George Santayana

From Philosopedia

Santayana, George (16 December 1863 - 26 September 1952)

Santayana, a Spanish-born U.S. philosopher and critic at Harvard University (1889–1912), wrote The Life of Reason (1905–1906), Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), and The Last Puritan (1935).

Contents 1 His Naturalism 2 His Sexuality 3 His Influences 4 The Life of Reason 5 Humanism 6 Skepticism 7 Materialism 8 The Last Puritan 9 His Death

His Naturalism

According to John Dewey scholar John Gouinlock, Santayana’s mother was a deist, his father an atheist. Both regarded religion as a form of superstition but believed in conforming to its outward requirements. His early The Life of Reason (1905–1906) used the Aristotelian principle to distinguish what is ideal in human life–in art and science, society and the moral life, and religion. Reason’s aim is harmony. Life teaches the lesson of human finitude, not of existence without end. If there were but one God, He would be responsible for evil as well as good. In polytheism, with its many gods which celebrate different ideal ends, religion is more robust, complete, and poetic. The Jews were the first to deny authenticity to other religions, and Christians and Muslims perpetuated this intolerance, making it a virtue. Calling himself a pessimist and one disillusioned, he meant that one must be free of illusion if he is to have a clear conception of the ideal; and to be pessimistic means to regard the universe as functioning according to laws that are indifferent to human interest and independent of human will, which explains his liking Spinoza, also one who was disillusioned and pessimistic. His naturalism was not consistently elaborated but, as Gouinlock notes, “Few philosophers have done so much to show how religion can become obscure and debased when it pretends to science; and no philosopher has argued so well that religion can be a poetic expression and celebration of temporal life.”

His Sexuality

Santayana did not fully acknowledge his homosexuality until fairly late in life. According to editor and critic Scott McLemee, Santayana told his secretary Daniel Cory after a 1929 conversation with a gay A. E. Housman that, “I think I must have been that way in my Harvard days, though I was unconscious of it at the time.” McLemee added,

• One finds Santayana’s clearest homophile expression in a set of four elegiac sonnets for Warwick Potter, a young man Santayana called his “last real friend,” who died of cholera following a boating accident in 1893. The sequence, “To W. P.” (1894) inevitably recalls Milton’s “Lycidas,” though Santayana’s poem is much less an exercise in literary and mythological allusion than Milton’s. More than “Lycidas,” it seems a genuine outpouring of grief - though the sense of loss is transformed by the poet into resignation and even acceptance:

For time a sadder mask may spread

Over the face that ever should be young.

The sequence ends on a note of transcendence, with his grieving friends vowing to Potter to

Keep you in whatso’ever things are good, and rear

In our weak virtues monuments to you.

Even so, Santayana’s most powerful lines convey the wounding permanence of loss:

And I scarce know which part may greater be -

What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

(A gay Manhattan wag has speculated as to what was intended when he wrote, “My humanism was entirely confined to man.”)

(See entry for Gay Philosophers)

His Influences

Santayana once wrote of his parents’ influence upon his thinking:

• I had heard many Unitarian sermons (being taken to hear them lest I should become too Catholic) and had been interested in them so far as they were rationalistic and informative, or even amusingly irreligious, as I often thought them to be; but neither in these discourses nor in Harvard philosophy was it easy for me to understand the Protestant combination of earnestness with waywardness. . . . My mother, like her father before her, was a Deist: she was sure there was a God, for who else could have made the world? But God was too great to take special thought for man: sacrifices, prayers, churches, and tales of immortality were invented by rascally priests in order to dominate the foolish. My father, except for the Deism, was emphatically of the same opinion. Thus, although I learned my prayers and catechism by rote, as was then inevitable in Spain, I knew that my parents regarded all religion as a work of human imaginations, and I agreed, and still agree, with them there. . . . The necessity of naturalism as a foundation for all further serious opinions was clear to me from the beginning.

The Life of Reason

In The Life of Reason he explained that religion is not something to be taken as being literally true. It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human, it aims at the “life of reason,” but it largely fails in attaining it. As for the gods, fear created them; but this fear and the mythology that it produces only half deceives the thinker. What is needed, he writes, is a paganizing of Christianity. It should take as its standard of value the human in life. Otherwise, it will continue with its mythology, the price of which is superstition, and although mythology and magic have their imaginative values, neither has succeeded: The Life of Reason, insofar as it is life, contains the mystic’s primordial assurances, and his rudimentary joys; but in so far as it is rational it has discovered what those assurances rest on, in what direction they may be trusted to support action and thought; and it has given those joys distinction and connexion, turning a dumb momentary ecstasy into a man-colored and natural happiness.”

Humanism

In 1951, while convalescing at the Convent of the Blue Nuns in Italy, he responded to Warren Allen Smith {WAS}, who asked his views about various humanisms: [lexicographical] humanism; ancient humanism; classical humanism; theistic humanism; atheistic humanism; communistic humanism; and naturalistic (or scientific) humanism:

• In my old-fashioned terminology, Humanist means a person saturated by the humanities: Humanism is something cultural: an accomplishment, not a doctrine. This might be something like what you call “classical humanism.” But unfortunately there is also a metaphysical or cosmological humanism or moralism which maintains that the world is governed by human interests and an alleged universal moral sense. This cosmic humanism for realists, who believe that knowledge has a prior and independent object which sense or thought signify, might be some religious orthodoxy, for idealists and phenomenalists an oracular destiny or dialectical evolution dominating the dream of life. This “humanism” is what I call egotism or moralism, and reject altogether. Naturalism, on the contrary, is something to which I am so thoroughly wedded that I like to call it materialism, so as to prevent all confusion from romantic naturalism like Goethe’s for instance, or that of Bergson. Mine is the hard, non-humanistic naturalism of the Ionian philosophers, of Democritus, Lucretius, and Spinoza. Those professors at Columbia who tell you that in my Idea of Christ in the Gospels I incline to theism have not read that book sympathetically. They forget that my naturalism is fundamental and includes man, his mind, and all his works, products of the generative order of Nature. Christ in the Gospels is a legendary figure. Spirit in him recognizes its dependence on the Father, and not monarchical government; i.e., the order of nature; and the animal will in man being thus devised, the spirit in man is freed and identified with that of the Father. My early Lucifer, which you mention, has the same doctrine.

• Original Letter from Santayana to Warren Allen Smith is in the Houghton Library, Harvard University

Skepticism

Santayana in Soliloquies in England (1922) wrote,

• Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer. . . . My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.”

Materialism

He also wrote, in his Reason in Science,

• A thorough Materialist, one born to the faith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold water, will be, like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher.

The Last Puritan

Martin Greif has called The Last Puritan the best novel ever written by a philosopher. It also is one of the saddest, for it relates the story, according to A. L. Rowse, of Santayana’s own unrequited love for Bertrand Russell’s heterosexual brother Frank. The attraction began when Santayana was invited to go for a cruise on the Russell yacht and, although Frank had no trouble crossing the narrow plank to the boat, George almost fell into the water and had to be helped over with the aid of Frank’s strong, manly arms. Even when Frank was later imprisoned for bigamy, the two maintained a correspondence. It is possible that the relationship was not totally unrequited, an allegation which came up later when Frank was sued for divorce by his wife. Forty years later, Santayana was writing to his first inspiration, his one and only love, “You now say more than you ever ‘said’ to me, even in our young days, about being ‘attached’ . . . to me; you must have been, in some way which . . . I don’t pretend to understand. In that case, why drop me now, when certainly there has been no change on my side except that involved in passing from twenty to sixty?”

Of the defects of the Russell character, for Frank once forgot George’s name and called him Sargeant, Santayana wrote of Bertrand Russell: “There is a strange mixture in him, as in his brother, of great ability and great disability; prodigious capacity and brilliance here—astonishing unconsciousness and want of perception there. They are like creatures of a species somewhat different from man.” Frank appears as the anti-hero Lord Jim Darnley in The Last Puritan, leading Rowse to conclude that “the story may have demanded it, but there is an element of wish-fulfillment here, perfectly understandable in the circumstances.”

His Death

Father Richard Butler, O.P., executive editor of the Priory Press, wrote about Santayana, "the Catholic Atheist," in Spirituality Today (Winter 1986, Vol. 38, pp. 319-336). Despite Santayana's life-long reputation as a naturalist, Father Butler describes Santayana's final days and implies he was turning Catholic. This, despite a 1951 letter in which Santayana clearly stated to a Columbia student,

• "Those professors at Columbia who tell you that in my Idea of Christ in the Gospels I incline to theism have not read that book sympathetically. They forget that my naturalism is fundamental and includes man, his mind, and all his works, products of the generative order of Nature. Christ in the Gospels is a legendary figure. Spirit in him recognizes its dependence on the Father, and not monarchical government; i.e., the order of nature; and the animal will in man being thus devised, the spirit in man is freed and identified with that of the Father. My early Lucifer, which you mention, has the same doctrine.

Father Butler described "the professor" who was loved by the Blue Sisters as "the poor old man" who lived in their midst in a sort of spiritual isolation, admiring but not sharing the faith that inspired them. He tells of a distant young relative visiting from Spain who visited and implored Santayana "to return to God":

• Santayana, visibly shaken, expelled the boy from his room and instructed Sister Angela never to permit his entrance again. He rejected a similar but less heated intervention by Jacques and Raissa Maritain during a car ride in the countryside and insisted the subject of conversation be changed or he would get out of the car and walk home. That happened, of course, in earlier years.

But when the hospital chaplain died,

• the friendly "professor" attended the funeral mass in the hospital chapel and gave a large sum of money to the Mother Superior and asked her to arrange for a number of requiem masses to be offered for his friend. I recall an afternoon when I entered Santayana's room and found him fretfully disturbed. My curiosity was aroused to the point of questioning his unusual manner. A boy had come, he explained, with a package that required payment. When he opened his desk drawer and reached for the amount needed, a wad of bills fell to the floor. Unable to stoop without difficulty, he asked the lad to pick up the money for him. After the boy had left, Santayana discovered that a considerable part of the money was missing. "Am I responsible for his theft by providing him with the occasion?" he asked. He was not asking a speculative question; he was sincerely concerned.

After visiting the Spanish Consulate to renew his passport, Santayana fell down the steps and fell into a coma, sometimes reciting verses of poetry and sometimes speaking coherently. Father Butler writes the following:

• Sister Angela, who had quietly served him and prayed for him for more than a decade, felt obliged in charity to say the obvious: "You are dying. You should see a priest and make your peace with God." A spark of determination shone in his eyes. "Say no more of this," he rasped. "I shall die as I have lived."

• About seventy years before this deathbed declaration, the young poet had speculated on his final stand on the ultimate issue that is inevitable to the wayward Christian. A single verse from "Easter Hymn" expressed the frank wonder of uncertain youth:

Perchance when Carnival is done,

And sun and moon go out on me

Christ will be God, and I the one

That in my youth I used to be.

• Once again his eyes flickered brightly and Sister Angela asked him, "Are you suffering?" He replied, "Not physically, but mentally." When she asked him what he meant, he answered with one word, "Desperation." A few days later, on September 26, 1952, sun and moon went out on him. Perhaps before it was over, Christ was God for him and he did return to his time of innocence.

• With characteristic ambiguity, he had expressed his wish to be buried in neutral (unblessed) ground in a Catholic cemetery. After some conflict with the well-known St. Paul's Protestant Cemetery director, who wanted him to be placed near the lots of Keats and Shelley, his request was honored. On the thirtieth day of September, 1952, George Santayana was laid to rest in the Catholic cemetery of Rome in a plot reserved for Spanish nationals.

To the disinterested, the lonely Santayana had made a pragmatic, not a theological, choice.

(See the section by Frederick A. Olafson on Santayana in Paul Edwards's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7. Also, see the entry for Max Eastman, whom he allegedly did not like.)

{CE; CL; EU, John Gouinlock; GL; HNS; PA; RE; TRI; TYD; WAS, 9 February 1951}