George Santayana

Santayana, George (b. Jorge Agustín Nicolás)

(1863–1952) philosopher, writer; born in Madrid, Spain. Immigrating to Boston as a boy, he studied with William James and Josiah Royce at Harvard, where he himself taught philosophy (1889–1912); among his students were T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Felix Frankfurter. Hating academic life and American commercialism and Puritanism, he took advantage of a modest inheritance to retire in 1912; he left the U.S.A. to live a solitary life in Oxford, Paris, and after 1925 in Rome. He wrote 18 volumes of philosophy, chief among them The Life of Reason (5 vols. 1905–06) and The Realms of Being (4 vols. 1927–40); his philosophical works are distinguished by their lucid, literary style. In addition he published poetry, literary, and cultural criticism; a novel, The Last Puritan (1935), an unexpected best-seller about Cambridge (Mass.) society; and a three-volume autobiography.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Santayana, George

 

Born Dec. 16, 1863, in Madrid; died Sept. 26, 1952, in Rome. American idealist philosopher and writer (the popular novel The Last Puritan, 1935).

A Spaniard by birth, Santayana lived in the USA from 1872 to 1912. From 1907 to 1912 he was a professor at Harvard University. Santayana interpreted critical realism, of which he was one of the chief representatives, in the tradition of Platonism. Adopting the standpoint of critical realism, he divided Being into two spheres: the phenomena of consciousness and material objects. According to Santayana, the evidence for the existence of the external world is a conviction of its objective reality, an “animal faith.” Santayana believed that only “experiential data,” or the phenomena of consciousness, are absolutely indubitable. According to Santayana, who adhered to a position of skepticism, knowledge of the external world is always subjectively interpreted and symbolic, and the only form of Weltanschauung is myth.

In Realms of Being (vols. 1–4, 1927–40), which purportedly combines realism and idealism, Santayana created a system of Being that includes four modes, or independent, unrelated “realities”: the realms of essence, matter, truth, and spirit. The central point in Santayana’s system is the concept of ideal essences, developed along the lines of the ideas of E. Husserl and A. N. Whitehead. The essences, which determine Being qualitatively, are diverse ideal qualities or spiritual formations. In Santayana’s system, matter is illusory—an entity devoid of content or qualities.

In ethics, Santayana developed a concept of “aesthetic morality.” In his social views, social phenomena typically dissolve into natural ones, giving rise to a biologism that is combined with a “moral-aesthetic” approach. Politically, Santayana opposed democracy and advocated rule by an “elite.”

WORKS

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. New York, 1900.
Scepticism and Animal Faith. London, 1923.
The Background of My Life. New York, 1944.
Dominations and Powers. New York, 1951.
The Life of Reason, vols. 1–5. New York, 1962.

REFERENCES

Endovitskii, V. D. Kritika filosofii amerikanskogo kriticheskogo realizma. Moscow, 1968.
Bogomolov, A. S. Burzhuaznaia filosofiía SShA XX veka. Moscow, 1974. Chapter 6.
The Philosophy of George Santayana. Evanston, Ill.-Chicago, 1940.
Butler, R. The Mind of Santayana. Chicago, 1955.
Munson, T. N. The Essential Wisdom of George Santayana. New York-London, 1962.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.