Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 14 Fall 1996

              The Quarrel Between
Poetry and Philosophy1
"Can it be an accident that the most adequate and probably the most lasting
exposition of these three schools of philosophy2 should have been made by
poets? Are poets, at heart, in search of a philosophy? Or is philosophy, in the
end, nothing but poetry?" Santayana3
"I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought
really to be written only as a poetic composition." Wittgenstein4
When one thinks about Santayana, there are two facts that spring immediately to
mind: the first is that, although he was not an American and spent the first eight
and the last forty years of his life in Europe, he is an American philosopher, one
of the triumvirate that reigned at Harvard in the last decade of the 19th century and in the
first decade of the twentieth. The second fact is that he wrote poetry and a novel. Now, this
second fact may be taken as being not so much an additional fact about Santayana as a
confirmation of the fact that he was indeed an American philosopher. Emerson wrote in his
Journal "The philosopher has a good deal of knowledge which cannot be abstractly
imparted, which needs the combinations and complexity of social action to paint it out....
As the musician avails himself of the concert, so the philosopher avails himself of the
drama, the epic, the novel, and becomes a poet; for these complex forms allow for the
utterance of his knowledge of life by indirection as well as in the didactic way, and can
therefore express the fluxional quantities and values which the thesis or dissertation could
never give."5 William James wrote in "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" that the
philosopher's "books upon ethics, therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must
more and more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative and
1 This paper was read to the Santayana Society at its annual meeting in New York on
December 28,1995.
2 Santayana is referring to "one complete system of philosophy, — materialism in
natural science, humanism in ethics", represented by Lucretius, supematuralism ("Its sources are
in the solitude of the spirit and in the disparity, or the opposition, between what the spirit feels it
is fitted to do, and what in this world it is condemned to waste itself upon."), whose ''unmatched
poet" is Dante, and German romanticism ("A demon drives [the Germans] on; and this demon,
divine and immortal in its apparent waywardness, is their inmost self), represented by Goethe's
Faust.
3 Introduction to Three Philosophical Poets (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1910).
4 Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1938), p. 24.
5 Joel Porte, Emerson in His Journals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1982), p. 217.