Open-mouthedness: World, poetry, and liberation in the philosophy of George Santayana

This dissertation investigates George Santayana's claim in Realms of Being that poetry and philosophy play a role in helping individuals achieve spiritual liberation, a state of total moral clarity. I consolidate, interpret, and defend Santayana's arguments that individuals pursuing the life of spirit employ poetry and philosophy in order, first, to understand the material basis of consciousness; second, to envision the whole of reality or the world; and, third, to cultivate a charitable attitude toward all living beings. Against those who argue that spiritual liberation consists of retreating from the world to contemplate essences, I argue that, by disclosing the worldliness of animal life, spiritual liberation allows one to pursue the good on a morally integrated basis.;This dissertation is divided into four chapters. Chapter One examines two charges commonly made against Santayana's final system: that it is too literary in character, and that it is incompatible with his middle-period humanism. I trace the historical origins of these charges and argue that both are grounded in a misunderstanding of Santayana's concept of poetry. Chapter Two examines Santayana's reflections on the systematic nature of philosophy, focusing on Santayana's argument that philosophy becomes transparent to itself when it accounts for the ways in which the psyche (the material ground of the organism) mediates knowledge of reality. A brief analysis of the concept of transparency in Heidegger's Being and Time provides the context for this discussion. Chapter Three examines the worldly character of experience. Though he was influenced by Heidegger's concept of being-in-the-world, I argue that the worldliness Santayana attributes to animal life is comparable to that developed by Hans Jonas in his book The Phenomenon of Life . Chapter Four explores Santayana's claims that man is prone to discover lawful patterns in the universe which he falsely supposes to govern moral life; that spiritual life begins with knowledge of the self; and that the self is intrinsically poetic. Finally, I bring these considerations to bear on Realms of Being itself, arguing that Santayana's magnum opus is intended to exemplify some of the poetic and philosophic features he claims are proper to spiritual reflection.