Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 21 Fall 2003

              The Possibility of an Empiricist
Naturalism: Dewey and Santayana
John Dewey and George Santayana were the outstanding defenders of
philosophical naturalism during the first half of the 20th century. Yet neither
recognized the other's philosophy as a genuine naturalism.1   Tie most severe
accusation leveled at the other was the harboring of Cartesian assumptions,
infecting naturalism with psychological subjectivity. Dewey distrusted Santayana's
realms of spirit and essence, and Santayana deplored Dewey's perspectival empiricism.
Yet each philosopher regarded his own naturalism as the best way to completely
exorcize Cartesian ghosts. Their philosophies compete still for the future of naturalism
(and also challenge the reductive materialism dominant after their deaths), but whose
philosophy should prevail? Examining their views on experience and nature is a good
place to start. Their contentious debates should not prevent us from seeking common
ground, since there may be more agreement than either was able to appreciate.
For both Dewey and Santayana, along with Charles Peirce and William James, the
primary issues that philosophy must confront revolve around the issues crucial to
viability of naturalism and of empiricism. They both deliberately took a contrary stand
against Cartesian rationalism and dualism, starting their rebellion by adopting three
anti-Cartesian principles. Dewey and Santayana agreed with empiricism's
epistemological principle that knowledge arises solely from human experience.
Furthermore, they agreed with realism's metaphysical principle that there is an external
reality whose existence is not dependent on mind. They also agreed with naturalism's
biological principle that the study of human intelligence must start from the fact that
human beings are organisms growing and surviving in a natural environment. But
after these mutual agreements, discord erupts quickly. Three philosophical inquiries,
legacies from Descartes, are discussed in this essay. First, can perceptual experience
directly apprehend its external object? Second, could experience be in any sense
natural? Third, are meanings in the natural world? Dewey defended affirmative
answers to all three questions, and understood (or misunderstood) Santayana to be
denying all three questions. If Santayana must indeed take the opposed stand on these
three questions, their naturalisms cannot be fully reconciled.
The first inquiry tests direct realism. Dewey, like James, rejected consciousness
as an ontologicai reality, arguing that objects in perception are not subjectively internal
mental entities. The only naturalistic alternative, Dewey held, is the position that
external physical objects are directly and immediately had in experience. There is a
price to be paid for this kind of empiricism to avoid phenomenalism and positivism,
and Dewey paid it willingly. This empiricism must adopt the view that perspectival
and relational qualities (like displayed color or apparent shape) are just as naturally
real as intrinsic and non-relational qualities. It is notoriously easy to demonstrate how
perception must fail to apprehend an external object (and thus apprehend indirectly
through representations) if we premise that the object's "real** properties are fixed and
Independent of context. However, that premise could not be the conclusion of
empirical observation, but only adopted a priori; so Dewey concluded that an
empiricist naturalism must be contextual and perspectival.  Santayana took notice of
1 This essay is a substantially revised version of a paper delivered at the 2002 Santayana Society
meeting in Philadelphia. I am grateful to the meeting organizers and participants, and especially
to Larry Hickman and Herman Saatkamp, Jr. for their encouragement and suggestions.