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culture. Anton sees that the only spectator able to maintain safe distance
from the steady flow of pathÊmata, is dispassionate logos,
usually arriving late, just as it does in the course of human development,
to direct the drama of history. It remains to see the reception
and development of Plato and the Platonic tradition during the first
part of the twentieth century as they are presented and evaluated by
Anton's first hand information. His evaluative comments include
Santayana, Woodbridge, John Dewey, Randal and Irwin Edman. 12
(a) Santayana, who taught courses on Plato and Aristotle at
Harvard, was the first to present a defense and espouse advocacy of
Greek philosophy as a rational mode of life in the five volumes of
his The Life of Reason (1905—1906). The work was inspired by
a blending Hegelian phenomenology and Plato with Aristotelian
ethics and aimed to project the full story of the progress of the human
mind. It was the closest any American thinker had ever come
to understanding the naturalism of the Greeks, especially at a time,
as he stated, when “the philosophical and political departments at
Harvard had not yet discovered Plato and Aristotle". His defense of
Plato against Lotze's position that Plato's ideas were abstractions,
Santayana thought it a distortion of Plato: “His (Plato's) ideas were
not abstractions but types, goals of thought, things we mean to
speak of when we have thoughts… something transcendent that our
thoughts aim at." 13 The canvas on which Santayana draws his tribute
to Socrates' contribution is on Reason in Common Sense: “Having
developed in the spirit the consciousness of its meanings and
purposes, Socrates rescued logic and ethics for ever from authority…".
Santayana's intuitive approach to Plato's “sublimest expression"
of the Socratic ethics is similar to the Eastern aesthetic approach
to Plato (see Keping Wang above). Plato, as a true Greek lover
of beauty wished it to flourish in the real world. This, for Santayana,
is Reason as Art. According to Anton, Santayana is viewing
Plato as a thinker who has accepted the flux of the immediate and
12 On Santayana, see Anton's essay on “Naturalism and the Platonic Tradition"
in American Naturalism & Greek Philosophy, Chapter 10, pp. 287—301,
which also includes “Woodbridge and Plato's Philosophy", “John Dewey and Platonism",
“Randal on Plato and Plotinus" and “Irwin Edman on Plato and Plotinus"
and which are of utmost importance for our research. All wrote provocative interpretations
using American naturalism as their stance from which to view and evaluate
the Ancient Greek philosophy, particularly, Plato and Neoplatonism. Briefly
stated: the Columbia naturalists read and used the wisdom of the Greeks as a tool
to resolve conflicts in the present. Plato, above all, became relevant to the social
and cultural concerns of the Columbians.
13 Lotze's System of Philosophy, ed. Paul Grimley Kuntz, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1971, pp. 44—45.
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