Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 25 Fall 2007

              Hegel as Alienist:
Santayana, Absolute Idealism, and
the Normal Madness of Materialism
I draw my title from suggestive remarks Santayana makes about Kant towards the
end of Scepticism and Animal Faith, which closely parallel his assessments of
Hegel and, more generally, modern philosophy. He characterizes Kant as "an
alienist discovering the logic of madness."1 In this Santayana pays Kant the
dubious compliment of being a more devout subjectivist than other modem's. He
characterizes Kant's "recondite categories" and forms of intuition as "pompous titles
for what Hume had satirically called tendencies to feign." Even if presented carefully
and discriminating enough to convince others of their plausibility as solid foundations
for the sciences, Kant's categories ultimately amount to what Santayana calls a
"gratuitous uniformity in error."2 More specifically, he charges that at their heart
Kant's categories issue in an unacknowledged negation of living existence, and, once
purified of its "personal alloy," it is evident that his philosophy denies the possibility
of knowledge (saf 301).
This astonishing set of charges against Kant is applied by Santayana with equal
force to the case of Hegel, and taking these two as decisive for the development of
later philosophy, he sweepingly maintains that all philosophy after modernity —
charmingly self-conscious and critical as it is — follows a trajectory patterned on
several colossal missteps in reasoning. These assessments may not carry much force
of persuasion for contemporary philosophic sensibilities, but they are of deep
consequence for a sufficient understanding of Santayana's thinking. As he writes
towards the end of Scepticism and Animal Faith:
I hope I have taken to heart what the [schools of transcendental criticism] have to offer by
way of disintegrating criticism of knowledge, and that in positing afresh the notions of
substance, soul, nature, and discourse, I have done so with my eyes open (SAF 301).
The point of Santayana's mature thinking is to recover for philosophy a sense of
confidence in common sense understanding—of life observed with "open eyes." Such
a recovery, Santayana believed, hinges on rescuing traditional notions of philosophy
from the shameful position in which they were placed by transcendental criticism. But
to do this, Santayana also knew, one must be capable of taking to heart the offerings of
transcendental critique.
I shall argue here that Santayana takes to heart transcendental critique in his view
that all consciousness is a form of delusion, a view that develops out of his own
deployment of transcendental method, which realizes itself in the discovery of essence.
1 See SAF 300. This paper was presented to the George Santayana Society during its annual
meeting at the American Philosophical Association in Washington D.C., December 29,2006.
2 Cf. Bertrand Russell on Hegel, who after identifying the latter's central confusion as conflating
the "is" of predication with the "is" of identity, asserts: "This is an example of how, for want of
care at the start, vast and imposing systems of philosophy are built upon stupid and trivial
confusions, which, but for the almost incredible fact that they are unintentional, one would be
tempted to characterize as puns." (Bertrand Russell. Our Knowledge of the External World as a
Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1914, 1961: 49) For a
persuasive defense of Hegel against Russell's criticism see "Hegel's Revenge on Russell..." by
Katharina Dulckeit in Hegel and His Critics. (New York: State University of New York Press,
1989:111-131.)