a symposium on the work of angus kerr-lawson / glenn tiller, guest editor || santayana's...

Santayana's Provocative Conception of the Philosophical LifeAuthor(s): Douglas AndersonSource: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 45, No. 4, A Symposium on theWork of Angus Kerr-Lawson / Glenn Tiller, Guest Editor (Fall 2009), pp. 579-595Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/TRA.2009.45.4.579 .

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579

TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETYVol. 45, No. 4 ©2009

Santayana’s Provocative Conception of the Philosophical LifeDouglas Anderson

AbstractI assess some of the ways in which Santayana takes philosophy to be a personal, poetic en-deavor. In doing so, I also suggest that in some ways his work in the realm of spirit is more of a philosophy of the personal than much of the work of the American pragmatists.

Keywords: James, Kerr-Lawson, Santayana, Pragmatism.

Paul Carus, as editor of the Monist, routine-ly ridiculed Jamesian pragmatism for being a philosophy of the personal. Had he read all of Santayana’s works, Carus would prob-ably not have made the same complaint against him; Santayana sounds like a tradi-tional and genuine philosopher in Carus’s terms. And yet, I think that what brings Santayana’s work fully within the fold of American philosophy is the fact that it is a philosophy of the personal. “Viewed from a suffi cient distance,” Santayana argued, “all systems of philosophy are seen to be per-sonal, temperamental, accidental, and pre-mature.”1 This is certainly reminiscent of James’s linking of philosophy and tempera-ment. Philosophy is for Santayana gener-ated fi rst by self-knowledge; it is a function of turning inward. However, unlike James, Santayana does not tell about which par-ticular roads he might walk home on, he does not describe his visits to Chautauqua or North Carolina, nor does he tell us about his dog. Instead, he reveals for our consider-ation the life of his mind—a philosophical outlook in the realm of spirit. This realm he describes as “this world of free expres-sion, this drift of sensations, passions and ideas, perpetually kindled and fading in the light of consciousness.”2 What is important for American philosophy is that Santayana’s



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philosophy of the personal is distinct from those of the pragmatists and transcendentalists—even if one disagrees with it, or perhaps especially if one disagrees with it, one may see it as providing a tempering per-spective.3 As other American thinkers aim to bring everything to the surface and to the public and the popular, seeking local and temporal answers, Santayana seeks depth and internality that will lead him in the direction of the eternal. As Angus Kerr-Lawson reminds us, for Santayana, “it is just the truly introspective thinkers who see that our thoughts arise in us from subterranean depths.”4

Santayana saw Americans as socially radical, independent, and with good will toward all. The American is also always in a productive hurry. “For the American,” says Santayana, “the urgency of his novel attack upon matter, his zeal in gathering its fruits, precludes meanderings in primrose paths. . . .”5 Moreover, “all his life he jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped . . . .”6 These traits carry over into our philosophical perspectives. Emersonian and Roycean idealisms fit well with the sense of hope and optimism that pervaded American culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-turies; in addition, the pragmatists developed an urgency for fixing things and bringing thought back to conduct and action. Americans are “in their hearts and lives,” Santayana said,

all pragmatists, and they prove it even by the spirit in which they maintain those other traditional allegiances, not out of rapt specula-tive sympathy, but because such allegiance seems an insurance against moral dissolution, guaranteeing social cohesion and practical success. Their real philosophy is the philosophy of enterprise.7

As much as Santayana liked the American’s energy and youthful cul-ture, he recognized that it makes little room for philosophy as a life of the spirit, as a “congenial ideal sport” that can be, and perhaps should be, conducted in a cooler, more patient way. The Americans are simply not good Greeks. It is precisely the clarity of this distinction in Santay-ana’s mind that allows his thought to serve as a breath of fresh air on the American scene. It is his focus on the nature of a philosophical life that has for years kept me listening to Santayana from a distance in hopes that he might temper my own tendencies to American philosophical extremes. In what follows, then, I will track a bit of what Santayana had to say about philosophy with the simple purpose of recommend-ing its cooling and soothing tendencies to others who may get carried away with the pragmatic strand of our cultural wisdom and who may, like me, be inattentive to what we actually do as philosophers in Amer-ica. Santayana reveals to us that even now philosophy can be, contra Dewey, a spectator activity—and even if one should ultimately shun Santayana’s philosophical vision, one will have learned from him that it is precisely this kind of vision that constitutes philosophical outlooks.



Santayana’s Provocative Conception of the Philosophical Life

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To the world of Santayana scholarship, I am an outsider; neverthe-less, I have often felt Santayana’s quizzical smile over my shoulder and, in this much, I have long been a student of his work. In studies of the history of American philosophy, Santayana has always been nominally included; and yet serious study and consistent teaching of his work has been limited to a relative few.8 Santayana quite intentionally stayed at philosophical arm’s length from his teachers Royce and James; he had a clear sense of their temperamental and cultural differences, and he was bound not to have his vision overly distorted by theirs. Why not, then, just let Santayana scholarship go its own way? My answer is that such a move is unhealthful for the development of American philosophy. San-tayana was too adept at reading the characters of others for us to let pass his practical wisdom in conducting philosophy; and his own vision of philosophy is too compelling given our actual practices for us to ignore. I begin, then, with some interesting assessments of Santayana made by William James: assessments that I will use to frame the essay at hand.

James clearly saw Santayana’s genius, but he never seemed to grasp his vision—a vision radically unlike James’s own. Though we often at-tribute human insight to James, it was Santayana, I think, who saw more clearly the relationship between their respective tempers and philosophical outlooks. James, in his animal resistance to Santayana’s temper and style, developed a habit of backhandedly discrediting San-tayana on those occasions on which he praised him. Comparing San-tayana to Emerson, for example, James claimed that ideas expressed by Emerson would seem “receptive, expansive, as if handling life through a wide funnel with a great indraught; Santayana as if through a pin-point orifice that emits his cooling spray outward over the universe like a nose-disinfectant from an ‘atomizer’ . . . . But it is a great feather in our cap to harbor such an absolute free expresser of individual convic-tions.”9 I doubt anyone will mistake being likened to a nasal disinfec-tant for high praise; but I think it worth considering with irony how the atomized, cooling spray of Santayana’s philosophical expression actually can serve to disinfect much of what passes for philosophy in America. In 1896, in a letter to President Eliot of Harvard, James added that “Santayana is a very honest and unworldly character, a spectator rather than an actor by temperament, but apart from that weakness, a man . . . of thoroughly wholesome mental atmosphere.”10 Again I take the ironic road—it seems to me that the spectating dimension of phi-losophy, so easily brushed away by James and Dewey, is not a weakness but something of which everyone who engages in philosophy must take account. Ours, after all, is a labor of the mind. Finally, two years later James wrote that Santayana is not a “hustler” but “has his style, his sub-tlety of perception, and his cold-blooded truthfulness.”11 Again, “cold-bloodedness” does not strike one as praise. Still, some hardcore honesty may indeed be a prerequisite for philosophy—especially if philosophy



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has a personal dimension that requires one to know oneself. Let us take each of these ironies in turn: cooling and disinfecting, spectating, and exercising cold-blooded honesty. As we sketch a picture of Santayana’s notion of philosophy, we can perhaps see what lessons it holds for the rest of American thought.

Transcendentalism and pragmatism both run hot with the idea of social transformation. We can move to wider circles; we can elevate ourselves to higher platforms; we can ameliorate any present set of conditions; we can work together as a community of hope to find truth and redemption in this world; we can educate ourselves out of our social messes; and, if James is to be believed, we can find multiple levels of inner energy with which to face the world. All we have to do is apply intelligence, engage our wills, and act. Santayana put the reins to this sort of thinking. He is far less sanguine about humanity’s ability to shape and redeem the cosmos; and he seems little surprised by our ability to create damage. He returns to the Greeks to find philosophi-cal kinship.

In light of this kinship, a brief glance at Santayana’s philosophi-cal heroes is instructive. He begins with Heraclitus who provides the simplest account of our everyday experience as incessant, inar-ticulate change in the realm of matter. He then adopts Democritus as a central persona for his own work. Democritus not only upholds the straightforward moral aim of achieving animal happiness but also provides the mechanistic account of the world that makes the most sense of our human encounters in the world of substance and matter. In reducing “phenomena to constant elements” to understand expe-rience, Democritus established himself as “an eternal spokesman of reason.”12 Plato, who appropriates elements from these predecessors, steps forward with imagination to bring to life the realm of essence—“the infinite multitude of distinguishable ideal terms.”13 Plato’s ideas or forms are some of the earliest and clearest expressions of what San-tayana called “essences.” As Kerr-Lawson points out: “Essences are like Platonic forms; but from the forms is stripped all compulsion either physical or metaphysical.”14 And, finally, Aristotle keeps alive the imaginative efforts of science and shows the persistent import of human purposes in giving meaning to human living. After the Greeks, however, the list of Santayana’s heroes dwindles exponentially. Among the moderns, only Spinoza upholds the powers of imagination and spends his energies most fully in the realm of spirit, where awareness of essences, not action in the world, is the philosopher’s trade.15 We will return to these heroes in passing below, but we must keep in mind that for Santayana philosophy is not an act of imitation. His heroes are kindred spirits who may influence his outlook, but as a philosopher Santayana never simply lives under the sway of another’s thinking. A philosopher must have the courage to travel her or his own roads.




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Philosophical Heat and Its CureI begin with a brief look at Santayana’s worries about philosophy as practiced in twentieth century America. He found the philosophies of enterprise to be too insistent on getting things done and on winning debates as if the aim were to succeed in business or litigation. Thus, the “patient art of rationalizing the various sides of life, the observational as well as the moral, without confusing them, is an art apparently seldom given to the haste and pugnacity of philosophers.”16 Philosophy, in its growing arrogance, tended to ignore its artful, poetic, and spiritual di-mensions to its own detriment. Most generally stated, philosophy fails for Santayana when it becomes too worldly. This is not just a moral failure; it is also a philosophical failure. The contemporary philosopher, still for the most part a descendent of modernism, habitually thinks of our ideas as straightforward features of the material realm. Physicalism is alive and well in American intellectual culture. Santayana agrees that we live an animal life in a world of matter; however, when we ascend to the life of the mind, we leave that realm behind. Physicalists tend to maintain that the life of the mind is just more physicality; they ulti-mately do not accede to anything like Santayana’s distinction between psyche and spirit. They have not, Santayana suggests, the patience or insight to hold apart realms that have no apparent experiential connec-tion; one sees here Santayana’s resistance both to pragmatism and to American versions of idealism, both of which fail to allow for this full-blown separation. Santayana sees this philosophical move as the most fundamental problem:

The sensuous or moral signs which matter generates in the animal, are then regarded not merely as names for matter but as qualities proper to it; and the vocabulary of the human senses becomes, for human opinion, the inventory of the world. This is the radical, the inevitable, the everlasting false step of phi-losophy.17

We too easily conflate our world of ideas with the world of matter. When this false step is taken, it is a short road to making philosophy’s ideas instruments and tools for social reconstruction in such a way that the philosopher is required always to be engaged with current and rel-evant issues of human life. We observe this phenomenon in the work of Thoreau and Dewey. Ironically, it is precisely this felt need for en-gagement, especially political and educational engagement, that helped generate the professionalization of philosophy in America. At the out-set of the twentieth century, philosophers and other academics came to be treated as any other mid-level professional contributing to the well being of democratic culture.

As philosophy became a profession, to the extent that it did so, it moved away from its moorings in the realm of spirit. Professors



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engaged in everyday affairs must be teachers in order to be useful. For Santayana, however, “that philosophers should be professors is an accident, and almost an anomaly.”18 They also accidentally became administrators and organizers of associations such as the American Philosophical Association. It is no wonder that in our highly cor-porate mode of being philosophers today we should find ourselves alienated from our “professional” work; nor would it be surprising to Santayana that the rest of the culture wonders what philosophers are good for. Santayana saw the developing professionialism as something to be assiduously avoided. As he wrote in a note to James in 1888: “But then it is very doubtful that I should ever get a professorship of philosophy anyway, and I hardly care to sacrifice my tastes to that bare possibility.”19

On the whole, then, for Santayana, making “philosophy” an en-trepreneurial and agonistic enterprise is perhaps the most direct way of killing off our philosophical instincts. Moreover, Santayana rightly pointed to a corollarial effect of our professionalization—a return to scholasticism. In seeing philosophy as the solving of particular prob-lems and in identifying philosophers by way of their institutional and societal affiliations, we create an environment in which we find our-selves in competition with each other as problem solvers. Philosophy becomes a public struggle over whose ideas are better and who will control the academy. Thus, for Santayana,

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany. And the reason is not too far to seek. When there is philosophical orthodoxy, and specula-tion is expected to be a reasoned defence of some funded inspiration, it becomes itself corporate and traditional, and requires centres of teaching, endowment, and propaganda.20

What better way to describe the history of the APA with its various efforts at exclusion. We have our schools—American, analytic, Con-tinental, applied and various other smaller schools—and each oper-ates by discounting the other schools as “genuine philosophy.” We are driven by propaganda sheets such as the “Leiter Report.” I doubt we could provide a better description of what we do than Santayana has already provided:

In those universities where philosophical controversy is rife, [philoso-phy’s] traditional and scholastic character is no less obvious; it lives less on meditation than on debate, and turns on proofs, objections, paradoxes, or expedients for seeming to re-establish everything that had come to seem clearly false, by some ingenious change of front or some twist of dialectic.21




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From Santayana’s perspective, given our initial misstep, none of this should be surprising to us. We have simply forgotten our own feelings for philosophy and the “human reason” that speaks in us. Where we see exclusion and competition, Santayana is inclined to find mutuality; philosophy is for him not a public competition but an artful attempt at self-expression. Moreover, it is meditative and contemplative; it is an activity of the individual spirit—internal, deep, and difficult.

It is easy for us to dismiss Santayana’s underlying separation of the realms of matter and spirit. Note the dismissiveness, for example, in James’s letter to a colleague regarding Santayana’s work: “Nevertheless, how fantastic a philosophy!—as if the ‘world of values’ were indepen-dent of existence.”22 We are habituated to Dewey’s unwillingness to allow philosophers to deal with the problems of philosophers and not the problems of persons. But we must not too easily dismiss the cool-ing effect of Santayana’s disinfectant mist. He has identified the heat of engagement, underwritten by identifying everything either as matter or as mind, as our central misstep and his analysis leads to a pretty clear picture of where we are experientially as philosophers in America; our very conception of philosophical practice leads directly to our dissatis-factions. We want to find time to think not, just teach; we desire to be treated as thinkers, not laborers in a corporate structure; and many if not most of us find the competitive structure of our profession—from tenure processes to professional talks—dehumanizing. So, if we, with James, aim to resist Santayana’s rejection of our engaged philosophy, we should do so thoughtfully, not dismissively. This requires at the least that we take a glimpse at a more positive picture of what Santayana takes philosophy to be. Philosophy as meditative makes the philoso-pher, in part at least, a spectator in the realm of essence.

Abnormal Madness: Inspecting the SelfSantayana argued that we all live in a state of “normal madness”—that is, we live in a world of ideas and essences that are for the most part impotent to change matter’s ways. We “believe in the imaginary and desire . . . the impossible,” but we do so in conventional, “acceptable” ways “which are sanctioned by tradition.”23 To be “normally” mad is to be considered “sane” by the cultural environment in which one lives. The philosopher, in imagining outside the limits of what is considered conventional, engages in a kind of abnormal madness such that she is “unjust to the madness of the vulgar” and vice versa. “Wisdom,” wrote Santayana, “is an evanescent madness, when the dream still continues but no longer deceives.”24 The philosopher’s quest for wisdom is one “medicine” Santayana offered for our normal madness. But as for Py-thagoras and Plato such a quest requires a life of spirit.

As Kerr-Lawson points out, Santayana described our state of normal madness as infused with a basic “working” philosophy.25 We humans



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have a natural competence for dealing with our animal lives. When we give articulation to this natural wisdom in signs, symbols, and es-sences, some of which have pragmatic meaning and some of which are more strictly philosophical, we create our normal madness. Out of our natural living emerges or arises—naturally—the life of spirit. “Animal life,” Santayana claimed, “is full of pauses, of rumination, of trance-like quietness and contemplation.”26 These come to constitute the home of philosophy and wisdom as evanescent madness. Whereas our normal madness is precisely a way of getting along in the world, our philosoph-ical, abnormal madness is an attempt to stand with essence, not exis-tence. We begin to understand, and to express our visions of, ourselves and our place in the world. Thus, even though, as Kerr-Lawson points out, Santayana did admit to a “limited pragmatism,” in the most essen-tial ways he was non-pragmatic; he contested the pragmatists’ picture of the philosopher’s life. Indeed, as Kerr-Lawson elsewhere suggests, “Especially important in [Santayana’s] eyes is the human ability to rise above animal life and size up the world and our place there: it can aspire to spiritual sympathy and true intelligence.”27 In spiritual sympathy we become spectators on our situation—this is medicinal for our madness.

Some may complain that Santayana, because he strove to separate existence and essence, failed to provide for us a philosophy of life and was, in this much, an un-American philosopher. This seems to me a fundamental misreading of Santayana. What he did not offer us is an idealist or pragmatic philosophy of life that puts us at the center of or suggests that we are in control of the universe. He did not offer us, as did American idealism and pragmatism, the vocation of manipulating the material world of natural and social mechanisms within which we are bodily, and therefore essentially, enmeshed. “When I rub my eyes and look at things candidly,” he argued, “it seems evident to me that this world is the sort of world described by Herbert Spencer, not the sort of world described by Hegel and Bergson.”28 This is why, for exam-ple, he saw Dewey’s naturalism to be “half-hearted and short-winded”; Dewey seemed to hold that while we are in the determinate material realm we could somehow transcend our material status and manipu-late the world. Against Dewey’s self-understanding perhaps, Santayana saw him as retaining unnecessary traces of Hegelian idealism.29 From Santayana’s more dualistic vantage point, if we cannot humanly recon-struct nature in the realm of matter, we must seek other avenues of philosophizing—specifically, that of imagining and poetizing by way of abnormal madness. We can become disclosers of human beauty.

For Santayana existence and essence, as it were, live separate lives. Santayana believed “that every natural event has several ontological di-mensions: it moves in the realm of matter, it is definable in the realm of truth, perhaps it flashes and burns for a moment in the realm of spirit, forming an actual feeling or thought.”30 Thus, he offered us the




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possibility of a philosophical life in which we see and disclose the poetic beauties of the mind. As he said in “Ultimate Religion,” “thinking is a way of living, and the most vital way.”31 The world of practice, politics, and production may be requisite for a spirited life as it was for Aristotle, but the best life resides in the realm of spirit. Only there do we find perfection and beauty among feelings and essences. As John Lachs puts it, “The characteristic perfection of human life is not moral. It is spiri-tual.”32 And spiritual perfection is not to be found directly in our social reconstruction or political engagement. Contra pragmatism, we must abandon our misguided attempts to control existence, and we must become contemplators and spectators of perception, truth and essence. Thus, “to live a spiritual life,” Lachs adds, “is to live in the eternal and to see everything under the form of eternity.”33 The ideas of spirit are not, as for James, the servants of practical life. Rather, “it is only for the sake of this free life [of spirit] that material competence and knowledge of fact are worth attempting.”34

Our American difficulty in following Santayana at this juncture is our often dogmatic adherence to a variety of alternative ontologies, all of which bridge the gap between existence and essence by making one inter-nal to the other. Idealism simply turns existence into the ongoing essence of some absolute, and pragmatism rejects essences altogether, making them temporal and existent “ideas” of particular entities. These are not unproblematic ontologies. We must at least acknowledge the experiential persuasiveness of Santayana’s outlook for our own philosophical prac-tices. Note that in Peirce’s conception of truth, in James’s discourse on ideals, and in Dewey’s notions of democracy and the great community, we encounter ideational perfections which we suspect are unrealizable. To deny their reality as perfections, or essences, is to deny their genuine efficacy for our thought. In other words, it appears that pragmatism lives with its own repressed versions of Santayana’s separation of existence and essence. On this score, his account of the philosophical life calls us out—we pragmatists and idealists are in need of some self-reflection, some honest introspection, and some accountability.

Santayana did present us with a way of life—a very personal way of life. The philosopher’s life, he suggested, is something of which we all, by way of our imagining and reflecting, have at least a dim awareness. It is a way of life exhibited and exemplified by a variety of folk in what we call the history of philosophy, some of whom we may recognize as kindred spirits. What, after all, keeps the reading of Plato alive is more than sheer force of habit. Many of us enjoy a kind of spiritual or intel-lectual sympathy with Plato. The philosopher’s life, however, is not the heated, engaged, “active” life of the politicized pragmatist. It is a life of meditation and reflection in the realm of spirit, a life among feelings, truths, and essences. It may not be the ideal life for everyone, but the beauty it reveals will give it exemplary status in human history and will



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serve as a lure to many of us for whom the life of the mind seems inher-ently worthwhile. It is an active life, but the activity in which we engage is spectating—meditating, contemplating, and imagining. “The busi-ness of the philosopher,” said Santayana, “is to be a good shepherd of his thoughts.”35

We may be tempted to say simply that Dewey took care of this way of thinking in Reconstruction in Philosophy when he excommunicated contemplation from the philosopher’s repertoire. Santayana responded by reminding us that philosophers are neither politicians nor plumb-ers—what is it that they do? They think. However much this sort of life has been caricatured and demeaned in the last hundred years of philosophy in America, it has never been abandoned. For Santayana, the greatest irony is that thinkers like James either ignore or downplay their own lives among the essences. They publicly pretend to a sim-plicity and vulgarity that they do not actually have. James was still an idea monger, conjuring up stories about the ways things are—however much he exuded physical energy, his was still a life of the mind. On the whole, Santayana did not make the sort of directed and concerted argument I suggest here. Instead, in keeping with his own thought, he brought to spiritual expression his own essential idea of the philosophi-cal life and left it on the table for our consideration. For him, as for Plato, it is up to the beauty of the ideas to attract their own spectators. His burden is to give them poetic expression and as much distinctness as his vision allows: “The purer and more distinct the spirit which a philosopher can bring to light in his thoughts, the greater the intellec-tual achievement . . . .”36

In living a life of abnormal madness, the philosopher stands op-posed to the sanity and conventionality of the normally mad. For Santayana, then, all philosophies are inherently “human heresies.”37 To live openly as a heretic is never an easy task, a lesson learned by Socrates, Bruno, Galileo, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Margaret Fuller among others. The normalcy of one’s environment can impose limits on one’s expression. But there is an equally dangerous personal feature of the philosophical life—the temptation to “absolutize” one’s own vi-sion. Thus, for Santayana, even as we learn to live as heretics, we must learn to temper our heresies. As spectators of essences, we must enact this tempering by recognizing that in the realms of truth and essence we each live with our own angle of vision. Thus, to be philosophers without being rudely heretical, we must cultivate “a temperament humble and skeptical enough. [The answer] lies in confessing that a system of philosophy is a personal work of art which gives a specious unity to some chance vista in the cosmic labyrinth.”38 This brings us to our last feature of Santayana’s lesson for American philosophy: his hardcore honesty.




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Philosophy: An Honest JobLiving as abnormally mad heretics is difficult enough even if one is humble and self-sceptical. Such a life requires spirit and courage. Even useful pragmatists have difficulty selling philosophy to the normally mad. They either try, like James, to pretend we live something other than a life of the mind or they try to argue, most often unsuccessfully, that the life of the mind is genuinely and immediately useful. These are the most obvious facts about being a philosopher in contemporary society. We either spend futile time trying to justify our work as useful, or we express our lack of social status in attitudes of resentment. Given this generic response to the philosophical life, said Santayana, living it is never easy. The social necessities seem to be against it. Instead of try-ing to outflank the difficulty, Santayana faces it and embraces it, and he does so with humility and humor.

Santayana outrightly rejected James’s temptation to dress philoso-phy in the clothes of the day and sell it as something “popular”:

What would you ask of philosophy? To feed you on sweets and lull you in your errors in hope that death may overtake you before you understand anything? Ah, wisdom is sharper than death and only the brave can love her.39

Pragmatism tried to make the spectating, philosophical life seem indif-ferent and remote—a life of problems of philosophers. Santayana saw this move, I think, as escapist. For him, the philosophical life is more difficult than appealing to or appeasing the public—it is more difficult than solving problems. It is the difficult work of finding and poetically expressing a vision of reality. “How many,” he asked, “are concentrated and contemplative enough to live in the eternal?”40 The courage and strength required for living in the eternal, however, are not needed only to face one’s publicly heretical status—they must also be exercised in order to face oneself.

As we noted at the outset, Santayana sees philosophy as personal. As he said of himself, to write The Life of Reason “all that was needed was to know oneself.”41 But to know oneself requires exploration and adven-ture. One does not merely construct one’s vision, one must be receptive to and be able to find one’s own vision. Thus Santayana wrote to James on Easter day of 1900: “I have a right to be sincere, to be absolutely objective and unapologetic, because it is not I that speak but human reason that speaks in me.”42 To exercise this philosophical courage, he suggested, requires our imagination and our independence, features we cannot create for ourselves: “Positive gifts of imagination and moral heroism are requisite to make a great philosopher, gifts which must come from the gods and not from circumstances.”43



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It is useful here to recall Santayana’s spiritual kinship with Spinoza. As much as he admired Spinoza’s thought, he was even more impressed with Spinoza’s exemplification of the philosophical life. He asked us to consider “the magnificent example he offers us of philosophic liberty, the courage, the firmness, and sincerity with which he reconciled his heart to the truth.”44 It is this living reconciliation, I think, that James mistakenly diagnosed as Santayana’s “cold-blooded” honesty.

Brute honesty is required by Santayana in order to avoid, to the ex-tent one can, a tyranny over one’s encounters in the realms of truth and essence. We need, on the one hand, to beware the excessive influence of external forces: “Too much subjection to another personality makes the expression of our own impossible.”45 Something like this should dawn on us when we identify ourselves as “Emersonians,” “Peirceans,” or “Deweyans.” On the other hand, we must beware the tyranny of our own egos. If one wishes “to challenge his own assumptions and come to spiritual self-knowledge, [one] must begin by abstention from all easy faith, lest he should be madly filling in the universe with images of his own reason and his own hopes.”46 The philosopher’s task is to find a freedom of expression in the realm of spirit that is not just an attempt to disseminate private thoughts. The aim is to work in league with the beauty of the ideas, not to manipulate them to our purposes. “So phi-losophy,” said Santayana, “is more spiritual in her humility and absti-nence than in her short-lived audacities . . . .”47 As Kerr-Lawson rightly articulates, for Santayana, such freedom is found in the honest expres-sion of the vision to which our perspective provides access: “Despite the obstacles, then, a measure of freedom is accessible through reason; by understanding ourselves and our places in the world, we may act out our portion of the global conatus in accord with it.”48 But, I repeat, such understanding is not, for Santayana, an arbitrary decision to express my views; it is, rather, the result of an exploration of truths and beauties disclosed in the realm of essence. “In his eyes,” says Kerr-Lawson, “the most important constraint is an internal one: the agent’s posit must be a serious one, reflecting self-knowledge and radical sincerity.”49

The opportunity for this hardcore honesty in the life of philoso-phy begins with our admission of our contingency and individual-ity. The implicit communitarianism of pragmatism must be resisted. Against Peirce, Santayana advocated the importance of introspection; the philosopher may speculate about community, but she does so as an individual. Again, the appeal to our experience is compelling. Who, upon reading Peirce’s explicit rejection of introspection, has not felt that a piece of her or his experience has gone missing? Santayana also invoked the younger Royce against the Royce of The Problem of Chris-tianity who had turned to community for philosophical comfort. “The genuine philosopher,” he said, “as Royce liked to say, quoting the Upa-nishads—wanders alone like the rhinoceros.”50 The philosophical life




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begins in aloneness and comes to fruition through the honesty this aloneness enables. In making this turn, Santayana understood that he was going against the grain of his time: “I am well aware,” he said, “that this mode of avoiding heresy, by living in one’s own house, while leav-ing the universe to manage its own affairs, is something repugnant to philosophers.”51

Herein lies the importance of Spinoza’s exemplary life. The phi-losopher must find a way to live in internal, introspective places. She must have time for and access to the infinite realm of essences. Unlike plumbers and mechanics, philosophers do not work only in the pres-ent. A philosopher, Santayana said, “must be silent for long seasons; for he is watching stars that move slowly and in courses that it is possible though difficult to foresee; and he is crushing all things in his heart as in a winepress, until his life and their secret flow out together.”52 In expressing her thinking, a philosopher is neither a journalist nor a pamphleteer; Santayana saw it as part of his task to remind us of this.

The American professionalization of philosophy has intruded on the temporal and spiritual spaces requisite for such a life. Most of us ex-perience this routinely and even complain about it. As noted earlier, we are more like low- and mid-level managers seeking CEO status, driven from philosophy by ambition, the promise of social status, and the possibility of a limited popularity. We are getting our livings but, for the most part, we are no longer living philosophical lives. Santayana’s warning sounds as clearly now for us as it did for university professors in the early twentieth century:

If philosophers must earn their living and not beg . . . it would be safer for them to polish lenses like Spinoza, or to sit in a black skull-capped white beard at the door of some unfrequented museum sell-ing catalogues and taking in the umbrellas; these innocent ways of earning their bread-card, in the future republic would not prejudice their meditations and would keep their eyes fixed without undue af-fection, on a characteristic bit of that real world which it is their busi-ness to understand.53

The multiple ways in which we willingly prejudice our meditations still astounds me. I have heard this line of Santayana run through my head many times after entering the profession. I recall days of working in factories and on dairy farms when neither the labor nor the per-sons around me intruded on the life of my mind—there was freedom to think. Thus, for Santayana, it makes sense for philosophers to “en-trench [our spirit life] in some consecrated citadel, where it may come to perfect expression.”54 From Santayana’s platform, if we professional philosophers think we are not compromised, we are simply not be-ing honest with ourselves; we do not understand ourselves. His point should not be ignored. The very way we try to practice philosophy in



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America is perfectly set to thwart a philosophical life; it is clearly poised to keep us from honest reflection on our engagement with essences and truths. Recognizing this, we try to duck its import by disestablishing essence and truth instead of addressing the serious issues that Santayana placed before us. We look for ways to avoid and ignore his provoca-tion. Santayana, advocating a more down-to-earth approach, will not, as Kerr-Lawson indicates, let us off the hook: “Concepts like that of an absolute truth . . . play their part in ordinary commonsense reasoning, and are not to be thrown out as unreliable and metaphysical.”55

In closing, let us return to James’s complaint that Santayana was cold-blooded. For Santayana, what is genuinely cold-blooded is our relentless, competitive, and litigious argumentation that parades as genuine philosophy. There is in this game little room for the “sportive passion” of the life of spirit. Recall, for Santayana philosophy is another form of human madness. It may be carried out seriously to bring some beauty to the ways we traverse a human life. As Kerr-Lawson insight-fully notes, “Santayana enlarges the life of Spirit beyond the love of truth in a Platonic direction toward the love of ideal beauty.”56 But we must never forget that all human life—as Parmenides suggested—is a form of illusion. This is our madness to which we must awaken.

In honestly recognizing this, the philosophical life enjoys the privi-lege of serious endeavor tempered with humility and humor. This hon-esty is not cold-blooded but, as Emerson might have put it, sturdy and alive. Wisdom begins for Santayana, as it did for the Greeks, with the acknowledgement that the “most lasting illusion of the mind is the illusion of its own importance.”57 The contemporary philosopher would, in Santayana’s eyes, do well to be a good Greek: “The pursuit of truth is a form of courage, and a philosopher may well love truth for its own sake, in that he is disposed to confront destiny, whatever it may be, with zest when possible, with resignation when necessary, and not seldom with amusement.”58 Horace Kallen is thus right to name San-tayana “the laughing philosopher,” though we must work to find San-tayana’s laughter in the midst of his serious philosophical endeavors.

ConclusionI have not aimed to defend Santayana’s ontological claims or his spe-cifically stated philosophical positions. My aim is more personal and more experiential. His expression of the life of philosophy as a personal, poetic adventure in the realm of spirit is doubly provocative. On one side, it calls into question our own attempts to practice philosophy in twenty-first century America. At the same time, his expression accu-rately brings to life dim memories of the joys of thinking that led some of us into philosophy and accurately describes many features of our ideal notions of philosophy. Insofar as he does both at once, I am pro-voked to a serious—though humble and humored—reconsideration of




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both my practices and my ideals. I find myself in too strong a kinship with Santayana’s vision to let it pass unnoticed.

More generally, then, I would argue that the philosopher in America who ignores Santayana—and the scholars of his work—does so at his or her own peril. Here is a powerful thinker who throws into clear relief some of the potential dangers of our own practices and beliefs, and who paints a limited but beautiful picture of what the life of philosophy may be. Moreover, whatever else we may say of him, Santayana remains a genuine friend of philosophy and, as he said of Emerson, “a friend and aider of those who would live in spirit.”59 Such friends are not easy to come by inside or outside the academy in the twenty-first century.

Southern Illinois University [email protected]

NOTES

1. Santayana, Obiter Scripta, ed. J. Buchler and B. Schwartz (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), p. 94.

2. Edman, Irwin, ed. The Philosophy of Santayana: Selections from the Works of George Santayana (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), p. 466.

3. In this essay I will address the question of philosophy in America with a focus on idealism and pragmatism, the two movements to which Santayana most explicitly reacted. However, I believe similar though distinct cases could be made against analytic and Continental philosophy as practiced in the U.S.

4. Kerr-Lawson, “Review of John Lachs’ Mind and Philosophers,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Fall 1989, XXV, 4, p. 532.

5. Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), p. 108.

6. Ibid.7. Santayana, Obiter Scripta, p. 218.8. I remain fully indebted to those folks who have kept Santayana alive and

have, indirectly, kept me alive to the importance of Santayana. These include, among many others, John Lachs, Angus Kerr-Lawson, and Herman Saatkamp.

9. Perry, Ralph Barton, The Thought and Character of William James, Volume I (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1935), p. 397.

10. Ibid., p. 270.11. Ibid.12. Edman, pp. 57–58.13. Edman, p. 464.14. Kerr-Lawson, “Essentialism and Santayana’s Realm of Essence,”

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Spring 1985, XXI, p. 203.15. See Kerr-Lawson, “On the Absence of Argument in Santayana,” Overheard

in Seville, No. 25, 2007, pp. 35–36.16. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (NY: Harper and Brothers,

1957), p. 17.17. Santayana, “On the False Steps of Philosophy,” The Journal of Philosophy,

LXI, 1, January 1964, p. 12.



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18. Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1967), p. 32.

19. Perry, p. 404.20. Santayana, Character and Opinion, pp. 37-38.21. Ibid., p. 38.22. Perry, p. 319.23. Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), p. 46.24. Ibid., p. 45.25. See Kerr-Lawson, “Santayana’s Limited Pragmatism,” Overheard in Seville,

No. 25, 2007, p. 32.26. Santayana, Journal of Philosophy, p. 12.27. Kerr-Lawson, “On the Supervenience of Spirit,” Overheard in Seville, No.

24, 2006, p. 28.28. Santayana, Obiter Scripta, p. 163. It is worth noting here that though he

was alluding to Spencer’s Spinozistic, mechanical account of the world that yields an evolutionary determinism, Santayana himself elsewhere challenged the absence of contingency in both Spencer and Spinoza. The key, however, is that we have no genuine autonomy in the realm of matter.

29. Many Dewey scholars would want to challenge Santayana’s reading of Dewey. Nevertheless, Santayana’s critique of Dewey’s naturalism is persuasive enough to provoke not just a textual defense of Dewey, but a thorough re-thinking of what Dewey’s ontological commitments are.

30. Santayana, Obiter Scripta, p. 179.31. Ibid., p. 288.32. Lachs, “Santayana’s Moral Philosophy,” The Journal of Philosophy, LXI,

No. 1, 1964, p. 60.33. Ibid., Dialogues, p. 57. 34. Edman, p. 466.35. Ibid., p. 471.36. Ibid., p. 472.37. Santayana, Obiter Scripta, p. 94.38. Ibid., p. 100.39. Ibid.40. Ibid., p. 268.41. Edman, p. 44.42. Perry, p. 321.43. Santayana, Character and Opinion, p. 163.44. Santayana, Obiter Scripta, p. 280.45. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, pp. 129–30.46. Santayana, Obiter Scripta, p. 282.47. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, p. 22.48. Kerr-Lawson, “Freedom and Free Will in Spinoza and Santayana,” Journal

of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 14, No. 4, 2000, p. 254.49. Kerr-Lawson, “On the Absence of Argument in Santayana,” Overheard in

Seville, No. 21, 2004, p. 22.50. Santayana, Character and Opinion, pp. 35–36.51. Santayana, Obiter Scripta, p. 102.52. Ibid., p. 37.53. Ibid., pp. 35–36.




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54. Edman, p. 473.55. Kerr-Lawson, “Limited Pragmatism,” p. 33.56. Kerr-Lawson, “Freedom,” p. 261. Indeed, Santayana suggested that as

“a true Greek and a true lover” Plato “wished to see beauty flourish in the real world.” Edman, p. 60.

57. Santayana, Dialogues, p. 44.58. Edman, p. 467.59. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, p. 233.



a symposium on the work of angus kerr-lawson / glenn tiller, guest editor || santayana's...

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