limbo Núm. 39, 2019, pp. 111-121 issn: 0210-1602 Th e Insinuated Self: Kremplewska’s Interpretation of Santayana Jessica Wahman Katarzyna Kremplewska. Life as Insinuation: George Santayana’s Her- meneutics of Finite Life and Human Self, suny Press, 2019, 269 pp. In her highly original and thought-provoking book, Katarzyna Kremplewska proff ers three main arguments: that the self is an in- terpretive agent; that George Santayana, when considered from a phenomenological and hermeneutic perspective, can be made her ally in demonstrating this claim; and that relevant aspects of San- tayana’s work are illuminated by putting him in dialogue with ma- jor Continental contemporaries, particularly Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson. She makes these arguments in service of her over- arching assertions that the self is aporetic and life is insinuation. By an aporetic self, I take her to mean that self-knowledge is not self- transparency, or, that one’s awareness of oneself does not amount to literal or perfect knowledge. If this is her intention, then her use of Santayana to make such a claim seems highly appropriate. By in- sinuation, Kremplewska is quite explicit in her meaning: she calls it “the idea of introducing something alien into something else, of graft ing something upon something else” (97). In calling life insinu- ation, as she does in the book’s title, she indicates that human selves are naturally grounded beings who, in interpreting their situations, add something new to the world. (She is not entirely explicit about what is insinuated, but one might infer that this addition is signifi - cance or meaning.) Ultimately, though I do not believe intention- Notas críticas 111 112 Jessica Wahman ally, Kremplewska’s project in this book is a performative one. Th is is to say, her reading of Santayana introduces something new and, I believe, alien to Santayana’s philosophy: the concept of a triad- ic self, structured as body-psyche-spirit. By contrast, Santayana is quite clear and consistent—neither vague, varying, nor perplexed, as she claims he is—in his assertion that the self is the material psy- che, or soul, particularly when considered in its social and politi- cal contexts. Kremplewska begins the book with a broad historical overview of philosophical concepts of selfh ood and relies heavily, though not exclusively, on the work of Charles Taylor in explicating this ma- terial. Th e author has indicated in her introduction that some of the book is drawn from her dissertation, and this chapter is an in- dication of that. It is not clear to me that such a broad overview is helpful or necessary in explicating Santayana’s psychology, if this is her primary undertaking. It does, instead, suggest to the reader that the author’s true agenda in the book is not explaining Santayana but positing her own original idea of the self as triadic. She is most explicit about this sort of motivation in Chapter Five on Santaya- na and Heidegger, where she states that she approaches Santayana’s marginalia in his copy of Being and Time “not as an [sic] evidence of similarities or of his ultimate views on Heidegger but rather as suggestions of possible affi nities, which happen to confi rm my pre- viously existing ideas” (p. 113). In other words, Kremplewska has her own theory of the self that she wants to promote, and she is us- ing aspects of other philosophies, including Santayana’s, to expli- cate it. Th is is a perfectly reasonable way to proceed, so long as the author is clear and explicit about what is her own position and how it may diff er from those of her interlocutors. Kremplewska is posit- ing an original, interesting, and carefully argued theory of selfh ood. Th e question remains, however, to what extent her position can be mined from the work of Santayana. Kremplewska devotes the majority of the book to 1) her herme- neutic reading of Santayana’s ontology, psychology, and account of Kremplewska’s Interpretation of Santayana 113 spirituality; 2) developing her theory of the triadic self (and attrib- uting this theory to Santayana’s own work); 3) comparing Santay- ana’s psychological philosophy with the thought of Bergson and Heidegger; 4) analyzing theories of tragedy and “the tragic” in vari- ous philosophies, including Santayana’s; and 5) closing with an anal- ysis of Santayana’s text on political philosophy, Dominations and Powers. While certainly the theme of the self—in its relation to life and its fi nitude, to self-knowledge, and to political interactions with others—is the connective thread running through the text, there is at the same time an unfocused aspect to the book. In some cases, be- cause of the way in which Kremplewska draws on, not only her dis- sertation, but articles she has previously published, many sections of the book seem to drift away from her stated main point about San- tayana’s concept of the self and its role in explicating life’s meaning. Th is is particularly the case in the fi rst chapter, as I mention above, and in Chapter Six, where she spends a great deal of time detailing various historical concepts of tragedy and of tragic life. She weaves Santayana’s position into this discussion, but he is hardly the main point of the chapter. Another case is the chapter on Santayana and Bergson, where Kremplewska spends as much time (if not more) ex- plicating Bergson as she does Santayana, leading the reader to again wonder as to her main point. Additionally, there is, throughout the book, a use of many diff erent authors (Taylor, Heidegger, Bergson, Pascal, Ricoeur, etc.) to explicate Santayana’s position, but before (or in some cases without) establishing why one or another of them should be fruitful for understanding Santayana. One of the more original and important aspects of the book is her use of Continen- tal philosophical fi gures, but her methods of comparison can be per- plexing, particularly when the language of one of the thinkers does not seem, at face value, to comport with this reader’s understanding of Santayana’s philosophy. Th e originality in Kremplewska’s scholarship lies, not only in her substantive use of Continental philosophers to interpret San- tayana, but in her hermeneutic approach to Santayana’s worldview. Notas críticas 114 Jessica Wahman She engages the notion of hermeneutics here in two ways. First, she treats Santayana’s notion of the self as hermeneutic in its operations; that is, the self is an interpreter of its experience. Second, and more intriguingly, she chooses to analyze Santayana’s own interpretive choices in generating his ontology and his motives for construct- ing it in the way that he did. Th at is, instead of straightforwardly explaining Santayana’s own professed theories of being, knowledge, and the spiritual life, as many scholars have done before her, she asks the question, what existential concerns would lead Santayana to formulate a worldview involving four realms of being, an episte- mology of animal faith, and a spirituality of temporary disinterest in worldly cares? Her answer lies in making the transcendental van- tage point of spirit central to his philosophy. From here, she sensibly interprets Santayana’s position as both advocating an acceptance of life’s fi nitude and celebrating the emancipatory possibilities of sub- jective detachment from the temporal and changeable fl ux of mat- ter while enjoying repose in the immediacy of universal essences. Th is approach, in which she focuses on Santayana’s philosophical agenda, makes for an important contribution to scholarship, most notably because, in doing so, she takes seriously the implicit paradox in Santayana’s claim that he is a materialist poet, one who affi rms the reality of matter but lives and thrives among the “masks,” or essenc- es, that pictorially, metaphorically, and fallibly represent it. In other words, while he acknowledges that the proper object of knowledge is the material world, he claims that he himself is ill equipped to study its operations. His realms of being are not parts of the world, but as Kremplewska aptly notes, labels for distinguishing things as they sort themselves out in his own thoughts. Furthermore, and as she thoroughly discusses, his own approach begins with a Cartesian skepticism not unlike Husserl’s epoché, and he similarly distinguish- es phenomenal objects of awareness from the material things be- lieved in via animal faith. In sum, Kremplewska makes full use of the fact that, even though Santayana cautions philosophers against idol- izing subjectivity, he does so from an existential perspective and po- Kremplewska’s Interpretation of Santayana 115 etic attitude that, unlike more scientifi cally oriented materialisms, takes subjective life seriously. Kremplewska’s hermeneutic approach and focus on the experi- ential makes it reasonable to put Santayana into conversation with the Continental phenomenologists and existentialists of his time, and she does so with thoughtfulness and attention to detail. Th is is a good thing, because her act of “placing the categories of Santay- ana’s nonreductive naturalism in a phenomenological and existen- tial-hermeneutic context” (p. xvii) is a risky endeavor, given Santay- ana’s expressed materialism and disdain for philosophies that attend too closely to the experiential. Th is phenomenological interpreta- tion has led some to mistakenly argue that the realm of matter is, for Santayana, a limit concept rather than the substance of the existing world and source of its power. [Cf. Rapp (1998)] Kremplewska bet- ter understands Santayana’s materialism and carefully and accurate- ly explains his four realms of being, focusing on the epistemological gap between intuition of essences and the material source that ulti- mately transcends them.