Santayana, George (1863–1952)

Philosopher, poet, novelist, and critic Jorge Agustin Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana was born on December 16, 1863, in Madrid to Spanish parents and was brought to Boston at the age of 9 and educated at the Boston Latin School. He studied at Harvard University under William James and the idealist philosopher Josiah Royce. His academic career was also at Harvard, where he was a professor of philosophy. But he became progressively more estranged from American life and, once he could afford to do so in 1912, he left the United States and migrated to Europe. In 1924 he settled in Rome, where he remained for the rest of his life, dying there on September 26, 1952.

Santayana is best remembered for two works: The Life of Reason (five volumes, 1905–1906), which is deeply imbued with the ideals of the naturalism and humanism of ancient Greece, and his novel The Last Puritan (1936), a study of New England attitudes and values. Other important books he wrote include Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923), wherein he revised some of the ideas expressed in The Life of Reason and refined others. During World War I, he expressed support for critical realism, contributing to an important collective work called Essays in Critical Realism (1920). A feature of Santayana's work is his extraordinary fluency with prose writing. He has been described as the finest writer of philosophy since Plato.

Santayana's views on time altered imperceptibly as he got older. In The Life of Reason, he articulated a meliorist view of progress, which opened the possibility of things improving, but only with concerted human effort. As he got older he became more conservative in political matters and less sure that even the modest forms of progress he had endorsed as a younger man were either possible or desirable.

During the first half of his philosophical career, until about 1923, he was broadly naturalistic and humanistic. But after that date he felt the need for a more systematic exposition of his naturalism, one that inserted ontological categories he called “essences” into the fabric of nature. These essences had a negative effect on his notions of progress. Athough this second half of his career was more Platonist in style, it was still fundamentally naturalistic. But throughout his philosophical career he eschewed dualism and advocated what he called the Aristotelian principle: All ideals have a natural basis but all natural processes are capable of ideal fulfillment. By reason, Santayana simply meant a higher-order impulse.

[Page 1132]Although he was an atheist and materialist, Santayana could see good in religion, when understood properly. He saw little value in literal belief and supernaturalism, but as a way of memorializing and celebrating what matters in life, religion was of inestimable value, he believed. Santayana's legacy is mixed. Ironically, it is in the United States, the country he felt least at home in, where he is best remembered and exerts the greatest influence, particularly among aestheticians and proponents of American philosophical naturalism.