The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Society, Volume VII, Book Two

Introduction

GEoRGE SANTAYANA: THE LIFE OF REASON AN iNTRoDUCTioN BY JAMES GoUiNloCK Santayana’s Life of Reason, published in five volumes, 1905–6, is one of the greatest works in modern philosophical naturalism. it proved to be a major stimulus to the revitalization of philosophy in America, and its value continues today. There is no canonical definition of “philosophical naturalism,” but a workable understanding of the idea is indispensable to an appreciation of Santayana’s achievement . The meanings of naturalism cluster around a certain nucleus, which might seem innocent enough but in historical fact is radical. The core idea is this: Any philosophy that would bring clarity and resource to human existence and fructify its meanings must steadily engage the pervasive realities of experience. These realities, and not the works of philosophers, are the fundamental subject matter. When the substance of experience is ignored or denied, philosophy subsides into academic pretense. The ultimate good of the naturalist is to bring intelligibility to the practical and intellectual strivings of humanity in the context of the nature of things—as Santayana will do with reason itself and with society, religion, art, science, and the moral life. The examination of nature and its issue must be candid, without unwarranted additions or subtractions. it must exercise intellectual honesty and rigor throughout its inquiries and in the formation of theories.1 one might suppose that any philosophy intends this, but in fact its occurrence is a rarity. Very few philosophers have proven capable of “free and disillusioned” thought. There has not been such a one since Spinoza, Santayana declared, judging him the only true philosophic 1 See Naturalism and the Human Spirit, edited by Yervant Krikorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), for a selection of essays that explore the distinguishing features of naturalism. introduction xiv mind of the modern era. The aim of a philosopher is typically something else: apologetics, the elaboration of antecedently preferred theories , or following a line of thought that would prescribe the nature of reality rather than seek its comprehension. if the urgencies of experience should interrupt these exercises, so much the worse for experience . it has been characteristic of philosophers to deny or to obscure the very features of experience and nature that life most depends upon. At the same time, such thinkers have invented one cosmos after another that suits their personal sensibilities. Naturalists are sensitive to these failings and wary of the propensity of philosophy to turn in upon itself and away from the world. Even with the world ostensibly in mind, the typical practice, Santayana complains, is for the philosopher to begin his reflections with fatal oversimplifications, making the inquiry vain. As he puts it in the Preface to Scepticism and Animal Faith: “i think that common sense, in a rough dogged way, is technically sounder than the special schools of philosophy, each of which squints and overlooks half the facts and half the difficulties in its eagerness to find in some detail the key to the whole.”2 The condition of philosophy during Santayana’s formative years, the late nineteenth century, is exhibit “A” in the account of the mystifications that philosophy is commonly drawn into. A prime avenue, then, to a grasp of the merits of philosophical naturalism and hence to a recognition of Santayana’s significance is by way of a summary of what was in fact the crisis in philosophy at that time. Thanks principally to the legacy of Descartes, the sum of all reality was thought to be wholly compartmentalized—so much so, indeed, that the universally observed continuities between these “compartments ” were unintelligible. Nature, according to Cartesianism, is nothing but matter in motion; it has no qualitative properties and is without potentiality for them. Hence it possesses none of the features that otherwise seem inseparable from our persistent life activity. The events we characterize as good and evil, beautiful and ugly, disordered and conflicted—the entire array of qualities that delight and confound our lives—all give way to the eternal night of matter in motion. Juxtaposed to nature is mind, which is an independent substance in its own right, and it shares none of the characteristics of matter, including those of the body. Given the radical exclusion of experience from nature, all 2 Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Scribner’s, 1923), v. xv introduction experience must occur within mind: We do not experience natural events, but only...