Scepticism and Animal Faith [Paperback]

This book is the most distinguished work of philosophy to emerge out of the critical realist tradition. Santayana defends the duality between ideas in the mind and the things these ideas represent in the natural world. Using this epistemological dualism, Santayana explains why all forms of idealism are unwarranted and absurd. Since human knowledge is merely symbolic (rather than literal), all the skeptical arguments claiming that, unless we can prove that our ideas are in some sense "identical" to the things they represent, then it follows that things the ideas allegedly represent must be consider as "unknowable." But Santayana shrewdly reminds us that knowledge consists in "thinking aptly about things, not in becoming like them." External reality, before it can be grasped by the mind, must be reduced to the human level.

"Skepticism and Animal Faith," along with David Stove's "The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies," represents the most effective and withering criticism that has ever been directed against the idealist creed. Where Stove attacks the positive argument for idealism, Santayana focuses his polemical guns on the negative argument--i.e., on the idealist argument against realism. Santayana shows how idealist skepticism of the existence of an external reality, if followed consistently, would deprive all our ideas of their cognitive meaning. If idealism is taken to its logical extreme, we would all find ourselves trapped in a solipsism of the passing moment, unable to understand the significance of any idea, image, or feeling experienced by the mind. The reason why human beings generally do not lapse into this state of idealist stupidity is because biological urges prompt them to assume that their ideas refer to things existing in an external, natural world. This biological urge Santayana calls "animal faith." It is a faith that is rewarded and justified in every moment of our waking existence; and even those who deny it speculatively assume its validity in action and intent.

I personally regard "Skepticism and Animal Faith" as the greatest work of epistemology ever written. This is a judgment, however, that few would agree with. Many philosophers disparage Santayana because he eschews most of the technical problems of epistemology and also because he writes more like a poet than an academic scholar. There is no symbolic logic, no arid syllogisms, no dryasdust argumentation in any of Santayana's philosophic works. Philosophy, for Santayana, is not a technique or a science, but an art. The technical epistemologies of academic philosophers are, accordingly, hopeless endeavors. "Thought can only be found by being enacted," Santayana writes. "I may therefore guide my thoughts according to some prudent rule, and appeal as often as I like to experience for a new starting-point or a controlling perception in my thinking; but I cannot by any possibility make experience or mental discourse at large the object of investigation: it is invisible, it is past, it is nowhere." In the final analysis, what makes Santayana superior to most other philosophers is his superior good sense coupled with the rare ability to express this wisdom in memorable phrases and apt metaphors. If there is a more beautifully written book of epistemology, I have yet to see it.

Santayana will probably never be popular among people who make their living as epistemologists, because he offers a devastating and ultimately unanswerable critique of their enterprise. The problem is that they do not take their own skepticism seriously, and so end up in "incidental sophistries," an endless, pointless verbal parlor game. His answer to Hume's backgammon comment is that one "should be ashamed to countenance opinons which, when not arguing, I did not believe." Doing that renders the whole enterprise unserious, a "limping skepticism." A worthy theory of knowledge must treat "of what I believe in my active moments, as a living animal, when I am really believing something." In other words, when it matters.

Descartes could not bring himself to be profoundly skeptical, which would have meant doubting his own principles of explanation. For example, he suggested that a malign demon might be the causing him to be deluded. "He thus assumed the principle of sufficient reason, for which there is no reason at all. If any idea or axiom were really a priori or spontaneous in the human mind, it would be infinitely improbable that it should apply to the facts of nature. Every genius, in this respect, is his own malign demon." The rest of Descartes is similarly exploded, after which Hume and Kant are taken to the woodshed for similar demolition.

What does Santayana himself offer? Starting from a truly profound skepticism in which nothing is given, he offers a sort of Platonic Darwinism in which all we have access to are intuitions of fleeting appearances, less than shadows on the wall, because no wall is given. In our struggle to survive, we learn to take some of those appearances ("essences") to signify things and events in a real world of substantial, enduring objects. This inference to existence can have no justification other than pure animal faith, without which we cannot trust our senses, discourse becomes absurd, and life cannot be lived.

This is a hugely impressive work, especially for anyone who has grown frustrated with the irrelevant cleverness of much of epistemology. That it seems to be largely ignored among epistemologists is no surprise; Santayana is out to ruin the whole party. One can easily object to his Platonism, but the fundamental aspects of his critique do not depend on that.

Something has to be said about Santayana's literary style. To say the writing is good is to convey nothing of what it's like. I started to copy out striking passages, but gave up because I would have copied out about thirty per cent of the text. Nobody in philosophy, and maybe nowhere else either, writes like this. With most writers it is possible to imagine, if only barely and only by giving yourself a huge benefit of the doubt, that with enough effort you might be able to write like they do. I was completely unable to imagine any such thing when reading Santayana. He's on a different verbal plane.

Santayana first strips away the myths and misconceptions about truth. If you haven;t done any reflection on the origin or soundness of your beliefs you may be in for a tough ride. But once you get past the definitions, positive and negative, of the domain under discussion, you'll be rewarded with a very positive view of existence. I think of Santayana as the best known and expressed Occidental Taoist. Well worth twice the price.