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III. Rational Life in Art, Religion, and Spirituality
- Indiana University Press
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III Rational Life in Art, Religion, and Spirituality Santayana’s early writings, such as The Life of Reason, are distinguished by their humanistic themes from his later ontological works, such as The Realms of Being; yet he maintained that his philosophy never changed. Writing seventeen years after the first publication of The Life of Reason, he claimed “there has been no change in my deliberate doctrine, only some changes of mental habit” (“Preface to the Second Edition,” in Reason in Common Sense, 2nd edition [Charles Scribner ’s Sons, 1922], v). Elsewhere he acknowledged changes in perspective and emphasis, and in sentiment and the material he took up in his writing; but he claimed that his theory and vision of human life did not alter (PGS, 560; PP, 159, 167). His earlier perspective he thought more transcendental and egotistical, and he characterized his earlier approach as “sentimental self-consciousness” (LGS, 3:14). Later, human belief occupied him less and nature or the enveloping environment of such belief took on greater significance. But his work always looked to the free rational life or “the healthy life of the spirit” (“Preface to the Second Edition,” in Reason in Common Sense, 2nd edition [Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922], xii), and this section attempts to show how this concern runs through his early works on poetry, religion, reason, and art and culminates in his later speculations on spirituality. In “The Elements and Function of Poetry” Santayana observed that poetry can organize sounds in pleasing and elegant ways and challenge conventions through the expression of passion, but he thought the highest function of poetry to be organizing human passions through the creation of ideals true to the highest capacities of human nature. He thought poetry that performed this task perfectly would be identical to religion without illusion. “Religion,” he wrote, “is poetry become the guide of life” (ES, 280). The guide of life, according to Santayana, orients one toward excellence, which is the defining aim of reason. He characterized the Life of Reason as “the happy marriage of . . . impulse and ideation” (ES, 284). When impulse is enlightened by reflection and memory, reason appears. The Life of Reason is a life consciously realizing its ideal perfection, a harmony of impulses that is its natural happiness. “The Birth of Reason” relates the naturalistic basis of both excellence and reason. The living organism’s efforts to preserve one set of conditions rather than another begin at a point assigned by fate, but this is the beginning of an instinctual discrimination among possibilities that shapes bias or interest. Reason, or the love and pursuit of the good, is a better form of interest because it is ultimately more assured, being concerned not with the shifting material flux but rather with ideals. The Essential Santayana 262 The ideals of excellence that distinguish the Life of Reason relate it to religion. Religion can be a means to the ultimate goods of the Life of Reason, such as happiness , harmony, and freedom. Both religion and reason establish standards of right and wrong, and both emancipate one from personal limitations. But where reason is simply a form or a principle and does not call out emotion, religion involves ideas, hopes, enthusiasms, and objects of worship, making the latter volatile and subject to illusion. Indeed, religion can go astray by asserting the literal truth of its poetic doctrines. But Santayana did not think religion to blame for hindering science and moral reflection. Obstacles to insight in these fields lie deeper than religion, and he found religion praiseworthy for promoting speculative insight. In “The Justification of Art” Santayana considered the contribution of art to the Life of Reason. He thought that art, being concerned with the ideal, does not directly influence the material world; rather it renders the world of matter into ideas and is a rehearsal of a life not yet realized. The power of art lies in its rejuvenation of imagination and the life of ideas. But taste in art does not begin in the life of ideas; instead it has a material basis in one’s natural affinities, making it dogmatic and inevitable. If one escapes the trap of believing one’s own dogma to be absolute, then taste may be refined in reflection, made sympathetic with a wider range of experience, and articulated as the criterion of taste. Good taste is appreciation for those things that harmonize with the Life of Reason or that secure and promote richer satisfactions, such as pleasures...