{"id":82195,"date":"1987-06-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1987-06-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/george-santayana-and-the-consolations-of-philosophy\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:47:47","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:47:47","slug":"george-santayana-and-the-consolations-of-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/george-santayana-and-the-consolations-of-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"George Santayana and the consolations of philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

P<\/span>hilosophers, unlike fish, do best not to travel in schools. Josiah Royce once said that the philosopher does well to imitate the rhinoceros, who travels in a herd of one. George Santayana, a rhinoceros among philosophers, an all-ivory and very elegant one, went even further in stipulating that the philosopher ought not to share unreservedly the spirit of his age, or be subject to its dominant moods. One of Santayana\u2019s criticisms of Bertrand Russell was that \u201che could never shake himself free from his environment and from the miscellaneous currents of opinion in his day.\u201d Insofar as philosophy implies the long view and the high view\u2014and insofar as it does not, philosophy is a great deal less interesting\u2014this would seem to make good sense. If the world is among those phenomena that are not better understood close up, then philosophers should indeed cultivate detachment the way English pensioners do delphiniums: for motives above and beyond immediate profit. But is the world best understood from the distance, away from the fray and above the ruck? That, as a certain notable Danish prince was wont to say, is the question.<\/p>\n

It was never much of a question for George Santayana, who, in suggesting that the philosopher ought not to live too fully in the spirit of his age, might have been writing his own job description. Not that Santayana had to cultivate detachment; he seems to have been born with it, the way other people are born with, say, large feet. This quality of extreme detachment in Santayana has put many people off, in our own time and even more in his. He referred to his own \u201cessential character as a traveller and a stranger, with the philosophical freedom that this implies.\u201d He felt that to be a stranger was his destiny and considered himself among those true travellers who, not \u201cpining for a better cage,\u201d are content with their own condition of permanent transience. Nowhere in Santayana\u2019s writings will one find the least yearning to be amidst the fray or in and around the ruck. He was quite content to occupy his seat in the shade, a glass of good wine in his hand, watching the other people dance.<\/p>\n

When Santayana remarked that being a stranger was his destiny, he could only have been alluding to the conditions of his birth and upbringing. He was the only child of his mother\u2019s second marriage, and was named after her first husband. His mother had earlier married the ninth child of the Boston merchant Nathaniel Russell Sturgis, with whom she had five children, three of whom survived. She had met her second husband, George\u2019s father, when he and her own father were officials in the Spanish civil service in the Philippine Islands, but did not marry him until many years later. In 1869, when George was six years old, his mother parted from him and his father to live in Boston among her deceased first husband\u2019s family, who were her main financial stay. Young George was left behind in the walled Spanish city of Avila with his father, who was then in his fifties. Three years later, along with his father, he joined his mother in Boston, to take his place as the youngest son in a shabby-genteel household with a remote connection to the wealthy and well-established Sturgises. When George\u2019s father found that he was too old to make the adjustment to life in the United States, he returned to Avila. His son would not see him again until he was at the end of his freshman year at Harvard.<\/p>\n

Santayana did not have to worry about his mother\u2019s love; from nearly the outset, he knew he didn\u2019t have it. Such maternal love as she seemed to possess spent itself upon her first-born son, Victor, who died in the second year of his life. The death \u201cmade a radical revolution in her heart,\u201d Santayana would note years later in his autobiography, Persons and Places<\/em><\/em>.<\/a>[1]<\/a> \u201cIt established there a reign of silent despair, permanent, devastating, ruffled perhaps by fresh events on the surface, but always dark and heavy beneath, like the depths of the sea.\u201d He would claim that his half-sister Susana, who was twelve years his senior, came closer to being his true mother. He frankly wondered what his parents saw in each other. As for him, he loved his father, whom he could not admire, and admired his mother, whom he could not love. Two interesting cards to be dealt so early in life.<\/p>\n

Santayana\u2019s manner in writing about his mother in Persons and Places<\/em><\/em> is characteristic of his detachment.<\/p>\n

Santayana\u2019s manner in writing about his mother in Persons and Places<\/em><\/em> is characteristic of his detachment. It is evenhanded but not cool; it is hot, but not red hot. He ticks off her many and serious shortcomings: her coldness; her incuriosity, not to say philistinism; her pridefulness; her hostility to everything that interested her children; her mismanagement of the lives of those children who would permit her any control over their lives. Santayana, pretty clearly, was not among the latter. He wasn\u2019t because in many respects he and his mother were very much alike: in their independence of will; in their need to separate themselves from those around them; in their common inability to be much moved by the most tragic of events; and in their fundamental despair, which seemed to raise them both above great concern over ordinary matters. One may not like a man who tells you straightaway that he is a cold fish, but one tends to trust him.<\/p>\n

If few of the conventional comforts of family life were open to Santayana, those of patriotism were even more closed off\u201d to him. Born in Spain and raised in the United States, he was truly neither American nor Spanish, though legally he remained and died a Spanish citizen. When he first returned to Spain, in 1883, in his twentieth year, he felt like a foreigner there \u201cand could not do myself justice in the language.\u201d Language was no barrier to him in America\u2014he spoke English with no marked accent\u2014but he felt even more of a foreigner here. He would later say that in feeling he was Spanish and that in mastering English he might be said \u201cto have been guilty, quite unintentionally, of a little stratagem, as if I had set out to say plausibly in English as many un-English things as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost by design, Santayana appears to have been a foreigner in every country in which he ever lived. In Spain, Santayana never sought out fellow Americans; in America he never sought the company of fellow Spaniards. Although he spent many a season living in Paris, the episodic and fashionable nature of French intellectual and artistic life put him ofF; so did the French mind, which he cited as \u201can exquisite medium for conveying such things as can be communicated in words. It is the unspoken things of which one feels the absence or mistrusts the quality [among the French].\u201d He thought about settling in England after he had given up teaching philosophy at Harvard in 1912, which was as early as he could afford to do so. (\u201cTrue serenity of mind comes, of course,\u201d as Murray Kempton once remarked, \u201cto those who can dismiss Harvard.\u201d) But he decided, while living there during World War I<\/span>, that he \u201cwas in danger of losing my philosophical cruelty<\/em> and independence\u201d (italics mine), and so departed once more, describing his farewell to England as akin to burying \u201ca wife long divorced.\u201d<\/p>\n

George Santayana was unassimilable by nature, a stranger by preference, a man without a country quite as much by choice as by circumstance. When in his sixties he finally settled in Rome, he did so not because he felt he had found an ideal society, but rather because he found suitable lodgings in an ideal situation of solitude and independence, \u201cafter the fashion of ancient philosophers,\u201d as he put it, \u201coften in exile, but always in sight of the market-place and the theatre.\u201d Of course, to be in exile one must first have a home country from which one has been ejected or has chosen to flee. As John McCormick writes in his excellent new biography of Santayana,<\/a>[2]<\/a> \u201cWherever he was, he was at ease, playing his part on the stage, but he was not at home.\u201d Yet it would be a mistake, I believe, to imagine George Santayana as lonely, alienated, an isolato<\/em>\u2014a mistake, in general, to imagine that Santayana did not enjoy life, for he did, immensely.<\/p>\n

George Santayana was unassimilable by nature, a stranger by preference, a man without a country quite as much by choice as by circumstance.<\/p>\n

How was Santayana able to do so without the consolations the rest of us require: love of family, of country, of friends? Consider only friendship. Santayana\u2019s friendships were sometimes intense but scarcely ever intimate. In regard to friends, he resembled a cousin of his father\u2019s, who \u201cliked all that was likable, without being deceived by it.\u201d Such friendships as Santayana made as a young man were based not on social class, for his own was a bit blurry, or on membership in the same circle, for he belonged to no circle, but instead on his own two prerequisites to perfect friendship\u2014\u201ccapacity to laugh and capacity to worship.\u201d Yet, he felt, at least from the perspective of old age, that \u201cmodern life is not made for friendship,\u201d offering as it did too many distractions. The friend who seems to have meant the most to Santayana was Frank Russell, the 2nd Earl Russell and Bertrand Russell\u2019s older, equally scandal-prone brother; the long duration of their friendship, Santayana believed, was owing to the fact that \u201cneither of us was ever a nuisance to the other.\u201d But this friendship, like almost all his others, would in time lapse. As he grew older, Santayana accustomed himself to lapsed friendships without bitterness. In a world where everything was transitory, friends could scarcely be otherwise, but for him this \u201cinvolved no estrangement, no disillusion; on the contrary, the limits of each friendship perfected that friendship, insured it against disaster, enshrined it in the eternal.\u201d To live sub species aeternitatis<\/em>, under the aspect of eternity, is of course the way philosophers are supposed to live. Yet to come across a philosopher who actually does so live is startling and not a little spooky, and we tend to be chilled by it.<\/p>\n

Of marriage, the ultimate friendship, that, for Santayana, was never a serious possibility. At twenty-two, studying in Germany on a Walker Fellowship from Harvard, he wrote in light verse to his friend Ward Thoron:<\/p>\n

\n

I cannot part from what I prize
\nFor all I prize is in my head;
\nMy fancies are the fields and skies
\nI will not change till I am dead,
\nUnless indeed I lose my wits
\nOr (what is much the same thing) wed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Years later, now a professor at Harvard, when asked why he didn\u2019t marry, he replied that he wished to retain his freedom and, besides, he did not intend always to live in America. He also mentioned religious difficulties, for he styled himself a \u201cfree-thinking Catholic\u201d (about which more presently), which left him in a socially impossible position in a Protestant country. He counted himself a d\u00e9racin\u00e9<\/em>, and, as he wrote in his autobiography, \u201ca d\u00e9racin\u00e9<\/em>, a man who has been torn up by the roots, cannot be replanted and should never propagate his kind.”<\/p>\n

Skeptical minds will want to know if all this isn\u2019t the sheerest twaddle and if Santayana was not in fact homosexual. It is a question worthy of Barbara Walters, but today, alas, all biographers must ask it of their unmarried subjects, or even of those who have married too often. John McCormick, who does little poking about in sexual closets in his biography, nonetheless feels that he must flop one way or another on the question, and he flops, on a very thin mattress of epistolary evidence, which is too thin to air out here, on the side that says Santayana must have been homosexual. Although I much admire Professor McCormick\u2019s biography, and although his brief sexual investigation does not in any serious way flaw his book, I wish he hadn\u2019t flopped at all.<\/p>\n

I think a much stronger case can be made for the other side. In a letter to Morton Fullerton, who was later to be Edith Wharton\u2019s lover and a friend to Henry James, Santayana sets out the sexual choices, but eliminates \u201cPaiderastia\u201d because \u201cour prejudices against it are so strong that it hardly comes under the possibilities for us.\u201d While he writes elsewhere in good Santayanan metaphor that \u201cthe chained dogs below keep barking in their kennels,\u201d he also avers that \u201clove has never made me long unhappy, nor sexual impulse uncomfortable.\u201d But what seems to be clinching is his critical treatment of the dons at King\u2019s College, Cambridge\u2014”my feeling when I was at King\u2019s was that the birds were not worthy of the cage\u201d\u2014during a time when the homosexual spirit was very much in the ascendant at that college. Santayana found E.M. Forster\u2019s friend and philosophical mentor, Lowes Dickinson, hopeless in his utopianly sentimental moralizing. Oscar Browning \u201copenly flaunted the banners of gluttony and paederasty, neither of them suitable for a teacher of youth . . . .\u201d Of Lytton Strachey, another great Cambridge figure of this era, Santayana wrote: \u201cObscene<\/em> was the character written all over him; and his expertness in secret history in satire expressed that character intellectually.\u201d To a correspondent who queried him many years later about Strachey, he replied: \u201cNo, I am not <\/em>an admirer of Strachey. I knew him.\u201d Such sentiments scarcely seem those of a man, to adopt Professor McCormick\u2019s unfortunate phrase, of \u201chomosexual temperament.\u201d<\/p>\n

Very little else about Professor McCormick\u2019s biography is unfortunate. It is well written; it is comprehensive; it is devoid of nonsense. George Santayana: A Biography<\/em> is a difficult biographical assignment brilliantly brought off. Of its difficulty, consider only the following: Santayana lived a long life (he died at eighty-eight) in which almost all the major events went on in his mind; d\u00e9racin\u00e9<\/em> by birth and as far from engag\u00e9<\/em> as possible in his intellectual life, only his views, ideas, books matter. In Persons and Places<\/em><\/em>, Santayana wrote one of the really splendid autobiographies of the twentieth century, and few things can be quite so discouraging to a biographer as his subject\u2019s having written well and truly about himself. One of those things may be to have this same subject also be among a small circle of extremely elegant English prose stylists, so that, next to his subject\u2019s, the biographer\u2019s own writing will often be made to seem rather dim, not to say a bit shoddy. (Careful readers will notice that thus far along in this essay I have refrained from quoting Santayana at length.)<\/p>\n

In the nature of this case, a biographer does not figure to be as subtle, penetrating, or artful as his subject. But he ought not to be too much less so. A biographer who can write about a subject whose mind is as well-stocked and intellectually intricate as Santayana\u2019s is not easily found. To understand Santayana, one has to be interested in art and philosophy, and to appreciate philosophy practiced as an art, which is the way he, Santayana, usually practiced it. John McCormick, who is not a professional philosopher but a teacher of comparative literature who has written on literary history and on the theoretical foundations of fiction, does understand all this. He is a worldly man, and a serious man, who writes lucidly, with power where it is called for, and with occasional enlivening flashes of wit, such as when, in passing, he remarks that old age is a reliable cure for hypochondria, or when he says of Santayana and Ezra Pound, \u201ctheir difference in age was considerable; their difference in temperament was alarming.\u201d McCormick\u2019s treatment of Santayana is even-handed; his general tone is one of appreciation not bereft of criticism. Unless one is wholly an aesthete, Santayana is not a writer one loves\u2014Lionel Trilling, writing about Santayana\u2019s letters in the middle 1950s, noted that \u201cindeed, it might be remarkably easy to dislike him\u201d\u2014but at the same time it is difficult not to feel fascinated admiration for him, so copious was his talent, so completely did he live his philosophy.<\/p>\n

Unless one is wholly an aesthete, Santayana is not a writer one loves.<\/p>\n

I<\/span>n his thirtieth year, in a letter to Norman Hapgood, Santayana wrote: \u201cIt becomes clearer to me every day that both in teaching and living our need is simplification, measure and docility to the facts.\u201d Of course his own needs were immensely simplified by his early understanding that he was among those with \u201cno other purpose but that of living to observe life,\u201d which is to say, that he was a writer. Whatever his other deficiencies, he had, in excelsis<\/em>, \u201cthe faculty of intellectual delight,\u201d which he never lost. On a travelling fellowship in Germany he wrote to his teacher William James that \u201cphilosophy seems to me to be its own reward, and its justification lies in the delight and dignity of the art itself\u201d; and he later confessed to James that what initially drew him to philosophy was \u201ccuriosity and a natural taste for ingenious thinking.\u201d All this makes him sound very much the cool aesthete, for whom philosophy is above all a superior game. And so it might have been but for his talent for facing unpleasant facts, the least pleasant of which he knew by the time he was twenty-three, and perhaps much earlier\u2014that \u201cthe world isn\u2019t run in our interest or with any reference to our needs.\u201d He calls this brute fact the \u201cultimate lesson of experience and philosophy,\u201d and by \u201cour\u201d he doesn\u2019t mean dreamy young men at Harvard but all human beings.<\/p>\n

That the world was not organized in the interest of human beings, nor had any special reference to their needs, was the last thing Santayana was likely to have learned at Harvard, where a Protestant spirit of uplift prevailed. This spirit, it does not seem too strong to say, Santayana detested. It was akin to the spirit he found in the Unitarian churches of Boston, where people flocked \u201cto hear a sermon like the leading article in some superior newspaper calculated to confirm the conviction already in them that their bourgeois virtues were quite sufficient and that perhaps in time poor backward races and nations might be led to acquire them.\u201d He considered the great New England god Emerson \u201ca sort of Puritan Goethe,\u201d who had \u201cslipped into transcendentalism and moralism and complacency in mediocrity, in order to flatter his countrymen and indirectly flatter himself.\u201d One of Santayana\u2019s many complaints against Harvard\u2019s President Charles W. Eliot (who brought the system of elective courses to the university) was that he, Eliot, thought that if a thing was moral it must also be true.<\/p>\n

Santayana detected and ultimately condemned this spirit in the philosophy department at Harvard\u2014a department that included William James, Josiah Royce, and, between the years 1889 and 1912, Santayana himself. \u201cProtestant philosophy,\u201d as he called philosophy in America in Character and Opinion in the United States<\/em> (1920), \u201cwas too conscientious to misrepresent what it found,\u201d but also too moral-minded not to undermine its findings. At Harvard, philosophers felt themselves bound \u201cby two different responsibilities, that of describing things as they are, and that of finding them propitious to certain preconceived human desires.\u201d Josiah Royce, who loved logic, labored with a powerful contradiction at the heart of his work, adducing the existence of evil to prove the existence of good, and then feeling he ought to strive to eliminate evil. Not even William James, according to Santayana, could shake off the heavy hand of Protestant moralizing: \u201cHe was worried about what ought<\/em> to be believed and the awful deprivation of disbelieving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Santayana has the distinction of being one of the few people to speak ill of William James with a pretty fair consistency. The feeling was not reciprocated, even though James is famously known, in a letter to George H. Palmer, his colleague in the Harvard philosophy department, to have referred to Santayana\u2019s \u201cperfection of rottenness in a philosophy\u201d and to his \u201cmoribund Latinity.\u201d As Professor McCormick shows, these phrases were embedded in a letter of otherwise exuberant praise for Santayana\u2019s book Interpretations of Poetry and Religion<\/em> (1900), about which James wrote: \u201cAlthough I absolutely reject the platonism of it, I have literally squealed with delight at the imperturbable perfection with which the position is laid down on page after page; and grunted with delight at the thickening up of our Harvard atmosphere . . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

It is reasonably certain that Santayana never either squealed or grunted with delight at anything William James wrote. James was in no serious sense Santayana\u2019s mentor, but he was, within the Harvard philosophy department, his protector, helping to arrange a job for him, solidifying a permanent position, aiding in his promotion.<\/a>[3]<\/a> Santayana may not have known this. Yet even had he known it, my guess is that he could not quite have let his disappointment in James be. In a letter to a Harvard colleague, after reporting that John Stuart Mill\u2019s psychologism repels him, he goes on to say, \u201cMill is a sort of ponderous and sober James.\u201d To the same man he earlier writes, \u201cI love W. James as a man. But what a singularly bad thinker he is!\u201d Yet if he claimed to love him in a letter of 1904, when he came to write about him decades later in Persons and Places<\/em><\/em> he noted:<\/p>\n

\n

I was uncomfortable in his presence. He was so extremely natural that there was no knowing what his nature was, or what to expect next; so that one was driven to behave and talk conventionally, as in the most artificial society. I found no foothold, I was soon fatigued, and it was a relief to be out again in the open, and alone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In Character and Opinion<\/em> in the United States, Santayana really lowered the boom on James\u2014a velvet-covered boom, to be sure, but one that could nonetheless knock off a man\u2019s head. There Santayana writes that James was a spirited but not a spiritual man; that The Varieties of Religious Experience<\/em> is a book that altogether overlooks the religious experience of the great mass of mankind, which \u201cconsists in simple faith in the truth and benefit of their religious traditions\u201d; that James was chary of coming to philosophical conclusions, or, as Santayana put it, \u201cliked to take things one by one, rather than to put two and two together\u201d; and that, finally, \u201cthere is a sense in which James was not a philosopher at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heavy praise was not part of the regular regimen of Santayana\u2019s intellectual exercise.<\/p>\n

Heavy praise was not part of the regular regimen of Santayana\u2019s intellectual exercise\u2014the only thinkers who unwaveringly find favor with him are the Greeks, Lucretius, and, after a jump of seventeen centuries, Spinoza\u2014but was there an air of spite in his treatment of William James? My own sense is that he was disappointed in James, whom he knew to be a superior man but not unfortunately superior enough to rise above what to Santayana was the stultifying atmosphere of fin de si\u00e8cle<\/em> Harvard. When James once accused Santayana of impertinence and of putting on airs, Santayana shot back: \u201cI wonder if you realize the years of suppressed irritation which I have passed in the midst of an unintelligible sanctimonious and often disingenuous Protestantism, which is thoroughly alien to and repulsive to me, and the need I have of joining hands with something far away from it and far above it.\u201d In a later letter he charged James with not seeing \u201cmy philosophy, nor my temper from the inside.\u201d Part of this could be put down to sheer clash of temperament; yet perhaps a greater part is owing to William James\u2019s impatience with the type of the artist, which Santayana most assuredly was. Odd that a man such as William James, who had so much sympathy, should in this regard have had so little imagination. One remembers here his inevitably disappointing letters to his brother Henry about Henry\u2019s books, with his, William\u2019s, invocations to Henry to try harder to write for the multitude, to which Henry on one occasion responded: \u201c. . . I’m always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of mine, and always hope you won\u2019t\u2014you seem to me so constitutionally unable to \u2018enjoy\u2019 it, and so condemned to look at it from a point of view remotely alien to mine in writing it. . . .\u201d As for Santayana, when he met Henry James, for the first and only time, toward the end of James\u2019s life, he seems to have understood him immediately and completely:<\/p>\n

\n

Those were his last years and I never saw him again. Nevertheless in that one interview he made me feel more at home, and better understood, than his brother William ever had done in the long years of our acquaintance. Henry was calm, he liked to see things as they are, and be free afterwards to imagine how they might have been. We talked about different countries as places of residence. He was of course subtle and bland, appreciative of all points of view, and amused at their limitations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Was it the artist in Santayana who discouraged the teacher in him? He never set out to become a teacher. Had he not been offered a half-time instructorship at Harvard, Professor McCormick informs us, he would have studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Santayana preferred not to be thought a professor. A poet, yes; a philosopher, certainly; a continuing student, inevitably; but a professor, \u201cI would rather beg than be one essentially.\u201d From the day he began teaching he began saving for the day he could cease teaching. He claimed that no close friend of his was ever a professor. Lee Simonson, the stage designer who was a student of Santayana\u2019s, recalls him when lecturing \u201cgazing over our heads as if looking for the sail that was to bear him home\u201d\u2014though where, exactly, home was could not have been all that clear even to Santayana, except away from Harvard.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you are trying to teach philosophy at Harvard,\u201d Henry Adams said to Santayana on the one occasion when they met. \u201cI once tried to teach history there, but it can\u2019t be done. It isn\u2019t really possible to teach anything.\u201d Santayana, had he been older, would have disagreed; it could be done, all right; for him the question was always whether it was worth doing. In a beautiful but cool passage in Character and Opinion in the United States<\/em>, Santayana neatly described teaching with an accuracy that only those who have tried<\/em> to give their best to teaching will readily recognize:<\/p>\n

\n

Teaching is a delightful paternal art, and especially teaching intelligent and warmhearted youngsters, as most American collegians are; but it is an art like acting, where the performance, often rehearsed, must be adapted to an audience hearing it only once. The speaker must make concessions to their impatience, their taste, their capacity, their prejudices, their ultimate good; he must neither bore nor perplex nor demoralise them. His thoughts must be such as can flow daily, and be set down in notes; they must come when the bell rings and stop appropriately when the bell rings a second time. The best that is in him, as Mephistopheles says in Faust<\/em>, he dare not tell them; and as the substance of this possession is spiritual, to withhold is often to lose it. For it is not merely a matter of fearing not to be understood, or giving offence; in the presence of a hundred upturned faces a man cannot, without diffidence, speak in his own person, of his own thoughts; he needs support, in order to exert influence with a good conscience; unless he feels that he is the vehicle of a massive tradition, he will become bitter, or flippant, or aggressive; if he is to teach with good grace and modesty and authority, it must not be he that speaks, but science or humanity that is speaking in him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Complain about teaching though Santayana did, he had a most impressive roster of students attend his classes and lectures at Harvard. Among them, as Professor McCormick reminds us, were Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost, Gilbert Seldes, Max Eastman, Harry Austryn Wolfson, Samuel Eliot Morison, Felix Frankfurter, T. S. Eliot, and Van Wyck Brooks. Wallace Stevens never took a course from Santayana, but was very much aware of his presence, and later wrote a splendid poem about him, \u201cTo an Old Philosopher in Rome.\u201d Walter Lippmann while a graduate student was his assistant. Most of these figures came away greatly impressed by Santayana\u2019s teaching. Only T. S. Eliot would later describe his lectures as \u201csoporific\u201d; and Van Wyck Brooks, in his autobiography, claimed to find Santayana\u2019s \u201cassumption of superiority\u201d repellent and his \u201cfeline aestheticism\u201d (Brooks was, avowedly, a canine man) no less so. Brooks was also put off by Santayana\u2019s distaste for things American, \u201cthough I could not deny that, wandering alone, a stranger and exile everywhere, Santayana lived the true life of the sage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Did Santayana actually hate America?<\/p>\n

Did Santayana actually hate America? I think he came near to doing so, without quite hating Americans. Around the time of his preparing to depart the United States for good, he wrote to his sister that \u201cI am far from wishing never to see my American friends again. It is only their country<\/em> that I am longing to lose sight of.\u201d He felt America to be a country where people were interested in what might or should be, whereas his sympathies were all for preserving the already formed. In America, ideas and traditions were not refuted but simply forgotten. The serenity for which he longed was not available in America, not even in religion: \u201cBe Christians,\u201d he claimed once to have heard a president of Yale tell his students, \u201cbe Christians and you will be successful.\u201d Returning from a trip to California and Canada, he wrote to his sister in Avila: \u201cThey are intellectually emptier than the Sahara, where I understand the Arabs have some idea of God or of Fate.\u201d In the same letter he remarks that at Harvard, \u201cin the midst of the dull round, a sort of instinct of courtesy makes me take it [America] for granted, and I become almost unconscious of how much I hate it all; otherwise I couldn\u2019t have stood it for forty years!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1911, Santayana worked out an arrangement whereby he would teach a single term at Harvard, leaving him otherwise free to live abroad, there to indulge his \u201cnative <\/em>affinities to European things.\u201d But when his mother died, in 1912, he wrote, from Paris, a letter of resignation to President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard saying that his mother\u2019s death marked \u201cthe moment when I should carry out the plan I have always had of giving up teaching, returning to live in Europe, and devoting myself to literary work. Each of these things is an object in itself sufficient to determine me, and the three conspire together.\u201d He was almost fifty, and free at last.<\/p>\n

H<\/span>enceforth Santayana would guard that freedom with the most sedulous care. Financially independent\u2014one of his Sturgis relations had invested his money for him wisely\u2014he had no social ambitions, required no regular circle of friends, no fixed abode, no round of engagements. He was not in any way reclusive, and rather enjoyed such people who came his way\u2014the stray poet or philosopher, the handsome and agreeable woman\u2014but, as he put it in Persons and Places<\/em>: \u201cFor constant company I had enough, and too much, with myself.\u201d Besides, he \u201cliked solitude in crowds, meals in restaurants, walks in public parks, architectural rambles in noble cities.\u201d Boundless and boundary-less, he roamed free, all of Europe his demesne, like a Henry James character from the late period with all the Jamesian sensibility, but without any interior conflict requiring resolution.<\/p>\n

Santayana\u2019s cousin Howard Sturgis, who was a friend of Henry James\u2019s and who lived in England, accused Santayana of being abominably selfish. Santayana allowed that he was merely \u201cprofoundly selfish,\u201d the distinction residing in the sense that, while he took pleasure in the life around him, he determined never to enter into relationships that would cause him to surrender his independence. (In fact, as Professor McCormick recounts, once his books began to sell well, Santayana was most generous in providing financial help to family and friends.) He then goes on to make the distinction that his selfishness is not of a competitive kind. \u201cI don\u2019t want to snatch money or position or pleasures from other people, nor do I attempt to dominate them, as an unselfish man would say, for their own good.\u201d Master of irony that Santayana is, in owning up to his own selfishness he makes us recognize that it is the unselfish man of that subordinate clause who is the real menace.<\/p>\n

The power of making distinctions, which can result in parching dryness in a pedantic philosopher, is in Santayana always a pleasure to behold. The smaller the distinction, often, the more charm it has. Thus in Persons and Places<\/em> one finds people who are argumentative but not critical, others who are cordial but not amiable; then others who have warmth but no passion. One man\u2014specifically, Spinoza\u2014is \u201cvirtuous but not normal\u201d; and another\u2014specifically, Frank Russell\u2014is \u201cpolygamous without being inconstant.\u201d A writer able to wield a linguistic cleaver with such skill makes one feel one\u2019s own prose has been cut, most coarsely, on a large buzz saw. Santayana also had the power, which Aristotle said cannot be taught, of constructing dazzling metaphors and similes. Thus (again) in Persons and Places<\/em> one comes upon buildings whose surfaces are stark and unyielding, thin and sharp, \u201clike impoverished old maids\u201d; frail elms, \u201clike tall young women in consumption\u201d; an aunt said to be \u201cliving out of the fifth act of the tragedy of her life\u201d; the speech of William Lyon Phelps, \u201chis every word . . . a cocktail, or at least a temperance drink.\u201d It was Santayana who once referred to those philosophers whose writing gave no aesthetic pleasure\u2014among them Epicurus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant\u2014 as \u201cleafless forests\u201d; to retain that botanical metaphor a moment longer, his own prose is a field of orchids on a mountain slope.<\/p>\n

But, then, it occurs to me, Santayana might have been repelled by the metaphor. A field of orchids perhaps plays too strongly into the stereotype of Santayana\u2019s reputation as the most dandiacal among modern philosophers. Orchids are all very beautiful, but one cannot after all derive sustenance from them; and might not the same be said of Santayana\u2019s philosophy? Santayana is perhaps best known for his book on aesthetics, The Sense of Beauty<\/em>, but in fact it is not a book he greatly esteemed (he also had strong reservations about his other well-known work, The Life of Reason<\/em>); and Professor McCormick informs us that the book secured promotion for Santayana to an assistant professorship at Harvard. Yet, powerful literary critic though he could be, and thoroughly literary though his sensibility was\u2014The Complete Poems of George Santayana<\/em> (1979) runs to more than five hundred pages, and his single excursion into fiction, The Last Puritan<\/em> (1935), had a popular success\u2014Santayana thought of himself as a philosopher, and a philosopher primarily.<\/p>\n

He was, however, a philosopher of a particular kind\u2014and the kind can best be distinguished by his method and his temperament. He was not a logician and he did not come to philosophy through science, for he had no scientific training of any serious sort. He never claimed originality for himself, and once remarked that all he cared for \u201cis to sift the truth<\/em> from traditional imagination<\/em>, without impoverishing the latter.\u201d As early as 1887, when he was twenty-four years old, he wrote to William James to say that he had no interest in the philosophy that sets out to solve problems, and that philosophy, for him, was \u201crather an attempt to express a half-discovered reality, just as art is, and that two different renderings, if they are expressive, far from cancelling each other add to each other\u2019s values . . . .\u201d Nearly thirty years later he wrote to a younger man just beginning a career in philosophy that, while he could not take the teaching of philosophy seriously, he did think philosophy \u201cmight be a life or a means of artistic expression.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Santayana, of course, philosophy was both a life and an art.<\/p>\n

For Santayana, of course, philosophy was both a life and an art: he lived his philosophy and he lavished attention on the production of it of the kind that the superior artist does upon his art. As a philosopher, he was no system builder, and attempts at elaborate argument in his technical philosophy are often difficult to follow. He was himself well aware of this, and when Logan Pearsall Smith proposed an anthology of his work that eventually appeared under the title Little Essays, Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana<\/em> (1920), Santayana, in remarking on Smith\u2019s initial selection, wrote: \u201cmy impression is that what I have to say is better conveyed in these occasional epigrams than in any of my attempts at argument or system.\u201d There was the additional difficulty that Santayana used certain key philosophical terms\u2014\u201cmoral,\u201d \u201cscience,\u201d \u201cgenius,\u201d \u201csubstance,\u201d \u201cintuition,\u201d and \u201cspirit,\u201d among others\u2014with special, sometimes quite slippery, meanings. This, too, he knew: \u201cPhilosophy seems to be richer in theories than in words to express them in; and much confusion results from the necessity of using old terms in new meanings.\u201d Owing to this, Santayana\u2019s philosophy, like certain poems, does not paraphrase easily, if at all.<\/p>\n

Like many another artist, Santayana was a brilliant critic of practitioners of his art. Although he claimed to despise an atmosphere of contention and controversy, he could handle the stiletto with the best of them. Frequently he chose to do so in the privacy of letters, as when, in one such letter, he describes G.E. Moore\u2019s Principia Ethica<\/em> as a book that \u201cseems to contain a grain of accuracy in a bushel of inexperience.\u201d Such is Bertrand Russell\u2019s intelligence and clarity, that \u201cthe more wrong he is the clearer he makes the wrongness of his position; and what more can you expect a philosopher to prove except that the views he has adopted are radically and eternally impossible? If every philosopher had done that in the past, we should now be almost out of the wood.\u201d To witness Santayana at work in his job as critic of philosophers one cannot do better than to read the brief book entitled Egotism in German Philosophy<\/em> (1916), in which, with great economy, he works up\u2014and over\u2014the German philosophical system builders. When he is done the landscape of German philosophy resembles nothing so much as Berlin in early 1946: scarcely any buildings are left standing, only a few shabby figures shuffle past, the smell of smoke is in the air. Toward the close of his life, he wrote: \u201cIf I were not too old and could venture to write in French, I should compose a short history of Les Faux Pas de la Philosophie<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the heart of Santayana\u2019s philosophy is a desire to be un-illusioned about the world and yet, unlike (say) Nietzsche, neither in despair nor in great anguish about it. \u201cI was never afraid of disillusion,\u201d Santayana wrote in the opening essay of The Philosophy of George Santayana<\/em>, the volume devoted to his work in the Library of Living Philosophers series, \u201cand I chose it.\u201d Perhaps it is just as accurate to say that disillusion chose him, given his upbringing in a house crowded with Spanish relatives, where, as a small boy, he witnessed women giving birth and, not much older, he shared a room with a half-brother of adolescent years and normal appetites. His father was an atheist, who found the idea of the existence of God ridiculous; his mother was a pantheist, who believed God existed but was everywhere and hence was quite impersonal. Being born without much of it, he early knew that money was not an illusion. He never for a moment seems to have felt that the world was \u201ca myth, to be clarified by a little literary criticism.\u201d Yet everything in his background conduced against his overestimating the importance of human beings in the universe. As he announced in a lecture on Herbert Spencer entitled \u201cThe Unknowable,\u201d life is not \u201can entertainment, a feast of ordered sensations . . . life is no such thing; it is a predicament. We are caught in it; it is something compulsory, urgent, dangerous, and tempting. We are surrounded by enormous, mysterious, half-friendly forces.\u201d And yet this only makes it all the more fascinating.<\/p>\n

At the heart of Santayana\u2019s philosophy is a desire to be un-illusioned about the world.<\/p>\n

To feel the vanity of life\u2014that everything changes and everything simultaneously remains the same\u2014was for Santayana \u201cthe beginning of seriousness.\u201d To trot out the \u201cisms,\u201d he claimed allegiance to materialism, the family of doctrines that give a primary place to matter, and to naturalism, which in Three Philosophical Poets<\/em> (1910) he described as an \u201cintellectual philosophy\u201d that \u201cdivines substance behind appearance, continuity behind change, law behind fortune.\u201d But more to the point, Santayana believed that \u201cman was not made to understand the world, but to live in it. Yet nature, in some of us, lets out her secret; it spoils the game, but it associates us with her own impartiality.\u201d That secret, as mentioned earlier, is that the world is not organized for man, that \u201cmorally,\u201d as he put it in Persons and Places<\/em>, \u201call things are neutral in themselves. It is we that bathe them in whatever emotion may be passing through us.\u201d A qualified pessimism, an almost happy pessimism, is at the center of Santayana\u2019s philosophy:<\/p>\n

\n

I have never seen much evidence of happiness in human life; but personally I cannot complain of my lot. It has been tolerable enough to allow me to be disinterested in speculation and therefore happy in it, as musicians can be happy in music or mathematicians in mathematics. But as men we are all sad failures. The world is a blind power, is too much for us, even for a Napoleon or a Goethe. But the same world, as an object of thought, is a wonderful theme; to understand it, virtually and mythically, as a man may, is the supreme triumph of life over life, the complete catharsis. Nonetheless, from the point of view of the animal in man, the truth remains tragic. An animal can be confident and brave only if he does not know the truth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This ought to be depressing in the extreme, and yet, somehow, it isn\u2019t\u2014as it isn\u2019t in the company of two other American laughing pessimists, Justice Holmes and H. L. Mencken. There is something grand about someone who can think the worst\u2014in this instance positing an existence in an uncaring universe whose end can only be oblivion\u2014and yet play bravely on through. \u201cSurvival is something impossible,\u201d Santayana wrote, \u201cbut it is possible to have lived well and died well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Santayana was in the odd category of being a non-believing (or free-thinking) Catholic\u2014a believer, in effect, in the doctrine that there was no God and Mary is his mother. Although he grew up in the Church, he early lost his faith, yet never quite lost his appreciation for the Church as an ancient institution of civilization, despite his belief that \u201cthe loss of illusions is an unmixed blessing.\u201d He tolerated what he once characterized as the \u201cabsurdity and fiction in religion\u201d because he felt that men, having \u201cno adequate knowledge and no trained courage in respect to their destiny,\u201d have \u201cto believe something or other, and that is their necessary religion.\u201d He himself favored a belief in something beyond man, and, it is not going too far to say, detested those who believed in nothing greater than man. Yet he was gentler in his views of paganism than he was of other modern religions. \u201cTo be a Protestant is to be crosseyed,\u201d he once wrote. And on the Jews he was much harder.<\/p>\n

Professor McCormick\u2019s admiration for Santayana does not blind him to the fact that Santayana had what is euphemistically known as a \u201cJewish problem.\u201d It can scarcely be ignored. One will be reading along, swept away by Santayana\u2019s penetration or powers of formulation or elegant wit, and, bang!, up will pop the devil. Thus, lulled by the pleasant chat of a letter written from Madrid, one comes upon the complaint that Santayana found Florence in December beastly, because \u201cthe expatriated anaemic aesthetes and the Jews surprised to find that success is not happiness made a moral atmosphere not wholesome to breathe . . .\u201d Such remarks do not qualify as gratuitous; they are more in the nature of compulsive. How explain this? Some of it may have been owing to Brahmanic Boston, whose anti-Semitic spirit Santayana might have caught. But even more, one suspects, may be owing to Santayana\u2019s disgust at what, in a letter written when he was not yet thirty, he termed the Jews\u2019 \u201cincredible conceit of believing that they had made a covenant with nature, by which the mastery of the earth and all the good things thereof were secured to them in return for fidelity to a certain social and religious organization.\u201d In Santayana\u2019s philosophy, nature (or, if one prefers, God) favors no one. Yet to allow such disgust to lead into such dismal slurs is a blot of prejudice, as Professor McCormick writes, \u201cunworthy of a man of his fineness in other matters, and scarcely comprehensible in the man who wrote The Life of Reason<\/em> and Realms of Being<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is also a blot on Santayana\u2019s disinterestedness, for, apart from his mania on the subject of the Jews, Santayana, when it came to disinterestedness, could make the calmer gods of Olympus seem as grubby as the asphalt-contractors lobby in the Texas legislature. Here was a man unassimilable by choice, who thought it an indignity \u201cto have a soul controlled by geography\u201d (that is, by patriotism), who wished to be associated with the impartiality of nature, and for whom it was axiomatic that \u201cin the end every philosopher has to walk alone.\u201d When Santayana remarked that he was concerned about losing the \u201ccruelty\u201d of his philosophy if he remained in England, what he meant was that he was concerned about his thought losing its edge through his adopting the attachments and passions of ordinary men. However beautiful his manners or convivial his tone, there was a deep impersonality about Santayana. It was the impersonality of the classical artist devoted, in his case, to the art of philosophy.<\/p>\n

\n

Time might transmute, without erasing, my first opinions and affections; I might wish to change my surroundings and way of living; I never undertook to change myself. I regard my occupations and interests somewhat as an actor regards his various parts or a painter his subjects. That a man has preferences and can understand and do one thing better than another, follows from his inevitable limitations and definite gifts; but that which marks progress in his life is the purity of his art; I mean the degree to which his art has become his life, so that the rest of his nature does not impede or corrupt his art, but only feeds it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

How did Santayana\u2019s impartiality square with his politics? Santayana was always interested in politics, but could he be said to have had politics? During World War I, he found himself siding with England, where he was living at the time. But he lived through World War II<\/span>, now quite an old man, in fascist Italy, without any qualms, above it all and, by then, choosing to be quite out of it. He was conservative by temper, and in his autobiography wrote that he loved Tory England and honored conservative Spain, though not \u201cwith any dogmatic or democratic passion,\u201d adding: \u201cIf any community can become and wishes to become communistic or democratic or anarchical I wish it joy from the bottom of my heart. I have only two qualms in this case: whether such ideals are realisable, and whether those who pursue them fancy them to be exclusively and universally right: an illusion pregnant with injustice, oppression, and war.\u201d Yet in 1977 Sidney Hook, who when a young man much admired Santayana\u2019s The Life of Reason<\/em>, published in The American Scholar<\/em> a series of letters that Santayana had written to him, in one of which (dated June 8, 1934) Santayana wrote:<\/p>\n

\n

But I love order in the sense of organized, harmonious, consecrated living; and for this reason I sympathize with the Soviets and the Fascists and the Catholics, but not at all with the liberals. I should sympathize with the Nazis too, if their system were, even in theory, founded on reality; but it is Nietzschean, founded on will; and therefore a sort of romanticism gone mad, rather than a serious organization of material forces\u2014which would be the only way, I think, of securing moral coherence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Others accused Santayana of being sympathetic to fascism. Professor McCormick does not justify Santayana\u2019s late-life politics, but he does attempt to explain them, citing other factors that need to be taken into account: \u201cHe was never politically active; his attitudes were aristocratic, illiberal by any modern definition of the word, at base philosophical.\u201d I myself prefer to think it one of those embarrassing moments for a great philosopher, and an example of the danger of coming at the complexities of the contemporary world from too high, too lofty, yes, even too philosophical a position. The dogs may bark, yet sometimes the caravan is carrying parts for gas chambers and needs to be stopped.<\/p>\n

When World War II<\/span> began in 1939, Santayana was seventy-six years old and permanently settled in Rome. Two years later he moved into the Clinica della Piccola Compagna di Maria, or Hospital of the Blue Nuns, an Irish order so named because of the color of their habit. The fees for his stay were paid through another center the order maintained in Chicago, for his money, held in America, could not be sent to Italy during the war. There, isolated from the war, easily able to deflect all efforts by the nuns to convert him (\u201cHe has too much brains,\u201d he reported Mother Superior saying of him, in justification of their failure), he worked away at his final books. Unlike so many of his American contemporaries interested in artistic and intellectual life, unlike Oliver Alden, the hero of The Last Puritan<\/em>, Santayana up to the very end showed no signs, in his own phrase, of \u201cpetering out.\u201d<\/p>\n

When after the war Edmund Wilson, writing pieces for The New Yorker<\/em> about Europe in the wake of World War II<\/span> that would eventually be published as Europe Without Baedeker<\/em>, visited Santayana in his austere room at the Hospital of the Blue Nuns, he, Wilson, was immensely impressed. It seemed to Wilson that Santayana was \u201cperhaps the most international\u2014or, better, the most supra-national\u2014personality I had ever met.\u201d The fire of intellect, Wilson found, still burned in the all but worn-out furnace that was Santayana\u2019s aged body. Wilson\u2019s meeting with Santayana appears to have been rather like Santayana\u2019s with Henry James. The least sentimental of men, Wilson on this occasion was greatly moved, and closes his essay by writing that \u201cthe intelligence that has persisted in him has been that of the civilized human race\u2014so how can he be lonely or old? He still loves to share in its thoughts, to try on its points of view. He has made it his business to extend himself into every kind of human consciousness with which he can establish contact, and he reposes on his shabby chaise longue like a monad in the universal mind.\u201d This is, of course, the way that every serious writer should like to end.<\/p>\n

Wilson wrote that he did not imagine Santayana was troubled by the thought of his impending death, and he seems to have been right. It was cancer that reached his liver that finally brought about his death. When he knew he was going to die, he instructed his amanuensis Daniel Cory not to believe, should he not be present, any stories about his deathbed conversion to the one Church that had ever mattered to him. Two days before his death, when Daniel Cory asked if he were suffering, Santayana is said to have answered, \u201cYes, my friend. But my anguish is entirely physical; there are no moral difficulties whatsoever.\u201d Philosophy had been for him, as for Boethius, a consolation, but finally also life itself. In the end he died as a philosopher should, his thoughts in order, at peace.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n
  1. <\/a>Persons and Places<\/em>, by George Santayana, was originally published in three volumes: Persons and Places<\/em> (1944), The Middle Span<\/em> (1945), and My Host the World<\/em> (1953). MIT Press has recently published a handsome critical edition, edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., with an introduction by Richard C. Lyon (761 pages, $35). Go back to the text.<\/a><\/font> <\/li>\n
  2. <\/a>George Santayana: A Biography<\/em>, by John McCormick; Alfred A. Knopf, 612 pages, $30. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/font><\/li>\n
  3. <\/a>See in this connection William James, Selected Unpublished Correspondence 1885-1910<\/em>, edited by Frederick J. Down Scott (Ohio State University Press, 603 pages, $45). Go back to the text.<\/a><\/font><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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