Katarzyna Kremplewska

There has been a long, surprisingly persistent tradition in labeling Santayana either as a unique and old fashioned figure of early twentieth century American philosophy, devoted to reviving metaphysics in a scholastic guise, or as a somewhat latent, closet pragmatist. This commonly held view was often additionally sealed in a dismissive way with the unpopular label of a quietist. In either case, the status of philosophical outcast was given to Santayana, echoing Charles William Eliot’s doubts as to the possible “usefulness” of this “withdrawn man” for Harvard’s philosophy department. Recent scholarship, in its effort to rid Santayana’s name from the taint of this opinion, has proposed a number of interpretations..

W eseju tym przyglądam się koncepcjom wojny i jej relacji do ludzkiej natury, kondycji, cywilizacji, tudzież immanentnej „struktury” władzy, autorstwa czterech dwudziestowiecznych filozofów – Arnolda Toynbee’go, René Girarda, Georgio Agambena i George’a Santayany. Zestawienie elementów tych teorii, a także krytyki kultury współczesnej, w którą wszyscy interlokutorzy się angażują, pozwala odkryć intrygujące punkty wspólne. Nawet jeśli niektóre analogie okazują się pozorne, to dyskusja rzuca nowe światło na zagadnienia takie jak związek między tożsamością a ofiarą, władzą a banitą, kłamstwem a systemem, czy też każdą stabilną organizacją społeczną.

In this book, Katarzyna Kremplewska offers a thorough analysis of Santayana's conception of human self, viewed as part of his larger philosophy of life. Santayana emerges as an author of a provocative philosophy of drama, in which human life is acted out. Kremplewska demonstrates how his thought addresses the dynamics of human self in this context and the possibility of sustaining self-integrity while coping with the limitations of finite life. Focusing on particular aspects of Santayana's thought such as his conception of the tragic aspect of existence, and the role of the doctrine of spirit in his philosophical anthropology and critique of culture, this book also sets Santayana's thought in substantial dialogue with other thinkers such as Heidegger, Bergson, and Nietzsche. Like Santayana's philosophy, this book seeks to build passages between theoretical reflection and practical life with the possibility of a good life in view.

The paper looks at the idea of grounding human freedom in selfhood, with particular attention to the strategies of “denaturalizing” time, resulting in its separation into different modalities. The perspective of practical philosophy, interested in accounting for and making legitimate the spontaneous first person assumption of being a free agent, is enriched with some historical references to different ontological and anthropological attempts at inscribing verticality or transcendence into the human self in order to secure to this self what is called here inalienable freedom. The paper focuses on some elements of Henri Bergson’s thought and tries to reinterpret them in terms of an example modern, anti-reductionist “immunization” of the triad freedom – self – humanity. It also emphasizes the emancipatory potential and the novelty of Bergson’s conception of the human self.

The article analyzes Henri Bergson’s understanding of human life in the light of his metaphor of life as “insinuation.” Comparing his ideas with the ideas of another original thinker of the age, George Santayana, allows shedding light on Bergson’s ontological strategy of making matter– as a threat to life –subject to mediation. Memory and imagination use matter to play out the past in the guise of the present–for the sake of life. The text also focuses on the formulas of freedom arising out of both thinkers’ conceptions of conscious life – that of Bergson, for whom the horizon and the fulfillment can be found in the beginning, or the primary vital impulse, and that of Santayana, who sees fulfillment in the forms of finitude assumed by each particular life. Looking at humanity in terms of a spiritual challenge links both conceptions. The whole discussion responds to the need to return to such fundamental but sidestepped terms as “humanity” and “spirituality”.

George Santayana – a philosopher, a critic of culture and an atheist deeply concerned with the issue of religion and secularization was an advocate of the idea of naturally founded human spirituality. Hence his critique of some modern forms of life which in his view were guilty of spiritual ignorance and the flattening of language. This essay, by juxtaposing Santayana’s ideas with those of William James, Peter Berger and Charles Taylor, aims at revealing some postsecular aspects of his thinking about religion and the unity they introduce into the large body of his eclectic writing. Santayana’s understanding of post-rationality commences in the idea that thinking rooted in a certain tradition and operating with certain terms allows for maintain a living mental structure which provides a favorable ground for spiritual growth and existential meaningfulness even after conventional forms of religiosity have faded.

At the end of the 20 century, after a few decades of oblivion, the thought of George Santayana (1863–1952), a major figure of the so-called Golden Age of American Philosophy, reappeared as subject of academic interest. It is believed that Santayana’s originality within the intellectual milieu of the dominant at that time in Anglo-Saxon context pragmatist and analytical thought contributed to this delayed reception. This text, being part of a broader project, looks at the concept of „the self” emerging from Santayana’s work, with particular emphasis on its temporal intricacies. Interpretative movement, which according to my thesis is a requirement posited by life itself, provides for subjective unity and is expressed by the recurrent term of „mask” as a trace of human existence. The idea of playing out one’s facticity implies the question „how?”, which in turn justifies the use of an aesthetic concept of „grace” which may be linked with the idea of authentic existence. The juxtaposition with elements of Heidegger’s philosophy, which is a novelty in research, throws some light on Santayana’s fascination with German thinker and allows to highlight the hermeneutic-existential side of his thought, which has been underestimated by scholarship so far.