George Santayana
![Realms of Being George Santayana]( "Realms of Being George Santayana")
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Masterpiece of poetic naturalism 5 out of 5 stars.
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Don't let the fact that this book is out of print fool you. "Realms of Being" is one of the greatest works of philosophy ever written. It demonstrates a subtlety of argument and an interpretive vision which places Santayana head and shoulders above his better known contemporaries (e.g., Russell, Dewey, Wittgenstien). Since Plato, most of Western Philosophy has labored under the delusion that "true" knowledge is certain and demonstrable, rather than conjectural and provisional, in nature, "episteme" rather than "doxa." This view of knowledge goes hand in hand with the underlying premise of nearly all philosophy since Descartes---namely, the view that a man's own ideas, perceptions, concepts (call them what you will) are the most certain things he knows, and that knowledge, in its most profound and fundamental state, is nothing more and nothing less than the intuition of ideas.In "Scepticism and Animal Faith," Santayana challenged & refuted the (idealist) contention that knowledge is intuition of ideas. The mere experience of an idea, Santayana argued, is without cognitive significance. It is solipsism, not knowledge. Ideas only become knowledge when they are taken for symbols representing an external, substantive reality. In "Realms of Being," Santayana develops all the important implications of this basic insight into human knowledge. In the first volume of the book, he examines the "Realm of Essence." Essences, for Santayana, are merely the mental constiuents of description, the form under which things appear to the mind. But although these essences describe or represent the qualities of things in the external world, they are not themselves external existences, but are merely signs or symbols which mediate between the mind and the world. Knowledge of reality, then, is indirect and transitive. For this reason, no idea can ever be perfectly adequate. Reality is far too rich and complex to be adequately represented in human symbolization. But for the practical purposes of living in the world---for eating, hunting, working, avoiding dangers, making love---the human mind will suffice. Nevertheless, human knowledge, because of its implacable mediacy, can never be certain. Knowledge, for Santayana, must always remain faith mediated by symbols, doxa rather than episteme.
In the second volume, "Realm of Matter," Santayana draws out some of the implications of his view that reality must be substantive, that is, it must be something and not simply our idea of something. In the third volume, the "Realm of Truth," he offers a series of very original & subtle arguments against the idea of "necessary" truth and logical facts. Facts are arbitrary, truth contingent, and logic ideal. The mind is "platonic from the beginning"; but reality itself is not platonic.
In the final volume of the book, the "Realm of Spirit," Santayana offers a sympathetic critique of several contrasting visions of the spiritual life, trying to extract from each of them their true wisdom in helping the afficted spirit make its way through its pilgrimage in life. The consequence is a naturalistic defense of spirituality. "Spirit pursues a perfection more inward and chastened than world arts and ambitions," Santayana writes; "but it would not exist or have a possible perfection to pursue, if it were not a natural faculty in a natural soul."
