Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 25 Fall 2007

              Santayana's Limited Pragmatism
[Knowledge] ... expresses in discourse the modified habits of an active being, plastic to
experience, and capable of readjusting its organic attitude to other things on the same
material plane of being with itself. (SAF 172)
Introduction
The above assertion by George Santayana has an unmistakable pragmatist ring. It is
unsurprising that some readers have seen him as a member of that school. But if
Santayana exploits the key idea of pragmatism in his treatment of factual knowledge,
he places this in an ontologicai setting of realms of being that is clearly alien to
pragmatism. Thus Santayana takes a part of the pragmatist position and grafts it neatly
into his materialism. It is evidently possible to detach a part — the key part — of
pragmatist doctrine and detach it from the rest. This I attempt to do in the last section
below, where I split off what I believe is the key insight of pragmatism from the
empiricist setting in which it has traditionally been placed. Once this has been done,
reasons come to light for questioning whether this is a happy union; the empiricist
setting is in some ways not a congenial environment for the application of this
important technique. I focus on just one of the areas where I see friction between the
two: the key idea is naturally suited to a philosophy treating human action; whereas an
empiricism that rejects substance in favour of reductive substitutes is ill suited for
dealing with action.
What conception of nature would best facilitate human action? What
philosophical language or system of categories would best serve with the various
vicissitudes of life? Santayana poses these questions directly in the early chapters of
The Realm of Matter; the conception of nature that he develops there is that which
seems to him forced on philosophers in order for them to function effectively in the
"field of action." Intelligent action requires us to reason about our bodies and other
physical things with which we interact, without scruples about proving their
existences. A radical merit of Santayana's epistemology of animal faith is its
accommodation and justification of these obvious human practices, the wisdom of our
intellectual heritage. In his eyes, empiricists are abandoning posits required for
intelligent human action, this done for laudatory reasons that unfortunately lead to a
"malicious psychology." I shall advance a part of Santayana's withering attack on
empiricists, but will place it in a limited context. I do not here question their claim
that, by dealing with reductive substitutes in place of physical objects and events, this
special language is a satisfactory way of confirming assertions about nature (although
Santayana does so). Rather I make the claim on behalf of Santayana that, whether or
not this artificial construction has merit for epistemology, it would be an especially
poor choice as a language suitable for dealing with human action. It seems to me that
many of his arguments are best placed in this context.
Santayana applies the key pragmatist technique in dealing with things and events
in rm, the locus for action; he does not apply it to his realms. As with the kernel of
pragmatism itself, the result is a viable philosophy of action. However, conflict arises
within pragmatism due to its setting in an empiricist theory, in which action is not well
handled.