SANTAYANA, GEORGE 1863-1952

Philosopher

Who Is Santayana?

In an article titled "Who Is Santayana?" published in the Saturday Review of Literature in January 1956, Charles Frankel wrote, "I am inclined to believe that what happens to Santayana's reputation will be the touchstone of the quality of our culture, and of our growth in maturity and wisdom." That George Santayana, Spanish by birth and passport, American "in practice" as a writer and teacher, and resident of Italy during the final twenty-eight years of his life, could inspire such a quote, along with poems of tribute from Wallace Stevens and Robert Lowell, indicates that he was a man of letters of enormous stature. He is known as a philosopher, but in essence he was a little of everything in the writing trade, an ascetic man who resisted a move by one man to nominate him for a Nobel Prize by asking, "In what science or art could I be said to have accomplished anything? Literature? Philosophy? It is doubtful." What is not doubtful is his stature as a prolific writer and thinker, among the giants of twentieth-century American thought.

Spain and Boston

He was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1863 and was raised in Avila, Spain, until the age of nine. His mother and his two sisters moved to Boston in 1869, leaving George with his father, though three years later Agustín Santayana followed his wife, reuniting the family in Boston in 1872. George was nine years old and spoke no English. Despite his age, he was initially placed in a kindergarten in order to learn English, but eventually he learned the language from his sister Susana, with whom he would maintain a close relationship. His father returned to Spain a year later, the same year that George entered a public school. In 1874, already fluent in English, George entered the prestigious Boston Latin School, from which he graduated in 1882. That fall he began attending Harvard College, with which he would be affiliated for the next thirty years. The young Santayana blossomed at Harvard. He drew cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon, and joined several clubs including art, chess, and Phi Beta Kappa. He acted on the stage, was a founding member of the Harvard Monthly, and was president of the Philosophical Club. His Harvard years included visits to his father in Spain in 1883 and travels through Europe. He studied at Harvard under William James, who influenced him greatly. Following graduation in 1886, Santayana and classmate Charles Strong traveled to Germany to study, but Santayana returned a year later and pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy. He finished in 1889 and his formal education ended, though he had not really decided on a career. In a sense learning was his career. Teaching was simply a necessity.

Professor

Santayana was offered a course to teach when William James became overburdened with work in 1889. Thus began Santayana's twenty-three-year teaching career in the Philosophy Department at Harvard. Once a student of James's, Santayana became a colleague. Among his students over the years would be poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, and T. S. Eliot and political essayist Walter Lippmann. Though most remembered him as a good teacher, Santayana was quick to retire from the work once he had the opportunity. His real love was writing, and his years as a Harvard professor were marked by mixed successes as a poet and the early development of his early philosophical ideas. His first published book, Sonnets and Other Verses (1894), was not well received, but his second, The Sense of Beauty (1896), an attempt at a complete statement of aesthetics, was praised by critics. The influence of James was present in Santayana's use of psychology to conceive a philosophy. Beauty was "pleasure objectified," in Santayana's words, a three-part combination of the materials of an art-work, its form, and its ability to display expression. Material and form were intrinsic to the object, while expression is a result of mental associations that result from the suggestions of the work. Santayana would further develop his aesthetic ideas in Reason in Art (1905), volume four of his five-volume The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress (1906-1917). The Sense of Beauty made Santayana's reputation and prior to The Life of Reason was his most successful work. He wrote another unsuccessful book of poetry and a failed drama in the 1890s and furthered his study at King's College, Cambridge, during a leave of absence from Harvard. In 1893 the deaths of a close friend, Warwick Potter, and his father put Santayana through a "passage through dark night," as he called it. The period made Santayana look even more inward. He began to live a simple life free from material concerns, a self-sufficient life of the mind. His chance to do so permanently came in 1912 with the death of his mother. She left him a small inheritance of $10,000, enough to allow Santayana to resign from Harvard and free himself for travel and learning. His years as a wandering student and writer began.

Influence

Even though Santayana's career as a teacher ended in 1912, he remained throughout the 1910s one of the most influential American philosophers. His ethical idealism served as a counterpart to the pragmatic philosophy of James and the instrumentalism of John Dewey, both of which emphasized the necessity of testing truth through experience. Young cultural radicals such as Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, and Van Wyck Brooks, who in the 1910s were critiquing the moral underpinnings of industrial capitalism, found in Santayana a guide and a soul mate.

Wanderer

The period between Santayana's resignation from Harvard and the outbreak of U.S. involvement in World War I in 1917 was one of restless traveling. He likened himself to a student in the Middle Ages, wandering from city to city in order to learn, with no practical applications for his knowledge. He would settle in England during the war and witness its horrors at relatively close range, wavering before choosing to support the Allies, In 1914 he published Appearances: Notes of Travel, East and West, and during the war he wrote Egotism in German Philosophy, an analysis and critique of the German nation, but as a whole, the war years were his least productive. The publication of The Life of Reason in 1905-1906 seemed to have closed out the first stage of his philosophical work, to which he would return in the early 1920s. When the war ended, Santayana traveled to Spain, only to find disillusionment. Politics strained his relations with his sister Susana, who had been an ardent supporter of Germany. Though he would always keep his Spanish passport, Santayana rarely visited again, and never again after 1928.

Philosopher Again

In 1922 Santayana published Scepticism and Animal Faith, one of his major philosophical statements and a recasting of his previous work. The work is transitional in that it serves as an introduction to the ideas that Santayana would discuss in his four-volume Realms of Being, published between 1927 and 1940. Essentially, he argues against logic and the senses. They cannot be trusted. But such deep skepticism is dangerous; thus, Santayana argues, a confidence, what he calls "animal faith," must be created by each individual in order to function meaningfully in the world. The work was an introduction to what Santayana would deem "essence," the cornerstone of his Realms of Being. Essences were concepts, unknowables, that could still be used in existence. In fact, the first volume of Realms of Being, titled The Realm of Essence, expands the notion and attempts to complete Santayana's philosophy. The subsequent volumes are mere addenda to this first important volume, Santayana had settled in Rome in 1924 in order to work on his final major philosophical statement. Rome would be his home until his death in 1952, though he continued to travel extensively between the two world wars.

An Old Philosopher in Rome

Rome proved to be a fruitful place for Santayana to settle through the 1930s. As Europe careened toward yet another major war, Santayana worked vigorously on Realms of Being while also writing the best-selling novel The Last Puritan, published in 1936. Its subtitle, A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, indicated that it was as much biography as fiction. It was hugely successful, and Santayana's career had managed to surprise again. He was shown on the cover of Time magazine. He had become an international celebrity, and celebrity brought visitors. Santayana became the old philosopher in Rome, receiving visitors frequently and generously as long as they did not disrupt his work schedule. He began his autobiography, Persons and Places, and when the war broke out he found refuge in a nursing home convent, operated by the Blue Nuns in Rome. It would be his final home. Santayana had one more best-seller in him. In March 1947 he published The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, which sold out the day of its publication. During the war he had begun reading the Bible again. Santayana's book found the life of Christ a poetic force, not an historic one. Though he believed Jesus of Nazareth was based on some historic figure, he refuted the Protestant insistence on the veracity of the gospels. The work was an application of Santayana's early religious philosophy applied to a text. He had always seen religion as poetry and myth, inspirational and beautiful but not to be taken literally. "Religion is a symbolic representation of moral reality," he had written in Reason in Religion. He identified God with the natural world, not nature as wildness, but natural as in that which exists. He was sympathetic to pantheism and held no denominational beliefs. His naturalism was summed up in a tribute by Spanish poet Jorge Guillen:

He looks to matter for his faith,
And Spanish by birth, English by language,
In the solitude of his eminence
Untrammeled, he is aware of the lay world
Without gods. Truth gives him serenity.

Santayana died in 1952 at the age of eighty-nine.

Source:

John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1987).

George Santayana

George Santayana (1863-1952), Spanish and American philosopher, developed a personal form of critical realism that was skeptical, materialistic, and humanistic.

George Santayana was unique among American and European philosophers during his long lifetime. While others strove to make philosophy "scientific" and to apply philosophy and science to society, Santayana proclaimed, "My philosophy neither is nor wishes to be scientific." He rejected the inherited genteel tradition in American thought as well as his contemporaries' pragmatism, idealism, and positivism. He openly disliked the liberal and democratic drift of Western civilization. In his philosophy he strove to combine philosophical materialism and a deep concern for spiritual values. A prolific writer with a graceful style, he also published several volumes of poetry, and his most popular book was a novel, TheLast Puritan (1936). He is singular among American philosophers for the special flavor of his thought and for his treatment of religion and art.

Life, Career, and Personality

As a girl Santayana's mother was taken to the Philippines, where she met and married George Sturgis, a Bostonian. Santayana later observed that this "set the background for my whole life." After being widowed, she tried to settle in Boston with her children but soon returned to Spain and remarried. The only child of this marriage was born in Madrid on Dec. 16, 1863, and christened Jorge Agustin de Santayana. He lived until the age of 9 in Á vila with his father, a lawyer and student of painting, then joined his mother, who was raising the children of her first marriage in Boston. Although he visited his father in Á vila and traveled in Europe frequently, Santayana lived and wrote in America for the next 40 years. As a boy he was quiet, studious, and lonely.

In spite of his connection to the Boston Sturgises and his American education, Santayana never felt fully at home in the United States. Indeed, he never felt fully at home anywhere. Dark-eyed, gentle, unobtrusive, witty, and very detached, he described himself as "a stranger at heart." His philosophy is clearly marked by a sense of detachment. "I have been involuntarily uprooted," he explained without regret. "I accept the intellectual advantages of that position, with its social and moral disqualifications."

Santayana's years at Harvard College, which he attended after Boston Latin School, were generally happy and satisfying. After graduating from Harvard in 1886, he studied philosophy in Germany. He returned to America in 1888 and completed the work for his doctorate in philosophy under the direction of Josiah Royce at Harvard. In 1889 Santayana joined Harvard's department of philosophy, with the apparent intention of retiring as soon as it was financially possible. When he inherited a modest legacy, he resigned his professorship in 1912.

Santayana lived the remainder of his life in Europe, traveling extensively and eventually settling in Italy. He spent his final years in Calvary Hospital, Rome, under the care of the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary. He died on Sept. 26, 1952.

His Philosophy

Santayana's true life was intellectual. "My career was not my life," he wrote. "Mine has been a life of reflection." His philosophy reflected the diversity of his own experience. Spanish Catholic by cultural inheritance and personal inclination, Protestant American by education and environment, disengaged by circumstances and temperament, he regarded his philosophy as a synthesis of these traditions. It is not surprising that his philosophy is full of ironies and ambiguities. At the same time, he was consistent in his concerns, if not in his opinions, and in the mood and tone of his philosophy. His primary orientation was spiritual, although not in the conventional sense, and his primary interest was moral, in the broadest sense.

The philosophy of Santayana is characterized by its skepticism, materialism, and humanism. His skepticism is evident throughout his writings: "My matured conclusion has been that no system is to be trusted, not even that of science in any literal or pictorial sense; but all systems may be used and, up to a certain point, trusted as symbols." His materialism or naturalism was "the foundation for all further serious opinions." Unlike that of so many contemporaries, Santayana's materialism depended not on science but on his own experiences and observations, for which he found philosophical confirmation in the works of Democritus, Lucretius, and Spinoza. In addition, in Greek ethics he found a vindication of order and beauty in human institutions and ideas. His systematic reading and thought culminated in the writing of his masterwork, The Life of Reason (5 vols., 1905-1906), which he intended as a critical history of the human imagination. He developed his philosophy further in Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), which served as an introduction to his philosophical consummation, Realms of Being (4 vols., 1927-1940).

Santayana's materialism, the foundation of his philosophy, was the conviction that matter is the source of everything; he held that there are purely natural or materialistic causes of all the phenomena of existence. Consequently, thought is the product of material organization and process. Throughout The Life of Reason he assumed that the whole life of reason was generated and controlled by the animal life of man in the bosom of nature. One critic has described him as a nondeterministic fatalist who believed that dark, irrational, impersonal powers determined events. The human mind could not affect nature. Santayana wrote, "We are creatures and not creators." This important feature of his thought is clear in his conception of essences, which he defined as the obvious features that distinguish facts from each other. Apart from the events they may figure in, essences have no existence. Ironically, the mind cannot know existence; it can know only essences. This means that there is no necessary relation between what is perceived (or thought) and what exists. Consequently, "The whole life of imagination and knowledge comes from within." It is no wonder that Santayana was thoroughly skeptical about the possibility of attaining genuine knowledge.

It is also no wonder that Santayana believed that the works of the imagination "alone are good; and [that] the rest—the whole real world—is ashes in its mouth." Religion, science, art, philosophy were all works of the imagination. But religion he regarded as "the head and front of everything." In spite of his sympathies, Santayana was not a practicing Catholic and did not believe in the existence of God. He considered religion a work of the imagination: "Religion is valid poetry infused into common life." The truth of religion was irrelevant, for all religions were imaginative, poetic interpretations of experience and ideals, not descriptions of existing things. The value of religion was moral, as was the value of art.

Beauty, to Santayana, was a moral good. He valued the arts precisely because they are illusory. Like religion, he explained, genuine art expresses ideals that are relevant to human conditions. "Of all reason's embodiments," Santayana exulted, "art is … the most splendid and complete." "This is all my message," he wrote by way of summary, "that morality and religion are expressions of human nature; that human nature is a biological growth; and finally that spirit, fascinated and tortured, is involved in the process, and asks to be saved."

His Influence

Santayana had few disciples, but his philosophy has attracted considerable critical attention since his death. The grace and beauty of his prose and the strength of his intellect partly account for this interest. In addition, in the intellectual climate of the years following World War II his philosophy of disillusion struck a sympathetic chord. Santayana, like others of his generation, found himself confronted with a choice between Catholicism and complete disillusion. He did not hesitate or complain: "I was never afraid of disillusion, and I have chosen it."

Further Reading

Santayana's autobiography, Persons and Places (3 vols., 1944-1953), reveals his personality, character, and some of his key ideas. It is supplemented by his Letters, edited by Daniel Cory (1955). An excellent anthology is Irwin Edman, ed., The Philosophy of Santayana: Selections from All the Works of George Santayana (1936; rev. ed. 1953).

Valuable critical and descriptive essays on his philosophy and Santayana's replies are in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of George Santayana (1940; 2d ed. 1951). Although there is no full intellectual biography of Santayana, Mossie M. Kirkwood, Santayana: Saint of the Imagination (1961), is a pleasant introduction. Willard E. Arnett, George Santayana (1968), compares Santayana's philosophy with that of his contemporaries. □

George Santayana , 1863–1952, American philosopher and poet, b. Madrid, Spain.

Life

Santayana emigrated to the United States in 1872. A graduate of Harvard (1886), he taught in the department of philosophy from 1889 until 1912. After resigning from Harvard he returned to Europe, eventually settling in Italy where he lived in a convent after the outbreak of World War II until his death. He detached himself from the social turmoil of the 20th cent., secluding himself from relationships with either people or events.

Philosophy

Santayana's philosophic stance has been given the apparently opposite descriptions of materialism and Platonism. The contradiction is partly understandable as resulting from his view of the mind as being firmly placed in and responsive to a physical, biological context, and his simultaneous emphasis on and high evaluation of the mind's rational and imaginative vision of physical reality. In an important early work, The Sense of Beauty (1896), he enunciated a qualified hedonism that placed high value on aesthetic pleasure; it was a pleasure that was understood to be an irrational expression of vital interests but was distinguished from direct, sensual pleasures.

The Life of Reason (1905–6) investigates the mind's evolving attempts to define its relationship to its natural context. In that work he saw the relationship of thought and reality as one of ideal correspondence. Santayana's earlier work is marked by a psychological approach to the life of the mind. With the publication of Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and The Realms of Being, a four-volume work ( The Realm of Essence, 1927; The Realm of Matter, 1930; The Realm of Truth, 1937; The Realm of Spirit, 1940; 1-vol. ed. 1942), he adopted a more classical philosophic approach, making ontological distinctions between the objects of mental activity. Against Cartesian skepticism and idealism he advanced the notion of "animal faith" as the basis of the life of reason.

Religion he viewed as an imaginative creation of real value but without absolute significance. Although he continued to value imaginative and rational consciousness he warned against the mind's tendency to confer substantial reality and causal efficacy on its own creations. His personal withdrawal from active life was paralleled in his philosophy by a decided moral detachment. The whole of Santayana's philosophic writing displays a characteristic richness of style; he also wrote poetry, a volume of which appeared in 1923. His only novel, The Last Puritan (1935), had great popular success. His Dominations and Powers, on political philosophy, was published in 1951.

Bibliography

See The Works of George Santayana (15 vol., 1936–40) and The Philosophy of Santayana, ed. by I. Edman (rev. ed. 1953, repr. 1973); his letters (ed. by D. Cory, 1955; repr. 1973); his memoirs, Persons and Places (3 vol., 1944–53). See also B. J. Singer, The Rational Society (1970); T. N. Munson, The Essential Wisdom of George Santayana (1962, repr. 1983); W. E. Arnett, Santayana and the Sense of Beaury (1955, repr. 1984).

Santayana, George (1863–1952). Spanish-American philosopher and man of letters. Santayana was born in Madrid to Spanish parents and always kept his Spanish nationality, but he was educated in the USA, wrote in English, and is generally considered American by adoption. He graduated from Harvard University in 1886 and taught philosophy there from 1889 until 1912. In that year his mother died, leaving him an inheritance sufficient to retire on, and he spent the rest of his life in Europe, first in England, then Paris, and finally Rome, where he settled in 1925. He was regarded as one of the most eminent philosophers of his day and he had distinguished friends, but he preferred to lead a secluded existence, spending his final years in a convent. Santayana's varied literary output included a novel, an autobiography, poetry, and literary criticism, as well as philosophical works. In these he avoided technical terms and he was admired for his unpedantic style. His ideas on art were part of an overall theory of values embracing morals and rational living, although as he became more withdrawn from the world, his views became more morally detached. His best-known book is The Theory of Beauty (1896), in which he defined beauty as ‘pleasure objectified’ and argued that the justification of art is that it adds to human happiness. Some of the analogies between the visual arts and music that he expressed here looked forward to abstract art. He developed his aesthetic ideas further in Reason in Art (1905), part of a five-volume treatise entitled The Life of Reason (1905–6).

Santayana, George (b Madrid, 16 Dec. 1863; d Rome, 26 Sept. 1952). Spanish-American philosopher and man of letters. He spent most of his life in Europe and always kept his Spanish nationality, but he was educated in the USA, wrote in English, and is generally considered American by adoption. His literary output included a novel, an autobiography, poetry, and literary criticism, as well as philosophical works. In these he avoided technical terms and he was admired for his unpedantic style. His ideas on art were part of an overall theory of values embracing morals and rational living, although as he became more withdrawn from the world (he spent his final years in a convent), his views became more morally detached. His best-known book is The Theory of Beauty (1896), in which he defined beauty as ‘pleasure objectified’ and argued that the justification of art is that it adds to human happiness. Some of the analogies between the visual arts and music that he expressed here looked forward to abstract art.

Santayana, George (1863–1952) US philosopher and poet, b. Spain. After 1939, Santayana withdrew from the world – a seclusion reflected in the moral detachment of his writing. He stressed both the biological nature of the mind and its creative and rational powers. His works include The Sense of Beauty (1896), The Life of Reason (1905–06), Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923), and the popular novel The Last Puritan (1935).