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WorkGeorge Santayana

Dialogues in Limbo

Ancient shades in Dante's limbo question a living Stranger, Santayana's own stand-in, about the follies of the modern world.

by George Santayana187 passages held

  • English, the original language, and your language
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First published
(aged 62)
Original language
English

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Overview

In Dante's Inferno, limbo is where the virtuous pagans spend eternity, unpunished and without hope. Santayana filled it with shades of the ancient world and sent down a living Stranger — a visitor from the present, and recognizably a version of himself — to talk with them. The shades include Democritus, the atomist whose materialism stood close to Santayana's own; Socrates, who questions the Stranger on government, self-government and philanthropy; Alcibiades, the Athenian general and Socrates' companion; Aristippus, founder of a school that made pleasure the good; Dionysius the Younger, tyrant of Syracuse; and Avicenna, the Persian philosopher and physician. The ancients want news of the present, and the Stranger's reports of modern life let Santayana set out, through speakers rather than a treatise, his view that reason is the art of living well among the passions nature supplies. Constable published the book in London in the summer of 1925 and Scribner's in New York the following year. Santayana did not leave it there. In 1948 an enlarged edition added three new dialogues, and that September, aged eighty-four, he wrote to John Hall Wheelock, his editor at Scribner's, approving the new jacket with its Greek border and imagining the book illustrated: Alcibiades gazing at his reflection in a fountain, with Socrates coming up behind him.

Key concepts

What does Democritus mean by ‘normal madness’?

The ordinary condition of every mind in nature. Since nothing is real save atoms and the void, perception, passion and painted thoughts are all illusions, and human philosophy, except science reckoning without images, is madness made systematic. It is not a disease to be cured: the dream lasts as long as life does, because the atoms sustain it. Wisdom, in his phrase, is an evanescent madness, when the dream continues but no longer deceives.

Who is Autologos, the god the shades bring to Democritus?

A god of madness, newly enshrined in limbo, whose oracle the dethroned tyrant Dionysius delivers. His worshippers must take whatever madness he sends and clear the stage between one illusion and the next, as a theatre is cleared between plays. Democritus calls him the one perfect atheist, persuaded that he rules and creates himself: the madness of thinking our thoughts produce one another and our actions.

Who is the Stranger, and why do the ancients distrust him?

A living visitor from the modern world, recognisably Santayana himself, who comes down to limbo and gives the shades news of the present. Democritus sniffs him out as a new-fangled compound, ill mixed, and Alcibiades finds him rather well washed for a Christian. Democritus charges him with saluting the atoms only from a distance, honouring reality for illusion’s sake, and studying in nature chiefly its pageants and perspectives.

How can an image with no original in nature still guide a creature well?

By keeping time with the events it stands for. Democritus holds that nature contains nothing but atoms and the void, so no image copies anything; yet an image joined to the times and order of natural events becomes a familiar name for them. Migratory birds write no geographies, but appointed dreams and secret sensations warn them when to fly. Illusion so used is compatible with sagacity and a prosperous life.

What is a person’s ‘true nature’ in the dialogue on philanthropy?

What they would discover themselves to be if they had self-knowledge: not their condition at any moment, their passing words and thoughts, or even their prevalent habits. The Stranger borrows an Indian phrase for it, becoming what one is. So he welcomes Socrates’ help in knowing himself, but resents meddlesome censors calling themselves philanthropists, who press their prejudices on him as moral first principles.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Reason as the Art of Living Among the Passions

If nature hands every creature its passions, what is left for reason to do? The shades and the Stranger answer by talking, and the answer is a way of life rather than a rule.

Reason, as the dialogues present it, rules nothing from outside. It is the art of living well among impulses nature has already supplied, finding which can be satisfied together and letting the rest go. The ancients hold the point easily, because their schools never asked for more, from Aristippus making pleasure the good to Democritus trusting only what nature allows. The Stranger’s reports of modern life show what happens when people forget it and ask reason to legislate for a world it did not make.

  • reason
  • human nature
  • desire
  • happiness
  • wisdom
  • ethics
  • naturalism
  • self-knowledge
  • freedom
  • intellect

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Illusion, Madness and the Atomist’s Sanity

If only atoms and the void are real, is everything else people live by a kind of madness? And if so, which madness is the sane one to keep?

Democritus, the atomist closest to Santayana’s own materialism, supplies the hard premise: what exists is matter in motion, and colours, values and gods are appearances a living body throws up. Yet the dialogues refuse the easy conclusion that appearances should be abolished. Imagination is how an animal lives at all, and a madness that serves life and knows itself for what it is differs from one that takes its dreams for facts. Sanity lies in holding illusions lightly, never in pretending to have none.

  • illusion
  • madness
  • appearance and reality
  • imagination
  • materialism
  • atomism
  • truth
  • knowledge
  • science
  • idealism

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Doing Good to Others, and Governing Them

Does the reformer who wants to make everyone happy know what their happiness is? Socrates, questioning the Stranger, puts modern philanthropy and modern democracy to the test.

Charity that meets a person’s own need is one thing; philanthropy that decides in advance what everyone ought to want is another, and the shades find the second presumptuous. The same suspicion falls on modern government. A ruler, ancient or elected, serves a people only by attending to their actual nature, which differs from person to person and from city to city. Socrates, questioning the Stranger on self-government, presses a modern visitor to say what a people’s real good is, and who is to judge it.

  • philanthropy
  • charity
  • political philosophy
  • political authority
  • democracy
  • human nature
  • happiness
  • embodiment

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Within this work

passages held
187
distinct concepts
369
by passages held, corpus-wide
#368

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “illusion” and “knowledge”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 16 pairings. 92 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
illusionknowledge4
madnessreligion4
human natureknowledge3
human naturepolitical philosophy3
appearance and realityillusion2
appearance and realitynaturalism2
appearance and realitypolitical philosophy2
illusionmadness2
madnessnaturalism2
appearance and realityknowledge1
appearance and realitymadness1
human natureillusion1
human naturereligion1
illusionreligion1
knowledgemadness1
knowledgepolitical philosophy1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1896 The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory

    The earliest of Santayana's prose books, following a volume of sonnets, and the one he later dismissed most bluntly; the psychological method it relies on is one his later philosophy moved away from.

     EN
  2. 1900 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

    Essays that carry the approach of The Sense of Beauty over from art to religion, and first set out the reading of religion as imaginative truth that The Life of Reason would develop at length.

     EN
  3. 1905 The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress

    His chief work from the Harvard years and the fullest statement of his moral philosophy; the Realms of Being, published two decades later, supply the account of knowledge and existence that lies beneath it.

     EN
  4. 1910 Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe

    Lecture-hall criticism from his last Harvard years, testing on three poets the claim of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion that poetry at its height is philosophy made vivid.

     EN
  5. 1913 Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion

    A companion to Character and Opinion in the United States, which returns to the American subject of its closing essay; the rest of the book weighs the philosophies then in fashion, from Bergson to Russell.

     EN
  6. 1915 Egotism in German Philosophy

    Written in Oxford during the First World War, it turns Santayana's long quarrel with idealism into a charge against a national tradition; the realism behind it gets its full statement in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
  7. 1920 Character and Opinion in the United States

    The American sequel to "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" in Winds of Doctrine, and the fullest record Santayana left of his Harvard teachers before his memoirs.

     EN
  8. 1922 Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies

    The short pieces of the English years, standing between the wartime Egotism in German Philosophy and the system that begins the next year with Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
  9. 1923 Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy

    Announced by its subtitle as the doorway to the late system, it sets out the two terms that the four Realms of Being then build on: essence and animal faith.

     EN
  10. 1923 The Unknowable

    One short lecture, given in the year Scepticism and Animal Faith appeared, that carries the book's theory of knowledge into an argument with Herbert Spencer.

     EN
  11. 1925 Dialogues in Limbo you are here EN
  12. 1927 Platonism and the Spiritual Life

    Published seven months before the system's first volume, a first sketch of the spiritual life that The Realm of Spirit would treat at length in 1940.

     EN
  13. 1927 The Realm of Essence

    Here the late system proper begins: the first of the four Realms of Being, giving full treatment to the vocabulary introduced in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
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