Santayana

George Santayana

Santayana is too often remembered for a single quotable line about repeating the past, but he was one of the most original and beautiful minds in American philosophy. He was a thoroughgoing materialist who nonetheless cherished the ideal, the spiritual, and the beautiful; an epistemologist who answered radical doubt with what he called animal faith; a philosopher of religion who loved religion as poetry while denying it as fact; and one of the supreme prose stylists the whole discipline has ever known. In him a hard naturalism and a tender love of beauty live together as in almost no one else.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. This room reads The Life of Reason (1905 to 1906), his early masterwork in five volumes, and The Sense of Beauty (1896), his aesthetics, both public domain by way of Project Gutenberg. His late system, Scepticism and Animal Faith and the four-volume Realms of Being, is discussed from training knowledge. The chat cites by work and by volume or chapter. Expect citations to The Life of Reason by volume and The Sense of Beauty by section.

Life. Santayana was born in 1863 in Madrid and raised between Spain and Boston, remaining all his life a Spaniard in America and an American in Europe, at home everywhere and nowhere. He studied at Harvard under William James and Josiah Royce and then taught there beside them for over twenty years, shaping students who included T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Walter Lippmann. At the age of fifty, with a small inheritance, he left Harvard and America for good to live and write in Europe, settling at last in Rome, a serene and detached observer of a world he had chosen to watch from a distance. Philosopher, poet, novelist, and memoirist, he made of detachment itself a way of seeing.

Where to begin. Start with The Life of Reason for the early naturalistic humanism, and The Sense of Beauty for the aesthetics. Move then to Scepticism and Animal Faith for the late epistemology and the Realms of Being for the mature ontology, and read the essays and the novel The Last Puritan for the incomparable stylist.

Naturalism: spirit grounded in matter. Everything Santayana thought rests on his naturalism. He was a strict materialist: matter, the flux of physical existence, is the only thing that exists in the full sense and the only source of power, and mind, consciousness, value, and every ideal arise from it and depend on it. But unlike cruder materialists he did not despise what matter brings forth. The spiritual life, the contemplation of beauty and truth, the imaginative ideals of religion and art, is for Santayana the very flower of the material world, its finest and most precious product. He is the rare materialist who is also, and without contradiction, a lover of the ideal.

The life of reason. Reason, in his early masterwork, is not a faculty set against passion but the marriage of impulse and reflection. The life of reason is the slow, imaginative art by which human beings take their raw animal impulses and shape from them a harmonious and satisfying life, raising up society, religion, art, and science as the great phases of human progress. It is a naturalistic humanism, an account of how ideals grow out of instincts and crown them. Here belongs his most famous sentence, that progress depends not on change but on holding fast to what has been won, so that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Scepticism and animal faith. Pressed to its limit, doubt can dissolve everything: I cannot strictly prove that anything exists, not the world, not my own past, not even a substantial self, for all that is absolutely given is the immediate quality of present experience, a fleeting essence. Yet I cannot live in that doubt, since to act at all is already to believe in a world of things to be dealt with. This instinctive, practical, unavoidable belief, prior to all proof, Santayana calls animal faith, the faith of a living creature that must act. Knowledge, on this view, is never certainty but faith mediated by symbols, animal faith reading the given essences as signs of the world that surrounds it.

The realms of being. His mature ontology marks out four realms. The realm of essence is the infinite domain of all possible forms and qualities, every character anything could have, eternal and non-existent and given purely in intuition. The realm of matter is the restless flux of actual existence, the only realm that has power, which animal faith affirms. The realm of truth is the complete and eternal description of all that matter has been and will be. And the realm of spirit is consciousness itself, the inward light of awareness in which essences are beheld. Existence is matter; the given is essence; and their meeting in a living animal is spirit.

Religion as poetry, and the sense of beauty. One of his most fertile ideas is that religion is not failed science but successful poetry. Raised a Catholic and forever fond of the Church's beauty, Santayana held that the myths and doctrines of religion are false if taken as literal fact about the world and profoundly true as imaginative interpretations of the moral and spiritual life; religion, he wrote, is human experience interpreted by human imagination. The wise course is neither to credit the myths literally nor to scorn them, but to live by their poetic truth as one inhabits a great work of art. The same instinct shapes his aesthetics: in The Sense of Beauty, beauty is pleasure objectified, pleasure felt and projected as a quality of the thing itself.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Long undervalued by a profession suspicious of his literary grace and his refusal of its quarrels, Santayana endures as a profound naturalist, a subtle epistemologist, and perhaps the finest writer that philosophy in English has produced. Read now, he is the materialist who saved the spiritual life, the skeptic who answered doubt with animal faith, and the sage who taught us to love religion and art as the poetry of a material world. He took his serene materialism from the ancient poet Lucretius, whom he revered and wrote upon, and his vision of nature seen under the aspect of eternity from Spinoza; he studied under and gently dissented from his Harvard masters William James and Josiah Royce, keeping their naturalism while refusing both the willfulness of pragmatism and the consolations of the Absolute; and his life of reason renews the Aristotelian ideal of a happiness built by shaping the passions toward their natural fulfillment. There is no cure for birth and death, he once wrote, save to enjoy the interval, and few thinkers have savored, or described, that interval more beautifully.