For Kremplewska, “ny consideration of selfhood in Santayana must take into account the fact that a naturalistic and quasi-pragmatic philosophy of action precedes and – to some extent – determines the shape of his mature ontology” (29). Her approach is also hermeneutic in the sense that she seeks to reveal the tacit historical, psychological, and moral motivations that purportedly led Santayana to his ontological categories of the being of essence, the existence of matter, the actuality of spirit or consciousness, and the eternality of truth. (The metaphor is borrowed from Bergson and grafted onto Santayana.) The notions of emerging and grafting are rather different, but Kremplewska’s main point appears to be that the human self in Santayana’s system is a conditioned reality. She sums up this idea with the unusual phrase contained in the title of her book, “life as insinuation,” a metaphor she defines as “introducing something alien into something else, of grafting something upon something else” (97). First, there is her thesis that Santayana’s notion of the self is not an independent substance or ego, but an entity that “emerges” via the process of interpreting the world (17). Her book is positively teeming with ideas, but the central themes she addresses after reconstructing Santayana’s conception of the self are his views about of the tragic conception of human life his account of human freedom and flourishing and his analysis of the self in relation to social and political life.Ģ Kremplewska’s study of Santayana’s philosophy is hermeneutic in at least a couple of respects. Kremplewska draws widely from the history of philosophy and the breadth of her discussions are impressive. Her aim is not only to reconstruct Santayana’s conception of the self, but also show how it provides the basis for understanding a number of key ideas in his philosophy of life or what she calls “contemplative vitalism” – a fitting term intended to capture both the material and the spiritual dimensions of Santayana’s philosophy (xiv). More specifically, she explains that she is undertaking an inquiry “into the latter in the context of the former” (xvi). 1 In her introduction to Life as Insinuation: George Santayana’s Hermeneutics of Finite Life and Human Self, Katarzyna Kremplewska states that the general aim of her book is “reconstructing George Santayana’s conception of human self as embedded in a larger project of philosophy of life” (xi).
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