Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 27 Fall 2009

              Santayana and Spinoza
On Philosophic Liberty
Santayana as beatnik: "Consider now the great emptiness of America: not merely
the primitive physical emptiness surviving in some regions, and the continental
spacing of the chief natural features, but also the moral emptiness of a settlement
where men and even houses are easily moved about, and no one, almost, lives where
he was born or believes what he has been taught."1
Santayana fascinates me because he did philosophy differently than his teachers
and colleagues at Harvard. He worked for a college president who wanted even the
philosophers to teach nothing but "facts." In being out of step with his place and time,
Santayana felt a kinship with Spinoza. When Charles Eliot, Harvard's then President,
suggested that he teach "facts," Santayana recalled thinking that the only facts in
philosophy are in the history of philosophy when taught mechanically. If that was
what the American university wanted, that was fine with Santayana. But he was, for
himself, after something quite different — a life of philosophy.
In reading Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, Santayana did not do the history of
philosophy mechanically; he agreed with Emerson that Plato, for example, could not
be read like a "catalogue." Indeed, what makes the history of philosophy
philosophical is not that philosophers say things with a sort of clear facticity — on the
contrary, this history is philosophical precisely because thinkers do not "know" exactly
what they mean or why they say what they do. They have a sense or a feel of what
and why, but when asked — as we invariably see in their correspondence, they must,
as would a poet or an artist, think about the answers; they must in effect reconstitute
their thinking. There is the philosophy. We historians engage in the rethinking of an
author's thinking and in so doing we philosophize anew. Short of this, we become the
journalists and reporters of facts that Eliot was seeking for his graduate programs at
Harvard. However, in rethinking others' thoughts, we are led to several possibilities:
what they actually thought, what they might have thought, what they could have or
would have thought under certain circumstances, and what they should have thought—
and all of these in light of what we think.
This is only my second foray into the wilds and thickets of Santayana's extensive
writings. I am in a position to say no more perhaps than what Santayana might have
thought. That is, as will be evident — I am no scholar of Santayana studies. I am at
best an apprentice — but an apprentice fascinated by Santayana's reflections on and
practice of philosophy. My apprenticeship begins with a relinquishing of the
caricature of Santayana taught to many of my generation.
Latter day pragmatists and Deweyans often mark their outlook by its resistance to
"dualisms." Ironically, they also divide philosophers on many occasions by sorting
out those who deal with what Dewey called "the problems of philosophers" (we may
call them theoretical philosophers) and those who deal with "the problems of men"
(practical philosophers); consider in this light Richard Rorty's more wholesale
rejection of philosophy. A neat dualism for the anti-dualists. I came to know
Santayana as one of the former and he was thought to be expendable for that reason.
1 Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (Garden City: Doubleday and Co.,
1956), p. 172. This paper was read to the George Santayana Society during its annual meeting,
held in conjunction with that of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, in
Philadelphia on December 29,2008.