Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 02 Fall 1984

              Santayana and Panpsychism
Santayana was certainly not a panpsychist. However, I believe that there
are panpsychist tendencies in his work. The aim of this paper is to
explore these.
It is necessary first to explain what is being understood by
'panpsychism'. I take it as the view that there is a principle by which the
physical world could be exhaustively divided (conceptually) into what we
may conveniently call basic units each of which has some kind of
sentience, though there will be physical individuals, composed of these
sentient ones as standing in certain relations, which will not necessarily be
sentient. On the version of this view most relevant here, these units will
not merely be sentient, but their sentience will constitute their 'real
essence*, while the real essence of the relations between them will be in
some manner psychical. For some versions of this view, the basic units
may be continuants, for others they will be momentary (probably not
instantaneous) events, though the units of one moment of time may
generate those of the next in a manner which constitutes each such event
a phase in the 'life' of a continuant. Although mentality constitutes the
real essence of the ultimate units of the physical world and of their interrelations, according to this view, that is not something directly implied by
our ordinary physical descriptions. These will either be of physical
individuals in terms of how they appear to consciousnesses such as ours,
or in terms of their structural properties, these latter in fact being
abstract aspects of properties which, in their full concreteness, are
psychical, most obviously in the sense of being groups of psychical
individuals related in some psychical manner. Among physical
descriptions is here understood formulations of the laws of nature, and it
will be an essential part of the kind of panpsychism of interest here that
it accepts the best efforts of scientists to arrive at these at face value,
without any specially philosophical doubts about them. The question
arises as to the status of 'consciousnesses such as ours' on this view.
There are three likely answers. (1) They might be especially high grade
examples of the basic units; (2) they might be in some manner generated
by states of affairs consisting in basic units standing in those relations to
each other which, at the physical level, constitute the existence of a
waking mammalian brain, and might, when generated, act back on the
system of basic units, i.e. on the brain; (3) they might be thus generated,
but not so as to act back in any way. Of these the second implies that the
laws of nature as they apply outside brains are interfered with within
them, the third implies that there is no such interference, and the first is
compatible either with there being special laws, or some breakdown of
physical law, within brains or with nothing of this sort being so. The
third option is a kind of panpsychist version of epiphenomenalism.1
1 These alternatives are treated more fully in chapter 4 of my The Vindication of Absolute