## 1. Biography




Santayana's heritage is rooted in the Spanish diplomatic society
with its stress on high education and familiarity with the world
community. He was born in Madrid, Spain, on 16 December 1863. His
father, Agustin Santayana, was born in 1812. The father studied
law and practiced for a short time before entering the colonial service
for posting to the Philippines. While studying law, Agustin
served an apprenticeship to a professional painter of the school of
Goya and a number of his paintings remain in the private possession of
the family. He translated four Senecan tragedies into Spanish, wrote an
unpublished book about the island of Mindanao, had an extensive
library, and made three trips around the world. In 1845, he became the
governor of Batang, a small island in the Philippines. He took over the
governorship from the recently deceased Jose Borras y
Bofarull, who was the father of Josefina Borras, later to become
Agustin's wife in 1861 and the mother of George Santayana. His
mother, Josefina Sturgis (formerly Josefina Borras y Carbonell),
was born in Scotland and was the daughter of a Spanish diplomat.
Previously she married George Sturgis (d. 1857), a Boston merchant,
whose early death left her alone with children in Manila. There were
five children from this first marriage, three of whom survived infancy.
She promised her first husband to raise the children in Boston where
she moved her family. During a holiday in Spain, Josefina met
Agustin again, and they were married in 1861. He was fifty years
of age and she was probably thirty-five. In 1863, Santayana was
christened Jorge Agustin Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana y
Borras. His half sister, Susan, insisted that he be called
"George," after her Boston father. Santayana, in turn,
always referred to his sister in the Spanish, "Susana."



**1863-1886.** Santayana lived eight years in Spain,
forty years in Boston, and forty years in Europe. In his autobiography,
*Persons and* Places, Santayana divides his life into three
phases. The background (1863-1886) encompasses his childhood in Spain
through his undergraduate years at Harvard. The second period
(1886-1912) is that of the Harvard graduate student and professor with
a trans-Atlantic penchant for traveling to Europe. The third period
(1912-1952) is the retired professor writing and traveling in Europe
and eventually establishing Rome as his home.




The family moved from Madrid to Avila where Santayana spent
his boyhood. In 1869, Santayana's mother left Spain in order to raise
the Sturgis children in Boston, keeping her pledge to her first
husband. In 1872, his father realized the opportunities for his son
were better in Boston, and he moved there with his son. Finding Boston
inhospitable, puritanical, and cold, the father returned alone to
Avila within a few months. The separation between father and
mother was permanent. In 1888 Agustin wrote to Josefina:
"When we were married I felt as if it were written that I should
be reunited with you, yielding to the force of destiny. Strange
marriage, this of ours! So you say, and so it is in fact. I love you
very much, and you too have cared for me, yet we do not live
together" (*Persons and Places*, 9).




Until his father's death (1893), Santayana regularly corresponded
with his father and he visited him after Santayana's first year at
Harvard College. In Boston, Santayana's family spoke only Spanish in
their home. Santayana first attended Mrs. Welchman's Kindergarten to
learn English from the younger children, then he was a student at the
Boston Latin School, and he completed his B.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard
College (1882-1889), including eighteen months of study in Germany on a
Walker Fellowship. His undergraduate years at Harvard reveal an
energetic student with an active social life. He was a member of eleven
organizations including *The Lampoon* (largely as a cartoonist),
the *Harvard Monthly* (a founding member), the Philosophical
Club (President), and the Hasty Pudding.




Some scholars conclude that Santayana was an active homosexual based
on allusions in Santayana's early poetry (McCormick, 49-52) and
Santayana's association with known homosexual and bisexual friends.
Santayana provides no clear indication of his sexual preferences, and
he never married. Attraction to both women and men seems apparent in
his undergraduate and graduate correspondence. The one documented
comment about his homosexuality occurs when he was sixty-five. After a
discussion of A. E. Housman's poetry and homosexuality, Santayana
remarked, "I think I must have been that way in my Harvard days --
although I was unconscious of it at the time" (Cory, *Santayana: The
Later Years*, 40). Because of Santayana's well-known frankness,
many scholars consider Santayana a latent homosexual based on this
evidence.



**1886-1912.** Santayana received his Ph.D. from
Harvard in 1889 and became a faculty member at Harvard University
(1889-1912) and eventually a central figure in the era now called
Classical American Philosophy. He was a highly respected and popular
teacher, and his students included poets (Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot,
Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens), journalists and writers (Walter
Lippmann, Max Eastman, Van Wyck Brooks), professors (Samuel Eliot
Morison, Harry Austryn Wolfson), a Supreme Court Justice (Felix
Frankfurter), many diplomats (including his friend Bronson Cutting),
and a university president (James B. Conant). He retired from Harvard
in 1912 at the age of forty-eight and lived the remainder of his life
in England and Europe, never returning to the U.S. and rejecting
academic posts offered at a number of universities, including Harvard,
Columbia, and Cambridge.




Santayana cherished academic life for its freedom to pursue
intellectual interests and curiosity, but he found that many aspects
of being a professor infringed on that freedom. Faculty meetings and
university committees seemed primarily to be partisan heat over false
issues, so he rarely attended them. The general corporate and
businesslike adaptation of universities was increasingly less
conducive to intellectual development and growth. He expressed concern
about the evolving Harvard goal of producing muscular intellectuals to
lead America as statesmen in business and government. Were not delight
and celebration also a central aspect of education? He wrote to a
friend in 1892, expressing the hope that his academic life would be
"resolutely unconventional" and noted that he could only
be a professor *per accidens*, saying that "I would
rather beg than be one essentially" (GS to H. W. Abbot,
Stoughton Hall, Harvard, 15 February 1892. Columbia).




In 1893, Santayana experienced a *metanoia*, a change of
heart. Gradually he altered his style of life from that of an active
student turned professor to one focused on the imaginative celebration
of life. In doing so, he began planning for his early retirement,
finding university life increasingly less conducive to intellectual
pursuits and delight in living. Three events preceded his
*metanoia*: the unexpected death of a young student, witnessing
his father's death, and the marriage of his sister Susana. Santayana's
reflections on these events led to the ancient wisdom that acceptance
of the tragic leads to a lyrical release. "Cultivate imagination,
love it, give it endless forms, but do not let it deceive you. Enjoy
the world, travel over it, and learn its ways, but do not let it hold
you ... . To possess things and persons in idea is the only pure
good to be got out of them; to possess them physically or legally is a
burden and a snare (*Persons and Places*, 427-28)."




Increasingly, naturalism and the lyrical cry of human imagination
became the focal points of Santayana's life and thought. Pragmatism, as
developed by Peirce and James, was an undercurrent in his naturalism,
particularly as an approach to how we ascertain knowledge, but there
are aspects of his naturalism more aligned with European and Greek
thought that presage developments in the late twentieth century. His
naturalism had its historical roots primarily in Aristotle and Spinoza
and its contemporary background in James's pragmatism and Royce's
idealism. His focus on and celebration of creative imagination in all
human endeavors (particularly in art, philosophy, religion, literature,
and science) is one of Santayana's major contributions to American
thought. This focus, along with his Spanish heritage, Catholic
upbringing, and European suspicion of American industry, set him apart
in the Harvard Yard.




Santayana's strong interest in literature and aesthetics is evident
throughout this early period, but by 1904, his attention turned almost
fully to philosophical pursuits. During this period his publications
include: *Lotze's System of Philosophy* (dissertation),
*Sonnets and Other Verses* (1894), *The Sense of Beauty*
(1896), *Lucifer: A Theological Tragedy* (1899),
*Interpretations of Poetry and Religion* (1900), *A Hermit of
Carmel, and Other Poems* (1901), *The Life of Reason* (five
books, 1905-1906), *Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and
Goethe* (1910).




In May 1911, Santayana formally announced his long-planned
retirement from Harvard. President Lowell asked him to reconsider. By
now Santayana was a highly recognized philosopher, cultural critic,
poet, and teacher, and his desire to be free from academic confinement
was also well known. Lowell indicated he was open to any arrangement
that provided Santayana the time he desired for writing and for travel
in Europe. Initially Santayana agreed to alternate years in Europe and
the U.S., but in 1912, his resolve to retire overtook his sense of
obligation to Harvard. The year before his retirement, he had presented
at least six lectures at a variety of universities including Berkeley,
Wisconsin, Columbia, and Williams. His books were selling well and his
publishers were asking for more. Two major universities were courting
him. At forty-eight, he left Harvard to become a full-time writer and
to escape the academic professionalism that nurtured a university
overgrown with "thistles of trivial and narrow scholarship."



**1912-1952.** As Santayana sailed for Europe, his
mother died, apparently of Alzheimer's disease. Always attentive to his
family, Santayana visited her weekly, then daily, during his last years
at Harvard. Knowing his mother's death was imminent, he arranged for
Josephine, his half sister, to live in Spain with Susana, who
previously had married a well-to-do Avilan. An inheritance of
$10,000 from his mother, coupled with his steady income from
publications and his early planning, made retirement easier. He
arranged for his half brother, Robert, to manage his finances with the
agreement that upon Santayana's death, Robert or his heirs would
receive the bulk of Santayana's estate. Hence, in January 1912, at age
forty-eight, Santayana was free from the constraints of university
regimen and expectations and, more importantly, free to write, to
travel, and to choose his residence and country.




Santayana's book publications after leaving Harvard is remarkable:
*Winds of Doctrine* (1913), *Egotism in German
Philosophy* (1915), *Character and Opinion in the United
States* (1920), *Soliloquies in England and Later
Soliloquies* (1922), *Scepticism and Animal Faith* (1923),
*Dialogues in Limbo* (1926), *Platonism and the Spiritual
Life* (1927), the four books of *The Realms of Being* (1927,
1930, 1938, 1940), *The Genteel Tradition at Bay* (1931),
*Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy* (1933), *The
Last Puritan* (1935), *Persons and Places* (1944), *The
Middle Span* (1945), *The Idea of Christ in the Gospels*
(1946), *Dominations and Powers* (1951), and *My Host the
World* (1953, posthumous).




Harvard attempted to bring him back to the United States, offering
him several professorships beginning in 1917. As late as 1929, he was
offered the Norton Chair in Poetry, one of Harvard's most respected
chairs. In 1931, he received an invitation from Brown University, and
Harvard later asked him to accept the William James Lecturer in
Philosophy, a newly established honorary post. But Santayana never
returned to Harvard or to America. Believing that the academic life was
not a place for him to cultivate intellectual achievement or scholarly
work, Santayana also refused academic appointments both at Oxford
University and Cambridge University.




At first, Santayana planned to reside in Europe, and after numerous
exploratory trips to several cities, he decided on Paris. However,
while he was in England, World War I broke out and he was unable to
return to the mainland. First, he lived in London and then primarily at
Oxford and Cambridge. After the war, he was more of a traveling
scholar, and his principal locales included Paris, Madrid,
Avila, the Riviera, Florence, and Rome. By the late 1920s, he
settled principally in Rome, and during the summers, he often retreated
to Cortina d'Ampezzo in Northern Italy to write and to escape the heat.
Because of his success as a writer, he assisted friends and scholars
when they found themselves in need of financial support. For example,
when Bertrand Russell was unable to find a teaching post in the U.S. or
England because of his views regarding pacifism and marriage, Santayana
displayed a characteristic generosity in his plan to make an anonymous
gift to Bertrand Russell of the $25,000 royalty earnings from *The
Last Puritan*, at the rate of $5,000 per year, in the letter to
George Sturgis (15 July 1937). Despite the fact that he and Russell
disagreed radically both politically and philosophically, his memory of
their earlier friendship and his regard for Russell's genius moved him
to compassion for Russell's financial plight.




The rise of Mussolini in the 1930s initially seemed positive to
Santayana. He viewed the Italian civil society as chaotic and thought
Mussolini might bring order where needed. But Santayana soon noted the
rise of a tyrant. Trying to leave Italy by train for Switzerland, he
was not permitted to cross the border because he did not have the
proper papers. With most of his funds coming from the United States and
England, his case was complicated by his Spanish citizenship and his
age. He returned to Rome, and on 14 October 1941 he entered the Clinica
della Piccola Compagna di Maria, a hospital-clinic run by a Catholic
order of nuns, where he lived until his death eleven years later. This
arrangement was not unusual. The hospital periodically received
distinguished guests and cared for them in an assisted-living
environment. Santayana died of cancer on 26 September 1952.




Santayana asked that he be buried in unconsecrated ground, affirming
his naturalism to the end. However, the only such cemetery ground in
Rome was reserved for criminals. The Spanish Consulate at Rome would
not permit Santayana to be buried in such a place and provided the
"Panteon de la Obra Pia espanola" in the Campo Verano
cemetery as a suitable burial ground, turning it into a memorial for
the lifelong Spanish citizen. At the graveside, Daniel Cory read lines
from Santayana's "The Poet's Testament," a poem affirming his
naturalistic outlook:



> I give back to the earth what the earth gave,
>   
> 
> All to the furrow, nothing to the grave.
>   
> 
> The candle's out, the spirit's vigil spent;
>   
> 
> Sight may not follow where the vision went.




In the United States, Wallace Stevens commemorated his teacher in
"To an Old Philosopher in Rome."



> Total grandeur of a total edifice,
>   
> 
> Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
>   
> 
> For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
>   
> 
> As if the design of all his words takes form
>   
> 
> And frame from thinking and is realized.


## 2. Philosophy, Literature, and Culture




Throughout his life, Santayana's literary achievements are evident.
As an eight-year-old Spaniard, he wrote *Un matrimonio* (A
Married Couple), describing the trip of a newly married couple that
meets the Queen of Spain. Later in Boston, he wrote a poetic parody of
*The Aeneid*; "A Short History of the Class of
'82"; and "Lines on Leaving the Bedford
St. Schoolhouse." His first book, *Sonnets and Other
Verses* (1894), is a book of poems, not philosophy. And, until the
turn of the century, much of his intellectual life was directed to the
writing of verse and drama. He was a principal figure in making
modernism possible but was not a modernist in poetry or
literature. His naturalism and emphasis on constructive imagination
influenced both T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. Eliot's notion of the
"objective correlative" is drawn from Santayana, and
Stevens follows Santayana in his refined naturalism by incorporating
both Platonism and Christianity without any nostalgia for God or
dogma.




Santayana was among the leaders in transforming the American
literary canon, dislodging the dominant Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier,
Holmes, Bryant canon. Santayana's essay "The Genteel Tradition in
American Philosophy" (presented to the Philosophical Union of the
University of California in 1911) greatly affected Van Wyck Brooks's
*America's Coming-of-Age*, a book that set the tone for
modernism. Brooks drew on Santayana's essay, adapting Santayana's idea
of two Americas to fit his notion of an America split between highbrow
and lowbrow culture.


 By the turn of the century, Santayana's interests largely centered
on his philosophical inquiries, and although he never abandoned
writing poetry, he no longer considered it his central work. Even so,
some of his most moving poetry came later and was inspired by the
trench warfare and casualties of World War I: "A Premonition:
Cambridge, October, 1913"; "The Undergraduate Killed in
Battle: Oxford, 1915"; "Sonnet: Oxford, 1916"; and
"The Darkest Hour: Oxford, 1917." Throughout his life,
even near death, he recited and translated long fragments of Horace,
Racine, Leopardi, and others.




The relationships between literature, art, religion and philosophy
are prominent themes throughout Santayana's writings. *The Sense of
Beauty* (1896) is a primary source for the study of aesthetics.
Philip Blair Rice wrote in the foreword to the 1955 Modern Library
edition: "To say that aesthetic theory in America reached
maturity with *The Sense of Beauty* is in no way an
overstatement. Only John Dewey's *Art as Experience* has
competed with it in the esteem of philosophical students of aesthetics
and has approached its suggestiveness for artists, critics and the
public which takes a thoughtful interest in the arts."
Santayana's groundbreaking approach to aesthetics is emphasized in
Arthur Danto's "Introduction" to the 1988 critical edition.
Danto writes that Santayana brings "beauty down to earth"
by treating it as a subject for science and giving it a central role in
human conduct, in contrast to the preceding intellectualist tradition
of aesthetics. "The exaltation of emotion and the naturalization
of beauty -- *especially* of beauty -- imply a revolutionary
impulse for a book it takes a certain violent act of historical
imagination to recover" (*Sense of Beauty*, xxviii). This
naturalistic approach to aesthetics is expanded in his philosophical
explication of art found in *The Life of Reason: Reason in Art*
(1905).




In 1900, Santayana's *Interpretations of Poetry and Religion*
develops his view that religion and poetry are expressive celebrations
of life. Each in its own right is of great value, but if either is
mistaken for science, the art of life is lost along with the beauty of
poetry and religion. Science provides explanations of natural
phenomena, but poetry and religion are festive celebrations of human
life born of consciousness generated from the interaction of one's
psyche (the natural structure and heritable traits of one's physical
body) and the physical environment. As expressions of human values,
poetry and religion are identical in origin. Understanding the
naturalistic base for poetry and religion and valuing their expressive
character enable one to appreciate them without being hoodwinked:
"poetry loses its frivolity and ceases to demoralise, while religion
surrenders its illusions and ceases to deceive" (172). Interestingly,
his father expressed similar views in his letters to his son, providing
the genesis of his son's reflections, and this conclusion is expressed
as late as the 1946 publication of *The Idea of Christ in the
Gospels* where Santayana presents the idea of Christ as poetic and
imaginative, contrasted with attempts at historical, factual accounts
of the Christ figure. The impact of Santayana's view was significant,
and Henry James (after reading *Interpretations of Poetry and
Religion*) wrote that he would "crawl across London" if need be to
meet Santayana.



*Three Philosophical Poets* (1910) was the first volume of
the Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature. Santayana employs a
naturalistic account of poetry and philosophy, attempting to combine
comparative structures with as few embedded parochial assumptions as
possible while making explicit our material boundness to particular
worlds and perspectives. His analyses of Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe
are described by one biographer as "a classical work and one of the few
written in America to be genuinely comparative in conception and
execution, for its absence of national bias and its intellectual,
linguistic, and aesthetic range" (McCormick, 193).




Initially, Santayana appears optimistic about the youthful America.
In his Berkeley lecture, "The Genteel Tradition in American
Philosophy," he declared "the American Will inhabits the
sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial
mansion." ("The Genteel Tradition in American
Philosophy," Triton Edition, vol. VII. P. 129.) European
transcendentalism and Calvinism are the American intellectual
traditions, but they no longer suit the American drive for success in
industry, business, and football. Hence, the youthful willfulness of
the country has outrun the old wits, but there remains a chance for
wisdom and energy to be coupled in a future coherent and rich
tradition, and he sees the beginnings of such a tradition in James's
pragmatism.




Within a decade, he is less optimistic. *Character and Opinion in
the United States* (1920) is his valediction to America. It
includes frank, intellectual portraits of his Harvard colleagues and of
American culture. From his residence in Cambridge, he praises the
English emphasis on social cooperation and personal integrity and
contrasts them with America where "You must wave, you must cheer, you
must push with the irresistible crowd; otherwise you will feel like a
traitor, a soulless outcast, a deserted ship high and dry on the shore
... . This national faith and morality are vague in idea, but
inexorable in spirit; they are the gospel of work and the belief in
progress. By them, in a country where all men are free, every man finds
that what most matters has been settled beforehand" (211).




Santayana's standing as a literary figure reached its zenith with
the publication of *The Last Puritan* (1936). *The Last
Puritan* is Santayana's only novel, and it was an international
success. It was compared positively with Goethe's *Wilhelm
Meister*, Pater's *Marius*, and Mann's *The Magic
Mountain*. Its provenance lies in the 1890s when Santayana began a
series of sketches on college life that, broadened through his
experience and travel, resulted in *The Last Puritan*.
Essentially, it is about the life and early death of an American youth,
Oliver Alden, who is sadly restricted by his Puritanism. Santayana
draws a sharp contrast with the European Mario, who delights in all
matters without a narrow moralism. Mario is a carefree, naturally
gifted and likeable young man who by American standards appears too
focused on the peripheral aspects of life: travel, opera, love affairs,
and architecture. And the American perspective is embodied in the
tragic hero, Oliver Alden, who is the last Puritan. He does what is
right, based on his duties to his family, school, and friends. Life is
a slow, powerful flow of tasks and responsibilities. He is intelligent
and knows there is more than obligation, and he senses his guilt at not
being able to achieve the natural abundant life, but knowing this only
nourishes his Puritanism and causes him to feel guilty about being
guilty. In a charming scene in the novel, Oliver introduces Mario to
Professor Santayana at Harvard. Oliver is a dedicated student and
football player, thoroughly a first rate American taking matters
seriously and doing his best. After only a short visit with the
Professor, Mario, it is decided by Santayana, does not need to take a
course from the Professor. Mario already has the natural, instinctual
approach of a cultivated person. Oliver, on the other hand, knows he
must work to achieve his goal, which will be only a succession of
goals, and ends tragically. Santayana's Hispanic and Catholic
background play a central role in his critique of American life: too
bound by past traditions and obligations that are not understood or
rooted in one's own culture.




The fear that Santayana's autobiography would be lost or destroyed
during World War II, led Scribner's, the publisher, to conspire with
the U.S. Department of State, the Vatican, and the Spanish government
to bring the manuscript of the first part (*Persons and Places*)
out of Rome *sub rosa*, despite the Italian government's refusal
to allow any mail to the U.S. The manuscript for the second part
(*The Middle Span*, 1945) also was conveyed surreptitiously to
New York. The third part (*My Host the World*, 1953) was
published after Santayana's death. His autobiography provides the basis
for understanding the development of his philosophy


## 3. Development of Santayana's Philosophy




In his autobiography, *Persons and Places*, Santayana describes
the development of his thought as a movement from the idealisms of
boyhood to the intellectual materialism of a traveling student, and
finally to the complete, naturalistic outlook of the adult
Santayana. He emphasizes the continuity of his life and beliefs,
contrasting what may appear to be disparate views with the overall
unity of his thought: "The more I change the more I am the same
person" (*Persons and Places*, 159).




As a young man of the nineteenth century, he was influenced by the
idealism of the age and of his age, but he claims to have always been a
realist or naturalist at heart.



> 
> 
> But those ideal universes in my head did not produce any firm
> convictions or actual duties. They had nothing to do with the wretched
> poverty-stricken real world in which I was condemned to live. That the
> real was rotten and only the imaginary at all interesting seemed to me
> axiomatic. That was too sweeping; yet allowing for the rash
> generalisations of youth, it is still what I think. My philosophy has
> never changed. (*Persons and Places*, 167)




Hence he notes, that in spite "of my religious and other
day-dreams, I was at bottom a young realist; I knew I was dreaming,
and so was awake. A sure proof of this was that I was never anxious
about what those dreams would have involved if they had been true. I
never had the least touch of superstition" (*Persons and
Places*, 167). Santayana cites poems, "To the Moon"
and "To the Host," written when he was fifteen or sixteen,
as revealing this early realism, and he quotes from memory one stanza
of "At the Church Door" where the realistic sentiment is
the same (*Persons and Places*, 169).




By the time he was a traveling student seeing the world in Germany,
England, and Spain his "intellectual materialism" was firmly
established with little change in his religious affections.




From the boy dreaming awake in the church of the Immaculate
Conception, to the travelling student seeing the world in Germany,
England, and Spain there had been no great change in sentiment.



> I was
> still "at the church door". Yet in belief, in the
> clarification of my philosophy, I had taken an important step. I no
> longer wavered between alternative views of the world, to be put on or
> taken off like alternative plays at the theatre. I now saw that there
> was only one possible play, the actual history of nature and of
> mankind, although there might well be ghosts among the characters and
> soliloquies among the speeches. Religions, all religions, and
> idealistic philosophies, all idealistic philosophies, were the
> soliloquies and the ghosts. They might be eloquent and profound. Like
> Hamlet's soliloquy they might be excellent reflective criticisms of
> the play as a whole. Nevertheless they were only parts of it, and
> their value as criticisms lay entirely in their fidelity to the facts,
> and to the sentiments which those facts aroused in the
> critic. (*Persons and Places*, 169)




The full statement and development of his materialism did not occur
until later in his life. It was certainly in place by the time of
*Scepticism and Animal Faith* (1923) but not fully so at the
time of *The Life of Reason* (1905). The influence of the
Harvard philosophers, particularly James and Royce is evident in
Santayana's thought, but he was hardly a mere follower and often
advanced his philosophy more along European and Greek lines rather than
the American tradition, which he thought was both too derivative and
too tied to the advancement of business and capitalism.




The move from Harvard marked not only a geographical shift but a
philosophical one as well. Henry Levinson in *Santayana,
Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life* provides a well-balanced
account of this gradual but distinctive move from the Harvard
philosophical mentality. Leaving Harvard also meant that Santayana
abandoned the view of a philosopher as a public, philosophical
statesman and of language as being representative. This philosophical
turn placed makes him a forerunner of many issues in the next two
centuries. Removing himself, literally and philosophically, from the
American scene, Santayana increasingly came to believe that the
"brimstone" sensibility of pragmatism was wrong-headed
(*Character and Opinion in the United States*, 53). A major
aspect of this sensibility was the view that philosophers must be
engaged fundamentally in social and cultural policy formulation, and
if they are not, they are not pulling their civic weight. In this
fashion, Santayana believes the pragmatists came to belie "the
genuinely expressive, poetic, meditative, and festive character of
their vocation" (Levinson,165). A condition that James took
seriously in his "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,"
suggesting that the world of practical responsibility fosters a
blindness to multiplural ways of living that can only be escaped by
catching sight of "the world of impersonal worths as such"
-- "only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolent loafer
or tramp can afford so sympathetic an occupation" (James,
*Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of
Life's Ideals*, 141). Interestingly, America's
imperialistic actions toward the Philippines during the
Spanish-American War sparked James' remarks; this was a war that
had a much deeper ancestral and historical aspect for Santayana and
led to his poem, "Young Sammy's First Wild Oats."
Whether connected or not, Santayana later came to identify himself as
an intellectual vagabond or tramp, not isolated in the specific
perspectives of an ideology, hosted by the world, and devoted to
spiritual disciplines that "appear irresponsible to philosophers
hoping to command representative or some otherwise privileged
authority at the center of society" (Levinson, 167).




Building on his naturalism, institutional pragmatism, social
realism, and poetic religion, Santayana on leaving Harvard moves even
farther from the role of philosophical statesman by removing the
representative authority of language from the quest for a comprehensive
synthesis, by narrowing the line between literature and philosophy (as
he had earlier done between religion and poetry), and by wrestling more
with the influence of James than of Emerson. Santayana's stay in Oxford
during the Great War led to his famous counter to Wilson's war to end
all wars: "Only the dead have seen the end of war." (*Soliloquies in
England and Later Soliloquies*, 102)




Santayana's message is clear: The epistemological project that
Russell's *Problems* epitomizes is diseased. The renewed quest
to establish unmediated Knowledge of Reality simply leads to
"intellectual cramp" (*Soliloquies*, 216). Philosophy has itself
become spiritually *disordered* by blinding its practitioners
from their traditional and proper task, which is to celebrate the good
life. If the spiritual disciplines of philosophy are to thrive,
philosophers have to take off the bandages of epistemology and
metaphysics altogether, accept the finite and fallible status of their
knowledge claims, and get on with confessing their belief in the things
that make life worth living (Levinson, 204).




Leaving Harvard and America enabled Santayana to develop his
naturalism.


## 4. Naturalism



*Scepticism and Animal Faith* (1923) introduces Santayana's
mature naturalism. In summary, he maintains that knowledge and belief
are not the result of reasoning. They are inescapable beliefs essential
for action. Epistemological foundationalism is a futile approach to
knowledge. A more promising approach is to discern the underlying
belief structures assumed in animal action and imposed by natural
circumstances. The foundations for this approach are rooted in
Aristotle's concept of activity and the pragmatic approach to action
and knowledge. Explanations of natural events are the proper purview of
scientists, while explications of the meaning and value of action may
be the proper sphere of historians and philosophers. Even so, both
scientific explanations and philosophical explications are based in the
natural world. Meaning and value are generated by the interaction of
our physical makeup, which Santayana calls "psyche," and
our material environment.




Santayana's critique of epistemological foundationalism is as unique
as his heritage. With Spanish irony, he structures his argument after
Descartes' *Meditations* but arrives at an anti-foundationalist
conclusion. Drawing attention to what is given in an instant of
awareness (the smallest conceivable moment of consciousness), he
maintains that any knowledge or recognition found in such an instant
would have to be characterized by a concept (or "essence"
to use Santayana's term). Concepts cannot be limited to particular
instances; rather the particular object is seen as an instance of the
concept (essence). Thus, pursuing doubt to its ultimate end, one is
confined by the "solipsism of the present moment." That is,
in a single instant of awareness there can be no knowledge or belief,
since both require concepts not bounded by a moment of awareness.
Hence, the ultimate end of doubt, an instance of awareness, is empty.
It is the vacant awareness of a given without a basis for belief,
knowledge or action. Santayana concludes that if one attempts to find
the bedrock of certainty, one may rest his claim only after he has, at
least theoretically, recognized that knowledge is composed of instances
of awareness that in themselves do not contain the prerequisites for
knowledge, e.g., concepts, universals, or essences. That both
skepticism and proofs against skepticism lead nowhere is precisely
Santayana's point.




Philosophy must begin *in medias res* (in the middle of
things), in action itself, where there is an instinctive and arational
belief in the natural world: "animal faith." For Santayana,
animal faith is the arational basis for any knowledge claims. It is the
nether world of biological order operating through our physical,
non-conscious being generating beliefs that are "radically incapable of
proof" (*Scepticism*, 35).



> 
> 
> In rising out of passive intuition, I pass, by a vital constitutional
> necessity, to belief in discourse, in experience, in substance, in
> truth and in spirit. All these objects may conceivably be illusory.
> Belief in them however, is not grounded on a prior probability, but
> all judgements of probability are grounded on them. They express a
> rational instinct or instinctive reason, the waxing faith of an animal
> living in a world which he can observe and sometimes remodel.
> (*Scepticism*, 308-309)




He describes these prejudices as "animal" in an effort to emphasize
our biological base and community. This emphasis is similar to
Wittgenstein's reference to convictions that are beyond being justified
or unjustified as "something animal" (*On Certainty* 359). Ours
is a long-standing primitive credulity, and our most basic beliefs are
those of an animal creed: "that there is a world, that there is a
future, that things sought can be found, and things seen can be eaten"
(*Scepticism* 180).




Santayana (like Hume, Wittgenstein, and Strawson) holds there are
certain inevitable beliefs; they are inescapable given nature and our
individual physical history. And like Wittgenstein, he maintains that
these beliefs are various and variable. They are determined by the
interplay between environment and psyche, i.e., between our natural
conditions and the inherited, physical "organisation of the animal"
(the psyche). That we now inescapably believe in external objects and
the general reliability of inductive reasoning, for example, is a
result of physical history and the natural conditions of our world and
ourselves. Since these beliefs are relative to our physical histories,
if our history and biological order had been different, our natural
beliefs would also be different.




The environment determines the occasions on which intuitions arise,
the psyche -- the inherited organisation of the animal -- determines
their form, and ancient conditions of life on Earth no doubt determined
which psyches should arise and prosper; and probably many forms of
intuition, unthinkable to man, express the facts and the rhythms of
nature to other animal minds (*Scepticism*, 88).




By displacing privileged mentalistic accounts with his pragmatic
naturalism, Santayana challenges then prevailing structures in both
American and English philosophies.




Santayana explicates the primary distinguishable characteristics of
our knowledge in his four-book *Realms of Being*. Believing that
philosophical terminology should have historical roots, Santayana
employed classical terminology for these characteristics: matter,
essence, spirit, and truth. And although these terms are central to
many philosophical traditions, he views his work as "a revision of the
categories of common sense, faithful in spirit to orthodox human
tradition, and endeavouring only to clarify those categories and
disentangle the confusions that inevitably arise ..."
(*Realms* 826).




Within Santayana's naturalism, the origins of all events in the
world are arbitrary, temporal, and contingent. Matter (by whatever name
it is called) is the principle of existence. It is "often untoward, and
an occasion of imperfection or conflict in things." (*Realm of
Matter*, v) Hence, a "sour moralist" may consider it evil, but,
according to Santayana, if one takes a wider view "matter would seem a
good ... because it is the principle of existence: it is all
things in their potentiality and therefore the condition of all their
excellence or possible perfection." (*Realm of Matter*, v)
Matter is the non-discursive, natural foundation for all that is. In
itself, it is neither good nor evil but may be perceived as such when
viewed from the vested interest of animal life. Latent animal interests
convert matter's non-discernible, neutral face to a smile or frown. But
"moral values cannot preside over nature." (*Realm of Matter*,
134) Principled values are the products of natural forces: "The
germination, definition, and prevalence of any good must be grounded in
nature herself, not in human eloquence." (*Realm of Matter*,
131) From the point of view of origins, therefore, the realm of matter
is the matrix and the source of everything: it is nature, the sphere of
genesis, the universal mother.




"Essence" is Santayana's term for concepts and meanings.
He draws on Aristotle's notion of essence but removes all capacities
for producing effects. An essence is a universal, an object of thought,
not a material force. However, consciousness of an essence is generated
by the interaction of a psyche and the material environment. Hence,
matter remains as the origin of existence and the arena of action, and
the realm of essence encompasses all possible thought.




"Truth," if some disinterested observer could ascertain
it, would constitute all the essences that genuinely characterize the
natural world and all activities within it. Since all living beings
have natural interests and preferences, no such knowledge of truth can
exist. All conscious beings must ascertain belief about truth based on
the success of actions that sustain life and permit periods of delight
and joy.




Santayana uses the term "spirit" to mean consciousness or
awareness. As early as 19 April 1909, Santayana wrote to his sister
that he was writing a brand new system of philosophy to be called
"The realms of Being" -- "not the mineral
vegetable and animal, but something far more metaphysical, namely
Essence, Matter, and Consciousness. It will not be a long book, but
very technical." When the book was published in the 1930s, he
had added his notion of truth and substituted "spirit" for
"consciousness." From his perspective, the substitution
did not alter the meaning of consciousness but rather captured an
entire tradition of philosophical and religious inquiry as well as
borrowed associated ideas from eastern religions. But to the
consternation of traditional views, many found the identity of spirit
with consciousness a troublesome idea. And so they should, for with
this identity Santayana removes the spiritual from the field of agency
as well as from being an alternative way of living. Santayana's
approach is therefore in direct contrast with those who think of
spirit as causing action or as fostering a particular lifestyle.
Following the tracks of Aristotle, he makes the spiritual life one
form of culminating experiences arising from fulfilling activity.




Awareness evolved through the natural development of the physical
world, and he demurs to scientific accounts for explanations of that
development. Almost poetically, he sees spirit as emerging in moments
of harmony between the psyche and the environment. Such harmony is
temporary, and the disorganized natural forces permit spirit to arise
"only spasmodically, to suffer and to fail. For just as the
birth of spirit is joyous, because some nascent harmony evokes it, so
the rending or smothering of that harmony, if not sudden, imposes
useless struggles and suffering" (*Birth of Reason*,
53). Accepting the world's insecure equilibrium enables one to
celebrate the birth of spirit. Reasoning, particularly reasoning
associated with action, is a signal of the nascent activities of the
psyche working to harmonize its actions with the environment, and if
successful, reason permits individual and social organization to
prosper while spirit leads to the delight of imagination and
artistry.




Some commentators characterize Santayana as an epiphenomenalist, and
there are some commonalities, specifically the view that spirit is not
efficacious. But there also are considerable differences. Santayana
does not characterize his view as one-way interactionism, primarily
because he does not think of spirit as an object to be acted upon.
Spirit is rather a distinguishable aspect of thought, generated in
activity, and may be viewed more as a relational property. Santayana
sometimes speaks of spirit and essence as supervening on material
events. But lacking the distinctions of contemporary philosophy, it is
difficult to characterize Santayana's philosophy of mind accurately.
His view of consciousness is more celebrational, as opposed to being a
burden or eliciting action. Spirit is "precisely the voice of order in
nature, the music, as full of light as of motion, of joy as of peace,
that comes with an even partial and momentary perfection in some vital
rhythm" (*Birth of Reason*, 53).




Santayana's account of spirit and essence may lead one to wonder
how Santayana can be included as a pragmatist, and this classification
is accurate only if one includes an extended notion of pragmatic
naturalism. For Santayana, explanations of human life, including reason
and spirit, lie within the sciences. The nature of truth simply is
correspondence with what is, but since humans, nor any other conscious
being, are able to see beyond the determinant limits of their nature
and environment, pragmatism becomes the test of truth rather than
correspondence. In short, the nature of truth is correspondence while
the test of truth is pragmatic. If an explanation continues to bear
fruit over the long run, then it is accepted as truth until it is
replaced by a better explanation. In this, Santayana's account of
pragmatic truth is more closely aligned with Peirce's conception than
that of James or Dewey, including a tripartite account of knowledge
consisting of the subject, symbol, and object. Pragmatism is properly
focused on scientific inquiry and explanations, and it is severely
limited, even useless, in spiritual and aesthetic matters. Pragmatism
is rooted in animal life, the need to know the world in a way that
fosters successful action. If all life were constituted only by
successful or unsuccessful activities, one's fated circumstances would
govern. But consciousness makes liberation possible and brings delight
and festivity in material circumstances.




Santayana's anti-foundationalism, non-reductive materialism, and
pragmatic naturalism coupled with his emphasis on the spiritual life
and his view of philosophy as literature anticipated many developments
in philosophy and literary criticism that occurred in the latter half
of the twentieth century, and these served as a challenge to the more
humanistic naturalisms of John Dewey and other American naturalists.
These views also provide the foundation for his view of ethics,
political philosophy, and the spiritual life.


## 5. Ethics, Politics, and the Spiritual Life




Santayana's moral philosophy is based on his naturalism. Most
commentators classify Santayana as an extreme moral relativist who
maintains that all individual moral perspectives have equal standing
and are based on the heritable traits and environmental circumstances
of individuals. This naturalistic approach applies to all living
organisms. Nature does not establish a moral hierarchy of goods between
animal populations nor between individual animals. However, this same
moral relativism is also the basis for Santayana's claim that the good
of individual animals is clear and is subject to naturalistic or
biological investigation.




Two tenets of his ethics are (1) the forms of the good are diverse,
and (2) the good of each animal is definite and final. The moral
terrain of animals, viewed from a neutral perspective, places all
animal interests and goods as equal. Each good stems from heritable
physical traits and is shaped by adaptations to the environment.
Concluding that the "forms of the good are divergent,"
Santayana holds that the good for each animal may differ, depending on
the nature of the psyche and the circumstances, and may be different
for an individual animal in different times and environments. There is
no one good for all, or even for an individual.




Seen as a whole, animal goods are not logically or morally ordered,
they are natural, morally neutral forces. But no living being can
observe all interests with such neutrality. Situated in a particular
place and time with heritable traits, all living beings have interests
originating from their physiology and physical environment. For
Santayana, one may reasonably note that a neutral observer could view
all moral perspectives as equal, but such a view must be balanced by
the understanding that no animal stands on neutral ground. There is a
polarity between the ideal neutral, objective understanding of behavior
on the one hand and the committed and vested interest of particular
living beings on the other hand. One may recognize that every animal
good has its own standing, and one may respect that ideal, but "the
right of alien natures to pursue their proper aims can never abolish
our right to pursue ours" (*Persons and Places*, 179).




Santayana's second moral insight is that for each animal the good is
definite and final. There are specific goods for each animal depending
on the specific heritable traits and interests of the psyche and on the
specific circumstances of the environment. Self-knowledge, then, is the
distinguishing moral mark. The extent to which one knows one's
interests, their complexity and centrality, will determine whether one
can achieve a good life, provided the environment is accommodating.
Santayana's philosophy rests on his naturalism and on his humane and
sympathetic appreciation for the excellence of each life. But from the
perspective of autobiography, Santayana's clear notion of
self-knowledge, in the sense of the Greeks, is his most distinguishing
mark. For Santayana, "integrity or self-definition is and remains first
and fundamental in morals ..." (*Persons and Places*
170).




Self-knowledge requires a critical appreciation of one's culture and
physical inheritance, and the ability to shape one's life in streams of
conflicting goods within oneself and within one's community. Although
this position is common to many considerations of political philosophy,
Santayana's approach to politics was much more conservative than that
normally associated with the founders of American pragmatism, such as
James and Dewey.




Santayana's political conservatism is founded on his naturalism and
his emphasis on self-realization and spirituality. He is concerned
that liberal democracy may not provide a consistent basis for
individual freedom and spirituality. The twin fears of private anarchy
and public uniformity are the grounds for his criticisms of democracy,
and his account of social justice focuses on the individual rather
than the society. Santayana's inattentiveness to social inequality is
perhaps understandable in the context of his naturalism where the
final cause is the "authority of things." His basic
contention that individual suffering is the worse feature of human
life, not social inequality, causes him to focus more on the natural
dilemmas of the individual rather than on social action. Coupling this
argument with the view that all institutions, including governments,
are inextricably rooted in their culture and background perhaps makes
it understandable that he would not readily see how particular views
of social inequality could be transferred readily from one culture to
another. In addition, Santayana's European and particularly Spanish
background influenced his attitudes toward social action. His repeated
"Latin" perspective caused him to look with considerable
suspicion toward forcing Anglo-Saxon outlooks on other cultures. Yet,
in individual matters he was remarkably forthcoming as when he
provided financial support to numerous friends, often of quite
different philosophical, literary, and political persuasions than his
own.




Within the natural order every living entity stands on the same
natural ground bathing equally in the impartial light of nature. No one
can claim a central place above others. But each entity also has an
embodied set of values, and the art of life is to structure one's
environment in such a fashion as to best realize those embodied values,
i.e., to place in harmony the natural forces of one's life and one's
environment.




American democracy has an exacting challenge. Lacking the time to
live in the mind, Americans use quantity as a justification for lack of
quality in their achievements. Quantity is potentially infinite and
assures unrivaled busy-ness, but is it worth it? No, according to
Santayana, if self-realization is the goal of individual life. Of
course, circumstances make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for some
individuals to order their lives reasonably and attain the practical
wisdom to achieve individual happiness. America's economic success
would appear to make this possible for many, but to succeed Americans
must abandon servility to mechanism and economics. What is needed is a
life made free by a recovery of the capacity to have a vision of the
good life (*Persons and Places*, xxxiv). According to Santayana,
the fanatic is a person who has lost sight of their goals and redoubled
their efforts. To supplant this busy, blind, relentlessly quantitative
existence, we must regain sight of our goals. Individual life should be
structured in light of those goals.




Santayana's focus is on the individual, and the role of the state is
to protect and to enable the individual to flourish. The goal is not
something far off to be worked toward. It is not a task to be
accomplished and then supplanted by another task, as is often the case
with American enterprise does. Rather it is the celebration of life in its
festivities. It is Aristotle's practical wisdom: structuring individual
life as it is, living it joyfully, and assuring that one's commitments
are conducive to the delights of the intellect and consistent with the
demands of the time and tradition. It is the exercise of one's free
choice, shaping one's life through material well-being, but doing so to
appreciate the poetic, dramatic quality of our own existence. To rush
through life and die without the joy of living, that is the tragedy of
American life.




For some, though perhaps not for many, the spiritual life will be an
organizing good. The cultural background for the spiritual life is the
religious life, primarily as found within the Catholic Church and
informed by the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century
accounts of Eastern religions. But Santayana is not interested in an
historical or doctrinal explication of the elements of traditional
religion, rather the philosophical task is to discern the elements
giving rise to such traditional views, and, in his own case, to
explicate the aspects of these origins without the dogmatism of
traditional religious belief.




Introducing the concept of a spiritual life led some to see an
inherent conflict between Santayana's life of reason and the spiritual
life. In a letter to Milton Karl Munitz (23 July 1939), Santayana
explains the different perspectives of the life of reason and the
spiritual life:



> 
> 
> I admit gladly that religion (= the "Spiritual life") is a
> natural interest, to be collated within the life of reason with every
> other interest; but it is an interest in the ultimate, an adjustment
> to life, death, science, and politics; and though cultivated specially
> by certain minds at certain hours, it has no moral or natural claim to
> predominance. The races and ages in which it is absent will inevitably
> regard it as unnecessary and obstructive, because they tend to arrange
> their moral economy without religion at all. Those to whom religion is
> absorbing (e.g., the Indians) will on the contrary think a moral
> economy inferior in which no place and no influence is given to the
> monition of ultimate facts. I think you would not find my two voices
> inharmonious (I agree that they are different in pitch) if you did not
> live in America in the XXth century when the "dominance of the
> foreground" is so pronounced. The dominance of the distance or
> background would impose a different synthesis. (*Works*, v. 5,
> book 6, 254)




If the spiritual life was considered a dominating or guiding influence
in structuring one's life, the way Santayana views reason, then one
would be forced to choose between the life of reason and the life of
the spirit as a monk or a nun must choose between the life of the
world and that of the religious order. But for Santayana, no such
conflict exists; spirituality is not choosing a way of living over an
extended period of time. Indeed, any effort to choose such a life
would be short lived, since the spiritual life is a life of
receptivity to all that comes in the moment while suspending animal
interests. Suspending one's specific natural interests, such as
eating or sleeping, for any extended period would be both detrimental
and tragic.




Consciousness essentially is only awareness, an attention to what is
given, rather than being an instrument in reshaping the world.
Consciousness, emerging late in the evolutionary pathway, is a
flowering of happy circumstances that celebrates what is given, and
when truly recognized, does only that. It is joyful, delighting in
what is presented, and not troubled by where it leads or what it
means. This is not to restate Santayana's view poetically but rather
to convey that Santayana characterizes consciousness, itself, as
poetic rather than as a means to an action or as a way of implementing
an action. The more dower, moralistic, and evangelical aspects of
religion he saw as confused efforts to make religion a science, a
social club, or a political movement. Spirit, or consciousness, is
momentary, fleeting, and depends on the physical forces of our bodies
and environment in order to exist. Shaping one's life to enhance these
spiritual, fleeting moments, extending them as long as is practical,
is one of the delights of living for some people, but it is certainly
not a goal for all, nor should it be.