Abstract
Rubin examines the central role of the imagination in Santayana’s life and works. He shows how the imagination is fundamental to Santayana’s sceptical inquiry in SAF and a necessary condition for knowledge about the material world and the mind. The imagination is a predominant theme in Santayana’s life and work. Even as a boy, he found himself solitary and unhappy in America and “attached only to a persistent dream life.” He published several literary works, including three plays, a novel, and many poems. In his philosophic work, he repeatedly insisted on the continuity between the imaginative nature of ordinary perception and the great accomplishments of the human imagination. Santayana’s idea that all perception consists of the intuition of non-existent essences means that for you to experience anything that exists you must imaginatively connect the data given to consciousness with things and events in the world. In Scepticism and Animal Faith, references to imagination appear throughout the book. Santayana argues that to truly understand something observations alone, even ones repeated many times from different angles, are not sufficient, because knowing how things actually are requires “sympathetic imagination.” Imagination leads to the most “complete and adequate” knowledge when the object is another mind. But knowledge of the material world is also a product of the imagination. Taking non-existent essences to signify existing things enables us to know what exists and what doesn’t. This knowledge frees the imagination to peruse the unbounded realm of essence without penalty. This freedom is possible because “poetic, creative, original fancy” is the primary form of sensibility. This freedom is necessary because for a living creature “his play-life is his true life.” This freedom makes possible the comprehensive visions of great art, literature, philosophic systems, and scientific theories. These works are continuous with everyday moments of experience, which are also fundamentally imaginative. Philosophy is successful when it enables us to creatively adjust to the world by probing our desires and finding each intuition a possible source of imaginative reflection.
This chapter is based on two previous publications, listed in the references as Rubin 2018 and Rubin 2021. It incorporates passages that occur in those articles, but they have been reworked, extended, and in the case of the 2018 article revised to focus primarily on the book that is the subject of this volume.
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Notes
- 1.
The image is from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. See further along in the paragraph.
- 2.
My usual practice, when reporting about a historical figure, is to use the past tense. Here I adopt the present tense to convey both the chapter-to-chapter progression of Scepticism and Animal Faith and the sense that Santayana is still talking to us.
- 3.
Santayana’s initial assumption—the one he wants to prove false—is that “presence is existence.” That phrasing is ambiguous and the passage quoted above shows the unacceptability of saying presence is sufficient for existence, meaning there could be unthought-of existences that are never present. But earlier in the same paragraph he wrote: “If presence to intuition were necessary to existence, intuition itself would not exist; that is, no other intuition would be right in positing it.” Another way of thinking about this is: if another intuition were needed to make an intuition exist, the first intuition would no longer be an intuition but a datum for some other intuition. And what then would make the other intuition exist? But if intuition is necessary for existence and there are no intuitions, then existence is impossible. So, the assumption “presence is existence” meant presence is equivalent to existence—both necessary and sufficient for it. Santayana has shown that appearance is neither necessary nor sufficient for existence. Sufficiency, to take one side of the argument, means that simply appearing implies that a thing exists. The only way that implication can be false is when something is an appearance but does not exist. It follows, then, that the refutation of sufficiency means that being an appearance means not existing. This conclusion is what the title of the chapter asserts. This conclusion has wide radiations in Santayana’s philosophy. For example, it leads to a refutation of idealism, when idealism means that ideas are fundamental components of existence. Because ideas are present to the mind in thought, they cannot exist.
- 4.
Two quotations affirm that a definition determines an essence: “Each essence is certainly not two contradictory essences at once; but the definitions which render each precisely what it is lie in the realm of essence, an infinite continuum of discrete forms” (SAF, 97); “The being of each essence is entirely exhausted by its definition; I do not mean its definition in words, but the character which distinguishes it from any other essence” (RB, 18).
- 5.
At this moment I am using “reality” as a synonym for existence, in Santayana’s restricted sense of being in flux, which is to say, in the world and excluding essence. Although Santayana used the term ambiguously, he wrote, “What is reality? As I should like to use the term, reality is being of any sort” (SAF, 34). In this sense, essences also have reality.
- 6.
From The World as Will and Representation: “A way from within stands open to us to that real nature of things to which we cannot penetrate from without. It is, so to speak, a subterranean passage, a secret alliance, which, as if by treachery, places us all at once in the fortress that could not be taken by attack from without” (Schopenhauer [1819], 2:195).
References with Abbreviations
Santayana, George
IPR. [1900] 1990. Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. Vol. 3 of The Works of George Santayana. Cambridge: MIT Press.
PGS. [1940] 1951. The Philosophy of George Santayana. Vol. 2. of The Library of Living Philosophers. Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Press, 2nd edition.
PP. [1944, 1945, 1953] 1986. Persons and Places. Edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. Vol. 1 of The Works of George Santayana. Cambridge: MIT Press.
RB. 1942. Realms of Being. One-Volume Edition, with a New Introduction by the Author. New York: Scribner’s.
SAF. 1923. Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Other References
Aristotle. 1964. De Anima. Translated by J. A. Smith. Quoted in Levi.
Levi, Albert William. 1964. The Two Imaginations. In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Vol. 25, No. 2 (Dec. 1964), 188–200.
Rubin, Richard M. 2018. Character and Philosophic Creativity–the Example of Santayana. Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the George Santayana Society 36: 89–98.
———. 2021. ‘The Imagination in Scepticism and Animal Faith.’ A Subsection of Richard M Rubin and Phillip L Beard, The Other Side of the Mountain: Wallace Stevens’s Poem and ‘The Watershed of Criticism.’ Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the George Santayana Society 39: 152–153.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. [1819, 1844, 1859], 1958, 1966. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Translated as The World as Will and Representation by E.F.J. Payne. Indian Hills, Colorado: The Falcon’s Wing Press, 1958. Reprint edition. New York: Dover Publications, 1966. 2 vols.
Shakespeare, William. 1964. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Quoted in Levi.
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Rubin, R.M. (2024). The Centrality of the Imagination in Scepticism and Animal Faith. In: Coleman, M.A., Tiller, G. (eds) The Palgrave Companion to George Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith. Palgrave Companions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46367-9_11
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