Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 18 Fall 2000

              22 OVERHEARD IN SEVILLE
stance is the natural viewpoint of spirit. Reduced to perspectives, the two cancel each
other out: neither is more legitimate than the other. This would leave the idea that
spirituality is an escape at least a viable option, on a par with the notion that it is the
completion or perfection of natural lives.
But the response overlooks Santayana's commitment to a realm of truth. We are
in fact animals living in a precarious environment. The transcendental perspective
that dreams of escape and liberation does not properly represent the alignment of
forces in the world. There is no escape from these forces, liberation is both
impossible and unnecessary, for spirit without psyche cannot survive, and the body is
the spirit's soil and home, not its enemy. More, when spirit speaks in its own voice,
we hear nothing of escape or liberation: pure intuition is unchained without having
had to escape, at liberty without the need to be set free. It sees only essences and
knows nothing of the travail of the universe.
Disregarding the spirituality Santayana calls to our attention is a grave
philosophical and personal mistake. Moments of carefree consciousness fill life with
laughter and increase the buoyancy of our burdened days. Without them, daily life
becomes torpid and even success loses its exhilaration. It may seem odd, though it
involves no contradiction, that the experiences we need to make life good are those in
which we forget about the good. Such temporary forgetfulness takes nothing away
from the moral life: pure intuitions occur as readily when we help people as when we
harm them. Helping them is a better strategy, but it adds nothing to spirituality.
JOHN LACHS
Vanderbilt University
Memorial Notice: Paul Grimley Kuntz (1915-2000)
The Santayana Society sadly notices the passing of Paul Kuntz, who died from
complications of pneumonia last January in Atlanta at the age of 84. In addition to
being a scholar of Santayana's thought, he was a longtime member of the Society and
one of its demiurges. Paul Kuntz was born in Philadelphia, the son of a Lutheran
minister; he died in the Catholic faith. He held both bachelor's and master's degrees
in theology from Harvard, where he also earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1946.
From Smith College, he went to Grinnell. His final appointment began In 1966 at
Emory University, where he taught for nineteen years. In retirement, he continued
the scholar's life in serene but steady research, sharing it with his wife, Marion,
herself a scholar of renaissance thought. Together they enjoyed summers in Venice,
where, last June, Paul suffered a heart attack.
Paul was an open-hearted philosopher who embraced pluralism as an expression
of the bounty of divine order. One of his earliest books, an introductory study co-
authored with Niel Klausner, is significantly titled Philosophy: the Study of Different
Beliefs. Not the desert landscapes of logical analysis, but the teeming, multilevel
rainforest of the Great Chain of Being and its principle of plenitude was his
philosophical home. His concern with the metaphysics of order led to a study of
Whitehead's thought and to The Concept of Order (1968) and Jacob's Ladder and
the Tree of Life (1987), coedited with Marion. His major contribution to Santayana
studies is, of course, the critical edition of Santayana's dissertation, Lotze's System of