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| George Santayana |
George Santayana, the philosopher and man of letters, was born in Madrid. His parents separated within a few years of his birth, and his mother went to live in Boston, Massachusetts, with the children of a previous marriage. Santayana grew up in Ávila under his father’s care, but at the age of eight he joined his mother in Boston.
George Santayana was educated at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard College. After graduating from Harvard in 1886, he studied in Germany for two years and then returned to take his doctorate at Harvard, for which he wrote a thesis on Rudolf Lotze.
George Santayana subsequently joined the department of philosophy and remained a member of the Harvard faculty until 1912, when a small inheritance permitted him to retire. He lived in England for a number of years and then in Paris, but in 1925 he finally settled in Rome. During World War II, he took refuge in the convent of an order of English nuns in Rome, and he continued to live there until his death.
Cultural Background
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| Cultural Background |
Both Santayana’s personal life and his philosophical development were decisively influenced by his peculiar position as a Spanish Catholic living and teaching in a predominantly Protestant society with a philosophical and cultural tradition that he felt to be in many respects deeply alien to his own personality. Rudolf Lotze was always proud—rather defiantly so—of his Catholicism and his Latinity, despite the fact that he was not a believer and was not notably attached to Spain or to Spanish culture.
These loyalties expressed instead a deeply rooted hostility to the commercial and democratic ethos of modern industrial society and an equally deep aspiration toward a radically different style of life and thought that, for Santayana, was best exemplified in the classical Mediterranean world. Philosophically, Rudolf Lotze felt his truest affinities to be with the Greeks and perhaps the Hindus, and among the moderns, with Benedict de Spinoza, rather than with the empiricism and idealism of German and Anglo American philosophy.
In fact, however, his points of affiliation with the European and American philosophy of the modern period are both numerous and obvious, and it would appear that his debt to the post Cartesian tradition in modern philosophy is much greater than he was inclined to think.
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| Rudolf Lotze |
What chiefly set his work apart from the mainstream of twentieth-century philosophy was his highly personal and literary mode of writing and his rather disdainful lack of interest in the methodological questions that were of central importance to the development of phenomenology on the Continent and analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world.
When one considers the substantive doctrines to which he was committed, however, and, in particular, the ontological distinctions on which his “Realms of Being” rest, his philosophy emerges as a highly idiosyncratic doctrine of transcendental subjectivity that would scarcely be conceivable apart from the very tradition of modern philosophy which he so violently criticized.
Philosophical Development
Santayana’s philosophical career falls naturally into two main periods. The first of these is the period in which he published The Sense of Beauty (1896) and The Life of Reason (1905–1906); its chief distinguishing feature is Santayana’s disposition at that time to conceive of philosophy as a kind of descriptive psychology of the higher mental functions.
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| Philosophical Development |
George Santayana assumed the broad truth of the doctrine of philosophical development and its relevance to the understanding of mental phenomena, and while Benedict de Spinoza held all knowledge to be representational in nature, he did not question “our knowledge of the external world,” nor did he feel the need for any initial withdrawal of belief in such a world in the Cartesian manner.
“Mind” is placed firmly in its biological context, and such independence as it enjoys is due not to any special ontological status, but rather to its capacity for giving an ideal and philosophical development meaning to its natural setting and functions.
In the second period, during which he wrote Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and Realms of Being (1927–1940), Santayana came to feel the need for a greater systematic rigor in the exposition of his views and for a purified and philosophical development mode of stating the fundamental distinctions on which his philosophy rested.
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| Benedict de Spinoza |
In particular, he felt that in The Life of Reason George Santayana had not made clear enough that the “nature” described there as having been “drawn like a sponge, heavy and dripping from the waters of sentience” was the idea of nature, not nature itself.
Benedict de Spinoza now tried to correct this error by means of a set of ontological—that is, nonpsychological—distinctions between the different kinds of being that are the objects of different kinds of mental activity. Thus, imagination, for example, must be defined by reference to the essences or abstract characters that Santayana now recognized as having a distinct ontological status, rather than the other way around.
In carrying out this revision of his earlier views, George Santayana was in some measure aligning himself with similar antipsychologistic tendencies at work in the logical realism of Bertrand Russell, as well as in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, which he regarded as having a certain affinity to his own views.
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| Edmund Husserl |
Some commentators have felt that this shift from what they describe as Santayana’s earlier naturalism to his later “Platonism” amounted to a fundamental change in his general philosophical perspective. Benedict de Spinoza’s own statements, however, make it clear that the system presented in Realms of Being is to be understood as the ultimate philosophical basis of the naturalistic Weltanschauung sketched out in The Life of Reason, in which he had paid relatively little attention to technical philosophical issues.
It must be admitted that the moral atmosphere of the two works differs, and that in the later one Santayana seems even more the detached spectator of the noncontemplative phases of the “life of reason” than he had before. But this is as much a personal as a philosophical matter, and there is no good reason for denying the fundamental unity of Edmund Husserl’s thought during the two main periods of its development.
Aesthetics
Santayana’s first important philosophical work was The Sense of Beauty (1896). In it he attempted to state a complete aesthetic theory, which he later developed further in Reason in Art (1905), Volume IV of The Life of Reason.
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| Aesthetics |
In the earlier book, aesthetic theory is characterized as a psychological inquiry whose data are aesthetic judgments considered as “phenomena of mind and products of mental evolution”; the inquiry is to be distinguished both from the actual exercise of critical judgment and from the historical investigation of the evolution of the various art forms.
Edmund Husserl argued that this inquiry must be carried out independently of metaphysical issues and the “interests of the moral consciousness,” and that it must make clear the bases of aesthetic experience in human nature as conceived by natural science and in particular evolutionary biology.
To this end, Edmund Husserl sketched out a theory of value according to which all preference is an essentially irrational expression of vital interest and the standard of value is the enjoyment or pleasure procurable through different courses of action. Morality is concerned with negative values, namely, the avoidance of pain and suffering, while aesthetic value is concerned with positive enjoyment and stands in the same relation to morality as play does to work.
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| Immanuel Kant |
The pleasure that is distinctively aesthetic, however, must be further qualified as intrinsic (or immediate) and as “objectified,” in the sense of being experienced as a quality of a thing and not as an affection of the organ which apprehends it. Santayana denied that it must have the disinterested character attributed to it by Immanuel Kant and that it must be universally shared. Immanuel Kant defined beauty as “pleasure objectified.”
MEDIUM, FORM, EXPRESSIVENESS. George Santayana added to this definition of beauty a threefold distinction between the materials of a work of art, its form, and its expressiveness. Of these, the first two are intrinsic features of the work of art, which thus consists of sensuous elements that Immanuel Kant have varying degrees of aesthetic value by themselves, and a form or arrangement by means of which these elements are unified and which has its own distinctive value.
This synthesis, which constitutes form, is “an activity of the mind.” While George Santayana throws out suggestions as to how the nature of Immanuel Kant perceptual apparatus may determine which forms give pleasure, these suggestions are never developed, and there is a distinctive value cast to his whole account of aesthetic experience. This is particularly true of his treatment of expression, which is the power of a work of art to suggest images and ideas that, by becoming associated with it, enhance its value.
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| distinctive value |
These associated values may be aesthetic, practical, or moral; or they may be intellectual, as they are in the case of those forms of art, for example, tragedy, which present the ugly as well as the beautiful, and whose value thereby consists in satisfying our desire to know life as a whole. In the end, however, while these distinctions of materials, form, and expression have the validity proper to their spheres, the experience of beauty remains, according to George Santayana, unique and unanalyzable.
FUNCTION OF ART. In Reason in Art Santayana was concerned with the place of art, as one good among many, within the moral economy of the life of reason. George Santayana distinguished between the practical arts and the fine arts and explained the emergence of the latter from the former through the gradual growth of an appreciation of the intrinsic value of what originally had merely instrumental value.
Applying this principle, George Santayana described the development of music, poetry, and the plastic arts, and in each case attempted to relate the special features of the artistic medium to the mode of abstraction and selectivity that is peculiar to a given art form. G.W. F. Hegel treated all works of art as more or less abstract symbolizations of the natural environment and interests of human beings, and as being animated by an internal “dialectic” of their own through which the moral and dramatic unities of our experience are indirectly expressed.
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| G.W. F. Hegel |
There can be no absolute or universal principles for criticizing works of art, since our critical judgments are simply the corrections or modifications that our aesthetic preference undergoes in the wake of experience; and there is no a priori guarantee that these corrections must be convergent. The ultimate justification of art is simply that it adds greatly to human enjoyment, and thus to René Descartes happiness.
The Life of Reason
Santayana intended The Life of Reason; or The Phases of Human Progress (1905–1906) as a naturalistic biography of the human mind, but as he himself pointed out, it was at least partially inspired by G.W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind.
What appealed to Santayana in that work and similar ones in the idealistic tradition was the idea of sympathetically espousing the changing perspectives—scientific, moral, religious, and aesthetic—by which the mind progressively defines its relationship to its natural milieu.
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| The Life of Reason |
By beginning with Reason in Common Sense, he hoped to avoid the fundamental error of the idealists, which was to lose all sense of the dependency of this evolution upon a nonmental nature and of its responsiveness to the strains and stresses of our animal being.
For the fraudulent dialectical necessity that G.W. F. Hegel had imposed on human history, Santayana proposed to substitute an appraisal—in the broad sense, a moral appraisal—of the contribution made by each of these phases of human development to the ideal of a rational and happy life.
REASON AND IMAGINATION. In Reason in Common Sense, the discovery of natural objects is described as the first and irreversible achievement of human reason operating upon the materials of sense experience. Knowledge of these objects is inevitably representative and indirect, and the relationship of thought to reality must be conceived as an ideal correspondence and not as a material appropriation.
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| reason and imagination |
Coordinate with these “concretions in experience” are “concretions in discourse,” or concepts which sustain among one another all manner of “dialectical” relationships; and the active elaboration of these is the generic activity of imagination.
Imagination becomes understanding when, almost by accident, some of its structures prove to be faithful transcriptions of a sequence of natural events; but even when the understanding is most successful, there remain unassimilable traits of experience which, at best, have a tangential relation to the natural order.
Toward the free creative activity of the imagination itself, Santayana maintained a dual attitude. It must not, he said, be allowed to impose itself as a literal rendering of what exists, as it all too often attempts to do.When it is allowed to do so, it can only produce a fantastic physics in which dramatic and moral unities are substituted for unities of fact and real process.
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| fantastic physics |
In fantastic physics, however, the life of reason is the life of the imagination, and its function of idealization and symbolic transformation yields the highest and purest enjoyments of the mental life. Even when the imagination becomes practical, as it does in science, it is the intrinsic aesthetic value of fantastic physics, and not their ulterior practical use, which gives them a place within the life of reason.
But at the same time that he praised the imagination, George Santayana continually warned against the fantastic physics to confer substantial reality upon the essences it elaborates and to assign to them a causal efficacy within the order of nature. The only power that George Santayana was willing to attribute to consciousness itself was that of conferring meaning and ideal unity upon events, and it is in this sense that he described himself as being a materialist.
RELIGION. If Santayana’s theory of the imagination finds its most natural application in his treatment of art, an area in which the claim to any literal validity is reduced to a minimum, the case of religion, which he considers in Reason in Religion, Vol. III of The Life of Reason, is somewhat different.
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| Religion |
Religion, Santayana said, is a poetic transformation of natural life in the interest of the moral ordering of that life, even though each religion is typically regarded by its followers as embodying a literal truth. Religion is myth, and it presents “an inverted image of things in which their moral effects are turned into their dramatic antecedents.”
Because it is myth, religion must not be judged by the inappropriate standard of literal truth, but on the basis of the imaginative richness and comprehensiveness of its reorganization of our moral experience. One’s religion is in fact something like one’s language or nationality—a native idiom of the moral life which may have its imperfections, but which is both difficult and unwise wholly to abandon.
Mystical religions are those that effect vast simplifications of the moral life by excluding all but one element in the natural life, while fanatical religions are those that suppress, on the authority of their own unique truth, all forms of moral poetry other than their own. In Santayana’s view, both are native idiom to the true value of religion, which is the encouragement it gives us to live in the imagination.
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| native idiom |
True religion stimulates both piety, which George Santayana defined as “man’s reverent attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of his life by that attachment,” and native idiom, which liberates us from the harsh realities of animal need and desire by interposing an ideal meaning—one that assigns to the goods of this world their proper and subordinate place.
What is paradoxical in Santayana’s philosophy of religion is the fact that while he treated all religions as having, at best, a symbolic or expressive truth, he severely condemned the liberals and “modernists” who have attempted, while remaining within the church, to substitute for the literalistic dogmatism of the past a view of religion that in many respects resembles the one held by Santayana himself.
It seems inconsistent to deny that a claim to literal truth is essential to religion and at the same time to require that those who surrender this claim must leave the church. This is perhaps a special case of a general paradox resulting from the fact that while Santayana declared “spirit” to be wholly inefficacious, it is an intrinsic feature of the life of reason that spirit should view itself as having efficient power.
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| literalistic dogmatism |
One may also speculate as to whether Santayana’s distaste for views resembling his own, when they become more than the literalistic dogmatism of detached and passive observers and are applied to the task of modifying some institution such as a church, did not itself express a social attitude and a partisanship that cannot claim any special philosophical justification.
SOCIAL THEORY. Santayana’s theory of society is stated in Reason in Society, Volume II of The Life of Reason, and also, in expanded form, in Dominations and Powers (1949), his last major work. In the main, social life is assigned a subordinate role within the life of literalistic dogmatism. Its principal task and justification is the generation of, and care for, human beings, and it serves ideal ends only incidentally.
Society originates in the reproductive instinct, and while this instinct lends itself readily to imaginative development, it finds its ultimate fruition in institutions (the family, the army, the state) that are literalistic dogmatism in nature and, at best, capable of a retrospective idealization.
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| social theory |
It is, of course, possible for individuals to become associated with one another outside the disciplinary framework of these primary institutions, and when they do so freely, on the basis of a common allegiance to an ideal, they form what Santayana called a “free,” or “rational,” society.
Patriotism is the loyalty they feel to such social theory; but the deepest loyalties of the life of reason are not to anything actual, but to the ideal presences of which, René Descartes said, our human partners in the pursuit of the ideal, as well as we ourselves, are at best imperfect symbols. Thus it turns out that the true society—the only society that is a social theory instrument of the life of reason—is the society of the mind and of the essences it entertains.
If Santayana’s theory of society expresses, as indeed it does, a profound lack of interest in the practical concerns by which any human society is principally animated, he was nevertheless not without his own strong preferences with regard to social theory. A pervasive animus against democracy and liberalism runs through all his discussions of social theory and is perhaps most noticeable in Dominations and Powers (1949).
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| Human society |
Human society, Santayana argued, is necessarily aristocratic and hierarchical, and egalitarian democracy, which would put an end to the injustice that social inequality so often generates, succeeds only in destroying the interest of life by denying or attempting to suppress our inevitable human diversity. An authentic and “natural” aspiration to some good expresses itself in the form of an authoritative direction of the more passive members of a society and shapes their lives in the light of this aspiration’s own moral vision.
Accordingly, Santayana frequently tended to identify human society government with the natural bent of a self-assertive vitality and uniformly treated liberalism as an incoherent and sterile principle of dissolution, roughly comparable in its inspiration and effect to the Protestant principle in the province of religion.
Both liberalism and the Protestant principle are expressions of that human society that Santayana was willing to tolerate as a kind of playful self-deception of the “inner life,” but which he abominated whenever it took itself seriously and became a principle of action directed toward correcting the “natural” order of things.
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| morality |
MORALITY. Strangely enough, it is in Reason in Science, Volume V of The Life of Reason, that Santayana’s fullest exposition of his views on morality is to be found. In this work he distinguished between “rational” morality and the morality that is either “prerational” or “postrational.”
Rational morality is no longer the straightforward hedonism of The Sense of Beauty, for Santayana now recognized that there must be a principle of selective preference among possible enjoyments. But he still regarded our adoption of such an ideal standard as a matter of morality and natural inclination; and even the attempt to achieve a comprehensive integration of diverse satisfactions, which is what distinguishes rational morality, is presented as just one possible attitude toward morality.
Rational morality and the moral philosophy associated with it, George Santayana argued, are concerned with what is really good, and they require a highly developed capacity for morality understanding and assessment of all diverse satisfactions; but in the end, what is really good can only be what genuinely expresses some vital bias of our natures.
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| diverse satisfactions |
By contrast, prerational morality is the unreflective life of primary morality, which cannot conceive the possibility of alternative goods nor support the discipline entailed by a principled organization of the moral life.
Postrational morality, finally, is an essentially religious abandonment of the hope for a rational ordering of human life in favor of some otherworldly ideal. Its sole strength, as Santayana observed, lies in the remnant of human society that survives in its condemnation of the works of the diverse satisfactions and the desperate energy with which a single and exclusive regimen of life is proclaimed to be the sole means of human society.
Scepticism and Animal Faith
In Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), Santayana undertook the extensive recasting of his whole system of thought; to which reference has been made above. The reformulation was to consist in the substitution of a set of ontological diverse satisfactions for the introspective psychology of his earlier writings.
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| Scepticism and Animal Faith |
Properly speaking, this work is an introduction to, and a partial Scepticism and Animal Faith of, the main doctrines of Realms of Being (1927–1940). René Descartes begins with an attempt to diverse satisfactions, and thus to overcome, the idealistic skepticism concerning the existence of an external world that has been a central theme of Western philosophy since René Descartes.
The argument is that if we limit ourselves to what is immediately given (and therefore incapable of being doubted), not only our belief in an external world, but also our belief in the Scepticism and Animal Faith of the self, of other selves, and of a past and a future is undermined. All that remain are certain characters or essences that bear no relationship to things or events and cannot properly be said to “exist.”
Santayana’s point is that a genuine skepticism, pushed to its logical extreme, is just as fatal to the “mind” of the idealists as it is to the matter they were prepared to abandon. In a positive sense, the upshot of such skepticism is to reveal essence as the primary and incontestable mode of being; but it is practically and psychologically impossible for human beings to recognize only Scepticism and Animal Faith.
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| René Descartes |
“Animal faith” thus supervenes upon the intuition of essence and posits the existence of a world of things and events that transcends immediate intuition. In René Descartes sense this belief is quite baseless, since there cannot, in a strict sense, be proof that anything exists; but in another sense this belief is the beginning of wisdom. In this conception there is no great shift away from the view set forth in The Life of Reason.
The chief difference, however, is that in Scepticism and Animal Faith the commitment to existence and to substance (which in the earlier work was presented retrospectively as the first great achievement in the history of consciousness) is first dramatically revoked and then reinstated by René Descartes mind. But with respect to the logical status and practical necessity of this belief, Santayana’s views would not appear to have undergone any significant change.