Regarding Santayana it has been claimed that he lacks a system
while contradicting himself in outrageous ways. An attentive
analysis of his complete oeuvre, however, reveals something else
entirely. It is not easy to classify a thinker as a Platonic
materialist, an ironic nihilist, a spiritual atheist, and a
conservative without political commitment, but, if one respects his
own language, one discerns an astonishing, little-known Santayana,
whose philosophical leitmotif consists in: 1) detecting the
numerous "false steps," logical and moral, supplied by the
imagination when it confuses things with the names that designate
them, or the world with the feelings that it provokes in the human
animal-these errors assume diverse faces: pantheism, moralism,
egotism, subjectivism, transcendentalism, Platonism, Puritanism,
and utopianism; 2) avoiding these illusions in such a way as to
keep the spiritual door open as a form of life to be lived out in
an honest fashion; 3) recognizing the natural origin of these
temptations and asking oneself what moves humans to succumb
imperceptibly to these mistakes, at times tragic, at others
comical, and what precautions one can take to remain cognizant of
the deceitful leaps that can hijack one's life; and 4) proposing as
an alternative the radical distinction between essence and
existence, which leads him to distinguish four realms of being: the
realm of essence, the realm of matter, the realm of truth, and the
realm of spirit. Essence as logical identity, matter as contingent
existence, truth as frozen history, and spirit as the flames that
part from contingency and approximate the eternal. An attempt has
been made in this book to expand on and clarify these questions.
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