Heidegger's Metahistory of Philosophy: Amor Fati, Being and Truth (review)

Abstract

278 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY own preference may have been, Santayana has achieved an eminent place in the American literary tradition, and whatever his fortunes may be among philosophers, his mastery of a distinctive style of expression in the English language and his genius as a critic are receiving increasing recognition. His poetic work is so intimately a personal creation that it will be read and enjoyed by literate Americans as art beyond fashion and intelligence beyond style. Who knows? He may still become what he hoped to be: "the last of the Victorians." An American Victorian is obviously an anomaly. To become a member of the illustrious company of English men of letters, he thought he would need to make himself at home in Oxford, The attempt to do so failed, and in his disappointment he reconciled himself to being a homeless non-Victorian. He would be a Latin humanist in Rome. There he could enjoy his tenuous foothold on earth as an opportunity to soar away like a skylark, "singing at heaven's gate." But having found an eternal home in the eternal city, he was nevertheless doomed by historical fate to receive a permanent home-base in America. Professor Stallknecht shows good judgment when he emphasizes Santayana's contributions to the philosophy of art and to the American literature of art-criticism, which is best represented by the early Harvard works on The Sense of Beauty, Interpretations o/Poetry and Religion, and Three Philosophical Poets. I am inclined to doubt Stallknecht's statement that these are Santayana's closest approaches to "genuine originality" (p. 21); his aesthetic doctrines are clearly dated and reflect the fashions of his time. But his lectures to Harvard students were, as Stallknecht says, "fresh" and in striking contrast to the "genteel tradition." He himself continued to respect his work on philosophical poetry more than the somewhat "juvenile" aspects of his own poetry and of The Life of Reason. When in 1927 he was writing his Platonism and the Spiritual Life against Dean Inge and the Christian exploitation of Plato, and again in 1931 when he was writing The Genteel Tradition at Bay, which was aimed at the absolutist humanism of Paul Elmer More and his group, he commented: "I had to take the unction out of Platonism." After a vigorous satire of the wrecks in contemporary culture of Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution, and Romance, he closed his essay with a positive defense of "the moral adequacy of naturalism." In all this, he was aware that his Victorian style might lead uncritical readers to associate him with these decadent types of Platonism or with the pale classicism of Walter Pater. It was therefore important for him to make clear that his own genteel style was not in the service of genteel philosophy. His interest in being "the last of the Victorians" was related to his confession of loyalty to the "last Puritan." To him, as he explained, Oliver, the "ultimate Puritan," believed conscientiously that he should not have a conscience. Against the Spanish Mario in him, whom he loathed, Santayana regarded this "last stand" of Oliver as truly heroic. Thus in the novel Santayana paid his respect to Puritan piety and to his New England heritage. Though the poetic imagination of Santayana should receive primary consideration, as it does in Stallknecht's essay, Stallknecht does well to close with a technical analysis of Scepticism and Animal Faith, in which the "animal faith" (behavioral) theory of knowledge is expounded after a technical defense of the freedom of the imagination to deal with "the given" (non-existent) as its toy, enjoying the "essences" as they come for the play (non-cognitive) of the imagination. To overlook this technical exposition of Santayana's system would indeed be a serious oversight. For "the idler at his work," as he refers to himself with his usual irony, was no mere "writer." HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, California Heidegger's Metahistory o/Philosophy: Arnor Fati, Being and Truth. By Bernd Magnus. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970. Pp. xiv + 146) Ostensibly a critical analysis of Heidegger's account of the development of Western BOOK REVIEWS 279 philosophy, Magnus' study is in fact a...