Dominations and Powers

Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government

George Santayana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351521796
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Democracy

"In what must be ranked as a foremost classic of twentieth-century political philosophy, George Santayana, in the preface to his last major work prior to his death, makes plain the limits as well as the aims of Dominations and Powers: ""All that it professes to contain is glimpses of tragedy and comedy played unawares by governments; and a continual intuitive reduction of political maxims and institutions to the intimate spiritual fruits that they are capable of bearing.""This astonishing volume shows how the potential beauty latent in all sorts of worldly artifacts and events are rooted in differing forms of power and dominion. The work is divided into three major parts: the generative order of society, which covers growth in the jungle, economic arts, and the liberal arts; the militant order of society, which examines factions and enterprise; and the rational order of society, which contains one of the most sustained critiques of democratic systems and liberal ideologies extant.Written at a midpoint in the century, but at the close of his career, Santayana's volume offers an ominous account of the weakness of the West and its similarities in substance, if not always in form, with totalitarian systems of the East. Few analyses of concepts, such as government by the people, the price of peace and the suppression of warfare, the nature of elites and limits of egalitarianism, and the nature of authority in free societies, are more comprehensive or compelling. This is a carefully rendered statement on tasks of leadership for free societies that take on added meaning after the fall of communism.The author of a definitive biography of Santayana, John McCormick provides the sort of deep background that makes possible an assessment of Dominations and Powers. He permits us to better appreciate the place of this work at the start no less than conclusion of Santayana's long career. For the author of The Life of Reason himself ad"

BOOK THIRD

THE RATIONAL ORDER OF SOCIETY

CHAPTER 1

THE STATUS OF REASON IN NATURE

IN POLITICS reason may seem to play an eminently militant part, since when it can it introduces a moral order into the chaos of conflicting customs and quarrels. Yet a moment’s reflection will suffice to remind us that militancy itself is a strand in the generative order of society, an eddy in the stream, when one vital interest becomes vivid and turns against the smothering pressure of the undirected flux of events. Militancy is but the integrity of a part asserting itself and seeking to dominate the blind drift of the rest. Now, such integrity in an insurgent Will is itself a triumph of reason and of vital liberty in the individual or the party girding itself for combat; so that reason enters the political arena as an aggressive demand put forward by an eager agent whose Will, suddenly clarified, feels capable of achieving social domination.

An oriental sage, however, might attain perfect integrity and rationality without growing in the least militant or figuring in politics as a reformer. The itch to make war on a drifting world would have to arise in him irrationally, as a heaven-sent mission or a political passion. Reason by no means requires a man to set about making rational those things which are irrational by nature, as life itself is. Don Quixote was kindly and heroically mad, but he had lost his reason. A rational order of society must be imposed on it by art, by express institutions and laws which presuppose birth, death, love, labour, war, and a perpetual fringe of madness and crime surrounding the fortified oasis of reason. And the needful agent in building and defending this fortress can never be reason itself but some sworn band of militant enthusiasts in whom the idea of a rational society has become an obsession.

The primary force in establishing a rational order of society is therefore a purely vegetative growth in the psyche, that easily spreads by contagion to a group of psyches, and forms a political party or philosophic sect. The germ of this political growth is not itself political but biological and moral: it is the seedling of the life of reason sprouting within the secret self, and spreading as it finds the psychic soil favourable and the surrounding climate clement and sunny. Sympathy is a great help in the early stages of such moral integrations; but when the inner domination has become deep-rooted and firm, contrary blasts harden rather than bend it; and zeal in the cause grows faster than does the good work itself. This occurs, however, only in a few leaders and ardent disciples; for rationality is a secondary habit in the animal psyche, a not indispensable synthesis of functions each capable of asserting itself separately, and apt, in rough weather, to lose all contact with its neighbours.

The political power exercised in the alleged service of reason is always exercised by persons, themselves fundamentally irrational, but attached in their studious meditations to some rational utopia, or to phrases become catch-words for special interests, but still suggesting the rational aspirations of some political philosopher. A rationalist party may thus arise and govern in its day, as rationalist sects arise in philosophy, probably in both cases animated by an irrational hatred of tradition in general, and of religion in particular. It is not the work of such parties that I wish to study under the name of the Rational Order of Society. Such an Order would liberate all human interests, especially those that being ideal and harmless do not materially trample on one another, and that even psychologically can often be pursued together, to the delight and enrichment of a rational mind; whereas rationalist sects usually favour only elementary material interests and unimaginative morals, counting bread-rations but not moments of sport or laughter.

The militant aspect of reason in politics is therefore accidental, as are aggression and enmity in the generative order. Fishes, for instance, may have no choice but to devour one another if they are to live at all, vegetable food being absent or insufficient in their medium; and plants in the jungle may be by nature pure parasites on other plants, or may, by merely existing, rob them of their necessary space, moisture, or sunlight. This is not militancy, but only involuntary and inevitable rivalry. So the agents that diffuse the life of reason must remove, not from the world but from their own lives and chosen surroundings, all that would destroy or subvert their rational economy. This would involve a strict and “totalitarian” discipline within the rational circle, as within a monastery or school or army, but without the least ambition to make all nature, all animals, or all societies rational after one’s own rule. For even the most uncompromising regimen has a natural and irrational nucleus; and as this nucleus differs in different races, ages, or countries, so the rational development there would differ from an equally rational development on another foundation. As to peace between different rational regimens or civilisations, it would depend on the physical possibility of their coexistence. If there was room and sustenance for all, they should rationally agree to differ. If only one could subsist at a time, underlying physical forces or economic developments, perhaps without war but certainly without reason, would automatically decide the issue.

In itself, indeed, reason is something internal to spirit: a faculty of seeing identity, affinity, contrast, or irrelevance between essences present together in direct intuition. Though purely speculative in itself, this faculty sheds continual and revealing light on events and on the whole history and composition of the world; because the images and the calculations that reveal surrounding facts to an animal have essentially dialectical relations to one another; and these relations become patent to intuition, if ever attention is directed upon them instead of distractedly following the lures, the threats, and the shocks of pressing events. Language in making recognisable sounds to mark similar accidents tends to cast a net of grammatical relations over the flux of experience, and superposes in this way a partially intelligible syntax on the natural order of genesis in the world. Mathematical science, which in itself is perfectly hypothetical and ideal, carries this application of reason to nature one step further, with brilliant practical and speculative results. These results prove the partial truth of what language and myth assume too sweepingly: that nature, though fundamentally contingent and irrational, falls readily into repetitions and analogies which render possible a rational description and appreciation of what happens in some spheres and in some directions. There can be shrewd divination even in psychology and politics, in business and in war; but all is at best imaginative presumption, which can be justified only where the objects studied are so simple in structure that the human senses can distinguish and measure their elements and movements. This is notoriously not the case in human history or politics; and when prophets profess to see dialectical necessity in the complex and confused movements of civilisation they indulge in a forced distortion both of facts and of logic and morals. The eloquent composition of historical books must indeed be inspired by a Muse, because it treats dramatically the fortunes of some man or some nation or some art; but the dark background of destiny still remains dominant and dictates the moral, unless the partisan author relies on eloquence to reverse the truth.

It is not therefore in the scientific description of society or of government, or in universal history, that any rational order is to be expected, but only, at best, in the exercise of government when this is virtuously inspired and intelligently pursued. The choice of reason as a guide, instead of Will or of faith or of public approval, is itself a matter of vital endowment or character in the individual. It will mark the type of morality that he advocates or actually exemplifies. Reason is a standard that the barbarian heartily despises and that has actually been seldom dominant even in the theory, much less in the practice, of politics. Intelligence has been admired and sharpened in the pursuit of irrational ends; it has seldom been allowed to criticise or to select the ends actually pursued. And this is no scandal or paradox. Distress and vitality in a man breed and employ reason as a method of concentrating natural powers in himself or discovering them in the world; but an intense cultivation of reason sucks up and reorganises all mental vistas into a speculative habit that transcends those animal and social interests which it was cultivated to serve. The chief field in which such a habit has borne rich political fruit is mechanics, where a mathematical formula posited to govern material processes is verified in them; yet even here the traceable rational order presupposes brute facts and arbitrary variations in them which do not become rational or intelligible simply for being habitual. Motion and change are themselves utterly irrational; and both the fact that they occur and the fact that they seem to obey certain laws are factors in the order of generation, not in any way dictated by reason.

Reason cannot rationally deny or condemn nature, or the life and Will that nature breeds; and this for various reasons. First: Reason itself owes its existence as a chief characteristic of the spirit to the spontaneous fertility of those material and vital powers. Secondly: Even spirit manifests an emotional and poetic sensibility which is not rational. Thirdly: On its rational side spirit transcends all censorious judgments or combative Will, and thereby gives carte blanche to all logical possibilities, but without sanctioning the existence of any one of them in particular. In all its sufferings and joys spirit therefore moves in the order of generation and not in that of reason. Consonantly with this, when reason becomes by any chance or any discipline a dominant movement in the psyche it tends to deflate all animal and political interests, and to deflate the passionate or playful impulses of spirit itself. It makes for omniscience, equilibrium, and peace: in a word, for Nirvana. Observing or foreseeing this, the domestic and political man, while obliged incidentally to invoke reason as an instrument in his pursuits, heartily detests reason as an inspiration or a sanctuary.

With this reminder that reason is properly a spiritual virtue, having its standards and rewards in itself, we may be prepared to find the rational arts that flourish in the world to be secluded, like mathematics, or festive, like music; also to find little but confusion and tragic failure where reason attempts to clarify such a concrete and mundane subject as politics or even as philosophy. For the life of reason on earth is inevitably distracted. In the presence of the aesthetic qualities and logical relations between things which actually appear to the spirit, a man harnessed to affairs or intent on his own passions will not see those obvious qualities in their rational logical order, but will see rather their irrational comings and goings or will feel only the active impulses which, as signs, they arouse automatically in his body. In this he obeys, like any other animal, the generative order of nature and of economic arts, in which the conjunction and distribution of images in minds is a vain accident and psychic waste, like after-images or dreams; and nothing counts except a man’s physical reaction to the physical presence of particular dynamic objects, such as public events, institutions, and persons; compounds that figure as units on the scale of the human body, and that produce that excitement in the psyche of which images and feelings are echoes or prophecies to the spirit.

What wonder, in such circumstances, that the political man should ignore reason, or be utterly confused if he attempts to be rational? Material complications and headlong events are calling to him or threatening on every side. He must pick his perilous way among realities; yet to conceive, remember, or forecast those realities he has only those “inert ideas” which past contacts have imposed on his uncertain and crowded memory; and on this he must model his probably fatuous expectations. His automatic reactions will carry him forward before he knows what reasons he will assign for them if challenged in debate; and in debate a few trite notions and standard phrases will have to represent his vague motives and, by mere repetition and emphasis, to vent his perhaps genuine emotions. If in a quandary he ever feels his terrible ignorance he can look for enlightenment only in the dead dramas congealed in books or in moral or religious precepts. There is indeed a fund of wisdom buried there, to which mankind may appeal when their living Will falters; but like proverbs such maxims, especially in politics and religion, are contradictory, local, and casual. You must first know your aim, before you can choose a precept by which to justify it.

CHAPTER 2

RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF MORALS

MISTAKES and failure of reason occur continually in the exercise of government, and are sometimes recognised afterwards by those who made them. The mistakes made in the programmes and theories of political parties are often pointed out by their opponents, but seldom acknowledged by the parties themselves, because the sources of their views are fixed and the tests to which those views are subjected in practice are never adequate or final, as may be the effect of a single measure or action. I assume that grounds exist, in the Will of certain men or in their education, for the choice that each party makes of its policy; these grounds cannot be rational fundamentally, but they may be consistent in their chosen aims; and irrationality in argument or in action will then appear only if the circumstances are ignored which, at that time and place, may render the execution of that policy impossible. Then any irrational attempt to carry out that policy would be due to ignorance.

If we agree to this, we shall be confirming the doctrine of Socrates that it is knowledge, not accidental desires or opinions, that makes conduct rational and right. What Socrates seems to have forgotten to say is that the knowledge requisite to make action rational in this sense lies entirely beyond the reach of mankind. We might be rational in trifles—in taking a bus marked for the place to which we wish to go—but never rational in choosing our political party and never, if leaders of that party, in choosing the man that our supporters must vote for. These major matters would all have to be decided by habit, accidental impressions, or mysterious intuition.

Modern speculation, on the other hand, being introverted, places virtue in sentiment and intention rather than in art, and seeks to found morals on “the moral sense” or conscience, so that morality, private or public, would be entirely a matter of direct intuition and absolute or “categorical” in its spontaneous precepts. I should think, however, that at least in politics, the first commandment of the conscience in a responsible statesman would be to understand the world in which he was playing a part, and the capacities and genuine needs of the people in whose interest he was acting. So that his moral sense, if it was not a mere prejudice, would bring him back again into the hopeless position of Socrates, demanding before he could act rightly, a knowledge that he could never possess.

Socrates, however, was providentially inspired as a prophet of his time, which was the turning point in the fortunes of ancient Greece. The age of political and plastic arts was over, and that of private moral reflection and conversion had begun. His imagination, if we may trust the Utopia that Plato puts into his mouth, was archaically political; and Plato’s own testament in the Laws was like the visions of the Hebrew Prophets, a transformation of a militant national past into an entrenched religious discipline, like that of the monasteries of the future. He meant to immortalise Sparta and Olympia, but he unwittingly legislated for Mount Athos and Monte Cassino. What I have called the forgetfulness of Socrates, in proposing an unattainable criterion for the conduct of life, was precisely what made him the herald of two thousand years of subjectivity and political and scientific disorder; not that there ensued any dark ages or mediaeval barbarism for the spirit; but on the contrary that a long and voluntary flight of the spirit into the wilderness was to develop its dramatic sense of isolation and its fonction fabulatrice, not only in theology, but in a poetic and historic rereading of the world in romantic and moralistic terms. Has not the time come for mankind to awake to its actual situation, and to that of the spirit that animates it?

The Sophists, who were in one sense the partners of Socrates, inasmuch as they too represented the dissolution of the classic world, pointed in an opposite direction, in that the corruption of the traditional ethos seemed to them an emancipation instead of a divine summons to repentance and to an inner discipline of the soul. They abounded in miscellaneous information, as do the intellectuals of our own age, and being more bold and free than any modern can be, they doted on the relativity of knowledge and of morals, as they understood this relativity: namely, that morals and science, goodness and truth, could never be anything but the feeling or thought that each man had of them at each moment; these thoughts and feelings were assumed, whenever a Sophist lectured to a company of town wits, to be indefinitely numerous and all different and, as assertions, contradictory; so that the doctrine of relativity might easily be expressed absolutely, by saying that all feelings of right and wrong, and all opinions were false: or in the language of Indian philosophy, were all illusions. But the Indians really meant this, and believed that only Brahman, or Spirit, was ever real. The Sophists, like the British empiricists, who have rediscovered this axiom, are essentially social beings, publicists, orators, teachers, and politicians. To them, the axiom that life is a dream, and all objects illusions, is taboo; you must never mention it, because it would prick the bubble of your analytic reform of philosophy.

Now when I say that morals and knowledge (not the truth, but opinions regarding the truth) and all judgments about right and wrong (not all goods) are relative I mean something entirely different. I mean that opinions and judgments arise in psyches and express the capacity and inevitableness of such opinions and judgments arising at each moment in each psyche; but the degree of their truth depends on the relation that their several deliverances have to the facts that provoke them and that they mean to refer to. That they refer to something which, existentially, they do not contain is due to the fact that they are not purely logical or psychological phenomena, but spiritual transcripts of biological processes and tensions which are all self-transcendent, as are all the phases of existence. Spirit arises in animals when they react, as organisms charged with specific reflexes and potentialities of growth, which specific occasions excite and turn into action; and as these reactions are directed upon the real objects that provoke them, so the spiritual transcript of them also is turned, in expectation, description, and appreciation upon the power that has evoked it.

It is in view of this biological status of perception, opinion, and moral judgment that these spiritual events are necessarily relevant to their occasion and relative to the character of the organ that produces them under that stimulus. The degree of truth in ideas and beliefs, and the degree of justness in our judgments corresponds not directly to their respective objects, which we can be aware of only by their effects, but on the character of the impression we receive and the complex reaction and radiation of that impression within the life of the psyche.

Nothing could therefore be more false, and willfull...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• PRELIMINARIES
• BOOK FIRST THE GENERATIVE ORDER OF SOCIETY
• BOOK SECOND THE MILITANT ORDER OF SOCIETY
• BOOK THIRD THE RATIONAL ORDER OF SOCIETY
• Index