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man. Thus, there is in man a hierarchy in the
modes in which the world is perceived,
which evolves through an ascensive movement,
by means of which reason leads
towards the Absolute: from sensory knowledge
to rational knowledge, Santayana
shows, man’s spirit ascends successive levels
which each time introduce new intellectual
necessities, that are ever more elaborate,
the last level possible being spiritual
knowledge, which implies the process of
transcending by aesthetic and mystical contemplation
3 .
It is not by accident that we here compare
a man of science (Prigogine) with a
man of letters (Santayana): the boundary
between literature/art/the humanities and
science is largely artificial, the two vast
fields being closely connected in that scientific
discoveries often take place through
artistic/creative imagination, while artistic
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Mihai A. Stroe
creativity often is the result of profound
knowledge of physical phenomena or
“facts”. The two are aspects of spirit, forming
a unifying dialectics, which justifies the
thesis that the role of literature and art in
general must be reconsidered in modern
science, just as the role of science in general
must be reevaluated in modern literary
studies – something that is already happening,
as can bee seen in recent works (which
seem to be increasingly more numerous
every year) such as Pamela Gossin’s
Encyclopedia of Literature and Science (2002).
In the system of one of the most famous
of the romantic poets, William Blake, mystical
contemplation was precisely a defining
capacity of the true spiritual man, as is suggested
by Santayana. In other words, man’s
cognitive “ascent” implies an increase of the
global structural complexity of the human
being (i.e. a spiritual evolution), and,
through it, implicitly of integral reality (see
for instance Teilhard de Chardin: the law of
complexity and of conscience: “the more
complexity, the more conscience” 4 ).
With this work, Santayana seems to have
anticipated also Ken Wilber’s idea regarding
integral semiotics: Wilber shows that in
“integral reality” there are more hierarchic
cognitive spaces, the emotional, magic,
mythical, rational, existential, psychic, subtle,
causal, nondual. Wilber’s emotional,
rational and nondual spaces approximately
correspond to Santayana’s three types of
knowledge. The consequence implied by
this idea is that in essence reality is psychiccognitive
in nature (something that C. G.
Jung demonstrated empirically) and hierarchically
ordered in accordance with laws of
increasing structural complexity, a phenomenon
forming the basis of Arthur Koestler’s
and Ken Wilber’s holonic-holarchic theory
(in this theory, holons are entities that are
simultaneously parts and wholes).
Similar to Prigogine’s theory, chaos theory
studies the behaviour of dynamic lifeless
systems (for instance, air and water cur-
3 Cf. George Santayana, The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress, 5 vol., 1952-1953, apud Denis
Huisman, Dicþionar de opere majore ale filosofiei, 2001, p. 471.
4 Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality – The Spirit of Evolution, 1995, p. 113.