Santayana's Hermeneutics of Poetry and Philosophy
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limbo Núm. 40, 2020, pp. 139-156 issn: 0210-1602 Santayana’s Hermeneutics of Poetry and Philosophy Leonarda Vaiana George Santayana, Th ree Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, in Th e Works of George Santayana, coedited by Kellie Dawson and David E. Spiech, with an Introduction by James Seaton, vol. viii, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, Th e Mit Press., 2019, 239+xxxvi. George Santayana was mentioned as “a brilliant philosopher and a man of letter” by the famous novelist and literary critic T.S. Eliot, who was one of Santayana’s students at Harvard. Some years later, John Crowe Ransom summed up this assessment labelling Santayana “literary philosopher”, and not so long ago Irving Singer entitled one of his books Santayana, Literary Philosopher. Yet not only literature and philosophy are the elements of a blend giving rise to original insights within the fi eld of literary criticism, as Singer suggests [Singer (2000)]. Rather they are totally melted, in Santayana’s words, in “a personal work of art” that makes it inappropriate to distinguish between literature and philosophy. Evidence of this are the questions that Santayana introduces at the beginning of his Th ree Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe: “Are poets, at heart, in search of a philosophy? Or is philosophy in the end, nothing but poetry?” (p. 6). Th us, James Seaton, in his stimulating introduction to the recent critical edition of this work, is right to assert the eccentricity of the close connection of philosophy and poetry, which “allowed Santayana to express the central emphasis of his own way of Notas críticas 139 140 Leonarda Vaiana thinking”, while “the most influential philosophical schools in England and the United States during Santayana’s lifetime discounted any relationship between philosophy and poetry and instead emphasized the connection between philosophy and science” (p. x). However, the dominance of analytic philosophy, and its focus on the relation between philosophy and science, is not the only reason why Santayana’s philosophical stance is so diff erent from contemporary American philosophers. Aft er all, in the fi rst years of twentieth century, when Th ree Philosophical Poets were published, American philosophers, including W. James and J. Royce, Santayana’s colleagues and mentors at Harvard, were still indebted to traditional currents of thought, like modern empiricism, Kantian criticism and German idealism, and even within this contest, Santayana was criticised. Actually, from the beginning, the reception of Santayana’s work has been characterized by a great diversity of opinion. Setting aside James’ defi nition of Santayana’s Interpretation of Poetry and Religion as “a perfection of rottenness” [James (1920), pp. 122-123], many commentators appreciated this work and the previous Th e Sense of Beauty since they were, moreover, among the earliest works published in America in the fi eld of aesthetics [Howgate (1938), p. 74]. Other evaluations were rather negative. For example, the literary critic Van Meter Ames stigmatized Santayana’s failure of realizing “what man can do through art”, and how modern art “had come to express the free human spirit” [Van Meter (1964), pp. 245-247]. Lane Cooper, in his review of Th ree Philosophical Poets, published in the series of Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, caustically blamed Santayana for “an occasional lapse from the purity and elevation of style that one might look for in the opening number of such a series, —as when the author (p. 12) broaches an idea by which he sets some store —” [Cooper (1911), p. 444]. Furthermore, Cooper criticized Santayana because he asserted to be “an amateur” and to off er “a piece of literary criticism” (Preface). According to Cooper, Santayana’s Hermeneutics of Poetry and Philosophy 141 literary criticism needs scholarship, a clear-cut methodology and an examination of secondary sources, while Santayana seemed to misunderstand learned investigation as “pedantry”, founding his criticism “upon something short of a fi rst-hand knowledge” [Cooper (1911), p. 443]. A similar view was argued in the review of A.O. Lovejoy, who claimed that Th ree Philosophical Poets was written “by a somewhat untechnical and temperamental philosopher who is also a poet and a master of English prose style”, and by an author “so innocent of erudition”, off ering his reader “the fruit of refl ection, not of research”. On the other side, Lovejoy’s review was “fl attering”, as McCormick notices [McCormick (1987), p. 208]. In fact, Lovejoy granted that he is reviewing “a book which no specialist in Lucretius or Dante or Goethe can aff ord to leave unread”, but also added that, for him, the book “should appeal also to a far wider circle of readers” [Lovejoy (1911), p. 245]. So if he was not inconsistent, his sincere opinion was the latter, while the former words expressed only polite phrases. Some decades later, a more interesting point of view was put forward by the infl uential critic Desmond McCarthy, who stated: “In my opinion Mr. Santayana is the greatest of living critics. I do not trust him so much as Matthew Arnold or some other poets, to point to what is fi nal and perfect in expression; but he is unsurpassed in measuring the minds of poets, novelists and philosophers” [McCarthy (1969), pp. 18-19]. As regards this comment, it is worth noticing that Santayana is appraised as “unsurpassed in measuring the minds of poets, novelists and philosophers”, since McCarthy’s words suggest the right perspective to understand Santayana as literary philosopher. Interpreting poets, novelists and philosophers, Santayana does not want to be a master of literary criticism, since —Lovejoy was right— he takes literary criticism and scholarship as pedantry. On this point, it is to be reminded that Santayana replied to an American student, who hoped that he took a strong criticist turn breaking away from philosophy, in the following way: Notas críticas 142 Leonarda Vaiana If you like that sort of vicarious literary nourishment, read Croce, or any other competent person who sets out to express the impression which literature has made upon him. But I should advise you to read the originals instead, and be satisfi ed with the impression they make upon you. You know Plato’s contempt for the image of an image; but as a man’s view of things is an image in the fi rst place, and his work is an image of that, and the critic’s feelings are an image of that work, and his writings an image of his feelings, and your idea of what the critic means only an image of his writings, — please consider that you are steeping your poor original tealeaves in their fi ft h wash of hot water, and are drinking slops. May not the remarkable sloppiness and feebleness of the cultivated American mind be due to this habit of drinking life in its fi ft h dilution only? What you need is not more criticism of current authors, but more philosophy: more courage and sincerity in facing nature directly, and in criticizing books or institutions only with a view to choosing among them whatever is most harmonious with the life you want to lead [Santayana 2002, p. 65]. So, knowing how much infl uential was not only Croce’s literary criticism but also his historicism, and their negative eff ects on post- war Italian philosophy and literature, as an Italian scholar and historian of philosophy, I appreciate Santayana’s fi rst-hand reading of texts and his fresh way of interpreting them. Turning back to Seaton’s comment, it is relevant to add that the fusion of literature and philosophy in Santayana’s work was also unrelated to continental philosophy. Although in recent times Santayana’s philosophy has been assimilated to Martin Heidegger’s, the schoolmaster of philosophical hermeneutics, it seems to me that this parallel is inappropriate for two main reasons. Th e fi rst is that Santayana, far from stigmatizing the dominance of reason in the history of western thought, focused on this topic in Th e Life of Reason [Santayana, 2011, p. 1], and never announced its end or hoped for it. Th e second is that Heidegger, becoming dissatisfi ed with philosophy turned to art and poetry, while Santayana, on Santayana’s Hermeneutics of Poetry and Philosophy 143 the contrary, starting with a concern for poetry and aesthetics, maintained that all his writings were to be appreciated especially for their philosophical content. In addition, although Santayana was far from the technical vocabulary of hermeneutics, it seems to me that he prospected a sort of hermeneutic circle when he interpreted the great poets and philosophers of past. With this in mind, it is possible to understand Santayana without charging him with arrogance or narcissism when he stated, for example: If a Democritus or Lucretius or Spinoza or Darwin works within the lines of nature, and clarifi es part of that familiar object, that fact is the ground of my attachment to them: they have the savour of truth; but what the savour of truth is, I know very well without their help [Santayana 1940, pp. 12-13]. What Santayana calls here a “familiar object”, may be compared to a sort of hermeneutic pre-understanding, and if he says that he knows “what the savour of truth is”, regardless of the authors whom he mentions from time to time, it is because his knowing the truth is nothing but his hermeneutic horizon, or in his own vocabulary, his “vista” on the truth. Seaton reminds rightly that, in the later years, Santayana “lost the confi dence expressed in Th ree Philosophical Poets about the ability of both philosophy and poetry to achieve a ‘steady contemplation of all things in their order and worth’” (p.