Santayana: Reality and First Premise
Epistemology, or the study of knowledge, has dogged Western philosophy since ancient times. Attempts to establish absolute truths fall prey, time and again, to the subjective nature of human being. If knowledge of a thing is 'felt' through tactile senses and stored in imperfect brain, then we can not know a thing precisely as someone else knows the thing. Therefore, there is no objective truth of the thing.
Many philosophers and religions make use of this and take it further to, essentially, destroy the world. We, poor creatures we are, can not know if we live in illusion of living. As with the popular movie, 'the Matrix has us.' It matters not what illusion is projected. It may be the Matrix, God's sandbox or merely a dream. We can not, they say, objectively establish existence as real.
Another long-standing problem for Western epistemology is first premise. The Greeks bestowed this inheritance. Briefly, if we assert a fact, we must substantiate it with previous facts and those facts in turn must be justified, ad infinitum. Following a chain of facts we invariably arrive at a point, usually the nature of existence itself, where no further facts can be proven. This, too, cripples the potential for knowledge since all facts are ultimately groundless.
In the opening paragraph of Novum Organum, Francis Bacon briefly considers the problem of absolute truth versus no truths at all. He shrugs off the problem as one of ridiculous extremes and opts for a middle road. He then proceeds to lay the foundations of modern science.
But even science can not relieve the problem.
"The laws formulated by science - the transitive figments describing the relation between fact and fact - possess only a Platonic sort of reality. They are more real, if you will, than the facts themselves, because they are more permanent, trustworthy, and pervasive; but at the same time they are, if you will, not real at all, because they are incompatible with immediacy and alien to brute existence." --- Santayana
According to Santayana, every life including man, either in thought or by action, possesses an arational belief in the natural world which he calls "animal faith." It is from this arational basis that any claim of knowledge derives. Biology, even non-conscious biology, operates with this belief even though it is "radically incapable of proof."
Another way of looking at Santayana's approach is to realize that while we can not by prior fact establish the basis for 'animal faith', we DO establish subsequent facts from that faith. Life acts 'as if' the physical world is true and possesses some set of laws of regularity.
This gives rise to Santayana's unphilosophical-sounding, but necessary and appropriate, animal declaration "that there is a world, there is a future, that things sought can be found, and things seen can be eaten."
Santayana's conclusion is not new. Bacon's pragmatic shrug is not far off the same mark and many others have said that the universe is simply what we have to work with. Perhaps of interest in Santayana's case is the separation and relation between the physical and life systems. It is through life that the physical reality of existence is established. And it is through our animal faith in that existence that all subsequent knowledge is born.
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Originally Posted by Jack
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