Platonism and the Spiritual Life

A short reply to Dean Inge that turned into Santayana's own account of the spiritual life.

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1927(aged 64)
Original language: English

Overview

William Ralph Inge, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London and a scholar of Plotinus, gave the Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge and published them in 1926 as The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought. Santayana sat down in the summer of 1926 to review Inge's book and wrote this short one instead — "an independent treatise of my own," he told a friend that October, "on how to become a saint without letting anybody know it." The spiritual life, it argues, is not a worship of values but a disintoxication from their influence. It came out in April 1927, and in 1957 Harper reissued it in one volume with Winds of Doctrine.

Key concepts

What does ‘spirit’ mean in this book?

Awareness itself: the act of making light actual, of greeting, observing, questioning and judging anything whatever. Spirit, Santayana writes, is awareness, intelligence, recollection. It needs no dogmas, as animal faith and the art of living do, and it is not human: it may spring up in any life and detach itself from any provincialism, so that human morality looks to it like the hygienic bias of one race of animals.

What does Santayana mean by disintoxication from values?

Freedom from being ruled by values, not blindness to them. Spirit still feels good and evil in their moral black and white and their aesthetic iridescence, since it was quickened among the needs that produce them, and every animal has a principle for telling good from evil. What the spiritual life drops is their hold: it sees the goods each society defends without taking any of them for the governing truth of the universe.

How do psyche and spirit differ?

The psyche is the animal life that sustains a person; spirit is her child, and of another race. Santayana compares the psyche to Vesta, goddess of the hearth and mother of the Promethean flame. She must learn a parent’s difficult unselfishness, content to be abandoned and revisited only in haste on some idle holiday, while her full-grown son gazes over her head into a far country.

What position of Dean Inge is this book answering?

That values are the most real things in the universe, and for the Platonist not only ideals but creative powers. Inge, Dean of St Paul’s and a scholar of Plotinus, found in the Platonic tradition a cosmos in which the good governs. Santayana replies that values are relative to living beings, and that a Platonism true to its word would need separate Ideas that actually act on the world.

Why does Santayana name Indians, not Greeks, the masters of the spiritual life?

Because they surrendered the claim that Platonism only refined: to live in a protecting world designed for one’s benefit. The great masters, he says, are the Indians, their disciples in the East, and those Moslems, Christians and Jews who gave up that early, unregenerate demand. Clinging to familiar treasures is human; making home values into a cosmic system that guarantees them is a need for comfort, not spirituality.

Themes of the book

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

The Spiritual Life as Release from Values

Is the spiritual life a deeper devotion to the highest values, or a freedom from being ruled by values at all? Santayana takes the second answer, and calls it disintoxication.

Every value is the shadow of some interest, and a person moved by values, however noble, is still pulled about by the cares of an animal. Spirit, as the book describes it, is the part of a life that can stop being pulled: it sees the goods others pursue, understands why they are pursued, and does not need to possess them. Santayana told a friend he had written a treatise on how to become a saint without letting anybody know it, and the saint he meant is detached rather than zealous.

spirituality
spirit
detachment
value theory
contemplation
worldliness
the good
morality
eternity
transcendence
mysticism

Enter a dialogue

Platonism Without a Good That Governs the World

Does the good rule the universe, or does it only shine for creatures that happen to want it? Reviewing Dean Inge’s Platonic tradition, Santayana keeps the Platonist’s contemplation and refuses the Platonist’s cosmology.

The Platonism Inge defended treats the eternal forms and the good above them as the true reality and the source of the world’s order. Santayana answers as a naturalist: the world moves by the causes science studies, and values arise in living psyches with particular needs. The forms survive, as eternal objects a mind may contemplate, but they explain nothing and command nothing. Turning a spiritual insight into a cosmic dogma, on his account, corrupts both, and a spirit freed from that dogma is freer, not poorer.

platonism
forms
essence
pure being
cosmology
causation
naturalism
science
religion
dogma
psyche
idealism

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 69
distinct concepts: 177
by passages held, corpus-wide: #583

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: “eternity” and “spirituality”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 7 concepts, joined by 14 pairings. 58 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
eternity	spirituality	4
religion	spirituality	4
metaphysics	platonism	3
platonism	religion	3
platonism	spirituality	3
eternity	platonism	2
metaphysics	value theory	2
eternity	metaphysics	1
eternity	spirit	1
platonism	spirit	1
platonism	value theory	1
religion	value theory	1
spirit	value theory	1
spirituality	value theory	1

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.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
1925 Dialogues in Limbo
His philosophy in dialogue form, published in the years between the introduction to his late system and its first volume.
EN
1927 Platonism and the Spiritual Life you are here EN
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

— or open another of their works