Scepticism and Animal Faith by George Santayana
"Scepticism and Animal Faith" by George Santayana serves as an introductory exploration of his philosophical system, which he later elaborates upon in his more extensive works. Central to Santayana's thesis is the idea that knowledge is fundamentally a form of faith, mediated through symbols derived from human experience. He posits that our perceptions—sensations, images, and feelings—are not direct reflections of the external world but rather elements of discourse that we engage with as living beings. This leads to the assertion that while we may question the existence of physical objects, we are compelled by our animal nature to interpret our experiences as meaningful.
Santayana introduces the concept of "animal faith" to articulate the notion that our beliefs about the world, although potentially unfounded, are essential for navigating our experiences. He distinguishes between essence, which represents the immutable characteristics of potential things, and the act of experiencing these essences. Through a critical examination of skepticism, he suggests that while our claims about existence are subject to challenge, our instinctive beliefs help impose order on an otherwise chaotic world. His work is characterized by a poetic style, making his philosophy both accessible and thought-provoking, inviting readers to engage with the intricate relationship between skepticism, knowledge, and the fundamental nature of human experience.
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Scepticism and Animal Faith by George Santayana
First published: 1923
Type of work: Philosophy
Critical Evaluation:
SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH was written as an introduction to a system of philosophy, a system later made explicit in Santayana’s four-volume THE REALMS OF BEING: THE REALM OF ESSENCE (1927), THE REALM OF MATTER (1930), THE REALM OF TRUTH (1938), THE REALM OF SPIRIT (1940). Despite the fact that the author believed that his ideas needed the extended treatment he gave them in these volumes, the introductory work remains the clearest, most concise, and most representative of Santayana’s works. Almost every important contribution which the author made to philosophy can be found here; and the advantage of this single work is that the reader can gain a synoptic vision of the relations of the ideas to each other, something he might fail to achieve if he centered his attention initially upon one of the volumes of THE REALMS OF BEING or THE LIFE OF REASON (1905-1906).
Santayana’s principal thesis is that knowledge is faith “mediated by symbols.” The symbols of human discourse, when man is talking to himself about the world of facts, are the elements in his experience: sensations, images, feelings, and the like. “The images in sense are parts of discourse, not parts of nature: they are the babble of our innocent organs under the stimulus of things,” writes Santayana. Since we cannot be certain that the given elements, the essences, are signs of physical objects affecting us as physical organisms, there is a sense in which we cannot be said to be free of the possibility of error. Nevertheless, as animals, as active beings, we find ourselves compelled to take our experiences as the experiences of a living organism in the process of being shocked and stimulated by the world. Our belief in a nature of change is made possible by our interpretation of the given—the data, the essences—but it cannot be justified by the given; hence, it is animal faith.
To prepare himself for the statement that all knowledge is the faith that certain given elements are signs of things and events, Santayana develops a thorough skepticism which ends with the cryptic statement that “Nothing given exists.” To understand the meaning and ground of this claim it is necessary to understand Santayana’s conception of the given—his theory of essences.
It is difficult to make all the proper qualifications in a brief description, but if one begins by supposing that essences are characteristics of actual and possible things, whether physical, psychical, mathematical, or whatever, a beginning has been made. If a person were to have two or three sense experiences of precisely the same sort—three sense images of a certain shade of yellow, for example—that shade of yellow would be an essence that had been given to him in sense experience. Even if he had not had the experience, he could have had it; the essence is a character his experience might come to have. Essences, then, are universals, not particulars; they are characteristics which may or may not be the characteristics of existing things.
It makes sense to say of a particular thing that it is, or was, or shall be; but we cannot sensibly talk that way about the characteristics of things. Considered in themselves, as they must be, essences are immutable, eternal, never vague, and neither good nor bad. In Santayana’s terms, the realm of essence “is simply the unwritten catalogue, prosaic and infinite, of all the characters possessed by such things as happen to exist, together with the characters which all different things would possess if they existed.”
If this definition of essence is kept clearly in mind, if an essence is simply a character but not necessarily the character of anything, then it becomes clear that if essences are given—and they are—then nothing given exists. If we are correct in our suppositions, then, whenever an essence is given, it is given to a self; i.e., someone has an experience, and the experience has a certain character, an essence. The self that has experiences exists; the “intuition,” i.e., the apprehension of the character of the experience, exists; and, if the self is not mistaken in its interpretation of the given, of the “datum,” a physical event or object exists as signified by the datum. In conventional language, there are persons, sense experiences, and the objects which give rise to the experiences. But it is improper now, and false, to say that the essence of the experience exists. To say this would violate Santayana’s definition of essence and, accordingly, lead to a paradox. For example, if an essence is a character, and if on three occasions the same character were given, then the consequence of saying that on each occasion the essence existed is that the essence will have gone in and out of existence three times. If two persons have the same kind of experience—i.e., intuit the same essence—then we would have to say that the essence is in two places at the same time. As long as one remembers that, by definition, an essence is a character considered as a character, it is clearly nonsense to think of essences as existing.
The discovery of essence is the reward of a relentless skepticism. In Santayana’s view, we have no final justification for our claims about the existence of external objects, and all of our beliefs about selves and change and memory are open to critical challenge. “Scepticism may . . . be carried to the point of denying change and memory, and the reality of all facts,” he writes.
But Santayana had no great affection for this ultimate skepticism. In his terms he was a “wayward sceptic,” entertaining the notion of an ultimate skepticism only to show that critical challenge of our customary beliefs is possible. It is customary and unavoidable for a human being to suppose that he himself lives and thinks, and Santayana’s rejoinder is, “That he does so is true; but to establish that truth he must appeal to animal faith.”
In order to discuss the human being in his response to the data of experience Santayana introduces his special senses of the terms “spirit,” “psyche,” and “intuition.” Intuition is the apprehension of essence; the spirit is the cool contemplator, that which intuits; and psyche is the self that acts, has preferences, takes data as signs. Of course, when we begin to use these terms as descriptive of facts, we are expressing our own animal faith; when we say that the spirit confronts essences and that the psyche acts accordingly, taking the essences as signs of a physical world, we are saying what the ultimate skeptic cannot allow—but we are animals, and the psyche has other business than philosophy.
There is something appealing and liberating in Santayana’s conception of animal faith. No one could be more careful than he in examining and challenging the pretensions of the pretenders to knowledge and wisdom: the paradox that knowledge is animal faith reveals that what we call “knowledge” is merely unwarranted, but stubborn, animal conviction. That same paradox brings out the positive side of Santayana’s philosophy: as animals taking data as signs we make sense out of what would otherwise be a static complex of essences and give order both to our world and ourselves.
In the description of the consequences of animal faith in action, Santayana considered first the belief in discourse which arises once one has given up “passive intuition.” From the belief in discourse one passes to belief “in experience, in substance, in truth, and in spirit.” This progression of beliefs is a natural one, and the description of the life of reason in various areas was undertaken by Santayana in his earlier five-volume work THE LIFE OF REASON. THE REALMS OF BEING naturally followed SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH as a careful elaboration of the terms “essence,” “matter,” “truth,” and “spirit.”
Unlike many philosophers, Santayana had self-confidence enough to know the limits of his inquiry. He did not pretend to be able to discover what the physicist, for example, can discover by acting on his scientific animal faith. Once we pass from the intuitive contemplation of essences to the recognition of the human use of data as signs, we soon come to the discovery of our assumptions of an experiencing self coming up against substance—the presumed cause of the data. The philosopher can clarify the idea of substance, explaining that it is extended, in space and time, with a structure, and so forth; and he can go on to identify substance with such homely examples as “the wood of this tree . . . the wind . . . the flesh and the bones of the man. . . .” But he need not, and Santayana does not, try to do what the physicist and the chemist do in their specialized ways.
By this practice, then, Santayana fulfilled the promise of his introduction to SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH in which he said: “Here is one more system of philosophy. If the reader is tempted to smile, I can assure him that I smile with him. . . . I am merely trying to express for the reader the principles to which he appeals when he smiles.”
In this book, as in all his others, Santayana presents his ideas by means of a beautifully articulated, poetic style. Even if his vision of knowledge as animal faith had no value, this work would endure as the most fascinating portrayal of the realm of essence which has yet appeared in literature. That this moving survey of the timeless, changeless realm of essence should have come from a naturalistic philosopher is one of those pleasant paradoxes to which we turn with classic delight after coming from SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH.