Category Archives: Philosophy

SANTAYANA: Skepticism and Animal Faith

May 25, 2022 – 7:28 PM

Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter XI Section 1.2 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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I. GEORGE SANTAYANA

2. Skepticism and Animal Faith

“Here,” says the preface, “is one more system of philosophy. If the reader is tempted to smile, I can assure him that I smile with him. … I am merely attempting to express for the reader the principles to which he appeals when he smiles.” Santayana is modest enough (and this is strange in a philosopher) to believe that other systems than his own are possible. “I do not ask anyone to think in my terms if he prefers others. Let him clean better, if he can, the windows of his soul, that the variety and beauty of the prospect may spread more brightly before him.” 

Santayana is modest enough to believe that other systems than his own are possible. 

In this last and introductory volume he proposes to clear away, first of all, the epistemological cobwebs that have enmeshed and arrested the growth of modern philosophy. Before he delineates the Life of Reason he is willing to discuss, with all the technical paraphernalia dear to the professional epistemologist, the origin, validity and limits of human reason. He knows that the great snare of thought is the uncritical acceptance of traditional assumptions: “criticism surprises the soul in the arms of convention,” he says, unconventionally. He is willing to doubt almost everything: the world comes to us dripping with the qualities of the senses through which it has flowed, and the past comes down to us through a memory treacherously colored with desire. Only one thing seems certain to him, and that is the experience of the moment—this color, this form, this taste, this odor, this quality; these are the “real” world, and their perception constitutes “the discovery of essence.”

The great snare of thought is the uncritical acceptance of traditional assumptions. Only the experience of the moment—this color, this form, this taste, this odor, this quality—is certain.

Idealism is correct, but of no great consequence: it is true that we knew the world only through our ideas; but since the world has behaved, for some thousands of years, substantially as if our combined sensations were true, we may accept this pragmatic sanction without worry for the future. “Animal faith” may be faith in a myth, but the myth is a good myth, since life is better than any syllogism. The fallacy of Hume lay in supposing that by discovering the origin of ideas he had destroyed their validity: “A natural child meant for him an illegitimate one; his philosophy had not yet reached the wisdom of the French lady who asked if all children were not natural.” This effort to be sceptically strict in doubting the veracity of experience has been carried by the Germans to the point of a disease, like a madman forever washing his hands to clean away dirt that is not there. But even these philosophers “who look for the foundations of the universe in their own minds” do not live as if they really believed that things cease to exist when not perceived.

We are not asked to abolish our conception of the natural world, nor even, in our daily life, to cease to believe in it; we are to be idealists only north-northwest, or transcendentally; when the wind is southerly we are to remain realists. … I should be ashamed to countenance opinions which, when not arguing, I did not believe. It would seem to me dishonest and cowardly to militate under other colors than those under which I live. … Therefore no modern writer is altogether a philosopher in my eyes, except Spinoza. … I have frankly taken nature by the hand, accepting as a rule, in my farthest speculation, the animal faith I live by from day to day.

Idealism is correct, but of no great consequence: it is true that we knew the world only through our ideas; but since the world has behaved, for some thousands of years, substantially as if our combined sensations were true, we may accept this pragmatic sanction without worry for the future.

And so Santayana is through with epistemology; and we breathe more easily as we pass on with him to that magnificent reconstruction of Plato and Aristotle which he calls “The Life of Reason.” This epistemological introduction was apparently a necessary baptism for the new philosophy. It is a transitional concession; philosophy still makes its bow in epistemological dress, like the labor leaders who for a time wear silk breeches at the king’s court. Some day, when the middle ages are really over, philosophy will come down from these clouds, and deal with the affairs of men.

Philosophy should come down from these clouds, and deal with the affairs of men.

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SANTAYANA: Biographical

May 25, 2022 – 6:06 PM

Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter XI Section 1.1 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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I. GEORGE SANTAYANA

1. Biographical

Santayana was born at Madrid in 1863. He was brought to America in 1872, and remained here till 1912. He took his degrees at Harvard, and taught there from his twenty-seventh to his fiftieth year. One of his students describes him vividly:

Those who remember him in the class room will remember him as a spirit solemn, sweet, and withdrawn, whose Johannine face by a Renaissance painter held an abstract eye and a hieratic smile, half mischief, half content; whose rich voice flowed evenly, in cadences smooth and balanced as a liturgy; whose periods had the intricate perfection of a poem and the import of a prophecy; who spoke somehow for his hearers and not to them, stirring the depths in their natures and troubling their minds, as an oracle might, to whom pertained mystery and reverence, so compact of remoteness and fascination was he, so moving and so unmoved.

He was not quite content with the country of his choice; his soul, softened with much learning, and sensitive as a poet’s soul must be (for he was poet first, and philosopher afterward), suffered from the noisy haste of American city-life; instinctively he shrank back to Boston, as if to be as near to Europe as he could; and from Boston to Cambridge and Harvard, and a privacy that preferred Plato and Aristotle to James and Royce. He smiled with a little bitterness at the popularity of his colleagues, and remained aloof from the crowd and the press; but he knew that he was fortunate to have found a home in the finest School of Philosophy that any American university had ever known. “It was a fresh morning in the life of reason, cloudy but brightening.”

Santayana was poet first, and philosopher afterward. He remained rather aloof from the crowd and the press.

His first essay in philosophy was The Sense of Beauty (1896), which even the matter-of-fact Munsterberg rated as the best American contribution to esthetics. Five years later came a more fragmentary, and more readable, volume, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Then, for seven years, like Jacob serving for his love, he worked silently, publishing only occasional verse; he was preparing his magnum opus, The Life of Reason. These five volumes (Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Religion, Reason in Art, and Reason in Science) at once lifted Santayana to a fame whose quality fully atoned for what it lacked in spread. Here was the soul of a Spanish grandee grafted upon the stock of the gentle Emerson; a refined mixture of Mediterranean aristocracy with New England individualism; and, above all, a thoroughly emancipated soul, almost immune to the spirit of his age, speaking as if with the accent of some pagan scholar come from ancient Alexandria to view our little systems with unwondering and superior eye, and to dash our new-old dreams with the calmest reasoning and the most perfect prose. Hardly since Plato had philosophy phrased itself so beautifully; here were words full of a novel tang, phrases of delicate texture, perfumed with subtlety and barbed with satiric wit; the poet spoke in these luxuriant metaphors, the artist in these chiseled paragraphs. It was good to find a man who could feel at once the lure of beauty and the call of truth.

Santayana was a man who could feel at once the lure of beauty and the call of truth.

After this effort Santayana rested on his fame, contenting himself with poems and minor volumes.* Then, strange to say, after he had left Harvard and gone to live in England, and the world presumed that he looked upon his work as finished, he published, in 1923, a substantial volume on Scepticism and Animal Faith, with the blithe announcement that this was merely the introduction to a new system of philosophy, to be called “Realms of Being.” It was exhilarating to see a man of sixty sailing forth on distant voyages anew, and producing a book as vigorous in thought, and as polished in style, as any that he had written. We must begin with this latest product, because it is in truth the open door to all of Santayana’s thinking.

* These are, chiefly: Three Philosophical Poets (1910)—classic lectures on Lucretius, Dante and Goethe: Winds of Doctrine (1913); Egotism in German Philosophy (1916); Character and Opinion in the United States (1921); and Soliloquies in England (1922). All of these are worth reading, and rather easier than the Life of Reason. Of this the finest volume is Reason in Religion. Little Essays from the Writings of George Santayana, edited by L. P. Smith. and arranged by Santayana himself, is an admirable selection.

Even at the age of sixty Santayana produced a book as vigorous in thought, and as polished in style, as any that he had written.

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Durant 1926: Introduction to American Philosophers

May 18, 2022 – 7:39 PM

Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter X Section 4 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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Introduction to American Philosophers

There are, as everybody knows, two Americas, of which one is European. European America js chiefly the eastern states, where the older stocks look up respectfully to foreign aristocracies, and more recent immigrants look back with a certain nostalgia to the culture and traditions of their native lands. In this European America there is an active conflict between the Anglo-Saxon soul, sober and genteel, and the restless and innovating spirit of the newer peoples. The English code of thought and manners must eventually succumb to the continental cultures that encompass and inundate it here; but for the present that British mood dominates the literature, though no longer the morals, of the American East. Our standard of art and taste in the Atlantic states is English; our literary heritage is English; and our philosophy, when we have time for any, is in the line of British thought. It is this new England that produced Washington and Irving and Emerson and even Poe; it is this new England that wrote the books of the first American philosopher, Jonathan Edwards; and it is this new England that captured and remade that strange, exotic figure, America’s latest thinker, George Santayana. For Santayana, of course, is an American philosopher only by grace of geography; he is a European who, having been born in Spain, was transported to America in his unknowing childhood, and who now, in his ripe age, returns to Europe as to a paradise for which his years with us were a probation. Santayana is steeped in the “genteel tradition” of the old America.*

* Cf. his own analysis of the two Americas: “America is not simply a young country with an old mentality; it is a country with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practices and discoveries of the younger generations. In all the higher things of the mind—in religion, in literature, in the moral emotions—it is the hereditary spirit that prevails, so much so that Mr. Bernard Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the times. The truth is that one-half of the American mind has remained, I will not say high and dry, but slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the back-water, while alongside, in invention and industry and social organization, the other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids. This may be found symbolized in American architecture. …The American Will inhabits the ‘skyscraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion.”—Winds of Doctrine, New York, 1913; p. 188.

Santayana is steeped in the “genteel tradition” of the old America.

The other America is American. It consists of those people, whether Yankees or Hoosiers or cowboys, whose roots are in this soil, and not in Europe; whose manners, ideas and ideals are a native formation; whose souls are touched neither with the gentility of the families that adorn Boston, or New York, or Philadelphia, or Richmond, nor with the volatile passions of the southern or eastern European; men and women moulded into physical ruggedness and mental directness and simplicity by their primitive environment and tasks. This is the America that produced Lincoln and Thoreau and Whitman and Mark Twain; it is the America of “horse sense,” of “practical men,” of “hard-headed business men”; it is the America which so impressed itself upon William James that he became its exponent in philosophy while his brother became more British than an Englishman; and it is the America that made John Dewey.

New America is characterized by “horse sense,” “practical men,” and “hard-headed business men.” William James was impressed by it. John Dewey grew up in it.

We shall study Santayana first, despite chronology; because, though he is the youngest of our greater philosophers, he represents an older and a foreign school; and the subtlety of his thought, and the fragrance. of his style are like the perfume that lingers in a room from which the flowers have been taken away. We shall have, very probably, no more Santayanas; for hereafter it is America, and not Europe, that will write America’s philosophies.

We shall have, very probably, no more Santayanas; for hereafter it is America, and not Europe, that will write America’s philosophies.

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BERTRAND RUSSELL: Epilogue

May 17, 2022 – 1:24 PM

Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter X Section 3.3 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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III. BERTRAND RUSSELL

3. Epilogue

All this, of course, is rather optimistic,—though it is better to err on the side of hope than in favor of despair. Russell has poured into his social philosophy the mysticism and the sentiment which he had so resolutely repressed in his attitude towards metaphysics and religion. He has not applied to his economic and political theories the same rigid scrutiny of assumptions, the same scepticism of axioms, which gave him such satisfaction in mathematics and logic. His passion for the a priori, his love of “perfection more than life,” leads him here to splendid pictures that serve rather as poetic relief to the prose of the world than as practicable approaches to the problems of life. It is delightful, for example, to contemplate a society in which art shall be better respected than wealth; but so long as nations rise and fall, in the flux of natural group-selection, according to their economic rather than their artistic power, it is economic and not artistic power which, having the greater survival value, will win the greater plaudits and the large rewards. Art can only be the flower that grows out of wealth; it cannot be wealth’s substitute. The Medici came before Michelangelo.

Russell is too optimistic. He has not applied his usual rigid scrutiny of assumptions to his economic and political theories. His passion leads him to splendid pictures but they do not serve as practicable approaches to the problems of life. 

But it is not necessary to pick more flaws in Russell’s brilliant vision; his own experience has been his severest critic. In Russia he found himself face to face with an effort to create a socialist society; and the difficulties encountered by the experiment almost destroyed Russell’s faith in his own gospel. He was disappointed to find that the Russian Government could not risk such a measure of democracy as had seemed to him the axiom of a liberal philosophy; and he was so angered by the suppression of free speech and free press, and by the resolute monopoly and systematic use of every avenue of propaganda, that he rejoiced in the illiteracy of the Russian people;—the ability to read being, in this age of subsidized newspapers, an impediment to the acquisition of truth. He was shocked to find that nationalization of the land had been forced (except on paper) to yield to private ownership; and it dawned upon him that men, as made today, will not properly till and husband their holdings unless they can rely on transmitting them, and the improvements which they put into them, to their children. “Russia seems on the way to becoming a greater France, a great nation of peasant proprietors. The old feudalism has disappeared.” He began to understand that this dramatic overturn, with all its sacrifices and all its heroism, was only Russia’s 1789.

Russell’s experience has been the severest critic of his brilliant vision. The difficulties encountered in Russia to create a socialist society almost destroyed his faith in his own gospel. It dawned upon him that men will not properly till and husband their holdings unless they can rely on transmitting them to their children. 

Perhaps he was more at home when he went for a year to teach in China; there was less mechanism there, and a slower pace, one could sit down and reason, and life would stand still while one dissected it. In that vast sea of humanity new perspectives came to our philosopher; he realized that Europe is but the tentative pseudopodium of a greater continent and an older—and perhaps profounder—culture; all his theories and syllogisms melted into a modest relativity before this mastodon of the nations. One sees his system loosening as he writes:

I have come to realize that the white race isn’t as important as I used to think it was. If Europe and America kill themselves off in war it will not necessarily mean the destruction of the human species, nor even an end to civilization. There will still be a considerable number of Chinese left; and in many ways China is the greatest country I have ever seen. It is not only the greatest numerically and the greatest culturally, but it seems to me the greatest intellectually. I know of no other civilization where there is such open-mindedness, such realism, such a willingness to face the facts as they are, instead of trying to distort them into a particular pattern.

Russell’s stay in China made him aware of an open-mindedness, a realism, and a willingness to face the facts as they are, that was superior to the western culture. He realized that there was much more to the human species than the white race.

It is a little difficult to pass from England to America, and then to Russia, and then to India and China, and yet keep one’s social philosophy unchanged. The world has convinced Bertrand-Russell that it is too big for his formulae, and perhaps too large and heavy to move very rapidly towards his heart’s desire. And there are so many hearts, and so many different desires! One finds him now “an older and a wiser man,” mellowed by time and a varied life; as wide awake as ever to all the ills that flesh is heir to and yet matured into the moderation that know’s the difficulties of social change. All in all, a very lovable man: capable of the profoundest metaphysics and the subtlest mathematics, and yet speaking always simply, with the clarity which comes only to those who are sincere; a man addicted to fields of thought that usually dry up the springs of feeling, and yet warmed and illumined with pity, full of an almost mystic tenderness for mankind. Not a courtier, but surely a scholar and a gentleman, and a better Christian than some who mouth the word. Happily, he is still young and vigorous, the flame of life burns brightly in him yet; who knows but this next decade will see him grow out of disillusionment into wisdom, and write his name among the highest in “the serene brotherhood of philosophs”?

Russell’s social philosophy could not help but change as he passed from the western to the eastern culture. His sincerity shines in the clarity of his observations. He did grow out of his disillusionment into wisdom.

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BERTRAND RUSSELL: The Reformer

May 17, 2022 – 11:03 AM

Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter X Section 3.2 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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III. BERTRAND RUSSELL

1. The Reformer

And then the Great Madness came; and the Bertrand Russell who had lain so long buried and mute under the weight of logic and mathematics and epistemology, suddenly burst forth, like a liberated flame, and the world was shocked to find that this slim and anemic-looking professor was a men of infinite courage, and a passionate lover of humanity. Out of the recesses of his formulae the scholar stepped forth, and poured out upon the most exalted statesmen of his country a flood of polemic that did not stop even when they ousted him from his chair at the University, and isolated him, like another Galileo, in a narrow quarter of London. Men who doubted his wisdom admitted his sincerity; but they were so disconcerted by this amazing transformation that they slipped for a moment into a very un-British intolerance. Our embattled pacifist, despite his most respectable origins, was outlawed from society, and denounced as a traitor to the country which had nourished him, and whose very existence seemed to be threatened by the maelstrom of the war.

Bertrand Russell who had lain so long buried and mute under the weight of logic and mathematics and epistemology, suddenly burst forth, like a liberated flame. He poured out a flood of polemic upon the most exalted statesmen of his country for which he was isolated and outlawed from society.

Back of this rebellion lay a simple horror of all bloody conflict. Bertrand Russell, who had tried to be a disembodied intellect, was really a system of feelings; and the interests of an empire seemed to him not worth the lives of the young men whom he saw so proudly marching forth to kill and die. He set to work to ferret out the causes of such a holocaust; and thought he found in socialism an economic and political analysis that at once revealed the sources of the disease and indicated its only cure. The cause was private property, and the cure was communism.

Back of this rebellion lay a simple horror of all bloody conflict. He set to work to ferret out the causes of such a holocaust. To him, the cause was private property, and the cure was communism.

All property, he pointed out, in his genial way, had had its origin in violence and theft; in the Kimberley diamond mines and the Rand gold mines the transition of robbery into property was going on under the nose of the world. “No good to the community, of any sort or kind, results from the private ownership of land. If men were reasonable they would decree that it should cease tomorrow, with no compensation beyond a moderate life-income to the present holders.”

Since private property is protected by the state, and the robberies that make property are sanctioned by legislation and enforced by arms and war, the state is a great evil; and it would be ‘Well if most of its functions were taken over by cooperatives and producers’ syndicates. Personality and individuality are crushed into a rote conformity by our societies; only the greater safety and orderliness of modern life can reconcile us to the state.

All property, he pointed out, in his genial way, had had its origin in violence and theft. Since private property is protected by the state, and the robberies that make property are sanctioned by legislation and enforced by arms and war, the state is a great evil.

Freedom is the supreme good; for without it personality is impossible. Life and knowledge are today so complex, that only by free discussion can we pick our way through errors and prejudices to that total perspective which is truth. Let men, let even teachers, differ and debate; out of such diverse opinions will come an intelligent relativity of belief which will not readily fly to arms; hatred and war come largely of fixed ideas or dogmatic faith. Freedom of thought and speech would go like a cleansing draught through the neuroses and superstitions of the “modern” mind.

Freedom is the supreme good; for without it personality is impossible. Life and knowledge are today so complex, that only by free discussion can we pick our way through errors and prejudices to that total perspective which is truth.

For we are not so educated as we think; we are but beginning the great experiment of universal schooling; and it has not had time to affect profoundly our ways of thinking and our public life. We are building the equipment, but we are still primitive in methods and technique; we think of education as the transmission of a certain body of settled knowledge, when it should be rather the development of a scientific habit of mind. The distinctive feature of the unintelligent man is the hastiness and absoluteness of his opinions; the scientist is slow to believe, and never speaks without modification. The larger use of science, and of scientific method, in education would give to us a measure of that intellectual conscience which believes only up to the evidence in hand, and is always ready to concede that it may be wrong. With such methods, education may prove the great solvent of our ills; it may even make of our children’s children the new men and women who must come before the new society can appear. “The instinctive part of our character is very malleable. It may be changed by beliefs, by material circumstances, by social circumstances, and by institutions.” It is quite conceivable, for example, that education could mould opinion to admire art more than wealth, as in the days of the Renaissance, and could guide itself by the resolution “to promote all that is creative, and so to diminish the impulses and desires that center round possession.” This is the Principle of Growth, whose corollaries would be the two great commandments of a new and natural morality: first, the Principle of Reverence, that “the vitality of individuals and communities is to be promoted as far as possible”; and. second, the Principle of Tolerance, that “the growth of one individual or one community is to be as little as possible at the expense of another.”

We think of education as the transmission of a certain body of settled knowledge, when it should be rather the development of a scientific habit of mind. The vitality of individuals and communities is to be promoted as far as possible. The growth of one individual or one community is to be as little as possible at the expense of another.”

There is nothing that man might not do if our splendid organization of schools and universities were properly developed and properly manned, and directed intelligently to the reconstruction of human character. This, and not violent revolution, or paper legislation, is the way out of economic greed and international brutality. Man has come to control all other forms of life because he has taken more time in which to grow up; when he takes still more time, and spends that time more wisely, he may learn even to control and remake himself. Our schools are the open sesame to Utopia.

Education and not violent revolution, or paper legislation, is the way out of economic greed and international brutality.

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