, is problematic, for what sense organ is it that would supposedly be sensing the brain itself?88 Place’s colleague, J.J.C. Smart, also questions the confidence with which Place makes mind-brain identity a straightforwardly empirical matter, and asserts that, in deciding between reductionism and an epiphenomenalist dualism, no empirical test can provide a solution (Smart 1959, 155). However, this does not lead Smart to reject identity theory; instead, he chooses to strengthen it. Because no scientific experiment can solve the problem, nor can a logical proof demand that we accept dualism, Occam’s razor charges us to explain the phenomena as simply as possible, and adding subjective states to brain states simply provides a more complex description where a simple one will do (142). We should not think of psychological states as composed of brain states because, physically speaking, there is nothing other than brain states that exist. In short, there is no “irreducibly psychical” something that is being correlated with brain states. Smart notes that “[y]ou cannot correlate something with itself. You correlate footprints with burglars, but not the burglar with Bill Sikes the burglar” (142). From this analogy, it is evident that Smart intends, as does Place, to deny that there are two natural entities that are being associated with one another. Footprints are located somewhere, and we may infer that a human being, now located elsewhere, made them. But subjective states are not “tracks” left by the brain. We cannot separate them in any physical sense; therefore they are one and the same thing. 88

In other words, the argument falls prey to the homonculus problem, where the explanation requires another observer within consciousness to explain consciousness, and hence begs the question of what conscious observation, in fact, is.

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Santayana’s Analysis of “Is”–Identity Versus Synthesis The example of Bill Sikes is a particularly helpful means of transition to Santayana’s “deconstruction,” so to speak, of the various meanings of the word “is” and the significance of these connotations to the mind-body problem. Recall that Smart denies we can correlate Bill Sikes with himself because he is simply identical to himself. Generally speaking, this appears obvious, but on closer examination it becomes evident that this statement is true in one sense, but false in another, and Smart may be unintentionally guilty of an equivocation here. In “Some Meanings Of The Word ‘Is’,” Santayana distinguishes seven different connotations of the verb, four of which might roughly fall under Hume’s category of relations of ideas and three under matters of fact.89 The first he reserves for only the strictest sense of identity and labels it, aptly enough, “identity.” All that may be truly identical is an essence–a distinct quality or character–with itself. The minute we try to suggest that one essence is really another, or indicates or explains some natural event, we have already moved beyond identity and are performing what Kant would call a synthetic operation. Santayana would agree with Smart that “Bill Sikes” and “Bill Sikes” are identical, but only in the sense that the essence thus invoked is itself and no other. The moment we claim that “Bill Sikes is a criminal in Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist,” we have combined several essences together, and thus “definition” (Santayana’s third meaning of “is”) is already something very different from identity. What Smart appears to mean when he claims that Bill Sikes cannot be correlated with himself is that there are not two physical beings in question, but one, were he to exist. But what if we take a slightly more complicated fictional character (and again, imagine he is of flesh and blood existence)? Clark Kent and Superman would be the same material entity, the one being the alter ego of the other, but can we really say that these two very different characters are identical to each other? True, when one is around, the other is nowhere to be seen, indicating that there is only one physical object to which we are referring, but is meek and mild Clark the same personality, to say nothing of the same formal essence, as the Man of Steel? Clearly Lois Lane did not think so. Santayana notes that “[e]very quality possibly found in any thing, or predicated of it, is a fundamental and separate essence evoked on that occasion” (Santayana 1936, 201). What we have in this case are two different essences–“Clark Kent” 89

The division is not quite as clean as it sounds, for Santayana explains that our ability to combine ideas by the “is” of predication depends on empirical observation, but I separate them in this way because the first four involve comparisons of essences, while the last three make reference in some way to existence.

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and “Superman”–being attributed (justly, I might add) to the same physical being. It is important to note that, when we claim that Clark Kent is Superman, we are not reporting a straightforward case of identity but actually making a rather complex knowledge claim by triangulating among two essences and a physical thing. While, in the strict sense, only an essence may be identical with anything (and then only with itself) the first form of “is” does not get us anywhere very interesting epistemologically. Knowledge, by contrast, requires that we move beyond identity, and while we lose the perfect adequacy of thought to thing for which traditional epistemology strives, we also gain something new by joining essences together and, by way of them, designating some material event or being. When this occurs, each formal character, description, or explanation becomes a symbolic act of representation, and though many such symbols may refer to the same object, there is no identity between those essences or between them and the object. In a sense, then, knowledge is an act of correlation; we need not restrict this term to connections between natural events, as Smart appears to have done. When we predicate some essences of others (Santayana’s fourth meaning of “is”)–for example, by claiming that a Macintosh apple is red and tart–we indicate the characteristics to be correlated with each other and with the being they are supposed to represent. And if I have never encountered this apple before, and yet I know the meanings of its predicates, will have learned something new by this synthetic act of predication.

The “Is” of Derivation and the Mind-Body Problem Thus far in my consideration of Santayana’s treatment of “is,” I have focused on the ways in which essences may define or predicate others, and as such, I have not yet hit on what is intended by identity theorists when they claim that consciousness is the same thing as a brain process. Place explicitly rejects the “is” of definition, and both he and Smart deny that statements about consciousness are identical to statements about brain processes, so to this extent, Santayana’s critique of the identity of essences would not be a critique of an identity theory of mind. However, it is dubious whether the “is” of composition is so easily equated with any of Santayana’s remaining descriptions, and this is a telling point. Identity theory makes both an ontological and an epistemological claim: that there is one material event in question, and that one description of that event is reducible to another one. When we claim that water is really H20, we are asserting that both terms refer to the same physical entity, and furthermore, that the latter term captures the true nature of the material object. In extending this metaphor to consciousness, identity theory claims that

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consciousness and brain processes refer to the same event and that observations of brain states more fully capture its true nature (consciousness merely reporting how it “appears”). When Place justifies this identity by referring to two kinds of observations of the same event, he is making an epistemological claim that Santayana would find problematic. An investigation of this claim using Santayana’s concept of the “is” of derivation will make it possible to assert, on the one hand, that consciousness and brain processes amount to one natural event and yet to deny, on the other, that consciousness is “just a brain process.” “Derivation” is the seventh, final, and, Santayana notes, “most misleading” of all the meanings of the word “is.” When we claim one thing is another in this way, the intention is that the first object “is derived from . . . or has the same substance” as the second (Santayana 1936, 209). Santayana notes that, in this case, “[t]he word ‘is’ has become a synonym of ‘comes from’; it attributes to an alleged fact a source in another alleged fact, asserting that the two are continuous genetically, however different they may be in character” (210). Truly, the assertion that one fact has a source in another could well be the “is” of composition that Place intends. Despite the fact that consciousness and brain states have very different characteristics, they nonetheless possess the same substance. Santayana’s example of this use of “is” involves seeing a spark and attributing it to a firefly (210). Place, explaining the “is” of composition, asserts that a lightning flash is an electrical discharge and likens this to the mind-body relation (Place 1956, 47-8). In all these cases, “is” is taken to indicate that a given appearance derives from a particular substance. Ontologically, both Place’s “is” of composition and Santayana’s “is” of derivation seem quite compatible. However, due to the different epistemological presuppositions of the two thinkers, the similarity between composition and derivation end with Place’s insistence that brain events are the actual substance of the matter. Santayana considers the “is” of derivation to be the most misleading because it assumes an unsupportable confidence in our ability to identify our observations with material existence itself. For Santayana, knowledge is a transitive operation in which essences function as indirect indicators of events in nature. In other words, all we have direct access to are intuited data, and when we make knowledge claims, we take those data to stand for something independent of our present awareness. To return to the Clark Kent/Superman example, both names, present to intuition, truly refer to the same substantial being; but neither term adequately captures the nature of that being. Or, to put this in Place’s language, two observations may be observations of the same event, but no observation is reducible to the other, for neither can succeed in laying bare substance itself. As if anticipating the entire contemporary dispute over naturalist accounts of consciousness, Santayana notes:

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Santayana, Identity Theory, and the Mind-Body Problem [O]ne school of philosophers will . . . maintain that everything physical is really mental, and another school that everything mental is really physical. A capital instance of this habit is found in the phrase . . . that something “is nothing but” something else. . . . The phrase “nothing but” claims adequacy for the definition that follows: but a definition can define adequately an essence only, it cannot pretend to exhaust a fact . . . [Santayana 1936, 210-211].

When we are describing consciousness and brain states, one can make a strong a posteriori argument that both are, at bottom, the same natural event. But this is something very different from claiming that one account of that event is reducible to the other. To describe or explain a fact is to situate it within a specific disciplinary context according to a given mode of discourse.90 We may accept that there is one natural event–as do both the materialist and the nonreductive naturalist–but deny that one form of discourse can fully capture the issues involved with the mind-body problem. And this, of course, is where the two schools of thought part company. The appeal of reductive materialism is its reliance on scientific information. The best accounts and predictions we have of the way matter behaves derive from the scientific method, and, perhaps as a result, much of reductionist philosophy simply equates such accounts of nature with nature itself. But this equation forgets the complex interpretive processes involved in generating scientific knowledge and treats conclusions drawn from technically derived data as straightforward perceptions of the very core of reality. One exception to this tendency to equate scientific fact with straightforward perception is Christopher Hill, who, in his critique of Kripke’s modal argument for dualism, indicates the problem with the notion that we might simply observe brain states: [T]his presupposition [that it is possible for us to perceive brain processes] is highly questionable. To be sure, we are able to use the naked eye to perceive whole brains and various parts of brains. Further, by focussing microscopes on preparations of dead tissue, we are able to perceive certain aspects of the structure of individual brain cells. But neither of these things count as perceiving electrochemical activity in living neurons. Accordingly, it seems reasonable to say that brain processes lie on the theoretical side of the fuzzy line that divides theoretical entities from observable entities. Our access to brain

90

For example, biology, chemistry, and physics all have their requisite terms, contexts, and forms of explanation, but it is debatable whether biological and chemical explanations are reducible to physical ones, as if the last explanation were the account of what is “really” going on.

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processes is mediated by theories. We cannot be said to perceive them [Hill 1997, 68].91

Hill’s claim that brain states cannot be directly perceived suggests a fruitful critique of Place’s reductionism, for it challenges the possibility that we are actually comparing two observations of the same event. Recall that Place claims reduction is justified when one observation provides an immediate explanation for the other. If anything, scientific explanations are highly mediated–by technology, processes of induction, and transactions among the scientific community. Where Place claims to be drawing a parallel between perceptions of consciousness and perceptions of brain events, he is actually comparing introspective intuitions with complex theoretical accounts of how those intuitions are generated. One is an appearance par excellence, the other involves abstract inferences from other appearances, in this case, technologically generated perceptions. In neither case do we have a simple perception that absolutely captures the material event.

The “Is” of Actuality and Non-Reductive Naturalism The essence of the non-reductive position on the mind-body problem is that something imperative is lost when consciousness is identified with matter. Naturalists of this ilk do agree with materialists that there is but one natural event taking place: they share the same ontological premise, but they do not buy the epistemological conclusion. Some, such as Thomas Nagel, point to the limitations of the objective sciences to provide an explanation of subjective life, while others, like Frank Jackson, show how knowledge of brain events cannot by themselves yield knowledge of subjective states.92 These thinkers recognize that qualitative awareness is an integral part, not only of experience generally, but of our ability to know anything whatsoever. Materialists contest these positions because they assume that what cannot be treated scientifically cannot be an object of investigation. As a result of this presupposition, they take the 91

In this essay, Hill is actually supporting reductive materialism by critiquing Kripke’s reliance on modal intuitions to argue for mind-body dualism. This point notwithstanding, Hill’s analysis of the difference between intuitions and scientific conclusions is significant to a critique of the epistemological, though not the ontological, claims of identity theory. 92 Nagel’s explanatory argument is most famously expressed in his essay “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” (1974) and Jackson’s knowledge argument appears in “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” where he presents the thought experiment of Mary, the colorblind scientist. Both of these arguments demonstrate cases where someone possesses all the requisite scientific information and yet is still wholly ignorant of the qualitative aspects of consciousness (1982).

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claim “consciousness is not a brain state” as an assertion that consciousness is a phenomenon over and above natural existence. They confuse the denial that consciousness is identical to brain activity with the denial that consciousness is derived from brain activity. Fortunately Santayana again has a meaning of “is” that can come to our rescue: “Is, applied to spirit or to any of its modes, accordingly means is actual; in other words, exists not by virtue of inclusion in the dynamic, incessant, and infinitely divisible flux of nature, but by its intrinsic incandescence, which brings essences to light and creates the world of appearance” (Santayana 1936, 209). Santayana uses the term “spirit” to refer to what I have been calling consciousness. It is not itself a phenomenon but an illumination of phenomena (in other words, of qualia). To say “he is in pain” or “I am seeing a green object” is to use “is” in this manner. When we do so, we do not posit a second observable event correlative with the material one. At the same time, we are indicating something true about the event in question. To say “I am in pain” is not just a confused way of saying that C-fiber activation is appearing to me as pain. It articulates something very different, something about the unified and total subjective state I am actually in. If statements about conscious states indicate something actually occurring and meaningfully different from statements about brains, they should not be excluded from philosophical discussion of the mind-body problem.

Conclusion One helpful way to think of the different beliefs naturalist philosophers may hold regarding the place of consciousness in nature is provided by David Chalmers, when he divides the challenge of understanding consciousness into an easy problem and a hard problem. The easy problem concerns questions about which mechanisms are responsible for consciousness, while the hard problem considers why such physical events should produce qualitative states at all (Chalmers 2002, 247). Reductive materialists believe the easy problem is the only problem there is: when we have satisfied the conditions for a scientific explanation we have solved the problem of consciousness. Non-reductive naturalists assert that there is more to be accounted for. Why it should be the case that there is something it is like to be a kind of organism cannot be justified through science alone. Smart claimed that Occam’s razor demands we exclude from our explanations what science cannot discover nor logic prove. In other words, if we can’t prove the existence of subjectivity, then there can be neither truth nor falsity to the matter, and philosophy should drop the issue. If we can explain the physical process involved without recourse to qualia, so much the worse for qualia.

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According to the reductionist view, then, the job of the philosopher of mind is to help science figure out what consciousness is, scientifically speaking: Where is it located? What engine makes it function? What biological purpose does it serve? When we have satisfied these sorts of questions, the scientistic philosopher claims we are done. And yet, Santayana nicely articulates the significance of including consciousness in our analyses when he writes: Intuitions are therefore not existences in the same sense of natural things, nor events after the fashion of natural events; and yet we must say of them preeminently that they exist and arise, unless we are willing to banish spirit from nature altogether and to forget, when we do so, that spirit in us is then engaged in discovering nature and in banishing spirit. Why should philosophers wish to impoverish the world in order to describe it more curtly [Santayana 1936, 208]?

The temptation of scientism is its tidiness. Science is very good at discovering truths about empirical objects, and there is nothing in principle that physical science cannot explain about physical existence, so why add some occult qualia to the problem when they add nothing to a physical solution? However, by confining ourselves to what can be tested empirically, we are forced to ignore the aspect of our lives with which we are most intimately involved: our subjective experience. Scientism shuns speculative philosophy, but with the mind we are confronted with an issue so complex that it cannot help but invite speculation. Consciousness is a unique philosophical problem, for it is not only an object of inquiry but also the inquiring subject itself. We philosophers are not scientists. We can, and should, draw on scientific information where appropriate, but we are also in a position to reflect on the limitations of what science can provide and to fruitfully examine regions where it cannot tread. Consciousness would appear to be one of those regions.

Works Cited Chalmers, David. 2002. “Consciousness and Its Place in Nature,” in Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. New York: Oxford University Press. Originally published in Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind. Ed. By S. Stich and T. Warfield. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2002. “Foundations,” in Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Ed. by David Chalmers. New York: Oxford University Press. Hill, Christopher S. 1997. “Imaginability, Conceivability, Possibility, and the Mind-body Problem.” Philosophical Studies 87:61-85. Jackson, Frank. 1982. “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” The Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127-136. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” The Philosophical

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Review 83: 435-50. Place, U.T. 1956. “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” British Journal of Psychology 47: 44-50. Santayana, George. 1936. Obiter Scripta. Ed. by Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Smart, J.J. C. 1959. “Sensations and Brain Processes.” The Philosophical Review 68 (2): 141-156.

ANIMAL FAITH OR NATURAL KNOWLEDGE? WHY DEWEY AND SANTAYANA CAN’T AGREE ABOUT PHILOSOPHY93 PAUL FORSTER

John Dewey thinks George Santayana’s doctrine that knowledge of fact rests on a dogmatic leap of “animal faith” is little improvement on Locke’s epistemological mistakes (HN: 59 and PJD: 531).94 He thinks Santayana’s doubts about the literal truth of science arise only on the presupposition that experience is a “veil” separating knowers from the natural setting they purport to know (HN: 60 and 62). He says “[i]t is not pragmatism nor any particular philosophical view which has rendered this conception questionable, but the progress of natural science” (HN: 58). He takes his debate with Santayana to be decided by appeal to the theory of nature advanced in physics and biology (HN: 59 and PJD: 530) and as far as he is concerned Santayana simply fails to take the lessons of these natural sciences to heart (HN: 63). For his part, Santayana thinks Dewey’s naturalism cannot withstand the sort of scrutiny of fundamental principles that profound philosophy requires. To repudiate the metaphysical picture of enlightenment scepticism on naturalistic grounds as Dewey proposes does not undermine scepticism as a method for examining beliefs (SAF: 108; DNM: 674). As he sees it, failure to grasp this point blinds Dewey to the fact that the presuppositions of natural science,

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A draft of this paper was delivered at a symposium on Santayana’s philosophy that took place at the meetings of the Charles Peirce Society in San Antonio, Texas in 2006. I am grateful to Glenn Tiller for the invitation to participate, for his insightful commentary and for further advice and criticism. I am also indebted to Andrew Lugg and Angus Kerr-Lawson for comments on this paper that led to important improvements. 94 Throughout this paper “HN” refers to Dewey’s “Half-hearted Naturalism”, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXIV, No. 3, February 3, 1927: 57-64. “PJD” refers to The Philosophy of John Dewey, Second Edition, Paul Schilpp (ed.) (New York, Tudor Publishing Company, 1951).

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however instinctive and inevitable (DNM: 674; PJD: 245), are dogmatic and vulnerable to sceptical challenges (PGS: 515).95 So whereas Dewey thinks Santayana’s critique of philosophical appeals to natural science harkens back to the sort of first philosophy that natural science itself shows to be ill-conceived, Santayana thinks Dewey’s naturalistic defence of science is philosophically superficial because it ignores the basis of natural knowledge in animal faith. These two philosophers cannot agree about the nature of knowledge because they do not agree about the nature of philosophical criticism. And their notions of philosophical criticism are inspired in large measure by their conceptions of the nature of knowledge. As a result their impasse is far more intricate and perplexing than either of them suggests in their published contributions to this debate. Santayana claims materialism (which he also calls, “naturalism”) “corroborates and justifies [his] analysis of knowledge [as] faith mediated by symbols” along with his claim that “sensibility cannot create within the animal a feeling existentially similar to the material object that provokes that feeling” (PGS: 504).96 He insists on distinguishing the way objects are conceived by humans symbolically and the way they are independently of human thought. But Dewey wonders “from what platform of beliefs [this distinction] is propounded” (HN: 57). Santayana himself precludes a source of knowledge about matter other than physics97 but his epistemology posits a world that 95

“DNM” refers to Santayana’s “Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXII, No. 25, December 3, 1925: 673-688. “PGS” refers to The Philosophy of George Santayana, Second Edition, Paul Schilpp (ed.) (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951). 96 Santayana says “the word [‘materialism’] denotes and confesses in the first place that I find myself carried along by a great automatic engine moving out of the past into the future, not giving me any reason for its being, nor any reason why I should be. Existence is groundless, essentially groundless; for if I thought I saw a ground for it, I should have to look for a ground for that ground, ad infinitum. I must halt content at the quia, at the brute fact” (PGS: 505). “I might easily have avoided certain antagonisms by giving to matter a more fashionable name and speaking instead of the realm of events or of spacetime or of evolution. I might even have taken refuge in that half-poetical language to which I am not disinclined, and might have called the realm of matter simply nature” (RB: 183). “[M]y materialism…is not metaphysical” (SAF: vii). “SAF” refers to Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Son’s, 1923). 97 “Science—I am speaking of natural science, not of mathematics or philology—is the study of nature… Any study or description of natural objects on their own plane is a study or description of matter: and any philosophy is materialistic that, like mine, regards this study, physics, as alone competent to reveal the secret source and method of gross events, or the ways of power” (PGS: 507-508). “I wait for the men of science to tell me what matter is, in so far as they can discover it…” (SAF: viii).

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physics cannot presume to get right literally. This renders Santayana’s naturalism “broken-backed” (HN: 58). He asks us at once to accept human knowledge as the only platform from which to understand the knower’s relation to the world, all the while discounting that knowledge as dogmatic faith. For Dewey, the only sort of argument there can be for the discrepancy Santayana sees between the objects of human knowledge and objects as they are in themselves draws on premises about nature that are warranted only if there is no such discrepancy. So Dewey thinks it unsurprising that Santayana’s scepticism is often “not as complete in detail as it is in formal official statement” (HN: 59) and that Santayana “often suggests that he shares the belief of the ordinary man that human experience, adequately safeguarded by a normal organism and a proper equipment of apparatus and technique, may afford dependable indications of the nature of things that underlie it; that we do not merely fall back on an ‘animal faith’ that there is some adorable substance behind, but that we come to reasonable terms with its constituents and relations” (HN: 59). As Dewey understands it, naturalism implies that knowers are in the very “realm of being” as the objects they know. Knowing is a natural phenomenon in the same sense that erosion and photosynthesis are. Epistemology is the study of how a certain kind of natural object (viz., the human organism) comes to know objects in nature. Its aim is to determine the processes involved in knowledge so as to facilitate the growth of intelligence in nature. Dewey says that the philosopher’s method “differs no whit from that of any investigator who, by making certain observations and experiments, and by utilizing the existing body of ideas available for calculation and interpretation, concludes that he really succeeds in finding out something about some limited aspect of nature” (HN: 59). On this view, philosophical knowledge about natural knowledge is itself knowledge of the natural world. To suppose with Santayana that natural knowledge is subject to “transcendental criticism” is to assume there is some reflective stance that does not rely on knowledge of nature. But once it is appreciated that philosophy itself is natural knowledge it becomes clear that any such stance is precluded. Thus, Dewey says: “[i]t is in virtue of what I call naturalism that such a gulf as Mr Santayana puts between nature and man… appears incredible, unnatural, and… reminiscent of supernatural beliefs” (HN: 58). There is nothing outside natural knowledge for the philosophical criticism of science to rest on. There is no first philosophy. To Santayana’s way of thinking, Dewey’s criticism does not so much challenge his position as restate the very problem concerning knowledge he is out to address. He agrees with Dewey that there is no standpoint outside common sense and science to appeal to in philosophy. He writes: “I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life” (SAF: vi). Philosophers, he

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insists, are “compelled… to plunge in medius res” (SAF: 1) and “must trust current presumptions no less in discovering that [these presumptions] are logical—that is, justified by more general unquestioned presumptions—than in discovering that they are arbitrary and merely instinctive” (SAF: 2).98 They must begin with “things as [they] find them in the gross, and not with first principles” (SAF: 3) and rely “on public experience” (SAF: x) all the while eschewing metaphysics (i.e. the “attempt to determine matters of fact by means of logical or moral or rhetorical constructions” [SAF: vii]).99 So it is while working within the “tangle of human beliefs, as conventionally expressed in talk and in literature” (SAF: 3) that Santayana distinguishes between empirical and transcendental criticism. The empirical critic differentiates appearance and reality by contrasting the world as it is customarily conceived with the course of nature as disclosed in inquiry.100 Such criticism reveals that there are determinants of belief other than facts, determinants that give rise to errors that, for a time at least, we take to be rooted in fact. Starting from the distinction between elements of knowledge forced on us because of the way things are and “optional” elements that are the result of interpretation (SAF: 3), the transcendental critic asks whether the assumptions of empirical knowledge can be defended from the sceptic’s challenge that their objectivity is “feigned” (SAF: 4).101 This critic asks “How much, when cleared 98

Santayana endeavours to think only “in such terms as are offered to me, to clear my mind of cant and free it from the cramp of artificial traditions” (SAF: vi). He sees himself as “lay[ing] siege to the truth only as animal exploration and fancy may do so, first from one quarter and then from another, expecting the reality to be not simpler than my experience of it but far more extensive and complex” (SAF: vi). Cf. LSK: 443. (“LSK” refers to “Literal and Symbolic Knowledge”, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method, Vol. XV, No. 16, August 1, 1918: 421-444. 99 He writes: “My philosophy is justified, and has been justified in all ages and countries, by the facts before every man’s eyes; and no great wit is requisite to discover it, only (what is rarer than wit) candour and courage” (SAF: x). 100 Empirical criticism of knowledge “reduce[s] conventional beliefs to the facts they rest on… to clear our intellectual conscience of voluntary or avoidable delusion” (SAF: 3). It involves, for example, the criticism of folk wisdom, natural theology and the like on scientific grounds. It is a case of nature “making fools” of us (SAF: 8). 101 “The only critical function of transcendentalism is to drive empiricism home, and challenge it to produce any knowledge of fact whatsoever. And empirical criticism will not be able to do so. Just as inattention leads ordinary people to assume as part of the given facts all that their unconscious transcendental logic has added to them, so inattention, at a deeper level, leads the empiricist to assume an existence in his radical facts which does not belong to them. In standing helpless and resigned before them he is, for all his assurance, obeying his illusion rather than their evidence. Thus transcendental criticism, used by a thorough sceptic, may compel empirical criticism to show its hand. It had mistaken its cards, and was bluffing without knowing it” (SAF: 4-5). “My

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as far as possible of idolatry, can sense or science reveal concerning the dark engine of nature?” (RB: 199).102 Far from denying Dewey’s claim that sceptical challenges to natural knowledge presume knowledge of fact, Santayana embraces it. A crucial move in his argument is to insist that the basis of transcendental criticism of natural knowledge is not supernatural. The transcendental critic simply exploits some accepted beliefs to undermine others.103 As he puts it: to suspect error about facts is to share the enterprise of knowledge, in which facts are presupposed and error is possible… Since [the sceptic’s] criticism may… be true and his doubt well grounded, they [sic] are certainly assertions; and if he is sincerely a sceptic, they are assertions which he is ready to maintain stoutly. Scepticism is accordingly a form of belief (SAF: 8).104

It is because he exploits current knowledge in mounting sceptical challenges that Santayana sees himself as thinking his naturalism through, rather than betraying it, as Dewey suggests. Recognizing there is no stance outside our beliefs from which to scrutinize knowledge does not defuse sceptical challenges, as Dewey supposes. To the contrary, sceptical challenges are all the more pressing because they are launched from within our system of the world.105 materialism is therefore simply ordinary perception, sustained in its impulsive trust but criticized in its deliverance (PGS: 505). 102 “RB” refers to Santayana’s Realms of Being, (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, inc., 1972). 103 In philosophy Santayana accepts “gladly any picture of nature honestly drawn by [scientists], as [he] accept[s] gladly any picture drawn by [his] own senses” (RB: 199). 104 “[T]he critic of the life of reason may then distinguish as far as his penetration goes, how much in any…logic or grammar is expressive of material circumstances, how much is exuberant rhetoric, how much local, and how much human. Of course, at every step such criticism rests on naturalistic dogmas; we could not understand any phase of human imagination, or even discover it, unless we found it growing in the common world of geography and commerce” (DNM: 687). To give just two examples, Santayana undermines religious doctrine as dogma, not by some prior standard of rational belief, but by the variation in doctrine across “tribes” and “centuries” (SAF: 12). “A man of the world soon learns to discredit established religions on account of their variety and absurdity, although he may good-naturedly continue to conform to his own… Without philosophical criticism, therefore, mere experience and good sense suggest that all positive religions are false, or at least (which is enough for my present purpose) that they are all fantastic and insecure” (SAF: 12). So too history is undermined by its reliance on knowledge of physical things—texts and artefacts—that rests on principles of induction for which we have no justification. 105 “The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular” (SAF: 9-10). “In broaching [the question raised by the

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It is unlikely however that Dewey would think this reply strengthens Santayana’s position much at all. Santayana contends that transcendental criticism reveals that solipsism of the present moment is the only position immune from sceptical challenge.106 For him, solipsism is an “honest position” (SAF: 15), one that would be utterly satisfactory were it not that the demands of animal life require a broader worldview (SAF: 17, 111, 125 and 133).107 But Dewey thinks that solipsism of the present moment is self-refuting inasmuch as it can only be justified by appeal to knowledge of things beyond the present moment.108 For example, he argues that the solipsist cannot know by intuition that objects of immediate experience are intuited rather than inferred.109 In other words, a solipsistic account of the nature and limits of intuition cannot be defended on solipsistic grounds. The solipsist presumes knowledge that he claims is impossible and so his position reduces to absurdity. For Santayana, however, this argument against solipsism confuses the solipsist’s position with the characterization of it by an outside observer. The solipsist contradicts himself if he appeals to knowledge in his own defence but, transcendental critic] I am not concerned with repeating, correcting, or forecasting the description which men of science may give of the world” (RB: 199) as if from an outside standpoint. 106 Santayana writes: “Transcendental reflection is a challenge to all dogmatism, a demand for radical evidence. It therefore tends to disallow substance and, when it is thorough, even to disallow existence. Nothing is ultimately left except the passing appearance or the appearance of something passing (RB: 200). “When by a difficult suspension of judgement I have deprived a given image of all adventitious significance, when it is taken neither for the manifestation of a substance nor for an idea in a mind nor for an event in a world, but simply if a colour for that colour and if music for that music, and if a face for that face, then an immense cognitive certitude comes to compensate me for so much cognitive abstention. My scepticism at last has touched bottom, and my doubt has found honourable rest in the absolutely indubitable. Whatever essence I find and note, that essence and no other is established before me. I cannot be mistaken about it, since I know have no object of intent other than the object of intuition” (SAF: 74). 107 “The authority of intuition would be entire if it kept to the definition of essences, and of their essential relations” (RB: 197). 108 Dewey gives this argument in “The Existence of the World as a Logical Problem” in Essays in Experimental Logic (New York, Dover Books, 1916). The official target of this paper is Russell’s project of logically constructing the external world from sense data but Dewey claims his argument applies to all other attempts to formulate the problem of the external world (281-282). For a more general formulation of the argument see “Conduct and Experience”, John Dewey The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 5:1929-1930, Jo Ann Boydston (ed) (Southern Illinois University Press, 1984): 218-235. 109 Similarly, the claim that objects of intuition are momentary can only be established by locating those objects in a temporal continuum in light of knowledge that extends beyond the present.

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Santayana claims, so long as the solipsist apprehends immediate experience without asserting or implying anything, no contradiction arises (SAF: 15-16). So while Santayana agrees with Dewey that it is impossible to justify solipsism without going beyond intuition,110 he takes this to show, not that solipsism is inconsistent, but only that it cannot be lived. He says: “the impossibility [of solipsism] is only psychological” (SAF: 16) and “the difficulties… in maintaining it consistently come from the social and laborious character of human life” (SAF: 17).111 As he sees it, Dewey’s claim that solipsism cannot be defended on solipsistic grounds only supports the view that no knowledge— not even the truth of solipsism—can be justified without praying in aid claims that are not given in intuition and are vulnerable to sceptical doubts.112 Santayana does not think his commitment to solipsism requires us to surrender knowledge claims but only to recognize that however compelling and inevitable they may, they remain vulnerable to sceptical objections. For him, Dewey’s objection to solipsism does not so much challenge as reinforce the point that “we find in pure intuition no evidence of any existence whatsoever” (SAF: 50). Thus Dewey’s objection is entirely consistent with the claim that natural knowledge, in going beyond what can be rendered certain by intuition, is dogmatic and founded in animal faith.113 110

See for example SAF: 118-119. Santayana says that “scepticism is not the less honourable for being difficult, when it is inspired by a firm determination to probe [the] confused and terrible apparition of life to the bottom” (SAF: 16). 112 “My sceptical analysis of human opinion, ending in solipsism of the passing moment, was as sincere as I could make it. It was not an invitation to the public to become solipsists or a pretence that I had become one, but a demonstration that demonstration in matters of belief is impossible, that the terms of experience are unsubstantial, and that life would be a vain dream, if faith did not interpret it” (PGS: 517). 113 “In each datum taken separately there would be no occasion to speak of existence. It would be an obvious appearance; whatever appeared there would be simply and wholly apparent, and the fact that it appeared (which would be the only fact involved) would not appear in it at all. This fact, the existence of the intuition, would not be asserted until the appearance ceased to be actual, and was viewed from the outside, as something that presumably had occurred, or would occur, or was occurring elsewhere. In such an external view there might be truth or error; not so in each appearance taken in itself, because in itself and as a whole each is a pure appearance and bears witness to nothing further… That which exists is the fact that the datum is given at that particular moment and crisis in the universe; the intuition, not the datum, is the fact which occurs; and this fact, if known at all, must be asserted at some other moment by an adventurous belief which may be true or false. That which is certain and given, on the contrary, is something of which existence cannot be predicated, and which, until it is used as a description of something else, cannot be either true or false” (SAF: 44-45). “The 111

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Viewed from the perspective of Dewey’s epistemology, Santayana’s position on solipsism involves a non sequiter. Dewey agrees with Santayana that natural knowledge cannot be justified by appeal to immediate experience and that this is because immediate experience is aesthetic rather than cognitive, that it is had rather than known.114 However, he thinks this can be taken to support Santayana’s scepticism only on the assumption that claims of natural knowledge must either be justified by appeal to immediate experience or else accepted on faith.115 Dewey rejects this assumption about what is necessary for justification on biological and psychological grounds. The theory that knowers must make out what the natural world is like solely on the basis of clues given in intuition is false to the epistemological condition in which humans naturally find themselves. On Dewey’s view, the world of human experience is the natural world. For him, the objects of experience include rocks, tables, plants, animals, and other human beings. Knowers do not posit these objects on the basis of private data, they experience them directly by interacting with them— just as we would say they experience life in a foreign country, a wedding or the birth of a child. Transactions with natural objects are lived through. They instruct us by modifying our dispositions to respond to future events. In the case of most knowledge claims, information about the immediate qualitative state of a human organism is simply irrelevant to justification and thus does not supply any added evidential support. So while Dewey agrees that retreating to immediate experience renders us incapable of justifying claims about nature, he does not think this is because it provides a foundation for knowledge that is so evidence of data is only obviousness; they give no evidence of anything else; they are not witnesses” (SAF: 99). 114 Dewey would no doubt agree with the following passages from Santayana: “Scepticism… suspends all knowledge worthy of the name, all that transitive and presumptive knowledge of facts which is a form of belief; and instead it bestows intuition of ideas, contemplative, aesthetic, dialectical, arbitrary… But whereas transitive knowledge…may always be challenged, intuition… neither has nor professes to have any ulterior object or truth, runs no risk of error, because it claims no jurisdiction over anything alien or eventual” (SAF: 70). “To consider an essence is... not even to broach knowledge of fact; and the ideal object so defined may have no natural significance, though it has aesthetic immediacy and logical definition” (SAF: 75) “The obvious leaves me helpless; for among objects in the realm of essence I can establish none of the distinctions which I am most concerned to establish in daily life, such as that between true and false, far or near, just now and long ago, once upon a time, and in five minutes” (SAF: 110-111). 115 Santayana does say things that might encourage Dewey in this reading. For example he says transcendental reflection involves “reversion, in the presence of any object of affirmation, to the immediate experience which discloses that object or prompts that affirmation.” (RB: 200).

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limited as to preclude knowledge of the natural world. The reason withdrawal to immediate experience fails to ground natural knowledge is, as biology, psychology and the history of science show, that animal learning requires activity—the testing of beliefs by the configuration of objects in the world in experimental practice. The difference in philosophical orientation between Dewey and Santayana is particularly acute at this point. Santayana does not pause over Dewey’s claims about the biological conditions of natural knowledge. He says he is “entirely persuaded of the genuineness and depth of Dewey’s views, within the limits of his method and taken as he means them” (DNM: 673).116 And yet this does not end the debate for him. What troubles him about Dewey’s account of knowledge is not that he has a better naturalistic theory of human inquiry but rather that Dewey’s method is “limited”. More specifically, Santayana is concerned that Dewey accepts “the spontaneous and inevitable body of beliefs involved in animal life” without sufficient question; that Dewey exhibits a “near-sighted sincerity” (DNM: 673) in regarding the “natural world as a landscape that paints itself” (DNM: 680). Acceptance of the results of natural science cannot defeat challenges to scientific claims to knowledge levelled by the transcendental critic.117 In scientific inquiry “fear of illusion” can be answered by replacing errors with warranted beliefs but, Santayana cautions,: 116

Santayana commends Dewey’s “scrupulous fidelity to facts” (DNM: 673) and rehearses many familiar Deweyan themes. For example, he says that “in the investigation of facts… [the] play of mind is merely instrumental and indicative: the intent is practical, the watchfulness earnest, the spirit humble” (SAF: 103). He says “the reason why… a man may be drawn to the study of nature… is because things, by their impact, startle him into attention and a new thought. Such external objects interest him for what they do, not for what they are; and knowledge of them is significant not for the essence it displays to intuition… but for the events it expresses or foreshadows… The function of perception and natural science is, not to flatter the sense of omniscience in an absolute mind, but to dignify animal life by harmonizing it, in action and in thought, with its conditions… In this there is no sacrifice of truth to utility; there is rather a wise direction of curiosity upon things on the human scale and within the range of art. Speculation beyond those limits cannot be controlled, and is irresponsible; and the symbolic terms in which it must be carried on… are the best possible indications for the facts in question”. (SAF: 104-105). “The spirit that actually breathes in man is an animal spirit, transitive like the material endeavours which it expresses; it has a material station and accidental point of view and a fevered preference for one alternative issue over another” (SAF: 125). 117 Recognizing that sceptical reflection is itself an event in the natural life of an organism does nothing to persuade us that the sceptical attitude is a mistake (SAF: 31 and SAF 34). “Perception is faith; more perception may extend this faith or reform it, but can never recant it except by sophistry” (SAF: 69).

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Animal Faith or Natural Knowledge? Why Dewey and Santayana Can’t Agree About Philosophy while in animal life this is the satisfying solution and the old habit of dogmatism may be resumed in consequence without practical inconvenience, speculatively the case is not at all advanced; because no criterion of truth is afforded except custom, comfort, and the accidental absence of doubt… (SAF: 72).

For Santayana, appeals to biology and psychology cannot establish that Dewey’s basic starting point—that knowers are animals in a natural world—is anything more than a rash presumption (SAF: 34) or out and out “idolatry” (DNM: 688). Dewey’s empirical “[c]orroboration is no new argument; if I am deceived once, I may all the more readily be deceived again.” (SAF: 115).118 Similarly, Dewey’s complaint that this plea for scepticism rests on a false theory of the processes of human knowledge is, for Santayana, an empirical criticism that is beside the transcendental critic’s philosophical point. He agrees with Dewey that human beings do not build up their conception of the world from objects of intuition.119 As he sees it, the transcendental critic retreats to immediate experience not because he thinks objects of intuition are first in the order of the genesis of knowledge or first in the order of discovery (SAF: 109). Rather he thinks the transcendental critic withdraws to immediate 118

“It is not the task of natural philosophy to justify this assumption [that I am surrounded by a natural world, peopled by creatures in whom intuition is as rife as in myself], which indeed can never be justified. Its task, after making that assumption, is to carry it out consistently and honestly, so as to arrive, if possible, at a conception of nature by which the faith involved in action may be enlightened and guided. Such a description of nature, if it were ever completed in outline, would come round full circle, and in its account of animals would report how they came to have intuitions (among them this natural philosophy) and to use them in the description of the world which actually surrounded them. The whole field of action and of facts would then be embraced in a single view, summary and symbolic, but comprehensive” (RB: 194). 119 Santayana says that “[t]he origin of beliefs and ideas, as of all events, is natural….[and] lies in the realm of matter…It is accordingly in the realm of matter, in the order of events in animal life, that I must distribute human beliefs and ideas if I wish to arrange them in the order of their genesis” (SAF: 109). He also says that “an essence given in intuition… [is] by no means the object at that moment intended by the animal in his alertness or pursuit” (SAF: 81). “Not the data of intuition, but the objects of animal faith, are the particulars perceived: they alone are the existing things or events to which the animal is reacting and to which he is attributing the essences which arise, as he does so, before his fancy” (SAF: 93). “The existence of things is assumed by animals in action and expectation before intuition supplies any description of what the thing is that confronts them in a certain quarter. But animals are not sceptics, and a long experience must intervene before the problem arises which I am here considering, namely, whether anything need be posited and believed in at all” (SAF: 133). “People are not naturally sceptics, wondering if a single one of their intellectual habits can be reasonably preserved; they are dogmatists angrily confident of maintaining them all” (SAF: 11-12).

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experience because it is first in the “order of evidence” (SAF: 110). It is bedrock in the sense that it is the only thing that survives sceptical criticism.120 Transcendental criticism does not yield a biological or psychological account of natural knowledge that rivals Dewey’s, it merely shows that Dewey’s account rests on animal faith and that Dewey himself does not question the basis of his epistemology deeply enough. So while Santayana grants that Dewey’s epistemology is true “within the limits of his method and taken as he means them” (DNM: 673), he nevertheless maintains that this decides nothing from the point of view of the transcendental critic.121 Still Dewey remains steadfast in the face of Santayana’s doubts about natural knowledge because natural science tells him that philosophical knowledge is no different from any other kind of knowledge and “empirical critique” is the only method of assessing philosophical truth. Since the scientific theories on which his epistemology relies predict the way natural objects behave, he wonders on what possible grounds Santayana can claim that the world is not the way science tells us. What standard other than successful prediction can Santayana appeal to in claiming science is not literally true, if not a supernatural one? Santayana’s answer is that the verdict of empirical science concerning the claims of science to literal truth is not so clear. While taken at face value (i.e. dogmatically) our theory of the world “asserts that in an observable biological sense, knowledge is possible” it also asserts “on the same biological grounds, that knowledge is relative” (PGS: 515). So far as we can tell the world we come to know is vast, complex and completely independent of the way human beings represent it to be and yet human cognitive capacities are limited, selective and driven by interests. We know objects by their effects upon us and these effects depend not only on the nature of the objects we confront but on the nature and state of the sensory organs on which they impinge and on knowers’ 120

“At any juncture in the life of reason a man may ask himself, as I am doing in this book, what he is most certain of, and what he believes only on hearsay or by some sort of suggestion or impulse of his own, which might be suspended or reversed” (SAF: 110). 121 Santayana would apply to Dewey’s views what he says about our belief in change: “The belief is irresistible in animal perception, for reasons which biology can plausibly assign; and it cannot be long suspended in actual thinking; but it may be suspended for a moment theoretically, in the interests of a thorough criticism” (SAF: 27). He also says that “[l]iving beings dwell in their expectations rather than in their senses. If they are ever to see what they see, they must first in a manner stop living; they must suspend the will, as Schopenhauer put it” (SAF: 68). “[W]hen [a] supposed fact is thought of as a substance, its existence, if it is found in the realm of nature, will justify that supposition; but [from the transcendental critic’s point of view] the realm of nature is of course only another object of belief, more remote if possible from intuition than even the realm of truth” (SAF: 100).

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background beliefs and practical concerns. Santayana says the effects of objects yield “true knowledge… in so far as [they] express faithfully the relevant relations between the object and the organism”. (PGS: 516), however “[s]uch knowledge cannot be literal or exhaustive because it expresses the violently selective and transmuting sensibility of one vital atom in a vast void” (PGS: 516).122 In light of these biological facts he concludes it is presumptuous to suppose that the principles necessary for humans to make sense of animal life represent the material world as it is apart from human capacities. “[E]ven if human experience could be admitted as known and vouched for”, he argues, “there would be an incredible arrogance in positing it as the whole of being” (SAF: 101). This is not to deny that natural science is the best grasp on the material world there is.123 Nor is it to deny science is objective humanly 122

“The sensibility of animals…is due to their own structure. The surrounding facts and forces…condition the existence of the animal and reward any apt habits which he may acquire; but he survives mainly by insensibility, and by a sort of pervasive immunity to most of the vibrations that run through him. It is only in very special directions, to very special occasional stimulations, that he develops instinctive responses in special organs: and his intuitions, if he has them, express these reactions” (SAF: 63-64). The “human observer…selects events from the vast continuities of nature because they go with rhythms in his own organism, with which his intuitions—the only vital culminations— are conjoined” (DNM: 682). “[A]nimal experience is a product of two factors, antecedent to the experience and not parts of it, namely, organ and stimulus, body and environment, person and situation. These two natural conditions must normally come together, like flint and steel, before the spark of experience will fly. But scepticism requires me to take the spark itself as my point of departure, since it alone lives morally and lights up with its vital flame the scene I seem to discover” (SAF: 23). For Santayana, “the sole basis of appearances [is] some event in the brain, in no way resembling them; and… the relation of data to the external events they [indicate is] that of a spontaneous symbol… and not that of a copy or emanation” (SAF: 56). In experience “the aesthetic image—the sound, the colour, the expanse of space, the scent, taste, and sweet or cruel pressure of bodies—wears an aspect altogether unlike the mechanisms it stands for” (SAF: 102). “[E]very naturalist knows that this waking dream is dependent for its existence, quality, intensity, and duration on obscure processes in the living body, in its interplay with its environment” (DNM: 684) and “that all the aspects of nature are relative and variable” (SAF: 19). Natural history itself is an imposed dramatic unity (DNM: 683). 123 “If now I turn my face in the other direction [i.e. away from scepticism] and consider the prospect open to animal faith, I see that all this insecurity and inadequacy of alleged knowledge are almost irrelevant to the natural effort of the mind to describe natural things. The discouragement we may feel in science does not come from failure; it comes from a false conception of what would be success. Our worst difficulties arise from the assumption that knowledge of existences ought to be literal, whereas knowledge of existences has no need, no propensity, and no fitness to be literal” (SAF: 101). “My

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speaking.124 His point is rather that “when zeal intervenes and we profess to find our favourite dialectic in things, we are betrayed into disrespect for nature and are inflating our egotism into cosmic proportions” (RB: 197-198). He writes: I suppose we should not call some of our ideas scientific if they did not trace the movement of nature more accurately and reliably than do our random sensations or dramatic myths; they are therefore presumably truer in regard to those distributive aspects of nature which they select. But science is a part of human discourse, and necessarily poetical, like language (DNM: 685).

For Santayana, natural knowledge reflects something of the constitution of the objects that prompts it but it is only knowledge of the object as it is in relation to the organism and not of the object as it is apart from human knowers (SAF: 106 and PGS: 515-516). The sort of strict adherence to the results of physics and biology that Dewey takes to be the hallmark of naturalism is thus indefensible in light of empirical, as well as transcendental, criticism.125 In presuming the world is literally the way it presents itself to human beings scepticism remains merely the confession that faith is faith, without any rebellion against the physical necessity of believing. It enables me to believe in common-sense and in materialism and… to warm both hands before the fire of life; and at the same it gives me the key to the realms of dialectic and fancy, which I a may enter without illusion” (PGS: 516-517). 124 “The ideas we have of things are not fair portraits; they are political caricatures made in the human interest; but in their partial way they may be masterpieces of characterization and insight… They therefore conduce to wisdom, and in their perpetual tentativeness have a cumulative truth” (SAF: 104). “[K]nowledge cannot be literal… yet because it is natural, such knowledge cannot be irrelevant to its occasions, and brings timely tidings of the real world, in appropriate moral perspectives, to each vital atom” (PGS: 516). Given the dependence of human knowledge on human nature, “[n]o language or logic is right in the sense of being identical with the facts it is used to express, but each may be right by being faithful to these facts, as a translation maybe faithful” (SAF: vi). Primary and secondary qualities both “report some particularity in the object which, being relative to me, may be of the highest importance, and being also relative to something in the constitution of the object, may be a valuable indication of its nature… The qualities most obviously relative and reversible, like pleasant and unpleasant, good and bad, are truly qualities of things in some of their relations. They can all, by judicious criticism and redistribution, become true expressions of the life of nature. They have their exits and entrances at appointed times, and they supply a perspective view, or caricature, of the world no less interesting and pungent for being purely egotistical. Artists have their place, and the animal mind is one of them” (SAF: 87). 125 “My dogmatism [i.e. acceptance of faith-based science] and my scepticism are complementary views of the same fact of natural history” (PGS: 515).

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Dewey denies what, to Santayana’s way of thinking, is the central tenet of naturalism: namely, the independence of the material world from our conceptions of it (DNM: 679). He writes: A foreground is by definition relative to… the station assumed in the midst of nature by some creature tethered by fortune to a particular time and place. If such a foreground becomes dominant in a philosophy naturalism is abandoned. Some local perspective or some casual interest is set up in place of universal nature or behind it, or before it, so that all the rest of nature is reputed to be intrinsically remote or dubious or merely ideal (DNM: 679).

In Santayana’s opinion Dewey’s naturalism is “half-hearted and short-winded” (DNM: 680) since according to it the “objectivity of things remains internal to the immediate sphere: they must never be supposed to possess an alleged substantial existence beyond experience” (DNM: 683)126 This amounts to a “reduction of matter to some human notion of matter” (DNM: 686). “[T]he perspectives of life, avowedly relative, have been treated as absolute, and the dominance of the foreground has been turned from a biological accident into a metaphysical principle. And this quite wantonly: because practice, far from suggesting such a reduction precludes it (DNM: 686)”.127 The price of Santayana’s refusal to define reality in human terms is that he must concede that his reasons for believing in a material world that cannot be known literally are themselves not literally true but merely “prejudiced and human” (SAF: 107). But this is not something he denies. To the contrary he embraces this consequence willingly. For him, objectivity

126

Santayana says of Dewey that “the whole complex theatre of contemporary action seems to him given immediately: whereas to others of us… this world of practice seems foreign, absent from our better moments, approachable even at the time of action only by animal faith and blind presumption, and compacted, when we consider its normal texture, out of human conventions, many of them variable and foolish” (DNM: 684-685). He thinks Dewey’s view has as a consequence that the reality of the past is dependent on how it is known—that “all the meaning of it lies in its possible relevance to actual interests” (DNM: 686)—and that “nothing but the immediate is real” (DNM: 683). 127 Santayana suggests Dewey takes natural events as “compounded of such qualities as appear to human observers, as if the character and emergence of these qualities had nothing to do with the existence, position, and organs of those observers” (DNM: 680) instead of as “substances presenting accidental appearances” (DNM: 680). On Dewey’s view, Santayana says, nature becomes a “panorama entirely relative to human discourse…not a world but a story” (DNM: 680) to which “nature laughs… and goes on living in her own way” (DNM: 682).

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humanly speaking is all we ever get, even though this is a conception of a world that is independent of human thought.128 Dewey, by contrast, thinks Santayana’s view creates an unbridgeable epistemological gap between the world as conceived of in natural science and the world as it really is. He further thinks that any notion of literal truth that human knowledge is alleged to fall short of ought to be rejected as unexplanatory in epistemology. The sources of illusion, error or distortion in human experience that Santayana calls attention to are detectable only given a veridical account of objects, there being no sense to the notion of appearance except by way of contrast to a reality that is truly known. And, as noted earlier, Santayana’s arguments concerning the limits of knowledge are convincing only if unless the claims about human beings on which they rest are reasonably taken to be correct. But to admit this is to view science, not merely as a record of nature as it appears to human beings, but of how it actually (i.e. literally) is. However, in denying any notion of reality beyond that conceived of by natural science, Dewey does not, as Santayana suggests, accept that nature is internal, or relative, to the human perspective. As he sees it, science tells us that there is a natural world independent of human belief. The theory of knowledge, undertaken within the parameters of that same science, tells us that the only notion of reality available to knowers is that afforded by their best scientific theories and those theories are justified on the basis of their instrumental efficacy. This means that Dewey’s instrumentalism in epistemology forms part of a realist theory of nature. While Dewey agrees with Santayana that human knowledge does not afford an absolute perspective on reality, he takes this to mean only that our best science is accepted provisionally pending a superior account. There is no basis for denying literal truth to one view, save another better corroborated one. To say science affords our best grasp of nature is not to say that nature is the product of human practice or constituted by human interests. It is only to recognize that while the theory of nature informs epistemology, epistemology also informs the theory of nature. The price to be paid for this view is to concede that natural science can be defended as the best grasp on the truth only by appeal to results drawn from natural science. Santayana insists any such defence is dogmatic. But Dewey does not deny this. Science tells him that “everyone…must be dogmatic at some point in order to get anywhere in other matters (HN: 57) and he rests content in the knowledge that science also reveals that there is no other defence of science to be had. I have not exhausted the avenues of debate between Santayana and Dewey. But my aim was only to argue that their disagreement is far more 128

For Santayana the natural world is a posit of animal faith that no marshalling of evidence can vindicate since all appeals to evidence presume a natural world that is the way it as apart from any merely human perspective.

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complicated than their writings on the topic might lead us to think. It might be thought that my analysis vindicates Santayana’s view that philosophical views rest on commitments that are not defensible on the basis of conclusive evidence and that fundamental disagreements in philosophy are resolved, if at all, by persuasive rhetoric rather than neutral arguments or demonstrations. However, Santayana’s views of the nature of philosophical debate rest on principles of his epistemology that Dewey contests. His assessment of the debate as incommensurable is thus on a par with all the other points of dispute that separate him from Dewey and is not at all an impartial characterization of it.129 My assessment of the debate, by contrast, rests on a comparison of Dewey’s and Santayana’s writings, rather than on any premises about the nature and limits of human knowledge or philosophy. I have tried to show Dewey and Santayana do not agree about the starting point in philosophy—that Santayana rejects Dewey’s naturalism because he thinks transcendental criticism shows that it presumes too much, while Dewey dismisses Santayana’s transcendental criticism as indefensible in light of the very science that Santayana finds philosophically dubitable. I have further argued that this dispute carries over into their debate in epistemology. Dewey thinks Santayana’s epistemological project rests on the false theory that human organisms are given immediate data and must justify knowledge of objects beyond the reach of experience. But Santayana does not view the debate as a question of which theory of biology or psychology is correct. For him it is a question of what can be said in defence of scientific knowledge in the face of compelling sceptical challenges of both a transcendental and empirical nature. Dewey thinks the facts underlying Santayana’s sceptical arguments presuppose the knowledge they call into question and thus those arguments are incoherent. Santayana thinks Dewey’s criticism takes natural science at face value and that in so doing conflates the way the world is and the way humans conceive of it. But Santayana’s concerns about idealism are entirely beside the point as Dewey sees it. He promotes a 129

Glenn Tiller has pointed out to me that in a letter to the editor of PJD written in 1925 Santayana acknowledges his debate with Dewey is more complex than he first suggested in DNM. However, it is not clear what he takes the implications of this to be. Santayana writes: “I am almost sorry that I allowed you to print that old review of mine about Dewey. I say in it that it is a transference of his problem into my own terms and categories”. Still, he says “I am not ashamed of it in that capacity” and only regrets that it was “not the sort of thing proper for this book”. While he says he would be “more sympathetic” were he to re-write his article, his tone is unrepentant when adding: “I agree with [Dewey] in his own field: the difficulty is that I find that field framed in, in my own mind, with much nearer and much wider realities—the spirit, the truth, the universe” (The Letters of George Santayana, William Holzberger (ed) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), vol.6: 291).

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theory of nature as it is independent of human beings, one he admits is formulated from the only standpoint available to him: that of a 20th-century philosopher living in a natural world with limited experience of it. Dewey prefers his naturalism to what he sees as Santayana’s transcendental scepticism. But, as I have noted, Santayana does not see his transcendentalism as anything other than a consistent thinking through of his naturalism. Dewey and Santayana not only disagree about which side to take in their debate, they disagree about what the debate is about and what means are appropriate to resolving it. It is for this reason that the debate runs far more deeply than either Dewey’s or Santayana’s arguments take it.

NATURALISM AND ANIMAL FAITH: SANTAYANA’S META-CRITICISM OF SCEPTICISM ÁNGEL M. FAERNA

It is rare to find Santayana’s book Scepticism and Animal Faith130 cited in contemporary discussion referring to scepticism. More strikingly, it is not even mentioned by those who invoke a sort of “natural impulse” to belief —in external objects, in other minds, in the reality of past events— as a crucial point of that discussion or, in fact, as the only ground that allows for getting rid of the sceptical challenge as a whole. The last thesis is sometimes called “naturalism” (in one of the various senses held by this fuzzy term). Santayana himself used to describe his own philosophical outlook as naturalistic —and one of my aims is to show its connection to those more recent uses of the term, although I do not pretend that this exhausts the meaning of Santayana’s naturalism— and he consequently rejected scepticism. But seemingly not in such direct way as to prevent some interpreters to depict his philosophy as subtly sceptical, whereas others take his appeal to animal faith at face value and consider him a wholehearted anti-sceptic.131 Now, if we are to assess the significance of Santayana’s epistemological ideas for current debates, we need first to clarify his position in relation to such key-notions as naturalism, scepticism, natural certainty or belief, and so on. This is the preliminary task that will be attempted here. In order to give the exposition a connecting thread, I will resort to a confrontation between Scepticism and Animal Faith and a brief well-known 130

George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1923). Subsequent references given by SAF and page number. 131 Of course, the disagreement may be in some cases partially verbal, for “scepticism” can be taken to mean different things. Here I will be referring to wholesale scepticism, summarily described by Barry Stroud as “the […] philosophical view that we can know nothing about the physical world around us” (The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984], viii). But such disagreement about the ultimate meaning of Santayana’s philosophy has also a more substantive source, as the following discussion intends to suggest, having to do with the sophisticated character of Santayana’s naturalism.

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essay of Peter Strawson, “Scepticism, Naturalism and Transcendental Arguments”.132 Let us begin where Strawson ends up, that is, with a set of three quotations from three quite different philosophers in which the move —or the “break”, as Strawson puts it— from scepticism to naturalism would be best illustrated or summarized.133 The first one is taken from Kant: It remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us […] must be accepted merely on faith and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof.

On this point, Santayana’s own contention is that, apart from faith, there is no way whatsoever of establishing the existence of things outside us; once the doubt mentioned by Kant is raised, it is insurmountable through proof or argument. As we shall see, this is by no means to concede that the sceptic is right, but it indicates that Santayana agrees with many other anti-sceptical philosophers in that the sceptic cannot be met by adducing a (more or less) elaborated “theory of knowledge” arranged to explain how knowledge is possible after all. The second quotation chosen by Strawson comes from Heidegger: The ‘scandal of philosophy’ is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again.

If this means that the pursuit of such a proof is hopelessly misled from the very beginning, then it is clear that Santayana would again, in this case, join Heidegger in opposition to Kant. According to Santayana, that faith that makes us believe in the existence of a world of material things is rooted in our animal nature, it is “animal faith”, and hence cannot be prompted nor altered by any intellectual operation. This is why the belief in the existence of things outside us must not be treated as a matter of proof. Michael Williams has used these very same quotations from Kant and Heidegger to illustrate the difference between what he calls the “constructive” and the “diagnostic” approach in response to scepticism. Following Kant’s intimation, the first approach “hopes to meet the sceptic by arguing for a 132

Peter F. Strawson, “Scepticism, Naturalism and Transcendental Arguments”, in Scepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (The Woodbridge Lectures 1983) (Bristol: Methuen, 1985). Subsequent references given by “SNTA” and page number. 133 “SNTA”, 24. The references are, respectively: I. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, B xxxix, note; M. Heidegger, Being and Time, I.6; and L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, § 471.

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positive theory of knowledge”, whereas “the diagnostically inclined philosopher suspects that there is something drastically wrong with the way the [sceptic’s] questions are posed. Accordingly, he thinks that the appropriate response to scepticism is not a proof of what the sceptic doubts but further investigation of his claims to doubt it.”134 Adopting this terminology, then, one would be tempted to say that Santayana belongs to the “diagnostically inclined” philosophical party, and in a sense he certainly does. However, in that case the definition should be slightly if significantly altered, for, as we shall see, it is not the way the sceptic poses his questions or the claims he makes to doubt everything that Santayana finds drastically wrong or illegitimate. Nonetheless, Santayana’s approach is “diagnostic” in the negative but still relevant sense, that it makes scepticism appear as a sort of intellectual “disarrangement” and not as a substantial problem. Strawson completes his series of quotations with this last one from Wittgenstein: It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not to try to go further back.

I would like to use this idea, and the philosophical stance that lies behind it, to clarify the sense in which the term “naturalism” will be employed here. That stance can be characterized in several ways. For instance, by saying that philosophy is continuous with other forms of knowledge or discourse such as science or common sense. To say that philosophy is “continuous” with these forms means that it partially presupposes such discourses and, therefore, that it cannot provide their so-called “foundations”. A second formulation of the same idea, and one that follows more literally Wittgenstein’s dictum, would be that the starting point of philosophy never can be an absolute one. According to Strawson, this is precisely what puts the naturalist in a position to evade from scepticism even if he cannot produce the kind of proof that Kant was asking for since, in order to answer the question that the sceptic is posing, one should step back to a detached absolute starting point that the naturalist declares as nonexistent. “To try to meet the sceptic’s challenge, in whatever way, by whatever style of argument, is to try to go further back. If one is to begin at the beginning, one must refuse the challenge as our naturalist refuses it.”135 That Santayana counts as a naturalist, in the sense already mentioned, is strongly suggested from the very first pages of Scepticism and Animal Faith. Concerning continuity, he insists repeatedly in the Preface that his philosophy 134

Michael Williams, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), xv-xvi. 135 “SNTA”, 24-25.

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simply gives “more accurate and circumspect form” to “everyday beliefs”, to “the sentiment and practice of laymen”, to “common sense”, to “old prejudices and workaday opinions of mankind”, or to “daily life”.136 It is not just that this philosophy confirms, by its own means, what common experience had established earlier without reflection for, in such a case, philosophy would still be acting as a final and independent judge. Instead, Santayana confesses that the philosopher does not have means of his own, nor a privileged standpoint from which to make his assertions. For good or ill, I am an ignorant man, almost a poet, and I can only spread a feast of what everybody knows. Fortunately exact science and the books of the learned are not necessary to establish my essential doctrine; nor can any of them claim a higher warrant than it has in itself: for it rests on public experience.137

Even more conspicuous is the naturalistic vein in Santayana’s position when we consider the second more “Wittgenstein’s-style” formulation proposed above. For the first chapter of his book bears a title that apparently repeats exactly the same idea in a different form: “There Is No First Principle of Criticism”. Here the reader will find what seems to be striking anticipations of Wittgenstein’s late remarks on the relation of principles of inference to habits or sheer procedures. But, regarding what is our matter of concern here, the main thesis seems to be wholly naturalistic: no matter whether we interpret “principles” metaphysically —as “the origin of things”— or logically —as “the first principles of discourse”—, any philosophical inquiry into those principles is but an unacknowledged operation of, and with, the outcome they have previously produced, so that the end of that inquiry, when reached, would be nothing more than a new outcome added to the others in the existing chain. It would be one more event placed in the middle of things —or thoughts— and not that “beginning” the philosopher was looking for. To that extent, it is as if such inquiries were doomed to be late even before they start. We must then conclude that philosophers were deeply mistaken every time they thought they had grasped any of those “principles” —we have no good reason even to assume that there are principles at all— and be content with “joining the procession wherever one happens to come upon it, and following it as long as one’s legs hold out”.138 136

SAF, v-vi. SAF, ix-x (my emphasis). This is not the place to discuss in detail Santayana’s idea of science, but it may be worth noting that, as this reference makes it patent, his naturalism is not that of the “strict”, “reductive”, or “hard” type —often called “scientism”— which Strawson identifies as one of the two main varieties of naturalism; see “SNTA”, 1-2, and 37 ff. 138 SAF, 1. 137

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Up to this point, Santayana seems to fit quite well in the picture Strawson is drawing of naturalism as a move away from scepticism and its legacy of sterile philosophical controversies. But, to see where he does not fit, I need to refer to the tree of alternative anti-sceptical strategies that Strawson considers.139 This tree consists of three branches: 1) attempts directly to refute scepticism by rational argument; 2) attempts indirectly to refute it by showing that it is in some way unintelligible or self-defeating; and 3) naturalism, according to which, as we have just seen, “sceptical doubts are not to be met by argument, they are simply to be neglected”.140 In the first branch he places Moore’s proofs of an external world, Descartes’s appeal to God in support of the reliability of clear and distinct ideas, and Quine’s proposal of a naturalized epistemology (a case of reductive, scientist naturalism). The second branch is illustrated by two cases: first, Carnap’s attempt to deprive the sceptical question of its meaning —or, at least, of its alleged philosophical interest— by reducing it to the practical decision of whether or not to adopt the physical-thing language for the organization of experience; and second, transcendental arguments, in the current sense established among scholars since Barry Stroud discussed them in an influential article.141 Finally, Strawson presents Hume and Wittgenstein as paramount exponents of the third branch, the naturalistic strategy, the only successful one in his opinion. A lot could be said about this classification of anti-sceptical arguments or strategies. For one thing, discrimination between branch 1 and the others is far from being clear: frequently, arguments belonging to the first group are but a dialectical concretion of a wider view which, actually, amounts to an argument of the second or third group. The examples selected by Strawson are paradigmatic in this respect. As an illustration, suffice it to mention the debates among scholars concerning the correct interpretation of Cartesian “God”, in which some interpreters read pure reason in a hardly disguised form, thus conferring the whole argument with a transcendental or even almost Kantian flavour; or the long controversies generated by such purportedly trivial arguments such as Moore’s as to their ultimate import, as if, in their apparent ingenuousness, they were pointing at something more radical and profound —it should be remembered that those arguments somehow inspired the notes in which Wittgenstein developed his naturalistic criticism of scepticism.142 But it is branches 2 and 3 that require our main attention here, for they help to grasp the 139

“SNTA”, 10. “SNTA”, 13. 141 Barry Stroud, “Transcendental Arguments”, Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 241-56. 142 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Úber Gewissheit / On Certainty, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979). 140

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“problematic fitting” of Santayana in the general picture of naturalism offered by Strawson. These two branches seem to correspond to what Williams calls the “diagnostic approach”, and again we will find that Santayana’s position cannot be accommodated into none of them. Anyway, it is the very distinction between the two branches which is dubious, for on what basis could the naturalist afford to neglect sceptical doubts? Simply because he decides to do so? Or, perhaps, because those doubts appear to him as unintelligible or ill-formed? In this last case, of course, naturalism (branch 3) confounds itself with a strategy of the second branch type. But if the naturalist actually decides to neglect them without showing first that they involve some inconsistency or that they lack full meaning —or without convincing us at least that they are less than compelling—, then in what sense can naturalism be considered to be a reasonable move away from scepticism? The anti-sceptical strategy of proving that sceptical doubts are “less than compelling,” so that we are not forced to produce a definitive refutation of scepticism but only to show that a non-sceptic alternative account fits in as well with our ordinary epistemic practices, is the one adopted by Michael Williams, who reproaches Strawson for not having thought of this possibility in his classification.143 We need not to discuss it here, but Williams makes a further comment on the ambivalence or “instability” of Strawson’s naturalism that connects with our present point. As he puts it, Strawson “moves from pure Humean naturalism to some form of theoretical objection to scepticism”.144 “Pure Humean naturalism” would mean, for Williams, deciding to neglect sceptical doubts while knowing at the same time that they are theoretically unbeatable, whereas to object theoretically to scepticism is to look for a direct or indirect refutation of it. And, if the first is obviously represented by Hume, the second (looking for an indirect refutation of scepticism) is what characterises Wittgenstein’s procedure. Hume abjures scepticism on a psychological basis — that is, by an appeal, not to logical or epistemological reasons, but to causes operating in the very nature of human beings—, and this answers the above question concerning the “reasonableness” of the naturalistic move: what is naturally unavoidable could hardly be censored as unreasonable. Wittgenstein, by contrast, gets into theoretical criticism of scepticism by trying to show that it makes a spurious use of our epistemic concepts, thus affording good reason to neglect the sceptic’s challenge.145 143

See Unnatural Doubts, 32. Unnatural Doubts, 24. 145 These are for Williams “two dimensions” of the naturalistic outlook, “substantive and methodological”. The first one “tends to dominate in Hume”, while the second one “comes to the fore in Wittgenstein”, and they “come into conflict”; therefore, “the 144

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It is plausible that the difficulties with branches 2 and 3 can be accounted for if one endorses William’s criticism that Strawson is assimilating too hastily Wittgenstein’s and Hume’s anti-sceptical strategies. In turning now to the discussion of Santayana’s problematic fitting in the picture we will find some indirect corroboration of this, specially when we compare Santayana with Hume and Wittgenstein. First, I shall briefly state why I consider it to be a problematic fitting. As we have seen, there are reasons to include Santayana’s self-labelled “naturalism” in the philosophical family which Strawson identifies by means of the same term. Those reasons, of course, invoke no more than a few general features, but this is only because the Strawsonian family is rather disperse: Hume and Wittgenstein are as far from each other in many other philosophical respects as Santayana could be from both of them. Nevertheless, those features are significant enough and reveal such a common attitude towards the topic of “natural belief”, that the family is worthy of being given a name. On the other hand, it is when we examine Santayana’s response to scepticism that the trouble appears, for this response does not consist by any means of neglecting it, as Strawsonian naturalists are supposed to do. If Santayana’s strategy against scepticism challenges, as I maintain it does, the classification afforded by Strawson, the conclusion should then be that the classification misses the essential point: it fails to capture the gist of naturalism by reducing it to a single strategy —namely, the one Strawson finds in (or attributes to) his naturalist champions—, thus shrinking its philosophical scope. One would say that this is a better diagnose than preserving Strawson’s narrow definition of naturalism as a particular anti-sceptical strategy and then cross out Santayana from the list. For, again, the features shared by Santayana and these other naturalists are real and significant, and they conform a recognizable pattern and a true affinity. As I said earlier, that animal faith, that, according to Santayana, makes us believe in an external world of facts, cannot be prompted nor altered by any intellectual operation. This means that, were we deprived of it, no act of reasoning would lead us from our intuitions of essences (the given) to the belief in existences; and that, being endowed with it as we are, reason cannot command its functioning in giving to our beliefs the peculiar “transitivity” they have. Yet, animal faith can be intellectually suspended, and it can be also intellectually reassured. These two speculative exercises are what Santayana means by “scepticism” and “naturalism”, respectively. And the key to naturalist position is intrinsically unstable” (Unnatural Doubts, 37). But the conclusion follows if, and only if, one concedes that Strawson has exhausted the meaning of naturalism, or even that naturalism is, by definition, that unstable mixture of Hume and Wittgenstein that Strawson takes pains to obtain. This is one of the reasons that make it interesting to examine Santayana’s fitting in the Strawsonian frame.

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understanding how they are dialectically related to each other lies precisely in the fact that they are both speculative: they belong to a level of discourse in which, no matter what we believe, we are allowed to question, freely and irresponsibly, the reality of any content given to us.146 This is precisely what the sceptic “thinks good” to do, in Kant’s phrase. Thus, the speculative naturalist is not someone who simply neglects what the sceptic has to say because he has, like Hume, discovered that the belief in the existence of things outside us depends on “a faculty which nature has antecedently implanted in the mind, and render’d unavoidable”;147 or because he finds out, like Wittgenstein, that such beliefs are expressed in “propositions which have a peculiar logical role in the system of our empirical propositions” —which amounts to a whole language-game— and “it is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language-game”.148 These remarks describe only the way we do believe, or speak, or act, and so they say nothing new to the sceptic. While for Hume and Wittgenstein (in the Strawsonian version of their assimilated anti-sceptical strategy) it seems to be enough to establish animal faith as a matter of fact in order to be justified in neglecting the sceptic’s whole point, for Santayana things are not that simple regarding the speculative level. It is true that Wittgenstein sometimes uses expressions that are very close to those of Santayana, as when he says, referring to some certainties, that he conceives them “as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal.”149 But again, this would not be, for Santayana, a naturalistic statement in itself since the sceptic needs not to deny it. On one hand, it simply states the condition in which our lives run their course, but the sceptic’s point is that that condition is totally delusive —describing it as “animal” would be, of course, a delusion as well. On the other hand, animal faith is certainly beyond justification, but only because justification has to do with (natural) knowledge which is instrumental and thus looks into things from their import, not from their substantial character. In Santayana’s own words: It matters little therefore to the pertinent knowledge of nature that the substance of things should remain recondite or unintelligible, if their movement and 146

In science and in the arts, which are not speculative endeavours, things interest us “for what they do, not for what they are”, and our aim is to “substitute the dominion of man over circumstances, as far as this is possible, for the dominion of chance”. These practical demands put limits to what can be offered as a plausible description of facts, but “speculation beyond those limits cannot be controlled, and is irresponsible”. SAF, 104105. 147 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn, rev. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), I, iv, I, 183. 148 On Certainty, §§ 136 and 204. 149 On Certainty, § 359.

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Wittgenstein’s remark that our belief in the existence of physical objects —or in any other proposition having that “peculiar logical role in the system”— is beyond being justified or unjustified, clearly intends to disarm the sceptic by excluding such beliefs from the class of our epistemic commitments. This is why he insists that we cannot say that we “know” (or ignore) such things, or that it makes no sense to speak of them in terms of truth (or falsity); i. e., the sceptic cannot even express his doubt in a meaningful way because his move is not allowed by the rules of the corresponding language-game. This both makes a difference with Hume and approximates Wittgenstein to the anti-sceptical strategies described in branch 2 of Strawson’s classification. However, the passage reproduced above shows that Santayana does not grant such disarming force to the fact, which he also concedes, that the very existence of things falls beneath or above, but in any case not into our practice of justification. And the reason is quite simple: Santayana, unlike Wittgenstein, does not wish to link the concept of truth to such practice.151 If “the function of perception and natural science is not to flatter the sense of omniscience in an absolute mind”, but basically to fulfil the requirements of action, then, for all that we know, everything in natural science and perception might work perfectly well and, as the sceptic suggests, our assumptions concerning “the substance of things” be absolutely wrong. Therefore, Santayana concludes, scepticism and the recognition of animal faith are mutually compatible: Complete scepticism is accordingly not inconsistent with animal faith; the admission that nothing given exists is not incompatible with belief in things not given. I may yield to the suasion of instinct, and practise the arts with a humble confidence, without in the least disavowing the most rigorous criticism of knowledge or hypostatising any of the data of sense or fancy. […] That such external things exist, that I exist myself, and live more or less prosperously in the midst of them, is a faith not founded on reason but precipitated in action, and in that intent, which is virtual action, involved in perception. This faith, which it 150

SAF, 104. For Wittgenstein, “if the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false” (On Certainty, § 205). While, for Santayana, the concept of truth has a logical status that renders it irreducible to the results of any human operations whatsoever, including justification. 151

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would be dishonest not to confess that I share, does no violence to a sceptical analysis of experience; on the contrary, it takes advantage of that analysis to interpret this volatile experience as all animals do and must, as a set of symbols for existences that cannot enter experience, and which, since they are not elements in knowledge, no analysis of knowledge can touch.152

In short, if by its mere affirmation animal faith does not cancel the “sceptical analysis of experience”, then naturalism cannot avoid scepticism by just affirming animal faith as a precondition of all our natural practices. It is no surprise, then, that Santayana considers Hume’s philosophy as “limping scepticism”.153 Now, this charge is obviously directed to Hume’s anti-sceptical strategy, not to his naturalism; that is, not to his vindication of our natural disposition to believe, but to his failure in supporting it philosophically, thus creating —to use Michael Williams’s words— “an irremediable conflict between our everyday attitude towards our beliefs about the world around us and the attitude to which (he [Hume] thought) we are inevitably led by sustained, reflective philosophical inquiry into their ground and status”.154 So we can think of Santayana as someone who tries to give back to Humean “real convictions”, the philosophical respectability of which it has been deprived in modern times by Humean “official philosophy”.155 152

SAF, 105-106. SAF, 296. In this final chapter of Scepticism and Animal Faith, entitled “Comparison with other Criticisms of Knowledge”, Santayana passes unusually harsh judgements on Hume and Kant, about whom he writes (293): “They had nothing to offer in the place of what they criticised, except the same cheque dishonoured. All their philosophy, where it was not simply a collapse into living without philosophy, was retrenchment”. And, referring in particular to Hume and “the whole modern school of idealists” (295), he rhetorically asks whether “their criticism is not at bottom a work of edification or of malice” (295-296) and adds: “This whole school criticises knowledge, not by extending knowledge and testing it further, but by reviewing it maliciously, on the tacit assumption that knowledge is impossible. But in that case this review of knowledge and all this shrewd psychology are themselves worthless; and we are reduced, as Hume was in his deeper moments of insight, to a speechless wonder. So that whilst all the animals trust their senses and live, philosophy would persuade man alone not to trust them and, if he was consistent, to stop living” (296-297). 154 Unnatural Doubts, xii. As we have seen, Santayana’s idea of what philosophy ought to do is just the opposite. Inasmuch as Williams also considers such conflicts as symptomatic that philosophic reflection has lost its way, he would sympathise with Santayana’s intent at least. 155 Santayana wrote in a letter: “In regard to Hume I think I have written nothing. But as a man of the world and a historian he felt as I do, and was not subjective or negative at all (I say “negative” rather than “sceptical” because he was a sceptic in official philosophy but a naturalist in his real convictions).” The Letters of George Santayana, ed. Daniel 153

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We saw that, for Santayana, naturalism must be an answer to the sceptic on the speculative or reflective level, and hence it is itself speculative. Yet it cannot consist in a proof of the existence of things, for the naturalist thinks that our belief in such existences should not be treated as a matter of proof. It cannot be Wittgenstein’s answer either, for Santayana acknowledges the sceptic’s title to launch his questions freely and irresponsibly, despite our practical incapacity to renounce the belief “in things not given”. Instead, Santayana’s rejection of scepticism results from a negative evaluation of it as a tenable form of criticism. His strategy is explicit at the beginning of Scepticism and Animal Faith: The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular; nor does it assure me that not to live would not, for this very reason, be far safer and saner. To be dead and have no opinions would certainly not be to discover the truth; but if all opinions are necessarily false, it would at least be not to sin against intellectual honour. Let me then push scepticism as far as I logically can, and endeavour to clear my mind of illusion, even at the price of intellectual suicide.156

These words not only introduce the implacable epoché which Santayana will display in the next chapters, but reveal what it is for him the sole responsibility of the speculative mind: to preserve intellectual honour or integrity. Apart from logical coherence, this is the only limit that criticism is obliged to acknowledge, but this is precisely the limit that Santayana charges the sceptic of having trespassed. For when his program is pushed as far as it is logically possible, it reduces itself to silence, to solipsism of the present moment.157 Then what? Is it not precisely where the sceptic wants to take us? Is it not the demonstration that he is right? Santayana’s answer is: no, because that proves that he is telling us something, and therefore is being dishonest. The dishonesty of the sceptic has been alleged as a line of argument for centuries. Nevertheless, it has always been related to his non-scepticism in Cory (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1955), 430. And in his autobiography, when recalling William James’s lectures on Locke, Berkeley and Hume while he was a student at Harvard, he registers a comment by George Herbert Palmer: “Hume was the one I least appreciated; yet Palmer once said that I had Hume in the bones”. Persons and Places (Boston: MIT Press, 1986), 238. I want to thank Daniel Moreno Moreno for having called my attention on these two references, and for a profitable conversation on Hume and Santayana during a nice walk in Opole. 156 SAF, 10. 157 Santayana’s progressive reduction of belief to the bedrock of meaningless “presence” in chapters III-VII of Scepticism and Animal Faith is brilliantly summarized by Michael Hodges and John Lachs, Thinking in the Ruins. Wittgenstein and Santayana on Contingency (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 27-30.

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everyday life; or, to put it in another form, it has been presented only as a contradiction in practice. So when Santayana argues that the sceptic is not being honest, he tends to be interpreted along the same lines.158 However, the dishonesty is, in his case, attributed directly to the sceptic’s speculative attempt and to that extent the argument meets the sceptic on his own ground. The lack of honesty imputed by Santayana to the sceptic has to do with the absence of a first principle of criticism that was the opening thesis of Scepticism and Animal Faith; but not, as Strawson presumes, since the non-existence of an absolute starting point deprives the sceptical doubts of a meaning, but because the sceptic tries surreptitiously to make those doubts pass for knowledge of some sort. In other words, the sceptical doubt makes sense; it is the sceptic’s stand that is untenable: If philosophy were something prior to convention rather than (as it is) only convention made consistent and deliberate, philosophy ought to reject belief in substance and in knowledge, and to entrench itself in the sheer confession and analysis of this belief, as of all others, without assenting to any of them. But I have found that criticism has no first principle, that analysis involves belief in discourse, and that belief in discourse involves belief in substance; so that any pretensions which criticism might set up to being more profound than common sense would be false pretensions. Criticism is only an exercise of reflective fancy, on the plane of literary psychology, an after-image of that faith in nature which it denies; and in dwelling on criticism as if it were more than a subjective perspective or play of logical optics, I should be renouncing all serious philosophy. Philosophy is nothing if not honest; and the critical attitude, when it refuses to rest at some point upon vulgar faith, inhibits all belief, denies all 159 claims to knowledge, and becomes dishonest; because it itself claims to know.

What Santayana is pointing at is worth emphasizing, because it tends to be overlooked. Much philosophical effort has been directed to elucidate whether the sceptic has a right to put his questions (this, as we know, is the basis of a 158

For instance, by Hodges and Lachs; see Thinking in the Ruins, 30-31. They see a parallelism between Santayana and Wittgenstein on this point: “While one [Wittgenstein] rejects the starting point of wholesale doubt and the other [Santayana] pushes the program to self-destruction, both thinkers concur that scepticism cannot be defeated on its own ground and fails in the end only because it is incompatible with action or the practices that constitutes our lives” (27). Of course, Santayana agrees in the fact that scepticism cannot be lived, and this is also a sign of dishonesty in philosophy according to his standards. But I do not think that he would consider this as a completely satisfactory answer, for it does not acknowledge the significance of criticism for philosophy. In any case, that interpretation omits what I think to be Santayana’s most original contribution to the debate of scepticism. 159 SAF, 186-187 (my emphasis).

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whole set of anti-sceptical strategies). The issue that Santayana now brings to the fore is different: are sceptical answers possible at all? Although arguments usually revolve around “doubts” and “questions”, one should not forget that scepticism consists in an assertion: we can know nothing about the physical world around us. This is not a self-defeating statement, since it asserts nothing about the physical world. But Santayana’s point160 is that, in pushing his questions to their very limit —which is inherent to the program of criticism—, the sceptic has stripped himself of all the resources of discourse and reduced himself to silent appreciation of essence (which is not even a form of belief). The privilege of speculation gives him the benefit of doubting everything he can, but for the sake of honesty, he cannot reintroduce at his convenience any item that his doubting have previously annihilated in the process. In fact, he normally does not have to: the effectiveness of sceptical strategy lies on the fact that it creates the impression of having asserted something by merely linking together a chain of questions. What Santayana is saying is that a chain of questions, no matter how deep the questions, nor how long the chain, does not amount to an answer. For Santayana, then, the sceptic is not in a position to make a point whatsoever. As a form of criticism, scepticism is intellectually disappointing, as eloquent as dumbness. It was born, not out of the concerns of everyday life, but out of the flights of speculation, and there it dissolves before it could yield any fruit. Now, criticism cannot ignore or neglect its questions. On the contrary, it learns two lessons from them. The first one is the discovery of the realm of essence; the second one is “recognition that an honest philosophy demands standards different from absolute certainty”161 —or, what amounts to the same thing, is admission that there is no first principle of criticism. Ironically enough, Santayana’s naturalism turns out to be a consequence of scepticism, but only in its inquisitive watershed. Like Wittgenstein’s ladder in the Tractatus, sceptical doubts must be thrown away once they have taken us to the right view; a view from which we can see that we do not need to care about them. By means of this meta-criticism of scepticism, animal faith is reassured and the link between spirit and a world of natural existences is restored. For, once the intellectual suspension of that faith has proved to be no more than a “subjective perspective or play of logical optics”, the space is clear for the speculative mind to relay again upon it. However, this restoration —the naturalist commitment to a world of substance as described by instinct and 160

It is not my purpose to make a critical assessment of his point now. My concern is only to show how Santayana’s anti-sceptical strategy differs in form from other naturalistic approaches (e. g., those studied by Strawson and Williams). 161 Thinking in the Ruins, 10. The idea that these are the two positive consequences of the sceptical reduction is taken from Hodges and Lachs.

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scientific reasoning— does not revoke, but incorporates, what speculation and criticism have revealed in the meantime, namely, that belief in existences is vouched for only by faith; a revelation that naturalists would have escaped if they had neglected the sceptical doubt. This is what confers Santayana’s naturalism its speculative character, or its irrevocable adscription to the point of view of criticism; and also what explains why some tend to detect in his philosophy an undercurrent of scepticism. For Santayana’s naturalism does not lead us back to the innocence of animal faith; it does not surrender to that faith, it only embraces it as a reasonable dogma —or a “compensatory dogma”, as he occasionally says.162 Santayana replaced Hume’s question “What assurances can philosophy offer against scepticism?” with the question “What is that that scepticism is in a position to assert anyway?” While the first is bound to always have a negative answer, even if animal faith is right in all its assumptions, the second forces scepticism to recognize its playful character and, ultimately, its vacuity as a critical thinking. Though, at the same time, Santayana did not agree with Wittgenstein in that philosophy “leaves everything as it is”.163 When criticism takes off from our everyday attitude towards belief, it is once and for all. The speculative mind can go beyond sceptical doubts, but it cannot come back.

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“It is true that many who have defended this view, in the form that all appearance is illusion, have done so in order to insist all the more stoutly on the existence of something occult which they call reality; but as the existence of this reality is far easier to doubt than the existence of the obvious, I may here disregard that compensatory dogma. I shall soon introduce compensatory dogmas of my own, more credible, I think, than theirs; and I shall attribute existence to a flux of natural events which can never be data of intuition, but only objects of a belief which men and animals, caught in that flux themselves, hazard instinctively.” SAF, 49. A few lines before in the same page, Santayana declared: “the scepticism I am defending is not meant to be provisional; its just conclusions will remain fixed, to remind me perpetually that all alleged knowledge of matters of fact is faith only” (my emphasis). 163 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 3rd edn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), I, § 124.

THE PIETY OF MATERIALISTIC CONVICTION AND THE ABNORMAL MADNESS OF WESTERN IDEALISM MATTHEW CALEB FLAMM

Between the laughing and the weeping philosopher there is no opposition: the same facts that make one laugh make one weep. No whole-hearted man, no sane art, can be limited to either mood. —George Santayana, Persons and Places, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944: 160.

With remarkably little shame for a philosopher, Santayana holds that belief in nature is an unjustifiable compulsion.164 His audacity in making what most humans take for granted in everyday living a fundamental precept of formal ontology is apt to offend mainstream philosophers for its inability to be gainsaid by logic, or demonstrative argument. But mainstream philosophers have hardly needed to be offended by Santayana’s thinking to ignore it; they have been able to do so for its affiliation with an orientation that has long played lead-pariah in the play that is the Western philosophic tradition: materialism. As Santayana observes in his own trenchant way, the historically subordinate status of materialism is traceable to Plato, who worked out his theory of Forms in open opposition to the orientation. A particularly damning treatment of materialism is found in a characterization in the Sophist, where the Stranger suggests to Theaetetus that their considerations can be summarized in the image of materialist giants disputing over the nature of reality with idealist gods: What we shall see is something like a battle of gods and giants…about reality165…One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for

164

RB, 194; SAF, 3. All references to Santayana’s texts are abbreviated in these notes. Legend of abbreviations giving full cites of individual editions can be found in the concluding bibliography. 165 In Greek, “to hon” (literally, “that which is”).

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they…strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch…and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word.166

Materialists are characterized by Plato’s Stranger as those who demean reality in thinking of it as embodied, while the Parmenidean idealists, imparters of the doctrine of Forms, are said to hold by appeal to divinity that reality is a bodiless, intelligible unity. Materialists are elsewhere characterized by Plato as crude,167 uncivilized168, and indicative of the irreligious mob of society.169 Given the preeminence of Plato in the Western tradition, one might reasonably question the attempt to defend a doctrine that was one of his principle targets. But the materialism that Plato refuted—and as I shall explore more fully in what follows, subsequent generations of Western philosophers both refuted and defended—lacks the moral depth of Santayana’s materialism. In this direction, there is much to be gained by reconsidering his materialistic orientation. Santayana’s materialism is unique in its delineating a role for spiritual life, and reconciling the same with natural life. Here I shall explicate this, Santayana’s pious materialism by connecting its main features with his historical critique of Western idealism. From Santayana’s perspective the Western tradition philosophically institutes what at the level of experience is the abnormal madness of idealism. Such madness is best remedied, Santayana argues, in the piety of materialistic conviction radiating from the center of all natural life. To begin, it helps to acknowledge Santayana’s synthetic historical perspective. With surprising degrees of sweep and subtlety he discerns in the development, especially, of Modern philosophy the Platonic hegemony of idealism. He offers resources for understanding how the ideas made critical use of by rationalists, empiricists, and eventually Kantian transcendentalists became

166

Plato. “Sophist,” in The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (multiple translators). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961: 990 (246a-b). 167 Plato. “Theaetetus,” in The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (multiple translators). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961: 861 (156a). 168 Plato. “Sophist,” in The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (multiple translators). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961: 990 (246c) 169 Plato. “Laws,” in The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (multiple translators). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961: 1442 (886ce).

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the vanguard of a more refined Platonic idealism, fortified against any legitimately materialistic conception of knowledge or reality: When idealists say…that ideas are the only objects of human knowledge and that they exist only in the mind, their language is incoherent, because knowledge of ideas is not knowledge, and presence to intuition is not existence. But this incoherence enables two different philosophies to use the same formula, to the extreme confusion both of doctrine and feeling.170

The two enabled philosophies Santayana identifies are Modern materialism and idealism, the former of which conceives ideas as “recollected events in nature,” and the latter as “terms of sensation and thought, and their pictorial or rhetorical synthesis.”171 Conceived this way, neither orientation is capable of bringing anything but incoherence to the question of reality raised poignantly many centuries ago by Plato and other Ancients. Modern Materialists—among whom, interestingly, Santayana includes psychologists as well as physicists—enjoy a provisional fame in their respective spheres of intellectual pursuit, yet they are easily ignored and sometimes dismissed outside of those spheres for the tenuousness of their representational accounts of reality. At the same time, idealists in the Modern era were absolutist in ways Plato never could have imagined, denying the existence even of facts except as what they would be if they were possible at all.172 As hinted in the passage just cited, Santayana holds that the key to understanding this development is found in the idealistic nature of the knowledge alleged to be scrutinized in the Modern tradition. When Modern empiricists attributed existence only to ideas, they professed to mean what Santayana calls “data” when in fact they meant “intuitions.”173 In other words, they reduced the given appearance to a collection of projected human senses, and in the process confused the object of knowledge with its appearance. Empiricists did so because they were eager lay siege to an experienced reality whose existence could not be discredited, as it was by the rationalists through their privileging of a priori knowledge. But in their eagerness, as fully realized in Hume, the empiricists ironically developed a critical framework that denied any attempt whatsoever to talk about external realities. At any moment there just is what is being perceived, an experience not justified by any successive conscious standpoint but only further complicated by such. The very notion that 170

SAF, 58. SAF, 59. 172 SAF, 59. 173 SAF, 57: “Empiricists are interested in practice, and wish to work with as light an intellectual equipment as possible; they therefore attribute existence to ‘ideas’—meaning intuitions but professing to mean data.” 171

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external realities are the source of sense-perceptions is, in Hume’s words, “without any foundation in reasoning.”174 Kant would exploit this logic to ends that officially exiled the materialism Santayana advocates once and for all from mainstream philosophy. The exile was in large part secured by the rigid distinction he drew between sensibility and the understanding, because, while the two were understood to play a symbiotic role in the production of knowledge, that role locked the perceived object within the confines of representational subjectivity.175 Sensibility, according to Kant, is that source of knowledge through which the object is “given,” while understanding is that source through which it is “thought.” Under such a conception the contribution external realities could be thought to make for its realization was greatly diminished after Kant. After Kant, the truth of alleged facts could no longer be presumed to consist in the simple agreement of knowledge with its objects: according to Kant such a presumption followed from the confused idea that there can be a “general criterion of truth,” a criterion “by its very nature…self-contradictory” since the content varies in each instance of knowledge.176 Instead, for Kant the truth of alleged facts hinged, in the first place, on distinguishing the content of knowledge from its form, and in the second place, on making explicit the a priori conditions for the possibility of the experience that permits such knowledge. In this convoluted way, Kant reconnected philosophy with its abiding rationalist orientation, reframing questions in an idealistic framework which privileged a priori knowledge no less than had Descartes or even Plato before him; but this with the crucial addition that the realism debated by Ancient and Medieval philosophers was dispatched once and for all. To whatever extent post-Kantian philosophers differed in their acceptance of the specifics of the subordination of object to subject, they were all willing inheritors of Kant’s wholesale rejection of the traditional realism required to justify materialistic doctrines such as those Santayana would 174

Here is the full passage from Hume, validating the previous two sentences: “It is a question of fact, whether the perceptions of the senses be produced by external objects, resembling them: How shall this question be determined? By experience surely; as all other questions of a like nature. But here experience is, and must be entirely silent. The mind has never any thing present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connection with objects. The supposition of such a connection is, therefore, without any foundation in reasoning.” David Hume. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993: 105. 175 See Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929: 92-93. 176 See Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929: 97-98.

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endorse. The Classical empiricist tradition apparently only managed to provide a preliminary means of upping the ante of this idealistic pathology. It is interesting in this context to recall Plato’s characterization of materialists as those who “would drag everything down to the level of body,”177 because the same discrediting of body-centric notions of reality appears to have animated the critical demolitions of the Modern’s; albeit, to more extreme ends. If all talk of external realities impressing themselves on bodies to stimulate senses is disallowed, materialism in any meaningful sense is impossible. Yet while for Plato this was an honest means of safeguarding his own idealism against his materialist predecessors, by the time of the Classical empiricists, the same strategy was paradoxically employed for the purpose of challenging a Cartesian, rationalist-realist view of reality that was simply Platonism repackaged. In other words, there were no materialists by the Modern era, and those few philosophers—such as Hobbes or Locke—who professed to honor a substantive external reality akin to matter did so solely on epistemological grounds: a pretend materialism predicated on the transparent logic that all known qualities must somehow inhere in an independent object.178 This proved easy prey for Kant’s predatory critical philosophy. These are extrapolations from flashing insights throughout Santayana’s writings, but some choice references will bring them together, and in the process bring his materialistic system into greater focus. In Scepticism and Animal Faith Santayana introduces his use of the term “substance” to designate both the abiding belief in a general realm of existence,179 and the primacy of the latter in human experience.180 This is provided in order to situate the concept in the history of Western thought, in particular to clear up some striking confusions introduced by Modern philosophers. Of the Modern’s, Locke was closest to being a materialist of Santayana’s stripe. But Santayana justifiably saw much ambivalence in Locke’s materialism.181 Hearkening the Eastern fable of the Elephant and Tortoise, Locke famously called substance “a supposed, I know

177

Plato. “Sophist,” in The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (multiple translators). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961: 990. 178 I elaborate on this in what follows. 179 SAF, 182: “It is impossible to eliminate belief in substance so long as belief in existence is retained.” 180 SAF, 188: “Experience brings belief in substance…before it brings intuition of essences; it is appetition before it is description.” 181 For Santayana’s most sympathetic take on the ambivalence of Locke’s materialism, see: “Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense,” in Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933: 6-7.

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not what, to support those ideas we call accidents.”182 Santayana justifiably calls this recognition in Locke a product of “inadvertence or want of courage” when considered in the context of his otherwise malicious criticism of knowledge.183 Aside from such tendentious Lockean sympathies, philosophers in the Modern period had little patience with the common sense belief in matter, principally because they viewed such sense as inimical to philosophic understanding. There is no more vivid example of this than in Berkeley’s famous argument for immaterialism in the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, in which the materialist Hylas is led by Philonous to abandon belief in a mind-independent material substance in order to return to “common sense”: “I have been a long time distrusting my senses…” Hylas proclaims, “Now the glasses are removed…I am clearly convinced that I see things in their native forms.”184 The native eyesight that has been restored to Hylas is ironically the same that had quickened the sceptical terrors of Descartes, and eventually Berkeley’s contemporary Hume, whose only recourse at the end of Book I of the Treatise is to recommend distraction from philosophy and emphasize the relative harmlessness of its ridiculous conclusions.185 Interestingly, Hume’s negative ground for belief comes quite close to the positive ground from which Santayana constructs his materialism: It matters little…to the pertinent knowledge of nature that the substance of things should remain recondite or unintelligible, if their movement and operation can be 182

John Locke. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. R. Woolhouse. London: Penguin Books, 1997: Book II; Chapter XXXIII; Section 15). 183 LR, (Reason in Common Sense, Volume One of the Life of Reason. Second Edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 84). Importantly, the entire chapter from which this assessment comes is omitted in the updated single-volume edition of The Life of Reason that was published posthumously by Daniel Cory. The Critical Edition volume that is shortly to be published by MIT Press will (as I have it from its editor Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr.), default to its original published form and retain the chapter. 184 George Berkeley. Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Philosophical Works: Including the Works on Vision. Vermont: Everyman, 1975: 252. 185 “Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition…return? I am confounded with all these questions…since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses…I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour’s amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther…Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.” (David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature. London, New York: Penguin Books, 1969: 316; 319.)

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The Piety of Materialistic Conviction and the Abnormal Madness of Western Idealism rightly determined on the plane of human perception. It matters little if their very existence is vouched for only by animal faith and presumption, so long as this faith posits existence where existence is, and this presumption expresses a prophetic preadaptation of animal instincts to the forces of the environment…complete scepticism is accordingly not inconsistent with animal faith.186

Here we find in Santayana the same Humean nihilism towards an ultimate knowledge of nature, yet none of the despairing forgetfulness through distraction, none of the sullying of philosophy as ridiculous endeavor. Santayana sees ultimate scepticism as wholly compatible with common sense claims about nature. Philosophy itself in Santayana’s view is a chastening of the intellect so that the probings and promptings of natural life do not ravage the spirit, a notion for which Hume had no use, arguably exposing the barrenness of his escapist conclusions. The restoration of sanity, or spiritual calm in Santayana’s sense, amidst the insane sallies of philosophic criticism requires acceptance of a pious materialism expressed in the sympathetic poetry of experiencing animals: capturing the central meaning of the term, “animal faith,” a surrender to the “suasion of instinct.”187 Yet while the practical way to animal faith is through experience, the spiritual way is through essence. When the conclusions of ultimate scepticism crystallize, they expose the bankruptcy of the criterion of absolute certitude on which Modern scepticism rests; bankrupt, that is, in its attempt to yield any sort of “knowledge,” but immeasurably wealthy in its ability to highlight a realm of being from the standpoint of which all things are reduced to appearances of themselves. This realm of essence is distinguished by Santayana in order to elaborate the edifying discovery that “nothing that [one] posess[es] in intuition, or actually see[s], is ever there.”188 While such a discovery is made at the opposite pole of natural experience, it lends to the same a disillusioned amplitude most evidently present in the detached calm in those executing exemplary physical performances: sport, dance, and the like.189 A colleague of mine, unfamiliar with Santayana’s philosophy, once rhetorically inquired while waving his hands about him to indicate all that he was directly experiencing: “So, for Santayana all of this is really matter, right?” Santayana’s answer to his question would be: “No. This is essence, and it does 186

SAF, 104-105. SAF, 105. 188 SAF, 99. 189 “…words will probably come most aptly when…they come unconsciously…The same thing happens in a game of ball…when a player is good; the quick adjustment of his faculties and organs, being automatic, kindles in his mind a graphic image and a pure emotion, to be the signs of his achievement to his inner man.” (RB, 10) 187

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not exist.” What is present to consciousness when noticed for itself is only a quality, or characteristic of matter, which existence remains forever removed from immediate experience, suggested by the promptings of natural experience. This is why Santayana emphasizes the discovery of essences: they are the only things people ever see and the last they notice. In its prodding way natural experience constantly distracts us from the obvious. A shock is felt; a response demanded; an ejaculation of energy solicited; a desire aroused. These are natural promptings that circumscribe every activity—intellectual and practical—of human beings. Animal faith is therefore a standpoint which is necessarily presupposed in any practical activity or action, and the discovery of essence is but an alternate route for those such as Santayana who would lend to such experience a spiritual confirmation of its legitimacy. The paradox then—one that Santayana’s philosophy does much to clarify—is that one can only become acquainted with the material by way of the ideal. To believe, one must transcend one’s intuitive disbelief in the apparent; and such transcendence will then be what in Santayana’s vocabulary is understood as spirit-become-intent, yielding to the governing material psyche: “Under such [material] circumstances and with such organs, consciousness could not be pure intuition: it must needs be intuition carried by intent…by…uprooting itself from its immediate datum, spirit becomes perception, and perception knowledge, in all its transitive and realistic force.”190 What appears is taken to have some meaning, which amounts to taking it as symbolic for something else (something it is not essentially). In this sense, the phrase “suspension of disbelief” as it is used to describe the need for credulity in fictional contexts is an analogue of what Santayana takes to be the process by which animal consciousness experiences natural existences. The process by which animal consciousness transcends the given to imbue it with significance is no methodological trickery, nor some systematic retrenchment of sheer cognition; it is the impulsive emergence of natural life, what, at the level of action has its most emphatic expression in the sexual response. No more emotionally integrated expression of passion, physical coercion, and ideal aspiration exists than in the sexual orgasm. Few Western philosophers have elaborated on this hugely significant feature of animal life. Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophy had a powerful influence on Santayana, is one of the exceptions: …satisfaction of the sexual impulse goes beyond the affirmation of one’s own existence that fills so short a time; it affirms life for an indefinite time beyond the death of the individual…Our own consciousness, the intensity of the impulse, 190

RB, 350.

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The Piety of Materialistic Conviction and the Abnormal Madness of Western Idealism teaches us that in this act is expressed the most decided affirmation of the will-tolive, pure and without further addition…With that affirmation beyond one’s own body to the production of a new body, suffering and death, as belonging to the phenomenon of life, are also affirmed anew, and the possibility of salvation, brought about by the most complete faculty of knowledge, is for this time declared to be fruitless.191

The possibility of salvation appears fruitless from the perspective of sexual activity, Schopenhauer argues, because the latter expresses most fully the affirmation of materiality (his word for which is Will), which is centrally contingent, fleeting, voracious, doomed to suffering and death, and generally anathema to the ideal permanency of the salvific state endorsed in, especially, Christian teaching. Hence, he goes on to observe, one finds the shameful disposition towards sexual activity itself within the Christian perspective. All of mankind must feel the shame of Adam’s sin (itself a mythical symbol for succumbing to sexual impulse), so that the salvific denial of the affirmation of material life can ensue. Like Schopenhauer, Santayana puzzles over the association of sexual activity with depravity and shame: “Animal love is a marvelous force; and while it issues in acts that may be followed by a revulsion of feeling, it yet deserves a more sympathetic treatment than art and morals have known how to accord it.”192 The association of sexual activity with sin in the Christian tradition is particularly regretful in Santayana’s view.193 His oblique references to the sexual response contain language that emphasizes the centrality of the experience to understanding the affirmation of material life: “…[the object of sexual passion is] breathlessly devoured in that pause and concentration of attention, that rearrangement of soul, which love is conceived in.”194 Love is conceived in the object of the devouring sexual impulse. A destructive impulse therefore accompanies amorous exertions, perhaps echoing the ontological relations that hold at their perimeter; particularly those between essence, matter, and truth. If in any full experience 191

Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation, Volume I. New York: Dover Publications, 1969: 328. 192 LR, 93. 193 “The darkness which conventionally covers this passion is one of the saddest consequences of Adam’s fall. It was a terrible misfortune in man’s development that he should not have been able to acquire the higher functions without deranging the lower. Why should the depths of his being be thus polluted and the most delightful of nature’s mysteries be an occasion not for communion with her, as it should have remained, but for depravity and sorrow?”—LR, 93-94. 194 LR, 98.

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essence is a self-sufficing quality instantiated by matter, the event and fact created by that instantiation becomes a truth forever distinguished within the realm of essence. But even in that sanctuary the essence-made-truth has been a plaything of matter: truth is “a furrow which matter must plough upon the face of essence.”195 The language Santayana uses to describe the embodiment of appearance by material realities evokes sexual violence: “existence doubly injures the forms of being it embodies, by ravishing them first and betraying them afterwards.”196 Existence rapes and abandons the forms it embodies, and perhaps the shame and repugnance felt towards the material realm, in particular the shame following sexual activity, is an overt disgust at this latent ontological assault. But if from the galleries of ontology natural life seems a fruitless rush of hit-and-run assault, on stage it is an exhilarating attachment; ennobling the spirit when willingly undertaken even if violating and diminishing when unwilling. And this is the true piety of materialistic conviction, which Santayana expresses beautifully in the Stranger’s fable in “Normal Madness,” the third dialogue from Dialogues in Limbo. Democritus begins the dialogue with a grand statement of his philosophy, initiating things by proclaiming the equally natural character of disease and self-preservation,197 and the indifference of nature in general to the moral state of humans. “Moral terms are caresses or insults and describe nothing; but they have a meaning to the heart, and are not forbidden.”198 The literature and poetry in which humans respond to their natural experience is a rhetorical flourish amidst unremitting material circumstances. To suffering hearts such singing consoles and pacifies, but meantime nature has moved on, utterly blind to its humanly judged successes and failures. In the shade of Democritus Santayana argues that consciousness is a normal madness, so that even when abnormal it cannot be contrary to nature: “…nothing can be contrary to nature; and that a man should shriek or see wild visions or talk to the air…is not contrary to nature, but only to the habit of the majority.”199 What distinguishes abnormal from normal madness is that the former is dissatisfied with its delusional condition and has sought to overcome it in one of three ways: through action, thought, or self-inflation.

195

SAF, 227; RB, 405. SAF, 48. 197 DL, 38: “The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.” 198 DL, 38-39. For a wonderful extrapolation on this striking line see Glenn Tiller, “Caresses or Insults: A Note on Santayana's Metaethics,” in Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society 16 (Fall 1998): 22-24. 199 DL, 38. 196

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The abnormal madness of action is seen in those who turn all of their efforts against material circumstances, who would strive for unity when all is changing, or vice versa, and who would generally set all of their own directions against those of nature. The abnormal madness of thought is seen in those who fail to distinguish the accent of their own proclamations, and would have them in all of their details become truths for everyone else. And the abnormal madness of self-inflation comes from the tempting anthropomorphism of the human condition itself whereby all material processes are transformed into fables for experiencing subjectivities within whose orbits they fall. This illusion of self-importance is identified by Santayana to be the origin of all opinion: “as the chief endeavor of the animal body is to defend and propagate itself at all costs, so the chief and most lasting illusion of the mind is the illusion of its own importance.”200 We have here a summary not simply of human folly, but of what for Santayana is its idealistic equivalent in the rationalistic philosophies of the Western tradition. Plato and Kant are veritable champions of the abnormal madness of thought, Descartes of self-inflation, and arguably Hegel of action.201 One is hard-pressed to produce a list of more decisively influential Western philosophers, all indicted by Santayana as succumbing to the abnormal madness of idealism. This indictment begs a concluding indication of what Santayana thinks of as the normal madness of materialism. In rare moments Santayana provides more definitive statements of his materialistic convictions: “Materialism is not a system of metaphysics; it is a speculation in chemistry and physiology, to the effect that, if analysis could go deep enough, it would find that all substance was homogeneous, and that all motion was regular.”202 The “speculation” Santayana has in mind here is akin to that described by A.N. Whitehead in the opening chapter of Process and Reality. Besides echoing Santayana’s argument that there is no first principle of criticism,203 Whitehead observes that while “The primary method of mathematics is deduction; the primary method of philosophy is descriptive 200

DL, 44. I elaborate this point with regard to Hegel in a paper shortly to be published in the next (2007) edition of Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society. 202 TPP, 31. 203 “There is no first principle which is in itself unknowable, not to be captured by a flash of insight.” Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1978 (1929, Macmillan Publishing Co.): 4. Compare to Santayana: “…it is not by deduction from first principles, arbitrarily chosen, that human reasoning actually proceeds, but by loose habits of mental evocation which such principles at best may exhibit afterwards in an idealized form.” (SAF, 2) Whitehead’s version of this claim was published six years later than Santayana’s. 201

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generalization.”204 In Whitehead’s estimation the model of deduction for philosophic criticism (developed fully in the Modern period), “has veiled the very considerable success of philosophy in providing generic notions which add lucidity to our apprehension of the facts of experience.”205 Philosophic criticism is in other words, as Santayana prefers to call it, literary: an apportionment of interpretive imagination to the richness of human experience. And such literary speculation is appropriate to the compulsive postulate of matter because while it is only a best guess about the underlying nature of all experience, it is the most abiding assumption behind all human knowledge, so much so that it survives even the most devastating sceptical criticism. This is the central point of the first ten chapters of Scepticism and Animal Faith: as deep as philosophic scepticism cuts it only succeeds in “clear[ing] our intellectual conscience of voluntary or avoidable delusion.”206 If all is delusion, then sanity depends upon accepting that fact: “by sanity I understand assurance and peace in being what one is, and in becoming what one must become…”207 Such peace comes from wisdom, also of course a form of madness.208 The disillusionment of material piety is not a ratcheting down of expectation, or imagination, but a conduction of the same into channels that expand their operation indefinitely. The insistence upon ideal existences is one that reality be arrested in-itself by thought: an impossible human delusion curable only by the recognition of the indomitable materiality of existence. This recognition is not merely one of limits, nor a crude unhelpful adherence to bodily resistance, but of the circumscription of all experience in a setting that appears quite foreign from the home of consciousness. One can imagine here the committed idealist demanding: of what value is such materialistic loyalty? To honor material reality by compulsion in natural life is one thing, to recognize the deliverance of all human aspiration and accomplishment into the realm of matter is quite another. Materialism is intrinsically offensive to human spirit because, as Santayana consistently observes, from its vantage there is no reason spirit should be lodged in any particular psyche in any particular historical time or place. Spirit is a reluctant admitter of truths that require it to suspend its intuitions, which is why ultimate religion, about which Santayana raised the question in his tercentenary address 204

Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1978 (1929, Macmillan Publishing Co.): 10. 205 Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1978 (1929, Macmillan Publishing Co.): 10. 206 SAF, 3. 207 DL, 40. 208 “Wisdom is an evanescent madness, when the dream still continues but no longer deceives.” DL, 45.

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on Spinoza, is proper only to a “wholly free and disillusioned spirit.”209 This explains the historical association of materialism with impiety: matter is an imposition on the intuitions of spirit; and if piety is, as Santayana calls it in one context the “domesticating [of] spirit in one specific region,”210 then the impositions of matter can only be anathema to the religious stance. Yet this is paradoxically the very basis of Santayana’s own pious materialism: it is spirit wizened to its ultimate destiny when, after a certain accumulation of life, its interests and preferences become resolved into realities from which it is forever estranged. While in its very estrangement spirit comes to understand its material dependency, and the vanity and delusion of its preoccupations, spirit has the ability to turn these realizations to its own advantage: spirit freed by what Santayana calls a “regenerate and disillusioned piety [replacing] arrogant idealisms of the will.”211 This is what gives Santayana’s materialism the moral depth lacking in other historical versions referred to at the outset. It is not love of reality that merits materialistic allegiance; the tender of that experience is wholly ideal. Rather, it is loyalty to the endeavor that such love—a voluntary delusion in its inception—never becomes the involuntary delusion that manifests itself in the different abnormal forms of idealistic madness.

Works Cited Berkeley, George. Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Philosophical Works: Including Works on Vision. Vermont: Everyman, 1975. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. London, New York: Penguin Books, 1969. —. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis,: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929. Lauer S.J., Quentin. A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Plato (all references). The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (multiple translators). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. 209

UR, 245. RB, 671. 211 RB, 398. 210

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Santayana, George (editions and full references of cites abbreviated in the text): DL = Dialogues in Limbo. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1957. LR = The Life of Reason: One Volume Edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955. RB = Realms of Being: One Volume Edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942. SAF = Scepticism and Animal Faith. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955. TPP = Three Philosophical Poets. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953. UR = “Ultimate Religion,” a paper read in the Domus Spinozana at the Hague for the commemoration of the tercentenary of the birth of Spinoza. Published in The Works of George Santayana, Triton Edition, Volume X (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937): 243-257. Also cited from Santayana: —. “Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense,” in Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933. —. Persons and Places, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944. —. The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, Volume I. New York: Dover Publications, 1969. Whitehead, A.N. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1978 (1929, Macmillan Publishing Co.)

PART II: CULTURE, SOCIETY, AMERICA

The papers comprising the second part of this book focus on Santayana’s cultural criticism, his views of his contemporaries, and bear on subjects today categorized under the heading of “social and political philosophy.” Santayana shunned active engagement with political controversies of his time, and at times his character has been called into question for what interpreters view to be a cold, unsympathetic attitude towards world atrocities. His relative inattention to social and political matters is reflected in his writings: the only sustained book he attempted on the subject, published near the end of his life and written unevenly over a series of years, was Dominations and Powers. Certainly his early volume from The Life of Reason series, Reason in Society (1905) cannot be discounted, but there as in Dominations and Powers Santayana’s interests are cosmic, fundamentally concerned with fitting human organizations and activities within the larger scope of non-human life. This issue—if such a characterization is appropriate—may involve features of Santayana’s thinking that carry a tinge of reaction against his contemporaries, especially in this case with regard to John Dewey, whose famous commission in 1937 cleared Marxist Leon Trotsky of his Moscow Trial charges. Such political involvement could never be expected of Santayana, who commented in a letter while living in Rome in 1923 at the onset of Mussolini’s dictatorial reign “Much of what people complain of in the world after the war does not worry me; on the contrary, if only the ‘industrial situation’ could remain always bad, and the population could diminish, especially in the manufacturing towns, I should think it a good thing.”212 It is hard—for the present author, at least—to read such remarks without cringing, yet placed more broadly in the context of Santayana’s cosmopolitan life, it is presumptuous to read into them a directly malicious intent. Santayana was wont to think of things in terms of their cosmic hang, and was struck by the contrast between individual human perspectives and their vain appearance when once the dust of history and events settles. Notwithstanding 212

The Works of George Santayana, Volume V, Book Three [1921-1927]: The Letters of George Santayana, Edited and with an introduction by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussetts, 2002: 137.

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the judgment concluding the preceding quote, Santayana refrained from ascribing to nature and the unfolding of historical events a moral purpose. Indeed—admitting the problematic derogation of the “manufacturing” populace—his sentiment that the culling of a population by industrial manufacture might be “good” begs the question: for whom? His ensuing remark suggests, no one in particular except perhaps for the dispensation of natural life: “There are now too many people, too many things, and too many conferences and elections.” At any rate it is clear that social and political philosophy has been given in contemporary times a position of preeminence that it lacked in Santayana’s day, and it is something of an anachronism to hold Santayana to its standards of evaluation. The first two of the authors that follow directly confront these particular challenges. Krzysztof Piotr Skowroñski raises a question about Santayana’s apparent “sympathy for Russian Bolshevism and Italian Fascism,” and his “silence about the madness of the Holocaust.” He strives to make sense out of these features—arguably in contradiction with other facets of humanistic sympathy evident in Santayana’s thinking—and to highlight those aspects of Santayana’s philosophy with which contemporary readers must contend. Richard Marc Rubin follows with the poignant question: “How can someone committed to social progress read Santayana sympathetically?” Rubin specifies crucial contemporary social and political issues facing humans today and brings them in line with a Santayanan sensibility. The remaining authors examine these issues as they arise within Santayana’s own critical matrix. James Seaton focuses on Santayana in the capacity of cultural critic, comparing his approach to that of Theodor Adorno. He highlights the contrast of aims in the two, cautioning that while Adorno’s work can be thought to present attitudes and take up subjects deemed more central to a politics of compassion, such features belie a pretense to false authority: “Neither explicitly nor implicitly does Santayana base his claims to authority as a cultural critic on the sensitivity of his moral awareness or the breadth of his compassion.” Ramón del Castillo next examines the portrait of William James drawn in the writings of Santayana. Santayana’s assessment of James, an influential early mentor, is vital to understanding his larger critique of the American ethos. Castillo concludes that for Santayana “James’s ardent morality was completely honest, but maybe too anxious to be actually practical.” Daniel Moreno Moreno analyzes the aforementioned late Santayana work in social and political philosophy, Dominations and Powers, contending that, despite its title, the book “presents a three-fold structure, given by the relationship between Powers, Dominations and Virtues.” Moreno’s analysis invigorates the unique approach to social and political matters exemplified in Santayana’s thinking. Finally, Charles Padrón examines three key motifs, or “notions,” in Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal

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Faith which shed further light on his cosmic sense: conscious animality, experience, the inevitability of death. These three notions lay out the “parameters” of Santayana’s thinking in a way that helps one understand the philosopher’s relative disinterest in contemporary political controversies.

SANTAYANA TODAY. PROBLEMS AND HOPES KRZYSZTOF PIOTR SKOWROÑSKI

One of the main indications of a thinker’s greatness is the inexhaustible fertility of his/her ideas that constantly inspire other people at various times in many lands. The ways of deciphering or interpreting his/her message are hardly ever the same because of the readers’ specific circumstances, new expectations, and fresh perspectives on the one hand, as well as the immense vastness and profound depth of a given system of thought on the other. Thus, it is natural that every generation in every geographical location has its own perception of the masters of the past. Let me point out some of the issues—that is, concerning Santayana’s style of writing, his moral stance, and his philosophy—that seem controversial at first sight, however, under closer examination, they can be seen as strong points giving hope and stimulation to many of his followers. Santayana’s hermetic, sophisticated, old fashioned, poetic, and often obscure style of writing is frequently lamented. He notoriously uses ambiguous notions (e.g. liberty, spirit, essence, power) and seldom follows analytical philosophers in his meaning and use of key concepts. This is why some readers suggest that Santayana’s philosophy should not be treated seriously and others avoid studying him at all; perhaps this is one of the reasons why he belongs to those men-of-letters whose names are widely known, but their works are hardy ever studied by a great number of scholars. However, he is an artist rather than an investigator, and he uses philosophy as a canvas to paint his visions rather than as a magnifying glass to detect hairs and split them carefully. According to his methodology, it is not analyzing philosophical terminology, solving particular problems, investigating the differences between past philosophers, and advising governments, but rather composing his own specific vision of a good life and a picture of the universe that are at stake here,213 and, once it has been done, the rest, including wording, perplexities of daily life, political turmoils, and social inequalities are seen as secondary and as if in the background. Santayana’s style is much less obscure when his works are taken as a whole, as a system of thought, as an expression of a vivid imagination without 213

Cf. George Santayana, The Realm of Essence. New York: Scribner’s, 1927, pp. XVIXVII, p. 11.

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pretensions to become the oracle in particular affairs and to provide the plain truth about the real world (however, by all means referring to the reality), although it is true that sometimes ambiguities in terminology are chosen on purpose: to provoke various associations in thought, to tint the text with a bit of mystery, and to suggest the less realistic possibilities. Hence, I would argue that this type of philosophizing—that is: realistic, artistic and systemic—can be promising in the sense that it encourages other humanists to create their own holistic, rather than haphazard, approaches to the external world, to “be their own poets”, to cultivate their own specific narratives: poetic, religious, scientific, philosophical. This way, it welcomes a conglomeration of systems, rather than fights against them as if they were mistaken, corrupt, and incomplete. Another question is: why are such systems needed at all, especially in the modern age? One of the answers to this is: because they can reduce the danger of depersonalization214 caused by the expansion of the institutionalization in all aspects of life. Many readers have to face Santayana’s underestimation of social institutions and their beneficial influence upon the members of the public. For example, his strong criticism of Harvard after President Charles William Eliot’s reforms was caused by a fear that this most prestigious American university had become the place where the liberal arts had been exchanged for “the mechanism of some great business bureau.”215 In other words, he was afraid that, as regards philosophy for example, institutionalized education meant pursuing information provided by experts or professors of philosophy, rather than, as it should, pursuing wisdom and ideals provided by sages or masters or Philosophers. As it seems, it is the intuition of many people today, especially those from the industrialized countries, that it is the democratic institutions including the legal system, the government, the police, the economy, science, education, the health service, etc. that are the inevitable tools for the betterment of life and the successful growth of many, if not all, contemporary societies. Thus, it is believed by many, the contribution to the development of these institutions in any possible way should be an obligation for all the citizens. However, Santayana seems to have followed the long tradition in the history of social thought—of which the most eminent names are Socrates, Lucretius, Montaigne, and Goethe—according to which self-reflection (Socratic “know thyself”) and

214

By depersonalization I understand the loss of one’s own identity and of one’s recognition of oneself as a separate, original, and worthy human being. 215 George Santayana, “The Spirit and Ideals of Harvard University”, in: George Santayana’s America. Essays on Literature and Culture. Collected and with an Introduction by James Ballowe. Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1967, p. 60.

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one’s own wisdom (“to be happy you must be wise”216) are primary, and upon them any morally valuable social order can be built and some “humane” institutions work. In The Life of Reason he wrote sympathetically about a model of timocracy,217 which says that the noble and eminent should constitute the social elite and give examples of excellency to be followed, imitated, and emulated by the rest of society. Elsewhere, he warns us against the inefficiency of social institutions when they try to rely mainly on the efficiency of mechanisms, neglecting the role of individual responsibility, and his insistence on the meaning of the liberal arts as a way to achieve this. Perhaps the most difficult problem that Santayana followers have to cope with is his supposed indifference to the fate of ordinary people who had to suffer from the grievous lot imposed upon them by others. If his aristocratic ideal of timocracy is non-democratic and his elitist veneration of the noblest thinkers old fashioned, his sympathy for Russian Bolshevism and Italian Fascism,218 as well as his silence about the madness of the Holocaust are the more difficult to accept, especially when we are talking about Santayana as a moralist or a moral thinker.219 However, having criticized him on this, I would like to understand him and look for some hope that can be had out of his moral stance. There have been attempts to justify the above by those who definitely have a moral right to do so. I mean Austrian sociologist Alfred Schutz – who helped many Jews to flee the Nazis and then later moved to the US himself. Schutz indicated Santayana’s “bios theoreticos”, after the fashion of Plato and Aristotle, as a justification of his indifference to social matters.220 Without 216

George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy. New York: Scribners, 1940, p. 152. 217 George Santayana, The Life of Reason. New York: Prometheus, 1998, pp. 146-147. 218 Cf. George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition at Bay. London: The Adelphi, 1931, p. 12; The Works of George Santayana, Volume V. Edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., The MIT Press, 1986-, pp. 4: 68, 5:116, 6: 30. See also: Christopher G. Janus, Angel on My Shoulder: Remembrances at Eighty. Charleston: West Virginia Library Commission Foundation, 1993, p. 49; H. S., “Philosopher on a Pillar,” Saturday Review of Literature, June 24, 1944, p. 16. 219 It must be added immediately, that, after all, it is only this moment of his biography that is controversial; not only did he never harm anybody but he was generous and helpful (to his family), even anonymously (to Bertrand Russell), and by no means can his political stance be compared to Martin Heidegger, who belonged (shortly) to the Nazis, nor to Ezra Pound, who was at a time an apologist of Fascism, nor to Knut Hamsun, who collaborated with German occupants of his native country. 220 “These general characteristics of the creative work of old age hold especially good for the work of a philosopher who has succeeded in leading a “bios theoreticos,” a life of pure contemplation in the sense of Plato and Aristotle. If such a philosopher deals with the social world he does not want to change it, he does not have to offer reforms; his aim

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arguing with this, I would like to stress some elements of (Late or Roman) Stoicism – a school which combined the doctrine of (soft) determinism with the ideas of moral virtue (arête, dignitas), personal tranquility (ataraxia), and social disinterestedness (apatia) – although we can say about moral affinity between the Stoics and Santayana rather than any philosophical influence of the former upon the latter. Especially the detachment that saturated Santayana and his way of thinking allowed him to represent such a position according to which it is secondary, at least for a philosopher, as to what political system or social order s/he lives in, because in each it is possible to rejoice and make one’s life meaningful, and one’s mind being too impotent to influence the external or natural world anyway. Thus, when he writes that “to be in harmony with necessity gives us a sense of freedom, which is the only freedom we have”221 – one can have a feeling that this philosophy is refreshing and hopeful in the general strategy towards the problem of the sense of life against all the odds. Happiness and a high quality of life can be achieved anywhere, of which Epictetus, perhaps the noblest of the Stoic sages, although himself a slave and physically disabled, is the most telling example; on the other hand, you can be unhappy, frustrated, and empty in the freest and richest of societies, and Santayana’s work is an important warning against the trap of commercialism, trumpery, and narrow-mindedness. All these three issues have something in common; namely, Santayana’s strong individualism, intellectualism, aesthetism, and egocentrism. If the next two have a similar background I do not know, but let me present them in the conviction that they are significant enough to give various people(s) hope for a is not to fight for a good cause or to defeat a bad one. He is just the detached and disinterested observer of the comedies and dramas of the social life, interested in their foundation in human nature and conduct, interested also in their moral implications, but not in their concrete result as far as political ends and means are concerned. On the contrary, the possibility of political ends and means as such, whatever their particular content might be, becomes philosophically questionable and problematic. Not a system of ends, or of means for their practical realization, has to be established by the thinker, but a theoretical system which, widely used, may teach the politician – any politician – where he comes from and where he is going. For this reason the many reviewers who have reproached Santayana for a lack of understanding of liberalism, of American leadership, of Soviet Russia’s policies, for refraining from any remark relating to fascism, and so on, have, I believe, missed the point entirely. All these categories vanish when we consider the theoretical position intentionally chosen by Santayana (Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. 2; Studies in Social Theory. Ed. By Arvid Brodersen. The Hague: Marinus Nijhoff, 1971, pp. 202203).” 221 George Santayana, Dominations and Powers. Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government. New Brunswick and London: Transactions Publishers, 1995, p. 66.

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better understanding of one another. Santayana’s criticism of American culture, including the “genteel tradition” and industrial liberalism, although disputatious due to its one-sidedness (he never criticized the Spanish Inquisition, the persecution of the Jews in Spain, Spain’s economic backwardness nor General Franco’s regime), is important for Americans themselves and also for nonAmericans, because nowadays many nations face the problem of Americanization, that is the imposition of some elements of the culture of the US that are alien to those said countries, and which are too strong to be rejected by them. For example, he makes us sensitive to distinct hierarchies of values, and – unlike those who translate “progress” into a conquest of the market, “success” into a better social recognition, and “increase” into gross national product – he understood these notions as aiming at intellectual self-realization, spiritual development, and philosophical maturity. But not only this; his cultural criticism has a solid metaphysical foundation, anthropological background, and ethical message, which makes it possible for us to follow him in treating American, Spanish, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Chinese, Roman, and Old Greek thought with equal respect as sources of wisdom and valuable models for a good life. Thus, according to his metaphysics, essence or an “intrinsic ideal possibility of all things”222 can be equally beautiful and pregnant with meaning and many of them can serve as ideals or models for us to perfect our own vital liberty until the complete self-realization. According to his anthropology, it is a matter of contingency rather than a predetermined lot that a given person was born and brought up in this or that country rather than another, therefore, there is very little rationale to elevate one established tradition (for example, my own) over another; hence, the claim for respect that each organism deserves in aiming at its own ultimate fruition is Santayana’s ethical message. This type of philosophical cosmopolitanism seems a very strong point indeed nowadays, when we face the problems of globalization, multiculturalism, and even the clash of cultures; the recognition and appreciation of various ways for a good life is very necessary. The most visible evidence of Santayana’s attractiveness in this respect is how differently people interpret his output. Thus, many commentators, especially from the US, want to see him as an American philosopher (emphasizing his Harvard education, his strong links with American thinkers, and that all of his books were written in English),223 many Spanish scholars treat him as a Spanish thinker (who never gave up his Spanish citizenship and constantly referred to Quixotic chivalry and Castilian 222

George Santayana, The Realm of Spirit. New York: Scribner’s, 1940, p. 24. Robert Dawidoff, The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage. High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James, and Santayana. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992; Henry Samuel Levinson, Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992 223

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mysticism),224 and others as both.225 In addition to this, there are scholars who take his thought as one deeply rooted in Greek antiquity (in Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Scepticism)226 or Buddhism (with its ideas of Nirvana and Brahma so much venerated by Santayana in various places),227 others treat him as a Catholic,228 an Atheist, even as a Catholic Atheist,229 and still others as a Platonist or Neo-Platonist230 – all seemingly taking inspiration from his work. There is a dispute about Santayana’s attempt to deal with Platonic supernaturalism and Pragmatic naturalism at the same time; it is said that such a 224

Cf.: Garcia Martin, Pedro. El sustrato abulense de Jorge Santayana. Avila: Gran Duque de Alba, 1989; Alonso Gamo, Jose Maria. Un espanol en el mundo: Santayana; Poesia y Poetica. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispanica; 1966 Sender, Ramon J. Unamuno, Valle Inclan, Barroja y Santayana: ensayos criticos. Mexico: De Andrea, 1955. 225 Herman J. Saatakmp Jr., “Santayana: Hispanic-American Philosopher.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 34 (Winter 1998): 51-68; David Carter, George Santayana. (Hispanics of Achievement Series) New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1992; Carlos Monsanto and Harold Durham. “George Santayana: A Spanish Glory in American Philosophy and Letters.” In A Hispanic Look at the Bicentennial, edited by David Cardus, pp. 81–89. Houston, Texas: Institute of Hispannic Culture of Houston, 1978. 226 Cf. Christopher Perricone, “George Santayana’s Roots in Ancient Rome.” Transactions of the Charles S. Perice Society. A Journal Quarterly in American Philosophy. Spring 2001, Vol. XXXVII, No. 2, pp. 223-242; David Dilworth, “The Place of Santayana in Modern Philosophy.” Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society 15 (1997), pp. 1-10; David Dilworth “Santayana and Democritus: Two Mutually Interpreting Philosophical Poets.” Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society 7 (1989), pp. 9–19; John Michelsen, “George Santayana: A Pyrrhonian Sceptic of Our Time”. Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society 7 (1993), pp. 30-40. Lawrence Evans, “Santayana and the Greek Sceptics.” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 11 (1973), 271-83. 227 Cf. John Michelsen, “The Place of Buddhism in Santayana’s Moral Philosophy”. Asian Philosophy, 5 (1995), pp. 39-46; Van Meter Ames, Zen and American Thought. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1962 (pp. 182-213). 228 Interestingly, there have been many dissertations and published works done by Catholic priests and nuns, for example, at Poland’s Catholic University of Lublin, rev. Tomasz Czernik’s dissertation on Santayana’s Concept of Man and Community (2003) and rev. Wojciech Pietraszak’s on Santayana’s Concept of Religion (1998). 229 Cf., Richard Butler, “George Santayana: Catholic Atheist.” Spirituality Today 38 (Winter 1986): 319–36; Manuel Alvar, “Evocación de Jorge Santayana.” ABC (24 January 1995), Madrid, also in: “A Catholic Atheist.” Wilson Quarterly (Autumn 1995): 128. 230 Paul G. Kuntz, “The Ascent of Spirit: Is Santayana’s System a Naturalistic NeoPlatonic Hierarchy?” Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society 10 (1992), pp. 22–31.

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system must be broken or internally split,231 because it is not possible to have eternal essences and the biological origin of life in one coherent system of thought. However, a philosophy in which such opposite elements have been implemented gives us splendid intellectual perspectives and philosophical inspirations. In such a case, the vision of the issues seems much vaster, the sensitivity to distinct ways of seeing things subtler, and the understanding of philosophy profounder. Thus, his thought is an elaborate and a courageous attempt, if not to combine these two, at least to take something very important out of these traditions, with the ideas of kalokagatia, perfectionism, and the objectivity of some moral values, on the first place. Thus, according to kalokagatia there is no sharp border between aesthetics and ethics (as well as politics), and beauty should be seen as an inevitable ingredient of a harmonious and complete life rather than limited to material works of art to be found in galleries and museums. Next, if the old Greek notion of perfectionism has an individual character, the Pragmatic notion of meliorism has a collective or social one; both, however, seem to be directed to the maximization of people’s potentialities, needs, and desires. In his philosophy of values, Santayana, trying to maneuver between the extremes of absolutism, subjectivism, and nihilism, searched for something less radical yet still fixed, stable, and solid; thus, he claimed that although fundamental values are relative to the biologically established and culturally rooted needs and desires, this relativity has an objective framework because it cannot be established subjectively, individually, temporary, and arbitrary. The doctrine of essence itself – apart from the problem of its implementation to a naturalistic philosophy – is a separate issue. It is difficult for many readers of today to understand what exactly ontological status the realm of essence would have and why there should be so much ado about it. According to Santayana “essences do not exist”, however, they are “the deepest, the only inevitable, form of reality”232; they are powerless, but can be intuited, in the same way as a possibility, no matter how unrealistic, can be intuited, imagined, discussed, and/or referred to. The complexity of the problem of universals has been investigated by many philosophers throughout the ages with dubious conclusions. However, there are comparatively new disciplines in which this conception can be incisive, and I would like to point to the ontology of literature, so much developed in various philosophical camps in recent

231

Stephen C. Pepper, “Santayana’s Theory of Value”, in: The Philosophy of George Santayana. The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 2. Edited by Paul Arthur Schlipp. New York: Tudor, 1951, p. 219-239. 232 The Realm of Essence, Op. cit., pp. 21, and 14.

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time.233 What is a literary work of art? What is the ontological status of the poem? How real are the protagonists’ actions and feelings? Can a cartoon show the truth and a science-fiction novel present the reality? Does the past in a memoir exist while I read it? – such are the exemplary questions interrogated here. Optimistically, some research has been done on Santayana’s notions of essence, reality, animal faith, sentimental time, picturesque space, idealization, projection, and symbol, also in the context of his literary output. 234 After all, he was also a novelist who incorporated his ontological ideas into his fiction. For example, in his best-selling The Last Puritan (the Epilogue) he tells us that his story does not mean “realistic” in the sense of following the stream of consciousness or photographing real people, but rather in the sense of recasting, re-living them, creating imaginary constructions based upon them, transforming their characters, eliminating those elements and features that do not fit the intended picture, and, at the same time, keeping the real names and real places; thus, they are idealized and eternalized creatures of imagination, although settled in the realm of matter. There are many more things that are controversial and problematic yet pregnant with meaning in George Santayana’s philosophy; epiphenomenalism, religion, an assessment of German philosophy, political conservatism, his sexuality, and others. However, as in the case of the greatest thinkers, our studies and criticism of his output makes our own lives fuller, worthier, and wiser, if we stick to Santayana’s meaning of wisdom, articulated in the final sentence of his last book published during his lifetime: “wisdom lies not in pronouncing what sort of good is best but in understanding each good within the lives that enjoy it as it actually is in its physical complexion and in its moral essence.”235

233

E.g. in phenomenology (Alfred Schutz, Roman Ingarden), post-structuralism (Umberto Eco), and elsewhere. 234 E.g. Irving Singer, George Santayana, Literary Philosopher. New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 2000; H.T. Kirby-Smith, A Philosophical Novelist. George Santayana and the Last Puritan. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997; Lois Hughson, Thresholds of Reality. George Santayana and Modernist Poetry. Port Washington, London: Kennikat Press, 1977; Joel Porte, „Artifices of Eternity: The Ideal and the Real in Stevens, Williams and Santayana”, Overheard in Seville. Bulletin of the Santayana Society, 23 (2005), pp. 1-8; James Seaton, “Scepticism, Romanticim and ‘Penitent Art’”, ibidem, pp. 9-15; David Dilworth, “The Life of the Spirit in Santayana, Stevens, and Williams”, ibidem, pp. 16-22; Steven Vaitkus, “Multiple Realities in Santayana’s Last Puritan”, Human Studies, 14 (July, 1991), pp. 159-179; Frederick W. Conner, “Lucifer and The Last Puritan”, American Literature, Vol. XXXIII, No.1, March 1961, pp. 1-19. 235 Dominations and Powers. Op. Cit., p. 466.

HOW CAN SOMEONE COMMITTED TO SOCIAL PROGRESS READ SANTAYANA SYMPATHETICALLY? RICHARD MARC RUBIN

In Dialogues in Limbo Santayana suggests that each philosophy gives off a distinct scent.236 The aroma of Santayana’s philosophy is pleasantly inviting, but sometimes the odor seems to turn foul, or at least waft upward before it has any lasting effect. My attitude to Santayana’s efflorescence is best summed by the bumper sticker that reads I thought of being a pessimist, but was afraid it wouldn’t work out.

Let’s face it. Little that we say here will matter in 100 years if humanity is unable to solve some fundamental problems. China and India have a rapidly growing middle-income population. Economic growth in formerly impoverished countries may well be a good thing; nevertheless, as Jared Diamond notes in his book Collapse,237 the world does not have enough resources for a majority of Chinese to live with First World expectations, such as: sanitary indoor plumbing and waste water disposal, central heating and air conditioning in homes and offices, household goods manufactured elsewhere, food often sold prepared and packaged (often in plastic) and not locally grown, readily available automobiles or efficient public transportation, laundry and dishes done in machines, and rapid access to high quality health care. In the year 2000, the United Nations Millennium Summit listed eight broad development goals.238 The nations of the world promised to invest the capital

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Santayana, George. Dialogues in Limbo. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925. Diamond, Jared M. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking Books, 2005. 238 http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ (as of 5 August 2006). 237

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necessary for impoverished nations to make substantial progress by the year 2015. These goals are: 1.

Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.

2.

Achieve universal education

3.

promote gender quality and empower women

4.

Reduce child mortality

5.

Improve maternal health

6.

Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases

7.

Ensure environmental sustainability

8.

Develop a global partnership for development

I won’t dwell on the shameful failure my own country’s government to contribute, in any but token or obstructionist ways, to achieving these goals. Even with whole-hearted world commitment, any one of these goals faces huge obstacles. Yet all are necessary and achievable, not only to lift the quality of life of a large portion of humanity, but also to reduce the political problems that arise when a large part of the human world lives in desperate circumstances. The Millennium Development Goals do not focus on war, genocide, nuclear weapons, political corruption, or terrorism. Yet providing for basic human needs is intertwined with these other problems. At least one study has found, for example, that terrorism is almost always bred in societies where young men have nothing to do and little hope for the future. What would Santayana have to say about this? The question is unfair. He died 54 years ago – we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Life of Reason – and a change of times often brings about a change in philosophic emphasis. Yet, although Santayana’s era was also fraught with dreadful problems, he complained in his review of Experience and Nature that Dewey and his brethren were sacrificing too much on the altar of “care.” During World War I, he wrote to Bertrand Russell, an ardent pacifist: As for deaths and loss of capital, I don’t much care. The young men killed would grow older if they lived, and then they would be good for nothing; and after being good for nothing for a number of years they would die of catarrh or a bad kidney or the halter or old age—and would that be less horrible? I am willing, almost glad, that the world should be poorer: I only wish the population too could become more sparse; and I am perfectly willing to live on a bread-ticket and a lodging-ticket and be known only by a number instead of a baptismal name, provided all this made an end of living on lies, and really cleared the

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I suspect Santayana’s tongue was embedded deep within his cheek and this letter is full of ironic goading. Even so, the sentiment is but an exaggeration of Santayana’s native inclinations. John Dewey campaigned for all people to develop the habit of intelligence in everyday life. Santayana’s letter to Bertrand Russell continued: People are not intelligent. It is very unreasonable to expect them to be so, and that is a fate my philosophy reconciled me to long ago. How else could I have lived for forty years in America?

Albert William Levi, in a small pamphlet-sized book called The Humanities Today (today was 1968, almost forty years ago), wrote that great works are not magic or divine products and a reader must select what is of value in each writer: The value record of the classics is a checkered thing, indeed, and the humanist who uses them to construct an integrated value position must be capable of finesse and a rather sophisticated selectivity. For he will find that he must be sympathetic to Hobbes’ respect for the rule of law while eschewing his centralized political despotism, sensitive to the Platonic feeling for excellence without succumbing to Plato’s contempt for the multitude which is its reverse side, admiring of Aristotle’s preference for autocratic magnanimity without condoning his tolerance of human slavery, approving of Rabellais’ openness to the multifariousness of human experience without accepting the coarseness which seems to be its price, … siding with Rousseau’s emphasis upon the virtues of natural feeling without condoning the morbid self-righteousness which is its less palatable counterpart, appreciative of Shelley’s lyric gift without being committed to the human irresponsibility which was its other side, moved by Ezra Pound’s espousal of Confucian integrity, but without sharing in his anti-Semitic 239 and Fascist impulses.

Santayana himself often performed such an exercise, as when he adopted Spinoza’s identification of the natural world and the divine, but rejected his principle that the order and connections in ideas is the same as the order and connection in things. Following the same method, we can accept Santayana’s critical appreciation of humanistic works, his description of the role spirit plays in human life that has arisen from nature, and his acceptance of the variety of 239

Levi, pp.37-38.

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forms human well-being can take and the variety of their philosophic expressions, while rejecting both his tendency to classify people according to national and social types and his sense that human intelligence is only effect, not a cause, and therefore impotent to bring about meaningful change. As an example of how it is possible to appreciate a philosopher one does not agree with, consider Ernest Nagel, one of the principal American philosophers of science in the generation that followed Santayana—hardly a philosopher whose focus was on spiritual matters and large moral concerns. Nagel wrote an appreciative essay praising Santayana for clarifying the status of the objective world and the place of humanity in it – a lesson more analytic philosophers might well follow. Nagel wrote: As Santayana made us keenly aware, the exclusiveness and even dogmatism that are inherent in a rational system of morals need not involve insensitivity to 240 human aspirations that one has elected not to accept as one’s own.

Nagel told me in conversation that he visited Santayana in the thirties in Rome. Nagel said that at the time, his own model and hope for the political future, and that of others of his generation, lay in Soviet Russia. When he expressed this view to Santayana, Santayana was most gracious. He told Nagel that although he did not agree with him, he understood how such a view would come quite naturally to a person of Nagel’s background and education. Although both Santayana and Nagel’s perception of Lenin and Soviet Russia has greatly been diminished by subsequent events, the hope for intelligent reworking of the conditions of human existence is not dead. I note that two of Santayana’s most noteworthy champions in the U.S., John Lachs and Herman Saatkamp, have both throughout their careers actively engaged in projects that attempt to improve the way things are. Without making Santayana into a pragmatist or meliorist, we can still find in his work notions of high value to those who of us are determined not just to enjoy the interval between birth and death, but to leave the world a better place than we found it. Here are ten such notions. I shall read each one and then comment briefly 1.

Belief in the natural world is an inevitable condition of animal and human life. As Santayana noted supernaturalism is but an extension of naturalism, and idealism must deal with our instinctive belief in a physical world in order to reject it. The centrality of belief in nature levels the playing field. It says

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Nagel, Ernest. “Some Gleanings from the Life of Reason.” The Journal of Philosophy (51:1, January 7, 1954): 49.

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there is a body of facts that cannot be evaded and which are ignored only at peril. Dewey and Hegel were both right is observing that the idea of nature – Santayana ‘s Realm of Essence – is a high abstraction, but it an extremely useful one. The idea is that everything emerged from and is part of nature is a foil to religious superstition and fanaticism, which today manifest themselves politically in Islamist extremism and in Christian fundamentalism (especially in America). The consequences of this idea become more obvious when we get to notion 7 (the importance of purging fanaticism and superstition. 2.

Both individuals and societies can strive to become internally coherent only when they acknowledge, come to terms with, and respect their natural origins. This notion could form the basis for an environmental activism that Santayana might not himself have participated in. This principle points out the folly of pretending that global warming is not occurring or ignoring the practical, cognitive, aesthetic loss that occurs daily as plant and animal species become extinct. But the idea of coming to terms with one’s nature has further consequences that I discuss under notion 9 (discovering fundamental passions).

3.

The terms of discourse and perception are non-existent ideas and images and, therefore, the human imagination, which can recognize this non-existence, is free to entertain and indulge in ideas and images without limit (except those limits imposed by natural circumstances). I will not dwell on this idea, except to note that if you ask: is the importance of the imagination primarily to discover possibilities in social, personal, and technical circumstances, to divine the ways of nature (as Kepler and Einstein did), or to broaden the scope of one’s vision and to express deeply felt personal and social matters; the answer is all three.

4.

Perceptive, imaginative, thoughtful, passionate life is a fundamentally different kind of existence from the raw physical reality that gives rise to it. Notions 3 and 4 are key ideas of Santayana’s metaphysics, but their consequence for our purpose is that they form the basis of notion 5 – literary psychology – a key precept of Santayana’s epistemology.

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Understanding other people (and ultimately by analogy the natural world) cannot be achieved through external observation alone, but requires sympathetic imagination. That behavioral observation alone does not provide adequate understanding of another person is important in all personal and therapeutic relationship Even to engage in conversation, we must form an imaginative reconstruction of what the other person is thinking and feeling. But, but literary psychology is also necessary in solving worldwide social and political problems, because it is needed to build understanding across political factions and cultural barriers.

6.

Imaginative works, though not literally true, find a home in Santayana’s Realm of Truth in so far as they express desires, aspirations, disappointments, and failures that may believably have been undergone or when they express truths about overriding passions that are best expressed in suggestive rather literal form. Dramatic and moral truth extend literary psychology by emphasizing that getting to deeply felt human desires – which insofar as they exist are parts of the Realm of Truth – requires a complex imaginative structure.

7.

Rational and moral life is possible only when individuals and societies can cast off superstition, fanaticism, and fixed moral rules. The important thing here is that truth is not an abstract, unreachable notion, but necessary to moral understanding. Let me cite one non-Santayanan example. In our American debates on stem cell research and abortion, for example, most proponents cite the possible medical benefits of stem cells and the regrettable but preferable consequences of abortion. The abortion issue is even more often framed in terms of power: women have the right to control their bodies. But I have read no one in recent debates who points out the theological absurdity of believing that there is some magic moment when the soul fuses with the body, instead of recognizing, as Santayana would have, that the soul, like the limbs and organs, evolves as the fetus (and the child and the adult) develops.

8.

An important component of moral life is cultivating an understanding of and sympathy for the variety of beliefs and passions, including those that give rise to superstition and fanaticism. What Santayana added to moral philosophy – something Kant’s categorical imperative stripped from the golden rule; something all kind-hearted children know – is empathy. The heart of Santayana’s moral and political philosophy may be found in the chapter on “Charity” in Reason in Religion.

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There he emphasized that goods divined by reason are not the only goods. Every impulse has a natural basis, which must be taken into account even if it must be overcome. The fanatic who has forgotten his aim did have one, if only it could be redivined. Amartya Sen has reminded us that reason is not solely the province or invention of the Western mind. It is part of the common treasury of human goods. But the forms in which it manifests itself are so varied that it often unrecognizable. As I noted earlier, crossing over cultural and political gaps requires imaginative reconstruction. 9.

Individuals and societies can progress and achieve integrity only when analyze their superficial desires and urgent motivations, and discover their fundamental passions. Santayana’s greatest affinity to Plato is his belief that issues of adjustment – of justice and virtue to use Platonic terms – within an individual mirror those in society. Although Santayana believed that each individual, as a separate center of consciousness, has no right to claim that his preferences are more important than any other’s, that belief does not make all desires equal. Only by probing to find what you really want – to discover meaning of your overt desires – and reconciling what you want with what the world allows can you begin to live well. (Jessica Wahman’s work has suggested how one might develop a Santayanan form of psychotherapy). Santayana has offered us a cure for fanaticism. Only by continually re-examining goals sought can a person or a society have any hope of reaching any measure satisfaction. Santayana reminds us to keep our eyes on the prize. Here Santayana’s system runs into a problem. Having admitted that spirit can improve its own internal situation, both by self-reflection and external sympathy, Santayana has acknowledged a way in which spirit can bring about change. If it can change things by inward investigation, why can it not also change things by being a guide to external action? To say that it is the psyche that focuses attention and guides action is a sleight-ofhand that only avoids the issue without clarifying it. The psyche is ignorant and indifferent. The very concept of improvement is a spiritual one: things cannot be better or worse except in light of some interest. To deny that spirit is a causal agent is to defy common sense – something Santayana claimed to be explicating in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

10. Fundamental passions are not universal. People are different. Beliefs are different. Philosophic systems are at bottom expressions of moral and aesthetic preferences Santayana has laid down a foundation for philosophic pluralism. It is a reminder that all good philosophy is critical analysis that requires us first to

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be clear about the overt meaning of statements, and then look at the social, cultural, historical, and personal context to determining what is really meant, recognizing that different modes of expression emphasize different concerns, give different weight to different questions, and, therefore, may not be compatible. The practical consequence is that in conversation, negotiation, or in critical writing we may have to switch vocabulary in order to make any headway. These ten ideas provide a framework for humanizing discourse on a wide range of thorny issues. They warn of the dangers of fanaticism, false and superstitious ideals, and tyranny, while at the same time they promote tolerance of diverse perspectives. It is too late for humanity to afford a dominant philosophic outlook that focuses primarily on the solitary individual and which makes contemplation the highest human activity. Times demand that we place hope in intelligent action, whether or not the hope is vain. But even as we applaud and encourage such efforts as progress towards the UN Millennium Development Goals, Santayana’s philosophy reminds us that goals of eradicating poverty and hunger, improving health, expanding education, controlling environmental degradation are all instrumental. The reason these are important is that they enable more people to live their lives as fully as possible. The simple, not to be forgotten, message is that—in spite of Santayana’s occasional denials—life is or should be worth living. Accommodating physical needs is not separate from spiritual life, but necessary for it and even part of it, as when we dine together rather than just eat. I began by characterizing Santayana as indifferent, using his letter to Russell about World War I deaths. But this characterization is a caricature. Santayana was not indifferent, but rather ultimately accepting, as the sad grieving poems that preface Soliloquies in England attest. In one he wails over the loss of an undergraduate killed in battle and cries out: Ah, demons of the whirlwind, have a care, What, trumpeting your triumphs, ye undo.

And in another poem, “The Darkest Hour,” also in the preface to Soliloquies in England, he wrote: The world’s too vast for hope.

Following Santayana’s method, I can understand the sentiment, but choose not to adopt it. I prefer instead to go with Anne Frank and believe that

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in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.

241

Frank, Anne. The Diary of Young Girl: Definitive Edition. (Original edition published 947). New York: Random House (Bantam Books), 1991: 328. This quotation can also be found at http://www.annefrank.com/2_life_excerpts.htm

GEORGE SANTAYANA AS A CULTURAL CRITIC JAMES SEATON

The first years of the twenty-first century are a good time to reconsider Santayana’s cultural criticism, so different in both tone and conclusions from the most influential criticism of the twentieth. Assuming the role of a detached observer, foregoing intimations of moral superiority and refusing to condemn entirely ways of life whose values he did not share, Santayana declined to adopt the strategies typifying influential cultural criticism in Europe and the United States in the last century. Santayana’s cultural criticism is at its best in his considered assessment of “English liberty in America,” the title of the last chapter of his classic study of American culture, Character and Opinion in the United States.242 “English Liberty in America” provides one of the most persuasive rationales for the social order of free-market liberal democracies, made all the more convincing because the philosopher himself harbored no great personal fondness for liberalism, capitalism or democracy. In contrast, much of the most influential cultural criticism of the last half-century has been premised on the moral necessity of revolution, even or especially in the liberal, freemarket democracies of Europe and the United States. Yet by the end of the twentieth century the radical alternatives to capitalism, liberalism and democracy that once seemed likely to dominate the future–fascism, Nazism and Communism–had been either defeated in war or proved unworkable in peace. The most urgent challenge of the new century is posed by a movement whose apocalyptic vision shares little with the most prestigious Western cultural criticism except the key assumption of the irremediable evil of societies whose political and economic arrangements make possible some version of “English liberty.” Theodor Adorno’s essay “Cultural Criticism and Society” has been one of the most influential essays of cultural criticism of the last fifty years, not least in its apparent assumption that the chief task of the cultural critic is to convey the need for radical transformation not only in societies without political 242

George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991). First published in 1920. Quotations from this work will be cited as COUS unless the context makes it clear that it is this work that is quoted, in which case only page numbers will be given.

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freedoms but also and perhaps especially in liberal democracies, in societies whose populations show no interest in revolution.243 Though Adorno does not mention the United States or any nation by name, it seems clear that he has the United States as well as other liberal democracies in mind. A comparison of Adorno’s essay to Santayana’s measured critique in Character and Opinion in the United States may suggest by contrast the advantages of Santayana’s approach. The world Adorno describes is caught in the grip of “a totalitarian disorder which embraces all areas of existence” (23). It is a paradoxical world, this “sinister, integrated society of today” (34) that is also marked by “the fatal fragmentation of society” (24). And yet its direction is clear; Adorno writes of “the open-air prison which the world is becoming” (34). The essay makes it clear that such insights are not based on facts derived from empirical observation but rather the result of avowedly “difficult” theoretical analysis carried on not in Nazi Germany or occupied Europe but under the especially adverse circumstances of life in the United States, specifically southern California: Adorno notes that “the semblance of freedom makes reflection upon one’s own unfreedom incomparably more difficult than formerly when such reflection stood in contradiction to manifest unfreedom” (21).244 Like Adorno, Santayana did not feel at home in American society. Like Adorno, he was aware that freedom of speech, though protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, had not prevented the formation of a public consensus that made dissent on some issues ineffectual at best. In Character and Opinion in the United States Santayana observed that everybody, including “the luckless American who is born a conservative . . . has the categorical excellence of work, growth, enterprise, reform, and prosperity dinned into his ears” (170). Unlike Adorno, however, Santayana did not contrast American “unfreedom” or “the semblance of freedom” with an ideal freedom, nowhere available on earth until after the impossible but necessary revolution. Instead, Santayana compares the “English liberty” of Americans with the “freedom most fought for and most praised in the past” (216), the “absolute liberty” desired by martyr or revolutionary “to live absolutely according to his ideal” (217). Santayana acknowledges that the dream of an 243

Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Webber (Cambridge, MA, 1981), 17-34. Quotations from this work will be cited as CCS unless the context makes it clear that it is this work that is quoted, in which case only page numbers will be given. 244 Martin Jay writes in The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 ( Boston, 1973) that Adorno “found the time in California to write essays on Huxley, Kafka, and cultural criticism in general, which were included in a volume called Prismen published in Germany after his return” (196).

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“absolute liberty” realized after a revolution both founds the new society “once for all on some eternally just principle,” and also sees to it that “all traditions, interests, faiths, and even words that [do] not belong to the system” (218) are abolished, arouses passions “English liberty” cannot match. He nevertheless concludes that the latter, though poetically uninspiring because based on “perpetual compromise” (228), “may last indefinitely,” precisely because it allows for compromise, “because it calls only for a partial and shifting unanimity among living men” (232); the former, though exhilarating for a moment, cannot last—“the wrecks of absolute empires, communisms, and religions are there to prove it” (262). While Adorno condemns liberal democracies in the name of an unattainable absolute freedom, Santayana argues that a choice must be made between two kinds of liberty, each of which has its attractions and its limitations. No matter which choice is made, utopia will remain unreachable, as the very necessity of choice demonstrates: “Absolute liberty and English liberty are incompatible, and mankind must make a painful and a brave choice between them. The necessity of rejecting and destroying some things that are beautiful is the deepest curse of existence” (233). Whether or not one agrees with Santayana that English liberty “is in harmony with the nature of things” (227), one can appreciate both his willingness to concede the practical virtue of a culture in which he would always be an outsider and the moral realism of his recognition that even the wisest decisions may involve the loss of “some things that are beautiful” (233). In contrast, Adorno condemns all existing societies, since they are all by definition guilty of propping up what he calls “the absolute rule of that which is” (34). Adorno’s reference in “Cultural Criticism and Society” to “the open-air prison which the world is becoming” (34) provides an illustration of his rhetoric. Adorno offers no explanation about exactly what evidence he has for his prediction. One assumes he is referring not only to the Soviet Union and other tyrannies but also, and perhaps especially, to Western Europe and the United States, countries where political freedoms existed, since an “open-air prison” presumably differs from other prisons in not locking its doors, in being “open.” Apparently, what seems like a free society to the ordinary person resembles an “open-air prison” to the critic. And if a “prison” is “open-air,” in what sense is it still a prison? Adorno does not explain. The prose styles of both Adorno and Santayana have been criticized as elitist, but there is an important difference between Adorno’s refusal to explain the reasoning behind his assertions and Santayana’s literary elegance. Santayana’s insistence on using words with the meanings they have in ordinary speech makes it possible for all readers willing to pay attention to follow his argument, grasp his meaning and then agree or disagree with his conclusions. Santayana’s prose is in important ways a democratic prose, even though it

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makes no attempt to imitate the vulgarities and discontinuities of everyday speech. It is democratic both because its clarity and its loyalty to the accepted meanings of words allow ordinary readers to make sense of his argument and because Santayana’s stance does not intimate the superiority of the author’s moral awareness to that of his audience. Adorno strikes a pose of unimpeachable righteousness in condemning “the absolute rule of that which is” (34). But in what sense beyond the banal can the entirety of “that which is” manage to “rule” in a way analogous to the “absolute rule” of a dictator or a party? What sort of action could be taken against “that which is”? The philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has commented that Adorno’s condemnation of any form of actually existing society “has provided a convenient ideological slogan for left-wing groups who sought a pretext for root-and-branch destruction as a political programme, and who extolled intellectual primitivism as the supreme form of dialectical initiation.”245 Kolakowski, it should be emphasized, is not criticizing Adorno himself but rather making an observation about the impact of his ideas, perhaps only halfunderstood, when they spread beyond the coterie of the Frankfurt School and its disciples: “It would be unjust, however, to accuse Adorno of intending to encourage such attitudes. His philosophy is not an expression of universal revolt, but of helplessness and despair” (369). Santayana refused to adopt an apocalyptic tone throughout a prolific career during an era dominated by two world wars and a long depression. He always rejected the notion that the triumph of trends or movements he opposed would lead to some final, ultimate catastrophe. Surveying the “The Intellectual Temper of the Age” in Winds of Doctrine, Santayana observed that the most powerful trend of the times is “the slow upward filtration of a new spirit–that of an emancipated, atheistic, international democracy.”246 Santayana expects his reader to share his own feelings and “shudder” at a movement that opposes everything he loves. Yet he insists that a philosopher who consults more than his own preferences must acknowledge that this spirit “is something positive and self-justified, some thing deeply rooted in our animal nature and inspiring to our hearts, something which, like every vital impulse, is pregnant with a morality of its own.” It is “amiable as well as disquieting, liberating as well as 245

Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution. Vol. 3: The Breakdown, trans. P. S. Falla (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 3689. The quotation immediately following is from the same source. 246 George Santayana, “The Intellectual Temper of the Age,” Winds of Doctrine, Winds of Doctrine and Platonism and the Spiritual Life (New York, 1957), 1. First published in 1913. The quotation immediately following is from the same source. Other quotations from this work will be cited as ITA unless the context makes it clear that it is this work that is quoted, in which case only page numbers will be given.

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barbaric” (1-2). In writing about American culture after the war in Character and Opinion in the United States, Santayana faces the possibility that the trends he observes in American culture may well result in a “flood of barbarism” that “may soon level all the fair works of our Christian ancestors, as another flood two thousand years ago levelled those of the ancients.” In such a flood almost everything that he himself cherishes would be lost, and yet Santayana insists that “Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair” (xliii). This was not a mere verbal concession but rather an example of Santayana’s consistent refusal to characterize a crisis or even a world war in apocalyptic terms. Every struggle seems to have cosmic significance for those involved, but Santayana believed it was the office of a philosopher to keep a sense of proportion. As he says in the preface to Character and Opinion in the United States, “to take as calm and as long a view as possible seems to be but another name for the love of truth” (xlii). In his last book, Dominations and Powers, Santayana cites his awareness that “the evening of one civilisation is the morning of another” as a key aspect of “the moral light in which I am accustomed to see the world” (xxii-xxiii).247 Throughout his work, Santayana assumes the position of a disinterested observer, a non-participant in the cultural and political wars of his time. Contemporary criticism has often dismissed the notion that detachment is possible, arguing that since partisanship is inevitable, the key thing is to make one’s stand as open and explicit as possible. In “Cultural Criticism and Society” Adorno argues that it is impossible for the critic to assume an “Archimedean position above culture” (31). Santayana asserts his own relative impartiality, but in doing so he makes no extraordinary claims for his own virtue. In his autobiography Persons and Places, Santayana makes it clear that his own detachment was not the achievement of heroic self-discipline but rather the result of his particular circumstances and character. Brought up in Boston by his widowed Spanish mother in a house he describes as “a little monastery” run as though each member of the family were “inwardly a hermit,“ he felt at peace “since nature had framed me for a recluse.”248 The “change of heart” or metanoia that Santayana says he underwent when he was thirty was no violent rejection of the world but rather a conscious acknowledgement and acceptance that both circumstances and philosophy had 247

George Santayana, Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government (New Brunswick NJ, 1995). First published in 1950. Quotations from this work will be cited as DP unless the context makes it clear that it is this work that is quoted, in which case only page numbers will be given. 248 George Santayana, Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography. Ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Cambridge MA, 1987), 55. Quotations from this work will be cited as PP unless the context makes it clear that it is this work that is quoted, in which case only page numbers will be given.

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left him an observer rather than a participant. Events that in themselves were significant but not necessarily life-changing–the unexpected death of a young friend, Warwick Potter, the death of Santayana’s father, an expected but nevertheless “impressive and sobering experience” (423-4), his disappointment over his sister’s marriage–moved Santayana to conclude that there was nothing in the world worth struggling to achieve or possess: “youth was past, friendship had had its day, the future offered me nothing that I cared for, religion and social utopias proposed nothing that I respected” (426). Santayana’s response, however, was not to surrender to bitterness or cynicism but to recognize that he was so constituted as to find fulfillment not in having or doing but in observing and understanding. Although to others Santayana’s stance of non-involvement might seem unfeeling and heartless, a pose arrived at by a purely intellectual process, a passage in his autobiography suggests that its ultimate source was a new awareness of his own emotional make-up: I had not been ravaged by any hostile fate; my heart had simply uttered a warning against its own weakness. It had said to me: Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms, but do not let it deceive you. Enjoy the world, travel over it, and learn its ways, but do not let it hold you. Do not suffer it to oppress you with craving or with regret for the images that you may form of it. You will do the least harm and find the greatest satisfactions, if, being furnished as lightly as possible with possessions, you live freely among ideas. (427-28)

Santayana recognizes and accepts that he is different from most in the degree to which he is both willing and able to find happiness through thought and reflection rather than through action and “possessions.” If some cultural critics suggest that we should trust them because of their compassion and concern for others, rather than themselves, Santayana in contrast repeatedly asserts that he writes not to assist others but because of the pleasure he derives from clarifying his own thoughts. Three Philosophical Poets begins with a disclaimer that the author is only a scholarly “amateur” without any specialist knowledge of the three poets he discusses. His “excuse” for writing “is merely the human excuse which every new poet has for writing about the spring.”249 Soliloquies in England was written while Santayana lived at Oxford during World War I, but, despite his sympathy for England in the war, it not a “war book,” not an attempt to aid the war effort. The title itself intimates that Santayana is more interested in developing his own thoughts and expressing his own feelings than in debating or even conversing with others. Santayana speculates that his essays’ “very abstraction from the time in which they were

249 George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets, The Works of George Santayana, The Triton Edition, Vol. VI (New York, 1936), 3. First published in 1910.

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written may commend them to a free mind.”250 He prefaced Character and Opinion in the United States with the assertion that “I have no axe to grind, only my thoughts to burnish, in the hope that some part of the truth of things may be reflected there” (xliii). Other critics may suggest that we should take them seriously because of the depth of their concern and the sincerity of their compassion. Richard Rorty, whose style is often self-deprecating and far from apocalyptic, nevertheless defines liberals like himself as “people who are more afraid of being cruel than of anything else.”251 Santayana seeks the truth not because he desires to help the helpless but simply because to do so gives him pleasure. He is seeking only his own pleasure, but he may be trusted, since his pleasure is to seek the truth. This claim is the more convincing in that Santayana does not portray himself as a martyr for truth. He merely happens to be one of those whose primary pleasure is found in understanding rather than in action. Santayana’s prose could not be considered exuberant, but one of the reasons it is such a pleasure to read is that it expresses the writer’s delight in understanding and clarifying his sentiments even while conveying his detachment from the concerns–personal, political, cultural–that drive most cultural critics. Santayana’s refusal to become a partisan of capitalism or Communism, liberalism or socialism, or even the ultimates of life or death, allows him to follow his ideas wherever they lead, a freedom denied those who have a position to maintain or followers to encourage. Rejecting entirely the romantic fascination with death, Santayana likewise refused to accept the notion that life is itself an ultimate value. Santayana considers it a mark of the “immaturity” of Fichte and his school that they believe “that the good is life, whereas for a rational being the good is only the good part of life, that healthy, stable, wise, kind, and beautiful sort of life which he calls happiness.”252 The affirmation of vitality as a concept in a learned system like that of Henri Bergson provides evidence that the reality is lacking, since “to be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia.” For Santayana life is not worth living unless one finds some things more important than mere life: “Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all” (ITA, 19). The 250

George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (Ann Arbor MI, 1967), 2. First published in 1922. Quotations from this work will be cited as SE unless the context makes it clear that it is this work that is quoted, in which case only page numbers will be given. 251 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, Great Britain, 1989), 192. 252 George Santayana, The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis (New York, 1968), 103. First published as Egotism in German Philosophy in 1915.

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Homeric poems, Santayana observes, dramatize the delights of earthly existence more convincingly than any other poetry, but they do so on the basis of an acceptance of human mortality. In contrast, the popular success of Bergson’s exaltation of life and vitality over reason and contemplation is an ironic indication that twentieth-century culture–in contrast to the world of Homer—is unable to face the inevitability of death. Santayana was all the more moved by the willingness of young English soldiers to go to their deaths without complaint; unlike those poets and novelists who depicted the carnage of the first world war as mere butchery, the war appears in Soliloquies in England as both a catastrophe and a test that brings out the best in the English character. In “Tipperary” he reflects that “Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility; life would not be worth having without the freedom of soul and the friendship with nature which that readiness brings” (106). Despite his appreciation for the warrior ethic of the Homeric poems and his admiration for the courage of the English soldier, Santayana, it is important to emphasize, never indulged in a voyeur’s glorification of war or violent combat. From his earliest days, however, Santayana had a sense that the goodness of mere life was over-rated. He never renounced the view of life he held as a young man: “That the real was rotten and only the imaginary at all interesting seemed to me axiomatic. That was too sweeping; yet allowing for the rash generalisations of youth, it is still what I think” (PP, 167). One might expect that a belief that “the real was rotten” would lead to a philosophy of cynicism, alienation and bitterness. It is of course true that Santayana’s philosophy rejects the view of the cosmos most appealing to human pride, the notion “that the universe exists and is governed for the sake of man or of the human spirit” (COUS, 17). But Santayana, unlike Nietzsche or existentialists like Sartre, did not anguish over the absence of God. His writings do not, unlike Adorno’s, convey “helplessness and despair.” Instead, his work expresses his own pleasure in working out his thoughts, whatever others may make of them, achieving thereby the “moral freedom” whose basis he described in Character and Opinion in the United States: “All that is requisite is that we should pause in living to enjoy life, and should lift up our hearts to things that are pure goods in themselves, so that once to have found and loved them, whatever else may betide, may remain a happiness that nothing can sully” (190). If on the evidence of his prose in “Cultural Criticism and Society” and other works, Adorno can be criticized for making rhetorical use of human suffering to inflate his own spiritual prestige, Santayana has been criticized for failing to be moved or affected by suffering. In defense, one can reply that Santayana, unlike Adorno, does not set himself up as an exemplar of sensitivity and compassion. Neither explicitly nor implicitly does Santayana base his

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claims to authority as a cultural critic on the sensitivity of his moral awareness or the breadth of his compassion. No partisan of revolutionary change, Santayana has no need to claim a moral or intellectual status superior to that of his readers. In keeping with Santayana’s own spirit, then, a defense of Santayana as a cultural critic should acknowledge that Santayana’s approach has its own dangers, which the philosopher was not always able to avoid. Santayana sometimes allowed the detachment of philosophic impartiality to become mere aestheticism, and the delight of understanding the pleasure of aesthetic appreciation or even sheer entertainment. An attitude entirely appropriate in considering works of art occasionally appears where it does not belong, in his consideration of political and social affairs. In Santayana’s most insightful cultural criticism, such as his study of “English Liberty in America” in Character and Opinion in the United States, he carefully refuses to judge social and political matters by aesthetic standards. Poets, he points out more than once, naturally despise English liberty—“a perpetual compromise” (228)—and instead “relish” the beauty of “absolute liberty,” “fierce liberty,” “absolute freedom.” A poet himself, and a sceptic in regard to the American “gospel of work and the belief in progress” (211), Santayana nevertheless concludes that it is less important that he himself feels no great affinity with a society with a society based on “English liberty” than that “English liberty . . . is in harmony with the nature of things” (227). He was not always so careful. Santayana could mock Irving Babbitt’s criticisms of the modern world on the grounds that the new developments are, in any case, entertaining for an observer: “Why not frankly rejoice in the benefits, so new and extraordinary, which our state of society affords? . . . at least (besides football) haven’t we Einstein and Freud, Proust and Paul Valéry Lenin and Mussolini?”253 The same misplaced aestheticism appears in an even more troubling way in the preface to Santayana’s last book, Dominations and Powers. In the first chapter he explains that the central distinction of his “reflections on liberty, society, and government” is a moral one: It does not hang on the degree of force exerted by the agent but only on its relation to the spontaneous life of some being that it affects. The same government that is a benign and useful power for once class or one province may exercise a cruel domination over another province or another class.” (1)

Yet in his preface Santayana presents another criterion, aesthetic rather than moral: “I prefer the rose to the dandelion; I prefer the lion to the vermin in the 253

The Genteel Tradition at Bay (The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana, Ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Lincoln, NE, 1998, 153-96, 163. First published as a book in 1931.

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lion’s skin. In order to obtain anything lovely, I would gladly extirpate all the crawling ugliness in the world” (xxiii). My own defense of Santayana does not extend to a defense of this or any similar passage. In an era when “vermin” was often used to refer to people of the wrong religion, the wrong class or the wrong nationality and shortly after Hitler’s very nearly successful “extirpation” of the Jews of Europe, the passage seems indefensible. Fortunately, the bulk of Santayana’s cultural criticism, including the text of Dominations and Powers itself, is not disfigured by such misplaced aestheticism. Indeed, Santayana’s lifelong critique of romanticism is in large part based on the romantic’s mistaken willingness to judge practical matters by reference to aesthetic criteria such as the intensity of emotion aroused. In confronting the conflicts of the twenty-first century we would be well-advised to remember Santayana’s sober warning about the limitations of programs that overestimate the appeal of an enlightenment rationality and underestimate the power of passions unsusceptible to reason of any sort: Enthusiasts for democracy, peace and a league of nations should not deceive themselves; they are not everybody’s friends; they are the enemies of what is deepest and most primitive in everybody. They inspire undying hatred in every untamable people and every absolute soul. (COUS 219)

Santayana does not encourage his readers to be like him, nor does he urge them to join his side in fighting cultural battles. His own perspective, he makes clear, is in any case the result of a particular collection of circumstances. We are free to read and learn from Santayana’s insights and yet feel no need to attempt to “live in eternity” as he did. Even if, unlike Santayana, we are partisans of liberal democracy; even if, unlike Santayana, we are not prepared, whatever our religious belief or lack of belief, to accept with philosophic calm a catastrophe or series of catastrophes that would, in his words, “level all the fair works of our Christian ancestors” (COUS xliii)—or “all the fair works” of any ancestors–we can still learn much from Santayana’s cultural criticism; all the more, perhaps, because his attitudes and his stance are not our own. Santayana himself disavowed any desire to persuade others to adopt his own philosophical detachment as a way of life—though he thought it worthwhile to encourage even non-philosophers to occasionally reflect on themselves and on life not as a means to achieve some goal but simply for the delight that understanding brings.

PORTRAIT OF AN ANXIETY: SANTAYANA ON WILLIAM JAMES RAMÓN DEL CASTILLO

Santayana’s criticism of William James and pragmatism is wellknown but usually is also reduced to its more simple terms. I would like to suggest that his ironic portraits of James were not only expression of a “moribund Latinity” reacting against heretic Protestantism, that ineffectual and sophomoric mixture of American barbarism and genteel tradition—he would say—of which pragmatism would be a consequence. To say that is right, but maybe too general. Santayana’s portrait reveals too many details and shades to be considered just only in these terms. He joined together, as nobody else, the fresh description of individuals and the accurate appreciation of entire worldviews or cultural traditions, the existential uniqueness and the representative dimension of great individuals. His portrait of James, for the first, did stress an essential ambivalence or contradiction deep inside his personality and philosophy. On the one hand, there was the impressionistic James, with his poetic and picturesque eye, open wide for the sensation of things as they are perceived beyond any immediate purpose, with his consciousness let free to react to the diverse stimuli of the naked experience, with his extraordinary sense for the live details. This was – according to Santayana– “not the William James of the later years… but the genial author of The Principles of Psychology, chapters of which we read from the manuscript and discussed with a small class of us in 1889”.254 “Actual experience, for William James, however varied and rich its assault might be, was always and altogether of the nature of a sensation: it possessed a vital, leaping, globular unity which made the only fact, the flying fact, of our being. Whatever continuities of quality might be traced in it, its existence was always momentary and self-warranted”.255 Santayana’s own “eidetic sensibility” seemed quite compatible with James early genius for recording experience in its most essential immediateness. It is not clear, however, if the descriptive 254

Santayana, G., “A General Confession”, in The Philosophy of George Santayana, P. A. Schilpp., ed., (La Salle, Ill.: 1940, 15). 255 Ibid., 15-16.

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style of later works satisfied him in the same way. Varieties of Religious Experience, for example, could be seen as the product of a delicate and sensitive eye, but also –Santayana could have said– of an impatient soul.256 There is another aspect of the early James that Santayana also recognized as decisive: to consider the study of the abnormal as the best way of understanding the normal, a sophisticated art that, however, James also had eventually turned into a sentimentalist and too romantic love for the rare, odd, outrageous, different, heretic, and neglected, into a democratic sympathy with the spontaneous and idiosyncratic.257 “Williams James became the friend and 256

He adds something important to see the progressive distance between them: “A man’s life or soul borrowed its reality and imputed wholeness from the intrinsic actuality of its successive parts; existence was a perpetual rebirth, a travelling light to which the past was lost and the future uncertain. The element of indetermination which James felt so strongly in this flood of existence was precisely the pulse of fresh unpredictable sensation, summoning attention hither and thither to unexpected facts. Apprehension in him impressionistic –that was the age if impressionism in painting too– and marvellously free form intellectual assumptions o presumptions, he felt intensely the fact of contingency, o the contingency of fact. This seemed to me not merely a peculiarity of temperament in him, but a profound insight into existence, in its inmost irrational essence. Existence, I learned to see, is intrinsically dispersed, seated in its distributed moments, and arbitrary not only as a whole, but in the character and place of each of its parts. Change the bits, and you change the mosaic: nor we can count or limit the elements, as in a little closed kaleidoscope; witch may be shaken together into the next picture. Many of them, such a pleasure and pain, or the total picture itself, cannot possibly have pre-existed […] James thus renounced that gift literary psychology, that romantic insight, in which alone he excelled, and indeed his followers are without it. I pride myself on remaining a disciple oh his earlier unsophisticated self, when he was an agnostic about the universe, but in his diagnosis of the heart an impulsive poet: a master in the art of recording or divining the lyric quality of experience as it actually came to him or to me” (ibid, 16-17, italics mine). 257 I think that the version of the maxim “to study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal” contained in Varieties would express something discomforting for the Santayana that loved the early James: “it always leads to a better understanding of a thing’s significance to consider its exaggerations and perversions, its equivalents and substitutes and nearest relatives elsewhere. Not that we may thereby swamp the thing in the wholesale condemnation which we pass on its inferior congeners, but rather that we may by contrast ascertain the more precisely in what its merits consists, by learning at the same time to what particular dangers of corruption it may also be exposed” (Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans, 1902-Penguin 1982, 21-22, mi italics). Indeed, I’m not sure than Santayana liked too much the overall tone of the book, since the impressionistic quality is dying by the nerve and tension of James’s earlier will to believe, his legendary defence of the right to believe that one might be right if one became to believe…–something too complicated and artificial to Santayana’s mystical temper.

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helper of those groping, nervous, half-educated, spiritually disinherited, emotionally hungry individuals of which America is full. He became, at the same time, their spokesmen and representative before the learned world; and he made it a chief part of his vocation to recast what the learned world has to offer, so that as far as possible it might serve the needs and interests of these people”.258 Here there was –Santayana would say– a peculiar kind of openness, naturalness and spontaneity which did not spring from disinterest (even less from patient impassiveness), but from the anxious belief that each particular experience or point of view could posses a shred of true in it, from the urgency to catch any fragment of possible truth, to assimilate and enjoy any possible sphere of reality: “He was impatient of the things he didn’t like in philosophy; his latent pragmatism appeared only in its negative germ, as scorn of everything remote and pretentious; and his love of lame ducks and neglected possibilities, which later took the form of charity and breadth of mind, then seemed rather the doctor’s quick eye for bad symptoms, as if he had diagnosed people in a jiffy and cried: “Ah, you are a paranoiac! Ah, you have the pox!”.259 Such a sense of frankness, however, ended up working in a contradictory way, at least in relation with other apparently more detached spirits: “He was so extremely natural that there was no knowing what his nature was, or what to expect next; so that one was driven to behave and talk conventionally, as in the most artificial societies”.260

258

“The Genteel Tradition”, in The Genteel Tradition. Nine Essays by George Santayana, edited with an Introduction by Douglas L. Wilson (Bison Books, 1998, 55). This passage also includes some other ironic comments as: “For one thing, Williams James kept his mind and heart wide open to all that might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in religion and philosophy. He gave a sincerely respectful hearing to sentimentalist, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and impostors. […] He thought, with his usual modesty, that any of these might have something to teach him. The lame, the halt, the blind, and those speaking with tongues could come to him with the certainty of finding sympathy; and if they were no healed, at least they were comforted, that a famous professor should take them so seriously; and they began to feel that after all to have only a leg, or one hand, or one eye, or to have three, might be in itself no less beauteous than to have just tow, like the stolid majority” (ibid.). In other place he also added: “James was a romantic individualist, generously sympathising with cranks, weakling, and impostors; they were entitled to prove themselves right, if they could, and to blaze a new trail trough other people’s gardens”. “Apologia pro mente sua”, also in The Philosophy of George Santayana, 583). See also “Marginal Notes on Civilization”, also in The Genteel Tradition, 146. 259 Persons and Places, Trade Edition, edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987. 232, italics mine). 260 Persons and Places, 401-402.

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The striking qualities of James’s character would not only be revealed in this nervous wish to be natural, but also in a anxious will to be direct: “The judgments of William James were indeed impulsive, and his descriptions impressionistic, based on a penetrating but casual spurt of sympathy or antipathy”.261 This compulsive character would explain in part why “the normal practical masculine American, too, had a friend in James”262, but for Santayana ironically would also be the more evident symptom of James’s deep deficit of realism and lacking of practical spirit. James’s pragmatism, indeed, was a question of resolved gestures and firm tones. As he once told his brother Henry Jr., his style basically consisted in overpassing the claims of reason once they helped to get to some point, in consummate and consume ideas –one would say. “My manner of execution is to say a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then drop it forever”.263 Of course this style based in “ejection of ideas” rather than in any dialectical “overcoming”, was intrinsically connected with something that Santayana labelled with other words. All abstract ideas and formal precepts – he said– “sink to the estimation of the pragmatist to a local and temporary grammar of action; a grammar of action that must be changed slowly by time, and maybe be changed quickly by genius”.264 Of course this grammar of action did not exclude perceptive description, but also seemed to demand a preceptive force incompatible with detached contemplation, a sense of moral coercion, in which Santayana believed to recognize more anxiety than selfreliance. James’ gospel of action –Santayana came to say– was not an incarnation of American strong willpower, but rather a sincere expression of a tense mixture of severe sense of moral obligation and enthusiastic longing for freedom: “He eluded the genteel tradition in the romantic way, by continuing it into its opposite”, rendering old anxieties unrecognizable trough their apparent transformation into reverse energies, meanwhile his brother Henry’s liberation from it –Santayana himself commented– was not romantic, since he adopted “the point of view of the outer world, and by turning it, as he turns everything else, into a subject-matter for analysis… he has overcome it in the classical way, understanding it”.265

261

“Apologia pro mente sua”, op. cit., 499, italics mine. “The Genteel Tradition”, op. cit., 56. 263 The Letters of William James, vol. II (New York: Longmans, 1920, 277-278). In the same fragment, James opposed his own directness to Henry’s avoiding of straightness, his tendency to arouse ideas only indirectly, out of allusions and associative references. 264 “The Genteel Tradition”, op. cit., 56. 265 Ibid., p. 54. 262

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Henry James, in fact, said of Emerson something similar to what Santayana came to pronounce of William James. Emerson –Henry said–, seemed permanently eager to feel more, to have more sensations… as a spasmodic fish taken out from water gasp for breath. Santayana seemed to insist in some similar lack, panting or deficit… or insufficiency: “Tough trenchant, [James] was short-winded in argument”.266 “In him I sympathised with the initial phases and moral promptings of his thoughts. The bird flew up bravely, but when my eye was able to follow his flight, I saw him flutter, and perch, as if he had lost his energy, on some casual, bough”.267 “He was really far from free, held back by old instincts, subject to old delusions, restless, spasmodic, self-interrupted: as if some impetuous bird kept flying aloft, but always stopped in mind-air, pulled back with a jerk by an invisible wire tethering him to a peg in the ground”268. “The general agreement in America to praise him as a marvellous person, and to pass on, is justified –Santayana adds– by delight at the way he started, without caring where he went. In fact he, he got nowhere; and for that reason his influence could be greater and beneficent over those who knew him, but soon seemed to become untraceable in the confused currents of the world”.269 James exhaled vital impetus, vital momentum, but he never enjoyed real effectiveness –Santayana insinuates–. 266

Persons and Places, 233. Ibid., 405. 268 Persons and Places, 401. italics mine. 269 Ibidem (italics mine). To some extent, Santayana reproached to James just what James had reproached him in early times: vagueness, lack of definition. James’s famous rebuke to Santayana on January 2, 1888, could be read in these terms, that is, as reproaching Santayana for lacking of directness. “…Our fellowships are for helping men to do some definite intellectual thing, an you must expect to have to show next May (if the fellowship is to be continued) that you are on a line of investigation of some sort which is likely to result in something more than a ‘culture’ which to the ordinary committeeman would look vague. I know your ability; and also you way of talking small about yourself. But your ability imposes arduous duties” (my italics). On April 22, after reading the essays that Santayana finally submitted, James praised his ability a creativeness but added: “This is a little too much like a poem… to count for much… it must be backed by a good deal of prose and appearance of practicality” (Letters of Williams James). “What arrested his attention –Santayana said later– was my aestheticism, that seemed to find the highest satisfaction in essences or ideals, apart from their eventual realisation in matters of fact. What he hyperbolically called perfection was [he refers to James’s dictum on Santayana’s book on poetry and religion as “the perfection of rottenness”] I suppose, my way of spying the self-deceptive processes, la function fabulatrice, of the inspired mind; what he called rottenness was my apparent assumption that in the direction of religion and morals imagination was all, and there was nothing objective. Mine, he also said, was the most anti-realistic book he had ever read” (“Apologia pro mente sua”, op. cit., 499). 267

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What did James’s prompt gestures exactly imply? What did his will to be direct turn to be? The images Santayana provided could seem too ironical, but they involve an insightful awareness of the distance between the American glorification of will and the impatient Jamesian cult of experience. Openness is not a calm stance, at least in hands of pragmatists like James. Many interpreters of James tend to emphasize his believe in an open universe or his will to leave possibilities permanently open as if they were non conflictive stances, as if a pluralist universe was an easy-going one, never dramatic or even tragic. Of course, “it is hard to draw the line, and James was not willing to draw it prematurely”.270 And of course, he was willing to consider sincerely as many options as possible, at the risk of being considered too anarchic or enemy of general and guiding ideals as “truth”. He does reject ideals “not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I’m not a lover of disorder and doubt at such –he said in Varieties–. Rather do I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly. That we can gain more and more of it by moving always in the right direction, I believe as much as any one”.271 However, it is true that sometimes this fear to lose truth seemed to prevail too much over any other moral stance. “He was worried about what ought to be believed and the awful deprivations of disbelieving. What he called the cynical view of anything had first to be brushed aside, without stopping to consider whether it was not the true one”.272 The key of Santayana’s ironic portrait, then, is how well it illuminates the paradoxical nature of James’s moral creed, and more exactly, his belief that “the good is not something to be contemplated, but something to be brought to pass”273 (James, needless to say, could never have accepted Santayana’s dictum: “Experience abounds, and teaches nothing”274). We knew 270

“The Genteel Tradition”, op. cit., 55. Varieties of Religious Experience, vid supra, 334. 272 “The Moral Background”, op. cit., 81. Santayana’s criticism of James’s pluralism and his tolerance without reserves is not free of exaggerations, as if James would say that the more desires and ideas can be thrown into the flux of experience, the more probably they would help or neutralize one another and truth would finally arise. James sometimes suggests that, but I think it is a misreading of his creed as simple as another similar proposed by Bertrand Russell in his day. The question doesn’t consist into believing as much as you can. To endorse more believes or values don’t secure to get right, as well as to shot indiscriminately many bulls don’t secure to hit the target. One thing is not denying in advance some possibilities, and another too different to believe all of them hoping that some of them could be the right one. 273 R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996, 250). 274 “Apologia pro mente sua”, op. cit., 540. 271

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well that James’ view of moral live as risk and fighting was in part addressed to himself, almost as a therapy against his own weakness. Santayana, of course, perceived some of this, but he also perceived better than anybody else James’ tendency to consider every piece of experience, any fact of existence, as an escape and a success (something that certainly sounds as a romantic continuation of the old protestant idea of “salvation”). The surplus, the overflow or excess so characteristic of James’ pragmatist gospel were signs of a sensibility too anxious to get the good direction, to do the right thing, a sense of duty that for Santayana still tied up to the old peg of genteel tradition. James –I would insist– did not represent exactly the American cult to the frenetic power of the will. His exhortative creed was not a glorification of a strong willpower capable of control over the contingencies (a will to power over experience). He rather seems to incarnate a much more vulnerable and self-dismantled kind of voluntarism. If voracity defined the official American will to power over realities, waste or abundance would had defined James’s power to will realities (“abundance” –remember– also means generosity, lavishness). James’s strange mix of uncertain and straightforward character was rooted much more in this longing for experience than in this typical egotism many would associated with crude Americanism or idiot pragmatism. Thanks to Santayana’s portrait one could understand better the problematical side of this creed: James denied emphatically dramatic unities, formulas, or maxims which all experience should illustrate… but he never denied that experience continuously needs to adopt a form, a quest that in many cases may not be particularly calming. The pragmatist temporary “grammar of action” was essentially animated by the will to cope with contingencies, by the obligation to shape temporary patterns into an essentially undetermined world, by a restless desire to experience more and more, eternally, without any external end or ultimate ideal. However, as much as the world is judged in terms of more and more experience, the less and less satisfactory any actual experience end up to be. Since there are no limits in advance, no concrete experience can inspire any ideal of “perfection”, even a simple sensation of realization, completion or resolution. Idealism –Santayana said– “views the world as an oracle or charade, concealing a dramatic unity, or formula, or maxim, which all experience exists to illustrate. The habit of regarding existence as a riddle, with a surprising solution which we think we have found, should be the source of rather mixed emotions; the facts remain as they were, and rival solutions may at any time suggest themselves; and the one we have hit on may not, after all, be particularly comforting”.275 For Santayana –I suspect– William James never 275

“The Moral Background”, also in The Genteel Tradition, 91.

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escaped totally from this idealist trap. For him, reality was the counterpart of what ought to be, something that, from the first, only exists to be transformed according to purposive paths. James’s universe was intrinsically multifarious and piecemeal, a stream of facts, challenges and contingencies, never a host of human beings, but something to inhabit by means of their creative agency. According to James, to think that this world could be essentially indifferent to human purposes would be to abolish the idea of human freedom and responsibility. He never could had understood Santayana’s version of amor intellectualis dei or had claimed that there is a supreme happiness in accepting existence without understanding it –as Santayana confessed in some of his soliloquies–. James belief in the continuity between the ideal and the existence liberated him from old metaphysical illusions, but it also threw him into a life of permanent experimentation and excessive vigilance. If the good ought to be produced, each action could be a chance: experience, then, is not only progressive development, but also urgency, imminence.276 If I had to summarize Santayana’s portrait of James I would say that its most significant feature is the way in which he reversed against James what one would take to be as the most positive of his qualities: definition, decision, spontaneity, naturalness. Maybe any “soul rebellious to its moral heritage is too weak to 276

For James “the ideal is a preferred form of life –something to be made real trough the energy of the will” (R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996, 250). So, it is something before being realized, something valued, although not disconnected of something good in the way oh human purposes. The famous quarrel between James and Santayana on the continuity or discontinuity between ideals and existence must be understood in its exact terms. James exaggerated the distance between each of them, as always… and Santayana tried to attenuate it, one more time… “I think you will find that, apart from temperament, I am nearer to you than you believe. What you say, for instance, about the value of the good lying in its existence, and about the continuity of the world of values with that of fact, is not different from what I should admit. Ideals would be irrelevant if they were not natural entelechies, if they were not called for by something that exists and it, consequently, their realization would not be a present and actual good” (Santayana’s answer to the famous letter that James sent to Palmer in 1900, see comments on it in Perry, op. cit., 251). In spite of this kind of peace-keeping attitude, Santayana’s emphasis is ultimately in negation of material life. Just because there can no be but connection with the material world, just because we cannot be but animals…the spirit reaffirms it own freedom by disconnecting imaginarily form this world. Of course that for Santayana, “whatever can be won is to be value, protected, used and enjoyed… but the high valuation of the material life is what makes, as it were, the necessity for its negation” (Lionell Trilling, “That Smile of Parmenides Made me Think”, in The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent. Selected Essays, Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, New York: 2000, 350, my italics).

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reach any firm definition of its inner life”.277 Maybe he failed to diffuse his intended effectiveness, “and yet succeeded while failing: for [he] added something pleasant and pure to the world”.278 Where there’s a will, there’s not always a way –Santayana comes to say–. James’s ardent morality was completely honest, but maybe too anxious to be actually practical.279 James incarnated as no other American intellectual, the contradiction of a visionary and heroic morality which tried to flatter everything in its path and to breathe new life around it, that seek to blow new air to this world, without caring of his own deficits of air... “I was conscious of being a foreigner with my essential breathing tubes to other regions –Santayana admitted–; nor did I really belong to the irritable genus; I had perhaps more natural stamina, less fineness, more unconcern, and the spirit of mockery, in the last resort, to protect me.280

277

“A General Confession”, also in The Philosophy of George Santayana, vid. supra., 15. Persons and Places, 367. 279 I have explained with more detail this point in “Varieties of American Ecstasy” (Streams of William James, A publication of the William James Society, vol 5, issue 2, 2003), in “James, Whitman y la religion americana” (Aproximaciones a la obra de William James, Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2005, 219-264) and in “The Glass Prison: Emerson, James and the religion of the individual” (New Perspectives on William James’s Philosophy of Religion, Eisendrath, Craig, y Krämer, F., eds., Olms, forthcoming). 280 “The Genteel Tradition”, op. cit., 146, my italics. I would like to thank Antonio Lastra for having read some drafts of this paper. I’m also very grateful to Krzysztof Piotr Skowroñski for his friendly invitation to participate in the II International Conference on George Santayana (June, 20-24 2006, Opole University, Poland). Many ideas of this paper have surely been improved thanks to the stimulus of the participants. 278

ON THE STRUCTURE OF SANTAYANA’S DOMINATIONS AND POWERS281 DANIEL MORENO MORENO

George Santayana’s Dominations and Powers, published in 1951—just a year before the author died—has the typical long gestation of any other Santayanian great work. In this case, this is reflected both in its careful structure and in its links to Santayana’s work as a whole. When none of these two issues are taken into account, the work is not well interpreted. For instance, in the section entitled “The Rational Order of Society” some authors look for definite allusions to political or historical schemes, or it can be understood that Santayana defends a kind of ideal society.282 From my point of view, both of these approaches are far from being Santayana’s aims. The link between Dominations and Powers and Realms of Being is clear. In Realms of Being Santayana analyses the psyche’s fight between being fallacious and not being fallacious, and his proposal is to transcend and understand this fight from the point of view of the spirit: not ending up with the illusion, but rather suspending it in some spiritual moments.283 Similarly, in Dominations and Powers Santayana describes the psyche's fight between Dominations and Powers and he supports neither one or the other, nor he tries to "exterminate" any of them, because this would be illusive. Instead, Santayana suggests searching for those moments in which Dominations and Powers manage to balance or harmonize, allowing the blooming of Virtues  the term that parallels "spiritual life" in the realm of politics. Dominations and Powers means the completion of Realms of Being because it directs the spirit's gaze towards the realm of society. While The Life of Reason presented the political questions interviewed with philosophic and religious ones in a “single” book, 281

Translation due to Daniel de Santos Loriente. I am very grateful to Angus KerrLawson, who read an earlier version of this paper and made relevant remarks. 282 Both positions are commented by John McCormick in George Santayana. A Biography, with a new introduction by the author (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 20032), pp. 488-489; hereafter cited as GSB. 283 See Daniel Moreno Moreno, “The Pathetic Fallacy in Santayana”, Overheard in Seville. Bulletin of the Santayana Society 22 (Fall 2004): 16-22.

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last Santayana, despite the appearances, makes the same, the only differences are that now we have two large books and that the mood is different, but the political questions neither disappear nor remain in a second place. Last Santayana is more detached than the Santayana who wrote The Life of Reason, but the spiritual life is not his only interest. The proof is at hand: Dominations and Powers. If pragmatists couldn’t find the response to his palpitant questions in this work, Santayana would shrug his shoulders; his aim consists “only” in extending the look of the spirit on the political realm: “For after all it is the spirit that witnesses and compares all things”284. And wisdom consists in understanding each social model from within, without relating it to a common model that, nevertheless, does not exist just as the spirit watches each of the psyche's interests and accepts them as good: If one political tendency kindled my wrath, it was precisely the tendency of industrial liberalism to level down all civilisations to a single cheap and dreary pattern. (DP xxi) Comparison can only be made with reference to a chosen good, chosen by chance; and wisdom lies not in pronouncing what sort of good is best but in understanding each good within the lives that enjoy it as it actually is in its physical complexion and its moral essence. (DP 466)

These quotations, which belong to the introduction and to the last paragraph of Dominations and Powers respectively, set an arc that gathers the ruling idea of the book and drive away some readers' judgment of this book as a miscellaneous285 volume. Santayana himself highlighted the importance that the idea expressed by the closing paragraph mentioned before as the bond underlying the whole book, and he did so commenting on a doctoral thesis that dealt with his own thought286. Santayana's relativist manner takes him apart from Plato's and Aristotle's positions on this matter although they are a source of inspiration for him in other aspects of his thought because they place ideals or models that Santayana regards not only as arbitrary but also as changing 284 George Santayana, Dominations and Powers (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1995), p. 26; hereafter cited as DP. 285 John McCormick considers, on the contrary, that the structure is weak and deceptive: “The weaknesses derive from the forced imposition of order on a mass of material written over a very long time. Although the three major sections, or books, are logical and just, with their titles –the Generative, the Militant, and the Rational orders of societyparts of the parts are interchangeable, the three orders melt and mingle on occasion, and the appearance of order in the table of contents is deceptive” (GSB, p. 486). 286 George Santayana, The Letters of George Santayana, (Daniel Cory, ed.), (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), p. 398; afterwards L.

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criteria of choice287. Santayana opts for moral relativism, and this leads him to prefer a variety of social systems depending on their material environment to uniformity. The logic of identity pushes to fanaticism and intolerance, the logic of harmony does not. Harmony requires heterogeneity; it needs that everything, maintaining its identity, reinforces the identity of the contrary in order to “sound” well. Harmony implies relativism, and Dominations and Powers stresses relativism more than The Life of Reason, but the approach is the same. Thereby, Santayana fully opposes the industrial liberalism that developed in his age, because this unified other ways of organization and imposed its own way as the most advanced one. Precisely, Santayana charges in his book against those philosophers and politicians who consider to posses an a priori knowledge of human needs, which they regard identical in all people. Moreover, they believe themselves to have the right to impose them on humankind: “All men, they say, must find the same moral political and scientific regimen, communism, or constitutional democracy, or the One True Religion, perfectly satisfying” (DP 462). Santayana does not write from the psyche, which would pose and defend a model for society, but from the spirit. The spirit takes eternity as the point of view from which to look at and be amazed at the psyche's activity, which is subject to every up and down. This activity is analyzed neither opting for any of the psyche's experiences nor taking any side in its fights. The perspective so achieved is nothing but what Santayana labels as spiritual life. The spirit's particular way of looking is revealed in each particular issue within every chapter of Dominations and Powers and, at the same time, in the relationship established between the chapters, the different sections of each book and the three books that make up the whole work. Therefore, far from being a rhapsodical volume, I think that it presents a well-arranged structure that is strongly linked to Santayana's work. In 1934 when the book does not possess a definite form yet, Santayana himself states that he could not extract articles from the written material because “I am trying to make articles out of the material of Doms. & Pow’s but it is really a book, and the parts imply one another, so that it isn’t easy to extract complete fragments”, and, later: “But the fragments, taken apart, may seem arbitrary or perverse”288. So I think that it is important to review what structure

287

See DP 119-120. It is a mostly interesting thing to have a look at his series of letters from 1951 (L 436-440), where Santayana compares his own materialism and relativism with John W. Yolton's idealism and moral absolutism. Yolton was then a young NorthAmerican philosopher sure about his belonging in a country that has just won a fair war. 288 George Santayana, The Letters of George Santayana. Book Five 1933-1936. Edited and with an Introduction by William G. Holzberger. Vol. 5 of The Works of George

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Dominations and Powers has in the final end. My thesis is that this book presents a three-fold structure, given by the relationship between Powers, Dominations and Virtues. Santayana maintains that these are not descriptive terms, each of them linked to a social or historical fact, but, rather, they are qualifications used by the spirit to name the different character that any fact can adopt depending on the point of view it is looked from. He distinguishes between “physical powers” and Powers: “Physical powers –and I think all power is physical at bottombegin to figure in politics only when they are exercised by persons forming a society, or capable of forming one” (DP 23). So Dominations and Powers deals only with the activities of the psyche, the agent in politics, it begins with “the first act of a new-born child [that] is a cry” (DP 35). The moral difference between Powers and Dominations hangs on the agent’s relation “to the spontaneous life of some being that it affects”, if it is favourable or neutral, it is Power, if fatal or frustating, a Domination (DP 1). From the eternal-spiritual point of view, all the activities of the psyche referred in Dominations and Powers are Powers, but from the psyche’s point of view, with its partial interests, some activities are Powers, and others, Dominations. So the moralmilitant perspective belongs to the psyche. Virtues enter as momentary harmonies or perfections. Only the spirit enjoys virtues, the psyche is blind to them. About Virtues, Santayana writes: “But without coming often upon the mention of fundamental or ultimate Virtues, I hope the reader may feel them always silently hovering over the pages” (DP 3). Virtue means harmony, beauty, flowers in the garden, perfection (Preface), excellence, ideal, happiness (DP 26). To Santayana-spirit only Virtues are interesting: “It is these vital achievements that essentially interest me” (DP2). In The Life of Reason harmony is more referred, Santayana trusted in it. In Dominations and Powers harmony is always present between the lines, but he knows now, more detached, that Virtues are short-lived (Preface). So Dominations and Powers deals with the psyche’s activity, not with the contemplating spirit, so its apparent dual structure: Powers and Dominations, becomes a real three-fold one: Powers, Dominations and Virtues. But to Santayana-spirit not all harmonies are the same, he has his own sympathies: vital Liberty, the liberal Arts, and Liberalism. His eternal question was precisely: “Is liberalism a Virtue?” Therefore, Powers, Dominations and Virtues are flexible and variable denominations because any fact looked from within is always a Power. Or, in other words, a potentiality that manages to come true spontaneously provided Santayna. (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003), pp. 151, 156.

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that material conditions allow for this, no matter what this fact is a song or a murder, a democracy or a dictatorship. Likewise, any fact looked from within the power it interferes with is a Domination, because in coming true it prevents the former from keeping in its own being. Therefore, every event is or may be Power and Domination simultaneously. When its own balance establishes some kind of harmony, facts-Virtues come to light. Finally, every fact can change its own character according to circumstances, or, in other words, it can be fundamentally a Domination in origin and turn into a Power with time, and vice versa289. Besides, all Powers and all Dominations are, in some sense, Virtues: “A great store of virtue is presupposed in any capacity to exercise power, not to speak of exercising domination” (DP 3). As for example, the salty water is Power to fishes, Domination to the landsman and Virtue to the sailor (DP 2). In this way we can understand the impression of careful ambiguity that the Santayanian analysis creates upon those readers who ignore its intimate complexity. Due to the fact that Santayana offers the analysis of the positive side of any event, as Power, and of its negative side too, as Domination, the result is apparently difficult to understand. The interplay of Powers, Dominations and Virtues is better shown in the structure of the whole Dominations and Powers. It is composed by three books: i) the first one, “The Generative Order of Society”, corresponds as a whole to Power because it gathers the emergence of those elements society needs; ii) the second one, “The Militant Order of Society”, corresponds to Domination, or to the emergence of control and imposition of some powers upon others; iii) the third one, “The Rational Order of Society”, corresponds to Virtue, because democracy or representative government are displayed as the rational way to harmonize former elements. At this point, Santayana is coherent with his own system and insists in the secondary character of this rational order regarding to the generative and militant orders. He also underlines that reason is powerless to impose its own order because both nature and the psyche the source of reason and its object in politics respectively are contingent and passionate or, in other words, irrational. In its first section (“Growth in the Jungle”), the first book deals with Powers in its natural context. In the second section (“Economics Arts”), this book addresses the Dominations that the psyche makes out of those powers when it invents tools or techniques. And, in the third section, it gathers the 289

“It is precisely for this reason that I wish to contrast them, since Dominations and Powers show their colours within each political or economic system, and the interest that guides the moral philosopher is less to trace the passage of mankind from one type of organisation to another, than to distinguish in each type the good and the evil that it comports: in other words, to disentangle the Powers at work in that civilisation and mark the Domination that one or another of them may exercise over the rest” (DP 26).

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invention of music, games and language as manifestations of potentialities where conflicts are harmonized, Virtues (“The Liberal Arts”). The second book deals, in its first section (“Faction”), with the spontaneous emergence of Dominations such as wars, varying personal opinions, language, poetry, realist philosophy, materialist history or the natural dissemination of ideas –Power- and how these become, with the help of imagination, artificial Dominations that adopt the form of genocidal wars, dogmatic public opinion, metaphysics, religion, idealist philosophy, philosophy of history or fanatic propaganda respectively –Domination-. In its second section (“Enterprise”), the second book deals with the originally virtuous character of scientific, technical and industrial development, and the subsequent prosperity it brings due to a number of inventions –Virtue-. But this character usually becomes a Domination too when it acquires the shape of capitalism, world trade, urban development and the submission and lack of culture of the working-class. The attempt to prevent wars and stop imperialism forces a try for a rational order between the different dominations (“The Rational Order of Society”), and this is the issue addressed in the third book. This book does not possess any internal organization, because Santayana only focuses on the social system that dominates his age, liberalism. He analyzes up to which point liberalism manages to fulfill the function of Virtue. Fascism and communism, the other possible social systems, are not dealt with in Dominations and Powers. Although Santayana was personally interested in them, these systems remain outside his political philosophy. This analysis can be split into smaller units. As an example, I will show the analysis of the first book: i) Within the jungle, which shows the growth of Powers, Santayana speaks of the birth of liberty as Power, and of the servitudes it is confronted to as Dominations. Within liberty, he distinguishes between “Primal Will” or “Vital Liberty”, as the natural manifestation of Powers that pursue the achievement of some end: the self-fulfillment of the happy psyche, and the conception of liberty as Domination, “Vacant Freedom”, as far as it denies any restriction and strives for a militant removal of any opposition. Within servitudes, Santayana distinguishes between “Necessary Servitude”, which is voluntarily accepted –Power-: for instance, the world that surrounds us, the psyche that supports the spirit, society, parents or customs, and “Slavery”, an involuntary and artificial servitude –Domination-. Examples of the latter are slavery or the Government, which is always an illness according to Santayana, because the Government makes use of language, religion, philosophy or laws to make war, which is the intimate core of government. ii) Liberty as Power is opposed by technique, “The Birth of Art”, as Domination. Technique can be used in a natural and spontaneous way –Power-, as is the case in agriculture,

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stockbreeding, family, monarchy or even in war, and it can also be used to impose mastery -Domination-, such as in industry, war, trade, family as institution or hereditary monarchy. iii) When technique enables harmony between the liberty of the jungle and technique as Domination, the liberal use of technique comes to life –Virtue-. Liberal arts, as Powers, do not look for usefulness but pursue beauty and goodness. They imply freedom and happiness, and their final end is their own coming to life, “Liberal Arts Liberate Spirit”. However, in parallel with the concept of vacant Freedom, liberal arts as Dominations try to deny their final natural subjection to usefulness and necessity, and so they try to separate from the ground that sees their birth and that watches them to become masters of each other. This means the emergence of “The Mythical Domination of Ideas” and we can understand now “How Religion May Become Political”.

SANTAYANA’S CONSCIOUS ANIMALITY, EXPERIENCE, AND INEVITABILITY: THE PARAMETERS OF HIS THOUGHT CHARLES L. PADRÓN

How many moments, sudden instances of thoughtful immediacy throughout the course of his mature intellectual life, must Santayana have entertained in words similar to (and actually in) these? “Where do we find ourselves?290 [“The light as it appears hides the candle. Perhaps there is no source of things at all, no simpler form from which they are 291 evolved, but only an endless succession of different complexities.”] We wake and find ourselves on a stair: there are stairs below us, and there are stairs above 292 us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. [“Human life, when it begins to possess intrinsic value, is an incipient order in the midst of what seems 293 a vast though. To some extent, a vanishing chaos.” ]…Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its 294 focus. [“Our transformation turns experience, intensely gaped at, into a mere strain, a mere sense of duration or tension.”]295

This contrasting of quotes, this point/counterpoint of expressions is with Emerson, a figure who, with reference to Santayana, there seems to be little

290

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, p. 245. 291 George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924), p. 1. 292 Ralph Waldo Emerson, op. cit.,p. 245. 293 George Santayana, The Life of Reason. (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1954), p. 3. 294 Ralph Waldo Emerson, op. cit., p. 248. 295 George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1924), p.

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agreement and/or consensus among scholars today as to its exactness.296 Furthermore, this relationship is not my topic today. The quotes from Emerson are found in his own “Experience” essay. Though giving only three examples, I find in common an adventurous perplexity and forthright humility. Capturing thoughts in words and voicing them with frankness reveals to me a shared characteristic of thinking between the men. I would like to focus here on three distinct, defining attributes of Santayana’s thought (one could call them notions, comprehensible characteristics that highlight his philosophical import): conscious animality, experience (human engagement in the circumscribing world) and inevitability (death). The principal Santayanan text that I will refer to is Scepticism and Animal Faith (SAF,1923), for this work is his first effort to systematize his mature reflections. Conscious animality, as I am denoting it, is the wellspring of all human reality. In the “Preface to SAF, Santayana both makes a claim and a confession: My philosophy is justified, and has been justified in all ages and countries, by the facts before every man’s eyes; and no great wit is requisite to discover it, only (which is rarer than wit) candour and courage). Learning does not liberate men from superstition when their souls are cowed or perplexed; and, without learning, clear eyes and honest reflection can discern the hang of the world, and distinguish the edge of truth from the might of imagination. In the past or in the future, my language and borrowed knowledge would have been different, but under whatever sky I had been born, since it is the same sky, I should have had 297 the same philosophy.

296

Nevertheless, in an essay completed in XXXX, and included in his Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, there are two passages that are worthy of mention. In the first, Santayana writes, “The source of his power lay not in his doctrine, but in his temperament, and the rare quality of his wisdom was due less to his reason than to his imagination…but his was open to all philosophic influences, from whatever quarter they might blow.” George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), p. 132. Was not Santayana eclectic to his very core? And touching on that capacity to comprehend human reality in a momentary “hue,” he adds, this gift of revolutionary thinking allowed new aspects, hints of wider laws, premonitions of unthought-of unities to spring constantly into view. But such visions were necessarily fleeting, because the human mind had long before settled its grammar, and discovered, after much groping and many defeats, the general forms in which experience will allow itself to be stated. These general forms are the principles of common sense and positive science, no less imaginative in their origin than those notions which we now call transcendental, but grown prosaic, like the metaphors of common speech, by dint of repetition.” George Santayana, op.cit., p. 132. 297 George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith (Charles Scribner’s, 1924), p. x.

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Into an alien, indifferent, series of surroundings that we are (as humans) ushered into without choice or consensus, we slowly undergo the process of growing, adapting, changing, making sense of, and even acquiring a degree of familiarity with, our the material context we are immersed in. We are in varying ways and to various extents nurtured by other humans (otherwise we simply die), and in due course struggle, achieve, suffer, aspire, undergo disappointment, love, lose love, rediscover love (to mention a small number), but above else experience this world. For indeed, experience can be understood as an arena in which our lives are played out. Contributing factors to our overall experience, such as historical setting, the culture we are born into and live in, gender, health, education, and talents, though having impact, are secondary. In each individual life, for Santayana, hardships and tribulations are navigated through and overcome, and in those encounters come each human’s unique relationship and command of language, thought, and the mind (call it psyche, spirit, soul, intellect). Santayana’s precisely defined concepts of essence and spirit, employing his own terms, are opened up. Both are grounded in our (this earthly limitation) phenomenological, material, tactile context. They furnish us with vocabularies to employ and subject matter to investigate further. Allow me just two passages: Essences are ideal terms at the command of fancy and of the senses (whose data are fancies) as words are at the command of a ready tongue. If thought arises at all, it must think something after some fashion; and the essences it evokes in intuition enable it to imagine, to assert, and perhaps truly to know something about what is not itself nor its own condition: some existing thing or removed event which would otherwise run blindly in its own medium, at best overtaking the animal unawares, or confronting him to no purpose.298

And, as for spirit: The occasions on which spirit arises in man are the vicissitudes of his animal life: this is why spirit in him runs so thick….Thus intelligence in man, being the spiritual transcript of an animal life, is transitional and impassioned. It approaches its objects by a massive attack, groping for them and tentatively spying them before it discovers them unmistakably. It is energetic and creative, in the sense of slowly focussing [sic.] its object within the field of felt currents with a felt direction, themselves the running direction of animal endeavours.299

Conscious animality is a human being’s locus in the world (reality). It encourages, and to a great degree necessitates, active participation. This sentient-oriented consciousness, which each of us possesses, generates all else. 298 299

Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., pp. 276-77.

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This includes the aesthetic and scientific realms, and pari passu, lucid glimpses into the eventuality of all animal existence. The latter notion can be juxtaposed with to Heidegger’s “Being-towards-death,” (“das Sein zum Tode”) but Heidegger’s meditative efforts on Dasein’s eventuality are more extensive and focused. Conscious animality, as distinct from Heidegger’s “Being-towardsdeath,” is an ever-present subtending hold on our patterns of everydayness, cushioned by such comforts that when we awaken after a spell of sleep that the world will be still more or less the world that we had a part of before sleeping. As John Lachs points out in an early study of Santayana’s thought, With respect to existence, primacy resides with the realm of matter….Without matter, no essences would gain embodiment; there could, therefore, be no truth. And conscious events are generated by changes in the physical world: the psyche is indispensable to the existence of spirit.300

The conceptual acceptance of an irrefutable given circumscribes Santayana’s philosophical parameters. He takes this natural ‘hang’ to be so obvious as to be fanatical not to admit its being the case. Although the natural ‘hang’ is vast, contingent, and too complex for any human mind to understand but relatively, we do approach it with an “animal faith,” with an unreflective trust in its basic structures, and though volatile and aleatory, its ever-changing chimerical permanence. Santayana’s own words confirm Lachs’ claim: What is called the uniformity of nature is an assumption made, in respect to the future, without any evidence, and with proportionately scanty evidence about the past: where experience confirms it in some particular, the confirmation is good for those instances, up to that time: it tells me nothing of anything beyond, or of the future. The source of my confidence is animal faith, the same that inspires confidence in a child towards his parents, or towards pet animals;…As experience remodels my impulses, I assume that the world will remain amenable to my new ways; the convert feels he is saved; the philosopher thinks he has found the key to happiness; …The word nature is poetical enough; it suggests sufficiently the generative and controlling function, the endless vitality and changeful order in which I live. Faith in nature restores in a comprehensive way that sense of the permanent which is dear to animal life. The world then becomes a home, and I can be a philosopher in it.301

In Chapter XXI of SAF dismisses as conceptual “ghosts”—those options and cultural possibilities, such as the solace and vagueness of superstition, anthropologizing deities through mythology, metaphysical speculation, and what he coins the “materialization of words,” that can ennoble 300 301

John Lachs, George Santayana (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988), p. 64. George Santayana, op. cit., pp. 234-38.

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human existence. He also identifies, and gives clear philosophical definitions for each, six barriers (intellectual hamstrings) which, in his perspective, are “the chief false substances which human faith may rest on when the characteristic veil of words and pictures hides the modes of matter which actually confront the human race in action.”302 These fundamentally mask and/or distort an individual’s, as Santayana understands it, creative responses to the world. They are attempts to enforce authoritatively our ephemeral, irregular understandings of our experience. And, to be sure, these culturally influenced forces, along with fresh, novel occurrences refashion and chip away at any budding confidences obtained by living life. Contingency permeates the human condition. We are constantly compelled, incessantly, to re-orientate and resituate our simple assumptions. Experience is the transformative catalyst. And just what is Santayana’s notion of experience? I have arrived at a state of understanding it as a form of friction (“shock” Santayana calls it) that arises from the very event of life, or living matter. It is ahistorical and recognizes no frontiers. It also accounts for the plurality of forms of life and evident distinctiveness among the visible and sentient world. It denotes the notion (again, as I read Santayana) that we are weak in our strengths, and strong even in out weaknesses. We are partially aware subjects open to inestimable prospects and risks driving us toward one conclusive terminus: death. Conscious animality thrives in vulnerability. At any moment of our lives we could be have a mishap, a freakish oddity, fall sick, suffer a personal or familial sadness, or even drop dead. Granted, these are somewhat extreme in their severity (and tend to be relatively few in a lifetime), but their possibility cannot be denied. Experience is the filter of our conscious animality, and is our teacher par excellence. We garner and store away essences through experience, lived and envisioned—which is, in actuality, lived also. In Chapter XV of SAF Santayana weaves these strands of insight together: That discourse is secretly an experience, and may be turned into knowledge, becomes particularly evident when it is interrupted by shocks. Not only may an essence suddenly present itself which was not the essence I expected or should have welcomed, but the whole placid tenor of my thoughts may be arrested or overwhelmed. I may suffer a sort of momentary and conscious death, in that I

302

These include: Events, Fact, Truth, Phenomena, Master-types (Platonic Ideas), and Soul. See George Santayana, op. cit., pp. 218-32.

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I am quite aware that I am emphasizing the non-joyous, even fatalistic facets that constitute composites of a human life.304 And I welcome that criticism as legitimate. To those familiar with the entirety of his written work, or even an extensive part of it, we are aware of a highly ironic, even at moments, seemingly aloof man. However, in bonding together the notions of conscious animality, experience, and inevitability (death, extinction) as three irrefutable characteristics of his mature thought, I am from time to time stunned by the surfeit of the evidence Santayana affords in his books and letters confirming their embedded centrality. Two passages penned in the 1920s aid me here: That the end of life should be death may sound sad; yet what other end can anything have?...An invitation to the dance is not rendered ironical because the dance cannot last for ever;…The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and that 305 their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so.

John McDermott, in an essay entitled “The Inevitability of Death: The Celebration of Time as a Prelude to Disaster,” claims at the end that “our impending death is not the major obstacle to our truly becoming human. The obstacle is found in our running for cover on behalf of our escape from 303

Ibid., p. 139. There is another face to Santayana’s thought and this is the “festive, or “comic” as Henry Samuel Levinson has termed it. His Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life (1992) is an outstanding and provocative work. Santayana wrote in the “Preface” (1922) to the 2nd edition of The Life of Reason, the following: “The vicissitudes of human belief absorb me less and less; the life of reason has become in my eyes e decidedly episodical thing, polyglot, interrupted, insecure. I cannot every phrase of art or religion or philosophy seriously, simply because it takes itself so. These things seem less tragic than they did, and more comic; and I am less eager to judge among them, as if only one form could be right.” Irwin Edman, ed., The Philosophy of George Santayana (New York: The Modern Library, 1953), pp. 42-3. In an article Levinson has claimed: “There was a comic spirit in Santayana’s thinking rather than a tragic one, a disciplined play of mind bent on taking joy as seriously as meanness; one offering a spiritual gift of grace, a culmination, a release, a transport beyond distraction.” Henry Samuel Levinson, “Santayana’s Pragmatism and the Comic Sense of Life,” p. 20. Levinson is confusing at least two points here. First, the tragic can just as easily “transport” as the comic, and there is no equivalency between “meanness” and the tragic. 305 George Santayana, “A Long Way Round to Nirvana,” in Irwin Edman, ed, op. cit., XXXXXX 304

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death.”306 Nothing could be more accurate, I maintain, of Santayana’s philosophy as a whole, than this simple, open-ended, one could even label it as ‘vacuous,’ assertion. Yet, again and again throughout his entire life a written trace would surface, on occasions implicitly, on others bluntly. Take, as an instance, the following. In the second line of his fourth published sonnet, but actually the first sonnet he ever wrote (later Sonnet III in Sonnets and Other Verses [1894] in The Complete Poems of George Santayana)307 in 1886, he expressed: “It is not wisdom to be only wise.”308 As he would later reveal in Persons and Places (1944)309, he lifted the line from Euripides’ The Bacchae, which affirmed the idea in the original Greek. Decades later he enlightened us all: It was this phrase, in that year 1884, that led me to write my first sonnet. printed a year or two later, and reappearing as Sonnet III in my Poems;…I translated the dictum of Euripides in the rather thin and prosaic line: “It is not wisdom to be only wise”; and then, given that sentiment and that rhyme, I built the whole sonnet round them. Even when I wrote it this sonnet was belated. I was twenty years old, and the sentiment was what I had felt at sixteen. But I still recognized, 310 as I recognize now at nearly eighty, the legitimacy of that feeling.

This ensued another admission: That the real was rotten and only the imaginary at all interesting seemed to me axiomatic. That was too sweeping; yet allowing for the rash generalizations of youth it is still what I think. My philosophy has never changed. It is by no means an artificial academic hypothesis; it doesn’t appeal at all to the professors; it is a system of presuppositions and categories discovered already alive and at work within me, willy nilly, like existence itself, but virtually present not only in the boy but in the embryo.311

306

Ryder, John, ed. American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994), p. 500. 307 This sonnet was originally published in The Harvard Monthly, vol. 2, no. 2 (April, 1896). Only three poems, all sonnets, had preceded it in publication. The first was a sonnet also published in The Harvard Monthly in October 1885, with the opening line that began “I would that I forget that I am I.” 308 William Holzberger, ed., The Complete Poems of George Santayana. Lewisburg. PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 92. 309 I am quoting from the authoritative, one-volume edition of Persons and Places: Fragments of an Autobiography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986). 310 Ibid., p. 231. 311 Ibid.,p. 167.

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What does exactly this “legitimacy” suggest to one attempting to understand what he is communicating—or more exactly, trying to communicate? I am arguing that it is recognition of human inevitability (finitude), of a human’s ultimate telos. In one instant he claims it was alive in the young child (even the embryo), then at sixteen, then most definitely at twenty, and still alive and well at eighty. Why would he go to such lengths to spell this out for us if it did not occupy a privileged place in his being, his attitude, and outlook? In his early sonnets Santayana exhibits an eclectic array of moods and inclinations. Not only is the primary tenor one of a nostalgic happiness, even youthful immature despair; but the imagery betrays a vulnerable helplessness. It intimates an awareness of the contingency of all finite life: For some are born to be beautified By anguish, and by grievous penance done; And some, to furnish forth the age’s pride, And to be praised of men beneath the sun; And some are born to stand perplexed aside From so much sorrow—of whom I am one.312

1893 also marked a watershed year for Santayana. Four separate, personal blows, within a short expanse of time, shattered any refuge in a natural naiveté once and for all. There were the deaths of Warwick Potter, “his last real friend,” and of his father; his estrangement from his half-sister and godmother; his utter disillusionment with any spiritual ties with Catholicism. These all militated to force upon his outlook that “youth was past, friendship had had its day, the future offered me nothing that I cared for, religion and social utopias proposed nothing that I respected.”313 His philosophical horizon became one through which “the truth could be seen only in the shadow of death; living and dying were simultaneous and inseparable.”314 The Greek word that Santayana chose to reflect this change was metanoia. Santayana’s joy in the humble moments of human flourishing, of human possibilities never closing themselves off through historical randomness and a degree of obvious self-destructiveness, never wavered despite nearly ninety years of per durance on an earth that never was his home, but residence. He accepted and internalized the Lucretian claim of the spirit originating in the body.

312

William Holzberger, ed., p. 96. Daniel Cory, ed., The Letters of George Santayana ((New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), p. 314 George Santayana, Persons and Places, p. 427. 313

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And although we all intuit extinction, its experience will never be ours. We learn (which is experience also) from the death of others that we too will die (inevitability). To be certain, we have only in our consciousness our pulsating animality and the instruction (knowledge and lessons learned from our experience to cherish—death itself will arrive soon enough.) Experience loses out, and conscious animality perishes. We are engulfed, in end, by life itself. I think Santayana would smile if he heard my claim. Inevitability is not the triumph of the cessation of life (death), but of life decreasing in vitality, in force, in effort, dissipating into an unknown—and letting go.

PART III: AESTHETICS, POETRY, AND SPIRIT

The third part of this book gathers essays examining themes that were arguably closest to Santayana’s heart; they are themes, at any rate, that among others stand out as the most abiding in his work. It should not be overlooked that Santayana began his publishing career as a poet, and entertained early thoughts of being an architect. His first book of philosophy, the product of academic pressure, was a tract on aesthetics (The Sense of Beauty). Moreover, although by no means subscribing to any institutional form of religion—and being himself no more a typical theist than his beloved forebear, Spinoza— Santayana always had deep sympathy for religious sensibilities and cultural contributions. The list of works spanning Santayana’s life taking up themes involving aesthetics, poetry and spirit alone speaks for their centrality in his thinking: Sonnets and Other Verses (1894), The Sense of Beauty (1896), Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), Three Philosophical Poets (1910), Poems (1923), Platonism and the Spiritual Life (1927), The Realm of Essence (1927), The Realm of Spirit (1940), The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (1946). Ironically, though Santayana tended to repudiate his first “academic” book on aesthetics, The Sense of Beauty remains the longest in reprint and the most assigned of his works in collegiate settings. These themes, and their importance to Santayana, contribute much to other’s impressions of him as cloistered ascetic, generating labels such as “hermit” and “sage”; characterizations that, interestingly, the philosopher did his own at times to perpetuate. The image, variously drawn from Harvard student memories, late-life photos, visitor’s accounts, and memento from his collaborating assistant and literary executor, Daniel Cory, has been a subject of some discussion: the twinkle-eyed, Mona Lisa-smiling figure, in his last years wearing pajamas and occasionally entertaining the odd visiting admirer between a fixed geriatric life at a hospital-clinic where he lived from 1941 until his death in September of 1952 (the Clinica della Piccola Compagna di Maria, or “Convent of the Blue Nuns”). In a Dialogue on George Santayana Horace Kallen offers a tragic psychoanalysis of this Santayana “…my final feeling about [Santayana] was that he was a lonely and yearning person who had to defend himself against his own emotions and so on, and that he built these

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structures.”315 This analysis is met with scepticism by other discussants, including Corliss Lamont: “About his loneliness, he chose, after all deliberately…to lead a rather isolated life.”316 Both because of their context and content these assessments need to be taken with much qualification. One should measure the departed by a standard of propriety matching that of one’s subject, and Santayana was a deep believer in respecting another’s inner life. But the lingering question seems to involve the extent to which Santayana can be tagged as a cynical outsider, unwilling to involve himself in otherwise important affairs for fear of personal loss. This question was addressed in the preceding section from the political standpoint, but in this context more is at stake: it is asked as a means of defending Santayana’s personal preferences. Was Santayana a fainéant? Charles William Eliot, Harvard President during Santayana’s early academic tenure thought so. He described Santayana as he suspected him to be, long before his official “retirement” to Europe: “The withdrawn, contemplative man who takes no part in the everyday work of the institution, or of the world, seems to me to be a person of very uncertain future value.”317 This assessment is at deep odds with the numerous students—many of whom were poets—who befriended Santayana during his student and professor years at Harvard. Santayana recounts in his autobiography one such Harvard relation who provided friendship and solace during his cloudy transition from student to professor. Sometime around 1889, Julian Codman, the son of an Episcopalean family with religious sympathies and English habits congenial to the cosmopolitan ways of Santayana, became the center of the latter’s poetry gatherings. Codman would shrewdly probe the social mill of Harvard to collect some six participants to recite Keats, Shelley, and Shakespeare over beer and Scotch in Santayana’s Stoughton room. After a good run of success contemporary with Santayana’s and Codman’s lively friendship, the “poetry bees” were revived by Santayana in somewhat different form in 1910, two years before his permanent European move.318 These and similar social gatherings, coupled with the warm and involved correspondences and associations Santayana maintained at Harvard and beyond—his affectionate loyalty to Nancy Saunders (Mrs. C.H.) Toy in particular—expose the superficiality of Eliot’s suspicions about Santayana. This said, there remains the puzzle: how does 315

Dialogue on George Santayana. Edited by Corliss Lamont. New York: Horizon Press, 1959: 52-53 316 Ibid., 62. 317 John McCormick. George Santayana: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987: 97. 318 This is all recounted in Persons and Places. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963: 102.

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Santayana’s mature-life emphasis upon spirit and the contemplative life, and general penchant for aesthetic subject matters stand in relation to the American character he did so much to help define in his cultural criticism? There is at least as much evidence that Santayana’s ambivalent attitude towards America came from his being treated like an outsider as there is that he was an unrepentant ascetic. In Character and Opinion in the United States, Santayana relates a disillusioning exchange from his early Harvard teaching years with Eliot, one which further illuminates the latter’s “outsider” assessment of the former. Eliot asks Santayana how his classes are progressing, and after Santayana indicates their work on Plato and Aristotle, corrects him: “No, no, Santayana, what I meant by my enquiry is, how many students have enrolled for your lectures?”319 Anecdotal and selective or not, Santayana surely had other similar encounters, enough to instill suspicions about the motives of his American hosts. The word “host” is used here both in loyalty to Santayana’s use in his autobiography, and more broadly to construe the manner in which he related to the persons among whom he found himself in his wide travels. The congenital traveler cannot but view himself as a guest of which his world and its other inhabitants play host. If one therefore wishes to understand Santayana’s emphasis on aesthetics, poetry, and spirit, and to bring into relief its contrast with his American heritage, it is as traveler, morally and materially, that Santayana needs to be categorized. If Santayana found many of the people he encountered in his life restrictively provincial, it was not out of high-mindedness, or unmerited conceit. It was rather because his sense of the world was so comparatively catholic—not in the religious sense (though Santayana admittedly offers this affinity)—but in the literary sense of being able to embrace and trust the world even when its scope defies human categorization. Santayana, as is true for most people, certainly lived in ideals. He simply refused to be deceived by them. This is the true meaning of Santayana’s asceticism, which, far from requiring defense or repentance, ought to be the basis for any recognizably “spiritual” life. The essays that follow amplify these points. Fittingly, given the biographical considerations implicitly involved in this set of themes, the first essay by Richard DeTar mines aspects of Santayana’s relationship with his father, and half-sister, Susana Sturgis that explain his abiding philosophical loyalties. DeTar gives evidence for understanding the personal background of Santayana’s attempt to reconcile scientific and religious sensibilities, symbolized respectively in the influences of his father and half-sister. Daniel 319

George Santayana. Character and Opinion in the United States. New York: Charles Scribner’s Son’s, 1920: 186, emphasis Santayana’s.

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Pinkas follows with an examination of two interrelated, surprisingly underdeveloped themes in Santayana’s work: the absurd and humor. He argues that “a very important component of Santayana’s response to the discovery of contingency, a component notoriously absent from the Absurd, is what I would like to call ‘ultimate laughter’ or ‘ultimate humor’.” Pinkas thus devises a means of bringing Santayana into conversation with an abiding motif of a range of Twentieth Century philosophies, most centrally those traceable to the existentialist tradition. Giuseppe Patella next examines Santayana’s “Mediterranean Aesthetics,” finding the latter to consist in “a unitarian…aesthetic ideal that finds its fulfillment in the idea of harmony.” Patella maintains that Santayana uses this understanding to justify the paradoxical contention that aesthetics is not a discipline, even as Santayana devoted so much of his thinking to the subject. We are pleased then to include for reprint the fine essay by Thomas Alexander, “Beauty and the Labyrinth of Evil: Santayana and the Possibility of Naturalistic Mysticism.”320 The essay is a beautifully constructed response, from the perspective of Buddhism, to Santayana’s contention that spiritual and moral lives are in inherent conflict.321 Till Kinzel follows with reflections on the “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, a kindred and amplifying theme to that of the previous authors. He provides fascinating parallels between Santayana’s work and that of Columbian writer, Gómez Dávila. Gómez Dávila’s aphorisms are mined to connect among other features the author’s kinship with Santayana in holding that aesthetic transformation is apolitical. Lenka Krejsova next provides a careful examination of Santayana’s first influential work on aesthetics, The Sense of Beauty. She argues that the book is to be read for its illuminating the important intersections of ethics and aesthetics, and that connecting the text with later works of Santayana can perhaps be used as a means to confront many characteristically postmodern questions. H.G. Callaway follows with a nuanced treatment of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Santayana on imagination. He builds his considerations to the vital cultural concern: “What are the appropriate philosophical principles of [a] philosophy of [the] life of the practical imagination?” Callaway establishes that the practical imagination—central to considerations taken up by both Emerson and Santayana—turns out to require a conservative attitude towards freedom, one that expresses the essence of liberal philosophy. Taking his cue from a work of Wallace Steven’s on the question of “supreme fiction,” Antonio Lastra considers an intriguing question involving a .

320

Previously published in Overheard in Seville: The Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 18, Fall 2000: http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~kerrlaws/Santayana/Bulletin/s1_2k.htm 321 The editor’s encourage interested readers to consult the same-cited issue of the Bulletin for a fascinating response by John Lachs.

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“supreme reading” of Santayana. Lastra wrangles with various aspects of Santayana’s thinking that animate our understanding of the present world, concluding that Santayana’s emphasis on spirit is an endorsement and expression of a free life lived under present cultural conditions. Jacek Gutorow knits together poet Wallace Stevens’ “meditations” on Santayana, including the latter’s famous “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.” Gutorow shows how Stevens’ work reflects a “lifelong preoccupation with Santayana the man and Santayana the thinker.” Finally, Manuel Garrido provides ideal concluding reflections on Santayana’s naturalistic system in the context of his understanding of spirit.

AGUSTIN, JORGE, SUSANA RICHARD DETAR

I am told that philosophers like to read about the influences on those in Philosophy of others in the field. They do not like to read about the influences on other philosophers of lay people. But we tell a less than complete story of George Santayana if we leave out the effects on him of two non-philosophers in particular: his father, Agustin Ruiz de Santayana, and his half-American older sister, Susana Parkman Sturgis. Each one of them symbolized for Santayana one half of the duality which he found running through all the thought of the nineteenth-century West and which it was a basic purpose of his philosophy to reconcile. This duality had two aspects. First, there was the large contest of worldviews throughout the whole culture between a largely traditional Christian religion and modern science, “modern” at that time and place being based on the evolutionary biology of Charles Darwin. Secondly, there was within Philosophy itself the conflict between realism in the modern sense and the idealism which flowed outward from Germany over all the Western world. The halves of these dualities were also associated, idealism with religion and realism with science and materialism. For the young Santayana, each side of this division was represented by a member of his own immediate family. …(T)hose spirited collocations of ideas were also and simultaneously figurations of quite personal tensions and ambivalences, of claims on his own mind and heart, demanding objectification as a necessary condition of self-knowledge.322

Scientific materialism and the Catholic religion were not abstract theories. They came alive because they were personified by individual people. Modern, scientific materialism lived for him in the persons of his parents, especially his father. The Catholic faith was a living reality partly because it 322

Richard C. Lyon, “Santayana, Some Recollections and Asides,” Overheard in Seville 4 (Fall 1986), 8.

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formed a bond between himself and his half-sister which at one time united them against their mother. Because of this allegorizing of a philosophical and cultural duality, his eventual resolution of the problem was partly a practical one. He saw science and Catholicism from an ethical perspective, in terms of what kind of ways of life each led to and what effect and influence each had on questions of human well-being. In Agustin Santayana’s letters to his son, the backwardness of Spain and the dominance there of the clergy are continually bemoaned. The scientific, the modern, the industrial are repeatedly held up as the ideals, and poor, oldfashioned Spain is frequently contrasted to its detriment with the advanced nations, like Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Both of Santayana’s parents were freethinkers of a sort, and both were anticlerical. On December 17, 1884, Agustin Santayana wrote to his son, …I am firmly convinced that the time is not far off when man will no longer be able to believe in anything supernatural, and that all religions are the inventions or creations of man himself, like poems.323

From a letter of January 25, 1886: I cannot stand it when they say that religion makes men better or happier. I believe completely the contrary: that religion built into a social system makes men worse and more unhappy than they are naturally. Examples and proofs in favor of this opinion abound not only in Spain, which in this respect is the most unfortunate country in Europe, but everywhere.

But Santayana did not choose to go his father’s way of materialism and rationalism. In his autobiography, he wrote this of Agustin: (H)e wished to understand why Spain made so little progress. “Progress” of course meant material development and assimilation to England and France. I think that intellectually my father had no other political criterion…;324

Santayana wrote this criticism of his father’s philosophy, the liberalism of the English-speaking world: 323

This quotation and the next one are from copies of Agustin Santayana’s letters to George in the collection of the Santayana Edition, which was, at least at the time of my research, at Texas A & M University.

324 George Santayana, Persons and Places Critical ed. Edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986, 21.

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In him the narrowing and desiccating force of this philosophy…became conspicuous…Anti-clericalism was the dominant crotchet: hatred of religion had acquired all the dogmatism and intolerance of religion, with none of its advantages. For it was noticeable in my father how comfortless…his philosophy was…325

Note that in this passage religion itself also came in for some criticism, indicating that Santayana would not simply desert his father’s philosophy for traditional religion. A particularly significant passage regarding his father occurs earlier in the same work: …(M)y father hated shams, among which he placed religion…he loved the garden of Epicurus, with simple natural pleasures, quietness, and a bittersweet understanding of everything. This garden of Epicurus, though my father would have denied it, was really…a convent garden; and it seemed strange to me that a man who had…seen many remote countries, should take such a narrow and stifled view of human nature. He was tolerant and kindly towards the minor vices and the physical ills of mankind; he was tightly and ferociously closed against all higher follies. But is it not an initial folly to exclude all happy possibilities and condemn oneself to limp through life on one leg? If it be legitimate to live physically, why isn’t it legitimate to live morally?326

Here we see the division in Santayana’s thought between the true and the good, that which is and that which ought to be, the realms of being of, in the first case, matter and truth, and, in the second, essence and spirit. One could say that this meant that his philosophy remained dualistic, but Santayana never sought exactly to “unify” the above dualities. What he sought, rather, was, in his terminology, “completion.” That is, he never denied that the true and the good were different and pertained to different realms of being. He regarded any attempt to unite them completely as a form of superstition, thus, perhaps, his conservatism. He did not reduce all reality to what Russell found Dewey’s philosophy to reduce it to, “a bowl of treacle.” For someone who was criticized for writing philosophy in too poetic and literary a manner, perhaps even sacrificing substance to style, Santayana could also sometimes be quite precise in his use of terminology. “Unity” smacked too much of mysticism, or of the rival monisms of idealism and materialism. Just as dualism drew the lines in reality too sharply and turned them into walls, turning distinctions into separations, separation only being possible in the realm of physical objects, so “unity” failed to recognize the distinctions in reality which are real. The message of Santayana’s philosophy is not, to parody the 1960s, that “everything 325 326

Ibid, 208. Ibid, 17

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is everything,” it is that any adequate philosophy has need of both the natural and the ideal worlds in order to be complete. What is and what should be were connected, though they never became one and the same, by the Aristotelian principle that all ideals had natural bases and all that was natural had ideal ends. Ideals do not descend from heaven, they rise up out of the natural earth, and the ideal is the fulfillment of the natural.6 Here is the key passage in which Santayana both passes judgment on the materialism of his parents and refers to his own philosophy: …(M)y parents regarded all religion as a work of human imagination: and I agreed, and still agree with them there. But this carried an implication in their minds against which every instinct in me rebelled, namely that the works of human imagination are bad. No, said I to myself even as a boy: they are good, they alone are good; and the rest – the whole real world – is ashes in the mouth. My sympathies were entirely with those other members of my family who were devout believers.327

“Those other members of my family” meant his half-sister, Susana Sturgis, but the word “entirely” in this passage is an exaggeration. Actually, his sympathies were quite divided, thus some of the genesis of his philosophy, which, like many philosophies of that time, pragmatism included, was partly intended to bridge the gap between science and traditional religion.328 It is not hard to find appreciations of Susana in Santayana’s works. “…(S)he was called by Providence to be really my spiritual mother and to catechize my young mind. It was she that initiated me into theology.”329 “There is my sister, for instance, certainly the most important influence in my life, psychologically my mother…”330 Santayana remembered siding with Susana against his parents at the time. …(T)hat I should love images and church functions and the mysteries of theology was dangerous and morbid: and who was to blame for it but Susana? A conflict against Susana and against Catholicism thereupon filled our

327

No point is so frequently made by Santayana in The Life of Reason. In Volume I, see pp. 7, 10, 110-11, 260, 267, 282-3, and 291. In Volume II, see pp. 53 and 174. In Volume III, see pp. 248 and 277. In Volume V, see p. 58. 328 For statements of this in the case of William James, see Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 160, 296, 300, 312. 329 Santayana, Persons and Places, 2, see also 75. 330 Santayana to Daniel Cory in Cory, Santayana: The Later Years (New York: Braziller, 1963), 210.

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Agustin, Jorge, Susana household, and ended by a separation of all parties, morally and even materially, and the separate entrenchment of each combatant in his own camp.331

In a letter to Santayana written February 10, 1887, his father wrote this: …Susana. I have always tolerated her ideas and religious devotions fairly well, because in her they have never repelled me nor seemed wrong, accustomed as I am to seeing many women in the same situation, beginning with my mother, who went to such extremes that I cannot find words to express it. What I did not want, and what I used to fear was that Susana would instill in you a preoccupation incompatible with any intellectual progress.332

Ironically, Santayana’s father had rebelled against his own mother’s ardent Roman Catholicism in favor of modern science only to come to fear that his son might rebel against him and his wife by returning to the faith. His concern was not about Susana, who was, after all, only a woman in a time when not much was expected of women in intellectual terms, at least by Agustin. The concern was for her influence on George. Santayana always retained a great love for Roman Catholicism, at least in the cultural sense and for the popular variety, although this love may have been strongest for the elements of paganism preserved within it. However, there are definite indications that he did not actually side “entirely” with Susana and The Church against his parents and science, perhaps not even at the time. “The imperfections I could not help seeing in Susana and the points – very few – on which we did not sympathize, were a source of unhappiness to me, for she occupied a niche in my pantheon where I could never place any other creature.”333 “…(M)y impulsive halfAmerican sister was an ardent disciple of Saint Teresa of whom Santayana himself also thought rather highly); and something in Susana’s piety perhaps prejudices my judgment in respect to the perfection of her model.”334 He was quite capable of writing critically of Susana and her Catholicism, despite his feelings for her, as well as of his father and his materialism. (Susana)…had no contempt of the world…her religious enthusiasm itself had been something human and social…she, who had given the first impulse to my speculative life, had never had any speculative or mystical insight…(S)he couldn’t live her religion as I lived my philosophy. It was too unreal for her human nature. (emphases in original) 331

Persons and Places, 84-5, see also 35. Letter from Agustin to George in the collection of the Santayana Edition. 333 Persons and Places, 94. 334 Ibid., 103 332

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This was a sad disillusion for me in regard to the person to whom I was most attached; and it became also in some measure a disillusion about Catholicism. Was Catholicism, in principle, much better than Judaism? Wasn’t it still worldliness, transferred to a future world, and thereby doubly falsified?…In Christianity the idea of prosperity is abandoned for that of salvation in the world to come…(T)he goal…remains as with the Jews an impossible security amid impossible splendours. The incidental esoteric discipline, which is all that I respect in Catholicism, terminates in the same inward liberation and peace that ancient sages attained under all religions or under none. The question is whether the paraphernalia of salvation are not in all cases accidental, sometimes pleasing and poetical, sometimes dangerously superstitious; and whether they do not encumber the spirit with otherworldliness.335

His father and his half-sister each tried to influence him to adopt their view and way of life. Ironically, and much about Santayana is ironic, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, part of the importance of each to him was to serve rather as a bad example. Each was an object lesson not only in his or her way of life but also in its shortcomings. But the young Santayana moved away from Catholicism. That in itself would not be at all remarkable. The journey away from traditional religion is one countless modern young people have made. It is only his being a philosopher and man of letters that make his particular journey interesting. He wrote of the process in Persons and Places. It is possible, of course, that his reconstruction of it in later life altered what actually happened, but we do not have very much written by him at the time his departure from orthodox Catholicism was occurring. Part of what was involved in this transformation was simply the interpretation of Catholicism as symbolic rather than literal. Though this is commonplace among liberal and moderate Christians today, it might not have been so common in the late nineteenth century, and the present state of religion in the United States clearly shows that Santayana’s nemesis of literalism has hardly been dispatched. I never had the least touch of superstition. To follow the logic of dogma and keep the feasts, if not the fasts, of the Church was a part of the game…But if you suppose that in an inferno like Dante’s you may soon be jumping about naked in a fiery furnace, you are dreaming. You are confusing poetry with fact. Never had I the least fear of a material hell or desire for a material heaven. The images were so violent, so childish as to be comic.336

335 336

Ibid., 424-6. Ibid., 167-8.

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Agustin, Jorge, Susana I now saw that there was only one possible play, the actual history of nature and of mankind, although there might well be ghosts among the characters and soliloquies among the speeches. Religions, all religions, and idealistic philosophies, all idealistic philosophies, were the soliloquies and the ghosts.337

Santayana wrote this of his own state of mind in the year 1893, the year of his metanoia: “I found myself, unwillingly and irreparably, separated from Spain, from England, from Europe, from my youth and from my religion.”338 What is significant here is not only that he was “irreparably” separated from Catholicism, but also that he still wrote of it as “my religion.” When Santayana published his first book, in 1894, the year after his metanoia, it was not a volume of philosophy at all, but rather a book of poetry, a sequence of twenty sonnets. A theme, perhaps even the principal theme, of this sonnet sequence is precisely the movement of his thought away from the Catholic faith. Here is a part of the fifth sonnet: Of my two lives which should I call the dream? Which action vanity? Which vision sight? Some greater waking must pronounce aright, If aught abideth of the things that seem, And with both currents swell the flooded stream Into an ocean infinite of light.339

The “two lives” could easily be the routine, mundane, material life of science and common sense and what appears to be a dream life, that of the religious imagination, which can nevertheless sometimes seem to be more real than the other. He hopes for a “greater waking” to resolve the duality between the two ways of life. Each makes the other seem like a dream, and some part of the self, either rational intellect and common sense or heart, imagination, and tradition must be denied. In the famous third sonnet, the two ways of life are contrasted as different ways of thought, of knowing the world, and here the advantage goes to the religious way. Here are the last lines: Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the pathway but one step ahead Across a void of mystery and dread. Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine 337

Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 423 339 George Santayana, The Complete Poems of George Santayana. Edited by William G. Holzberger. (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1978), 93. 338

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By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.340

In sonnet VII, he reflects on how much happier we would be if the duality did not exist, if we were either animals living entirely in the world of matter or disembodied spirits living a totally spiritual existence. Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food, But calling not his suffering his own; Blessed the angel, gazing on all good, But knowing not he sits upon a throne; Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood, And doomed to know his aching heart alone.341

The sonnet sequence contains, quite reasonably, some mixed messages, but the general sense is of a movement from orthodox Catholicism not to his father’s modern materialist and scientific views, but rather to a sort of neopagan nature worship in which the primitive Great Earth Mother can, admittedly, be assimilated without too much difficulty to the maryolatry of popular Catholicism. This is from an earlier, unpublished poem: My soul was native to the Christian dream, And in faith’s faery garden oped her eyes; The floating angels did her playmates seem, On banks of incense in the purple skies. When night o’erwhelmed the glories of that day And drove my soul from her enchanted life, She to the house of exile took her way, Wrapped in her mantle, and disdaining strife. Till from the portals she beheld the morn Girding the vineyards of an earthly vale, And cried, Farewell, ye paling ghosts forlorn! Hail, living fire, kind light of heaven, hail!342

In the first sonnet, Santayana writes this of Jesus in a vein redolent of his love of a Mediterranean world which predates Christianity: 340

Ibid., 92. Ibid., 94. 342 From a letter of Santayana’s to Henry Ward Abbot dated July 26, 1889, copy in the Santayana Collection at Texas A&M University. 341

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Agustin, Jorge, Susana His love made mortal sorrow light to bear, But his deep wounds put joy to shamed flight. And though his arms, outstretched upon the tree, Were beautiful, and pleaded my embrace, My sins were loth to look upon his face. So I came down from Golgotha to thee, Eternal mother; let the sun and sea Heal me, and keep me in thy dwelling place.343

Here, from the last of the twenty 1894 sonnets, is, in a certain temporary sense, his “final” word on the subject: …(W)ith these flowering thorns I dare to weave The crown, great Mother, on thine altar hung. Teach thou a larger speech to my loosed tongue, And to mine opened eyes thy secrets give, That in thy perfect love I learn to live, And in thine immortality be young. The soul is not on earth an alien thing That hath her life’s rich sources otherwhere; She is a parcel of the sacred air. She takes her being from the breath of spring, The glance of Phoebus is her fount of light, And her long sleep a draft of primal night.344

There will be a progression in Santayana’s resolution of this fundamental duality in his early works. In The Sense of Beauty, he will naturalize aesthetics and the arts. In Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, he will assimilate the two elements of that work’s title, interpreting religion as basically the highest form of art and art as a lower form of religion. Finally, in his greatest early work, The Life of Reason, he will crown the achievement by producing his resolution and completion of the worldviews he imbibed in his early life from his father and from Susana.

343 344

Santayana, Complete Poems, 91. Ibid., 100.

SANTAYANA, THE ABSURD AND ULTIMATE HUMOR DANIEL PINKAS

In some of the best philosophical commentary on Santayana, including John Lachs’ recent introduction to his thought,345 one finds but few occurrences of the word “laughter” or its cognates (“humor,” “comedy,” “wit”). Lachs does mention Morris Grossman’s, Henry Levinson’s and Henny Wenkart’s articles on Santayana as ironist, but that is about all.346 Yet, any self-respecting Santayana scholar would concede that laughter, humor, esprit and comedy can in no way be seen as peripheral to Santayana’s outlook. In spite of Levinson’s Santayana, Pragmatism and the Spiritual Life and Elkin Calhoun Wilson’s Shakespeare, Santayana and the Comic,347 two books that acknowledge and celebrate the centrality of humor in Santayana, much remains to be said if we are to do justice to the satirical and comical dimensions in his philosophy. What follows is a set of loosely knit preparatory notes serving as stepping-stones toward that aim.348 A well-known paragraph from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (§294) provides a suitable starting point:

345

John Lachs, On Santayana, Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006. See Morris Grossman, “Interpreting Interpretations,” in Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society, Angus Kerr-Lawson, ed., Indianapolis: Indiana UniversityPurdue University, 1990, pp.18-28; Henry S. Levinson, “What Good is Irony?” in Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society, Angus Kerr-Lawson, ed., Indianapolis: Indiana University-Purdue University, 1990, pp. 29-34; Henny Wenkart, “Pragmatism and Irony in Santayana”, in Frontiers in American Philosophy, Vol. 2, Robert W. Burch and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., eds., College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996, pp. 143-157. 347 See Henry S. Levinson, Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992; Elkin Calhoun Wilson, Shakespeare, Santayana, and the Comic, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1973. 348 Jessica Wahman’s “We Are All Mad Here: Santayana and the Significance of Humor,” Contemporary Pragmatism, Vol. 2, No. 2 (December 2005), pp. 73-83, is a recent and most perceptive paper with a somewhat similar aim. 346

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Santayana, the Absurd and Ultimate Humor The Olympian vice. —In spite of that philosopher who, as a genuine Englishman, tried to make laughing a defamation of character among all thinking men, “Laughter is a serious infirmity of human nature which every thinking man will strive to overcome” (Hobbes), I would really allow myself to order the ranks of philosophers according to the rank of their laughter—right up to those who are capable of golden laughter. And assuming that the gods also philosophize— something which many conclusions have already driven me to—I don’t doubt that in the process they know how to laugh in a superhuman and new way—and at the expense of all serious things! Gods delight in making fun: even where sacred actions are concerned, it seems they cannot stop laughing.

Nietzsche leaves it up to the reader to imaginatively determine what “laughter” qualified by “golden” might mean, but Santayana, in virtue of the importance of humor and laughter, both in his writings and on a personal level, is a clear contender for the upper ranks of Nietzsche’s philosophical hit-parade. As Trilling says, “the ironic smile at the universal joke never left the face of his writing” 349 (adding: “but neither did the sense of how unpleasant the joke was”). Regarding Santayana’s personal humorous disposition we have, among many others, Harry Wood’s (Santayana’s old-age portraitist) first-hand testimony: If he had unconsciously turned his head into an El Greco grandee, he had surely also turned himself “like the superb Democritus” into a “laughing philosopher”. I wish that those who found him only a singer in a minor key who “never caught the heart cleansing laughter of paganism” might have sat with him an hour. They would have a lifetime deposit of the 20th century’s most precious laughter stored in their ear-memories, as I have.

“I laugh far too much”, Santayana apologized, after one of his jubilant tongue-sprees. 350 The reference to the laughing philosopher brings to mind a striking passage form The Life of Reason that leads straight to the heart of our subject: A theory is not an unemotional thing. […]. Materialism has its distinct aesthetic and emotional color […]. If you are in the habit of believing in special providences, or of expecting to continue your romantic adventures in a second life, materialism will dash your hopes most unpleasantly, and you may think for 349

Lionel Trilling, “That Smile of Parmenides Made Me Think” in A Gathering of Fugitives, London: Secker and Waburg, 1957, p. 167. 350 Harry Wood, « That Bit has its Unfading Color », Overheard in Seville, Bulletin of the Santayana Society, Angus Kerr-Lawson, ed., Indianapolis: Indiana University-Purdue University, 2001, p. 25. The phrase “[those] who never caught the heart cleansing laughter of paganism” comes from Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, p. 551.

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a year or two that you have nothing left to live for. But a thorough materialist, one born to the faith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold water, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher. His delight in a mechanism that can fall into so many marvelous and beautiful shapes, and can generate so many exciting passions, should be of the same intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in a museum of natural history, where he views the myriad butterflies in their cases, the flamingoes and shellfish, the mammoths and gorillas. Doubtless there were pangs in that incalculable life, but they were soon over; and how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitely interesting the universal interplay, and how foolish and inevitable those absolute little passions. Somewhat of that sort might be the sentiment that materialism would arouse in a vigorous mind, active, joyful, and in respect to private illusions not without a touch of scorn. […] Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and 351 quite incapable of laughter.

Another revealing passage can be found in the memorable captatio benevolentiae at the outset of Scepticism and Animal Faith, suggesting that humor is part and parcel of a general critique of traditional metaphysics and therefore much more than a pleasant ornamental feature: Here is one more system of philosophy. If the reader is tempted to smile, I can assure him that I smile with him, and that my system—to which this volume is a critical introduction —differs widely in spirit and pretensions from what usually goes by that name. In the first place, my system is not mine, nor new. I am merely attempting to express for the reader the principles to which he appeals when he smiles.352

What the French existentialists have called “l’absurde” and Santayana’s recognition of the fundamentally contingent nature of existence are two distinct, though interestingly linked, phenomena. In Thinking in the Ruins, Michael Hodges and John Lachs contend that “the modern malaise […] came to consciousness as the recognition that our values and practices are thoroughly contingent, that they lack the certainty, rightness or absolute justification prior generations insisted they could attain.” 353 The growth of this complex consciousness is what they call “the discovery of contingency”. This discovery 351

George Santayana, Reason in Science, Volume Five of “The Life of Reason”, New York: Dover, 1983, p. 90. (This edition is a republication of the volume originally published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1906). 352 George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith, London: Constable and Co., 1923, p. V. 353 Michael Hodges and John Lachs, Thinking in the Ruins: Wittgenstein and Santayana on Contigency, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000, p. 3.

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can be understood under three aspects: metaphysical, epistemic and cosmic. 1) When John Lachs writes, in his recent book, “contradictoriness of the denial of what we assert is unattainable concerning anything that relates to existence. The opposite of any matter of fact is always possible”, he nicely encapsulates the metaphysical aspect of the discovery of contingency.354 2) Hodge and Lachs’ initial characterization of the discovery (“the recognition that our values and practices […] lack certainty, rightness or absolute justification”) is clearly epistemic. 3) The cosmic dimension well illustrated in Santayana’s writings, manifesting itself in his Lucretian response to a material world felt to be “irrepressible, many-sided, here flaring up savagely, there helplessly dying down.”355 As for the Absurd, it could be counted as one of the reactions to Hodges and Lachs’s “painful discovery of contingency”, though strangely enough they do not include the existentialist reaction among the six distinct responses to that discovery that they distinguish. I would guess it is closest to what they call the “sceptic’s and nihilist embrace of a message of desperation”.356 As is well known, the modern sense of the Absurd is captured by Albert Camus in the Myth of Sisyphus “ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight”. In Robert Solomon’s characterization: the Absurd is a breach in cosmic expectations, a leap from life to a view of life […]. The absurdity of life is not a single untoward event, breaking the surface of an otherwise calm and transparently meaningful life, filled with thousands of tiny meanings appearing one after the other in rapid succession. Nor is the Absurd a whirl that throws us about in senseless turbulence. The Absurd is rather that absolute silence and calm itself, the homogeneous but viscous translucency that Camus describes as the seeming “indifference of the universe”. “At any street corner,” Camus writes, “the feeling of absurdity can hit a man in the face. […] One day the ‘why ’ arises and everything begins with the weariness tinged with amazement.” […] We detachedly observe another couple making love; it is an absurd, an obscene performance. Even our own love-making seems absurd and obscene. Camus describes a man talking on the phone behind a glass

354

John Lachs, On Santayana, p. 15. George Santayana, Realms of Being, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942, pp. 187-188. Many wonderful examples of a Santayanian phenomenology of cosmic alienation can be found in Anthony Woodward, Living in the Eternal, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1988, Chapter 3. 356 Michael Hodges and John Lachs, Thinking in the Ruins, p. 4. 355

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partition; we cannot hear him, but we see “his incomprehensible dumb show, you wonder why he is alive.”357

All this faintly resembles Santayana’s response to the discovery of cosmic contingency, yet the sentiment is altogether different. Santayana’s reaction and what Solomon calls “the passions of Sisyphus” have, at bottom, very little in common. For what are these Sisyphean passions? According to Camus, the Absurd is the confrontation of man and universe, of our expectations and our “reason” against the infinite indifference and “inhuman silence” of Reality. But we may ask, with Solomon, why these expectations, and also whether there really is any such confrontation. Solomon answers in a thoroughly Nietzschean vein: The metaphysics [of Camus] is not only the dualism of the psychical and the physical; it is, more importantly, the traditional Christian metaphysics of guilt and redemption. The “appeal” to which Camus refers [when saying that we should live “without hope, without appeal”] is the Christian sense of appeal; the object of his scorn is indeed a god—or a shadow of a God—who has abandoned us. Or rather, Camus has abandoned God, but he has retained the whole of the Christian order of the passions, sin and guilt, condemnation and redemption […]. The “absurd hero” […] absurdly seeks absolution from unspecified sins—like Kafka’s Joseph K—in a world where there is no longer absolution. […] Hitherto [Christianity] offered us the hope of salvation. But the basis of the guilt and the hope were one and the same […]. Underlying the metaphysics of the Absurd lies the ghost of a much older metaphysics; but underlying that is a familiar but often undiagnosed malady of passion, a bitter and defensive view of the world in which the passions of self-demeaning guilt and despair play a leading role. The Absurd is but their rationalized façade.358

Thus, according to Solomon, the object of absurdity is not a “confrontation” with an “indifferent universe” or a man talking soundlessly in a telephone booth but our own Self: “Absurdity is a self-demeaning view of ourselves. It never appears in love; it almost always appears in depression and resentment.”359 There is an element of exaggeration and even of unfairness in Solomon’s claim that it is this syndrome of resentment, the passions of Sisyphus (“his scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, the fact that he is without hope, without power, “wretched” but “rebellious”) that constitutes the Absurd; or in the idea that the “objective” arguments for the absurdity of existence presuppose, not entail, the passions of the Absurd, that Camus begins with a 357

Robert C. Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993, pp. 36-37. 358 Ibid., pp. 39-40. 359 Ibid., p. 51.

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resentful view of man as inferior, impotent and persecuted. But whether this Nietzschean diagnosis is on target is not my main concern here. What is striking, as I mentioned before, is the extent to which Santayana’s reaction to contingency differs from the “passions of Sisyphus”. That this is so can be gathered from a passage of a letter written in 1887 by a 24 year old Santayana to his friend Henry Ward Abbott: “Is it worth while after all?” you ask. What a simple-hearted question! Of course it isn’t worth while. Do you suppose when God made up his mind to create this world after his own image, he thought it was worth while? I wouldn’t make such an imputation on his intelligence. Do you suppose he existed there in his uncaused loneliness because it was worth while? Did Nothing ask God, before God existed, whether it would be worth while to try life for a while? or did Nothing have to decide the question? Do you suppose the slow, painful, nasty, bloody process, by which things in this world grow, is worth having for the sake of the perfection of a moment? Did you come into this world because you thought it worth while? No more do you stay in it because you do. The idea of demanding that things should be worth doing is a human impertinence.360

What I am driving at, of course, is that a very important component of Santayana’s response to the discovery of contingency, a component notoriously absent from the Absurd, is what I would like to call “ultimate laughter” or “ultimate humor”.361 The locus classicus for Santayana’s thoughts on ultimate laughter is Soliloquies in England. George W. Howgate had already noted in his early monograph that “Santayana brings his thoughts within a single focus in the remarkable essay ‘Carnival’ which is the crux of his whole philosophy of life”362 and Henry Levinson grounds his festive interpretation of Santayana’s philosophy on that soliloquy and quotes extensively from it. Three general points concerning “Carnival” need to be made in the present context. 1) The idea of ultimate laughter as a response to contingency is explicitly stated in the long last paragraph of the essay. A famous aphorism immediately precedes that paragraph: “[…] everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, 360 George Santayana, The Letters of George Santayana, Book One, ed. William G. Hozberger, Cambridge Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2001, p. 43. 361 I do not think Santayana ever uses the expression « ultimate humor » or « ultimate laughter », although he does talk at one point of « radical comedy ». I have found this remarkably Santayanian phrase in Stephen Leacock’s Humor and Humanity, New York : Holt, 1938, pp. 219-220. By « ultimate laughter or humor » Leacock means the laughter or humor that arises from the perception of « the incongruous contrast between the eager fret of our life and its final nothingness ». 362 George W. Howgate, Santayana, Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 1938, p. 199.

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tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”363 Santayana goes on to propose a shrewd and credible analysis of why and how one becomes a metaphysical idealist or an absolute monist: The most profound philosophers […] deny that any of those things exist which we find existing, and maintain that the only reality is changeless, infinite, and indistinguishable into parts; and I call them the most profound philosophers in spite of this obvious folly of theirs, because they are led into it by the force of intense reflection, which discloses to them that what exists is unintelligible and has no reason for existing; and since their moral and religious prejudices do not allow them to say that to be irrational and unintelligible is the character proper to existence, they are driven to the alternative of saying that existence is illusion and that the only reality is something beneath or above existence. That real existence should be radically comic never occurs to these solemn sages; they are without one ray of humour and are persuaded that the universe too must be without one.364

2) Ultimate laughter is introduced in terms of a cognitive-affective reaction to perceived incongruity along the lines of Aristotle’s and Schopenhauer’s theories of humor: Existence involves changes and happenings and is comic inherently, like a pun that begins with one meaning and ends with another. Incongruity is a consequence of change; and this incongruity becomes especially conspicuous when, as in the flux of nature, change is going on at different rates in different strands of being, so that not only does each thing surprise itself by what it becomes, but it is continually astonished and disconcerted by what other things have turned into without its leave. The mishaps, the expedients, the merry solutions of comedy, in which everybody acknowledges himself beaten and deceived, yet is the happier for the unexpected posture of affairs, belong to the 365 very texture of temporal being.

One could thus say that ultimate laughter is caused by a mismatch between conceptual understanding and perception, driven by the material flux. Furthermore, it is itself a form of perception with a definite cognitive value. In a passage from the essay on Dickens (also in Soliloquies), playing adroitly with the social and cosmic meanings of “world”, Santayana says so in so many words:

363

George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Other Soliloquies, London: Constable & Co., 1922, p. 142. 364 Ibid., pp. 142-143. 365 Ibid., p.141.

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Santayana, the Absurd and Ultimate Humor The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. But as it nevertheless intends all the time to be something different and highly dignified, at the next moment it corrects and checks and tries to cover up the absurd thing it was; so that a conventional world, a world of masks, is superimposed on the reality, and passes in every sphere of human interest for the reality itself. Humour is the perception of this illusion, the fact allowed to pierce here and there through convention, whilst the convention continues to be maintained, as if we had not observed its 366 absurdity.

In other words, ultimate humor does not deny but rather affirms the incongruities in things right down to the fundamental incongruity which Thomas Nagel describes as “the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt”367 – or, we could add, open to jokes. 3) The affinities between humor, play, detachment, the aesthetic and the non practical run deep and wide in Santayana’s thought and would deserve extended commentary. “Life is free play fundamentally, and would like to be free play altogether”, says Santayana. 368 The humorous stance, in this regard, is basically attuned to reality, affords an arena of playfulness, both requires and promotes a modicum of detachment, and allows bracketing the anxiety that inevitably haunts a conscious animal. It is also, although modern aesthetics has systematically tended to forget it, a paradigmatic aesthetic phenomenon. I should mention briefly another extensive discussion of laughter that takes place in The Realm of Spirit, near the end of the chapter on Union. That discussion arises immediately after the following provocative pronouncement: “Strange as it may sound to the rationalist who thinks prayer ridiculous, the only perfect rational form of life for a spirit that has attained self-knowledge is the 366

Ibid., p. 66, my emphasis. Jessica Wahman’s comment on this very quotation (« We Are All Mad Here: Santayana and the Significance of Humor », p. 75) emphasizes an exceedingly important point about the psychological function of ultimate laughter: “A sense of humor lightens the load by enabling us to see the conventional as conventional without fundamentally threatening its power to compel us. It corrects our illusions while respecting our reliance on them, and this absurd combination keeps us sane. Sanity, then, may be viewed as humor applied to the realization that all our creations —cultural, perceptual, and intellectual— are not literally true but that we must nonetheless live by them as if they were.” This has something to do with Nietzsche’s thought that “it is the sign of a finer humanity to respect ‘ the mask’and not, in the wrong places, indulge in psychology or psychological curiosity.” (Beyond Good and Evil, § 270). 367 Thomas Nagel, «The Absurd », The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 68, 1971, pp. 718. 368 George Santayana, Soliloquies in England, p. 141.

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life of prayer.”369 Santayana reasserts the three points I singled out from “Carnival”, namely: laughter is a response to contingency; it has a definite cognitive value (“it lifts us to the happy level of understanding”370); it is, in many ways, akin to play. But perhaps the most interesting part of that discussion concerns the limitations and corruptions of laughter: bitter, rancorous, malicious, scornful, egotistic, egoistic, savage and obtuse laughter. It vindicates the observation that no sane and humane thinker can tackle the topic of laughter without recognizing its ambivalence and necessary limitations. *** What weight should we then accord to humorous levity in Santayana? Whatever the answer, I suspect that substantial interpretative differences concerning Santayana’s philosophy are in play. Take, for example, Levinson’s treatment of the theory of essences, where he concludes that “holding on to the discourse of essence and ‘the given’ turns out to be more trouble than it is worth, the two key terms (‘essence’ and ‘the given’) losing all but satirical point.” 371 I confess that I have often felt (and found textual evidence in justification of this feeling), even before reading Levinson’s book, that the theory of essences should be viewed as a sort of parody of a “theory” and that, in Levinson’s words, “we can admire the hygienic parts of Santayana’s sceptical suspension, and even go on to affirm much of his ‘animal faith’, without having to suffer the ‘intellectual cramps’ involved in affirming myths of the given, myths of subsistence or claims to eternity or timelessness.”372 This goes well beyond John Lachs’ proposition that “one consequence of Santayana’s theory of essence is, ironically, the impossibility of essentialism.”373 Perhaps it all boils down to a mere difference in emphasis, since all intelligent commentators seem to agree on the theoretical “strangeness” of Santayanian essences; but, frankly, I doubt it. Behind the differences in emphasis I perceive real disagreements about the way we should allocate priorities when it comes to the aspects of Santayana’s legacy that ought to be preserved. (I happen to live in a French-speaking country where the literary model for philosophy has done a tremendous amount of harm—and, incidentally, produced voluminous streams of appalling philosophical prose—and am inclined to view analytical philosophy as something more than simple 369

George Santayana, The Realm of Spirit, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940, p. 248. 370 Ibid., p. 249. 371 Henry Levinson, Santayana, Pragmatism and the Spiritual Life, p. 249. 372 Ibid., p. 216. 373 John Lachs, On Santayana, p. 35.

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philosophical fashion (although, while reacting with some justification to the conceptual imprecision, sleight-of-hand and haziness of most literary philosophy, it has undoubtedly also been that). The idea that after Frege, Russell, Quine or Wittgenstein, certain philosophical moves are hardly playable anymore doesn’t strike me as evidently ludicrous or obscurantist.) The real challenge, for us who wish to do justice to Santayana’s achievements, is not, primarily, to organize and maximize the philosopher’s presence on the Internet – although that might be important too. The real challenge is to convince other philosophers and scholars—including analytically minded ones—that Santayana deserves to be studied and criticized. As I have just hinted, I doubt that an ontology based on the doctrine of essences and underlying a conception of mind that, for this very reason, teeters on the brink of epiphenomenalism, will be of much help in that respect; but there are many, many other good philosophical reasons for reading Santayana, even for an analytical philosopher. Just to name a few: his original position towards scepticism, the fact that he is unique among philosophers in conveying what it is like to be alive, the way he revitalizes the paradoxes of the philosophy of mind, and never forgets our animality and the inevitabilities we all face... To conclude, I want to suggest that the image of the honest philosopher laughing at himself that Santayana so often projects in his works, is a major reason for reading him, precisely because one cannot uphold the ideal of an honest philosophy (which I dare hope is universal) without considerable doses of self-derision. To quote from The Realm of Spirit: Philosophy strips the human world of all authority and liberates the spirit intellectually; but it cannot strip the world of its power, or even of its ascendancy over the philosopher’s soul. He remains an unhappy creature, divided against himself and tempted to play the Pharisee; for in his theoretical pose he professes to dominate the worlds and benevolently to criticize it, while in his life and person he is hardly less subject than other men to every worldly requirement, vice and affectation. And in him, the domination of the flesh and the world over the spirit seems less excusable than in simple honest people, in whom it may be positively amiable and a part of the comedy of existence. So it might be in the 374 philosopher too, if he were frank enough to laugh at himself.

374

George Santayana, Realm of Spirit, p. 159.

SANTAYANA’S MEDITERRANEAN AESTHETICS GIUSEPPE PATELLA

There is no doubt that Santayana has been and maybe will be for a long time to come an untimely thinker used to moving against current, outside academic circles, fashions and cultural trends, and that his thought, in this sense, cannot interest those who want to be in step with the times and not even, I believe, the philologists or the antiquarians of thought. However it is this untimely character, to this day so enigmatic and impenetrable that fascinates us and invites a rereading of his aesthetic work which contains nothing new except those questions that have always driven philosophical reflection, that is, what is life? What is the mystery of beauty? Where is art born and what is its purpose? It is not a question, then, to make actual a thought that in itself already rejected any “barbarian” concession to the actuality of his times, rather to allow a new glance to emerge toward that dimension of the “reasonable” to which Santayana’s aesthetics provides an important contribution, making possible the discovery of a wider experience of feeling in all its manifold aspects and a more articulated vision of reason and life. Now despite the breadth and fascination of his philosophical work which has always attracted scholars, specialists but also the common reader, his aesthetic reflection has been studied only recently and although American criticism has examined these aspects above all between the 50’s and the 60’s 375, it has not assured him a place in the world of aesthetics where he remains today basically unknown. But, as it is well-known, Santayana is the author of many works of aesthetics, which occupy a central part in his vast philosophical production376,

375

See W.E. Arnett, Santayana and the Sense of Beauty, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1955; I. Singer, Santayana’s Aesthetics. A Critical Introduction, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1957; J. Ashmore, Santayana, Arts and Aesthetics, Cleveland, The Press of Western Reserve University, 1966. 376 See G. Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, New York, Scribner’s, 1896; Italian edition edited by G. Patella, Il senso della Bellezza, Palermo, Aesthetica Edizioni, 1997 (hereafter SB); Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, New York, Scribner’s, 1900; Reason in Art, 1905 (hereafter RA), vol. IV of The Life of Reason or the Phases of

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beside a long series of critical essays whose relevance for contemporary aesthetics still remains to be discovered. The reasons that Santayana has been forgotten entirely by official aesthetics are not to be found solely in the discipline of aesthetics per se, but also in Santayana’s own aesthetic conceptions that have always denied aesthetics its autonomy as discipline. He is convinced, in fact, not only that the term “aesthetics” is vague and ambiguous, but also that if we conceive aesthetics as an autonomous sphere of experience it would not have any real right to exist. After all, he states explicitly that in philosophy he does not recognise “no separable thing called aesthetics”377, and that the very word “aesthetic” is “too broad” a term (SB, 42) “a vague term, largely applied in academic circles to everything that has to do with works of art or with the sense of beauty”378. In his entire thought he always opposed, decidedly, the attempt to identify the term “aesthetics” with the exclusive one of “beauty” and to claim, therefore, the impossibility to turn aesthetics into an exclusive category. And yet, very paradoxically, he is one of the first to introduce and to teach aesthetics in American universities, and to devote to it his first great philosophical work, The Sense of Beauty, which from its subtitle is introduced as “Outline of aesthetic theory”. He begins his career as a philosopher and professor at Harvard University precisely with The Sense of Beauty, which is in fact not only its most important philosophical contribution to aesthetics as a discipline, but also one of the first American treatises on aesthetics379, destined to have great philosophical impact. How to explain, then, Santayana’s paradoxical position that while continuing to work on aesthetics virtually for his entire life, he always denied it the status as a discipline? What should we understand when he speaks of aesthetics? The answer to these questions we find them in a brief essay of 1904, until now neglected by critics, with the significant title “What is Aesthetics?” which eight years later from The Sense of Beauty and just around Reason in Art, comes to terms once again with this question demonstrating an important continuity in theme and interest. Human Progress, New York, Scribner’s, 1905-06; Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante and Goethe, New York, Scribner’s, 1910. 377 G. Santayana, A General Confession, in Aa.Vv., The Philosophy of George Santayana, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, Evaston and Chicago, Northwestern University Press, 1940, p. 20 (hereafter PGS). 378 Id., What is Aesthetics?, in “Philosophical Review”, XIII, 3, 1904, p. 321 (hereafter WA). 379 J. McCormick, George Santayana. A Biography, New York, Paragon House, 1987, p. 127.

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In this essay Santayana claims that the group of activities that we define as aesthetics is too broad and heterogeneous to be reduced to a unity and that, as a result, one cannot isolate any one block of experience supposing that aesthetics can adequately describe it or represent it. As a result aesthetic experience is so broad, varied and part of every aspect of life that it appears manifold and complex as life itself. Neither in nature nor in man there is a power, an organ or a sensitive faculty capable of defining an isolated activity that corresponds to aesthetics. (WA, 322). In this sense – Santayana goes on – to try and separate the aesthetic sphere from all the other human interests would mean turning it into an instrument or into something disdainful. To boast of maintaining this single interest free from all the others excluding any possible affinity with any other effect would be a bit like boasting to be deliberately mad. An ideal of beauty, completely autonomous and independent would be, therefore, something irrational, just as would be a mathematics without natural application, or a moral without connection with life (WA, 325). From this perspective there is no doubt that Santayana’s reservations with respect to aesthetics are motivated by the intention of avoiding that aesthetic judgements are limited to a single sphere of experience and by the necessity, instead, to make sure that they become the instruments thanks to which the different spheres of life can be known and valued. Therefore he denies the possibility of looking at the aesthetic phenomenon as something isolated from any other vital and cultural phenomena. In this sense, aesthetic values cannot be thought as elements foreign to experience that are later added to it, but as something that always accompanies it. Thus, against an aesthetics reduced to a special doctrine and reified into an autonomous discipline, Santayana seems to assert in a more essential way what we can define as the primacy of the aesthetic, that is to say the onto-genetic primacy of the vital and perceptive dimension of the entire experience. The aesthetic sense, in fact, is deeply intertwined with all the cultural manifestations of man, is always already present in thought, in actions and in human affects. And if things were different, one would have to think of the aesthetic as some kind of protected area, an oasis isolated in the middle of the desert of experience. Throughout his thinking life Santayana will always remain faithful to this notion of the primacy of the aesthetic as modality of life and existence, a category of the vital potentiality of the imagination380. As a result, aesthetic value as what specifically is brought to 380

For this reason his thought has been linked to Kierkegaard (see W.R. Comstock, Aspects of Aesthetic Existence: Kierkegaard and Santayana, in “International Philosophical Quarterly”, VI, 2, 1966, pp. 189-213) or, in a key of "aesthetic existence", to Proust (see M.V. Ames, Proust and Santayana. The Aesthetic Way of Life, New YorkChicago, 1937).

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perception is in some sense the premise that presupposes all the values that thought and action can realize. To the point that the basic formation of his reflection can be considered to be deeply aesthetic, or better, essentially poetic. In fact, his thinking is moved by a deep sense of poetry understood as intuition of forms and essences, as creation of ideal types and characters, as a cosmic vision that impregnates every aspect of existence, as a peculiar forum of knowledge where, as it has been remarked, “the immediate is the definitive and the ultimate is the immediate”381 . A thought that does not renounce the spontaneity and intuitive character of poetry, on the contrary, in fact it makes it into its essential character, and nonetheless avoids in the most absolute way to change into an indistinct expressive lyricism devoid of intimate coherence and consistency. After all Santayana himself writes that “there is in art nothing but manual knack and professional tradition on the practical side, and on the contemplative side pure intuition of essences, with the inevitable intellectual or luxurious pleasure which pure intuition involves” (PGS 20). Now, to the extent that it is so aesthetically defined, philosophy for Santayana must remove those conditions of neutrality and objectivity sought for by the sciences or by metaphysics in order to become, as part of experience, a reflection inspired by experience itself, a thoughtful reflection on life. The consequences of this belief can also be found coherently on the stylistic and formal level of his reflection, which acquires more and more the structures, rhythms and modules of narrative: lyrical expressions, confessions, dialogues, apologias, letters, autobiographical narratives, fictional narratives, a novelistic style, and a personal and confidential tone express better than philosophical systems or treatises this direct approach to experience perhaps because, he writes in his famous novel The Last Puritan, “fiction, in order to reconcile men with reality, in some ways, can be more necessary than the truth”382. From this perspective, then, art and life, beauty and experience, as poetry and philosophy after all, can only be strictly joined. One cannot love art without loving nature, nor contemplate beauty outside the world of experience and perception. An object is not beautiful, writes Santayana, “unless it is capable of giving pleasure to anyone. Something beautiful toward which every man was indifferent would be a contradiction in terms” (SB, 61). For this reason for Santayana an aesthetics as autonomous discipline does not make sense, since the aesthetic is nothing more than experience itself, experience caught in its wealth and totality, and aesthetic is also that attitude complete and expressive in itself, free, spontaneous, of pleasant enjoyment and contemplation 381

V. Cilento, La “non estetica” di George Santayana, in “Rivista di Estetica”, I, 1, 1956, p. 83. 382 The Last Puritan, New York, Scribner’s, 1936, epilogue (hereafter LP).

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of the very characters of experience, of which Santayana acknowledges the primacy. And this is also the reason why aesthetic experience in some ways coincides with moral experience, since just as the latter it is expression of the fundamental interests of the individual and at the same time it looks to an ideal equilibrium, reasonable, that can hold together soul and nature, reason and life. Santayana’s philosophy seems to move, in fact, over all, toward a unitarian ideal of this type, an aesthetic ideal that finds its fulfillment in the idea of harmony. Harmony, he writes, “which might be called an aesthetic principle, is also the principle of health, of justice and of happiness” (PGS 20). But – he adds – “a harmony in appearance only, one that touches the spings of nothing and has no power to propagate itself, is so partial and momentary a good that we may justly call it an illusion” (RA, 216). Thus, the more the aesthetic values are widespread and we succeed in making compatible with all the others of human experience, the more we realize a moral ideal, a rational principle, and we also feel a pleasant sensation of happiness. The most aesthetically relevant value, therefore, is harmony, that synthesis and fullness of life that in ethics we call happiness. Therefore we find ourselves before a sort of eudemonic aesthetics, if we can say so, Greek style, according to which the idea of happiness is aesthetic and the aesthetic one is moral. If this was not the case, we would find ourselves before a case of pure barbarism, since – Santayana adds – “it is mere barbarism to feel that a thing is aesthetically good but morally evil, or morally good but hateful to perception” (RA, 177). On the other hand, Santayana is convinced that happiness is the supreme sanction of art. In fact, “if happiness is the ultimate sanction of art, art in turn is the best instrument of happiness,” he writes in Reason in Art (RA, 229). To be sure, it is a happiness that does not coincide with personal whim, but consists in its accord with reason and experience. Happiness depends on reason and the latter is only the result of the encounter of different individual interests. Thus happiness, on the one hand, crowns individual experience which, on the other hand, reason contributes to integrate with other experiences and to harmonize with other general interests. In this fashion aesthetics becomes instrumental to a life based on rational principles and leads to the realization of ideals that are completely ethico-aesthetics. Over all, the aesthetic theories of Santayana seem to retrace the hypothesis of a moral order, which represents the aim and goal of man’s actions, and which is perfectly within his reach and constitutes a sort of ultimate structure of which is penetrated both the environment surrounding him and the universe in its entirety. And even though the senses alone cannot grasp this structure immediately, it can be reached anyway, only by activities and by interventions interrelations that stem directly from the senses, without whose involvement no objective or ideal can be conquered. And it is here that aesthetic

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experience intervenes, of which art represents the main activity. “The emergence of arts out of instincts is the token and exact measure of nature’s success and of mortal happiness” (RA, 230). In his moral dimension, for Santayana the aesthetic represents, therefore, an essential part of experience in its globality and art a decisive part of life. If we now look at this unitarian ideal of harmony, synthesis of happiness and beauty, which is realized on the concrete terrain of art, of which beauty is the primary expression, we cannot call into question that sense of balance and measure, that solar sentiment of nature and life, which elsewhere I have defined “mediterranean” and placed at the center of Santayana’s aesthetic reflection383. At the basis of this “mediterranean feeling”, in fact, we find not only the rejection of Harvard’s philosophy, that is of that peculiar “protestant combination of earnestness with waywardness” (PGS, 9), which he found above all in the Romanticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and in the idealism of Josiah Royce, and which he also noticed in the empiricism of his first teacher William James, but also the overcoming of the so-called “romantic disease,” that is the negation of an inconclusive intuitionism, of an empty lyricism, of a mere indeterminate expressivity. For a spirit “scornful of any romantic worship or idealization of the real world” (PGS, 12), as he believed himself to be, and who was disgusted by that sort of “forced optimism” and “pulpit unction”(PGS, 11), which he saw both in German idealism, inspired by the abstract protestant rationality and in his American puritanical tradition, he had no choice but to entrust himself to a more concrete and reflective “mediterranean reason,” of which the goddess Minerva can be said to be the symbol, as Serge Latouche (1999) has recently pointed out. It is a question, therefore, of a practical, worldly wisdom, made up of as much prudence (phrónesis) as wit (métis), which rejects excesses, makes the “reasonable” its virtue, and nonetheless “gives way necessarily to rivalry (agón) since it is as nourished by debate and conflict while rationality claims to assert itself without discussion”384. A meridian sensibility which appeals to a plurality of aspects and values, to a controlled tonality, made up of sobriety and discretion, of good common sense, of balance between the corporeal and the mental, the natural and the spiritual, directed toward a use of reason at the 383 See our Bellezza, arte e vita. L’estetica mediterranea di George Santayana, Milano, Mimesis, 2001. 384 S. Latouche, Le Défi de Minerve. Rationalité occidentale et raison méditerranéenne, 1999; trad. it., La sfida di Minerva. Razionalità occidentale e ragione mediterranea, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2000, p. 53. According to Latouche “mediterranean reason” is based on reasonableness of the phrónesis (prudence or wisdom) opposed to a “protestant rationality”, daughter rather of geometric reason of the lógos epistemonikós.

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service of life and art, with respect for the material basis of existence together with the sensibility for a value of harmony which is aesthetic and ethical at the same time. The reasonable reason, writes Latouche appropriately, “is manifold because it obeys to more than one criteria. It is 'good common sense' when it is founded on mature deliberation and not on a bunch of prejudices, it is the critique of good sense, when the latter is not reasonable”385. The reasonable could also be what someone has called Santayana’s “greekness” that for him meant “the search for freedom in order, of harmony in diversity, of virtue in tolerance, of formal perfection in concrete and sensible reality; self-knowledge, moral sincerity, political wisdom, aesthetic taste, intellectual lucidity”386. But it is better, perhaps, to define it as “mediterraneity” in the wider sense, as a mediterranean feeling, in which flow very diverse cultural contributions of very different traditions: the Greek, the Roman, the Christian, the African…387, in virtue of which one can also explain, for example, Santayana’s entirely aesthetic “sympathy” for Catholicism, for its symbols, its figures, its wisdom388 , or, at the same time and for the same reasons, for Paganism, for its symbols, its figures, its wisdom. Therefore it does not come as a surprise if the most vocal accusations to his thought came from the academic world of Harvard – that embodiment of the quintessence of the purest yankee spirit, which branded his thought as “mediterranean decadentism”, ”moribond latinity“ or “total absurdity” (W. James). In this sense, his constant appeal to hispanidad in the field of philosophy and of American culture had no other significance than that of defending the value of this Mediterranean character, that is, of a type of vital rationality, wise and prudent, a form of practical wisdom, worldly, determined, to oppose to Harvard’s dark idealism, and to that American transcendentalism that continued in pure puritanic style, weighing it furthermore with the contribution of Calvinist Theodicy, the already “torbid” and sterile idealism of German philosophy, already despised in itself because already believed to be egocentric, moralistic and malicious.

385

Ivi, p. 96. N. Bosco, Invito al pensiero di George Santayana, Milano, Mursia, 1987, p. 162. 387 On this mediterranean character see in general F. Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1996 and M. Alcaro, Sull’identità meridionale. Forme di una cultura mediterranea, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. On african contribution in particular called attention to Martin Bernal, with his lucky Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Piscataway, Rutgers U.P., 1987, and S. Latouche, L’Autre Afrique, Paris, Michel, 1998. 388 A bond to Catholicism of aesthetic type, well expressed in The Idea of Christ in the Gospels; or God in Man, New York, Scribner’s, 1946. 386

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Within this overall perspective, we can better characterize Santayana’s aesthetics by defining it not as an aesthetics of a unilateral rational type, where reason takes on an absolute and dominant role, but with a more balanced reasonable aesthetics, that is a more Mediterranean aesthetics. The reasonable, in fact, seems to be his signature qualified, that is, by a type of reason never isolated, self-sufficient or closed in itself, but one that establishes its roots in the complex and layered world of life, in the free and spontaneous impulses of the individual, in the world of play and liberty, which in fact represents the proper reign of beauty and art. A reasonable aesthetics is an aesthetics that makes a wise controlled and prudent use of reason, places it at the service of the vital processes where art with its products testifies to the unity of human experience, of its elements, the close connection of intuitive dimension and formal perspective, of sensible and reflexive aspect, whose beauty as pleasure objectified389 is the privileged manifestation. Therefore, an aesthetic which is wise, balanced, not at all monothematic, unilateral, foolish, or even less amoral, as we have shown, because in the reasonable “the tension toward the good is always present,” as Latouche reminds us, and also presupposes “an acute consciousness of the tragic condition of man and at the same time a sense always alert to the limits of the situation"390. On the other hand, to look closely, the reasonable in Santayana takes on the semblance of that vital reason which can be identified as resulting from the same Life of Reason, as the title of his masterpiece of 1905-06 goes, that is, a reason which is anything but pure and isolated, in fact from the beginning compromised with the corporeal and the material, with the always changing matter of life. No reality, not even the most abstract one, derives from pure ideas – “the ideal is a concomitant emanation from the natural and has no other possible status” (RA, 28) – and reason, like thought, is an act of life, follows from its fluxes and transforms them in habits, emerges from “the adaptation of the imagination and habits to the facts and material occasions”391. The reason which we are dealing with here possesses properly life, The Life of Reasons, precisely, and it is in itself always vital, it finds “its antecedent in what is called life”. In fact, it does not assert itself autonomously from the outside, but is born on the very ground of life, is the result of a long work of 389

It is well-konwn that in The Sense of Beauty Santayana defines beauty as a “pleasure objectified”, that is “pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing” (SB, § 11). On this definition and its meaning you can see our Introduction of Italian edition of The Sense of Beauty (cit.). All arguments deepened also in our Bellezza, arte e vita. L’estetica mediterranea di George Santayana, cit., chapter II. 390 S. Latouche, op. cit., p. 53. 391 The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress. Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, II edition, New York, Scribner’s, 1922, p. 14 (Hereafter RCS).

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mediation and adaptation of irrational and unconscious processes. The life of reason, therefore, is also defined as “the happy marriage of two elements – impulse and ideation – which if wholly divorced would reduce man to a brute or to a maniac” (RCS, 6). Reason, Santayana adds, “is a form of life and should be conceived in analogy with nourishment, procreation and art” (RCS, 87). Therefore, it is not a question of a system, in the idealist sense, dialectically organized and ultimately guaranteed, the “life of reason” is rather a “romance”, writes Santayana, “the Romance of Wisdom” (RCS, vii), or even the total history "of the human imagination” whose final between the splendours and miseries of existence always remains open. So defined, reason “is not a force contrary to passions, but their possible harmony” and “could not have any other point of application than in their world”392. “The intelligible,” writes Santayana, “lies at the periphery of experience, the surd at its core” (RCS, 68). In this sense, reason is “just harmony between irrational impulses.” After all, he qualifies in his autobiography, a “pure reason, a reason that is not based on irrational postulates and presupposition, is perfectly impotent”393 . The rational dimension is by nature always relative, it never provides the data on which it works. Mediation and synthesis are its essence (SB 44). Thus reason does not have an absolute value in itself but acquires its proper value the moment it becomes the mediator of experience, and of vital interests. Therefore, the reason to which Santayana alludes, is in itself always a vital reason, the reasonable precisely, and as such it represents the pivot of his aesthetic theory. His theory of beauty and art is deeply tied to this philosophy of vital reason which is adequately developed in The Life of Reason. If the sense of the beautiful derives from the immediate reaction of the élan vital before the soliciting of what stands before us, the aesthetic values are essentially vital and, as other values, they contribute to the fullness of life, to its harmony. The beautiful and art, in fact, are born spontaneously like life itself, and like reason, after all, which in itself is always vital, embodied in matter and in time, a living and operating activity. In this sense, to discover the reasonable, Latouche remarks, “is also to discover that under the thick layer of pollution and utilitarianism, the world and life offer themselves in an immense and total gratuity”394. If, in conclusion, we wanted to point to the direction toward which Santayana’s aesthetics moves, we could say that it moves toward a balanced 392

Realms of Being, New York, Scribner’s, 1942, p. 339. Persons and Places. Fragments of Autobiography, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1986, pp. 231-232. 394 S. Latouche, op. cit., p. 148. 393

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reasonable conception of experience, namely, it moves in the direction of integrating beauty and art with the life of that reason from which they derive, of re-inserting them in the context of interests, impulses, passions and all human actions to raise them at the same time to an ideal moral dimension. If this is the point of arrival of Santayana’s reasonable aesthetics, we understand why the aesthetic problem cannot be posited as a problem in itself but as one caught in the essential relation with the living unity of the natural universe and with the essential equilibrium of human experience. The reigns of beauty and art, as parts of those “realms of being” of which Santayana speaks, are not in this sense isolated reigns, and their products are not the result of a reckless and disordered imagination, but of a reason at the service of life, experience and civilization. It is to the extent to which it moves in this direction that the reasonable and the mediterranean character appear to assume an alternative value, not to say a properly radical one.

BEAUTY AND THE LABYRINTH OF EVIL: SANTAYANA AND THE POSSIBILITY OF NATURALISTIC MYSTICISM THOMAS ALEXANDER

Among the thinkers of this passing century that offer themselves to the future for its reflection, Santayana must stand out as a singular figure, one whose thought is dedicated to the overarching possibility of the spiritual life undertaken without religious faith or metaphysical dogma.395 Among the throngs that fill the philosophical bestiary of the 20th Century, Santayana may be the one genuine contemplative of note.396 The majority of doctrines dominant in the century have been directed either toward the goal of action (Marxism, pragmatism, existentialism) or the problem of knowledge, truth and meaning (positivism, analytic philosophy, phenomenology). Genuinely contemplative philosophies cannot be classified with either one of these categories, however much they may touch upon common themes. Given that Santayana sought to find a basis for philosophy as a contemplative life by grafting the classical doctrine of essence onto the modernist theory of matter as power, his thought engages nearly the whole of the history of the west, while ranging into the field of the systems of India as well. This may seem a puzzling bequest to the future from this century so filled with violence and wreckage. If the true historical parameter of the century is measured by events, we might find that it could be dated from 1914 to 1991, from the onset of World War I to the exhausted collapse of the Soviet Union, a period in which the world was either preparing for war or actively engaged in it. But the violence of the century must include the rapid and constant reorganization of life forced upon the globe by technologies some of whose impact is as yet hardly discerned. It is possible to view Santayana against this backdrop as a piece of intellectual nostalgia, rather like a beautiful old church in a buzzing urban center that someone forgot to bulldoze to the ground. 395

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Santayana Society at its annual meeting in Boston on December 28, 1999. 396 Along with Thomas Merton, a theologian rather than a philosopher.

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I think such a response would be unfortunate because the spiritual life is a perennial concern for us, one that politics and technology cannot address however successfully or intelligently managed they may be. The thought of Santayana offers then a permanent opportunity to explore the dimensions of the spiritual life without the confusions introduced by archaic physics or forgotten political aspirations. In the words of William James, "Mystical classics have ... neither birthday nor native land" and so have the opportunity to be as accessible or inaccessible as the contingent features of the world permit.397 Santayana's writings may be read from this angle, and it is this approach I will take myself. Thus the problem which I intend to explore does not try to address Santayana as a figure of the 20th century or even as an "American" or "pragmatist" of whatever stripe. Rather, I want to raise an internal issue to the prospect of the spiritual discipline or askesis presented especially in Santayana's later philosophy, the problem of the relation of the spiritual and the moral lives. What, if anything, does the quest for a beatific vision have to do with the "problem of evil" in a naturalistic mysticism such as Santayana's? In this essay I will explore Santayana's vision of the spiritual life as a naturalistic contemplative discipline in relation to Platonism and Neo-Platonism.398 In

397

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Harvard, 1985), p. 332. I find that my comments in this essay have unintentionally inserted themselves into a previous discussion carried on between my old teacher Paul Kuntz and Herman Saatkamp. (See Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society No. 3, 1985, and No. 10, 1992.) In his initial article, "Santayana's Neo-Platonism," Kuntz argued that Santayana's Realms of Being implied not only a spiritual ascent but an ontological order corresponding to it, one that was Christian as well as Neo-Platonic. While acknowledging Santayana's use of the imagery of the spiritual ascent, Saatkamp did not find this to lead to any deep commitment to anything beyond a naturalism that accepts a plurality of goods, only one of which might be the "life of spirit." Kuntz's reply, "The Ascent of Spirit: Is Santayana's System a Naturalistic Neo-Platonic Hierarchy" (1992), persisted with the original argument, focusing on a detailed exegesis of Platonism and the Spiritual Life (a key text for my essay as well). While I agree, as does Saatkamp, that Kuntz has commendably drawn attention to the Neo-Platonic (and Indian) influences in Santayana's mature philosophy, which have tended to be neglected by those stressing Santayana's naturalism, I also agree with Saatkamp that Kuntz has pushed the argument a step too far and is in danger of ignoring the explicit role of contingency and plurality as the basis for any sort of life, spiritual or otherwise. In short, Kuntz tries to move Santayana's ideal of the spiritual life from being the expression of one of the many contingent values in nature (one that Santayana himself valued) to one everyone ought to adopt because nature herself recommends it, thereby transforming Santayana's ontology into a moralistic metaphysics. This move is explicitly rejected by Santayana. For an attempt to present a much more Aristotelian idea of a spiritual life, a practical rather than contemplative ideal grounded in Santayana's The Life of Reason, see the recent essay by 398

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response to Santayana's conclusion that the spiritual and moral lives are somewhat at variance with each other, I offer the example of Buddhism which, though it accepts some of Santayana's fundamental premises, arrives at a different understanding of how these two lives are connected. In short I will try to show that a contemplative spirituality may acknowledge the existence of evil and develop a compassionate response to it without thereby surrendering the ideal of contemplative detachment. Santayana's ideal of the spiritual life is thus one, but not the only, possibility that is available, given the initial premises of his later system. Santayana describes the quest of the spiritual life in terms of the radical separation of it from the natural world or "realm of matter" which forces the animal psyche to live in terms of "values" such as good and bad, which, in their extreme forms of judgment, may be described as "absolute good" and "evil." Instead, Santayana offers us an approach to the realm of essence which can be called a form of liberation insofar as spirit achieves its complete function without service to the alien needs of the psyche: intuition pure and simple. The question I wish to probe is the relation of the moral life to the spiritual, for Santayana certainly sees them not merely as divergent but in some ways as mutually inhibiting when not kept distinct. Morality, he claims, pushes spiritual life toward dogmatism, subverting it to the defense of local ideals instead of allowing spirit to roam free and see things as they are without concern for their ulterior values for life. In retrieving the classical doctrine of essence, then, Santayana had to emphasize the rejection of the moral in the spiritual, lest his view be confounded with Platonism, a doctrine whose time had come – and gone, he thought – with the revolution in modern physics. The release of spirit into its own domain, into the play of essence, leaves behind all moral concerns, including the "problem of evil." While moral judgments may be made about the spiritual life an individual pursues, they are made from the moral angle, not the spiritual.

Santayana and Neo-Platonism There are two interesting essays where the issue came to occupy Santayana, though they might be regarded as occasional pieces: both were responses to bungled attempts to handle the topic of "Platonism" – or, more specifically, Neo-Platonism – that was so close to Santayana's heart. One was the 1916 essay "Plotinus and the Nature of Evil" written in light of B.A.G. Fuller's The Problem of Evil in Plotinus. The second, Platonism and the yet another former teacher of mine, James Gouinlock's "Ultimate Religion," Overheard in Seville, Vol. 12 (1998).

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Spiritual Life, was composed in 1926 and takes on Dean Inge's The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought.399 I suspect that this monograph, which saw the light of day in 1927 along with The Realm of Essence may also have been written in the afterglow of Santayana's reading of the Fifth Ennead, just published in McKenna's translation.400 Santayana paid the highest respect to the Plotinian system, which, unlike Plato's fundamentally political philosophy, he saw as truly oriented toward the spiritual life. In a letter from 1919, Santayana defends the philosophy of Plotinus to Robert Bridges in terms that come quite close to those of Santayana's own system: But it seems to me a very great system, very "good philosophy," and I am glad that the mystics in Oxford are taking him up, rather than pretending to find comfort in Hegel or in the meretricious psychology of Bergson. ... Of course all those things he describes do not exist; of course he is not describing this world, he is describing the other world, that is, deciphering the good just beyond it or above it, which each actual thing suggests. Even this rendering of moral aspiration is arbitrary, because nature does not really aspire to anything, each living thing aspires to something different in divergent ways. But this arbitrary aspiration, which Plotinus reads into the world, sincerely expresses his own aspiration and that of his age. That is why I say he is a decidedly "good philosopher." It is the Byzantine architecture of the mind, just as good or better than the Gothic. It seems to me better than Christian theology in this respect, that it isn't mixed up with history, it isn't half Jewish, half worldly. It is the Greek side of Christian theology made pure; and that is the side which seems to be truly 401 spiritual, truly sacrificial and penitentially joyful.

It might help us to summarize the Plotinian analysis of the problem of evil as "nothing positive in itself, only the absence of Good," which has dominated the discussion of the topic in the west ever since St. Augustine appropriated it for 399

In fact it may have also been settling a score dating back to 1918 when Santayana had written in the margin of Inge's The Philosophy of Plotinus "The motley eloquence of the pulpit, the lazy [line?] of a rhetorician and moralist who wants to talk about the world without studying it." Cited in John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography (Knopf, 1987), p. 268. 400 McKenna's beautiful, if eccentric, multi-volume translation of the Enneads began in 1917 with Ennead I (along with other extracts), and continued with a second volume in 1921 (consisting of Enneads III and II in that order), with a third in 1924 (Ennead IV). The final volume with the sixth Ennead was published in 1930. But my suspicion is as yet unverified. 401 Santayana to Robert Bridges of Sept. 18, 1919 in The Letters of George Santayana, ed. Daniel Cory (Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1955), p. 178. In this letter Santayana does comment on reading the first volume of McKenna's translation just then published.

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use in Christian theology. The most famous place this occurs in the Enneads is in the Ninth Treatise of the Second Book, the essay directed against the Gnostics.402 The Plotinian system, recall, finds the one true principle or arch of Being beyond Being itself, and so beyond Form, making it a simplicity that defies conceptual and linguistic understanding except as such understanding can turn itself toward its source and acknowledge its derivative status.403 From this power, the world of Being "overflows," articulating itself into the world of Form and the Divine Nous that eternally thinks them and, in thinking them, can turn back toward their common source, understanding the Forms and itself in light of the One. But the activity of direct, contemplative insight into Form is also productive, generating another "overflow" into the mimetic order of the cosmos and the living, temporal soul that animates it. Action, time, body-all are degenerate modes of "contemplation" for Plotinus.404 Beyond the rhythmic dance of nature, everlastingly turning about the One like dancers in a chorus, is the dim and weakened quasi-nothingness of matter, a mere reception of activity that cannot produce anything further itself. It is the termination of pure generative power into absolute impotence. This is the context in which Plotinus faced the Gnostics, who held that the physical world was evil, produced by an arrogant and rebellious god in an act of cosmic hubris (possibly, some speculated, the very figure described in the Hebrew Genesis). By a saving act of intimate, esoteric knowledge — gnosis — the soul could be delivered to its true home and cease to be afflicted by the body. Such a doctrine proceeds from a hard moral realism about the sorts of 402

Recent scholarship has actually determined that this is but the last third of a much longer treatise cut up and distributed throughout the Enneads by Plotinus' editor, Porphyry. The full treatise consists of Enneads III. 8, V.5, and II.9. When read together in proper sequence the work ranks, in my view, with one of the greatest philosophical documents from antiquity. See the discussion by A. H. Armstrong at II.9 in his edition and translation of the Enneads (Loeb Classical Library). 403 The whole philosophy of Plotinus develops the logical consequences of Plato's sketchy and somewhat embarrassed treatment of the Good as "the Form of Forms" at Republic 509 c, which describes it as "transcending Being in dignity and power,"a comment that provokes laughter from Glaucon and Adeimantus. As the arch of Form, Plotinus observed, the One cannot be a Form and so is form-less and as the principle of Being cannot be said to "be" at all. Logos fails, though Plotinus is willing to describe the One as "limitless power" as well as pure simplicity. As "one" it is not at all a "numerical unity," something both conceptual and abstract. 404 "Contemplation" is the poor English word used for the Greek therein (). This word rejects any notion discursive process or muddled drifting, which our word "contemplation" drags in. It involves the idea of rapt, penetrating comprehension in which the truth, order and beauty of something are fused together forever timelessly and made entirely lucid.

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expectations one must face in our sojourn here in the realm of matter, from the fumbled attempts at order nature regularly produces and the daily ineptitudes of any given political or administrative system to the impressive catastrophes of the Black Death or mudslides that entomb twenty thousand people at once or similar human catastrophes: Huns, Goths, Mongols, Nazis, the Japanese Imperial Army, and so on. I dwell on this because, in a certain sense (as Anthony Woodward has noted), Santayana's own view of nature bears at times rather close resemblance to the Gnostics' bleak view of nature.405 Plotinus' response to this view was to say we shouldn't judge a city by looking only at its worst neighborhoods.406 If this order is confused, it nevertheless leads usto recognize it as the image of the higher and more intelligible good, and, as a rippling reflection in water may turns us toward its source, so nature can direct us to go beyond itself. But the reflection is not "evil" for being a reflection, even if it is a troubled reflection. Disciplined reasoning, says Plotinus, allows us to place the goods and bads of the world in their proper place and rise above them to the genuine, higher goods.407 More profoundly, Plotinus says that to hate the world is to remove oneself from the immanence of the divine which is at the innermost center of our being. The genuine beauty of the world lures us to turn toward an inner and higher beauty that leaves the world and its imperfections behind. The emotion of contempt or hatred utterly fails to make this inward ascent. As Augustine would say, God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Pondus meum, amor meus, he says: my love is my weight.408 I stress this point 405

See Anthony Woodward, Living in the Eternal (Vanderbilt, 1988), pp. 108-109, 111113. What offsets his tendency toward the gnostic view of the world, of course is Santayana's equally hard-headed rejection of magic and supernaturalism, leaving him with a more realistic and occasionally genial expression of "natural piety" toward the Realm of Matter. Nevertheless, he did find idealism of any sort insufferably tenderminded. 406 En. II.9.7 407 A constant criticism in Ennead II.9 is that the Gnostics are half-literate, irrational, pompous and histrionic (the ancient world apparently had its fundamentalists). He says, "The rest of their teachings I leave you to investigate by reading their books and to observe throughout the kind of philosophy which we pursue, besides all its other excellences, displays simplicity and straightforwardness of character along with clear thinking, and aims at dignity, not rash arrogance, and combines confident boldness with reason and much safeguarding and caution and a great deal of circumspection: you are to use philosophy of this kind as a standard of comparison for the rest." (Armstrong) 408 Confessions XIII.9. The role of beauty in salvation is the key theme of Ennead I.6, one of the first and most influential of the Enneads read by Augustine. The idea of one's love being one's "weight" (or the natural place toward which one tends) is the guiding theme of Dante's Comedia: the souls exist in the manifested world of their genuine loves, from lowest to highest.

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because I believe it is crucial in Santayana's own response to "the problem of evil." Beauty is not a "solution" to the riddle of the existence of evil, but a strategy that turns away from the problem itself. The response to evil, in other words, lies in the discovery of the spiritual life.

The Spiritual Life as Transcendent of the Problem of Evil With this in the background, let us now turn to Santayana's 1916 essay "Plotinus and the Nature of Evil," ostensibly a review of Fuller's book on the topic. Fuller saw the problem of evil on the horns of a dilemma. The alternatives are either naturalism or mysticism. If one opts for naturalism, Fuller thought, then all values must be equal, for everything is equally "natural," the saint and the serial murderer and everyone in between. Each thing is perfect after its own unique kind. The only alternative, to Fuller at least, was mysticism in which the only good was the highest reality and anything that separated itself from that good was automatically evil. The dilemma is summed up by Santayana as "either all excellences are absolute and incomparable, or there is no excellence but one.”409 With reference to the naturalist horn, Santayana argues that to say everything is equally a phenomenon of nature does not lead to pure moral relativism. Naturalism admits that the impulses that spring from the live creature may be premoral, but this is not the same as saying they are all equal, much less morally equal. Some are more in harmony with their environments than others, and insofar as they are out of harmony, may generate ideals naturally. As Santayana says, "Hence each nature originally pronounces itself to be good, but imperfect as it stumbles and creaks as it goes" (os, 72). Moral values and ideals may have a natural origin without therefore being branded equal. As living interests become organized, so goods may be organized in a hierarchy of values. In short, as a naturalist it may be valuable to have a system of ethics more functional and in touch with the world than pure relativism allows, though this certainly does not prevent the naturalist from seeing that several systems are possible or may conflict with each other. This is more true when we consider values arising from nonhuman organisms. As Santayana put it, "Had animals spoken, the Inquisition would have had pretty work on its hands" (os, 70). This leaves the mystical horn of Fuller's dilemma. Santayana will not admit the thesis that there is one supreme good means that everything else falls into some degree of evil, that the levels in the great chain of Being are but "so many stages of spiritual misery" (os, 70). One overarching good does not exclude the possibility of subordinate goods. A good book may have good 409

Obiter Scripta, p. 71. Hereafter cited as os.

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sentences and each sentence be composed of well-chosen words written out in perfectly formed letters. Each may be perfect after its kind and also involved in an overall order of higher and lower degrees of perfection. It is true, Santayana says, that Plotinus, believing as he did in the potency of form, reversed the true order of genesis – his mythology of the overflowing descent of creative power from beyond the Forms down through nature into the torpid murk of matter was an inversion of the truth. In nature as we saw there is a natural heterogeneity of goods. In this way, says Santayana, Plotinus "incidentally ... missed the true explanation of the origin of evil, which lies in the natural conflict of many powers and many ideals" (os, 75-76).410 To thrive in nature we must adopt an organized economy of values so we can move in one direction at a time, but this does not mean we may not encounter someone else whose internal economy has set them at cross purposes to ours. Platonism is basically a moral view that seeks to insist that its analysis of human values achieves a final, defining insight into the order of things as such, and this is merely presumptuous, according to Santayana. For such a person, he says, "His Socratic wisdom in life will become Platonic folly in science" (os, 76). Thus evil, for Santayana, is simply the partisan word for the inevitable clash of interests in a natural world that is inherently pluralistic in its aims and not governed by an over-arching, coordinating good that redeems and saves all things. Fuller's more fundamental problem lies behind the sophistic dilemma; it is a failure to understand mysticism as much as naturalism. The true mystic is not kept from a "hatred of finitude" simply by a mere inconsistency any more than the naturalist is kept from proclaiming the equality of every value. Pointing out to the mystic that he adores his supreme good only because he is separate from it does not lead at all to his condemnation of himself and everything else distinguished from that good as "evil." Actual mystics – not the "classroom idols" of Fuller's paradox – have been quite consistent with their principles when they felt "the tenderness and wonder which filled them in the presence of creation" (os, 77). Though it is true that the adoration of the mystic implies a separation from the source, this does not fill him or her with rage at the separation, but with humility and adoration. The problem, as seen by Plotinus, then, was not the existence of evil; "it was rather to rise above evil, to decipher a divine image in the worn and degraded lineaments of things and to save the soul 410

Compare Platonism and the Spiritual Life where he says, "Evil can arise only within each world when it becomes faithless to some Idea which it has begun to pursue or is crossed in it by some external enemy (if any) or by the inward contradiction and complexity of its own impulses" (p. 44). To judge the world as "evil" requires those very animal interests and concerns that are condemned in the act of judgment—"these feelings are part of the world which they condemn." Hence to turn from the moral world is to turn from such judgments altogether.

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from a temporal and sensuous life to which evil was native" (os, 78). It may be that when evil cannot be erased, the natural impulse is to evade it as much as possible, but the root impulse of Platonism was a love of beauty, passing from lower to higher forms of it. The problem of evil, says Santayana, is for theologians and apologists for creator deities or pantheists wishing to assert that all is somehow good. But It does not exist for the naturalist because for him both good and evil are relative to finite interests necessarily at war in this crowded world. Nor does it exist for the Platonist, to whom it is obvious that the good is far away and that it was not the good that removed the good where it is absent. The problem of darkness does not exist for the man gazing at the stars. No doubt the darkness is there, fundamental, pervasive, and unconquerable except at the pinpoints where the stars twinkle; but the problem is not why there is such darkness, but what is the light that breaks through it so remarkably; and granting this light, why we have eyes to see it and hearts to be gladdened by it. (os 86)

Even though Platonism is now in abeyance, being an ideal of values now out of fashion, it may be that "things come round in this world; the ruffians may be upon us some day when we least expect it and philosophy may have again to retire to the sanctuary." Santayana concludes with this enigmatic remark: " Even then we should search the books of Plotinus in vain for any solution to the artificial problem concerning the existence of evil; but if we searched them for a thread out of the natural labyrinth of evil, we might possibly find it" (os, 86-87). Santayana indicates that there may be an important clue for us in the philosophy of Plotinus, something far different from an sophistical "solution" to the "problem of evil." Instead of a solution, there is an escape. But what is this "thread" out of the "natural labyrinth of evil"? And what is the relationship of Santayana's own later philosophy to this "escape"? Could Santayana's later philosophy be the naturalistic version of tracing the Plotinian thread out of the labyrinth, a version purged of Plotinus' moralistic metaphysics and with its myth of the descending emanation of the supernatural into nature inverted to become the ascent of spirit from the realm of matter?

Santayana's Ideal in Platonism and the Spiritual Life I turn now to Platonism and the Spiritual Life, written a decade after Santayana's response to Fuller. Santayana scholars tend to neglect this monograph for some puzzling reason, since I find it one of the most lucid statements of his thought, something of an enchiridion to the Realms of Being.411 411

At least see John McCormick's rather dismissive remarks in his George Santayana: A Biography, p. 268. For Platonism and the Spiritual Life as an enchiridion or "handbook"

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Coming as it did after Scepticism and Animal Faith and appearing simultaneously with The Realm of Essence, it offered at the time an important link between those opening works in Santayana's mature system and The Realm of Spirit, the concluding volume of the series, not destined to appear until some thirteen years later. In other words, at the time of its appearance, Platonism and the Spiritual Life offered a crucial as well as succinct overview of the spiritual upshot of Realms of Being. As in the earlier essay on Plotinus, Santayana begins with a critique of a fumbled interpretation, this time by Dean Inge, who had described Platonism as "a firm belief in absolute and eternal values as the most real things in the universe.”412 As we have seen, "value" for Santayana refers to something as it stands in contingent relationship to various human desires, and so does not express at all well the eternal characters of Plato's eid. Plato was willing to assert the eternal worth of the Forms for the soul because he thought the nature of the universe relatively fixed and eternal, a fact which we now know not to be true. Secondly, Plato had conceived his Forms as causes, which for Santayana was a confession of faith in magic, since their power to make other things behave derived solely from their inward character of being. The true locus of casual power he identified with matter, conceived along the lines of a dynamic flux. However much he respected matter as the only source of existence, Santayana did not find in it any reassuring endorsement of an "absolute and eternal" set of values. On the contrary, contingency and conflict, waste and annihilation abound in nature. Given that death is the one "absolute" the live creature faces, the realm of matter might well have been that "labyrinth of evil" Santayana had spoken of earlier.413 Nevertheless, natural piety insists that without matter neither animal, psyche nor the embodiment of essence could exist. Thus the problem of the spiritual life is how is it possible, given that nature is not fixed and essences are impotent. The failure of Inge's effort to reassert the contemporary value of Platonism provoked Santayana to explore the permanent possibility of the spiritual life without it. The essay had in fact begun with this challenge: "One of the great things past is Platonism, and one of the great things always possible is the spiritual life" (psl, 1).

of Santayana's later philosophy see my article "Santayana's Sage: The Disciplines of Aesthetic Enlightenment," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, XXXIII, No. 2, p. 332 f. By describing the work as an enchiridon, I am not only thinking of its similarity to the "handbooks" of Epictetus, Augustine, and Erasmus, but of other short, major summaries of a philosopher's thought such as Spinoza's Treatise on the Improvement of the Mind or Leibniz's Monadology. 412 Quoted in Platonism and the Spiritual Life, p. 2. Hereafter cited in the text as psl. 413 In fact in this essay he describes it as "barbarous and in indefinite flux" (psl, 33).

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Actually, Santayana does not see Plato as a genuine champion of the spiritual life at all. He quite correctly describes Plato as from first to last a political thinker. "To this descendent of Solon," says Santayana, "the universe could never be anything but a crystal case to hold the jewel of a Greek city" (psl, 27).414 His metaphysics, according to Santayana, was a sublimated and poetized mythology reflecting Greek morals. On the other hand, in Plotinus, for whom the political realm was a gesture and an afterthought, one finds a perfect expression of what the spiritual life is because it made the act of contemplation, the "flight of the alone to the Alone," the central theme of its system, to which, as we have noted, Santayana paid the highest of compliments.415 As Santayana put it, the political world for Plotinus was a mere "barnyard" compared to the fortunes of the soul (psl, 25). Thus the spiritual life for Plotinus was not a "compensation" for frustrated political hopes, as it was for Plato. "Pure spiritual life cannot be something compensatory, a consolation for having missed more solid satisfactions," comments Santayana, "it should be rather the flower of all satisfactions, in which satisfaction becomes free from care, selfless, and wholly actual, and in that inward sense, eternal" (psl, 29). The underlying drive of Platonic spirituality, ers, is replaced with the condition of what Santayana calls being "truly emancipated and enlightened" (psl, 29). The spiritual life is the "disintoxication" from the moral life, the world of "values," not its sublimated fulfillment, according to Santayana. The function of pure intelligence becomes "to see such things as come its way under the form of eternity," which is to say as essences considered apart from their existence, truth, import or history (psl, 33). Though spirituality arises from material conditions, including such moral virtues as "concentration of thought, indifference to fortune and reputation, warmth of temperament (because spirit cannot burn clear except at high temperature)," nevertheless "when once aroused, it does not look back in that direction" (psl, 38). In its purified state, spirit achieves "self-annihilation" (psl, 40). The spiritual life for Santayana cannot be based on the ultimate fulfilment of the erotic desire of the good since it aims at the overcoming of all desire for liberation, that is, enlightenment.

414

For those who insist on thinking of Plato as primarily a metaphysician, some attention should be given to the likelihood that the tetrology beginning with Timaeus was broken off in mid-sentence in its second work, Critias, so that Plato could undertake his longest work, Laws. 415 Ennead VI.9.11, the famous conclusion of the Enneads. Santayana says, "In the unclouded, synthetic believing mind of Plotinus, this chastened mythology [i.e. Plato's] crystalized into the most beautiful of systems" (psl, 23, italics added). This is no idle compliment.

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Although Santayana wishes to speak of the life of spirit in this purely positive sense, in terms of liberation, yet he is willing to acknowledge two ways in which it can still maintain an orientation to the world of existence, one by bearing, as it were, the scars of its birth, and the other involving a selfless and somewhat icy tenderness as it looks down from its liberated heights. With regard to the first, Santayana gives a somewhat extraordinary and, I suspect, confessional description. He says: Were any world perfect ... its spirit would view it with the same contemplative satisfaction with which it views any pure essence that spontaneously engages its attention. It would not, in respect to that perfect world, be harassed by remorse, as it must be in an imperfect world where it counts the cost of existence and considers the dreadful sufferings which plagued it like a nightmare, before something beautiful and good could appear for even a moment. I say remorse because such is the feeling that comes over me when I remember the travail in which, at least in man, the spirit has had to endure in bringing its better life to birth: but the spirit itself has no guilt in the matter; it was caught in a vice; and it may overlook that terrible gestation when at last it reaches the open and rewards itself with an hour of freedom and gladness. (psl, 51)

As in the earlier essay on Plotinus, Santayana insists that the aim of spirit is not to rebuke the world for the darkness in it, but to gaze instead at the stars. The Gnostic who condemns the world as evil and who dwells upon that fact has merely transported the moral distractions of existence into the world of spirit, thereby spoiling its own natural radiance and joy with a halo of sadness and recrimination that could—and should—have been left behind. The other response of spirit when it has achieved detachment is not blank indifference, but "joy" in anything when approached in "simplicity," that is, without any "ulterior interest." ... in other words, purity comes from detaching the thing seen and loved from the world that besets and threatens it and attaching it to the spirit to which it is an eternal possession. But this thing eternally possessed is not the thing as the world knows and prizes it; it is not the person, nation, or religion as it asserts and flaunts itself, in a mortal anxiety to be dominant; it is only that thing in its eternal essence, out of which the stress and doubt of existence have wholly passed. It is that thing dead, immortal, its soul restored, as Plotinus would have said, to the soul of the universe where, together with all other souls, it has always been contained in its purity and perfection. But the truth of it there is not the fact of it here; and therefore the world, though the spirit loves it far more truly and tenderly than it loves itself, is chilled and rebuked by that look of divine love, which, if it were heeded, would transmute its whole life and change it from what

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it so passionately and cruelly is, in time, into that which the spirit sees it to be in eternity. (psl, 53-54)416

Thus the joy and tenderness with which spirit sees the world are due to spirit's ability to see the things of the world purely, as essences, and not as the mortal, suffering beings they are, caught up in the turbid flood of existence. Spirit apprehends things in the light of its own actuality: "awareness, intelligence, reconciliation" (psl, 56). It welcomes the essences that come its way without hunger or desire or with the sense that better views are to be had elsewhere. As Dante's Picardia says in her eternal place in the lowly lunar heaven, "There is no envy in these spheres" (psl, 75).417 Thus Santayana offers us a naturalistic mysticism, a "way out of the labyrinth of evil" that releases spirit to its free home, the infinite wilderness of essence where things may be selflessly possessed in their eternity and immediacy. Mysticism, Santayana observes, means silence because it involves "the negation of every human wish and idea" (psl, 77). Names still carry "animal faith" with them, and so any discourse about "essence" may permit it to be overheard as a "temporal fact"; "Silence is therefore imperative, if the mystic has any conscience" (psl, 78). The only danger is that the mystic confuses his ecstasy for a higher reality or makes ecstasy itself his object. The first is a mistake in truth and the second in substitution of essence for the will, which must be renounced to be transcended. In renouncing words, Santayana says, we know them as symbols only; the straight but difficult way, in the words of San Juan de la Cruz is "Nothing, Nothing, Nothing" (psl, 81). Spirit is nothing and empties itself into nothing. The discipline of the spiritual life is "disillusion," a term Santayana had used from the very beginning of his philosophical development.418 Positively, this means that we experience the world as much as possible with the sense of "the ultimate in the immediate" (psl, 83). Anxiety must be effectively banished, initially by all pragmatic means to achieve a temporary island of relative stability in the flux of existence, and ultimately by the concentration of spirit 416

Santayana's stress of the words "here" and "there" is an echo of Plotinian language, "here" being the world of nature and "there" () being the divine world of Nous contemplating the Forms. Compare psl, p. 64 and refer to the full text of the letter to Robert Bridges cited above. 417 Paradiso III. This is the sphere of those who, though dedicated to a life of worship, have had to break their vows and return to worldly life, hence the significance of the mottled discoloration of the moon reflects their lives of "blended virtues." After speaking, Picardia recedes singing, "vanishing like a heavy thing downward in deep water" (123). 418 See "A Religion of Disillusion" in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion and the much later, crucial essay "Ultimate Religion" in Obiter Scripta.

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apart from the urgencies and anguishes of the animal host. Thus morality actually presents a serious danger to Santayana insofar as it may interject its "distractions" into the spiritual life—the heaven of Christianity, did it exist, might effectively choke the life of spirit with its perfect and pervasive moral industriousness. In other words, in a world where the Good and the Beautiful perfectly combine everywhere, it is far more likely that the Beautiful will be eclipsed by the Good and remain unseen for what it is. Romantic pantheism presents a similar problem, infected as it is with a subliminal need to moralize beauty. Wordsworth, for example, could not effectively free his spirit, struggling as it did "to wash the world white and clean, adopt it and set it up for a respectable person" (psl, 85). But, says Santayana, "The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded for ever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these the spirit blooms timidly and struggles to the light among the thorns" (psl, 85). Wordsworth's problem was that he could not banish the world and "Nothing is able to banish the world except contempt for the world, and this was not in him" (psl, 85). This then is Santayana's challenge: the condition of the spiritual life is to leave moral concerns behind; if the world is held in the light, it is the in cold light of the emptiness of essence under the sky of eternity. But Santayana's discipline of liberation, like its Plotinian model, is a discipline of ascent. The irony, of course, is that Santayana has utterly rejected any Platonic metaphysics that would make this ascent one toward reality. His "ascent" is a flight that takes off from terra firma (or rather, given his view of matter, terra infirma) and must return to it. Indeed, it never really leaves the ground. It is more of a shift of attention away from the path before us toward the stars above. Like that of Plotinus, Santayana's askesis requires perfection of inward concentration that ends in ecstatic union where simplicity of vision coincides perfectly with the simplicity of its object. But that is where Santayana's discussions leave us, both in the breviary of Platonism and the Spiritual Life and the conclusion of The Realm of Spirit.

The Descent of Spirit and Santayana's Dilemma The trouble with the mystic ascent, however, is that the ladder is never really pulled up. There is the descent, the reawakening. This troubled Plotinus deeply. “Many times it has happened,” he says, “lifted out of the body into myself, becoming external to all other things and self-encentered, beholding a marvelous beauty ... yet there comes the moment of descent ... I ask myself how

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it happens that I can now be descending...”419 For Santayana this is no more than the trough of the wave which we ride through until the next crest, and our moral concerns are those of keeping afloat and navigating the waters as best we may. The moral life is not abandoned at all, merely temporarily bracketed in precious moments of illumination. And it may be any kind of moral life, though Santayana recommends one that lives with piety toward the real natural harmonies that can exist between the rhythms of nature and our own bodies. Still, in the end, the moral life and the spiritual life have little to say to each other: the spiritual life offers itself to the moral life as a potentially welcome distraction; the moral life threatens to disturb the spiritual life, even while making it possible in the first place. The more the two are brought into harmony, it seems, the greater the danger that the spiritual life will become confused with the moral life—with "Platonism" being the unhappy result. Is this a necessary conclusion? Or has Santayana presented us with something akin to Fuller's dilemma, that is, a false dilemma based upon extremes that are artificial abstractions? First, Santayana does not claim that the spiritual life has an absolute demand upon all of us. There are a plurality of values for living beings and what he has to say about the spiritual life only has bearing upon those for whom this has a positive value in the first place. Others may be perfectly happy wandering the “labyrinth” without concern for an escape. While his moral and political writings may speak to those individuals, Santayana recognizes that his ulterior philosophy of the spiritual life is not addressed to them at all. He is a contemplative speaking to contemplatives. In this dialogue, however, there may be a response that diverges from Santayana's own conclusions without violating the premises. Second, there is some difficulty with the opposition between these two lives Santayana presents. There is something unsettling in the attempt to deal with the reality of evil (not the conceptual "problem of evil") by relegating it to the inherent plurality of values the natural world spawns and offering an aesthetic alternative that, from its own perspective, is value-neutral. Must an aesthetic attitude toward the world be forced to choose between the view that art's sole function is to serve morality or be limited to focus on pure form regardless of content? To use an example, Goya's Third of May, 1808, which shows Spanish patriots being executed by a French firing squad, or Picasso's Guernica, also a protest against the horrors of war, can both be viewed in the gallery in terms of their "pure form," that is, in terms of their rhythm, balance, color, use of space and so on. And one school of aesthetics would say this is really what constitutes them as "art," whatever their content may refer to. But a richer aesthetics would say that these works evoke through their aesthetic form 419

Ennead IV.8.1. McKenna translation.

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the clarified meaning of the evils they portray, a clarification that may not have been lucidly present even to those who suffered the events directly. If one beheld a Greek tragedy while remaining oblivious to the moral content of the play, one would miss the meaning of the aesthetic experience.420 The evocation of these meanings enables us to engage in a contemplative response to the world in all its aspects, including the moral. In other words, the aesthetic attitude can contemplate an "essence" as a meaning that has been purified or clarified via catharsis. And this may result in our ability to exist in the world itself with an enhanced understanding and vision of things. In other words, one of the aims of contemplative liberation may be to teach us a way of wisdom, an enlightened way of life, that is thoroughly integrated, not tangential to, daily moral practice. The question that needs to be posed to Santayana is: Given the presuppositions of his ontology, can there be a method of liberation that offers a more inclusive response to the moral life and the nature of the existence of the natural world than the one Santayana himself offered? Can the spiritual life be directed toward a compassionate, mindful awareness of the world without thereby developing a moralism antithetical to the spiritual life.

The Buddhist Ideal of Compassionate Insight The Buddhist tradition may offer an important example for Santayana's philosophy, sharing as it does a similar view of the physical world as a turbid flux of "dependent co-arising" or "inter-being" (pratitya-samutpada) which is fundamentally "empty" (unya) and so pervaded with transitory instability, anxiety, and suffering (dukkha).421 Buddhism does not take a Gnostic view of the world as inherently "evil," though at times it can dramatize its negative aspects rather excessively.422 Nevertheless, the proper pragmatic Buddhist response is: If the world is like this, then what can we do about it? Like 420

The idea that art allows us to look at the "clarified meaning" of events that otherwise may remain dark is what I take to be the best understanding of the term katharsis, whatever Aristotle himself may have intended. Art, like tragedy, gives us emotional as well as intellectual clarification of meaning and value. The contrast between Santayana's formalist aesthetics and Dewey's aesthetics that integrates form and content is the theme of my essay, "Santayana's Unbearable Lightness of Being," Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society 11 (1993). 421 Though dukkha can often carry the primary sense of "suffering," it can also mean "instability" and "impermanence." Thus the experience of happiness or joy, though certainly not "sorrowful" or painful at the time is nevertheless dukkha when understood clearly. 422 The Buddha's famous "Fire Sermon" being one noted example of this tendency.

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Santayana, Buddhist philosophy sees an intelligent or "awakened" (bodhi) response to the nature of existence which aims at liberation by clarity of insight (prajña) into the fundamentals (or dharmas) and their behavior.423 A great deal of attention is paid in Buddhist practice to training the mind to see beyond the apparent substantiality of ordinary experience and recognizing how objects and "self" arise functionally as products of change, desire, and inherited causal dispositions (karma).424 With enough skill, this can effect the dissipation of desire born of illusion, the frantic "thirst" or "grasping" after things (tanha) that gives rise to the existential "problem of evil," the reality of suffering. Not only does this dispel any false notion of the substantial self-identity of "objects," which are ways of designating events (even the elements or dharmas of the world are "empty," unya, said Nagarjuna), but the self-identity of "essences," even of the non-existential sort like Santayana's, suffers the same fate.425 In other words, the critique of a Buddhist philosopher like Nagarjuna would be that to assert the non-existential identity of essences is still due to a degree of "attachment" or grasping, and when this is given up the essence is neither identical nor non-identical and can be penetrated with an act of liberating insight (prajña). When all things can be seen in their emptiness, their clear but momentary "suchness" (tathata), then nirvana and samsara coincide.426 Liberation is not a rejection of the world for the sake of some transcendent "there." Nirvana is not a "place" (as if fire went "somewhere" when it was put out) but a "way"; not a "what" but a "how." How does one behold the world and respond to it when one has "passed through" the empty nature of desire? 423

Dharma has a wide range of meanings (comparable to those of the Greek term logos): its core meaning is "that which upholds," and so is extended to "laws" or moral customs which uphold society, the laws of the universe, the basic elements of the universe, the elements of self, the expression of those laws in teachings, and specifically the teachings of the Buddha. 424 This part of Buddhist teaching is called "Abidharma." 425 Nagarjuna (ca. 150 CE) was one of the main philosophical exponents of the Mahayana school known as "the Middle Way" or Madhyamika. By insisting on the emptiness of the dharmas (taken in whatever sense), Nagarjuna moved Buddhist philosophy from the dogmatic factionalism into which it had lapsed back to its original therapeutic mission. See Frederick Streng's fine study, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning. 426 Samsara is the "wheel" of existence of ordinary life lived in ignorance, and so subject to the demands of causality and grasping – the "Realm of Matter" in Santayana's terminology as experienced by biological organisms. Santayana puts all morality into this sphere. By showing that nirvana, the realm of liberated insight (Santayana's Realm of Spirit) is "empty" and so nowhere, it is nothing else than the world, but experienced in terms of its emptiness and so freed of its existential power. Indeed, the liberating nature of insight (prajña) is that the world stands out far more clearly than before.

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"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form," says the Heart Sutra, but this insight does not terminate in pessimism, fatalism, scepticism or nihilism.427 Rather, it leads to "tranquility" or the extinction of dukkha (i.e., "nirvana") which is also positively described at times as "bliss" (ananda), a condition that also involves the response of compassion (karuna) for all sentient beings, at least in the later Mahayana traditions stemming from the Prajñaparamita literature.428 Buddhism does not seek to turn away from this world to another, better one. Rather, it is concerned with a careful way of "handling" this world without getting burned by it. In this approach contemplative insight and practical action are not opposed by mutually sustaining. The Buddha himself presented the Eightfold Path precisely as a "skilful way" of passing through this world, a moral discipline that was fundamentally connected with the spiritual life. The eight parts of the path are classified in three main groups. One consists of three virtues of right conduct: kindness and moderation in (1) speech, (2) actions and (3) livelihood. Another includes three virtues of right mental discipline: (4) building habits of endeavor, (5) clarity of awareness, and (6) meditative concentration. The last has two virtues of right wisdom: (7) intelligent understanding and (8) "right thought." All work together, as the eight spokes of a wheel, to keep it moving smoothly.429 But it is this last, "right thought," that I will briefly describe because it offers, I believe, a significant alternative to the severe antimoralism of Santayana's conception of the spiritual life while still accepting most of his analysis of the nature of existence. It shows us a "contemplative ethics of compassion" that does not fall into Santayana's conception of the moral life as a "distraction" to the spiritual life. Right thought (samm sankappa) is included with right understanding (samm ditthi) as a necessary aspect of the nature of wisdom. "Right understanding" involves deep insight into the true nature of the world, especially with respect to the problem of suffering — the "labyrinth of evil," as Santayana would say. It is a strictly cognitive ability. "Right thought," however, is a discipline that works on meditative beholding suffering beings with compassion. 427

The Heart Sutra is a short but central Mahayana text containing a synopsis of the prajñaparamita teaching. "Form" (rupa) is actually more what we would call "substance" or even "body." See Buddhist Texts Through the Ages, ed. Edward Conze (Philosophical Library, 1954), pp. 152-53 and Conze's commentary in Buddhist Wisdom Texts. 428 These texts were the product of various thinkers in India between 200 BCE and 400CE. They are critical of the earlier ideal of the enlightened sage (arhat) who simply rejects the world for his own salvation and put forward the new ideal of the "awakened being of compassion," the bodhisattva, who turns toward the suffering beings of the world with enlightened understanding. 429 For a discussion of the Eightfold Path, here summarized, see Walpola Ruhala, What the Buddha Taught, 2nd edition (Grove Press, 1974), Ch. V.

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It is not easy to say that this is a moral or aesthetic or emotional ability more than a "cognitive" one, since it also involves insight into the true nature of things. But it focuses upon those aspects of the world that help us attain compassionate awareness. It is an integral part of the nature of wisdom to cultivate benevolent selfless love (metta) with respect to all beings and compassion (karuna) for all that are suffering. Buddhism believes that our daily actions, including those that are called "moral," spring from the sorts of beliefs we have which in turn generate desires which create the "objects" to which we become attached (including the "object" of the self). Attention to our basic beliefs and a clear understanding of how they constitute the objects of our world—and so of our lives—is a central concern for Buddhism. As Walpola Ruhala says, "All thoughts of selfish desire, ill-will, hatred, and violence are the result of lack of wisdom—in all spheres of life, whether individual, social or political.”430 The way to overcome dukkha is to develop insights and daily habits that generate actions that do not lead to grasping, violence, and so to more suffering. All eight parts of the Eightfold Path cooperate and mutually sustain each other. Contemplation and practice work together to generate a life that is "liberated." And this may be contrasted to Santayana's philosophy which tends to keep the spiritual and moral lives disjointed or, at best, irrelevant to each other. The Buddhist discipline of right thought in particular might reveal a more functional connection between these two ends and so exhibit an alternative to Santayana's response to "the labyrinth of evil." Right understanding involves daily attentiveness to features of the world that might awaken the negative passions of grasping or hatred and beholding them instead with gentle but egoless benevolence attended by penetratingly clear understanding into their fundamental nature. It involves daily meditation practices that develop methods of beholding other beings so that feelings of benevolence and compassion are at the forefront of consciousness.431 By contemplating others compassionately, one is not only more disposed to act in a compassionate manner toward them but in a way that evokes the ability of others to seek compassionate, liberated wisdom. For example, a great deal of obscurity of perception can arise from conscious or unconscious fears we may have toward things. Beholding those things as "essences" not only allows us to see them more clearly but to transcend our fear of them. Compassion or metta means seeing things as they truly are; this can only be done when the spirit is at peace. Another example is the meditation practice that seeks to cultivate enduring states of benevolent 430

What the Buddha Taught, p. 49. Metta or benevolence is the first of the four "brahma-viharas" or "sacred houses" of karuna (compassion), mudita (sympathetic joy), and upekha (equinimity), these latter growing out of the cultivation of the first. 431

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compassion by developing habits that focus on remembering acts of benevolence one has done or which have been done to one, gradually extending these thoughts outward toward recollection of acts of benevolence others have done to others and so on. By so doing, one comes to focus one's conscious thoughts regularly on being well-disposed to others in the world.432 As the Mahayana sages say, all beings are potentially the Buddha.433 The path towards that goal of compassionate freedom lies in cultivating habits of "paying attention.”434 To put these ideas into more Santayanan terms, the Realm of Essence may be constituted of an infinite number of essences, any of which may offer themselves to spirit as an object of contemplation. But some of those essences may be conducive toward leading a lift of compassionate benevolence while others may be conducive toward quite the opposite sort of actions. That is, there are a number of essences relating to aspects of compassion, and by disciplining ourselves to focus on these as they might be instantiated in the realm of existence, we can develop a mode of conduct that is at once "ethical" without involving "distraction" from the spiritual life. Indeed, by concentrating on such essences one might develop a mode of life that was even more highly conducive to the spiritual life than the one offered by Santayana himself, which suffers from a fluctuation between acting in the existential, moral life and intermittently escaping into the realm of spirit for its "hour of gladness." The sorts of essences spirit contemplates do not have equally neutral consequences for our existential psychic life, and the concern which essences might be contemplated is not merely a question for the animal psyche, but for spirit as well. In particular, a life that is in harmony with spirit's ideal of liberation and persistently conducive to it, should be preferred by both the psyche and spirit over those lives in which the two do not sustain each other or, worse, in which spirit and psyche inhibit each other and are at best disconnected. In this sense, the Buddhist life of contemplative compassion offers a significant alternative to Santayana's conception of the spiritual life without fundamentally altering the premises from which Santayana's later philosophy sets out.435 432

Compare Dante's purification before entering the Garden of Eden at the end of Purgatario: he bathes in the river of Lethe to forget his sins and then in the river of Eunoë to remember all the good deeds he did and which were done to him. (Purgartario XXVIII, XXXI). 433 To explore how this is carried out in practice, see Sharon Salzberg's Loving-Kindness (Shambala Publications, 1995). Salzberg is an acclaimed American Buddhist teacher specializing in this particular form of meditation practice. 434 Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness, p.192. 435 In this sense, James Gouinlock's attempt to present a conception of the spiritual life based on the more Aristotelian views of Santayana's Life of Reason – and those of

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I offer this as an example only—that we may see that there is more connection between the spiritual and the moral life than Santayana was willing to grant. Santayana thought of the moral life in western terms, as a struggle of will, and so an effort reaching toward an end, rather than as a shadow that follows us because we have turned toward the light. In concluding, I will reaffirm that I think what Santayana has offered the future is an exemplary conception of philosophy in service to the spiritual life. His own rendition of this philosophy bears understandably the scars of its birth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which saw the shattering of so many ideals and comforting illusions. No doubt it also bears the scars of its "terrible gestation" in Santayana's own life, which he only obliquely acknowledges. But I do not think that we need to dismiss the moral life from the spiritual or to condemn its presence in spirit as regrettable "remorse" tainting the otherwise happy intuition of essence. Compassion and benevolence are part of the wisdom of spirit, if handled properly. As the Japanese poet Issa said on the death of his child, This world of dew is a world of dew, and yet, and yet ... .

Aristotle himself – does not present the strong counter-example to Santayana's later philosophy that Buddhism does, in my view, because it introduces a sense of naturalistic teleology that the later Santayana clearly abjures.

REFLECTIONS ON GEORGE SANTAYANA, AESTHETICS, AND THE ANCIENT QUARREL BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY TILL KINZEL

Aesthetics is definitely a tricky philosophical subject. Age-old questions such as “what is art?” do not seem to allow of a meaningful universal answer that can gain the consent of everyone who thinks about it. It is very likely indeed that the impossibility to reach such a consensus may be connected to the very subject matter of aesthetics, being tied as it is to the individual’s apparatus of sense perception and thus ineluctably subjective and historically conditioned. Aesthetics is a distinctly modern “discipline” of philosophy and as such an inquiry into the beautiful and the ugly by way of its sense perception. It does, however, also include reflections on the relation of aesthetics to other fields of inquiry and especially to the realm of society with which art is also connected. In discussing philosophically pertinent aspects of aesthetics and poetics I suggest we keep in my mind certain fundamental distinctions or debates that have their origin in classical antiquity and, especially, Greek philosophy. I refer here to some concepts or doctrines, as the case may be, of Plato and Aristotle. Concerning Plato, the philosophically most challenging formulation is one attributed to Socrates in the course of the famous discussion of poetry in book X of Plato’s Republic. Socrates speaks here of “the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Republic 607b), implying, firstly, that there is indeed such a quarrel; that, secondly, it is of some consequence; and, thirdly, that it has been going on for a very long time.436 This fact already hints at the possible intractability of the problem—since it is an old quarrel, how can we hope to lay the argument at rest? Implicitly, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry may also turn out not to be easily laid at rest, because it is a quarrel resulting from 436

I note in passing that the Putnams took the title for their paper on Santayana, mostly dealing with The Last Puritan, from this phrase, without, however, attempting to answer the questions implicit in their title. See Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam, “The Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy”, in: Bulletin of the Santayana Society 15 (1996), p. 1-14.

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different answers to an existential questions not allowing of harmonization. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry may turn out to be no less than a perennial quarrel.437 The quarrel between poetry and philosophy is, in this interpretation, a quarrel about the best way of life, about which way of life, which interpretation of the world attendant to these ways of life, is superior. In other words: It is not a purely academic question the answer to which does not matter one way or the other that is at stake here. As Socrates famously said, “the argument is not about just any question, but about the way one should live” (Republic 352 d; transl. Allan Bloom). To stake out the various and conflicting claims of poetry and philosophy entails an answer to the question of what constitutes the good life or at least a proposal of how to interpret the question of the good life. Implied in all this is, of course, the question of the rationality and justifiability of the respective ways of life that are founded either on a poetical of philosophical understanding of the world. Thus the quarrel between philosophy and poetry becomes of crucial importance if philosophy is understood, or understands itself, as a way of life. Taking the Platonic-Socratic question from the Republic as a starting point, one might well wonder whether there are not ways to integrate the poet’s and the philosopher’s vision of the world in such a way as to arrive at a more complete account of reality than either of them would seem to permit. If the relation of philosophy and poetry can be interpreted or understood as a quarrel this of course entails the fact that there is something to quarrel about. Though it is possible that the quarrel turns around nothing—this would be the case if it rested on a misinterpretation of each of the parties to the argument—I do not think this very likely. In fact, it is hard to see what controversy, which quarrel could be more existentially important or more urgent—time is short—than the question concerning the good life, which in its own turn is somehow connected to the question of the nature of the cosmos. Thus to pose the question whether the cosmos is ultimately good or evil, a place where man can feel at home or where he finds himself willy-nilly but without ever finding happiness, is the question that needs to be addressed if one is to live fully and soberly in the presence of the tragedy and comedy of life.438 437

See for the whole question the two incisive accounts by Stanley Rosen, The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry, London: Routledge, 1988, p. 1-26; and Plato’s Republic. A Study, New Haven: Yale, 2005, 352-376. 438 But cf. Irving Singer, George Santayana, Literary Philosopher, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 76, on Santayana’s view that life is a flux, therefore neither tragic nor comic. However, true as this may be sub specie aeternitatis, human life does not in fact transcend the level of tragedy and comedy. Cf. as well the view expounded by Caleb Wetherbee as one of the possbile alternatives open to human faith, namely that of

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George Santayana is a philosopher who seems to be particularly pertinent to this inquiry, for he clearly partakes of both realms, the realm of poetry or literature and the realm of philosophy. Santayana also clearly senses the need for an “apology for art” by proving “that art belongs to the Life of Reason”439, for art is closely allied to “bewitchedment” or ecnhachntment and therefore in certain respects dangerous: “Intoxication is a sad business, at least for a philosopher”, Santayana says. It is thus, from the standpoint of philosophy, a necessity of the highest order to deal with the quarrel between poetry and philosophy and to try to answer the (implicit and explicit) objections poetry makes to philosophy. One can find an indication for this as well in some remarks in Santayana’s novel The Last Puritan, where the narrator reflects on the role of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in forming a young person’s view of the world, thereby showing the need to intellectually, and that means, philosophically think through what is poetically presented to the mind and heart of a young man who still is able to wonder about the world: “What better theme than Hamlet for orchestration by young emotions, when the world still surprises us for being so wrong and transports us by being so beautiful? Hamlet provokes speculation, and without speculation, without wonder raising afresh the most baffling ultimate questions, the fervid confabulations of youth would not be complete.” Thus, reflection on Hamlet is intimately tied up with nothing less than ultimate questions—precisely the questions philosophy seeks to address. Santayana then goes on to liken philosophy metaphorically to chivalrous pursuits, giving it a sublime importance in the battle of life with its dark prospects: “Philosophy is a romantic field into which chivalrous young souls must canter out bravely, to challenge the sinister shadows of death and failure. The sublimity if the issue establishes a sort of sporting fellowship even among opposite minds, and the green battlefield draws them together more than their contrary colours can avail to separate them”.440 Poetry would thus seem to draw at least the young ones (for they are at issue at this point in Santayana’s novel) into a philosophizing that faces up to the beauty and the ugliness of life and which is, as a noble fight for understanding, by nature edifying, though, it would seem, beyond tragedy and comedy. the “broad and obvious path of heathen philosophy”, in George Santayana, The Last Puritan. A Memoir In the Form of a Novel, London: Constable, 1935, p. 234: “Your life will be a tragic or a comic episode in a universal hurly-burly of atoms or laws or energies or illusions.” 439 George Santayana, The Life of Reason, New York: Prometheus Books, 1998, p. 363. Cf. Irving Singer, George Santayana, Literary Philosopher, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 177. 440 George Santayana, The Last Puritan. A Memoir In the Form of a Novel, London: Constable, 1935, p. 286.

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The concept of poetry gains further importance for the question of the good life, because Santayana for one explicitly links poetry to religion, and religion is surely one of the most existentially important elements of and forces in human life. Santayana’s statement that “poetry is called religion when it intervenes on life”441 is of necessity highly controversial. For Santayana methodically denies the truth value that religions claim (must claim, if they take themselves seriously) for themselves. The rejection by Santayana of the “horrid claim of ideas to literal truth” leads him to look with a more tolerant eye on religion than would be otherwise possible for him to do.442 Abstracting from the many elements of religion that cannot be regarded as poetry, Santayana nevertheless accords poetry as religion or religion as poetry a role in human life that should not be underestimated. Religion, according to Santayana, “pursues rationality through imagination”,443 i. e., through what is also essential for poetry. Religion represents both “the conditions and the aims of life” poetically, as Santayana goes on to say, yet “this poetry tends to arrogate to itself literal truth and moral authority, neither of which it possesses.”444 Especially in light of recent discussions of the virulence of political theology445, of the necessity to take political theology into account for understanding the political and cultural situation of our world, highlighting the poetic elements of political theologies may help to understand a crucial feature of these. For if the beliefs of people in thrall to political-theological radicalisms can be described as poetic in this sense it is immediately clear why attempts at refutation in the manner of rational enlightenment (will) prove mostly futile and cannot be counted on in the current battle of ideas. Getting somewhat more concrete, I want to discuss some ideas of two thinkers of the twentieth century who reached quite different conclusions about this, the topic at hand, but might still be profitably compared so as to further elucidate the inherent problems connect with a philosophical theory of aesthetics and its relation to democracy. Both thinkers, as it happens, are connected to the Spanish-speaking world, albeit in a somewhat eccentric way – George Santayana as a representative of a dialogue between Latin and Anglo-Saxon traditions and Nicolás Gómez Dávila a Latin American steeped in European 441

George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957, p. v. 442 See George Santayana, “A General Confession”, in: Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of George Santayana, Evanston-Chicago: Northwestern University, 1940, p. 29. 443 George Santayana, The Life of Reason, p. 182. 444 George Santayana, The Life of Reason, p. 183. 445 See in this regard my essay “Politische Theologie” , in: Sezession Nr. 11 (October 2005), p. 34-39.

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high culture with not much to say in favour of American culture (both North and South). As the latter is still widely unknown—in fact, he has been fittingly described as “un ilustre desconocido”, “a famous unknown” by José Miguel Oviedo446 —I will say a few more words about him. However, Gómez Dávila is now slowly beginning to receive the attention due his philosophical importance.447 Gómez Dávila, a Colombian writer, thinker and self-proclaimed “reactionary” who understood his thought as a thorough-going critique of modernity, died in 1994 at the age of 79, did not write many books, and those he did write, were printed in small numbers, sometimes only for private circulation, and consisted mainly of thousands and thousands of aphorisms, or what he called “glosses to an implicit text”, apparently following no principle of order and dealing with all kinds of topics in the fields of theology, politics, history, philosophy, culture, art, and literature.448 It is in the nature of Gómez Dávila’s aphoristic philosophising that he does not engage in a thorough critical confrontation with other thinkers (for which it would have been necessary to write something like treatises or critical commentaries), and there is, in fact, no direct reference to the works of Santayana in his writings. However, we know that Gómez Dávila’s close friend, the Colombian philosopher, Mario Laserna Pinzón once met Santayana in 1948 and may well have talked about this to Gómez Dávila at the time.449 Furthermore, a look at the catalogue of Gómez Dávila’s immensely large library (about 30.000 volumes) compiled after his death reveals that he had in his 446 José Miguel Oviedo, Breve historia del ensayo hispanoamericano, Madrid: , 1991, p. 150-151. 447 See as the first monograph study Till Kinzel, Nicolás Gómez Dávila. Parteigänger verlorener Sachen, Schnellroda: Edition Antaios, ³2006 (with bibliography)as well as Till Kinzel, „Ein kolumbianischer Guerillero der Literatur: Nicolás Gómez Dávilas Ästhetik des Widerstands“, in: Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 1/2004, p. 87-107. Most of the scholarly work on Gómez Dávila so far has been done in German and Italian. 448 There are so far no English translations of his book, most have been translated into German, and there are a few Italian and French translations. I here give merely the Spanish titles (editions) of his works. The Colombian publisher Villegas plans to bring out an English edition of Gómez Dávila’s “glosses”. The major works of Gómez Dávila are the following: Escolios a un texto implícito, 2 vol., Bogotá 1977; Escolios a un texto implícito. Selección, Bogotá 2001; Notas I, México 1954, Bogotá 2004; Nuevos Escolios a un texto implícitio, 2 vol., Bogotá 1986; „El reaccionario auténtico. Un ensayo inédito“, in: Revista Universidad de Antioquia No. 240, April-June 1995, p. 16-19; Sucesivos escolios a un texto implícito, Santafé de Bogotá 1992, Barcelona 2002; Textos I, Bogotá 1959, 2002. 449 Cf. Irving Singer, George Santayana, Literary Philosopher, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 10.

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possession some of the major works of Santayana.450 Even though we do not know which of these books Gómez Dávila studied in which intensity (I have not been to Colombia to look at his library, but those who have report that Gómez Dávila did not write or mark anything in the margins of his books), it is still significant that he would own a considerable selection of Santayana’s works. One could surmise that Nicolás Gómez did have quite some sympathy for certain aspects of Santayana’s political philosophy, especially its critical perspective on democratic mass society, the problems of twentieth century liberalism as well as his insistence on the importance of poetry as opposed to the vain attempt to solve the riddles of existence by means of science. Both Santayana and Gómez Dávila also recognize the positive effects of aristocratic values for culture, for, as Santayana remarks, “to abolish aristocracy […] would be to cut off the source from which all culture has hitherto flowed”.451 However, there were also serious differences, for in contrast to Santayana’s atheism on the basis of a residual traditional, yet non-practising Catholicism, Gómez Dávila was a devout and practising Catholic who, though in some respects a (methodical) sceptic (in the way that Hamann employed Humean scepticism to defend faith), was deeply critical of atheism as a dogmatic form of mind. However, it must also be said that Gómez Dávila actually preferred atheism to the smug and watered-down theologies of modern liberalism, infected by relativism and nihilism, and occasionally he liked to describe his own mindset as that of a pagan who believes in Jesus Christ452, whereas Santayana spoke of his “Catholic and pagan affinities”.453 For Gómez Dávila, the ineradicable strangeness of the world could not be made to go away, but had to be captured by means of a fractured kind of writing such as his aphorisms. He believed that all systems of thought had to be deceptive and would lead to philosophical dishonesty or at least to the

450

The following titles (editions) are listed: The Sense of Beauty 1896; Winds of Doctrine 1926; The Life of Reason 1936; Three Philosophical Poets 1935; The Last Puritan 1937; Egotism in German Literature 1940; Persons and Places 1944; The Idea of Christ in the Gospels 1946; Poems 1946; Dominations and Powers 1951; My Host the World 1953; The Letters 1955; Essays in Literary Criticism 1956; Character and Opinion in the United States (no year given). See the unpublished catalogue of the library of Gómez Dávila, p. 272. 451 George Santayana, The Life of Reason, p. 144. 452 Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito.Selección, Bogotá: Villegas, 2001, p. 113. 453 George Santayana, “Apologia pro mente sua”, in: Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of George Santayana, Evanston-Chicago: Northwestern University, 1940, p. 554.

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temptation to give up philosophy in favour of the system.454 Thus Gómez Dávila stressed the concreteness of things that had to be taken account of against the dangers of abstract reasoning. Gómez Dávila had a keen sense for the inevitably individual incarnation of human reality, and this slant towards concreteness and individuality also influenced the way Gómez Dávila thought about art and aesthetics as well as culture and politics. In the field of aesthetics this means that Gómez Dávila was strictly opposed to a system of aesthetics that would apply certain pre-defined principles to the understanding of works of art. An aesthetic theory or concept can only be legitimate if it takes as it starting point the individual works of art, and one should beware of all kinds of “principles”. A great artist is one who triumphs with his work of art regardless of the theory with which equipped one looks at it.455 Likewise critical intelligence with respect to literature is always a concrete intelligence derived from a long experience of reading and re-reading.456 Thus a proper aesthetic judgement in literature is of necessity a somewhat “elitist” thing, something to be developed only by the very few as opposed to the many fools who abound there as everywhere else. Literature is also, according to Gómez Dávila, a necessary counterweight to the spiritually numbing specialization in fields such as philosophy and to the self-misunderstanding of philosophy that calls itself analytical. An important part of Gómez Dávila’s aesthetic is the axiological notion of value judgements. These judgements cannot be dispensed with, if works of art are to be treated as works of art. Judgments in matters of art are not purely intellectual acts of analysis: “The work of art is not a mere artefact created for the purpose of giving us the opportunity to exercise our analytical faculties; it is, in fact, a kind of apparatus inciting us to make value judgments.”457 In order to make these value judgments it is necessary to have some notion of the beautiful and for this to exist beautiful art needs to be part of the life of men. Gómez Dávila criticizes museums precisely for the reason that they are the product of men who have no place for works of art neither in their homes nor their lives.458 454

In contrast, Santayana was clearly a systematic thinker. However, he introduces his system of philosophy quite ironically, explicitly distancing himself from any claims to universality or total knowledge, while taking his starting point for philosophizing in the middle of things surrounding him. See George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith, New York: Dover, 1955 (reprint 1923), p. v-x; 1. 455 Nicolás Gómez Dávila. Sucesivos escolios a un texto implícito, Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1992, p. 35. 456 Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito II, Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1977, p. 413. 457 Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito II, p. 5. 458 Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito II, p. 285.

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Interestingly, Santayana also regards museums as very dubious repositories of beauty, for they merely provide the historian, he says, with “the sediment which the stream of intuition in the past had deposited as it flowed”; possibly looking at works of art in a museum might awaken some “intuitions of the beautiful”, but the artists and poets will draw their inspiration from “the daily unintentional aspects of nature and action”.459 The beautiful has to be bound up with life, and this is why, as Santayana pithily remarks, an “artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.”460 Religion and poetry/aesthetics have this in common that they do not permit the notion of progress in any meaningful sense. Both have in themselves a kind of presence of perfection. The value of a work of art, its beauty, is ineluctable, it is not possible to explain it completely by reference to the circumstances of its production. All its ingredients are important but still not sufficient for a proper understanding of the work. The beautiful cannot be defined according to any theory that would then cover each and every phenomenon regarded as beautiful. Aesthetics means precisely that—the priority of perception over theory. Gómez Dávila, however, seeks to take into account the necessary subjectivity of the artist while also tying it to a nonsubjective axiology, a cosmos of values ultimately guaranteed by God’s creation of the cosmos itself. Beauty is therefore to be understood as a value, which, according to Gómez Dávila, does not have a history.461 A crucial difference between the two thinkers is the fact that both have a diametrically opposed view of Romanticism. Whereas Santayana is deeply critical of the Romantic attitude, Gómez Dávila extols Romanticism as a major precursor of reaction as he understands it. Romanticism for Gómez Dávila is an important anti-modern movement in the arts, attempting to produce a reenchantment (Wiederverzauberung) of the world, thus using poetry as a weapon against the modernizing scientific and technological spirit. Gómez Dávila therefore spoke highly of poets like William Blake or William Wordsworth, and he subscribed to the interpretation of Romanticism as the expression of the wish not to be here, in this place, in this century, in this world.462 Gómez Dávila was not alone in proclaiming himself a reactionary, but he did not regard his reactionary stance as a form of political action; and even though he was highly critical of modern politics, especially as a danger to traditional forms of liberty, he did not attempt to attack modern society directly. But this is precisely where aesthetic considerations come into play, because Goméz Dávila regarded the 459

George Santayana, Dominations and Powers. Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995, p. 277. 460 George Santayana, Reason in Art, New York: Scribner’s, 1936, p. 299. 461 Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito I, p. 316. 462 Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito I, 1977, p. 318.

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ugliness of the modern world as a major argument against it. For this reason, he thinks that only those who secretly propagate beauty would successfully conspire against the modern world.463 Beauty can be found in works of art and literature of all times. Therefore studying them (not the books about them!) is of the utmost importance. Resistance to the evil of ugliness is of the highest importance according to Gómez Dávila, and insofar as modern literature does just that by creating beautiful works, it is a marvellous reactionary enterprise.464 Gómez Dávila stresses the paradoxical nature of the importance of art in our time. He says that in no other period in history the arts and sciences had been as popular as they are today. Arts and sciences flood the schools, the press and the publishers’ catalogues. But still, he goes on to say, no other epoch has ever produced such ugly things, dreamed such cheap dreams or adopted such vulgar ideas. And his biting criticism culminates in the remark: “It is said that the public has become more educated. But one does not see any proff of this.”465 There are definite limits to the educational value of art, as appears from other aphorisms. For Gómez Dávila as a solitary thinker does not believe in mass education for good things. Art, he believes, does not educate anyone but the artist.466 It is only possible for the individual to overcome the ugliness surrounding him by educating himself in what is beautiful, in getting acquainted with what is beautiful, thus preventing the vulgarity that the ancient Greeks called apeirokalia, being inexperienced in beautiful things. The writer’s task, e. g., is therefore to work on his style, polishing his sentences and reworking them so as to express what he wants to say also stylistically. “The sentence”, he says, “has to possess the hardness of the stone and the vibrating of the twig”. Whereas Gómez Dávila wrote aphorisms (which, as mentioned above, he called glosses—escolios) and a few essays and extended notes, Santayana also wrote poetry and a novel, which, however, lends itself quite well for excerpting aphorisms of some kind. Taking up on Gómez Dávila’s emphasis on value judgements in the arts, it is important to note that Santayana also locates art in the realm of values insofar as he regards beauty not as a “fact” but as a “value”. This would preclude, it seems, any metaphysical notion about the beauty of the world as such as, e. g., created by God Almighty. If beauty is a value, that is notionally and emotionally attached and attributed to an object (i. e. objectified) it cannot be taken as a logical element of some proof for God’s ordering the world. Santayana therefore stresses that beauty and rightness (of form) “are relative to our judgment and emotion; they in no sense exist in nature

463

Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito II, p. 444. Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito I, p. 311. 465 Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito I, p. 348. 466 Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios. Selección, Bogotá: Villegas, 2001, p. 120. 464

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or preside over her.”467 He regards “the idea of beauty and rationality presiding over nature and guiding her” as a projection that can be explained psychologically.468 It is thus a psychologically justified confusion to believe “that nature could be governed by an aspiration towards beauty”.469 Santayana’s world view thus seems to square with that of Gómez Dávila in a very important point, when the latter acknowledges, not quite in harmony with his theological conception of the world, that the impression of order is a deception, though a necessary one: “Order is deception (engano). But disorder is no solution.”470 Gómez Dávila, however, might appear to circumvent the gravity of this issue. He claims that works of art somehow reflect an objective order of values that actually exists, despite the fact that we can only perceive instances of these values but never the values themselves. Values such as beauty need bodily incarnations to be perceived, enjoyed and recognized. Interestingly, here one might find some common ground between the two thinkers, when it comes to the place of the erotic in life and of its importance for aesthetic life in particular. Santayana stresses the formative influence of the passion of love, of sex, on the aesthetic imagination, everything being as it were suffused by sexuality.471 Gómez Dávila, most clearly in his early book Notas emphasizes the irreducible importance of sensuality, of the beauty of the naked body as a kind of archetype for feeling at home the world. Thus, for Gómez Dávila, art is perception of what is beautifully there, but does not aim at transforming reality in any political sense. He famously declared, e. g., that in the poetical works of good communist poets such as Aragon, Eluard, Neruda and others you have to distinguish between the poetry and the communism—implying that these are by nature at odds, because the political content is inimical to the poetry.472 Art cannot be made subservient to any social norms, according to Gómez Dávila, which also accords with Santayana’s remark, in Reason in Art, that art “is abstract and inconsequential”, “ends in itself” and that “nothing concerns it less than to influence the world”.473 However, I strongly doubt whether Gómez Dávila would have subscribed to Santayana’s notion that “the value of art lies in making people happy”, even though he may have recognized a grain of truth in Santayana’s belief that art “is 467

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, New York: Cosimo Classics, 2004 (reprint of 1896 edition), p. 159 (§ 39). 468 George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 160. 469 George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 160. 470 Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito II, p. 316. 471 George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 56-62; Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Notas, Bogotá: Villegas, 2003, p. 306. 472 Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito I, p. 182. 473 George Santayana, Life of Reason, p. 364.

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the best instrument of happiness”.474 Maybe the closest Gómez Dávila came to acknowledge this insight was when he said, on the basis of his religious way of thinking, that “where there is a work of art, there is no devil.”475 The art of leading people into philosophizing – what the ancients called protreptics – necessitates a choice of the literary form. The literary form best adapted to the purpose at hand can vary. But it is always subservient to the philosophical purpose. The quarrel between philosophy and poetry is a quarrel because philosophy can seem to be critical of poetry. But a philosophical understanding of poetry and its necessity for human life leads us to suspect that poetry and philosophy are not necessarily inimical to each other. Philosophy can help poetry to understand itself, and poetry can remind philosophy of the value of beauty in concrete things that it is prone to overlook in its drift toward abstraction. Thus poetry and the arts in general, by providing manifold occasions first for wonder and then for value judgments, serve as starting points for philosophical reflection that remind the philosopher of the need to be tolerant of the irreducible pluralism that is the world.

474 475

George Santayana, Life of Reason, p. 375. Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito I, p. 172.

THE PLACE OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN THE CONCEPTION OF BEAUTY IN THE SENSE OF BEAUTY LENKA KREJSOVA

A characteristic feature of Santayana’s philosophical works is refinement of discourse, elegance of style, and great richness of knowledge. His philosophy does not strive to be a system of proved truths but rather the personal confession of a thinker, searching for proof of truth in beauty and proof of beauty in truth, a 476 harmony of rational and emotional, and an aesthetic approach to existence.

Santayana’s clear influence on aesthetic inquiry results largely from his method of analysis, which differs sharply from the preceding intellectualist traditions of aesthetics. This radical approach is emphasised in Arthur C. Danto’s “Introduction” to the 1988 critical edition in which he says that Santayana brings “beauty down to earth” by treating it as a subject for science, and giving it a central role in human conduct. Ideas of beauty can be found in almost every culture and at almost every time of history, with many similarities and differences. Philosophers know that to define beauty is not an easy task and they have been trying to do so since ancient times. The question is whether they have been successful in defining beauty. Is it possible to determine which definition of beauty is the right one? In this early philosophical work is visible the “young Santayana who had a markedly pessimistic attitude toward life. He tried to find a refuge in the realm of fantasy, imagination, symbolism and poetic contemplation.” 477 Santayana asks at the beginning of the book: “Why, when and how beauty appears, what conditions an object must fulfil to be beautiful, what elements of our nature make us sensible of beauty and what the relation is between constitution of the object and the excitement of our susceptibility.”478

476

Antológia z diel filozofov Pragamatizmus, Realizmus, Fenomenológia, Existencializmus, Bratislava 1969, p. 346 477 Novozámská, Jana: G. Santayana a americká filosofie, Academia Praha, 1968, p. 59. 478 Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty, New York 1936, p.11.

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The important question is whether beauty exists in the object or somewhere else. What conditions must be met in perceiving beauty? Does beauty exist in the mind of the beholder? In Santayana’s conception of beauty experience or more exactly aesthetic experience plays one of the most important roles. Aesthetic experience is infused throughout everyday life in Santayana’s conception. He conceives experience as the dominant disposition of man in perceiving beauty. Man can only on the basis of experience perceive one and the same thing, yet always in a different way. Any time man perceives an object, he can find some other “dimension” of beauty there. Experience enables us to see beauty that we have not seen before – in previous perceiving. It is obvious that aesthetic experience in this conception is subjective. The Problem of beauty entails the problem of value as it pertains to emotional consciousness. Intellectual judgments are judgments of facts and truth is their criterion. On the other hand aesthetic and moral judgments are judgments of value. Aesthetic judgments are predominantly positive and moral judgments are negative. Aesthetic judgments are spontaneous and autonomous while moral judgments are constrained, and heteronemous. Santayana rejects the traditional distinction between work and play. In his conception, play is not useless activity and work is not an action that is necessary or useful for life but “work and play here take on a different meaning, and become equivalent to servitude and freedom,” and “we no longer mean by work all that is done usefully, but only what is done unwillingly and by the spur of necessity. By play we are designating, no longer what is done fruitlessly, but whatever is done spontaneously and for its own sake, whether it have or not an ulterior utility.” 479 Aesthetic judgments align with play and moral judgments with work. The sense of beauty comes into being from the immediate and inexplicable response of vital spirit to the impulse of thing, which exists. In this way, the aesthetic judgment is bound up with existence. One of the most significant features of existence is experience and in Santayana conception it is aesthetic experience. Santayana interprets the sense of beauty theoretically as a satisfaction of reason caused by the harmony between our nature and our experience, as “beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”

480

479 480

Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty,New York 1936, p. 19. Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty, New York 1936, p. 164

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According to experience three dimensions of beauty can be distinguished in Santayana’s view. These three dimensions can be distinguished in music, poetry, and theatre or fine arts. 1. 2. 3.

Beauty of material (e.g. the pleasure of colours and sounds), Beauty of form (e.g. pleasure in symmetry and proportion), Beauty of expression.

The beauty of matter and form exists in perceiving, because as Santayana says: “Beauty, as we have seen, is a value; it cannot be conceived as an independent existence which affects our senses and which we consequently perceive. It exists in perception, and cannot exist otherwise. A beauty not perceived is a pleasure not felt, and a contradiction”481 and beauty of expression come into existence after associations start to operate. The process of associations is very important for beauty of expression. The process of associations is closely interconnected with experience as such. It could not exist without experience (previous experience). The process of associations can reach so called beauty of expression by the connection of our previous experience with imagination and present experience. And how can this be done? When perceiving man creates his own “aesthetic object” (as phenomenalists would call it). However, Santayana does not call it an “aesthetic object” but rather a “value”. There is a significant difference between the “aesthetic object” and a “value”. Whereas the “aesthetic object is isolated, disengaged from experience and opinions,” thus Santayana’s “value” involves experience, opinions, and imagination as well. According to Guyer “Santayana does not argue that any object is necessarily more beautiful the more of these ‘dimensions’ of beauty it has…. How beautiful any particular object is and what the sources of its beauty are can only be determined by experience”.482 In Santayana’s conception the perception of matter is a necessary condition of the perception of form. And furthermore, these are necessary for the perception of the “highest” dimension of beauty that is the beauty of expression. Santayana thinks that the aesthetic effects of form “cannot be reduced to expression without denying the existence of immediate aesthetic values altogether.” Reducing the aesthetic effects of form to expression “would be like explaining sea sickness as the fear of shipwreck”. 483 Beauty can never be understood as an existence, which affects our senses and which is being perceived by a man. Santayana defines beauty as a 481

Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty, New York 1936, p.11 Guyer, Paul.: Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics, Camridge University Press, New York, 2005, p. 217 483 Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty,New York 1936, p.54 482

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value, which is created in the mind of the perceiver thanks to his experience and current state of mind. Santayana’s understanding of beauty aspires to axiological categorization. He defines beauty as a value; value “intrinsic, positive, and objectified.”484 He connects the sense of beauty with moral sensibility. “Because beauty is the objectification of pleasure, and because pleasure is a subjective and relative phenomenon, beauty has its basis in the subjective, just as moral goodness does.”485 Each value is a judgment, objective assessment viewed as a quality of a thing and as a pleasant goal. The “pleasant goal” is one of the reasons why Santayana distinguishes different degrees of beauty that were mentioned above. In his conception there is the thing and our experience of it. The value is reached through our imaginative experience. The important question is whether we can talk about phenomenological influences here or not. We perceive an object by our senses, accompanied by our imagination, fantasy and aesthetic experience, of course. So why does the subjective experience seem objective? We could say that it seems so because of its projection on an object and is thus differentiated from moral feeling. Other features that play an important role in Santayana’s conception of beauty are education and talent. We can say that Santayana has abandoned Kant’s conception of genius and he thinks that anyone can become an artist or experience the pleasure of beauty. However, it depends on his individual dispositions (talent, education, imagination, fantasy, experience.) In Reason in Art, he compares the artist to a child. The artist seems to be happy because his life is spontaneous and as we have already said, art should be spontaneous. Santayana adds that if the artist wants to be really happy “he must be well bread, reared from the cradle, as it were, under propitious influences, so that he may have learned to love what conduces to his development.” 486 This is the reason why Santayana emphasises the significance of the individual. Beauty does not exist exactly in front of us, even less in our feelings, impressions or pleasures but is formatted by the “objectification” of pleasure. To understand beauty one must look beyond its experience. The experience of beauty is more important than understanding it, and understanding it cannot rest solely on the experience. The growth of aesthetic experience is based on the physiological development of the individual and the environment. Each perceiving is specific and even one and the same person is not able to perceive the same object several times in the same way. His perceiving is influenced by his present mood. Not every man perceives the object in the same way and even not everyone is able to reach the pleasure of beauty. As Santayana 484

Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty,New York 1936, p.31 Bulletin of the Santayana Society – No. 16 – Fall 1998 p. 1 486 Santayana, George.: The Life of Reason, vol. IV, N. Y. 1905, p. 220 485

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says “human nature is a vague abstraction; that which is common to all men is the least part of their natural endowment. Aesthetic capacity is much vaster and more complex to one man than to another.” 487 Each man has different dispositions, degrees of perceiving, tastes, talents with which he is endowed, abilities and education that he has acquired throughout life. In addition not only these dispositions have an influence on perceiving but also his actual feelings and impressions. It is clear how important is man and aesthetic experience in Santayana’s conception of beauty. Beauty is not based on universality as it was in conceptions of different thinkers before or even after Santayana. Santayana does not emphasize universality as he prefers individuality, man’s singularity and dispositions and also subjectivity of values. It seems to me that he critically engages the universal validity of aesthetic judgments suggested by Kant. He does not agree with Kant’s two assumptions. First, Kant asserts that in “pure” judgments of taste our pleasure is a response only to the perceptible form of an object, not to any matter or content it may have. Second, he assumes that the cognitive faculties of all human beings really do work the same way, that is, respond to particular objects in the same way, even when they are in “free play” rather than at serious work. As we can see these assumptions are not viable for Santayana. Instead, Santayana emphasizes individuality, singularity, and unrepeatable perceiving. He is after a definition of beauty that explains its origin in human experience, and one that explains the human capacity to be sensible of beauty and the relation between a beautiful object and its ability to excite the human senses. In defining beauty as “pleasure regarded as a quality of a thing” Santayana preserves many of Kant’s distinctions, with an emphasis on the experience rather than the quality. Plato, Aristotle, and Kant influence Santayana’s account of beauty. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea influenced him with its focus on objectification. However, Santayana’s objectification is not a metaphysical necessity. It is a natural, evolutionary accident that leads to a better understanding of the nature of the sense of beauty and of its origins in the physiology and social settings of the individual. Beauty can be found in any object and therefore as Santayana says “no object is essentially ugly”.488 In perceiving, man is influenced not only by his own dispositions and experience as we have already said, but also by the particular environment in which he perceives. “Each new environment must open to us, if we allow it to educate our perception, a new wealth of beautiful forms.” 489 The experience as such is being stressed because without the 487

Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty, New York 1936, p.81 Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty, New York 1936, p.79 489 Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty, New York 1936, p.79 488

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experience man would not be able to discover new forms and kinds of beauty. We have already agreed that “no object is essentially ugly” and therefore we could say that everything is beautiful but in different degrees. Santayana says “everything is beautiful because everything is capable in some degree of interesting and charming our attention; but things differ immensely in this capacity to please us in contemplation of them and therefore they differ immensely in beauty.” 490 An artist is important in Santayana’s conception of beauty and predominantly of art. He talks about an ideal artist. In his view, “the ideal artist, like the ideal philosopher, has all time and all existence for his virtual theme. Fed by the world, he can help to mould it, and his insight is a kind of wisdom, preparing him for using the world well and making it more fruitful.” 491 Life is the basis for art in Santayana’s conception and the basis of art in instinct and experience. We could talk about his naturalism in this sense. When life is a basis for art the most important phenomenon of life is experience of life. However, art should not imitate life but it should transform life and experience in such a way that accomplishes its main task; that is to provoke pleasure of beauty. And what is the value of art? “The value of art lies in making people happy, first in practising the art and then in possessing its product.” 492 Santayana in his later work the Life of Reason claims that reason is the principle of both art and happiness. “Art is not an end in itself, but is, like every other facet of human activity, in the service of our passions and our needs; the aesthetic is a value which is never given alone, in its purity but is rather a kind of highlight of a special type that accompanies each and every human creation.” 493 We could say that in this conception even ugly things can appear as beautiful and morally bad things can appear as good. It mostly depends on the act of presentation (or presentation as such) and on our perceiving which is very closely connected with our experience. The act of presentation is another important feature of Santayana’s conception of beauty. It functions as a phenomenon, which preserves the aesthetic function. A modification of the act of presentation (presentation) can result in the loss of aesthetic value. Art has the ability to present unpleasant experiences in a pleasant way. As Santayana says “the more terrible the experience described, the more powerful must the art be which is to transform it.” 494 At this point I can mention comedy, humour 490

Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty, New York 1936, p.80 Santayana, George.: The Life of Reason, vol. IV, N. Y. 1905, p. 221 492 Santayana, George.: The Life of Reason, vol. IV, N. Y. 1905, p. 222 493 Bulletin of the Santayana Society – Concept and Aesthetics in George Santayana by Fernando Savater 494 Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty,New York 1936, p.139 491

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versus tragedy for example in theatre. It depends on presentation and of course on our way of perceiving whether the performance will be perceived as a kind of comedy or tragedy. We can conclude that aesthetic experience is as important to human life as sex, hunger, aggression, love, and hate. Aesthetic experience gives form, meaning and most importantly, value, to everything we are and we do. Theoretically life without it would be a shapeless, meaningless and colorless series of sensations, events, and reactions. Santayana believes that every aspect of our experience has an aesthetic dimension (or perhaps more dimensions), and that this dimension is optimally elaborated and refined through life. Santayana at the end of his book writes that “beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.” 495 However, we can experience the pleasure that beauty offers just by the aesthetic experience. And what is the experience in this sense? Santayana thinks that “beauty exists for the same reason that the object which is beautiful exists, or the world in which that object lies, or we that look upon both. It is an experience: there is nothing more to say about it.” 496 Santayana considers beauty an important phenomenon of human life. According to him, each man should experience a pleasure of beauty. A man who has never experienced such a pleasure cannot be happy. And happiness is one of the things man is looking for. Art is an ideal for Santayana. “Ideal is nothing else than selection and organization of experience” 497 It is the process of explanation and interpretation, strengthening and concentration of experience. This process puts the experience above normal conditions of life. Art is a more perfect kind of world than life itself. For Santayana the most perfect experience is the aesthetic experience. And that is the reason why it should be infused throughout every day life. Santayana combines two miscellaneous types of cultures – American, affected by industrialism and technical development, and European with strong humanistic features. The combination of different features and contrapositive attitudes and opinions is one of the typical features of his philosophical works. This is probably one of the reasons why his works became so renowned. Although Santayana wrote at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the questions and problems that he tried to answer have become relevant even in today’s postmodern period. “Old” problems have gained new meaning as a consequence of modern and postmodern art, and therefore it is necessary to re495

Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty, New York 1936, p.163 Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty, New York 1936, p.163 497 Tagliaubue, Guido Morpurgo. : Souþasná estetika, Odeon Milano 1960, p. 172 496

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read and re-interpret some works. Attention should be paid to Santayana’s work The Sense of Beauty where is visible an interesting relation between aesthetics and ethics, which can be used towards the interpretation of contemporary art. The understanding of beauty in contemporary art, and what is the sense of beauty in postmodern art are important questions that should be answered. Santayana’s understanding of experience and the act of representation may help to give answers to these questions. Should we perceive post-modern art in the same way that we have perceived ancient, medieval, or modern art? Is the role of art different in the postmodern world? These questions are worth thinking of when we read Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty, Reason in Art or Interpretation on Poetry and Religion. Although the works were written in different historical, political, cultural and philosophical periods of time they may help to understand the post-modern situation. And what is paradoxical, to understand postmodern art, which Santayana would have probably dismissed.

Works Cited Antológia z diel filozofov Pragamatizmus, Realizmus, Fenomenológia, Existencializmus, Bratislava 1969 Bulletin of the Santayana Society – No. 16 – Fall 1998 Guyer, Paul.: Values of Beauty, Historical Essays in Aesthetics, Camridge University Press, New York, 2005 Kelly, Michael.: Encyklopedia of Aesthetics, vol. IV, New York 1998 Novozámská, Jana: G. Santayana a americká filosofie, Academia Praha, 1968 Perniola, Mário: Estetika 20. storoþia, Praha 2000, ISBN 80-246-0213-X Santayana, George.: The Sense of Beauty, New York 1936 —. The Life of Reason, vol. IV, N. Y. 1905 Tagliaubue, Guido Morpurgo. : Souþasná estetika, ODEON Milano 1960

EMERSON AND SANTAYANA ON IMAGINATION H.G. CALLAWAY

This paper examines Santayana on imagination, and related themes, chiefly as these are expressed in his early work, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900). My hypothesis is that Santayana underestimates, in this book, the force and significance of the prevalent distinction between imagination and fancy, as this was originally put forward by Coleridge and later developed in Emerson’s late essays. I will focus on some of those aspects of Santayana’s book which appear to react to or to engage with Emerson’s views and aim to bring Santayana’s treatment of the theme of imagination into relation with Emerson. Understanding the differences in greater detail we stand a better chance of reasoned evaluation of alternative conceptions of imagination. I will argue that the Coleridge-Emersonian conception of the distinction between imagination and fancy is a crucial element of the background of Peircean abduction, and in this fashion, contributes to the continuity of Emerson’s writings with the pragmatist tradition. Santayana, in some contrast, resists the pragmatic tendencies of Anglo-American thought; and his alternative treatment of imagination, in stricter contrast with the scientific and common-sense understanding, prefigures or reflects his more emphatic distinction of the ideal and the real, which made of Santayana a “philosophical materialist,” as he purports.498 Though we may certainly regard Santayana’s conception of imagination as resisting the tendency to make the imagined better the enemy of the good, his approach invites, too, our contrary concern with melioration and pluralism.

1. Santayana and the Ordinary Language of Imagination The English word “imagination” comes to us through Middle English and Middle French ultimately from the Latin verb “imaginari.” My Latin dictionary gives a noun, “imaginatio,” translated to English as “imagination, fancy.” These Latin forms, in turn, were traditionally used to translate a Greek word, “Phantasia,” from “phantazein”—to present to the mind.

498

Cf. Norman V. Henfrey, “Santayana, George” in The Encyclopedia Britannica (1999).

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Webster’s American dictionary lists three chief meanings.499 First of all, imagination is “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.” This first meaning emphasizes the connection between imagination and images, as we contrast images with discursive imaginings. Secondly, imagination is rendered by Webster’s as “creative ability” including the “ability to confront and deal with a problem.” A person of imagination is, then, in this second sense, not someone sitting by and contemplating mental images, but a person of resourcefulness: the thinking person or active mind. An imaginative person is thus one who engages our interest, for instance, by means of stories or accomplishments “that fire the imagination.” Imagination as creative ability points to new and engaging possibilities arising in the face of recognized problems. The third listing, however, builds from the formation and contemplation of images into a broader sense: imagination is a creation of the mind; especially an idealized or poetic creation but including, too, “fanciful or empty assumptions.” We say to the child, frightened by shadows in the night, “Don’t let your imagination run away with you;” or “You are only imagining things.” This final sense of imagination harkens back to the translation of the Latin “imaginatio” as both “imagination” and “fancy.” There is a clear sense in which Santayana is a great advocate of imagination. Our initial problem is to try to understand what sense of imagination he is employing or advocating in particular contexts of discussion, and for that purpose, I have gone over the meaning of the English word in some detail. All the elements of common usage are present in Santayana’s early book, and the chief problem is to see how the configuration of these elements figures into his arguments. In his Preface to Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, Santayana criticizes the liberal school of religion which we would expect to include the Unitarians: The liberal school “attempts to fortify religion by minimizing its expression, both theoretic and devotional,” he complains, and it “seems from this point of view to be merely impoverishing religious symbols and vulgarizing religious aims;” and in particular Santayana charged that the liberal school “subtracts from faith that imagination by which faith becomes an interpretation and idealization of human life, and retains only a stark and superfluous principle of superstition.”500

499

See The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 1994. Santayana 1900, “Preface,” to Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. (New York: Scribner’s), p. vii. Cf. the discussion of the religious imagination in Santayana 1896, The Sense of Beauty 47, “The Religious Imagination,” and especially the final pages, pp. 185187 in the Modern Library edition.

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Clearly, Santayana in this early passage, would have us dispense with the superstition while avoiding the impoverishment of religious symbols and religious imagination. We are not to fortify or strengthen the plausibility of religion by minimizing its claims and expressions but instead add to faith that imagination by means of which faith enters into the interpretation and idealization of life. I think we can see here already that concrete differences between religious traditions enter into Santayana’s conception of what to count as appropriate imaginative expression and interpretation. In the background of these comments we might expect to find something of Santayana’s perception and reaction to the comparatively austere visual forms of New England Puritanism and Unitarianism, in contrast with the richly colored devotional and decorative practices of the Catholic tradition. As in much of Judaism and Islam, the dissenting or non-conformist Protestant founders of New England typically rejected the aim of artful visual presentation of their ideals, and they are emphatically a “people of the book.” In order to focus on the Word, it was felt necessary to remove all visual and imagistic distraction, minimize decoration and ceremony, and highlight the “good news,” the discursive message to be conveyed. Form follows function. There is something of a divide regarding religious aesthetics in the offing here; and concerning Santayana’s claims against the subtraction of imagination from faith, my inclination is to see him implicitly emphasizing the visual and imagistic in imagination as contrasted with the discursive imagination and a more practical orientation. Consider, for instance the empty Calvinist “cross of the resurrection,” in contrast with the crucifix, or a white New England, wood-frame meeting house in contrast with the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Rome. Certainly something has gone missing in these Protestant expressions, but it may certainly be argued that it is not imagination itself which is missing, not imagination of the sort which can form and reform lives, it is instead a certain outward grandeur which has been replaced by the preacher’s and the congregation’s discursive elaboration of the good news. The empty cross of the resurrection, it is said, is a symbol of hope and new life. Similarly, the simplicity of Puritan-derived architecture suggests that the Word, written and spoken, is regarded as more important and central. Yet whatever forms are felt to be more appropriate for religious expression, I think we will all agree that only a particular narrowness of perspective would prevent a purely aesthetic appreciation of the contrasting forms. In criticism of any positivistic account of society and religion in his Preface, Santayana certainly does make some room for the moral and more practical import of imagination. “The environing world can justify itself to the mind,” he writes, “only by the free life which it fosters there” (a profound comment, as I see it); and moreover, according to Santayana, “All observation is observation

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of brute fact, all discipline is mere repression, until these facts digested, and this discipline embodied in humane impulses, become the starting-point for a creative movement of the imagination,” which, according to Santayana, we are to understand as “the firm basis for ideal constructions in society, religion, and art.”501 Mere facts tell us little of interest except when understood “as conditions of these human activities.” The facts of nature and history only become morally intelligible or have any practically import, when understood in relation to creative movements of the imagination which enter into our constructions of the ideals of society, religion and art. There is a suggestion of the moral function of the imagination, then, according to Santayana,502 along side the poetic nature of religion, and when Santayana makes these kinds of points, we should take note that imagination seems less imagistic and more discursive. The theme of the moral function of the imagination even suggests more practical concerns insofar as the readers take ideals to have practical import. However, in light of Santayana’s comments, neither should we be greatly surprised if the imagination of New England has had its own specific, historical and developmental forms and direction. Santayana draws upon all the elements of our common-sense or ordinarylanguage conceptions of the imagination, and if there is something distinctive in his approach, then this would seem to depend on the particular stress which he places on particular elements, say, imagination as related to images, in particular contexts or regarding particular themes. From what we have so far seen, one might suspect somewhat traditional or orthodox devotional practices as entering into his conception of the religious imagination. This seems to enter significantly into his opening criticism of “the liberal school.” Yet Santayana recognized the power of Emerson’s imaginative practice, and we cannot read his opening criticism of the liberal school into his criticism of Emerson. On the contrary, if anything, he exaggerates the Emersonian imagination, saying, of Emerson that “Imagination, indeed, is his single theme.”503 Santayana also says of Emerson that “Reality eluded him,”504 and this is a claim we need to review in light of Emerson’s anti-nominalism.

2. Emerson, Imagination and Abduction There is a significant philosophical conception of imagination in AngloAmerican thought running through Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ralph Waldo 501

Ibid., pp. viii-ix. Ibid, p. x. 503 Santayana 1900, “Emerson,” in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, p. 220. 504 Ibid., p. 218. 502

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Emerson. In comparison to the American dictionary definition of imagination, given above, the approach in Coleridge and Emerson appears to arise as a reaction against a stronger traditional association of imagination and fantasy. This traditional association is perhaps evident in the definition of “immaginazione,” given in some contemporary dictionaries of Italian. “Immaginazione” is both L’immaginare and fantasia: La facoltà di concepire nella fantasia e accostare liberamente: “the faculty to conceive in fantasy and with a free approach.” Though talk of imagination invites the ideas of fantasy and fancy in English, as we see from the final element in the English definition given above, “fanciful or empty assumptions,” the differences in the definitions suggests something of a statistical difference between different languages in the corresponding usages of the specific elements involved in our notion of imagination. In spite of this Coleridge himself, in sponsoring the distinction between imagination and fantasy, insisted that all languages contain some tendency toward expression of the distinction. Behind differences of emphasis on the particular elements of the ordinary notion of imagination, I expect we might find some difference in the relative influence of the ancient Epicureans and Stoics connected with contrasting emphases on the cognitive function of imagination. In German, the English word “imagination” translates most directly as a rather technical term, “Vorstellungskraft.” But since most of what we would ordinarily say in English using “imagination” would require something more colloquial, the burden of expression falls on the verb “vorstellen,” which literally means to place before, and is more evocative of mental imagings and material presentation or representation. “Fancy” and “fantasy” contrasts with “imagination” in Emerson’s thought, following Coleridge on this topic. While imagination builds on or projects “necessity” from what has gone before, according to Emerson, mere fancy implies an arbitrary relation or capricious departure. The very character of this distinction suggests culturally and philosophically specific roots of the philosophical treatment of imagination. In Emerson’s 1836 Lecture “Modern Aspects of Letters,” he says of Coleridge: He has made admirable definitions, and drawn indelible lines between things heretofore confounded. He thought and thought truly that all confusion of thought tended to confusion in action; and said that he had never observed an abuse of terms obtain currency without being followed by some practical error. He has enriched the English language and the English mind with an explanation of the object of philosophy; of the all important distinction between Reason and Understanding; the distinction of an idea and a conception; between Genius and

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The passage testifies to the early influence of Coleridge on Emerson’s thought, and I have found good reason to stress the passage in several contexts. It suggests, too, some resemblance in their methodologies. While later Coleridge is associated with the romantic revival of the Church of England, since America has no establishment of religion, and, in contrast with Great Britain, is predominantly non-conformist Protestant in history and culture (Catholics make up about 25% of the contemporary population and Jews and Moslems about 23% each), Emerson is a quite “non-conformist” Protestant figure—though by no means orthodox in terms of any of our approximately 800 distinct Protestant denominations, including that of his own Unitarian background. Still, like Coleridge, Emerson was always interested in the reasoned revival of religious sentiment, and like Coleridge he is a reformer or meliorist, working in significant degree within and against the given background of the existing society and culture. There is certainly no lack of emphasis on imagination in Emerson’s writings. Emerson contrasts imagination and fancy perhaps most vividly in his Letters and Social Aims (1875): Imagination is central; fancy superficial. Fancy relates to surface, in which a great part of life lies. The lover is rightly said to fancy the hair, eyes, complexion of the maid. Fancy is a willful imagination, a spontaneous act; fancy, a play as with dolls and puppets which we chose to call men and women; imagination, a perception and affirming of a real relation between a thought and some material fact. Fancy amuses; imagination expands and exalts us. Imagination uses an organic classification. Fancy joins by accidental resemblance, surprises and amuses the idle, but is silent in the presence of great passion and action. Fancy aggregates; imagination animates. Fancy is related to color; imagination to form. Fancy paints; imagination sculptures.506

In effect, flights of fancy are here contrasted with the constructive, cognitively oriented imagination. “Imagination is central,” says Emerson, while “fancy is a willful imagination” and sometimes “a play as with dolls and puppets which we chose to call men and women.” Imagination, in contrast, always relates thought to “some material fact,” it is “a perception,” according to Emerson, a matter of 505

R.W. Emerson 1836, “Modern Aspects of Letters,” in Whicher, Stephen E. and Robert E. Spiller eds. 1966, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. I., 18331836. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 371-385. 506 R.W. Emerson 1875, “Poetry and Imagination,” in Letters and Social Aims. (Boston: Osgood). To understand something of Emerson’s development from Coleridge, compare Coleridge 1817, Biographia Literaria, Chapter 4.

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at least taking something to be true, since we do not affirm the perception that so and so, and at the same time call it an illusion, too. “Imagination uses an organic classification,” says Emerson, while fancy “joins by accidental resemblances” and “is silent in the presence of action.” From a philosophical perspective, as contrasted with that of literature as purely aesthetic interest, Emerson’s fully developed conception of imagination is a refinement of the common-sense notion which eliminates or sharply separates the element of willful fantasy, and it is a significant precursor of C.S. Peirce on abduction. The point is closely connected with what I have called Emerson’s anti-nominalism. For example, in his 1860 essay “Fate,” fate is understood as a matter of unalterable law. Law, whether scientific law of nature or moral law has always at least some tendency to execute itself. The self-execution of the moral law, is implied in Emerson’s theme of “compensation.” Implicitly, Emerson follows traditional definition: Fate is a power superior to the human will and operating in accord with arcane laws knowable only to the initiate.507 Though Emerson stresses the point that thought, as cognitive accomplishment, makes us free, still, he equally emphasizes normative observation of laws of thought. “For if we give it the high sense in which the poets use it,” Emerson says, “even thought itself is not above Fate: that too must act according to eternal laws, and all that is willful and fantastic in it is in opposition to its fundamental essence.”508 From this one may safely infer, I think, that the “organic classification” which imagination is to employ corresponds to those concepts required for and identified in ascertained law of nature, including, in Emerson, natural moral laws. Crucial in understanding Emerson’s perspective is to recognize that on his view, so long as we are subject to unalterable circumstance, and have some need to expand our freedom and power, there is always a prospective “higher law,” which we have yet to observe, recognize, or institute. It is this kind of point which made of Emerson an abolitionist. However we may be inclined to deal with the topic of Peircean abduction, what is central is the idea that we need some deeper understanding of the origin of reasonable hypotheses in contrast with wild guessing, and equally we have some need for comparative evaluation of hypotheses at a point short of their verification 507

Compare the Italian: “Destino”: Potenza superiore all’umana volontà che opera secondo leggi arcane e inalterabili; provvidenza; destinazione; fato (Finson 2005, Enciclopedia Multimediale); “Destino”: Potere superiore che talora sembra guido l’uomo indipendentemente dalla sua e dall’altrui volontà; fato (M.G. Bacci 1993, Dizionario Della Lingua Italiana. Milano: Edizioni Polaris); “Destino”: fate; (futuro) destiny; “Era destino che accadesse” = It was fated to happen (The Collins Italian Concise Dictionary. London: Collins). 508 R.W. Emerson 1860, “Fate” in Callaway ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Conduct of Life, A Philosophical Reading. (Lanham, MD, University Press of America), p. 11.

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or refutation by empirical testing. Peirce proposed to investigate the logic of abduction, though I suspect there is at best a quasi-logic of the comparative evaluation of untested hypotheses. Peirce also claimed, in a very suggestive formulation that “The question of pragmatism is the question of abduction,”509 The point is of special interest for our studies of American philosophy, if we are concerned to resist the tendency of the current revival of pragmatism to reduce to a disreputable anti-intellectualism and “vulgar pragmatism,” which to use a phrase of Santayana’s, we might expect to be perpetually captured in the foreground of experience. The crucial point is to understand how accepted laws or generalizations and concepts of a given field of inquiry may structure and constrain the formation and initial plausibility of new hypotheses in answer to outstanding problems of the field.

3. Santayana, Imagination, and liberty Turning back more directly to Santayana, I would like to skip forward to writings of 20 years later, “Materialism and Idealism in American Life,” and “English Liberty in America,” which were published in Character and Opinion in the United States. First a passage concerning American Imagination: “The American is imaginative,” say Santayana, “for where life is intense, imagination is intense also;” Addressing the future-oriented character of American life, Santayana has it that if the American “were not imaginative, he would not live so much in the future.”510 What is the general character of this American Imaginativeness? Santayana answers in general strokes: But this imagination is practical, and the future it forecasts is immediate; it works with the clearest and least ambiguous terms known to his experience, in terms of number, measure, contrivance, economy, and speed. He is an idealist working on matter. Understanding as he does the material potentialities of things, he is successful in invention, conservative in reform, and quick in emergencies.511

The imagination here attributed is not the imagination prone to forming mental images or contemplating abstractions, and it certainly will seek to exclude vain 509

C. S. Peirce 1903, Lectures on Pragmatism; [CP 1.196]: “If you carefully consider the question of pragmatism you will see that it is nothing else than the question of the logic of abduction;” and further “no effect of pragmatism which is consequent upon its effect on abduction can go to show that pragmatism is anything more than a doctrine concerning the logic of abduction.” 510 Santayana 1920, “Materialism and Idealism in American Life,” in Character and Opinion in the United States. (New York: Scribner’s), p. 174-175. 511 Ibid., p. 175.

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and fanciful ideas and ideals. What Santayana attributes is the imagination of practical resourcefulness, which, like Emerson’s account must, at its best, sharply distinguish between imagination and mere fantasy; just as Peirce, if we consider him as looking at abduction as a model of the scientific imagination, helping to distinguish genuine hypothesis from wild guessing, seeks to limit and focus us away from merely fanciful wanderings. It is not, then, a contemplative imagination which is to hold us engaged in the American world, but instead a more conservative and practical orientation to action, which finds expression in American pragmatism as in every day life. In the end, then, we are faced with an important traditional question of American thought and civilization, “Can philosophy be practical?”—which we may now approach in something of the spirit of Santayana’s work. What are the appropriate philosophical principles of the philosophy of this life of the practical imagination? We do not expect any totalizing or apodictic answer in the style of a priori rationalism, of course. Yet at the same time, a philosophy there must be, a general way of thought, suited to stand substantially against the practical man’s tendency of intolerance and impatience with our philosophizing. Can we be both practical and principled? The practical imagination is responsible for engagement with life and the environment. Yet, on the other hand, it has its own general moral and social conditions. What philosophy will sustain the practical imagination and yet sustain itself and thus the general social and institutional conditions within which the practical imagination is free to operate? The practical imagination projects potentialities and opportunities, such as belong to the American style in the integration of immigrants, for instance. This cannot be a matter of mere images of opportunities and potentialities, a social bait and switch, or it will cease to be genuinely practical. What we imagine in any given case is free and cooperative activity. “The will is a mass of passions,” says Santayana in “English Liberty in America,” and “when it sets up absolute claims it is both tragic and ridiculous.”512 The philosophy suited to sustain the realm and reign of free cooperation is thus anti-absolutist and as a matter of positive policy it is fallibilistic. Those for whom a conservative and principled fallibilism is not sufficient as a principled policy simply demand too much. Though this may seem a harsh rule on occasion, as is the intolerance of intolerance, it is a necessary rule of the freedom of inquiry. More generally, both science and human enterprise present to us ever new facts which we dare not ignore, and the process of moral and intellectual adjustment to them, and evaluation of them, dare be no less persistent. From this 512

Santayana 1920, “English Liberty in America,” in Character and Opinion in the United States, p. 227.

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perspective any purportedly infallible dogma, however dressed, is an impediment: the mere static image of final perfection which cannot effectively enter into our world of cooperative action except as a stumbling block. But that is far from saying that we cannot justly be more conservative about principles basic to our civilization. In order to be more conservative regarding principle, we must look to living traditions of law, society and to established results of the diverse fields of inquiry. In Santayana’s account of “English Liberty in America,” there is both freedom and cooperation—and this significant combination demands much of the practical imagination and of principled action. It deserves a secure place in our philosophical practice as it does in the wider world of human affairs. Being conservative on the principles of freedom is of the essence of political liberality.

NOTES TOWARDS A SUPREME READING OF GEORGE SANTAYANA* ANTONIO LASTRA

... a movement from the forgotten into the unforeseen. —George Santayana

The title of this paper is obviously a parody (I hope a respectful one) of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’. Rather than the Harvard poet and listener of the Master —just at the moment when the young professor of Philosophy was saying farewell to poetry-writing—Stevens was a sensitive reader of George Santayana’s “faithful speech” throughout his life, and their relationship —i. e., the link between poetry and philosophy—is one of the most fruitful subjects of recent scholarship. “Supreme Fiction” was partially a retraction in Steven’s poetry from the pure imagination to the real world. By “supreme reading” I would like to recommend a way of reading Santayana that contributes to an understanding of his philosophy, and its place in the same real world, also (perhaps) our world. In a sense, I would like to suggest a way of reading towards the understanding of Santayana’s first philosophy. Nearly fifty years ago, in 1963, at the centenary commemoration of the birth of Santayana, a philosopher and a public figure almost forgotten after several decades of celebrity, Arthur Danto claimed the importance of the author of The Life of Reason for the task that philosophy had ahead or, simply, in front of her: “I am concerned —Danto wrote—, not with what Santayana might come to mean to philosophers of the future, but with what he can mean to philosophers today”. Nevertheless, “today” is necessarily an ephemeral word, and if, as Danto said, “the recent history of analytical philosophy recapitulates in a way the intellectual crisis which Santayana helped overcome”, a crisis that Danto called, before deconstruction and literary theory occupied the place of philosophy in the American universities, “a disease of grammar”, and which Santayana himself *

This paper is a versión of the introduction to GEORGE SANTAYANA, La filosofía en América, ed. by J. Alcoriza and A. Lastra, Biblioteca Nueva, Madrid, 2006. I would like to express my gratitude to the scholar Mercedes García Bolós, who amended, in a constitutional sense of writing too, my English.

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would have considered a sophistication of Nominalism or Idealism —a false step in philosophy, as he would have said in one of the texts left unfinished at his death—, we almost could conclude that philosophers today are not so situated as Danto to recognize in Santayana a precursor, neither to discover in his central teaching — materialism, or the harmony between living beings and the natural conditions of their existence— a new emancipation. The writings of Santayana, “sufficiently engaging to be taken up and given, as all important philosophical work must finally be, the status of contemporaneity” —as Danto said— are now in danger to appearing untimely or out of phase, in danger of not providing the answers that the day (today) needs and perhaps of not raising either the questions that would enlighten the necessities of the day (today); being indeed too well written and needing, in appearance, no commentary, and showing a certain indifference or arrogance at moments of extreme solidarity. Every wave of enlightenment extinguises, indeed, some lights. The reading of Santayana has not been, of course, one of the consequences of pragmatism, but both in Danto’s call to action as in the later reflections of Richard Rorty or Stanley Cavell on American philosophy there is a limit that Santayana would like to be the first to trespass, whatever it was, in first instance, the imaginary direction of the spirit —a favorite word of the old philosopher in Rome— in the outside world. Santayana emphatized that he was not a professor of philosophy, but a philosopher, and that the business of a philosopher —as he claimed in the Preface to The Realms of Being— is rather to be a good shepherd of his thoughts, not of other’s (neither other philosopher’s), thoughts: “Even if defeated in the pursuit of truth, the spirit may be victorious in selfexpression and self-knowledge; and if a philosopher could be nothing else, he might still be a moralist and a poet.” Stevens (and Emerson) would agree with this literary ethics. Nevertheless, the distinction between the philosopher and the professor of philosophy would not have sounded so proud or neglected, in its cell of Rome, while he gave the last touch to the political philosophy of Dominations and Powers and rewrote The Life of Reason, if Santayana had left in the open the, without a doubt, hidden source of its considerations: “There are nowadays professors of philosophy —wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden—, but no philosophers”. The observation of the disciple of Emerson was as much acute because at his time, at least in the United States, were not, in an strict or academic sense, professors of philosophy, and philosophy itself was comprised in a broad transcendentalist culture, although excluded in the case of Emerson and Thoreau of the university teaching, a culture that Santayana would despise, a generation later, with the qualifying motto of “genteel tradition”, a disqualification that would exert an extraordinary influence in American (transcendentalist or not) culture. Unlike Thoreau, Santayana would know, almost from its foundation, and from inside, American academic philosophy, of which he would be a part during almost forty

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years, twenty of them as a professor. In that philosophy, Santayana would recognize cum reluctantia as his equal —the “three American philosophers” of which he would write about in one of his last papers— William James and John Dewey, the great creators of pragmatism. To be a philosopher, nevertheless, was not merely for Thoreau “to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust”. Santayana would have been pleased to know that his philosophy was to be read at any time, inside or outside the academy, as a sample of the simplicity, the independence, the magnanimity, and the trust of his life. Wisdom would never consist for Santayana in being only a wise person. It is admirable to profess philosophy —added Thoreau— because it was once admirable to live it. Whatever will be the meaning or the value of a philosophical life, it will deliberately challenge the philosophical theory: “life of reason” could lack, as Santayana warned repeatedly, of reason to exist and would be, nevertheless, preferable. It would be preferable, of course, in comparison with the professionalization or specialization of philosophy or with its conversion in any form of textualism. As a philosopher and a writer, Santayana would almost elude successfully both the regulated transmission of the knowledge and the indiscipline of the deconstruction, but we must read him as a philosopher and a writer, as a “poet philosopher” or as the literary philosopher who himself resisted to be, and probably as a philosopher he had not admited that the single writing was sufficient —not needing of the example of a rational life or the ideal of the nature—, and as a writer he practiced the irony or the retraction, the classic forms of the apology, so that, even in the case that there were anything outside the text and that the philosophy were only a sort of writing or a literary style with its own norms, it had, at least, two or more texts, successive or simultaneous, susceptible of interpretation. One of the keys of the reading of the work of Santayana resides, undoubtedly, in the logographic necessity to read several of its writings at the same time, as if they were written or rewritten deliberately by the same author. The philosophy of Santayana, and his writing, would have be the same, but the readers would have changed since then. Almost half century after the paper of Danto, an excellent critical edition of his works is in progress, and it is established an international, rigorous and trustworthy Santayana’s scholarship; in very different cultural and political circumstances, the work of Santayana has renewed the spring of its inspiration and, if not in the strictly academic philosophy —the small realm of the professors of philosophy—, in the appreciation of the philosophy by a world of readers Santayana still keeps intact the prestige of its writing and perhaps the radiation of its thought. But the condition of contemporary demands that we know, sooner or later, for whom wrote Santayana.

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In the case of Spain, the readings of Santayana could be an example of what the author himself would have called a “pathetic fallacy”: “Jorge Santayana” is, surely, a cultural illusion by which has been projected on “George Santayana” a feeling of sympathy, of property and adhesion to a “Spanish philosophy” of which, nevertheless, nobody would know to offer a definition the sufficiently precise as to include in it the author of Interpretations of poetry and religion or Scepticism and faith animal. An illusion, on the other hand, that Santayana himself fed, without too much responsibility, in his autobiographical writings and his lack of afection for the American philosophy, character, opinion or civilization. Probably the relations of Santayana with Spain constitute one of the reasons of study more needed of prudence and disinterestedness; in many aspects Santayana shows himself a partisan of a tradition that we could hardly accept that it prevailed (the moral regeneration of Spain!) and, out of the purely personal affections of the author — nobody could insist about them that knows to what extent the reflections of Santayana on the generative order of the society got rid successfully of all “domestic temptation” —, is little what the philosophy of Santayana, whatever were the sky under which it was written, could have in common with a nonexistent Spanish philosophy, in fact, outside the academy. A man’s feet, said Santayana, must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world. It is, indeed, if we avoided the academy and, in certain way, the national allegiance of any philosophy, how the philosophy is revealed everywhere identical and persuasive: that the philosophy pronounces always the same speeches is not a secret. For Santayana, “German philosophy” or “American philosophy” were contemptuous terms, and “Spanish philosophy” would not have been less. Yet, is an easily correctable pathetic fallacy: it would be enough with making available to Spanish readers a complete translation of the works of Santayana, updated and faithful to the critical edition in course, so that the pathetic fallacy yielded the passage to a literary experience more than compensating. It would be, in effect, a translation, and it is reasonable to think that, being the translation the true lingua franca of culture, would allow to warn to what extent the writing of Santayana does not match with Spanish literature: nobody has written in Spanish as Santayana wrote in English, nobody has written in Spanish that which Santayana wrote in English, and it is not absolutely certain, as the author himself affirmed in more than an occasion, that he wanted to say in English the greater possible number of non English or American things. On the contrary, Santayana reiterated a substantial part of the English philosophy, specially of the English political philosophy, and measured its forces with the “American Renaissance” —according to the classic formulation of F. O. Matthiessen— opposed to the traditional lamp of the English experience. If America made of Santayana an exilate and a foreigner, Spain could not provide (not then, not now) a mother country or a ground under the feet; that exile did to him, in addition, free —as we can read in ‘The Poet’s Testament’— it is more

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doubtful and it demands that we know the world in which Santayana, or the powers integrated of his “psique” or spiritual autonomy, could establish its appropriate and specific truth. Santayana did not write for Spanish readers, and the best Spanish or Hispano-American readers of Santayana have had to pass through the experience of the translation to begin to know his thought, and it is not a simpler experience than to read authors of whom it would be unimaginable that could be adapted to any national philosophy, like Lévinas or Wittgenstein. Not even in its jovial form of a “travel philosophy” that searches the wisdom that goes, as often as it is possible to him, from the familiar to the strange, neither with the less spontaneous recognition that he was a critical foreigner, is easy to accept in our days —in which exile has received the aspect of the refugees, the forced displaced or the massive immigration— the exile of Santayana as an emancipation, unless we are unnecessarily frivolous on the matter. As Edward W. Said has written, in the “immense and impersonal present scene”, the exile does not serve to the humanism. To question the exile of Santayana is a form to ask for whom he wrote its books and which were the ideal readers to whom he addressed, specially when his books began to be written outside the United States, in Spain or France and, in a more significant way, in the between-war England and Fascist or Democristiana Italy. ‘The Irony of Liberalism’, for instance, a characteristic text of the exilewriting of Santayana, was published in the American magazine The Dial in 1921 and a year laterin the Later Soliloquies that Santayana would add to the Soliloquies in England. His biographer, John McCormick, noticed in the last Soliloquies a change of tone according, in a certain way, with the course of the events in the world. Soliloquies in England was, as Santayana himself suggested, an elegy on a lost cause, “but when causes are thoroughly lost, the bitterness goes out of the memory, and it becomes timeless and pleasant”. Many of the first Soliloquies had been written, and published, during World War I, in the first stage of Santayana’s exile, after he had left the United States in 1912; unlike Egotism and German Philosophy, a true war-book, published shortly before and that soon would be obsolete —Nazism would surpass all the limits granted to the egotism and the German philosophy—, predominated in them a sense, for a vagabond like Santayana, of England still could offer something similar to an asylum: the old one and merry England, rural, universitary and imperial, that would need a second world war to wake up of the Victorian dream that Santayana still slumbered in the stately mansions of his friends or during the aristocratic Grand Tour by the continent. Anthony Trollope, the quietest of the English novelists, had noticed which would happen with England when she realized that did not deserve anything of whatever guarded in her own benefit, not even the spiritual goods by which Santayana felt predilection. In ‘The Irony of Liberalism’ Santayana would describe, indeed, the sense of waking up of a dream and even of a nightmare: Liberalism

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was, in fact, “prenietzschean”. The irony of the title, nevertheless, react on the own mood of the writer. It was not, although in appearance it adopted the traditional and dispassionate form of the essay-writing, a serene text, and soon Santayana would realize of the consequences of being ironic with respect to Liberalism. As much in the writing of Dominations and Powers (1951) like in the rewriting of The Life of Reason, whose edition in a single volume would be published posthumously in 1954, it is perceivable between lines the concernence of a writer —one which according to his own confession had found at different moments and places, breathable the liberal, catholic and German air, and counted with the security that the Comunism does not lack advantages for a free man nor splendid emotions— on the future of the democracy in the world in a literal sense: the length and sometimes esoteric commentary to the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln in Dominations and Powers would not be an ironic text or it would be ironic in a literary, not a worldly sense. But Santayana, who is frequently dissociated of the rest of philosophers, especially of the philosophers or professors of philosophy of Twenty Century which were his contemporary ones, was not so heterodox in his opinions on Liberalism. ‘The Irony of Liberalism’ is a reflection on exile, and exile always conditioned the opinions of Santayana: when a part of the intellectuals had to emigrate unwillingly to the United States in the first half of the century, Santayana exiled willingly to Europe, where he would remain more or less resigned —most of the time in Fascist Italy— and elaborate or reconsidered the most important part of his vast work. Already in Fascist Italy, indeed, and not in the ironically liberal England of between-war, Santayana would have the chance to retake its text on Liberalism. In 1934, as an answer to a question by the nature of the government of Benito Mussolini, Santayana wrote ‘Alternative to Liberalism’, a text, as it were, more ironic than the first text on Liberalism, in the measurement in which it did not offer any alternative and insisted on his critics to Liberalism. In his reference to classics —to the pietas and closed society of old—Santayana would not have been arranged to turn his work in a paraphrasis of classic texts like, for instance, Leo Strauss, another adversary of Liberalism (and the philosopher of Twenty Century which more affections and differences suscite with Santayana), who expressed in that way his exile in the United States. An illusion of the past in the second postwar period, Liberalism would vanish before the reality of the present, scrupulously democratic and even revolutionary in the measurement in which Liberalism had been a farce of history and not a legitimate representation. The prediction of Santayana on the loss of the spontaneity and the autonomy of the American democracy would give back to the philosophy, understood then like scepticism and chastity of intelligence. The value of reading of an ironic text on Liberalism at the present time is evident, but surely it would not be easy to find alternatives to a democracy in which it is little by little extended the element of the power or the

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order without the popular or social element. The secret of the political philosophy —Santayana’s last teaching—resided in the tension or the commitment between both elements, and not in its relaxation. The democracy always says two things, not always compatible, and to say two things with a single word could be perfectly the expression of the irony. The world that hosted Santayana has disappeared almost completely: the England of the Russell, the Fascist and Democristiana Italy, the abulense Spain, even the Soviet Comunism and probably also the genteel tradition whose death had announced Santayana, although himself would have preferred that continued existing to have to reconstruct it for want of a better tradition, and is not possible to find in its writings another tradition to which Santayana has dedicated so many efforts. The spirit must learn to live in a thankless world, where no government could serve to all the interests nor the philosopher could hope reasonably that the city was as reasonable as himself. To a disinterested philosopher like Santayana corresponds to understand that the others may have such an interest which as soon as possible he would want to come off itself. Adhesion to anyone of militant orders —as Santayana would call to the political forms that the modern society had tolerated, from Liberalism to the Comunism— would only suppose a false escape from domination, like the domination of the United States that Santayana saw appear in the horizon of its time and that, as any other form of the domination, would tend in the future to eliminate the rival powers. Only the spirit is called to dominate legitimately the existence. The elimination of the innumerable incarnations of the spirit —of now we would call multiculturalism— would be the equivalent, therefore, to the cancellation of the favorable conditions of the experience to the philosophy, to which Santayana always would talk about in singular; in a world dominated by a new militant order —by a democracy that, in opinion of Santayana, had lost its spontaneity or autonomy—, philosophy would have to resort, indeed, to the scepticism: the scepticism would be, as Santayana wrote, the chastity of intelligence. But the chastity, as the abstention, is sterile. The scepticism could not be the last word of the philosophy in general nor of the philosophy of Santayana in particular; even so, it would remain to know what it is what provokes the incredulity of the philosopher and which is the stone of scandal of the philosophy. In an ulterior philosophy to Santayana’s like the philosophy of Cavell —based on a reading without prejudices of Emerson and Thoreau—, to resist the threat of the scepticism is a task linked to a new form to understand the meaning or the importance of America for the philosophy. In a work, like the work of Santayana, that still has to discover many of his meaning, it would not be absolutely impertinent to reread his writing on America and the philosophy in America at the same time that its philosophical or autobiographical writing, that often is overlapped. It could almost be said that the first essay on “The genteel tradition in

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the American philosophy” constituted the declaration of independence of Santayana, that exiled to Europe immediately after writing it, and that the rest of its reflections on the United States would be only one series of autobiographical chapters that would justify their simultaneous decision to leave the teaching of the philosophy. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the United States is not distinguished at the present time of any other State more or less civilized, although the temptation to project on its eminently republican forms the accidental, and sinister, forms of the empire would not have to be more seductive than the temptation to project on the old world (and the world is old indeed, and can have changed but little since man arose in it) the republican forms. The “americanization of the world” —that could simply mean a representative government in the terms in which Santayana would expose in Dominations and Powers, with an strong impronta of Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton, as a perpetual commitment— remains a preferable option to any other of which at the moment the human beings have materially to at hand. The Constitution of the United States was not only a political event and, in any case, the American authority was scrupulously reticent. Today we could include the writing of Santayana in the American constitutional writing, a writing of which it has been possible to say — about the writing of its more outstanding representative, Emerson— than is undeconstructable, in the measurement in which it does not establish that there is not anything outside the constitutional text, but that that same text —formed by the Declaration of Independencia and Walden, by the Gettysburg Address, Pragmatism or The education of Henry Adams— constitutes the world of the rational life of the men and has not been finished still writing. That radical infinitude of the American constitutional text would not be incompatible with the tension between the radical instability of the matter that Santayana would reiterate and the voice of order of the spirit in the nature. Santayana would describe its American experience of several ways, some of them superficial and deeper others, almost hidden to one first reading of its texts: perhaps the differences between the first writing of the genteel tradition and the second, its “marginal notes” on the civilization in the United States and, specially, their commentary to the Gettysburg Address, if not Dominations and Powers as a whole, show a constitutional writing and, in an elevated degree, that which Joseph Riddel called a “reading of America”, the reading of “a text without origin, a translation of a translation”. Santayana defined the spirit like a world of the free expression, and it is almost safe that it wrote solely for those who lived in that world. Perhaps the realm of the spirit is not but the expression of an amendment, of an amendment to the first amendment of the constitutional text that would affirm the right to the freedom of expression. The writing of a philosopher —as Santayana wrote with regard to Spinoza— attached to the sincere confidences of those who have undressed of all

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doubtful right and of all debatable guarantee, has always a supreme value of reading.

Works Cited Danto, Arthur C. ‘Santayana and the Task Ahead’, en The Nation (December 21, 1963), pp. 437-440. Dawidoff, Robert. The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage. High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James, and Santayana. North Carolina UP, Chapel Hill and London, 1992. Lastra, Antonio. La Constitución americana y el arte de escribir. Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Valencia, Valencia, 2002. McCormick, John. George Santayana. A Biography, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1987. Mitchell, Charles E. Individualism and Its Discontents: Appropiations of Emerson, 1880-1950, University of Massachussets Press, Armhest, 1997. Riddel, Joseph. ‘Rereading America/American Readers’, Modern Language Notes, vol. 99, 4 (1984). Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile, Harvard UP, 2001. Santayana, George. The Birth of Reason and Other Essays (1968). Edited by D. Cory, with a new introduction by H. J. Saatkamp Jr. Columbia University Press, New York, 1995. —. Character and Opinion in the United States (1920), with a new introduction by J. W. Yolton, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick and London, 1991. —. The Complete Poems of George Santayana. A Critical Edition, ed. by W. G. Holzberger, Associated University Presses, Cranbury, NJ, and London, 1979. —. Dominations and Powers. Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government (1951), with a new Introduction by J. McCormick, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick and London, 1995. —. The Genteel Tradition. Nine essays by George Santayana, ed. by D. L. Wilson, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1967; reprinted with an Introduction by R. Dawidoff, Bison Books Edition, The University of Nebraska Press, 1998. —. George’s Santayana America. Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. by J. Ballowe, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1967. —. The Life of Reason (1905-1906), Prometheus Books, Amherst, 1998. —. Santayana on America. Essays, Notes and Letters on American Life, Literature and Philosophy, ed. by R. Colton Lyon, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1968.

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Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, 150th Anniversary Edition, ed. by J. Lyndon Shanley, with an introduction by J. Updike, The Writings of HDT, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2004.

“TO AN OLD PHILOSOPHER IN ROME”: WALLACE STEVENS’S POETIC MEDITATIONS ON SANTAYANA JACEK GUTOROW

Stevens’s lifelong fascination with Santayana is a known fact. The poet met the philosopher in Harvard, sometime between 1897 and 1900 when he was an undergraduate student there. They exchanged poems, and Santayana’s 1900 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion proved an important, if latent, influence on Stevens. Although they would not meet in the later years (Santayana was abroad from 1912 until his death), there remained a sort of affinity between the two projects. We know that Stevens read all of the books published by Santayana (Young 264), and anyway he referred to the philosopher (particularly after 1940) as one of the “major men”; for example, in his seminal essay “Imagination as Value” he described Santayana as dwelling “in the head of the world” (Necessary Angel, 148). I propose looking at Stevens’s debt to Santayana from two positions. The first is that of a young poet fascinated by the aesthetic project of his Harvard mentor – evidence of such fascination may be found in the fake epic “The Comedian as the Letter C” (1922), Stevens’s reversal of the Romantic quest poem. The second perspective involves Stevens’s two major poems of his later years: “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (1949) and the 1952 preelegy “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” which was dedicated to the dying philosopher and marked a more advanced and serious examination of Santayana’s work. I would like to show that Stevens’s poetic meditation on Santayana in Rome was an artistic elaboration of his early enchantment, and it may be read as a culmination of the poet’s intellectual, indeed existential, development. More and more is known about Stevens’s reaction to Santayana’s Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. In his pioneering study of the poet Frank Kermode noticed that it was a “key book for the thought of Stevens” (81), and quoted three passages that revealed some obvious anticipations of the poet’s later concepts and aesthetic theories (decisive role of imagination, concept of the reality, notion of the Supreme Fiction):

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“To an Old Philosopher in Rome”: Wallace Stevens’s Poetic Meditations on Santayana [the poet] disintegrates the fictions of common perception into their sensuous elements, gathers these together again into chance groups, as the accidents of his environment or the affinities of his temperament may conjoin them; and this wealth of sensation and this freedom of fancy, which make an extraordinary ferment in his ignorant heart, presently bubble over into some kind of utterance. The great function of poetry… is… to repair to the material of experience, seizing hold of the reality of sensation and fancy beneath the surface of conventional ideas, and then out of that living but indefinite material to build new structures, richer, finer, fitted to the primary tendencies of our nature… the sphere of significant imagination, of relevant fiction, of idealism become the interpretation of the reality it leaves behind, Poetry raised to its higher power is then identical with religion grasped in its inmost truth… (all quotes Kermode, 513 81)

But the poet’s reaction was by no means definite. As it is, Stevens reviewed the book in the Harvard Advocate (an unsigned review was published on 24 March, 1900), but significantly – and prophetically – he had some reservations about Santayana’s main arguments. What he did not accept was the philosopher’s radical aestheticism. As the young Stevens put it, “as an ultimate solution of the problems of existence, [Interpretations of Poetry and Religion] is not wholly adequate” since it passes over “the imperfect world of fact” (qtd in Longenbach 19). With this, Stevens was also addressing his own fascination with the French Symbolists and the idea of “Art For Art’s Sake” – one can easily see, here and in the later texts, that Santayana was for him a point of selfreference and a touchstone of artistic identity. On the other hand, the two projects had many common points, most of them resulting from Santayana’s and Stevens’s intellectual debts to William James.514 As Lisa Ruddick has shown, we can detect in James a decisive transition from the nineteenth-century symbolism “that pictures the human mind as a solid edifice in the midst of a fluid world” (335) to the twentieth-century collapse of such a vision. As Ruddick convincingly argues, for James language is a “fortification against fluidity, a foothold in a dissolving universe” (339), “a solid fortress in a fluxional universe” (340). Santayana, and later Stevens, depart from the same assumption but arrive at different conclusions. Santayana provides the reader with images of the world as a chaotic sea of sensations and of our language as a bridge over the liquid chaos (347), but this simple metaphor is then questioned – our perceptions “dominate experience only as the parallels 513

Other texts on Santayana’s influence on Stevens during the latter’s Harvard years include Hughson 1977 and Young 1965. 514 See also Durant 365-389.

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and meridians make a checker-board of the sea. They guide our voyage without controlling the waves, which toss forever in spite of our ability to ride over them” (qtd 347). This in turn undermines the very fluid symbolism as language is no longer seen as stable and dominant, and is referential (symbolical) power is lost. Such a transition may be witnessed in American poetry as well, with Whitman (Sea-Drift cycle including “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”), Stevens and Ashbery (his 1991 Flow Chart in particular) as high points. However, what Ruddick stresses is Santayana’s and Stevens’s subsequent revisions of water imagery and symbolism. The critic’s main point is that Santayana’s descent to the reality as flux “generated a broader ‘ascent’” (349) – structures of thought “may be destroyed only in order that ‘new structures’ may be built” (349). This is the moment when Santayana resorts to the symbols of the edifice: “We can turn… to the building of our own house, knowing that… [the] universe… [may] be partially dominated by our intelligence” (349). Consequently, the author of The Sense of Beauty “profoundly altered his master’s emphasis” as he “distrusted the ocean of sensation” and called for a “descent to experience but for an ascent into the splendid house of the imagination” (349-350). This association is strengthened by Santayana’s descriptions of the figure of the poet. Santayana’s idea is that of the poet descending to “the dim region of the nameless” (347) and then to recover a “total vision of the world” (348). Now, the same moment may be detected in Stevens whose “The Comedian as the Letter C,” a long poetic meditation included in Harmonium (1923), is, as Ruddick says, “one of Stevens’ fullest meditations on the role of the poet in a watery universe” (351). Like James and the early Santayana, Stevens records a process of personal disintegration as dissolving in water. In the poem’s first section (“The World without Imagination”) Crispin, the poet’s alter ego, is “washed away by magnitude” and transformed into Triton: nothing left of him, Except in faint, memorial gesturings, That were like arms and shoulders in the waves (Collected Poems, 28-29)

This leads to a powerful image of Crispin reduced to his “starker, barer self/ In a starker, barer world” (29), and to the canto’s terse conclusion: “The sea/ Seevers not only lands but also selves” (30). Yet in the next sections of the poem – and it brings us to the late Santayana – Crispin decides to build “A Nice Shady Home” (this is the title of the fifth canto): “a cabin who once planned/ Loquacious columns by the ructive sea” (41). The poet develops this image:

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“To an Old Philosopher in Rome”: Wallace Stevens’s Poetic Meditations on Santayana And so it came, his cabin shuffled up, His trees were planted, his duenna brought Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands, The curtains flittered and the door was closed. Crispin, magister of a single room, Latched up the night. (42)

Ruddick compares this to Santayana’s “Every art looks to the building up of something” (352) though she rightly notices that with Stevens the building up of a nice shady home is one more fiction, “as tentative and impermanent as the last, and… must be abandoned the moment it is achieved” (353). Nevertheless, the idea of poetry and reality as supreme fiction came to Stevens much later – in “The Comedian” the poet satisfies himself with building a small house and accommodating his hero in a high-and-dry place. Ruddick’s remarks can be also applied to Stevens’s 1949 great and epic-like meditation ”An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” The main difference is that “The Comedian” provides us with a reversed poetic Bildungsroman, a distorted record of the fake growth of the poet’s mind, whereas the New Haven meditation is essentially incoherent, heterogenous and devoid of any sense of unity and wholeness – it seems that ideally its sections should be read simultaneously, and that they “happen” at one time. The Stevens of the New Haven poem might be called a “radical sceptic” (Young 270) who may repeat after Santayana: “My scepticism has at last touched bottom and my doubt has found honourable rest in the absolutely indubitable” (qtd in Young 270). As a matter of fact, the poet expressed the same sentiments in one of his letters: when accused of nihilism, he wrote back immediately: “I do at least arrive at the end of my logic” (Letters, 861). David Young quotes the following passage of the New Haven poem: Inescapable romance, inescapable choice Or dreams, disillusion as the last illusion, Reality as a thing seen by the mind, Not that which is but that which is apprehended, A mirror, a lake of reflections in a room, A glassy ocean lying at the door, A great town hanging pendent in a shade, An enormous nation happy in a style, Everything as unreal as real can be… (Collected Poems, 468)

However, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” is also a meditation on the mind which seeks to root itself in the very process of thinking. The

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poem’s second canto is crucial here. It points to the fact that the house composed of the sun is in fact the house of the self – only man is capable of dwelling in the free sphere of his own Being, and the latter (the idea of the sun) can be realized only through man. Moments of thinking and dwelling overlap: Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves, So that they become an impalpable town, full of Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound, Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self, Impalpable habitations that seem to move In the movement of the colors of the mind (466)

I think there are surprising parallels here between Stevens’s poetic visions and Heidegger’s philosophical arguments as expressed in his post-war texts, especially “Building Dwelling Thinking,” an important lecture given in Darmstadt in 1951. According to the German philosopher, “man is the being whose Being as ek-sistence consists in his dwelling in the nearness of Being” (222). Therefore, man is the “neighbor of Being” (222). In the New Haven poem Stevens refers to “a sense in which we are poised,” “the perpetual reference,” “object of the perpetual meditation,” “point of the enduring, visionary love” (Collected Poems, 466) – and these, I think, are the specifications of what Heidegger called Sein, i.e. Being as unfolding. The words “point” and “object” suggest singular events, but the poet evidently stresses their dynamic character by means of adjectives and progressive verb forms: perpetual, enduring, visionary. The context of the canto makes the whole scene tentative – first of all, it is to be supposed and not something already existing; it is also inseparably associated with its medium, i.e. language: “we cannot tell apart/ The idea and the bearer-being of the idea” (466). Thus, the object of the poet’s perpetual meditation cannot be identified with Eliot’s “still point of the turning world” (Eliot, 191). Rather, it resembles Whitman’s and Ashbery’s long, Wordsworthian poems which are indefinite and ever-transforming, or, as Stevens has it, “endlessly elaborating” (Collected Poems, 486). “These houses” are not behind or beyond language – they are imbedded within language, within its texture. Heidegger: “Language is the house of Being in which man ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of Being, guarding it” (213). Equally important is Stevens’s amazing vision of “an impalpable town” full of transparencies (sounds, dwellings, selves). There is a strong tension between “spirit’s speeches,” which are depicted as “[c]onfused illuminations and sonorities” (Collected Poems, 466) and the pre-Lapsarian, angelic version of New Haven where language is redundant because our intentions and thoughts are transparent. Once again, the context of the whole poem helps us see that the

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ideal, heaven-like vision of New Haven is a reflection of a meditating mind, and that it is entangled in its own linguistic network. What is worth noting, however, is Stevens’s obsessive preoccupation with moments of nearness and neighborhood, of “[c]oming together in a sense in which we are poised” (466). The coming together is synonymous with thinking as translation and accommodation – thanks to the neighborhood of language and thought man can realize and arrive at his own Being. This dimension of nearness as something superior to a free play of signifiers recurs throughout Heidegger’s late texts. As the Polish critic Krzysztof Ziarek has it, “the specificity of Heidegger’s understanding of language as a translation or a way of the saying (Sage) of manifestation into words can in fact be articulated only through the relation, the neighboring, of poetry and thinking” (22). The same supposition may be found in Stevens’s long meditative poems in which the poet tries to translate – and thus accommodate – his disintegrating and vanishing self. The building-dwelling-thinking motif was further developed in “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.”515 Like Henry Church, Santayana became for Stevens an incarnation of what the poet described as the all-round man, rabbi or major man. At the same time it seems that both thinkers served Stevens as sublime idealizations of his own personality. The Santayana of the 1952 poem is hardly real – in fact, he is devoid of human features, and is reduced to a medium through which the poet imagines a supreme version of himself. Like the places Stevens never visited (Paris, Munich, Basil), the dedicatee of the Rome poem is a postcard persona: two-dimensional and iconic, a sign rather than a consciousness. In this he resembles Professor Eucalyptus from the New Haven poem – both Santayana and Eucalyptus are “scholars of one candle,” and they embody the Stevensian ideal of man complete. Both Santayana and Stevens long for the reality beyond external phenomena and attempt to bring to life structures of Being wherein they can dwell. There are conspicuous affinities between the New Haven poem and “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.” Both are, so to say, architectural poems, poems about buildings and spaces including buildings and men. As already stated, the architectural scene is essential for Stevens as it evokes problems of perception and accommodation; it is also a recollection and regrouping of the fluid symbolism as employed by Stevens in his early poems. For one, the scene is unavoidably in perspective and it confronts a subjective point of view and the ultimate perception of reality in its wholeness: both Eucalyptus and Santayana are capable of transgressing subjectivity and perceiving the world “beyond the eye” and beyond the “horizons of perception” (both phrases are taken from the 515

Stevens based his pre-elegy on the information taken from Edmund Wilson’s New Yorker article depicting the critic’s encounter with the dying Santayana (see Wilson).

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Rome poem). Also, the scene includes reality in its thingness: buildings, arches, are naves are physical and opaque – you cannot see through them and they do not reflect one’s gaze. Ostensibly obstacles, walls and stones became for Stevens metonymies of hard reality which does not submit itself to tricks of the eye, so deceptive and turning everything into dazzling facets of the perceiving mind (this would find its culmination in the late figure of the rock). There are obvious Heideggerian parallels here: disappointed with his early poems exorcising private phenomenology, Stevens turned to the Heideggerian project of thinking as building and dwelling, and of poetry understood as a search for the essential reality and not its manifestations. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” are culminations of this search. In “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” Stevens imagines two cities: the actual New Haven and an “impalpable town” with “impalpable habitations.” The same dichotomy informs “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” which starts with a vision of two Romes (“Rome, and that more merciful Rome/ Beyond,” 508), and then continues by doubling Santayana’s convent room and making it both the actual room and its enlarged imaginary version. This is of course the sublime moment: the eye tries to go beyond eyesight and toward the invisible. In architectural terms, this means crossing the threshold – but here the metaphor fails as it is not a matter of passing from interior (consciousness) to exterior (the world as it is) but rather experiencing and inhabiting the interior in a new way. First, there is a literal description: The bed the books, the chair, the moving nuns, The candle as it evades the sight, these are The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome… (508-509)

At the end of the poem the description is repeated: It is a kind of total grandeur at the end, With every visible thing enlarged and yet No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns… (510)

The word “yet” cuts both ways - we can easily paraphrase the fragment and say: it is merely a bed, a chair and moving nuns, and yet every thing is enlarged. Such a play of perspectives is nearly dominant in the poem. The same city and the same room may be viewed from two perspectives. Or perhaps we should speak about one shifting perspective: the figures in the street Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement Of men growing small in the distances of space, Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound… (508)

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Stevens starts “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” by placing us “[o]n the threshold of heaven,” but this may as well be interpreted as being on the threshold of two modes of being and not necessarily in a spatial sense. It is not perception but accommodation that is at stake – according to Stevens, the allround men like Santayana understand that perception is illusory and instead approach reality as a house to be dwelt in. Such a reality becomes the poem’s “total grandeur of a total edifice” – there is an affinity to Heidegger’s “House of Being” where existence and thinking are one and the same thing. This is what – according to Stevens – Santayana accomplishes at the end of his life, and this is also what is achieved at the end of the poem: Total grandeur of a total edifice, Chosen by an inquisitor of structures For himself. (510)

“To an Old Philosopher in Rome” is also a poem of transgression and impossibility of transgression. In fact, this is yet another version of the American Sublime, a critical password suggested and analyzed by such thinkers as Harold Bloom, Mary Arensberg or Rob Wilson. Bloom called the poem a “very late version of an American Sublime” (362) by which he understood overcoming, or at least attempts at overcoming, the poet’s inherent scepticism. Bloom found a Transcendental credo in this fragment: A light on the candle tearing against the wick To join a hovering excellence, to escape From fire and be part only of that of which Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible. (509)

I find here a direct reference to Canto VII of The Auroras of Autumn: He opens the door of his house On flames. The scholar of one candle sees An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

There is a striking difference between the two sublime modes: the poem about Santayana is a poem about a possibility of complete transgression. However, and once again, this possibility is bracketed and undermined, as if (linguistically) thwarted at the very threshold of illumination: He stops upon this threshold, As if the design of all his words takes form And frame from thinking and is realized. (511)

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The Stevens of the 1952 poem seems to be much surer of what he wants to achieve but it is significant that the knowledge is attributed to Santayana and not the poet himself. So when the speaker of the poem says: “Be orator but with an accurate tongue/ And without eloquence” (509) we feel that Stevens would thus address himself – yet this is evidently directed to the great philosopher. This is another threshold to be crossed by the poet who shows his transcendental credentials but at the same time cannot get rid of poetic eloquence. “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” was a culmination of Stevens’s lifelong preoccupation with Santayana the man and Santayana the thinker. As I have tried to show, traces of Santayana may be found in Stevens’s poems from different periods, and they constitute a distinct poetic route with a felt meditative and philosophical strain. In Harmonium one can see the poet’s growing dissatisfaction with his own nineteenth-century aesthetic credentials, convincingly analyzed in “The Comedian as the Letter C.” Stevens’s later poems witnessed a shift towards the “ever elaborating poem” resembling philosophical meditations and interpreting existence as a project. The latter is a Heideggerian gesture but, as Stevens did not read Heidegger, it might easily be said to be influenced by Santayana’s ghost: the imaginary “head of the world” which finds its place in the world and is determined to inhabit it. That is why I think we must not disregard this latent and somewhat secretive relationship between the poet and the philosopher. And would it be going too far to suggest that the opening statements of Stevens’s “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” are also dedicated to the great spirit of the philosopher dying in Rome? Two forms move among the dead, high sleep Who by his highness quiets them, high peace Upon whose shoulders even the heavens rest, Two brothers. (CP, 431)

Works Cited Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca and London: Cornell U Press, 1977. Durant, Will. The Story of Philosophy. The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953. Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1963. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

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Hughson, Lois. “Stevens and the Sufficiency of Reality.” Thresholds of Reality. George Santayana and Modernist Poetics. Port Washington-London: National U Publication, Kennikat Press, 1977, 158-175. Kermode, Frank. Wallace Stevens. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1960. Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens. The Plain Sense of Things. New York: Oxford U Press, 1991. Ruddick, Lisa. “Fluid Symbols in American Modernism: William James, Gertrude Stein, George Santayana, and Wallace Stevens.” Allegory, Myth, and Symbol. Edited by Morton W. Bloomfield. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard U Press, 1981, 335-353. Stevens, Wallace. Letters. Selected and Edited by Holly Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. —. “Imagination as Value.” The Necessary Angel. Essays on Reality and the Imagination. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984. —. Collected Poems. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Wilson, Edmund. “Santayana at the Convent of the Blue Nuns.” The New Yorker 22, 8 (6 April 1946), 59-64. Young, David P. “A Sceptical Music: Stevens and Santayana.” Criticism 7 (1965), 263-283. Ziarek, Krzysztof. Inflected Language. Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness. Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, Celan. Albany: State U of New York Press, 1994.

THE AGONY OF THE SPIRIT IN SANTAYANA’S NATURALISM MANUEL GARRIDO

I The club of the desperate naturalists The label “desperate naturalism” was an occurrence of the classic historian of North American philosophy Herbert W. Schneider. He coined it at the end of XIXth century in order to characterize and integrate in a tiny group four thinkers of his country who accepted the triumph of darwinism and pragmatism but showed a manifest disappointment in the face of the materialism wave that that triumph had untied. In this minute group, Schneider included Henry Adams and George Santayana; and he detected as a common factor in all of its four members a certain nostalgic reaction of the spirit of the idealistic philosophy, a spirit coloured by the pesimism of Schopenhauer, one of the more admired philosophers by those years and about who Josiah Royce, an author very well known of the intellectuals of Boston, had written an influential book. This reaction brings European readers to the memory the parallel disillusion at that time experienced in our continent by Max Weber in the face of the rise of positivist science. But Schneider observed that while three of the components of the quartet –at the end cruelly isolated by their cultural community- oriented their nostalgia in the vindication of a sort of collective spirit with Hegelian reminiscences, the fiercely individualist Santayana, seemingly born for the soliloquy, opted fearless on the other hand, without never submit to the social pressure, for a kind of subjective spirit. An instead of waiting to the reaction of his community, he preferred to be ahead to leave it. In the particular case of Santayana, this historical tension between the arrogance of darwinism and pragmatism and the lucid reserve of Schopenhauer’s pessimism characterizes fundamentally the phase ––called by him "North American"–– of his thought, as it obviously shows the reading of his

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main work in this period, The Life of Reason. But the root of that conflict also continues operating in his second, or European, epoch of maturity and soliloquy, although at this new time the problem isn’t now looked by Santayana from a historical-genetic perspective but from a conceptual and systematic frame –i.e., not in the level of the philosophy of history but in that of the ontology- as a tension and contrast between naturalism and spiritualism, or, to put it in a simpler way, between matter and spirit. Both poles of the conflict, matter and spirit, are exposed systematically in the second magnum opus of Santayana, the treatise of ontology in four volumes Realms of Being. The volumes second and quarter of this work, The Realm of Matter and The Realm of Spirit, appeared, respectively, in 1930 and 1940. But it would be convenient not to forget that although Santayana assigns in his treaty of ontology two different “realms of being” to the matter and the spirit, he rejected, in every moment of his life, any temptation to profess an ontological dualism in the style of Plato or Descartes, who always considered material and spiritual things as two different and separated sorts of being, leaving therefore open space to an eventual intuition or demonstration of the existence of a des-incarnated spirit in state of purity. For Santayana, a full fledged materialist, matter and spirit are not two things nor two phenomena, but rather a thing or substance and one of its concomitant accidents, or also, to put it in a in a way less congenial to him, a phenomenon and its epiphenomenon. The analysis of the Santayana’s theory of spirit presupposes the knowledge of his theory of the matter, whose existence is for him the fundamental assumption of the existence of the spirit.

II The confidences of Avicenna Many books of history of philosophy report that the Persian thinker Avicenna needed to read forty times the Metaphysics of Aristotle before he could understand it. How it could be that one of the most brilliant stars of the medieval philosophy, a genius to which the logic and the metaphysics owe immortal contributions and the author of a treaty of medicine whose study continued being mandatory in some European universities until the XVIIIth century needed to reflect so many times on that book? Santayana took as pretext this curious story to explain ironically, in the last of its Dialogues in Limbo, the most original facet of its materialism. Under the figure of a young “foreigner” the Spanish philosopher imagines to realize, imitating Dante but backing down now from modernity, a spectral visit to the

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place where reside the souls of the great thinkers of the antiquity and of the medieval times. There, he debates with the ghosts of Democritus, Socrates and Avicena, who reveals to the foreign youth that he has managed to decipher a secret that Aristotle had kept jealously during all his life in order to not scandalizing to the world: AVICENNA …the matter which exists and works is matter formed and unequally distributed, the body of nature in all its variety and motion. So taken, matter… has bred every living thing and our own spirit; and the soul which animates this matter is spontaneous there; it is simply the native plasticity by which matter continually changes its forms. This impulse in matter… is the only principle of genesis anywhere and the one true cause. THE STRANGER I see: “Tis love that makes the world go round, and not, as idolatrous people imagine, the object of love…. You are a believer in automatism, and not in magic. AVICENNA Excellent. If the final cause, or the object of love, bears by courtesy the title of the good, believe me when I tell you that the efficient cause, the native impulse 516 in matter, by moving towards that object, bestows that title upon it.

In this brief passage, that to an inexpert reader could appear as nothing else that a literary fragment, synthesizes Santayana his materialistic doctrine, as he maintains that the matter, or what it is the same thing, “the body of the nature in all its variety and motion” “has bred every living thing and our own spirit”, adding subsequently that “this impulse in matter” or, what it is the same thing, “the native plasticity by which matter continually changes its forms”, “is the only principle of genesis anywhere and the one true cause.” The traditional, or orthodox, Aristotelianism admits, as everybody knows, four causes in order to explain the change in the natural things: material, formal, efficient and final. The heterodox Aristotelianism of Santayana, here disguised of Avicena – to who the Marxist philosopher Bloch painted precisely as a “left wing Aristotle” –, unloads of existencial and effective weight, until the point of making them inoperative, the causes formal and final (which are, so to speak, of a more spiritual or platonic character) and reduces the other two to a single one: the matter. In this way, Santayana came to make with Aristotle the same thing that Marx had done with Hegel a half century before: to put his feets on the earth, or as Friedrich Engels would say, “we found Hegel standing on his head, and set him up right-side up again”. For that reason, as indicates the same 516

Dialogues in Limbo , Triton edition,.pp. 153-4.

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“Foreigner” (who is also the same Santayana), Avicenna prefers the mechanical explanation (“automatism”) to the “magic”, understanding here with this word the platonic- idealistic belief in the effective power of the forms. The Dialogues in the Limb saw the light in 1925. Sixteen years later, one year after the publication of the Realm of Spirit, Santayana states openly, and this time in a clear and diaphanous language without any literary envelope, that the principle that matter is the only substance, power, or agency in the universe: and… not that matter is the only reality, is the first principle of materialism.517 And in that same place Santayana says again what already was insinuated by him in the previously mentioned passage of Dialogues in the Limb: that for him the terms materialism, naturalism and mechanicism are practically synonymous. His materialism is, then, radical, but not reductive or exclusive and is, therefore, compatible with the existence of a “realm of spirit”, an existence that we can accept provided that we do not admit that this kingdom exists independently or separately, but only by derivation, opportunely credited, of the “realm of matter”. The materialism of Santayana is first of all an ontological thesis that we should not mistake for the basic postulate of the animal faith, which unquestionably counteracts, at a primary level, any initial profession of scepticism. This animal faith moves us invincibly to believe in the outer existence of the natural world of the bodies. The materialistic thesis is deduced as the first fruit of that belief by an analysis that makes explicit, through an eventual deduction or rational construction, what was before only implicit. Scepticism, states Santayana, is the chastity of the philosophy. If after accepting the invincible postulate of our animal faith we decide to adopt an ontological interpretation of the reality –an assumption that perhaps not every demanding reader of Santayana’s book Scepticism and animal faith would be disposed to accept- we should try, continues the author of this book, that our construction were the lightest possible: not a luxurious palace, but a minimum structure, a simple cabin where we can lodge with sufficient comfort our imagination, while we tried to reduce to a minimum all supposition or rational conjecture that can threatens the respect for the sceptic’s healthful chastity vote. From this perspective, from the point of view of an economy of maximally compatible assumptions with the natural incredulity of the sceptic, the ontology of Santayana resists advantageously any comparison with anyone of the splendid ontologies that bloomed in Europe during the first third of the XXth century, like those of Husserl or Whitehead, to mention only two 517

P. A. Schilpp, The philosophy of George Santayana, Lassalle, Ill., Open Court, 1917, 2nd. Impr., p. 509.

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admirable models. But if the criterion of comparison between ontologies is not their possible frugality of assumptions, but, for example, their proximity to science, the ontology of Santayana cannot compete, as it is obvious, with the ontological system of a so deep connoisseur of contemporary science as Whitehead. As correctly objected Bertrand Russell, the resistance of Santayana to accept any literal interpretation of any rational truth, prevented him to be seriously interested for the contents of science, although he respects and accepts them . The fact, for example, that the physical science declares, from Maxwell to Einstein, that its basic concept is not the material particle, as held the Newtonian mechanicist physics until the XIXth century, but the concept of field, is not trivial for a philosophy seriously interested in science. Nevertheless the satisfaction of this interest scarcely has place in the comfortable but light ontological cabin of Santayana, whose main defense only can be to emphasize that his rational constructions are closer than any other ontology, to the common sense of the man of the street.

III The Agony of the Spirit An old tradition distinguishes two fundamental parts in philosophy that differ in subject and method. One of them attempts to understand the world, sharing somehow with the science the rational investigation of the cosmic reality; the purpose of the other is the critic and the eventual satisfaction of the ideals, dreams and exigencies of our heart and our mind. We call natural philosophy to the first part and moral philosophy to the second. The main contribution of Santayana to natural philosophy is, as we already know, his defense of the materialistic or naturalistic thesis, as it is initially exposed in his first great work The Life of the Reason and more systematically developed in The Realm of Matter. His main contribution to moral philosophy is his theory of the spirit, already initiated in The Life of the Reason, partially developed later in Scepticism and Faith Animal and in Platonism and the spiritual life, and thoroughly and definitively exposed in The Realm of Spirit. 1. The impotence of the spirit. Santayana’s first step in his approach to the spiritual realm is to state that in the same way as his natural philosophy has its foundation in the thesis that the nature or matter is the power that causes every change, his moral philosophy has as its basic postulate the antithetical thesis that the spirit is radically impotent.

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In the elaboration of this thesis, Santayana contracted an immense debt, that he always recognized, with the philosophy of Schopenhauer. The crucial matter here is the moral evaluation of power. In fact, in the pagan and medieval Christian and also in the modern and contemporary philosophies, the power has been always considered as something intrinsically good and the supreme power as the supreme good. We owe to Schopenhauer the revolutionary rupture already initiated, nevertheless, millennia ago by Buddha in India- of such a conception in the Western philosophical thought. The cruel spectacle of the nature is for Schopenhauer a visible reflection of the powerful force that animates it, a cosmic Will that prolongs (extends) mercilessly its existence at the cost of the unhappiness of the innumerable suffering creatures that populate the world. He agrees with Buddha in seeing that the infernal traffic of the cosmic jungle is an inexhaustible source of pain In the Nidana, one of the canonical writings pali that contains the teachings attributed to Buddha, we can read this short statement: Birth gives rise to old age and death, which invites us to reflect on the sense and value of the life in the world. The art, observes Schopenhauer, makes us free from our natural links with the matter, because the vision of the beauty makes us forget for a moment the pains of the world. But such a liberation is unfortunately transitory. Schopenhauer thinks that it is not the path of the art, but the road of ethics, what wakes up in us the affection and the love of charity for all suffering creature and what, consequently, can leads us to the happiness through a permanent renouncement to the egoistic satisfaction of our needs in the world, as it was taught by Buddha.

Finding his inspiration, like Schopenhauer, in the Christian and Hindu thought, Santayana maintains that the spirit is powerless for transforming physically the world and for improving it satisfactorily. His argument is that all physical improvement is nothing else that the attainment of a partial aim which may correct or eliminate a certain evil, but that implies fatally the collateral production of new evils. The right punishment of a criminal may entail, for instance, the ruin of his family. Paradoxically, and in spite of its ineffective physical impotence, the spirit "can", nevertheless, really produce in us a moral transformation. The understanding of the life and the world in its beauty, the resignation, which renounces to the satisfaction of every egoistic aim, and the spiritual love, which is a charitable love ––that is, an uninterested or egoistic love, either physically effective nor procreative––, may liberate us from the wheel of natural needs, which is the source of our pains. 2. The spirit and the psyche. All this may be better understood if we compare the spirit with the mind or psyche. Santayana uses the word "spirit" to refer concretely to what we call usua1ly "conscience". He insist in the necessity

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to distinguish carefully between the entity referred by that word and what the ancient and moderns called "soul” and the contemporaries "mind" or "psyche". By mind or psyche Santayana practically understands, as Aristotle, the form of a human organism. As such a form of a real organism, the psyche is deeply engaged and involved in the worldly affairs, because nothing matters to it more than the survival of its own organism. The psyche comes to be, says Santayana, a nucleus or "trope", an innovating natural turn of interests and projects, equipped with the intelligence and the effective power to transform the world for its own sake. And obviously it may be investigated, like any natural object, by the corresponding natural science, in this case scientific psychology. The German philosopher and father of the contemporary historicism, Wilhelm Dilthey, proposed to distinguish between a scientific or "explanatory" psychology and a “descriptive” or “comprehensive” one. The first, said Dilthey, imitates the natural sciences in the practice of experimental method; the second one, whose main tool was not the scientific causal explanation, but the hermeneutical understanding, was for him the foundation of the moral and cultural sciences. Analogously, Santayana would propose also a half century later to distinguish between scientific psychology (the behaviourism of his time) and what he called "literary psychology". Literary Psychology would employ a descriptive method and its use would be preferentially philosophical. In his opinion, if the psyche is the subject of investigation of scientific psychology, the mysteries of the spirit may be scrutinized and described by the literary psychology. The freedom of the spirit does not import (convey), as the freedom of the psyche, the power to move physically –in its case, magically- the matter. The spirit cannot say to a paralytic “get up and walk” with any probability of success. But it can say to a man “your sins are forgiven” and to operate herewith a moral transformation upon him. Tolstoi tells in his memories that, when he was serving in a military school as a cadet, he saw a fellow cadet beating a soldier. “How can you hit a human being?" said Tolstoi to him, "don’t you know what is written in the Gospel?" And the fellow answered: “And don’t you know what is written in the military ordinances ?” Tolstoi, Santayana would say, was speaking in this case in the name of the spirit and his fellow cadet in the name of the psyche. 3. The passion of the spirit. The tension between the psyche and the spirit manifest itself, for instance, in the quotidian fact that the moral dictates of our conscience do not agree usually with the natural desires of our psyche. To this respect, Santayana speaks sometimes of an agony of the spirit. This same expression is used recurrently by Unamuno, who experiences as “agony” the religious feeling, and it is also reminiscent of the violent antagonism between

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the soul and the spirit denounced by Ludwig Klages in his famous book Der Geist als Widersacher des Geistes. But in the case of Unamuno and Klages the root of the agony of the spirit is strictly anthropological. In Unamuno this agony is a consequence of the struggle between our will to believe and our critical reason, that hinders that will. However, the source of the antagonism is in Klages the bergsonian contrast between the spontaneous, intuitive and concrete way of the life’s knowing and the conceptual and abstract one of the spirit, that “kills” the life. In Santayana, however, the root of the agony, or, as he also says sometimes, “passion” of the spirit is not only anthropological, but cosmic. More similar to Santayana’s passion of the spirit would be perhaps the feeling of anxiety (Angst) which, according to Heidegger, produces in us the fact that we are ‘thrown’ (geworfen) into the world. But, again, the point of view of Santayana is more clearly cosmic, and not only cultural, than the heideggerian one. In general terms, it is for him an ontological exigency, a consequence of his materialistic thesis, that the only place in which the spirit can really exist is the natural world. But more specifically, the agony of the spirit that Santayana describes is generated by the hostility and inclemency of the cosmos: The world is as evil for the natural Will as the natural Win is evil for the world. The true sin is cosmic and constitutional; it is the heritage of Chaos. This is the sin of which spirit is the innocent victim. 518 4. The cognitive and the saving functions of the spirit. The spirit, as Santayana conceives it, is in relation to nature like the light to the matter. The light is something basically material, but a matter characterized by its iluminative and enlightening mission. This idea introduces in Santayana’s system the theory of knowledge of Aristotle and Plotino. The activity of the reason, says Aristotle in his Metaphysics, is (spiritual) life, and that life is knowledge: The pure, legitimate, divine offspring of being is seeing, and the ripe fruit of seeing is comprehending.519

But next to this function that is eminently cognitive, enlightens the cosmos and the life and implies the happy vision of the truth and the beauty, Santayana attributes also to the spirit the suffering of world’s pain and the mission of saving and redeeming us from it. At this point he was strongly influenced by the Epicurean theory of happiness as social retirement and by the Hindu doctrines of our redemption from the pain of the world. The spirit has not physical power, but it has moral authority enough to instruct and to persuade to 518 519

Realms of Being, N. Y., Scribner 1942, p. 785. The Idea of Christ ,N. Y., Scribner 1946 ,p. 202

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the psyche of that the true happiness does not reside in the physical possession of the things but in renouncing to it. To the exercise of this saving function the spirit feel himself moved and stimulated by the sad spectacle of the pain of the world, a spectacle of which it is witness and judge. 5 The credo of Nicea as a symbolic illustration of Santayana’s theory of spirit. We owe to the unbridled imagination of Santayana and to his obsessive predilection for the contents of the Christian religion, the design of an interesting analogy constructed with illustrative intention between the Christian story of the mystery of the divine Trinity and his theory of the spirit as it appears in the Realms of Being. It is not necessary to be a theology or medieval philosophy scholar to realize the importance of the mystery of the divine Trinity in the conceptual inventory of the Christian revelation. About it speculated thoroughly St. Augustine, during the first years of the Vth century C.A., in his treaty De Trinitate. The contents of this mystery had been fixed almost one century before in the Council of Nicea. This Council teaches that the nature of God is only one; however it consists of three divine persons that operate sinergically: the God Father, creator of the universe, whose main attribute is the Omnipotence, the God Son, of which the Gospel of Saint John predicates the Logos as attribute, and later or derivatively, as a result of the very peculiar flow of knowledge and love between the Father's and Son’s persons, it arises or proceeds, flying between both of them, the third person of the trinitarian mystery ,that is the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, Santayana’s doctrine of spirit may be summarized in these four propositions: (1) the scope of reality is fundamentally constituted by a single principle of action and power that is the nature or matter; (2) the nature or matter needs, in order to become real, to configure itself adopting temporarily and successively a legion of forms extracted from the unreal universe of the purely possible (the realm of essence); (3) in the continuous and endless trade of transformations that is the flow of the natural things we can delimit the more reduced realm (region) of the life and of the psyche; and (4) in this last realm (region) emerges naturally and preferably, as emerges the rainbow when the sun and the rain coincide, a sort of by-product, an epiphenomenon of the psyche, as luminous as ineffective, to which Santayana proposes to call “spirit”. The analogy or partial coincidence, and the correlative discrepancy between both doctrines, the Christian mystery of Trinity and the theory of the fourth realm of being in Santayana’s ontology become clear when we consider these two fundamental points: (1) the reality of the creation (the nature or world) is explained in both doctrines as a result of the collaboration of the Power

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(that is, God Father in the Christian religion and the matter in the ontology of Realms of Being) with the Reason or Logos; (which is God Son in the Christian religion and the realm of essence in Santayana’s ontology); and (2) in both doctrines the last principle or element (the third person in the trinitarian mystery, that is the Holy Spirit, and the fourth realm of being, that is the spirit in Santayana’s ontology) arises in a spontaneous but derivative way. 6. A brief reflexion on the originality and credibility of Santayana’s philosophy. An easy way to determine the eventual originality of a thinker is to compare his system of thought with the systems of his contemporaries. In natural philosophy, where all modern philosophers, sceptical, realists and idealists, attempt to approach to the world with the tool of kowledge, Santayana appeals paradoxically to the animal faith . And in moral philosophy (religious matters included), where everybody who professes the Christian religion, Catholic or Protestant, attempts to approach to the contents of divine revelation with the tool of faith, Santayana appeals not less paradoxically, as the old gnostics, to the tool of knowledge. Its appeal to animal faith faces it with the immense majority of its colleagues, for who faith is the negation of rational knowledge. And its appeal to the knowledge as regards religion faces it with the current majority of the Christian believers for who a religion without faith in the literal truth of the content of revelation becomes pure phantasmagory. But one thing is the eventual originality of a thinker and another one the credibility of his system of thought. To evaluate a moral system Bertrand Russell recommended to answer to these three questions: if this system attracts or convinces us, if it possesses internal coherence and if it is historically important. And concerning Santayana system of moral philosophy, it seems to me difficult not to subscribe this Russell’s veredict: I will, to begin with, briefly state my own view of Santayana's system. To a certain extent, though not wholly, I am in agreement with it; it is exceptionally self-consistent; and I have no doubt that it is important.520

520

Schilpp, o.c., p. 454.

CONTRIBUTORS

Thomas Alexander, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, at Carbondale. He specializes in American philosophy (especially the thought of John Dewey, George Santayana, and Emerson), aesthetics, and classical philosophy. He is the author of John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling, and is co-editor, with Larry Hickman, of The Essential Dewey. H.G. Callaway, Ph.D. is the author of Context of Meaning and Analysis: A Critical Study in Philosophy of Language (Rodopi, 1993), co-author of American Ethics: A Source Book from Edwards to Dewey (University Press of America, 2000) and editor of The Conduct of Life: by Ralph Waldo Emerson (University Press of America, 2006). He has taught at The Pennsylvania State University, The University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and the University of Erlangen, and of Mainz in Germany. Ramón del Castillo, Ph.D. is Professor of Contemporary Philosophy and Cultural Theory at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Madrid). In 1995 he published Conocimiento y acción, a historical and comparative study on the connection between American and European pragmatists. He has published many essays on American philosophers, including “The Accidental American” (a review of Santayana’s Personas y lugares), and “Entusiasmo o ironía: Santayana y James” (El animal humano. Debate con Santayana). Richard DeTar, Ph.D. earned a BA from Kalamazoo College (1967) and an MA from Western Michigan University (1972), both in Political Science. For 26 years, he was a Supplemental Security Income Claims Representative with the Social Security Administration. In 1998, he received a doctorate in Philosophy from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. His dissertation was titled Scientific Materialism and the Roman Catholic Religion in the Early Santayana. He is now employed part time as a court reporter at Social Security disability hearings.

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Ángel M. Faerna, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo (Spain). He is the author of Introducción a la teoría pragmatista del conocimiento [An Introduction to Pragmatist Theory of Knowledge] (1996), and co-editor of the volumes Individuo, identidad e historia [The Individual, Identity, and History], with Mercedes Torrevejano (2003), and Caminos de la hermenéutica [Paths of Hermeneutics], with Jacobo Muñoz (2006). He is also the editor of an anthology of essays by John Dewey: La miseria de la epistemología: ensayos de pragmatismo [The Poverty of Epistemology: Essays on Pragmatism] (2000). Matthew Caleb Flamm, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rockford College. He has articles on George Santayana and John Dewey appearing in Overheard in Seville: The Bulletin of the Santayana Society, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, and Education and Culture. He is currently working on a book examining Santayana’s engagements with German Idealism. Paul Forster, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. Among his publications are The Rule of Reason: The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (University of Toronto Press) (co-edited), “Kant, Boole and Peirce’s Early Metaphysics”, Synthese 113: 43-70, “The Logic of Pragmatism: A Neglected Argument for Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, v. 39, no. 4: 525-554, “The Unity of Peirce’s Theories of Truth”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, v. 4, no. 1: 119147, “What is at Stake Between Putnam and Rorty?”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, v. 52, no. 3: 585-604 and “Neither Dogma nor Common Sense: Moore’s Confidence in his Proof of an External World”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy (forthcoming). Manuel Garrido, Ph.D. is Chair of Catedra Jorge Santayana in Madrid, Spain. He is founder as well as director of Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy. He also founded Limbo, Boletin de la Catedra “Jorge Santayana” del Ateneo de Madrid in 1996. Garrido as been for many years Professor of Philosophy at Valencia Univeristy. He has many publications on logic, philosophy of science, and history of philosophy, including Lógica simbólica, having appeared in many editions. Finally, Garrido has translated many books for Biblioteca del pensamiento actual.

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Jacek Gutorow, Ph.D. is a poet, translator and literary critic. He has published four volumes of poetry and two books of essays: Na kresach czáowieka. SzeĞü esejów o dekonstrukcji [The Ends of Man. Six Essays on Deconstruction, 2001] and NiepodlegáoĞü gáosu. Szkice o poezji polskiej po 1968 roku [Independence of Voice. Notes on the Polish Poetry after 1968, 2003]. He has translated British and American poetry (Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Simon Armitage, Charles Tomlinson). His critical monograph of Wallace Stevens will be published at the end of 2007. Angus Kerr-Lawson, Ph.D. is professor emeritus from the University of Waterloo in both the Pure Mathematics and the Philosophy Departments. He is president of the George Santayana Society and editor of the Bulletin of the Santayana Society. He has written papers on Santayana for the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Till Kinzel, Ph.D. teaches English and American literature and culture at the Technical University at Berlin. He has also held a teaching position at the university of Paderborn and has published widely in the field of literature, philosophy and politics. His books include Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika. Studien zu Allan Blooms The Closing of the American Mind (2002), Nicolás Gómez Dávila – Parteigänger verlorener Sachen (2003, 2006) as well as Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens. Eine Studie zu Zuckermans Amerika in Philip Roths Amerika-Trilogie (2006). Lenka Krejsova is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Prešov, in the Faculty of Arts in Slovakia. She completed her studies in the Department of Aesthetics and Fine Arts in 2005, and her studies of British and American Literature and History in the Department of British and American Studies in 2005. She wrote her diploma thesis on Santayana’s Aesthetics and has translated several parts of Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty and Reason in Art into Slovakian. Currently Ms. Krejsova teaches the History of Aesthetics, mainly with a focus on the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, and is working on her dissertation titled “The Realistic Aesthetics of George Santayana.” John Lachs, Ph.D. is Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Intermediate Man, In Love with Life, A Community of Individuals and other books. He wrote George Santayana (Twayne) and On Santayana (Wadsworth).

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Antonio Lastra, Ph.D. has translated Santayana into Spanish and is the author of Emerson transcendens (2004). He is co-editor of the Cultural Studies Review La Torre del Virrey. Daniel Moreno Moreno, Ph.D. teaches philosophy at the IES Miguel Servet (Zaragoza, Spain). He has translated Santayana’s Platonism and the Spiritual Life into Spanish, and several other Santayana essays. His monograph Santayana Filósofo. La Vida Como Forma de Vida will be published in 2007 in Trotta (Madrid). Charles L. Padrón, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacagdoches, Texas. He has publications on George Santayana, including a biography entry on Santayana in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. He took his Master of Arts degree from Bucknell University, and his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University. Giuseppe Patella, Ph.D. is Professor of Aesthetics at University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. He is the chief editor of “Agalma,” review of aesthetics and cultural studies, corresponding editor of “Differentia: Review of Italian Thought” and member of SIE (Società Italiana d’Estetica). Among his last books: Sul postmoderno. Per un postmodernismo della resistenza (Roma 1990); Gracián o della perfezione (Roma 1993); Senso, corpo, poesia. Giambattista Vico e l’origine dell’estetica moderna (Milano 1995); Bellezza, arte e vita. L’estetica mediterranea di George Santayana (Milano 2001); Giambattista Vico tra Barocco e Postmoderno (Milano 2005); Estetica culturale. Oltre il multiculturalismo (Roma 2005). Daniel Pinkas, Ph.D. is professor of philosophy and head of the immédiat- arts et médias program at the Geneva University of Art and Design, in Geneva Switzerland. His areas of focus are the philosophy of mind, aesthetics and the philosophy of technology. He is the author of La matérialité de l'esprit (La Découverte, 1995) and Santayana et l'Amérique du Bon Ton (Métropolis, 2003). Richard Marc Rubin, Ph.D. received his Ph.D. in 2000 from Washington University in St Louis, where he teaches from time to time as an Adjunct Instructor. The subject of his dissertation was the Santayana-Dewey Controversy, a topic on which he presented papers at such places as Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Washington University, Indiana University (IUPUI -twice), the Santayana Society (twice), and the New York Pragmatist Forum (at Fordham University). The two papers presented at the Santayana Society were published in the Society’s bulletin, Overheard in Seville, under the

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following titles: “The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare: Dewey and Santayana on Shakespeare and Religion” (2003) and “The Philosophical and Interpretive Import of Santayana’s Marginalia” (2006). James Seaton, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University. He is currently editing a volume on Santayana for Yale University Press’s “Revisiting the Western Tradition” series. His essays and reviews on Santayana have been published in The Hudson Review, Modern Age, The University Bookman, Overheard in Seville and The Wall Street Journal. His most recent book is Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: From Criticism to Cultural Studies (University of Michigan Press, 1996). His literary and cultural criticism has appeared in a wide variety of journals, including the Yale Journal of Law & Humanities, The Journal of the History of Ideas, The American Scholar, Salamagundi, The Claremont Review, The Weekly Standard, and First Things. Krzysztof Piotr Skowroñski, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of Opole University, Poland. His main publications are on Santayana and have appeared in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society and Overheard in Seville: The Bulletin of Santayana Society). Glenn Tiller, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He has written articles on Santayana appearing in Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, and Journal of the History of Philosophy. Jessica Wahman, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She specializes in American philosophy, especially the work of George Santayana, and in topics connected to philosophy and psychology, including the philosophy of mind. Her published essays on Santayana appear in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, and Contemporary Pragmatism.

INDEX Abbott, Henry Ward, 164 Absurd, 162, 164 Adorno, Theodor, 111-120 aesthetics, 171; 213-220 Meditterranean: 171-179 America, 2, 3, 91, 94, 103, 105, 109, 117, 121, 124, 223, 225, 226, 227 American, as Santayana is regarded by scholars, 1 analytic philosophers, 93, 104 analytic philosophy, 168, 180 ancient philosophy, 78, 79, 209, 210, 211, 217 animal faith, iii, 13, 26, 28, 35, 62, 63, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 82, 83, 99, 168, 192 Aristotle, 95, 98, 103, 130, 147, 166, 195, 199, 201, 215 Aristoteleanism, 253 art, 68, 195 ascetic Santayana resists characterisation of himself as, 17 Santayana's alleged reputation as, 149 Augustine, St. 183, 185, 188, 259 Babbitt, Irving, 117 beauty, 98, 132, 148, 180, 185, 187, 193, 203-220 Being-towards-death Heidegger's concept, 138 Bergson, Henri, 116, 183 Berkeley, George, 9, 71, 81, 89 Bhagavad Gita, 20 Black Death, 184 Blake, William, 208 Bridges, Robert, 183 Buddhism, 196-201 Butler, Richard, 98

Camus, Albert, 162, 163 Carnap, Rudolf, 66 Catholic religion not an abstract theory, 149 Santayana's treatment as, 98 Catholicism, 143, 149, 154, 156, 176, 206 Cavell, Stanley, 229 certainty John Lachs and Michael Hodges on, 162 certitude absolute, as Modern criterion, 82 Chalmers, David, 37, 44 Character and Opinion in the United States, 23, 109, 110, 113, 115, 116, 117, 205, 226 charity, 19 Santayana's account of in Realm of Spirit, 19 Charity, 106 Christian, 84, 181 its meaning under controversy, 9 Theology, 183 Christianity, 163, 193 Church, Henry, 242 Codman, Julian, 146 Cory, Daniel, 145 Dante, 154, 170, 185, 192, 198 Danto, Arthur C., 211, 228, 230 Darwin, Charles, 149 Darwinism, 251 Dasein, 138 death, 136 democracy, 109, 112, 118, 131-133, 204, 232-234 Democritus, 85, 86, 98, 160, 161 Descartes, René, 66, 79, 81, 86 detachment, 18

Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana Santayana's advocacy of in later work, 14 Dewey, John, 1, 5, 6, 46-61, 91, 102105, 151, 229 Dialogues in Limbo, 85, 89, 101 Diamond, Jared, 101 Dickens, Charles, 39, 166 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 257 Dominations and Powers, 16, 20, 91, 92, 96, 100, 113, 117, 118, 129-134, 207, 229, 232, 234, 236 doubt, 50, 51, 54, 63, 70, 73, 75, 125, 160, 167, 168, 240 dualism, 38, 42, 151, 163 Egotism and German Philosophy, 232 Eightfold Path, 197 Einstein, Albert, 105, 117 Eliot, Charles William, 94, 146, 147 Eliot, T.S., 241, 245 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 123, 127, 135, 136, 148, 175, 219, 221-230, 234-236, 249 empiricism, 49, 78, 175 Epictetus, 96 Epicurus, 151 epistemology, 29, 39, 47, 48, 52, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 66, 105 scepticism in, 2 essence, 2, 5, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 41, 43, 51, 53, 54, 55, 74, 82, 83, 85, 93, 97, 99, 100, 121, 130, 137, 148, 151, 165, 168, 178, 180, 182, 189-195, 196, 200, 225, 227 distinguished from existence, 27 truth a subset of, 33 evil, 181-184 existence, 166 experience, 137 Experience Emerson Essay, 136 Experience and Nature, Dewey, 102 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 9 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 9, 115 Frank, Anne, 108

267

Frankfurt School, 112 Frege, Gottlieb, 168 Freud, Sigmund, 117 Fuller, B. A. G., 183 genteel tradition, 96, 120, 123, 229, 233, 235 "Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," Santayana's Address, 234 Gnostics, 184 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 94 Gómez Dávila, Nicolás, 205-210 Goya, Francisco de Third of May, 1808, 194 Guyer, Paul, 213 Haeckel, Ernst, 9 Harvard, 94 Santayana's departure from, 6 Heart Sutra, 196 Hegel, G.W.F., 11, 13, 86, 105, 183 Hegelian, 9 Hegelianism, 7 Heidegger, Martin, 63, 138, 241, 243 Heideggerian, 242, 245 Hill, Christopher, 42 Hitler, Adolf, 118 Hobbes, Thomas, 9, 80 Hodges, Michael, 161 Homer, 116 Howgate, George W., 165 Hume, David, 39, 66-71, 75-79, 81 Humean naturalism, 67 nihilism, 82 scepticism, 206 humor, 159, 160, 161, 167 idealism, 9-12, 61, 80, 104, 151, 175, 176, 228, 238 abnormal madness of, 86 from Germany, 149 German, 175 Platonic, 77 Santayana on, 126 Western, 77 Identity Theory of mind, 35-37

268 imagination, 219 Inge, Dean, 182, 189 intent, 83 quote from Santayana, 70 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 219, 237 intuition, 41, 51, 52, 53, 173, 182, 207 as act of spirit, 28 introspective, 43 objects of, 55 of essence, 200 of essences, 68 suspension of, 88 versus data, 78 Jackson, Frank, 43 James, Henry, 122, 123 James, William, 1, 3, 6, 31, 32, 92, 120, 121, 175, 176, 180, 229, 238, 239 Jewish Holocaust, 95 Kallen, Horace, 145 Kant, Immanuel, 63, 79, 86, 215 categorical imperative, 106 Keats, John, 146 Kepler, Johannes, 105 Kermode, Frank, 237 knowledge literal and symbolic, 29 of matter, 29 Kolakowski, Leszek, 112 Kripke, Saul, 42 la Generación del ’98 as Santayana is regarded by some in his native Spain, 1 Lachs, John, 104, 161 quoted, 138 Lamont, Corliss, 145 Latouche, Serge, 175, 178 Lenin, Vladimir llyich, 117 Levi, Albert William, 103 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 231 Levinson, Henry Samuel, 141, 165, 168 life of reason, 14 Life of Reason, 2, 160 Locke, John, 46, 80

Index Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 6 Lucretian claim that spirit originates in body, 143 Lucretius, 9, 94 madness "abnormal," of idealism, 77 "abnormal," of self-inflation, 86 "abnormal," of thought, 86 "normal," of materialism, 87 of the Holocaust, 92 wisdom a form of, 88 Marx, Karl, 9 materialism, 9 latent idealism of according to Santayana, 13 Platonistic in ontology, 2 matter, 5, 10, 26, 28, 85 Santayana's notion not atomistic, 10 Matthiessen, F. O., 231 McCormick, John, 232 McDermott, John J. quoted, 141 Mead, George Herbert, 1 metanoia, 114, 143, 155 metaphysical foundation, 97 illusions, 126 principle, 59, 65 metaphysics, 49, 133 moralistic, 181 Neo-Platonic, 2 Santayana's materialism is not, 87 traditional, 161 mind-body problem, 36-44, See naturalists Modern philosophy, 77 modernity, 204 Montaigne, Michel de, 94 Moore, G.E., 7, 12, 66 moral truth its discussion in Santayana's work, 15 Muslim its meaning under controversy, 9 Mussolini. Benito, 91, 117, 233 Nagarjuna, 196 Nagel, Ernest, 104

Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana Nagel, Thomas, 43, 167 naturalism, 2, 62, 64, 65, 71, 72, 185, 187, 216, See Humean as Dewey understands it, 48 debate with John Dewey, 5 Dewey's, 61 Dewey's, according to Santayana, 46 non-reductive, 43 same as "materialism" in Santayana, 47 Santayana's, 50, 58, 62, 68, 74 Strawson's, 63, 66-68 naturalists on mind-body problem, 36 Neo-Platonism, 98, 181 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 159, 160 Occam’s Razor, 38, 44 Oliver Twist, 39 ontological realms, 5 Ortega y Gasset, José, 1 Oviedo, José Miguel quoted, 204 Parmenidean, 77 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 1, 11, 32, 219, 224-226 Peircean, 225 Persons and Places, 3, 6, 113, 142, 154 phenomenological our context, 137 Phenomenology of Spirit, 12 philosophy of mind, 169 Picasso, Pablo, 195 Guernica, 195 Pinzón, Mario Laserna close friend of Gómez Dávila, 205 Place, U.T., 37 Plato, 76-80, 86, 95, 103, 107, 130, 147, 189, 190, 201, 215 Forms, 189 Platonic, 77, 103, 107, 193 Platonism, 181, 182, 187, 188, 194 Platonism and the Spiritual Life, 112, 145, 181, 182, 187, 188, 189, 193, 249 Plotinus, 183, 190 political

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problems arising from other's suffering, 102 politics border between it and aesthetics, 98 Ernest Nagel's model for the future, 104 post-rational morality, 14, 17, 18 Pound, Ezra, 103 pragmatic, 23, 192, 219 Buddhism, 195 view of truth, 7 Pragmatic meliorism, 99 naturalism, 98 pragmatism, 2, 120, 251 pre-rational morality choice between it and post-rational morality as ethics of life of reason, 22 Process and Reality, 87 Protestant, 125, 221, 223 rationality, 175 Santayana's view of Emerson, 175 Protestantism, 120 Proust, Marcel, 117 psyche, 16, 21, 83, 88, 107, 129-134, 182, 189, 199 Puritanism in Royce according to Santayana, 7 Quine, W. V. O., 168 rational ethics, 14 rational order of society as discussed by Santayana, 16 rationality in social philosophy, 2 reality, 138 Realm of Essence, 182, 189 Realm of Matter, 9 Realm of Spirit, 14, 169, 189 Realms of Being, 2, 15, 17, 129 distinguished from Life of Reason, 17 Reason in Art, 174, 210, 214 Reason in Religion, 106 religion, 2 Republic

270 Plato, quoted, 202 Rorty, Richard, 7, 8, 23, 24, 25, 115, 229 Royce, Josiah, 1, 6, 7, 175 Ruddick, Lisa, 238 Ruhala, Walpola, 198 Russell, Bertrand, 2, 7, 151, 168, 260 Saatkamp, Herman, 104 Said, Edward W., 232 Santayana, Agustin, 150 Scepticism and Animal Faith, 80, 87, 107, 136, 161 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 84, 166, 215, 251 quoted, 83-84 Schutz, Alfred, 95 Schneider, Herbert W., 251 science, 2 scientism, 45 Sense of Beauty, 213-220 sexuality, 84 sexual violence as a metaphor for the relation between matter and essence, 85 Shakespeare, William, 146 Hamlet, 203 Shelley, Percy, 146 Smart, J. J. C., 38 Socrates, 94, 201 Soliloqueys in England, 6, 108, 114, 116, 165 solipsism, 52 solipsism of the present moment, 51 Solomon, Robert, 162 Sophist Plato's Dialogue, 76 Spanish philosophy, 230, 231 speaking world as it relates to Spinoza, Baruch de, 2, 21, 88, 103 spirit, 5, 14, 28, 43, 137 against a self-interested moral philosophy, 15 its nature to see things objectively, 14 spiritual life, 14 spirituality, 2

Index Sprigge, Timothy, 8, 27, 33, 35 Stevens, Wallace, 148, 228, 237-244 "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven", 240 Stoicism, 96 Strawson, P.F., 62, 66 Stroud, Barry, 66 Sturgis, Susana, 152 Superman, 39 Clark Kent, 39 supernatural, 10, 56, 150, 188 knowledge is not, 50 supernaturalism, 98, 104 supernaturalist, 36 systematicity, 5 Thales, 11 The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, 145 The Last Puritan, 100, 203 The Life of Reason, 15, 129 distinguished from Realms of Being, 17 The Principles of Psychology, 120 The Realm of Spirit, 15, 18 The Sense of Beauty, 145 Thoreau, Henry David, 229, 230, 234 Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, 81 Three Philosophical Poets, 114 tragic, 141 Trilling, Lionel, 160 Trollope, Anthony, 232 Trotsky, Leon, 91 truth, 5, 85, See moral "denials of", 24 as subset of realm of essence, 33 eternality of, 28 its ties to spirit, essence, and matter, 34 Santayana's ontological account of, 23 sense in which it is a realm, 24 Unamuno, Migel de, 1 universal, how it is sidestepped, 13 universals, 11 what makes them real, 12 Valéry, Paul, 117 Varieties of Religious Experience, 120 Virtues, 132

Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana Weber, Max, 251 Whitehead, Alfred North., 87 Whitman, Walt, 238 Williams, Michael, 63, 67 quoted, 71 Winds of Doctrine, 112

271

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 64-70, 75, 168, 231 Ladder Metaphor from the Tractatus, 74 Wood, Harry, 160 Wordsworth, William, 193, 208 Young, David, 240