Dr. Williams Demonstrates Santayanan "Spiritual" Vision

Dr. Williams's "so much" is what Santayana called "living in the eternal." That life is a visionary mode: learning to see through our symbolic appropriations of things (what Williams termed "the idea of the thing") to the point where we can see them for "what they are in themselves" (Williams's "the thing itself"). And "what they are in themselves" remains a symbolic appropriation (Santayana was no naive realist; he understood this sort of transfiguration of sense perception is inescapable) but, seen sub specie aeternatis, it is recognized as such. Re-cognition at this level of sophistication is effected by divesting the symbol so acquired of personal interest.

Santayanan spiritual vision is a variety of Schopenhauerian liberation.