Liberating the Spirit
George Santayana, a well known skeptical thinker and self-proclaimed materialist, created an in depth ontology which includes the realm of Spirit. This realm of spirit does not include the pseudo-religious way we commonly use the word to signify supernatural creators or death-surviving selves. Instead, “spirit is an awareness natural to animals, revealing the world and themselves in it (1).” This spirit may go by many other names including “consciousness, attention, feeling, thought, or any word that marks the total inner difference between being awake or asleep, alive or dead (1).” After recognizing the spirit we may move on to address the potential of liberation or salvation of the spirit; prospects which are so naturally ingrained in humans as evidenced by the rise of religions as well as the universal questions surrounding the meaning of life.
In order to understand Santayana’s realm of spirit we must first understand consciousness - which is a collection of units of momentary cognitive awareness or intuition, directing its attention at the essences which give form to objects. More basic than the spirit is the psyche – “the organic order and potentiality in a living body” and the animal force concerned with its own survival and other animal needs (2). The psyche is a more primitive form of intelligence, but is essential as a host for the creation and survival of the spirit. As “spirit is a product of the psyche” the two naturally share many affinities (2). However, the crucial difference remains: psyche is the pattern of self-maintenance and reproduction which holds its organism most valuable whereas spirit does not have persistence or potential (1) but is rather the transcendental “unattached spectator of all time and existence and the contemplator of every possibility (4).”
The Spirit wanders the world, always centered in the ‘now’ and always at the ‘here,’ observing the ways of nature and witnessing “the cosmic dance” that nature performs (1). Spirit may take on many interests. It may be “philosophical, absorbed in curiosity and wonder, impressed by the size, force, complexity, and harmony of the universe” or it may simply be a “station from which to survey the world (2).”
However, the spirit often has a hard time in realizing itself. It faces many hardships from its animal body and psyche that mitigate its transcendence. Santayana suggests that the spirit suffers torment out of sympathy for its poor lost psyche being put through the hardships of earthly life (1). The spirit wishes to see through this confusion to a vista of clarity and understanding.
Attachment is a great source of pain for both psyche and spirit. It is ignorant for a spirit to “attach itself absolutely to anything relative” – even its own life (2). This may be impossible for the psyche to accept graciously, but “the assurance that truth is eternal and that life and beauty may be perpetually renewed in other shapes” can comfort the spirit (2). The miracle of life is granted with a guarantee of death. In fact, in this cyclical pattern “life is a perpetual resurrection; and spirit too is continually being born again (2).” Spirit can rest assured of “the same rational light breaking out anew in some fresh creature (2).”
Santayana suggests we view our particular existences not as intentional occurrences planned by supernatural creators, but rather as accidents. This view, while being more scientific, also makes our happening more rare and more interesting. But we still seek salvation or liberation from the toils and troubles and pains our bodies and psyches must endure. Santayana claims that the spirit offers salvation “by shifting the centre of appreciation from human psyche to the divine spirit (2).” This salvation goes by many different names including Brahma, Nirvana, and accepting the Spirit of Christ; although it is often interpreted to include a false supernatural aspect. Instead of this external non-natural force, it is man himself “a human person assuming and adopting a divine nature (2).”
Humans may lapse in and out of touch with their spirituality, or they may choose to remain ‘enlightened’ through devotion. “Absorption in pure intuition, even if temporary, constitutes the spiritual life (3).” Necessarily, this life is “free of values and empty of striving,” because the enlightened knows not to attach to relative things (3). To live this spiritual life one must replace ideas, emotions, fears, and attachments with spontaneous, disinterested, pure intuition and thereby “detaching us from each thing with humility and humour, and attaching us to all things with justice charity and pure joy” enabling the enjoyment of truth and essence (2).
I have relayed Santayana’s view through this intellectual medium, but the actual attainment and realization of spirit would be better helped along by a poet, a painter, a songbird, or a sunrise.
“Awaken attention, intensify it, purify it into white flame, and the actual and unsubstantial object of intuition will stand before you in all its living immediacy and innocent nakedness (3).”
When that “supreme moment liberates us” we accept it without thinking or judging it and “feel withdrawn into an inner citadel of insight and exaltation (2).”
Works Cited
1) The Nature of Spirit from Realms of Being (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942 [1937]), pp. 555-572
2) Liberation from Realms of Being (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942 [1937]), pp. 736-767
3) Essence from Realms of Being (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942 [1937]), pp. 1-25
4) Stuhr, John J. (Ed.). (2000). Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy.
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