Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 08 Fall 1990

              Interpreting Interpretations
-i-
When I first wrote about Santayana long ago, I assumed that I was working
more with literary critical categories than strictly philosophical ones. My
attempt to see Santayana stylistically, in terms of drama and irony, was different
from other approaches at the time. Literary interpretations have grown and
even begun to prevail in philosophy. This is seen in the burgeoning of
philosophy-and-literature enterprises, in deconstruction, and in the sometimes
strange indiscernability of texts with respect to whether they were written by
professors of literature, professors of philosophy, or by some total interloper
from somewhere across the disciplines. There are now frequent literary and
stylistic studies of poet-philosophers like Plato and Nietzsche, of barely-poet-
philosophers like Hobbes, Hegel and Hume, and even of non-poet-
philosophers like Kant and Peirce. For better or worse, philosophy as literary
criticism, even philosophy as art, is staking out large claims and gaining wide
recognition.
Remarkably, these newer approaches have been directed at philosophers
for whom they are far less suitable than they would be for Santayana - a
genuine philosophical poet. Santayana scholars tend to grapple with Santayana
in traditional, orderly, sensible, analytic fashion. They think to disentangle the
essential doctrines from the literary overlay; they even think to uncover serious
arguments and moral claims that stand secure as Santayana's own - not to be
confused with other arguments and claims that somehow got lodged in the
texts in some peripheral and embarrassing way.
This inclines me, in a spirit of corrective misprisioning, to go to greater and
greater lengths to see only irony and drama, even more than I once saw, and to
dismiss those arguments and doctrines that in the past I thought could be
saved. I began by finding much irony and drama in Santayana, along with
some argumentative seriousness and even some "positions.* Now I find, or
have decided to find, only irony and drama and literary art. This is the
"dialogical" way some scholars approach Plato, and it is fitting to attempt it with
Santayana.
Briefly then, if by argument one means anything like a serious development
of a position which is then maintained univocally and securely, then there are
no arguments or doctrines in Santayana as there are, indeed, no doctrines in
Plato. There is an absence of religion and philosophy in Santayana in quite the
same sense that he found such an absence in Shakespeare. They were both too
good, too aloof and too remote to have to carry along that kind of baggage.
This is a revised version of a paper read to the Santayana Society in Atlanta, Georgia, on
December 28, 1989.