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The Life of Reason is such an ominously serious-sounding title, one so ponderously heavy that the book's purpose and meaning may take the reader by surprise. When George Santayana refers to the life of reason he means one that is lived in a way and in an institutional context that promotes human happiness. As things stand, the author finds much in our world that is man-made and deemed important, even essential to living a decent and responsible life, but that is thoroughly incongruent with human happiness. He explains this and a great deal more in a book that is distinctive for the author's mastery of elegant English prose and his voluminous knowledge.
The Life of Reason is surely the work of an author comfortable with an astonishingly broad range of commonplace and simple, as well as sophisticated and complex material that he discusses masterfully at a very high level of abstraction. His style is well suited to a cosmopolitan intellectual who approaches his work as a rigorously disciplined scholar. His wide sweep of interests and attainments is consistent with the breadth and nature of his objective, covering just about every organization and activity that bears, for good or ill, on attaining human happiness and thereby living a life of reason.
The specific issues dealt with, as a result, are sometimes ones that today's readers will find familiar: the family, politics, religion, sex roles, and ethnic differences are among them. Santayana's remarkably candid and accurate account of the over-time changes in feelings and objectives that characterize the contemporary family is one of the best things I've read on this mundane topic. It is clearly a developmental typification that works best when applied in a middle class or upper middle class setting, and may be the sort of thing that all involved understand in an unspoken way. But it's illuminating and morally refreshing to see it made specific in an insightfully detailed manner, though its class-based character is one of the book's limitations.
The foundation of Santayana's presentation is the observation that there is nothing elusive or difficult to fathom about human nature. Instead, human nature is nature, an integral part of the world that we share with each other and all else that is alive or remembered. Human beings, after all, are animals of a specific and, as it turns out, mutable kind. This mutability is manifest in Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, which for Santayana means that we are always changing. This means, of course, that human nature, too, is changing, as are the conditions necessary for living a life of reason.
Once the author has taken the position that the reasonable is the good, namely that which makes our lives richer and more fulfilling thereby fostering happiness, he has inevitably called forth countless implications, all worthy of investigation and discussion. For example, he sees no value in an all-consuming religious mysticism that characterizes some religions and their rigorous practice; it lends nothing to human happiness and is not part of the life of reason. On the other hand, he sees real value -- reason -- in some religions and their modes of being, especially those that poetically express what it is to be, hence his fondness for some forms of ancient mythology.
Santayana's brilliantly interpretative accounts of the centuries-long emergence of Twentieth Century Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism are, in my limited experience, wholly original. Though his rendering of Twentieth Century Protestant asceticism and striving for wealth and other worldly attainments as ends in themselves is not new, it's interesting to read his dismissal of Protestant life as not consistent with a life of reason because it is a manifestation of pointless self-abnegation. While he understands that the rites and rituals of Catholicism are of no instrumental value, he endorses their worth as wholesome modes of emotional expression. Nevertheless, Catholicism and dogmatic Judaism are given their full share of unfavorable commentary insofar as they, also, impose limitations and standards that serve no purpose save as inhumane prohibitions and obstacles that are at odds with human nature.
Santayana recognized the power and flexibility of language as a form of discourse, but he only hints at the notion that it is language that makes us human and with which we make our world. He does, however, note that human beings are the only animals that have language, though he does not discuss its genesis, except for an off-handed reference to naming. However, his account of issues such as the relationship between poetry and prose, and his repeated references to the nature of the dialectic are brilliantly insightful. Still, he avoids the "language is everything" assumption so pervasive in scholarly discourse today.
Those of us who are less well informed than the author and who have thought less about life and its manifestations and activities, especially when viewed historically, will sometimes be unable to fully appreciate his argument and its meaning. As an example, Santayana's discussion of the nature of music is brilliantly rendered, offering interpretations that, to my knowledge, are completely original and, therefore, forbiddingly unfamiliar. Nevertheless, for Santayana art of all kinds contributes to the life of reason insofar as it enriches and delights those of us who see or hear it. Art, after all, is another way of giving structure and meaning of a specific and beautiful sort to the flux of unfettered existence. Sometimes this is intended, as in the case of a Gothic cathedral, and sometimes it is an unplanned consequence of an artist's effort to capture something especially affecting, as with an abstract juxtaposition of colors in what otherwise would be a conventional landscape. "The value of art lies in making people happy."
The Life of Reason is loaded with brilliant insights that often occur in an aphoristic but almost incidental way. The aphorisms are not self-consciously produced to provide powerfully effective sentences. Instead, they occur naturally, emerging from a text that is extraordinarily rich with learning and unique perspectives. One of my favorites is "dogmatism in the thinker is only the speculative side of greed and courage in the brute."
Santayana is not to be read without paying close attention. His classically well-wrought mode of expression and richness of meaning, from one page to another, makes this essential to understanding him. The relentless abstractness of his presentation is a primary factor in making this book a fairly difficult read. It also makes concentration for long periods difficult to maintain, or so it seemed to me.
The Life of Reason originally appeared in five volumes, but each was subsequently pared into a chapter, an effort to which Santayana devoted the last years of his life. Even in one volume, however, it is clear that Santayana was a man who devoted his life to scholarship and thought, as unfettered as anyone can be by the demands of fashion, unreasonable tradition, and blindingly personal bias. His truly was a life of the mind, as is overwhelmingly evident in The Life of Reason.
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A GREAT SPANISH-AMERICAN THINKER
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