Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 21 Fall 2003

              Santayana Read from a Perspective
of Polish Post-Communism
Eastern Europe's political turmoil associated with the collapse of Communism
deserves the name of revolution; it has been a gigantic political, social,
intellectual, and moral quake that has destroyed the hitherto status quo and has
given place to a completely new one.1 The walls have collapsed and new vistas
opened. Before there was imposed a black and white scheme of things (for instance,
atheistic communism against religion) with a clear distinction between good and bad
— what behooves one to do and what not. Now there has emerged a multifarious
panorama of ways, methods, choices, and poses to take up. Liberty has been won;
however, it did not take long to learn that liberty, when offered to the unprepared,
immature, and unfit, might become a curse. As a consequence of this, the beliefs and
convictions of ordinary people have started either to fall or undergo radical revisions,
not to say distortions; ultimate truths have dissolved, and many of the previous values
became valueless overnight. On the other hand, a rapid and uncontrolled influx of new
ideas, religions, sects, doctrines, ideologies, philosophies, and fashions has had to be
confronted: spiritual disorientation and intellectual helplessness became rife. The
danger of axiologieal and cultural catastrophe loomed large. What had, for many years
prior to the revolution, been firmly believed in, deeply relied on, and unlimitedly
trusted to, were seen to be relative and/or dependent upon the circumstances:
economic, political, cultural, even geographical. The absolute values, for which there
had been a sometimes life-long struggle, were seen differently after the victory, when
liberty had been gained and the free world had to be faced In its full complexity. Many
people became dazed and confused; paradoxically, instead of becoming intellectually
open and willing to absorb what has been offered by the free world, they seem to have
closed themselves before the unknown. They seemed unable to cope with this, which
sometimes strengthened conservatism and kindled fanaticism. For others, the need to
redefine their own identity anew became clear and urgent. Cultural life can hardly
tolerate an empty space for long, and this started t& be filled in different ways
immediately.
It is not my intention to embrace all the aspects of the situation in the post-
Communist era, nor do I have in mind a full presentation of George Santayana's
philosophy. In the present paper, three selected problems have been posed from the
perspective of a Pole (or, broader, an Eastern European) in order to show that
Santayana has something important and stimulating to say to modern Eastern
Europeans, who have to face the challenges of the future and wrestle with the heritage
of the totalitarian past.2
I try to transcend the historical limitations (I.e. the end of 19th and the beginning of the
20th centuries) and geographical ones (i.e. American, Bostonian or Harvardian)
J I should like to thank Dean Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. for making possible a seven month
research visit to IUPUI (of which this paper is one of results) and introducing me both to American
academia and Santayana's philosophy. At the same time, I am very grateful to The Kosciuszko
Foundation for supporting my studies on Santayana in the US.
2 The problem of squaring with the past (Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Fascism) in the light
of Santayana's philosophy deserves a separate paper.