A FOREIGNER KNOWN AS AN AMERICAN

The rather peculiar case of the Spanish-born philosopher, poet and author George Santayana (Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás) (1863-1952) is considered here, in this section, instead of the Twilight section, where he would have resided, had I agreed to his common designation as an American philosopher. But there is no way I could, because of several reasons. Brought to America from Spain in 1872, he attended a very good school in Boston, and went straight on to Harvard, graduating in 1886. He then left America to study in Berlin for two years, returning to Harvard for his dissertation, and to teach philosophy. In 1896-1897, his residence was at the University of Cambridge, where he added another feather into the hat of his education. In 1912 he left Harvard and America never to return, and would spent the rest of his life (forty years of it) in Europe, primarily in Rome, where he eventually died. Ironically, he did not mind Mussolini’s fascist regime (although strongly objecting after 1936 to Franco in his native Spain) and the regime did not mind him. This fact alone constitutes an irresistible motive for a further investigation which I most definitely intend to undertake at a later time with more blessed leisure on my hands.

Temperamentally and otherwise, Santayana was as far from being “an American” as only can be imagined by one with an adequate imagination and discernment. Characterized as a “Castilian Platonist” he was aristocratic, detached, and elitist. Like Alexis de Tocqueville (nobody would dare calling that one an American!), Santayana observed American culture and character from a foreigner’s point of view. But even though he remained, on principle, a lifelong citizen of Spain, having declined to become an American citizen, and happily resided in fascist Italy for decades, he is unswervingly considered an American writer by Americans! But as he himself admitted, he felt most at home, intellectually and aesthetically, not even in Rome, but at… Oxford.

“Philosophically” speaking, he was more an aphorist than a philosopher. He wrote books and essays on a wide range of subjects including philosophy of a less technical sort, literary criticism, the history of ideas, politics and morals, human nature, and the subtle influence of religion on culture and social psychology, in a literary style, with ample wit and humor. While his writings on technical philosophy are difficult, his other writings are far more readable, and all of his books contain quotable passages.

For the purpose of this raw preliminary entry we shall briefly consider the outline of his philosophical credo and finish it with some of my best-liked quotations.

From everything I have read of him and about him, I find Santayana philosophically more of a commentator that a postulator. The following Wikipedia summary is highly inadequate yet I will quote it here as reference (or rather a virtual space-filler) for a future reexamination and elaboration. Any longer and more substantive summary would be impractical at this time.

Santayana’s main philosophical legacy of work consists of The Sense of Beauty (1896), probably, the first major work on aesthetics written in the United States; The Life of Reason, in five volumes (1905–6), the high point of his Harvard career; Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923); and The Realms of Being, in four volumes (1927–40). Although Santayana was not a pragmatist in the mold of William James or John Dewey, The Life of Reason is arguably the first extended treatment of pragmatism ever penned.

Like many of the classical pragmatists, and because he is also well-versed in evolutionary theory, Santayana was committed to a naturalist metaphysics, where human cognition, cultural practices, and social institutions have evolved so as to harmonize with the conditions present in their environment. Their value may, then, be adjudged by the extent to which they facilitate human happiness. The alternate title to The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress, is indicative of this metaphysical stance… Santayana was an early adherent of epiphenomenalism, but admired the classical materialism of Democritus and Lucretius. He held Spinoza in high regard, without subscribing to the latter’s rationalism or pantheism.

Although an atheist (?!), he held a fairly benign view of religion in contrast to thinkers like Bertrand Russell who held that religion was harmful in addition to being false. His views on religion are outlined in his books Reason in Religion, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, and Interpretations of Poetry and Religion.

The question of Santayana’s “atheism” must be taken with a complex grain of salt. Here is how it is treated by Bertrand Russell in the chapter On Catholic and Protestant Skeptics in Why I Am Not a Christian:

In the realm of philosophy, a very interesting example is Mr. Santayana, who has always loved orthodoxy in itself, but hankered after some intellectually less abhorrent form than that provided by the Catholic Church. He liked always in Catholicism the institution of the Church, and its political influence. He liked, speaking broadly, what the Church has taken over from Greece and from Rome, but he did not like what the Church has taken over from the Jews including of course whatever it owes to its founder. He could have wished that Lucretius had succeeded in founding a church based on the tenets of Democritus, for materialism has always appealed to his intellect, and, at any rate, in his earlier works, he came nearer to worshipping matter than to awarding this distinction to anything else. But in the long run he seems to have come to feel that any church which actually exists is to be preferred to a church confined to the realm of essence. Mr. Santayana however is an exceptional phenomenon hardly fitting into any of our modern categories. He is really pre-Renaissance and belongs, if anything, with the Ghibellines whom Dante found suffering in Hell for their adherence to the doctrines of Epicurus. This outlook is, no doubt, reinforced by the nostalgia for the past, which an unwilling and prolonged contact with America was bound to produce in a Spanish temperament.

Most interesting and instructive, as virtually everything written by Russell’s pen. No wonder he is one of my staple foods! And now, of course, comes the final segment of this entry: my favorite Santayana dicta:

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is such a powerful phrase and it is so much in harmony with what I am doing in this book, that I might just as well use it as one of the epigraphs to Nunc Dimittis. Nota bene!

A man’s feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world. The trouble, though, is that one cannot see the world for what it is from the outside, but getting inside foreign places is not possible without getting one’s feet off the home ground. I think that Santayana was one of the best to understand this from his own expatriate experiences.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a much happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. This is a remarkable multifaceted adage, that can be understood with reference to one’s advancing age, but also purely philosophically, and particularly stoically, as one’s attitude of happy imperviousness to one’s changing fortunes.

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it. This usually misquoted adage speaks for itself, whether in this correct form, or even when misquoted.

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences. Another pearl of wisdom which speaks for itself better than any commentator.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and were it not assumed, the most improbable of conclusions. Another dictum best left without a comment, and what a magnificent one!

Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope. This is a very pleasant pro-theistic statement. After an apologetic affirmation like this, who would dare calling Santayana an atheist, even if he himself might have played with this word on occasion?

A child only educated at school is an uneducated child. How true!

There are many more aphoristic masterpieces originated by Santayana, but the ones above are the closest to my heart and to my mind. Au révoir, chèr Santayana… A bientôt!