Post-Foundationalist Religion

In a lecture delivered in Turin, Italy, on September 21 2005, Richard Rorty invoked George Santayana in an effort to describe "post-foundationalist religion." Rorty noted that Santayana defined "superstition" as "the confusion of an ideal with power. Superstition, he said, is the belief that any legitimate ideal must somehow be grounded in something already actual, something transcendent that sets this ideal before us. What the pope calls the structure of human existence is an example of such a transcendent entity. Santayana said, and I agree, that only the source of moral ideals is the human imagination."

"Santayana hoped that human beings would eventually give up the idea that moral ideals must be grounded in something larger than ourselves. He hoped that we would come to think of all such ideals as human creations and none the worse for that. Santayana's claim that imagination is a good enough source for the ideal led him to say that religion and poetry are identical in essence. He used the term 'poetry' in an expansive sense to mean something like 'product of the imagination.' He used the word 'religion' in an equally large sense to include political idealism, aspirations to make the life of a community radically different, radically better than it had been before. Poetry, Santayana said, is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion when it merely supervenes upon life is seen to be nothing but poetry. Neither poetry nor religion, Santayana believed, should be thought of as telling us about something that is already real" Richard Rorty, An Ethics For Today, New York: Columbia University Press (2011), 8-9.