"To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be. The poets and philosophers who express this aesthetic experience and stimulate the same function in us by their example, do a greater service to mankind and deserve higher honor than the discoveries of historical truths." (from The Sense of Beauty)
George Santayana was born in Madrid. His mother, Josefina Borrás y Carbonell, was Spanish. She married a Boston merchant, George Sturgis, and after his death, Augustin Ruiz de Santayan y Reboiro, Santayana's father. When Santayana was nine, his family moved to the United States, and settled in Boston. On arrival he did not speak English, though he made it his literary language. In his new home country Santayana considered himself only an observer. He never became an American citizen and he always maintained a certain distance from the American culture.
Santayana studied at Boston Latin School, and Harvard University, Cambridge (1882-86). In 1888 he was Walker Fellow in Germany and England, and in 1889 he received his Ph.D. From 1896 to 1897 he studied at King's College, Cambridge.
From 1889 to 1912 Santayana taught at Harvard University. He was Hyde Lecturer at Sorbonne, Paris, in 1905-06. Santayana's lectures on the philosophy of history formed the foundation of THE LIFE OF REASON (1905-06), a response to Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind and an interpretation of the role of reason in manifold activities of the human spirit. Santayana argued that happiness is the good for humankind and is best secured by the harmonization of our various interests by the use of reason. From this basis he asked, "In which of its adventures would the human race, reviewing its whole experience, acknowledge a progress and a gain," and focused his survey on society, religion, art and science. Abstract or non-objective art he viewed with suspicion.
Santayana lived in America until he was 50 years old, and then started his life as a "wandering scholar." In 1912, after the death of his mother, he moved to Europe, living three years in England, then in France, and moving finally to Rome (1925-52). Santayana never returned to the United States. In 1923 he published SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH, which was acclaimed as the gteatest contribution of critical realism to epistemology. According to Santayana, all rational processes are expressions of animal compulsion to believe certain things, such as the existence of matter. We have an irresistible urge ("animal faith") to believe that there exists an external world. Further, Santayana distinguishes between existence and being - the latter has four realms: essence, matter, truth and spirit. Matter is external to consciousness, and all existence is grounded in matter. Spirit and body are realizations of the same fact in incomparable realms of being. Santayana's Platonist as well as materialist system of philosophy is set out in the comprehensive 4-volume REALMS OF BEING (1927-40). In its last volume, THE REALM OF SPIRIT (1940), Santayana concluded that spirit, too, is material.
Santayana' style was ornate but eloquent, full or metaphors, similes and irony. Experimentation is the arts he viewed with suspicion. He despised idealism and its spiritual home, Germany, and especially Hegel's philosophy. Generally skeptical about progress, Santayana's political conservatism had also a skeptical foundation. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," is his most famous aphorism. He felt that no system of thought is to be trusted, and wrote in the essay 'A General Confession' that "mind does not come to repeat to world but celebrate it". In INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY AND RELIGION (1900) Santayana stated that human imagination compensates for the limitations of understanding - art arises in response to our need for entertainment through our senses and imagination. "Mind does not come to repeat the world but to celebrate it." (from 'A General Confession', 1940)
During World War II Santayana stayed in Mussolini's Italy, for which he was much criticized. For the remaining years of his life, Santayana was tended by the English sisters of the Little Company of Mary, but he was never a practicing Catholic. In 'The Poet's Testament' he wrote: "I give back to 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." He died in Rome on September 26, 1952. Santayana remained bachelor for his whole life. He was homosexual and in private had a disdain for heterosexuality - he called it 'breeding'. Santayana's autobiographical work, PERSONS AND PLACES (1944-53), became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Edmund Wilson compared it to The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Yeats's memoirs and Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27).
Santayana wrote poems, a great deal of literary criticism, and the bestselling novel THE LAST PURITAN (1935). At the time of its appearance he was already seventy. The story of the tragic fate of a sincere and intelligent man struggling against Boston gentily was written over twenty years. It arose from Santayana's dislike of what he found most antipathetic in American life: Calvinism and Transcendentalism. The hero is Oliver Alden, a heir of the wealthy New England family. He and his mother are abandoned by his hedonistic drug addict-father, who wanders about the world in his yacht. Oliver joins at the age of 17 him for a cruise and meets Jim Darnley, a young male paid companion. Oliver turns into a handsome and athletic critic of his decadent surroundings. His father commits suicide. After graduation Oliver visits the Darnleys in England and falls in love with Jim's sister Rose, who falls in love with Mario, Oliver's European cousin. Oliver, who has become neurotic and febrile, follows Marios example and enters the army at the outbreak of World War I. He leaves for France and is killed there.
For further reading: The Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. by P.A. Schilpp (1940); Vida y Pensamiento de Jorge Santayana by L. Farré (1953); Santayana and the Sense of Beauty by Willard E. Arnett (1955); Santayana: The Later Years by Daniel Cory (1963); The Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. by Paul Arthur Schillp (1971, orig. ed. 1940); Santayana, an Examination of His Philosophy by T. Sprigge (1974); George Santayana: A Biography by John McCormick (1987); Critical Esays on George Santayana, ed. by K. Price (1991); George Santayana by D. Carter (1992); Santayana by H.S. Levinson (1992)
Selected works:
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