Matthew Flamm

Flamm examines a dominant theme in Santayana’s philosophy: the spiritual life. He puts Santayana’s philosophy in dialogue with the novella Soul (Dzhan) by Andrey Platonov and examines the various ways Santayana associates crying with a materialist conception of the spiritual life.The association of crying and spiritual life is conspicuous enough in Santayana’s writings to merit exploration. In an astonishing variety of rhetorical modes Santayana writes of the various “cries” of spirit, of psyche, of soul, and of the human heart, emphasizing the idea that it is through moral suffering that humans come to spiritual understanding (Some examples: “An impetuous spirit when betrayed by the world will cry …” (LR2, Chapter VIII, “Ideal Society,” p. 121); “the universal need and cry of human souls …” (LR3, Chapter XII, “Charity,” pp. 130–31); “spirit is physically the voice of the soul crying in the wilderness” (RB/RE, “The Nature of Spirit,” p. 568); “our very soul begins to cry for help” (RB/RE “On Cosmic Animism,” p. 576); “pain,” the “first form of distraction” in the psyche causes it to “awake with a sharp cry, a conscious protest” (RB/RE, “Distraction,” p. 679)). Santayana goes so far in one context to suggest that crying experiences testify to the existence of matter (“The more ecstatic or the more tragic experience is, the more unmistakably it is the voice of matter.” “Cross Lights,” SE, p. 25). In this chapter I link the various ways Santayana associates crying and spiritual life with the novella Soul (Dzhan) by Andrey Platonov (Andrey Platonov (1899–1951) was a Russian author whose works during the Stalinist era were heavily censored and banned and have only recently (relative to their importance, as of the late 1990s) begun appearing in approved English translations. I am a lover of Russian literature and no expert, but am prepared to agree with poet-translator Robert Chandler, who claimed (before he died in 2007) that Russians will come one day to recognize Platonov as their “greatest prose writer” (Chandler’s exquisite co-translation of Platonov’s Soul was chosen in 2004 as “best translation of the year from a Slavonic language” by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages)). Santayana in dialogue with Platonov offers a radiant picture of the materialist conception of spiritual life.

Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana is a testament to the cross-cultural relevance of the work of one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century, George Santayana. A list of geographic origins of the twenty-two contributions contained in this volume indicates the transatlantic cultural diversity of scholarly representation: scholars variously hailing from Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Slovakia, and Switzerland, and from the United States, representing three of its major regions. The authors explore the major plots of Santayana's thinking, including materialistic Platonism in ontology, skepticism in epistemology, rationality in social philosophy, naturalism in aesthetics, piety in materialism, and literary and poetic expression as a means to cosmic understanding. After a preface by Professor John Lachs, and an editorial introduction, the book is divided into three respective thematic parts: I. Ontology and Naturalism; II. Culture, Society, America; and III. Aesthetics, Poetry, and Spirit. Before each thematic section brief introductions of the section papers is provided to accommodate specific scholarly interests. The authors entrust the present volume to readers appreciative of the philosophic catholicity of the subject's work, invoking the book title which is taken from the preface of Santayana's mature system of philosophy, Scepticism and Animal Faith: "In the past or in the future, my language and my borrowed knowledge would have been different, but under whatever sky I had been born, since it is the same sky, I should have had the same philosophy"