Author: David Spiech Page 28 of 283

To Rimsa Michel
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo. 6
Rome. September 22, 1949

Dear Mr. Michel,
Since I seem to be responsible for turning you into the wilderness of philosophy, I suppose I ought to help you to get out of it, but I am not sure that there was ever any “Humanism” in me that I have given up. Certainly I have given up talking about the superiority of rational to inspired poetry, or vice versa. I am not a dogmatist in morals, which for me include both aesthetic and political judgments; and in judgment of love or taste I am entirely a humanist in the sense of thinking that the human psyche is, in each case, the only possible judge; and naturally each psyche the only possible judge, for it own satisfaction, of the satisfaction that it finds in the satisfactions of the others. But what I don’t believe, or seriously ever did, is that any human authority, private or social, has any absolute control or jurisdiction over what “ought” to be done or praised. In fact, I have been attempting, in my old age, to re-educate myself in the matter of poetry, so as to be able to appreciate the “modern” forms of it. But I have never so much enjoyed and admired the old Latin poets as of late years: and have actually translated, at great expense of sleepless hours, a bit of the 3rd Elegy of Tibullus, Book I, which will come out in a new English little Review which will begin publication before long. The editor writes that my diction is still traditional but that the poem is a modern poem. So you see I practice what I preach.
Edwin Edman is a sour-sweet friend of my philosophy, but was (before this last war) much offended at my Toryism which he felt to be Fascist. He appreciates some parts of my philosophy—the “spiritual” or religious radiations of it, but I am not sure that he respects the respect I have for matter or “Will” (according to Schopenhauer).
Ask him what he thinks of my “Idea of Christ.” My own opinion of it is that I was never more religious in insight and never less religious in opinion. The Catholics like and condemn it. Prof. Guzzo, of Turin and his wife have beautifully translated it into Italian; they think I am more truly Christian than any of the Fathers; but I hear that an American Catholic Bishop has said that not one sentence in that book could have been written by a Christian. I agree with both judgments, if by being a good “Christian” you understand being a disciple of Christology or worshipper of God in Man.
I don’t think I have moved, ever, either to the Right or to the Left. I have radiated, and now feel more at home than in my callow youth in both camps: but I don’t agree at all with the Left about the Right or with the Right about the Left. It is only where they love that they are intelligent, both of them, in regard to what is good in their object; neither sound, however, about the cosmological importance of their interests.
Yours sincerely
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

To Robert Seymour Bridges
9 Av. de l’Observatoire,
Paris. September 18, 1919

I won’t attempt to answer your letter seriatim, although each of the things you tell me prompts me to say something, but I can’t let Plotinus lie under the imputation you throw on him of not being a “good philosopher”. If you mean that his system of the universe is not a map of it, is not scientifically correct or in scale, of course I agree. But it seems to me a very great system, very “good philosophy”, and I am glad that the mystics in Oxford are taking him up, rather than pretending to find comfort in Hegel or in the meretricious psychology of Bergson. The doctrines of Plotinus are flights in the same direction as the doctrines of Christianity: they are not hypotheses intended to explain facts, but expressions invented for sentiment and aspiration. The world, he feels, is full of the suggestion of beauty and goodness, but of the suggestion only. In fact, it betrays and obliterates everything it tries to express, like an inscription in invisible ink that should become luminous only for a moment. And his question is: What does the world say, what does life mean, what is there beyond, . . . that might lend significance and a worthy origin and end to this wonderful apparition and to our passionate love and passionate dissatisfaction in its presence?

His system is an elaborate answer to this question. It is not a hypothesis but an intuition, and such rightness as it has is merely fidelity and fineness in rendering moral experience. Of course all those things he describes do not exist; of course he is not describing this world, he is describing the other world, that is, deciphering the good, just beyond it or above it, which each actual thing suggests. Even this rendering of moral aspiration is arbitrary, because nature really does not aspire to anything, and each living thing aspires to something different, in divergent ways. But this arbitrary aspiration, which Plotinus reads into the world, sincerely expresses his own aspiration and that of his age. That is why I say he is decidedly a “good philosopher”. It is the Byzantine architecture of the mind, just as good or better than the Gothic. It seems to me better than Christian theology in this respect, that it isn’t mixed up with history, it isn’t half Jewish, half worldly. It is the Greek side of Christian theology isolated and made pure; and that is the side of it which seems to me truly spiritual, truly sacrificial and penitentially joyful. That it is terribly superstitious and turns all physics into magic is an integral part of its poetic and expressive virtue. Every passion, every force, must be a devil or an angel, because it is agreed to begin with we are looking for the spirit in things.

I didn’t mean to go on in this way, especially as really I know Plotinus very little; but I feel a great power in him, a sublime illusion, as if some plant or some pensive animal had laboriously spun the moral dialectic of its own experience round itself, and called it the universe.

. . . Do you ever see the Athenaeum? I have kept on writing for it, although to be quite frank I don’t like the review as a whole, and don’t read it; but there is no other that I know of that would publish my effusions, and it is a great relief to have them in print. What is once out is done for, and one doesn’t have to think of it any more.

Are you going to America? If your society for the purification of the language is going to cleanse those Augean stables, I don’t envy it its labours. Why shouldn’t the English language of a hundred years hence be as different from ours as ours is from Shakespeare’s? I know you say he pronounced as we do: but we don’t write like him. The Americans have a great love of language for its own sake, and will develop new effects, if not new beauties. As one of them used to say whenever anything was censured: Let them have their fun!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England.