Santayanaʼs Philosophical Synthesis.

“[W]hen one thought one was reconciling Plato and Democritus,

purging Aristotle and humanising Spinoza”.

~Santayana, in a letter to his colleague 

Charles Augustus Strong, 29 June 1905 

(Letters 1: 305, MIT Critical Edition).

When Santayana published his first masterpiece, The Life of Reason, many did not understand what he was at. Many thought he was a pragmatist, others an empiricist, others a Catholic sceptic: the majority just love his prose, but understood nothing beyond that. Santayanaʼs purpose when writing his first masterpiece in 1905-1906 was the same as when he published his second masterpiece Realms of Being (1940): he was a materialist defending Homo sapiensʼs capacity for spirituality and contemplation to attain joy and happiness while being a materialist. You can be an atheist but have piety and spirituality. His philosophical synthesis is quite amazing, as it was Mozartʼs synthesis in music. You can be a materialist (Democritus) and contemplate non-existent essences (Plato) while living a good life purged from a bad physics (Aristotle) and seeing your life under the form of eternity but focusing on forms not power (Spinoza). 

   The only thing Santayana did not remark in that letter to his colleague about the purpose of his synthesis is that he purged Schopenhauer from his metaphysical Will. For if you take the idealism from the Will of Schopenhauer you get Santantaya, plus essences without existence (which Arthur believed in). Ideas come from other ideas. Creation is re-creation, a variation of other ideas. It is all a natural process. What Santayana lacks is a Radical Enlightenmentʼs philosophy in politics. He equated democracy with socialism and Karl Marx. But democracy is not socialism, but equal rights, freedom of expression and the press, and the separation of Church and State, equality of sexes, races, creeds. Santayanaʼs naturalism must be completed with Karl Popperʼs Open Society –for me, of course, coming from long years of Albert Camus and Günter Grass. Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Santayana, Popper, Camus, Grass. And then, just then, Evolutionary Psychology and Richard Dawkins. Is it not a pity not to write a book on this history of the world as seen from the history of a mind? Is it not a passionate story to show to readers how a mind has got her beliefs (psyche is feminine in Greek)?  I think it is. I love to do it. And I am writing it. I could not be doing so, however, without having read Jonathan Israelʼs magnificent series of books devoted to this subject. The video below is an homage to this scholarʼs beautiful mind.