F.R. Leavis on Santayana

 

For Johnson, I said, expression was necessarily statement; critically, he couldn't come to terms with the use of language, not as a medium in which to put 'previously definite' ideas, but for exploratory creation. Poetry as creating what it presents, and as presenting something that stands there to speak for itself, or, rather, that isn't a matter of saying, but of being and enacting,he couldn't properly understand.

(from Tragedy and the ‘medium’ essay in The Common Pursuit by F.R. Leavis)

Leavis is deprecating Santayana’s philosopher’s view that Shakespeare is expressing his own sense of the futility of life that he puts into the mouth of Macbeth, “Tomorrow and tomorrow etc.” No, no, no it is the play that is speaking. As I have expressed it in relation to Flannery O’Connor, the work gets away on its creator. ‘I didn’t know he was going to say that’ she says of a character. If you’re a reader you can feel this and it may be that writers who can’t read fail to ever pass into the active imagination
active imagination
by which a world is mediated.
cf.getting away on Flannery

The Last Puritan by Santayana and The Late George Apley by John Marquand are both exemplars of Beacon Hill Brahminism but the former stays within the program withal beautifully written while Marquand’s work may have surprised himself.
The Last Puritan
The Late George Apley

George is fatuous, blinkered but strangely noble and lovable. Oliver has to die to make his point but it seems unsatisfactory that he was not given more of a chance to meet himself, to catch himself on as the saying was. That is the tragedy of dying young never having been able for happiness.

Sankara, Santayana, and Animal Faith.

When in a discussion marked by terseness Sankara in an aside dilates on a topic, that is I think an indication that an unfamiliar line of argument is being broached. Santayana makes a similar point about what he calls animal faith namely that pre-theoretic, arational, immediacy of our confrontation with the world. He used it in Scepticism and Animal Faith to impugn the mentalistic folly of Cartesian foundationalism. Sankara drops in the claim that even animal consciousness involves superimposition/adhyasa. There is no subject/object consciousness without it. Not that animals can parse in this manner and that is just the point. Here we have something more basic than analysis.

Moreover there is no difference (of the learned) from the animals (in regard to empirical behaviour). Just as animals and others turn away from sound etc. when these appear to be unfavourable after their ears come in contact with them, and they move towards these when they are favourable; and they move towards these when they are favourable; and just as by noticing a man approaching them with a raised stick, they begin to run away thinking, “This one wants to hurt me”, and they approach another carrying green grass in his hands, similarly even the wise are repelled by the presence of strong, uproarious people with evil looks and upraised swords, and are attracted by men of opposite nature. Therefore the behaviour of men with regard to the means and objects of knowledge is similar to that of animals. And it is a familiar fact that the animals use their means of perception etc. without discrimination (between the body and the Self). From this fact of similarity, the conclusion can be drawn that so far as empirical behaviour is concerned, the use of the means of perception by the wise is similar to that of lower animals, (it being a result of superimposition).

(from the preamble to Brahma Sutra Bhasya by Sankara.)

Common or Garden Tropes

This inalienable individuality of each essence renders it a universal; for being perfectly self-contained and real only by virtue of its intrinsic character, it contains no reference to any setting in space or time, and stands in no adventitious relations to anything. Therefore without forfeiting its absolute identity it may be repeated or reviewed any number of times. Such embodiments or views of it, like the copies of a book or the acts of reading of it, will be facts or events in nature ( which is a net of external relations ) ; but the copies would not be copies of the same book, nor the readings readings of it, unless ( and in so far as ) the same essence reappeared in them all. Physical obstacles to exact repetitions or reproductions do not affect the essential universality of every essence, even if by chance it occurs only once, or never occurs at all; because in virtue of its perfect identity and individuality, it cannot fall out of the catalogue of essences, where it fills its particular place. If I try to delete it, I reinstate it, since in deleting that I have recognised it and defined it anew, bearing witness to its possessing the whole being which can claim as an essence. There accordingly it stands, waiting to be embodied or noticed, if nature or attention ever choose to halt at that point or traverse it. Every essence in its own realm is just as central, just as normal, and just as complete as any other: it is therefore alway just as open to exemplification or to thought, without the addition or subtraction of one iota of its being.

(from The Realm of Essence Section II: The Being Proper to Essences By George Santayana pub.1927)
There accordingly it stands, waiting to be embodied or noticed, if nature or attention ever choose to halt at that point or traverse it. This I understand as the delineation of the notion of trope (tropein - to turn). As we scan the flux the universal pops out. The thought that it can be deleted or deletion might be attempted seems to indicate that it is out there in the flux but that needn't be the case if 'extracting' universals is a power or a capacity that evokes. To alter Plato's aviary that 'bird' does not exist independently in the cage to be whistled up. Looking makes it and calls it up. That this 'bird' is a common or garden one,
- metaphor don't fail me now - is due to our animal nature and evolutionary heritage. This is the famous animal faith.

That is my initial bead on 'the bird' and is probably wrong. By the bye it occurred to me today that while the variety of religious creeds is for the atheist an indication that none of them are right, the variety of philosophical systems which are counter to each other does not likewise imply the uselessness of philosophising.

Descartes' Meditation led by Santayana

" I think, therefore I am," if taken as an inference is sound because analytical, only repeating in the conclusion, for the sake of emphasis, something assumed in the premise. If taken as an attestation of fact, as I suppose it was meant, it is honest and richly indicative, all its terms being heavy with empirical connotations. What is " thinking," what is "I," what is " therefore," and what is " existence " ? If there were no existence there would certainly be no persons and no thinking, and it may be doubted (as I have indicated above) that anything exists at all. That any being exists that may be called "I," so that I am not a mere essence, is a thousand times more doubtful, and is often denied by the keenest wits. The persuasion that in saying "I am " I have reached an indubitable fact, can only excite a smile in the genuine sceptic. No fact is self-evident ; and what sort of fact is this " I," and in what sense do I " exist" ?

further below:

 and this inner life of the body, I suspect, was the rock of vulgar belief which Descartes found at hand, easy to mount on, after his not very serious shipwreck. And the rock was well chosen ; not because the existence of my inner man is a simpler or a surer fact than any other ; to a true sceptic this alleged being so busily thinking and willing and fuming within my body is but a strange feature in the fantastic world that appears for the moment. Yet the choice of the inner man as the one certain existence was a happy one, because this sense of life within me is more constant than other perceptions, and not wholly to be shaken off except in profound contemplation or in some strange forms or madness. 

The last chapter of Scepticism and Animal Faith is a close analysis of the idealism of Descartes and Hume. It also indicates why Santayana was attracted to Indian philosophy. The method of questioning called Atma Vichara or the probing into the roots of the self by the inquiry who am I was presented by the modern sage Ramana Maharshi (d.1950).Who Am I
Now there is a double bind in this process in that there can be no answer to the question. However that self definition is the context of what Freud took to be the purpose of life namely the creation of a strong central ego. Maya, Sigmund, Maya.

The first extract above is about the process of questioning, the second indicates the goal or at least its partial attainment. The sense of life within me as bare awareness is channelled through a chakra. We in a sense allow ourselves because we are incarnated to fall through that level of awareness. This is generally the Ajna or Hridaya chakra. As Santayana says beyond that is profound formless contemplation.

Santayana on Hume

The last chapter of Scepticism and Animal Faith by Santayana is a relief after the previous three which seemed for me to hover on the brink of making sense. This chapter is entitled Comparison with Other Criticisms of Knowledge and is an examination of the wrong turn into literary psychology taken by Descartes and Hume. It is called literary because it replicates the standard approach of an author who has privileged access to the mind of his characters. As an aside the 'show rather than tell' as a writer's maxim only follows the ontic. Maybe Dickens and Wittgenstein were right: 'the human body is the best picture of the human soul'. (Body includes all its motions)

Professor Edward Feser exhumes Hume as he forgot to write himself - he is fond of the eponymous pun.
Feser on Hume

From Scepticism and Animal Faith:

Hume seems to have, assumed that every perception perceived itself. He assumed further that these perceptions lay in time and formed certain sequences. Why a given perception belonged to one sequence rather than to another, and why all simultaneous perceptions were not in the same mind, he never considered ; the questions were unanswerable, so long as he ignored or denied the existence of bodies. He asserted also that these perceptions were repeated, and that the repetitions were always fainter than the originals—two groundless assertions, unless the transitive force of memory is admitted, and impressions are distinguished from ideas externally, by calling an intuition an impression when caused by a present object, visible to a third person, and calling it an idea when not so caused. Furthermore, he invoked an alleged habit of perceptions always to follow one another in the same order—something flatly contrary to fact ; but the notion was made plausible by confusion with the habits of the physical world, where similar events recur when the conditions are similar. In tuitions no doubt follow the same routine ; but the conditions for an intuition are not the previous intuitions, but the whole present state of the psyche and of the environment, something of which the previous intuitions were at best prophetic symptoms, symptoms often falsified by the event.

Santayana's marginalia on Dasgupta's A History of Indian Philosophy

Substance is not more real than appearance, nor appearance more real than essence, but only differently real. When the word reality is used invidiously or eulogistically, it is merely in view of the special sort of reality which the speaker expects or desires to find in a particular instance. So when the starving gymnosophist takes a rope for a serpent, he misses the reality of that, which is lifeless matter......W hen substance is asserted, appearance is not denied ; its actuality is not diminished, but a significance is added to it which, as a bare datum, it could not have.

(from Scepticism and Animal Faith)

The gymnosophists/naked sages known in India as ‘avadoothas’ or sky-clothed are generally far from starving. I’ve seen two myself, one basking on a pavement in Bangalore and the other marching along a country road in Andra Pradesh. The only kit they carry is a water pot made from a gourd and a strong staff. At the Kumba Meelah when they take their bath in the ganges en masse, films of this auspicious event show them to range from well-fed to corpulent.

The classical confusion of snake for rope occurs at dusk. Error happens as the result of a defect in the conditions of perception, the default is veridicality. The advaitic view is similar to Santayana’s (qv above) and marginal notes in Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy from Santayana’s library show that he appreciated its insights:

It is because we have an awareness of blueness that we speak of having perceived a blue object
How good all this is

Note on page 154 of History of Indian Philosophy (taken from George Santayana’s Marginalia: A Critical Selection Bk.I ed. John McCormick)

The idea of the illusion having its locus in the substratum of the rope broadly conforms to Santayana’s concept of substance and the illusion itself has its link to reality through its counterpositive or a real snake.

The Idiot Questioner

To say that a proposition is true is not to say that we are justified in accepting it as true, and to say that we are justified in accepting it as true is not to say that it is true.

(from The Myth of the Given by Roderick Chisholm)

There is a flux of immediate experience of which it makes no sense to say that we are justified in accepting it perhaps because that would entail a justification of our not accepting it in some circumstance. Justifications and foundations are an element of the mental or as Santayana might say, metaphorical constructions of reality. But are they true the idiot questioner asks?

The Negation is the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in Man
This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal
“Spirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off & annihilated alway”
To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-examination.
To bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not Human
I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration
To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration
“To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering”
“To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination”
“To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration”
That it no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of Madness
“Cast on the Inspired, by the tame high finisher of paltry Blots,”
“Indefinite, or paltry Rhymes; or paltry Harmonies.”
Who creeps into State Government like a catterpiller to destroy
“To cast off the idiot Questioner who is always questioning,”
But never capable of answering; who sits with a sly grin
“Silent plotting when to question, like a thief in a cave;”
Who publishes doubt & calls it knowledge; whose Science is Despair

(from Milton by William Blake

In dreams there is no negative and therefore no logic. If we want to negate something we have to undo it. In a dream a man wants to find the source of the self. A guide instructs him to proceed 5 steps to the right, 10 steps forward, 5 steps to the left, 10 steps back and then 5 steps to the left. He is to dig there to find the treasure. He is digging in the spot he started from. Why not say ‘dig where you are now’? The instructions symbolise the spiritual discipline that enable one to ‘know the place for the first time’.

We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.

(from Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot)

Santayana and the Buddhist doctrine of Anatman

Santayana in Scepticism and Animal Faith poses a question which is also applicable to the Buddhist anatman doctrine:

The ego, as Fichte tells us, unaware of itself, posits a non-ego, and then by reflection posits itself as the agent in that positing, or as the patient which the activity posited in the non-ego posits in its turn. But all this positing would be mere folly, unless it was an intelligent discovery of antecedent facts. Why should a non-existent ego be troubled with the delirious duty of positing anything at all ?

Buddhists of course go about the ‘delirious duty’ in a quite different manner postulating that vertiginous congeries, the five heaps. The fact of memory was the response of Shankara and is I think a sufficient refutation. Santayana goes beneath the tropes of faculty psychology to find in the animal response to nature an individuality which does not require demonstration but is the presupposition of demonstration and the discovery of structure. He does not seem to accept that evolution from hominid consciousness to human might bring a structure which is immediately known.

Scepticism, Animal Faith, and Fog

Is global scepticism or unrestricted methodic doubt actually rational if it forbids us doing what we do and saying what we say in our everyday lives? Is the purported bowing to reason and rationality and the elevation of knowledge to the incorrigible precisely the opposite of what draws us on to clarity. We accept the foggy and fuzzy under advisement hoping by judicious repair to achieve progress. To feel you are doomed to security only in the thin atmosphere of mathematics is the original Platonic error that continues to fascinate philosophers.

The Daddy of contemporary insecurity and the writer of its finest prose is Santayana. Scepticism and Animal Faith is a most comfortable bed and we barely feel the winding of its Procrustean windlass. In discussing the cognitive claims of memory he writes:

I have already accepted the belief in memory ; indeed, without accepting it I could not have taken the first step forward from the most speechless scepticism. But since such acceptance is an act of faith, and asserts transitive or realistic knowledge, I will pause to consider somewhat more explicitly what the cognitive claims of memory are, on which all human beliefs are reared.

As is often the case with Santayana we are brought up short at the sudden chilling of the warm prose bath by an insight put with much less suavity by Sidney Shoemaker in Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity.

Santayana:

A frame or foreground is accordingly indispensable to the projection which renders a present image a vision of some past fact : I must stand here to point there. Yet if my present station were explicitly perceived, if the whole immediate datum were focussed equally in thought, the picture would seem flat and the perspective merely painted upon it, as upon a cheap drop-curtain in a theatre. It would destroy the claim and, if you like, the illusion of memory to remember that I am remembering ; for then I should be considering myself only, and only the present, whereas in living remembrance I am self-forgetful, and live in the present thinking only of the past, and observe the past without supposing that I am living in it.

‘You cannot remember that you are remembering’. Similar points have been made by Thomas Reid and Elizabeth Anscombe cf. http://ombhurbhuva.blogspot.ie/2012/07/reid-and-anscombe-on-memory.html
I am at the stage in the reading of Animal Faith where he has admitted memory whilst still holding on to the reality of the flux of essences which are the creation of imagination. Are essences concepts or ideas? To which I answer 'pass’. Here I must call on Coleridge in Biographia Litteraria Chap.XII:

In the perusal of philosophical works I have been greatly benefited by a resolve, which, in the antithetic form and with the allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim, I have been accustomed to word thus: until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. This golden rule of mine does, I own, resemble those of Pythagoras in its obscurity rather than in its depth. If however the reader will permit me to be my own Hierocles, I trust, that he will find its meaning fully explained by the following instances. I have now before me a treatise of a religious fanatic, full of dreams and supernatural experiences. I see clearly the writer's grounds, and their hollowness. I have a complete insight into the causes, which through the medium of his body has acted on his mind; and by application of received and ascertained laws I can satisfactorily explain to my own reason all the strange incidents, which the writer records of himself. And this I can do without suspecting him of any intentional falsehood. As when in broad day-light a man tracks the steps of a traveller, who had lost his way in a fog or by a treacherous moonshine, even so, and with the same tranquil sense of certainty, can I follow the traces of this bewildered visionary. I understand his ignorance.

Accentuate the Counterpositive

The Indians, in asserting the non-existence of every term in possible experience, not only free the spirit from idolatry, but free the realm of spirit (which is that of intuition) from limitation ; because if nothing that appears exists, anything may appear without the labour and expense of existing.........

(from Chap.VIII Scepticism and Animal Faith

Santayana’s characterisation of Vedanta has been informed by the customary imprecision of Indian commentators and perhaps a tendency to draw the sceptical conclusion of the argument from illusion when presented with the snake/rope analogy. Things do exist but they exist as an appearance or manifestation. They do not have a free-standing reality, their reality is dependent or contingent. They have no necessary existence. When the rope appears as a snake this appearance has its reality in the substratum of the rope. It is also the case that the rope could not appear as a snake unless there were snakes in reality. The unreal snake has as counterpositive (pratiyogin) the real snake. In this way illusion has a basis in reality, it does not signify pure non-existence. There is a real substratum i.e. the rope and a real snake as a counterpositive.

The other thing that is forgotten in relation to Advaita Vedanta is that perception is taken to be veridical unless there is some defect in the conditions in which perception takes place. So given good sight in clear daylight and sobriety I can say with assurance ‘that’s a tree in the yard’. I can’t recall any discussion of absolutely sceptical brain-in-vat scenarios in which illusion is incorrigible.

It is the Indians who have insisted most sincerely and intrepidly on the non-existence of everything given, even adjusting their moral regimen to this insight. Life is a dream, they say : and all experienced events are illusions. In dreaming of nature and of ourselves we are deceived, even in imagining that we exist and are deceived and dreaming.  Some aver, indeed, that there is a universal dreamer, Brahma, slumbering and breathing deeply in all of us, who is the reality of our dreams, and the negation of them. 

(ibid)

Though the Swamis will say this sort of thing and early advaita has a great deal of illusionism in it cf. Gaudapada’s Karikas, the mature philosophy represented in the commentaries on the Upanishads by Shankara are more nuanced. In any case this cosmic illusion is not a sceptical position which is related to empirical fallibility wrought to its uttermost.