The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

Turning at last to his native United States, Durant finds that one America looks with fondness toward its European (especially English) forebears and sees their own country as an extension of its culture and traditions. The other America fiercely rejects such foreign influences, seeing America alone as a source worth cultivating and preferring the common sense of the average man to the refined wisdom of the continental aristocrat.

Turning first to George Santayana, a Spanish immigrant, Durant presents him as part of a dying breed of Europeanized American philosophers. A poet as well as a philosopher, Santayana came to prominence for his multivolume work The Life of Reason, after which he left the United States for England. In his work Skepticism and Animal Faith, Santayana describes “animal faith” as denoting beliefs which may not be correct, but which are nonetheless valuable in reflecting a universal and ineradicable human impulse. Everyone must rely on all manner of information beyond their sensory perception, or else life is simply impossible to manage.

There can in fact be a happy union between reason and instinct, with science providing “merely a shorthand description of regularities observed in our experience, rather than ‘laws’ governing the world and guaranteed unchangeable” (536). This is a suitable object of faith, but an incomplete one, as “the flower and its seed, the child and its laughter, contain more of the mystery of the universe than any machine that ever was on land or sea” (539). In that vein, he regards religion as a potentially beautiful expression of humanity’s innermost desires, even if he cannot bring himself into the camp of the faithful. He has no use for the iconoclasts who tear down religion for being untrue, preferring those who “leave undisturbed the myths that so comfort and inspire the life of the people; and perhaps he will a little envy them their hope” (544).

For Santayana, the great problem of philosophy was that an increasingly complex society required organizing principles which could not possibly have an objective existence, as anything beyond the family (and even that, to an extent) was what is now called a social construction. Democracy threatened to make matters far worse with its insistence on flattering the prejudices of the masses. Unlike Nietzsche, he does not yearn for a pre-democratic age, but does hope for a system that can find its wisest and most capable for its elected leaders.

William James is a more thoroughly American figure, the inventor of what has been called the most American of philosophic traditions, pragmatism. He was the brother of the novelist Henry James, who had a much greater European sensibility. Impatient with excessive abstractions, James’s pragmatism sought “truth as an objective relation, as once good and beauty had been; now what if truth, like these, were also relative to human judgment and human needs?” (557). Given the unknowability of natural law, the next best thing was to figure out which ideas were most beneficial to the individual, society, and humanity at large. An example is religious tolerance: It cannot be proven whether there is a god, but surely it is better for a society to tolerate a multitude of religious perspectives and their own version of the truth rather than insist upon the imposition of one (or none) upon the others. Pluralism also allows for multiple visions of the truth to interact with one another, producing new syntheses, whereas “a monistic world is for us a dead world” (561). James was quintessentially American in his desire to “cut through the cobwebs that had entangled philosophy” (565) and build a consensus on the foundations of common sense.

Finally, John Dewey made his mark as a philosopher of education. A devoted student of evolution with little regard for metaphysics, he tended to dismiss his philosophic forebears who did not share his commitment to naturalism as no better than medieval Scholastics. He fully embraced the modernist faith that “the problem of philosophy is not how we can come to know an external world, but how we can learn to control it and remake it” (569, emphasis added). This belief extended to the human person, whom Dewey regarded as almost entirely malleable, especially at a young age, given how much of life is socially constructed. It is incumbent upon adults to change what they think they know about the world to prepare children for a new and better world.

It is on this basis that Dewey accepts democracy—a rare quality among philosophers—both because he believes “the aim of a political order is to help the individual to develop himself completely” (572) and because of his confidence that the public at large can one day internalize the wisdom normally reserved for a philosophic elite. Should such internalization succeed, then philosophers would be kings, and everyone would be a king.