Santayana and Animal Faith.

I concurr with John Lachs that Santayanaʼs Scepticism and Animal Faith is one of the greatest books one can read on epistemology. Let us break the argument step by step. René Descartesʼs famous I think, therefore I am is not true, tells us Santayana. I beg you pardon? Yes, listen. When we think something all we can say is that there is an idea there, entirely individual and clear: the idea is an essence, in Santayanaʼs terms. But when we think the idea there is no ego there for us, there is no time, there is no space. Nothing material is actually seen in the essence but the essence itself. This is the most reduced point of epistemology. That I think is positied by Descartes, but it is not warranted by the idea seen. So, when we say I think, thefore I am we should rather say I think, thefore there is something thought. That something thought is the essence.

The next step is clear: how can we scape from this radical scepticism that denies the reality of our minds, time, space, and matter? Santayana tells us: by animal faith. When we see an essence and act accordingly in a natural environment, the result of our actions confirm that we had a valid presumption to believe that the world is real and we exist. Naturalism then, is confirmed in action, acting, solving problems like survival, cooperation, reproduction, eating, sleeping, etc. The ontological nature of the essence is still individual, particular, and non-existent. An essence is eternal for it does not exist in the world, but is in our minds. The animal that you see moving before you has no name attached to it, it has no description nor label: it is a form of matter moving before us. But if we want to ride on it and hunt animals we can verify if that horse (an essence used in action) can help us hunt better. Horse as essence does not exist. But as you use it to communicate with others and make yourself understood, it serves its purpose. Now that piece of matter which exist has an essence, a name, a label, attached: it is the horse.

So, Santayana divides the world into a unified reality, which is matter, the material world, and then describes what we do to survive and live in that material world: we create a culture, knowledge, traditions, literature, poetry, science, music, to be adapted to that world. All that cultural dimension is based on non-existent general terms, but their base is always the particular idea, the eternal essence in our minds, and action in the world is the only way we have to confirm or reject if those essences are pertinent or false. If we say that the fire is hot and we feel that the fire is cold, we should correct those essences attached to those existential facts of our natural environment, but hot and cold do not exist in the world, they are positied by us to adapt ourselves better to the environment. What Santayana shows by animal faith is that reality, material reality, has no reason to be, it is the irrational flux of matter, the blind force of matter in flux. Animals like us with mental capacities to use concepts and words (cultural evolution), use those terms as another adaptation, in this case, as Richard Dawkins would say, as an extended phenotype. What Popper called World 3 of culture. To think an idea or essence and posit that I think you must have animal faith, because you are nowhere in that thought: the thought is only what it is, an idea of itself. So, we hope and expect to say that it is us that are thinking those ideas, and that expectation is confirmed if we act to confirm it. If you are hungry and say: “I think I am hungry,” the only way to know that your faith in yourself having that idea of hungriness is true or not is..., to eat. And that action confirms that you were right in believing that the essence was yours. I think, therefore I act to confirm if I am. And you are. That is what animal faith is all about. Many have essences that are irrational, and we say so rightly, because in action those thoughts are not confirmed. Take the case of I think, therefore I am a bird. And not being able to fly, the person falls to the ground and dies. A thought confirmed in action is reason.

We could talk about an essence that implies and existence, as Spinoza says in his Ethics. In this case, we could say that Spinoza is wrong. No essence is an existence. Existence is the domain of matter, which we know by an essence (“matter”) but we ignore what it is at core. Matter is the flux of existence, the brutal force from which we arise. What we know is that the realm of essence we contemplate and use as signs is infinite. But those essences do not exist, they are created, thought, communicated by us, and the only way to confirm if we are correctly using those essences is to act, to move and see if that fire is hot or the water is cold. As to nature being the only infinite Substance, that is another essence, and Santayana has some good words on Substance in his Realms of Being. I will write something about it later.