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Santayana's Hermeneutics of Poetry and Philosophy

Santayana's Hermeneutics of Poetry and Philosophy

limbo Núm. 40, 2020, pp. 139-156 issn: 0210-1602

Santayana’s Hermeneutics of and

Leonarda Vaiana

George Santayana, Th ree Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, in Th e Works of , 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 ” 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 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 since they were, moreover, among the earliest works published in America in the fi eld of [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 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 , 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 ’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. xxi). Yet I think it is important to admit that, in the same time, he was improving more and more the sense of viewing “from somewhere”, that is a perspective sense of the truth [Vaiana (2016), pp. 26-30]. Actually the term ‘vista’, whose philosophical meaning was already adopted by Walt Whitman, played an important role since Santayana’s fi rst writings, such as Th e Sense of Beauty (1896), Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), Th ree Philosophical Poets (1910) and “Philosophical Heresy” (1915). Th erefore, I suggest

Notas críticas 144 Leonarda Vaiana taking it as a key term to interpret Santayana both as literary philosopher and as historian of philosophy. If this is right, we should expect to fi nd in his works neither applications of literary theory nor exercises of historiography of philosophy, not because Santayana was not a learned scholar of poetry, literature and philosophy, but because he was not interested to express what the authors that he comments say literally. He was rather interested to check his understanding of a theme that was already known by him. Focusing on Th ree Philosophical Poets, it seems to me that we should not try to discover if Santayana understood rightly —that is along the line of a philosophical scholarship— the three authors. Rather, it is of a great interest for us to know the three authors from Santayana’s vistas, and to see if these vistas are meaningful also in order to understand the view that he developed throughout his philosophical life. First of all, it is worth noticing that Santayana introduces his work as “only a piece of literary criticism, together with a fi rst broad lesson in the history of philosophy —and, perhaps, in philosophy itself ” (Preface). Now as any good teacher knows, the main objective in a fi rst lesson is to explain that, in spite of their fondness for quarrelling with one another, philosophers nevertheless are doing a good work when they show their views, though each of them is only but a particular view, or a way of “ things as they would seem from that angle, not as they are” [Santayana (2011, pp. 183- 184]. Th e same thing may be said about the poets. Actually, what is the excellence of poetic imagination? Santayana answers that the poet, “though fl eeting, has a vision”, a common feature with the philosopher, because “to this fl eeting moment the philosopher, as well as the poet, is actually confi ned”. Yet his “fl eeting moment” can become a powerful moment for the poet and the philosopher, in so much as “each must enrich it with his endless vistas, vistas necessary focused, if they are to be disclosed at all, in the eye of the observer, here and now” (p. 8). Santayana’s Hermeneutics of Poetry and Philosophy 145

Th e fi rst of the “three historical illustrations” that, according to Santayana, will prove his view, is Lucretius’ poetry. Initially, there is a methodological point that seems to me worth to notice, in this “fi rst broad lesson in the history of philosophy”, namely that Santayana, distancing himself from a shared psychologist presentation of an author’s work, states however that “it is his intellectual vision that the naturalist in particular wishes to hand down to posterity, not the shabby incidents that preceded that vision in his own person” (p. 14). Quite apart from this, however, there is a general remark, which Santayana puts forward about Lucretius’ materialism that it is important to underline in order to understand how, since now; his own naturalism is so diff erent from other contemporary approaches. For him, the greatest achievements which transformed physics in a science were Lucretius’ —and his Greeks forerunners— discovery of substance and the exclusion of fi nal causes from nature: nil…natumst in corpore, ut uti possemus, sed quod natumst id procreat usum (p. 18, n. 1). About the latter point, it is to be admitted that, even if the demise of Aristotelian fi nalism is a commonplace beginning with modern science, yet in Santayana’s time it was not taken for granted. , for example, still adopted a teleological view of nature and, supporting his view by a wrong interpretation of Darwinism, stated: “Nature is made teleological all the way through.” [Dewey (1969), p. 103]. Indeed this is one of the views which explain the contrast between Santayana and Dewey that will be explicit later; but “the seeds of this divergence” [Rubin (2010), p. 31], as Richard Rubinj reminds, date back just to the days when Santayana was invited to give a series of lectures at Columbia University that, some months later, were published as Th ree Philosophical Poets. Rubin rightly asserts that “Dewey remained puzzled as to what Santayana meant by the term ‘essence’”, which later became a crucial topic of his philosophical system. Yet, also the nature that Santayana sees when he celebrates Lucretius as “the poet of nature”, could not be farther from Dewey’s view. For Santayana, Lucretius knows “the

Notas críticas 146 Leonarda Vaiana ways of nature”, namely he knows that “nature has depth as well as surface”, that there is “a hidden background that connects and explain” all the “sights and sounds” that may be called “appearance” (p. 22). And he is “a poet of matter”, because “he is a poet of the source of the landscape”, whose particular function is to fi nd words to express that nature means “the principle of birth and genesis, the universal mother, the great cause, or system of causes, that brings phenomena to light” (p. 33). It is a hard question, since the poet must cope with “the unfi tness of language” to render an alien object, while language’s fi tness can render “only what, like language itself, is bodiless and fl owing, – action, feeling, and thought” (p. 34). Under this view, many years later, Santayana found the great mistake of Dewey’s naturalism in “the dominance of foreground”. Th erefore in reviewing Dewey’s Experience and Nature, he asserted that

in nature there is no foreground or background, no here, no now, no moral cathedra, no centre so really central as to reduce all other things to mere margins and mere perspectives. A foreground is by defi nition relative to some chosen point of view, to the station assumed in the midst of nature by some creature tethered by fortune to a particular time and place [Santayana (1925), pp. 678-79].

For this reason, Santayana makes the distinction between Lucretius, “the poet of the source of landscape” and William Wordsworth, “the poet of landscape”. Th e latter voices the moral inspiration that he draws from the landscape, but

this moral inspiration is not drawn at all from the real process of nature which every landscape manifests in some aspect and for one moment. Such would have been the method of Lucretius; he would have passed imaginatively from the landscape to the source of landscape; he would have disclosed the poetry of matter, not of spirit. Wordsworth, on the contrary, dwells on adventitious human matters (p. 35). Santayana’s Hermeneutics of Poetry and Philosophy 147

So, inasmuch as Wordsworth was “a poet of human nature”, fi lling up the blank side of Lucretius naturalism, he “was a truly poet of nature”. Yet Lucretius is Santayana’s preference, since “moral life […] was better understood and better sung by him for being seen in its natural setting” (p. 36). Th e reason of this preference is explained by Santayana himself: Wordsworth’s unacceptable mistake is “the pathetic fallacy”, the moralization and humanization of nature, namely the philosophical fault that Santayana assigns to Idealism when it is not simply “a part of the world”, but the “view of the central and universal power in the world”. Still, “if, like Lucretius and every philosophical poet, we range over all time and all existence, we shall forget our own persons, as he did, and even wish them to be forgotten, if only the things we care for may subsist or arise” (p. 33). Furthermore, the narrow “vista”, which Idealism misunderstands as a universal perspective, not only involves a philosophical fallacy, as Santayana maintains at the end of his Egotism in German Philosophy, but it also leads to a moral guilt: the moral absolutism of the “genteel tradition”, which dresses up its covert bigotry in idealism and [Santayana (2016a), p. 460]. Actually Lucretius did not allow either himself or his reader any form of humanization of nature. On the contrary his nature- mother is all but human, she is a perennial movement of mechanic forces were life and death alternate without any moral supervision and, albeit Lucretius may off er a cold picture of her, it is the one consistent with his own naturalism. He said: Ita res accendent lumina rebus [Lucretius, I, 1115-18]; on his turn, Santayana celebrated the naturalness of anything, namely “the innocent necessity by which it [anything] has assumed its special and perhaps extraordinary form” [Santayana (2016a), p. 460]. Yet, there are two sides of this naturalness whose absence from Lucretius’ soul was to him unforgivable, that is “the strain of piety and the strain of friendship” (p. 36). Due to this lack, in Lucretius “zeal is mightier than sympathy and scorn mightier than ”. For this reason, although recognizing the “perennial application”

Notas críticas 148 Leonarda Vaiana of Lucretius’ art, Santayana cannot help but admit that “if it was impossible for him not to be always serious and austere, he might at least have noted the melancholy of friendship - for friendship, where nature has made minds isolated and bodies mortal, is rich also in melancholy” (p. 39). Lucretius’ chapter concludes by mentioning Dante as “the poet of faith”, who “will tell us that we must fi nd our peace in the will that gives us our limited portion” (p. 41). Will he express the human side of nature that was unknown to Lucretius? So it seems, since Lucretius does breed “no love, no patriotism, no enterprise, no religion”, while Dante “sees the various pitfalls of the life with intense distinctness; and seeing them clearly, and how fatal each is, he sees also why men fall into them, the dream that leads men astray, and the sweetness of those goods that are impossible.” For this reason Dante is “the master of distinction” (p. 122). In addition, landscape’s poetry is enriched, since “never before or since has a poet lived in so a large landscape as Dante”, whose spaces “enlarged, to the limits of human imagination, the habitations and destinies of mankind” (p. 73). Yet, before approaching Santayana’s refl ections on Dante, we should admit that a historian of philosophy would not aff ord such a “skip” from Lucretius’ naturalism to Dante’s supernaturalism (p. 49. Diff erent reasons, however, may be off ered on behalf of it. Th e fi rst is announced by Santayana’s saying to be “an amateur”, who does not want to treat his themes displaying erudition. Yet, this manifest modesty is at odds with his expertise in medieval philosophy (in the mid of 1890’s he had conduced seminars on Scholasticism), evident in his way of arguing. Consequently the reason is another, and it has to do with Santayana’s conception of history. From 1902 to 1910 he had taught Philosophy of History and, during these years, he had published Th e Life of Reason, which is a history of human civilizations whose “phases” were described by a succession of big pictures embodying an innovative idea of progress. Th is progress – which could be better named ‘change’ – moved, as Santayana later explained, “not toward any one form of life, but centrifugally Santayana’s Hermeneutics of Poetry and Philosophy 149 towards every diametrically contrary form of life. […] Progress could not, then be universal or endless, but only episodic, divergent, and multifarious” [Santayana (1971b), pp. 558-559]. Th erefore, in describing a philosophical conception, Santayana let it appear as a quite broad fi eld, related to a large background of connections and destined to survive over a period of time until, at some point, a new age will show another scene. Adopting Foucault’s hermeneutical vocabulary, such a framework could be named a “moment” and, in Th ree Philosophical Poets, at fi rst it shows “the rude beginning of wisdom in natural philosophy”, that is a naturalistic “moment”, starting with the theory of “the All is One” and culminating with Lucretius’ naturalism (p. 15). Later, it disappears making room for Neo-Platonist cosmology and Aristotelian ethics, whose heritage in medieval philosophy was combined by Dante with the Hebrew and Christian tradition to draw the of his great poem. Actually, it is generally allowed that Plato and Aristotle shaped the boundaries of a paradigm, which is inherited by medieval philosophy at the expense of the Hellenistic philosophy that was dismissed for its incompatibility with the Catholic faith. Consequently, Santayana did not miss any relevant philosophical step focusing on Dante’s Platonism and Aristotelianism in order to reconstruct the survival of ancient philosophy in medieval philosophy. Th e newness of medieval paradigm is, above all, the fi nalism and rationality of nature that is an opposite view to the causalistic paradigm of naturalism. Santayana dos not fail to ridicule such a physics because of its lacking of scientifi city. Yet, for him “under this childish or metaphorical physics, there is a serious morality” (pp. 46-7), which is the missing piece in Lucretius’ naturalism. Plato’s reversal of the real and the ideal fi nds its destination in Dante, so that “the revolution is complete, not merely intellectually […], but complete morally and poetically, in that all the habits of the mind and the sanctions of public life had been assimilated to it.” (p. 47). Santayana also accurately identifi es the turning point

Notas críticas 150 Leonarda Vaiana of Platonism in Christianity, from an eternal and static to a “historical drama”, also attributable to Hebraic view, according to which the imperfection of things, and of human beings, is not due to their intrinsic and permanent character, opposite to the perfection of the ideas, but to a historical accident: the fall and the possibility of the redemption. Th is view provided “a rich subject to work upon”, so that for Dante “every episode became the symbol for some moral state or some moral principle” (p. 50). Let us consider, for example, two of the most famous episodes of the Divine , both dedicated to the meaning of love. Th e fi rst depicts the “love among the ruins” of Paolo and Francesca in a way that, according to Santayana, shows that unlike the romantic poets, who will be only “apprentices in life”, Dante “was one of the masters” (p. 70). Far from understanding the eternal love of the damned couple as a capital punishment, the romantic poets will consider it as the desirable eternal life. Actually they did not realize that love “dreams of more than mere possession […] possession in the dark, without an environment, without a future.” Th us Santayana objects that only a poet like Dante, who is also a sound moralist, could understand and express the misery of “a love that is nothing but love” (pp. 70-71). Th e other face of love is, of course, Dante’s love for Beatrice, a sort of love which appears also in his early work Vita Nuova, the embodiment of the ideal, to the point that the historical existence of Beatrice becomes unimportant in order to see her as a symbol of theology [p. 58]. Later, in Paradise (xviii. 13-18) Beatrice appears as the revelation of God that Dante sees, “rimirando lei”. It is, however, a vision where the man is totally annulled in “a complete absorption and disappearance” in God. Other figures, though “powerful and vehement”, are “not beautiful” for Santayana. For example, in spite of a distinguished critical tradition which appreciates Dante’s crude representation of Ugolino’s horrible “fi erce meal” in Inferno, just for its tragic intensity that suspends the reader’s moral —if not Dante’s— Santayana fi nds in it “vulgarities”, because “we fell too much, in Santayana’s Hermeneutics of Poetry and Philosophy 151 these cases, the heat of the poet’s prejudice or indignation”. And so it happens that Dante “forgets that he is in the eternal world, and dips for the moment into a brawl in some Italian market-place, or into the council-chamber of some factious condottiere” (p. 76). Yet, is it only a lapse in that Santayana imputes to Dante? It seems to me, rather, that Santayana fi nds here a manifest example of Dante’s “excess of humanism”, which he always stigmatizes as a form of short-sightedness. In fact, “he believes in controlling and chastening the individual soul; so that he seems to be a cosmic poet, and to have escaped the anthropocentric conceit of .” Actually, he only constructed “a golden cage” in order “to satisfy and glorify human distinctions and human preferences” (p. 124). All in all, neither does Dante get to express the human side of nature lacking in Lucretius: his vision of life is only moral or spiritual, and his notion of nature “is not genuine”, as it “is an inverted image of the moral world, cast like a gigantic shadow upon the sky” (p. 123). We have to go to Goethe’s Faust to fi nd “human life in its immediacy”. So Santayana, from a point of view, that is “formally” and “in respect to their type of philosophy and imagination”, maintains that “Dante is on a higher plane than Lucretius, and Lucretius on a higher plan than Goethe.” Yet aft er some lines, we read that “it is necessary to revert from Lucretius to Goethe to get at the volume of life”, because “the plan on which a poet dwells is not everything; much depends on what he bring up with him to that level”. And, instead of Dante’s shadow of nature or Lucretius’s “empty” intellect, on his own plan Goethe brings a “magical medley” of images, passions, memories without which there is no human life (p. 123). Interestingly, Santayana underlines that in xvi century the fi gure of Doctor Faustus, expert in magic , was an edifying example of the snares of science, of pleasure, and of ambition for every Christian (of course Protestant) believer, while people were generally attracted to this legendary person “who had dared to relish the good things of this life above the sad joys vaguely promised for the other” (p. 87).

Notas críticas 152 Leonarda Vaiana

And, while Calderón de la Barca, in his Wonder-working Magician, glorifi es the movement from paganism to Christianity”, Goethe, on the contrary, “glorifi es the return from Christianity to paganism” [p. 89-90], because in his time a second Renaissance brought back the love of life, of nature and its secrets to discover. So his Faust, “like the bolder spirits of the Renaissance, is hoping to fi nd in universal nature, infi nite, placid, non-censorious, an escape from the prison-house of Christian doctrine and Christian law (pp. 91- 92). Once again, Santayana challenges the learned scholarship, engaged in the Entstehungsgeshichte of works of art, since it is only a way of distracting attention from “the poetic value and individual character” of the work. In particular, “the round philosophy” and the “place in the moral world” of Goethe’s Faust is the romantic individualistic revolt against Christian, and in general conventional, authority. Yet, Faust’s want of knowledge and action is neither satisfi ed by traditional science nor by his alliance with the Earth- Spirit, since

His will, though shaken, is not extinguished by such misadventures. He would continue, if life could last, doing things that, in some respect, he would be obliged to regret: but he would banish that regret easily, in the pursuit of some new interest, and, on the whole, he would not regret having been obliged to regret them. Otherwise, he would not have shared he whole experience of mankind, but missed the important experience of self-accusation and of self-recovery (p. 109).

Aft er all, in the human destiny of Faust there is at once his condemnation and its salvation by God —whose words in the Prolog are mentioned by Santayana, and so commented: “in his necessary errors, the good man never misses the right road” (p. 95)— and by Santayana himself, although from a diff erent perspective, of course. For him the serious philosophy of Faust is to be looked for in Spinoza’s “seeing things under the form of eternity”. From this point of view, the life of a man is not worth for its single or fi nal Santayana’s Hermeneutics of Poetry and Philosophy 153 achievement but, as a whole, for its being an ongoing experiment. Th erefore Santayana says that God and Faust himself, in his last moment of insight, see that to have led such a life, in such a spirit, was to be saved; it was to be the sort of man a man should be” (p. 112). Yet, if this is right, why Goethe is not the highest poet? Th e answer to this question rises in the last pages, and it is related to the in-between Spinozism and Romanticism of Faust and Goethe. Santayana says that “Faust ends on the same philosophical level on which it began - the level of romanticism. Th e worth of life lies in pursuit, not in attainment; therefore, everything is worth pursuing, and nothing brings satisfaction - save this endless destiny itself ” (p. 115). But also: “the incidental philosophy or of Goethe’s Faust are, to my mind, oft en better than its ultimate philosophy”. So Santayana agrees with Goethe when he “is interpreting nature with Spinoza”, namely valuing the infi nity if nature, and also when he reveals the sense of “indefi nite”, of “unfi nished” that is essential to the romantic life. On the contrary, he stigmatizes the other face of Goethe’s Romanticism that is the transcendentalism, shift ing in absolutism when the simple pursuit of infi nite is misunderstood as the accomplishment of infi nite. Actually transcendentalism, as Santayana will underline in all his writings, is to be meant only as a method, as a point of view, always partial and not fi nal, which can off er only “vistas into nature”, as it also happens in the pages of Faust (p. 116). In conclusion, all three philosophical poets try to capture, without succeeding, eternity: Lucretius, observing nature “from without”, Dante, viewing experience “from above” and Goethe, the poet of “immediacy”, of “experience in all its extent”, who takes this ‘from inside’, we could say, for “seeing things under the form of eternity”. For this reason each of the three authors, in spite of his greatness, off ers not only a partial “vista”, but also an improper “vista”, in as much as it is off ered as the one possible. Th e poet “never existed”, who “is needed nevertheless”, will be therefore the one who

Notas críticas 154 Leonarda Vaiana will be able “to reconstitute the shattered picture of the world” (p. 127). Th ere is a last point about “this fi rst broad lesson in history of philosophy”, that is worth to take in account, at least so it seems to me. European philosophers and historians of philosophy are accustomed to relate modernity to Enlightenment, but for Santayana Lucretius, Dante and Goethe “sum up all European philosophy”. How to intend this exclusion? Not only I think, in as much as, being mathematical and not poetical, illuminist intellect is out of the chosen theme in this book. Rather the neglect of Enlightenment can be explained because, in Santayana’s perspective, the romantic temper was stronger, and engulfed in itself the illuminist temper. So we can understand why later, in Americanism, Santayana will write that Doctor Faustus “did not hope for light: he was willing to potter about for ever, fl oundering among absurdities; but he hoped for power. He was the forerunner of Bacon and of the pragmatists” [Santayana, 2016b, p. 244]. And also that “we are still in the laboratory of Doctor Faustus. Cosmic brainstorms have settled down to the analysis of matter, and the manufacture of Homunculus, or the mechanical man” [p. 252]. Yet M. Foucault, infl uential philosopher of our time, and as anti- Illuminist and anti-Romantic as Santayana, has a diff erent view. For him Faust is the edifying fi gure of a spirituality disappearing in the rising of Aufk lärung that will dominate a new long-lasting paradigm [Foucault (2001), p. 127]. Th is is a further confi rmation, if confi rmation is needed, that Santayana’s history of philosophy is his “personal ”, and as such we should appreciate it.

University of Messina Via Concezione 6-8 98121 Messina Italy e-mail: [email protected] Santayana’s Hermeneutics of Poetry and Philosophy 155

references

Cooper, Lane (1911), “Th ree Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. By George Santayana”, Th e Philosophical Review, 20, No. 4 (July 1911), pp. 443-444. Dewey, John (1969), “Ethics and Physical Science” (1887), in Th e Early Works, 1882-1898, Vol. 1, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, London and Amsterdam. —(1929), Experience and Nature (1925), Chicago, Open Court Publishing Co, second edition. Foucault, Michel (2001) L’Erméneutique Du Sujet. Cours au College de France 1981-1982. , Seuil/Gallimard. Howgate, W. George (1938), Santayana, New York, Russell &Russell. James, William, (1920), The Letters of William James: Edited by His Son, Henry James, in two Vols., Vol. 2, New York, Atlantic Monthly Press. Lovejoy, O. Arthur (1911), “Review of Th ree Philosophical Poets – Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe”, Modern Language Notes, 26, No. 8 (December 1911), pp. 244-247. McCarthy, Desmond (1969), “George Santayana” (1932) in Criticism, New York, Freeport, Books for Libraries Press, pp. 18-19. McCormick, John (1987) George Santayana: A Biography, New York, Alfred A. Knopf. Rubin, M. Richard (2010), “George Santayana and John Dewey Meet”, Limbo, n.º30, pp. 31-52. Santayana, George (1915), “Philosophical Heresy”, in Th e Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientifi c Methods, vol. xii, No. 21. —(1925), “Dewey’s Naturalistic ” in Th e Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 25, pp. 678-79. —— (1936), Egotism in German Philosophy, in Th e Works of George Santayana, vol. vi Triton Edition, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons. —(1971a), “A General Confession” (1940), in Th e Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, Th e Library of Living Philosophers, vol. ii, La Salle, Open Court, pp. 1-30.

Notas críticas 156 Leonarda Vaiana

—(1971b), “Apologia Pro Mente Sua” (1940), in Th e Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, Th e Library of Living Philosophers, vol. ii, La Salle, Open Court, pp. 495-605. —(1988), Th e Sense of Beauty, edited by William G. Holzberger and Hermann J. Saatkamp, vol. ii, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, Th e Mit Press. —(1990) Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, edited by William G. Holzberger and Hermann J. Saatkamp, vol. iii, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, Th e Mit Press. —(2002), Th e Letters of George Santayana, Book Th ree, 1921-1927, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. & William G. Holzberger, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, Th e mit Press. —(2011), Th e Life of Reason. Introduction and Reason in Commons Sense, co-edited by Marianne S. Wokeck and Martin A. Coleman, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, Th e Mit Press 2002. —(2016a), “Th e Genteel Tradition at Bay” (1931), in George Santayana La tradizione signorile e altri saggi, edited and with an Introduction by Leonarda Vaiana, Milano, Bompiani, pp. 367-461. —(2016b), “Americanism” (1955), in George Santayana, La tradizione signorile ed altri saggi, edited and with an Introduction by Leonarda Vaiana, Milano, Bompiani, 233-303. Singer, Irving (2000), Santayana, Literary Philosopher, New Haven & London, Yale University Press. Vaiana, Leonarda (2016), “La fi losofi a della cultura di George Santayana”, in George Santayana, La tradizione signorile ed altri saggi, Milano, Bompiani. Van Meter, Ames (1964), “Santayana at One Hundred”, in Th e Journal of Aesthetics and , Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 243-247.

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