Moreover, Santayana distrusts democracy, and sees it as "a vulgar, anonymous tyranny," much like Plato. This 'natural aristocracy' (a term never used by Santayana taken instead from Thomas Jefferson) is built upon Santayana's dislike of equality-he argues, with Plato, that "the equality of unequals is inequality"-though he still champions equality of opportunity. For this, he advocates a sort of natural aristocracy, for though the state is "a monster," he accepts its necessity in maintaining stability and safety for its constituents. Though families provide the basic unit of organization among men, it is necessary to develop beyond them. He agrees with Arthur Schopenhauer that, in love, "nine-tenths of the cause of love are in the lover, for one-tenth that may be in the object" and that love "fuses the soul again into the impersonal blind flux." Despite this, he still champions love as the most fulfilling experience of life: " Laplace is reported to have said on his deathbed that science was mere trifling, and that nothing was real but love." Families and children are immensely important too, as, "we commit the blotted manuscript of our lives more willingly to the flames, when we find the immortal text half engrossed in a fairer copy." The non-philosopher must rely upon the "growth of those social emotions which bloom in the generous atmosphere of love and the home."
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Santayana wishes, according to Will Durant, to "devise a means whereby men may be persuaded to virtue without the stimulus of supernatural hopes and fears." Unfortunately, as he says in 'Reason in Society', "a truly rational morality or social regimen has never existed in the world, and is hardly to be looked for" as such constructions are the luxury of philosophers. As Cory writes in the volume's preface, in addition to excising prolixities and redundancies from the book, " sustained effort was made to dispel those early mists of idealism from the realistic body of his philosophy, and to make clear to the reader that our idea of a natural world can never be that world itself."Įntries are needed for the other two volumes: Reason in Common Sense - the 1st volume! - and also Reason in Art In 1951, near the end of his life, Santayana engaged himself in the weighty task of producing a one-volume abridgment of The Life of Reason at the urging of his editor at Scribner's, with the assistance of his friend and student, Daniel Cory. To supply but a single example, the oft-quoted aphorism of Santayana's, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," may be found on p. 284 of Reason in Common Sense. The Life of Reason is sometimes considered to be one of the most poetic and well-written works of philosophy in Western history. Santayana's philosophy is strongly influenced by the materialism of Democritus and the refined ethics of Aristotle, with a special emphasis on the natural development of ideal ends. The work is considered to be the most complete expression of Santayana's moral philosophy by contrast, his later magnum opus, the four-volume The Realms of Being, more fully develops his metaphysical and epistemological theory, particularly his doctrine of essences. It consists of Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Religion, Reason in Art, and Reason in Science.
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress is a book published in five volumes from 1905 to 1906, by Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana.
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