Literary Awakenings by Koury Ronald;

Author:Koury, Ronald;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2017-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

A Pilgrimage to Santayana

IRVING SINGER

When historians in the twenty-first century assess the nature of twentieth-century philosophy from their own perspective, they may have some difficulty in placing the mind and works of George Santayana. There are two ways in which we might appraise his contribution. We could take him as a writer about the human condition who also did philosophy, or else as a theorist in various branches of philosophy who wrote essays, literary criticism, history of ideas, social commentary, volumes of poetry, a best-selling novel, and so on. Both approaches to his talent must be employed, and interwoven, in order to attain a clear idea of what Santayana accomplished in his books.

More than any other great philosopher in the English language, Santayana not only harmonized the two types of writing—the literary and the philosophical—but also made harmonization of this sort a fundamental resource in his doctrinal outlook. In the preface to Scepticism and Animal Faith, he writes that if the reader is tempted to smile at the idea that he is offering “one more system of philosophy,” he smiles as well.1 Despite its systematic structure, Santayana’s philosophy was intended to be an expression of the author’s personal experience and imaginative interpretation of his life as he lived it. Neither in his works nor in anyone else’s, he thought, could a reader find the certitude and objectivity that so many others promised.

In taking this attitude, Santayana believed that philosophical speculation was inherently a literary pursuit and therefore a branch of the humanities rather than of the sciences. Santayana sought to further humanistic acuities that would permeate philosophy as they also permeate the fine arts and the various forms of criticism that interpret and evaluate them. He denied that these different facets of human inspiration could be reduced or rendered subservient to technical procedures that science (correctly) employs for its own expertise. He recognized that the life of the mind, above all in the humanities, becomes stunted when artificial barriers are reared between philosophy and literature or philosophy and history or, in a different dimension, between creative and critical insights. Ideally these would not be separated from one another. To the extent that they establish a harmonious interpenetration, they enrich each other.

Above all in the United States, but now in most other countries, intellectual and academic fields have become increasingly splintered in the twentieth century, even split into hermetically distinct compartments. The long humanistic tradition that linked the early Renaissance to the art and history of the ancient world, and then continued to evolve for the next five hundred years, has suffered disabilities from which it may never recover. In the past few decades, the danger to the humanistic spirit has accelerated greatly. As a reminder of what we have had, and as a model for what we may yet regain as a supplement to the new achievements on which we can rightly pride ourselves, Santayana’s books merit the renewed study that some scholars are now giving them. Though far from

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