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WorkGeorge Santayana

Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe

Lucretius, Dante and Goethe read as three complete answers to how to live, and a sketch of the poet who would unite them.

by George Santayana196 passages held

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First published
(aged 47)
Original language
English

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Overview

Harvard University Press opened its series Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature in 1910 with a philosopher's lectures on three poets. Read at Columbia University that February and repeated at the University of Wisconsin in April, the six lectures grew out of a course Santayana had long taught at Harvard; the preface nonetheless disclaims expertise in any of the three poets and offers the impressions of an ordinary reader. What follows is a claim about poetry at its height: each of these poets gave complete imaginative form to one of the great European views of life. Lucretius, the Roman who put the atomism of Epicurus into verse, made a poem of naturalism, a world of atoms and void in which the gods do nothing and death is nothing to fear. Dante, in the Divine Comedy, made one of the Christian moral order, where every soul stands where its loves have brought it. Goethe's Faust made one of romantic experience, the restless pursuit of life for its own sake. None of the three, Santayana concludes, had everything a philosophical poet needs; the ideal one would join Lucretius's sense of nature, Dante's discipline of the good and Goethe's range of experience, and no poet had yet done it. The book came out a year before Santayana gave his last Harvard lecture; in 2019 it became part of the MIT Press critical edition of his works.

Key concepts

What makes a poet a ‘philosophical poet’ in Santayana’s sense?

Giving complete imaginative form to a whole view of life. Each of the three, Santayana argues, did this for one of the great European outlooks, so that the doctrine is felt and seen rather than argued. Such a poet ranges over all time and existence, and in doing so, like Lucretius, forgets his own person: his moral interests widen even as his personal fortunes shrink to one brief glimpse of earth.

What do naturalism, supernaturalism and romanticism mean in this book?

The three views of life the poets embody. Naturalism, in Lucretius, is a world of atoms and void where the gods do nothing and death is nothing to fear. Supernaturalism, in Dante, sees the soul as a pilgrim on a fallen earth, whose happiness is to be hoped for in a future life. Romanticism, in Goethe’s Faust, is an infinite fountain of life within the self, driving it on without rest.

Why does Santayana call Epicurus’s wise man ‘a provocation to supernaturalism’?

Because his muffled pleasures left a great void. The Epicurean retreat, safe inside an atomic universe, had no answer to the thought that after death one might wake in a world where the atomic philosophy did not apply. When the heart is empty, Santayana writes, it fills itself with such attenuated dreams, and before long supernaturalism, which the book shows in Dante, rushed in to quicken the pulses of life.

What is the ‘demon’ Santayana sees driving the romantic spirit?

The insatiable will of the self. Santayana describes northern peoples, become Protestants, turning in turn to the Bible, to learning, to patriotism and to industry for new objects to love, yet too vital or too immature to rest in any. A demon drives them on, divine and immortal in its waywardness, and it is their inmost self, their radical courage. Faust is its poem: experience pursued for its own sake.

Does the book rank Lucretius, Dante and Goethe against each other?

No. Each is the best in his way, Santayana says, and none is the best in every way; a preference would be less a criticism than a personal confession, varying with temperament, age, language and the doctrine one knows. His comparison instead reviews the type of imagination and philosophy each embodies, and ends by sketching the poet who would unite all three, and who has not yet appeared.

Themes of the book

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

Lucretius: Naturalism Made Into a Poem

Can a world of atoms and void, where the gods do nothing, be the stuff of great poetry? In Lucretius, Santayana finds that it can, and that it offers a consolation of its own.

Lucretius put the atomism of Epicurus into verse and made of it one of the great European views of life: nature as the whole of what exists, indifferent, lawful and endlessly fertile. Death is nothing to fear, because there is no one left to suffer it, and the gods are no threat, because they do nothing. Santayana, a materialist himself, admires the poem’s sense of nature more than its ethics of withdrawal: the cosmology is magnificent, while the life it recommends asks too little of the world.

  • naturalism
  • materialism
  • epicureanism
  • nature
  • cosmology
  • death
  • freedom

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Dante: Every Soul Where Its Loves Have Brought It

What would the universe look like if it were arranged entirely by the moral worth of what each person loved? The Divine Comedy is Santayana’s answer, and his model of discipline.

Dante made a poem of the Christian moral order, in which the afterlife is simply the truth about a life, made permanent. Every soul stands where its loves have brought it, and hell, purgatory and paradise are the shapes those loves take when nothing more can change them. Santayana reads the allegory as a moral psychology rather than a cosmology: its authority does not depend on the other world existing. What he takes from Dante is the discipline of the good, a hierarchy of aims in which every passion has its rank.

  • salvation
  • afterlife
  • love
  • allegory
  • symbolism
  • platonism
  • teleology
  • ethics
  • moral psychology
  • religion

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Goethe’s Faust: Life Pursued for Its Own Sake

Is a life of endless striving, never resting in any one satisfaction, the fullest life or an aimless one? In Faust, Santayana finds the great poem of romantic experience, and its limit.

Faust wants everything, one experience after another, and his salvation lies in never ceasing to want. Goethe gave that restlessness its complete imaginative form, and Santayana honours the range: no poet had taken in more of life. But the romantic hero learns nothing final from what he passes through. Experience is prized because it is his, and it keeps its value only while it moves. Where Dante ranks every passion, Goethe lets them follow one another, and the resulting wisdom is wide rather than deep.

  • romanticism
  • experience
  • striving
  • will
  • action
  • free will
  • happiness
  • imagination

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The Philosophical Poet Nobody Has Yet Been

If each of the three saw only part of the truth, what would a complete philosophical poet look like? Santayana sketches him and concludes that he has not yet appeared.

Poetry at its height, the lectures claim, is philosophy made vivid, a whole view of life given imaginative form. Each of the three achieved that for one view and missed the others. The ideal poet would join Lucretius’s sense of nature, Dante’s discipline of the good and Goethe’s range of experience, knowing the world as a naturalist, judging it as a moralist and feeling it as a romantic. Santayana offers this as a standard rather than a prophecy, and the gap between it and any actual poet is his argument’s last word.

  • poetry
  • aesthetics
  • ideals
  • idealism
  • knowledge
  • moral psychology

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Within this work

passages held
196
distinct concepts
437
by passages held, corpus-wide
#358

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: “experience” and “romanticism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 93 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
experienceromanticism6
aestheticspoetry5
aestheticsromanticism5
materialismnaturalism5
natureromanticism4
experiencenature3
aestheticsnature2
naturalismromanticism2
naturepoetry2
romanticismsalvation2
aestheticsexperience1
aestheticsmaterialism1
aestheticsnaturalism1
experiencepoetry1
materialismnature1
materialismpoetry1
naturalismpoetry1

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 you are here 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

    His philosophy in dialogue form, published in the years between the introduction to his late system and its first volume.

     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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