Santayana's "Realms of Being"

The stimulus that calls animal attention to some external fact, in provoking an act of the body, also presents some image to the mind. Moreover this labor of perception may be more or less welcome, pleasant, or life-enhancing, apart from its ulterior uses; and sometimes this incidental emotion is so strong that it overpowers the interest which I may have had originally in the external facts; and, I may suspend my action or continue it automatically, while my thought is absorbed in the image and arrested there. As I was jogging to market in my village cart, beauty has burst upon me and the reins have dropped from my hands. I am transported, in a certain measure, into a state of trance. I see with extraordinary clearness, yet what I see seems strange and wonderful, because I no longer look in order to understand, but only in order to see. I have lost my preoccupation with fact, and am contemplating an essence.

Realms of Being, pp. 6-7.

For Santayana, "essence" is not unmediated contact with what really exists; he was not a naive realist but a "critical" one. Something in our environment stimulates our senses and draws our attention. Our attentive response to that stimulus is a complex psycho-physical act. Part of our response will consist of pure, animal reflex; but another part--what might be described as a kind of neural surplus--endows that stimulus with a subjective interest or a meaning that is recorded by our emotion-laden intelligence in symbolic form. Santayana asserted that contemplation of that "datum" can have a salutary effect upon the person who experiences it because resident within it is all that the human organism can actually claim to "know" about the world.

This implies that our knowledge of the found world does not consist of "brute facts." By means of our sense organs, we "ingest" (as it were) brute facts as we encounter them, but our relationship to them does not rise to the level of conscious apprehension; instead, they are reflexively negotiated without gaining entrance to our store of knowledge--not, at least, as brute facts. The only things that enter our store of knowledge are the symbols that our nervous systems generate in response to stimuli. It is the complexity of the homo sapien's neurophysiology that determines its apprehension of the world. We see through a lens--not outside or beyond it. And we cannot factor out the distortion our lens introduces to our vision because we have no way to determine what that factor might be: we cannot escape the mechanism we inhabit; we simply are that mechanism.

Interestingly, this state of affairs did not cause Santayana anxiety. He concluded a peace treaty with his human, all-too-human constitution--accepting it for what it was. This acceptance is, in fact, an attribute of a consciousness that inhabits--in some sense or to some degree--what Santayana termed the "Realm of Spirit." Such a consciousness acquires the distinction traditionally referred to as "wisdom."

What is distinctive about Santayana's "Realm of Spirit" is the attitude that one adopts towards the "essences" one apprehends--and entrance into the "spiritual realm" depends entirely upon that attitude. Here we find Santayana's youthful enthusiasm for Schopenhauer paying dividends. For while it is subjective interest that draws our attention to elements in our environment and initiates the process of symbolic appropriation, it is a willed indifference to those subjectively acquired symbols that elevates them to the status of pure essence. Our passions put us on the road to our "philosophical" destination, but only dispassion permits us entry into the Promised Land of "spirit."

With Santayana, we hail the return of the late Hellenistic Sage.