A Philosopher's Farewell

DOMINATIONS AND POWERS (481 pp.)--George Santayana--Scribner ($4.50).

The nuns in the convent of the Little Company of Mary in Rome pad very softly past a certain room these days. Inside that airy corner room, filled with the neat disarray of an old bachelor's belongings, a fragile, black-eyed old man with one of the most far-ranging minds of the 20th Century is recovering from an annoying bout with the flu. In his 88th year, Philosopher George Santayana takes his ailments philosophically. His many would-be visitors feel them more keenly. Formerly host to every sensitive traveler with a metaphysical bee in his Baedeker, Santayana now restricts himself to old friends. Comparative solitude comes as no penance to a man who has long preferred a cloistered life, and shared for the past ten years the placid round of a Roman Catholic retreat.

He amusedly calls himself "the despair of the nuns." They hope for a deathbed display of piety from their speculative old boarder. Outside the convent, he is the despair and delight of his fellow philosophers and critics, who are confounded by his lack of a "system," but cannot resist the charming cadences of his style.

Angel on Furlough. His latest work, Dominations and Powers, a sheaf of reflections on liberty, society, government and man's fate in general, is written with the luminous grace of an angel on furlough and the clinical detachment of a onetime Harvard professor (1889-1912).

The urbanely skeptical Santayana holds that it is the only one of his books which has been "inspired." But anyone who has waded knee-deep in the old philosopher's stream of consciousness may feel there is more recapitulation in the new work than revelation.

Santayana passes in review all his favorite ideas--materialism, naturalism, humanism, relativism. Then he dismisses each of them by saying that "chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything." This verdict does not land Santayana in the camp of the simon-pure pessimists. Nature, he insists, does trace out repetitive patterns of order, and for Naturalist Santayana the life of mankind is a problem in horticulture.

Circles & Squares. The world is like a vast prolific garden. Every form of life, flower and weed, sprouts up in "blind exuberance." This he calls the Generative

Order, or order of growth. Pretty soon a Militant Order, or reform association, develops. On a program of destroying weeds, it manages to hack up most of the flowers.

"Reformers," says Santayana, "blame the world for being themselves ill fitted to live in it." Only the Rational Order, or life of reason, introduces intelligent pruning and brings the buds to blossom. Operating judiciously "in the light or shadow of the past and the possible," reason fosters the only kind of precarious progress there is--"perfections after our own kind in our own time and place." Says Santayana: "The circle neither envies the square nor wishes to devour it." "Live and let live" is his implied credo.

Santayana's chief quarrel with modern societies and governments is that they lack his and Nature's opulent tolerance. They try to stamp out their subjects with the uniformity of a cookie-cutter, leveling "all civilizations to a single cheap and dreary pattern." They aspire to be "dominations" rather than "powers," and domination is power run riot like cancer cells ravaging the body.

The Long View. Today, thinks Santayana, both the U.S. and Russia "aspire to be universal; and under either of them, if absolutely dominant, mankind might become safe, law-abiding, sporting, and uniform." And under either, the individual soul attempting to follow its "native bent" might find itself in a spiritual concentration camp. Since he dreads the export of America's "commercial" culture as much as any French intellectual who winces at the sight of a Coke, Santayana feels that perhaps the "barbarians" of the East might organize the future better than the "decadent" technicians of the West. "Conviction has deserted the civilized mind; and a good conscience exists only at the extreme left, in that crudely deluded mass of plethoric humanity which perhaps forms the substance of another material tide destined to sweep away the remnants of our old vanities, and to breed new vanities of its own."

To Santayana, even a momentous East-West clash would be foam in the trough of history's innumerable waves. He has no chummy predisposition to back the U.S. team. Aristocratic, contemplative, traditional, he is separated from the America he left in 1912 by a wider gulf than the Atlantic. Occasionally his biases flash out.

On democracy: "The domination of politicians . . . sometimes idle gentlemen and sometimes idle workmen; but more often small lawyers and busybodies looking for a job."

On Protestantism: "A tradesman's religion ... He [the Protestant] is to live the life of the world, conscientiously no doubt, but heartily, and his religion is to separate him as little as possible from it . . . The ultimate Protestant ideal is to have no outward or specific religion at all --no priests, churches, theology, Scripture or Sabbath, and indeed, no God."

On mass culture: "The effort of social reformers to supply intellectual as well as material luxuries to the poor fails for want of roots in primary human nature ... To dump into the poor man's mind the products of a decadent aristocratic culture will perhaps accelerate their decomposition, but it will not sow the seed of anything better."

Love & Fertilizer. More frequently sage than sniping, Santayana's mind glows like a lamp, and page after page of Dominations glitters with apt observations caught in its radiant beams.

On love: "The people we care for most give us the most trouble."

On propaganda: "The great fertilizer, for artificial convictions, is the appeal to irrelevant interests. You must maintain religion, because it is good for morality and for commerce; you must keep up sports to avoid dissipation and ill health; you must raise armies to avoid war. But if really good only for such purposes, you would have only a sham army, sham sports, and a sham religion . . ."

On the degradation of the modern spirit: "Our one preoccupation is to be safe. We don't know what we love, or if we do we don't dare mention it. We are willing to become anything, to be turned into any sort of worm, by the will of the majority. We are afraid of starving, of standing alone; above all we are afraid of having to fight. And when nevertheless we are forced to fight, we do so without chivalry. We do not talk of justice, but of interests."

On death: "It is easy, almost pleasant, to give up the world, if we know what the world is; and we never die too soon, if we have found something eternal to live with."

The Rational Anarchist. With the publication of Dominations and Powers, Santayana undoubtedly feels closer to eternity. It is the Mst book he intends to have published in his lifetime. A book of allegorical verse firmly entitled Posthumous Poems will appear after his death, and so will the third and concluding volume of his autobiography. The autobiography, he feels, might wound persons still living with its candid comments.

As a philosopher, George Santayana stands as a paradoxical contradiction to his time. In an age of the splintered mind, he asserts the old Greek genius for wholeness. In an age of prosaic utility, he rates beauty first. In an age of ideological choices, he affirms "the free uses to be made of life." In an age of the fast answer, he asks the puzzling, fundamental questions about man's nature and destiny, the good life and how to live it.

There is no neat and easy label for him, though "rational anarchist" comes close. In his probings of the modern spirit, Santayana also comes as close as the 20th Century is likely to get to another famous moral gadfly: Socrates.

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