Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 19 Fall 2001

              Self-Knowledge and Psychology:
Literary, Dialectical, and Scientific
In her thoughtful discussion of self-knowledge, Jessica Wahman turns our
attention to a subject of the highest importance in Santayana's philosophy. It is of
the highest importance since Santayana essentially identifies the quest for the
good life with the quest for self-knowledge. He maintains that one could not begin to
live morally, rationally, or happily without sufficient awareness of one's interests and
abilities. When Santayana tells us in Persons and Places that the contemporary
world has turned its back on the attempt to live rationally, he means that while we are
technologically advanced, we are at the same time blind to our true interests (pp
542).1
Wahman makes it very clear that the key to a proper conception of the self is
found in Santayana's notion of the psyche, a portion of the realm of matter organized
into a self-maintaining, reproducing form of life. In the psyche she finds the antidote
to modern subjectivist philosophy that identifies the self with spirit. Contrary to
subjectivist accounts, the self or psyche is not comprised of the thin flux of
consciousness — according to Santayana, the most superficial part of an individual's
total being (afsl 115). The psyche is rather those habits of matter that make-up our
predispositions and preferences. It accounts for everything from the habit of the body
to repair itself to one's capacity for enjoying music. And perhaps most importantly,
taken as the "predetermined, specific direction of animal life," the psyche is "the key
to everything moral" (se 219).
If the psyche represents a proper, materialist conception of the self, how are we
to know its organization and movements? Here Wahman's comments are particularly
illuminating. She tells us that each branch of physical science that takes the psyche
as its object, such as "psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and neurobiology are all in their
own way edifying of the nature of material psyche" (Wahman 5). This is true to
Santayana's system. He writes that "[t]he problem is not where to place the frontier
between two disparate regions [of science], but only to discover how the tropes most
obvious in each of them are superposed to grow out of one another" (RB 333).
One question raised by Wahman's analysis is whether scientific psychology in
any of its forms is the only way to acquire self-knowledge. It certainly might seem so.
For the other two types of psychology that Santayana distinguishes, namely, literary
psychology and dialectical psychology, are not considered descriptive of nature. For
example, in the case of literary psychology, or the "art of imagining how [people] feel
and think" (saf 252), Santayana asserts that "not one conclusion in it has the least
scientific value" (saf 254). This is so because the moral and emotional essences
native to spirit cannot be observed to exist in the realm of matter. In order to be
known, the moral and emotional essences of literary psychology must be given to
spirit; they are not known as measurable units of matter. Similarly, Santayana states
that dialectical psychology, which traces the ideal implications of desires and
feelings, "is also out of place in a psychology that means to be an account of what
happens in the world.    For these dialectical implications do not actually work
1 This paper was read at the annual meeting of the Santayana Society in New York on December 28,
2000, in response to the above paper by Jessica Wahman.