Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe by George Santayana

Abstract

Reviewed by: Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe by George Santayana Daniel DiMassa George Santayana. Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Coedited by Kellie Dawson and David E. Spiech. Introduced by James Seaton. Cambridge: MIT, 2019. xxxvi + 239 pp. Why might anyone turn now, more than a century after its publication, to Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets (1910)? Reading Santayana's essay is a bit like reading Erich Auerbach. It attunes one to concerns that, though fixed firmly in the field of philology, quite clearly hover in the spheres of philosophy. As with Auerbach, Santayana's preoccupations with nature and history result in an essay of daunting intellectual sweep and grand pretension: he aims to sketch—using the examples of Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe—tectonic shifts in the history of philosophy. The essay, unfortunately, only recommends Santayana as a poor man's Auerbach. Driven by his commitment to naturalism, the history he traces is clichéd and undifferentiated. His insights are rarely original or even interesting. Whereas Auerbach could take up Dante and make a case for him as the first "poet of the secular world," Santayana—in a tired recapitulation of rationalist readings—views him as a talent despite his age, a supernaturalist who peddles a "mirage" while neglecting the evidence of nature. This, despite the fact that Santayana, in a significant anticipation of Auerbach's key arguments, regards Dante's afterlife as a "fulfillment" of an individual's life on earth (as opposed to a punishment or reward). Santayana's affections lie with Lucretius and Goethe, the two naturalists among the three poets. But here, too, certain clichés govern the lines of his inquiry: Goethe, whom he writes about with reference only to Faust, is above all the poet of "Romantic immediacy," in Santayana's view, and no poet of special philosophical or scientific competence. To get at the philosophical dynamics at play in Faust, Santayana leans on Spinoza, which is helpful, save for the degree to which it shunts from view any other portions of Goethe's philosophical diet. Santayana treats Goethe's Romanticism as a historical affair, but ironically, we find in Santayana himself the traces of a lingering Romanticism. He may have been unaware of it, but his conjunction of precisely these three poets was an unusually Romantic gesture. Around 1800, Goethe and Schelling had planned a didactic poem of nature in the style of Lucretius's De rerum natura; when Goethe relinquished the project, Schelling planned to complete the poem in the style of Dante's Commedia. At the same time, Friedrich Schlegel, in his essay on changes in Goethe's poetic style, conceived of the Olympian in Weimar as a new Dante. Santayana's history of poetic philosophers, in other words, emerges from a peculiarly Romantic history of poetry. But whereas Romantics like Schelling and Schlegel located affinities across these texts, Santayana finds, by and large, differences. He is keen to summarize them as such: "Goethe is the poet of life; Lucretius the poet of nature; Dante the poet of salvation." In their differences they complement and complete each other; what conjoins the three poets, according to Santayana, is their status as representatives of a historical age. Perhaps it is that status, widely intuited as such, that has led many self-professed "amateurs" to write about Dante and Goethe. Indeed, these sorts of texts may amount to a semischolarly genre unto itself, with predictably mixed results. Santayana's essay announces itself as the "impressions of an amateur," and Vittorio Hösle, citing Santayana, has defended his own "amateur" contributions to the scholarship of Dante and Goethe. But Hösle and other scholars of diverse backgrounds, e.g., Josef Pieper, have rendered meaningful contributions to the knowledge of such poets and their texts. I am not convinced Santayana has. But, to be [End Page 373] clear, if Santayana's text is imperfect, it is rhetorically magnificent in its imperfection and, as such, a useful foil for budding scholars. The section on Goethe's Faust, for example, could easily serve as a usefully problematic commentary in an undergraduate seminar on Goethe. For the professor who wishes her students to see Goethe's...