George Santayana (born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) was a Spanish American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Born in Spain, he moved to the United States at the age of eight.
As a philosopher, Santayana is known for aphorisms, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it",Santayana, George (1905) Reason in Common Sense, p. 284, volume 1 of The Life of Reason. and "Only the dead have seen the end of war",Santayana, George (1922) Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, number 25. and his definition of beauty as "pleasure objectified".
Although an atheist, Santayana respected the culture of the Spanish Catholic values, practices, and worldview, in which he was raised. As an intellectual, George Santayana was a broad-range cultural critic in several academic disciplines.
At the age of 48, he left his academic position at Harvard University and permanently returned to Europe; his last will was to be buried in the Spanish Pantheon in the Campo di Verano, Rome.
Early life George Santayana was born on December 16, 1863, in Calle de San Bernardo of Madrid and spent his early childhood in Ávila, Spain. His mother Josefina Borrás was the daughter of a Spanish official in the Philippines and he was the only child of her second marriage."George Santayana" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Retrieved April 25, 2021 Josefina Borrás' first husband was George Sturgis, a Boston merchant with the Manila firm Russell & Sturgis. She had five children with him; two of them died in infancy. She lived in Boston for a few years following her husband's death in 1857; in 1861, she moved with her three surviving children to Madrid. There she encountered Agustín Ruiz de Santayana, an old friend from her years in the Philippines. They married in 1862. A colonial civil servant, Ruiz de Santayana was a painter and minor intellectual. The family lived in Madrid and Ávila, and Jorge was born in Spain in 1863.
In 1869, Josefina Borrás de Santayana returned to Boston with her three Sturgis children, because she had promised her first husband to raise the children in the US. She left the six-year-old Jorge with his father in Spain. Jorge and his father followed her to Boston in 1872. His father, finding neither Boston nor his wife's attitude to his liking, soon returned alone to Ávila, and remained there the rest of his life. Jorge did not see him again until he entered Harvard College and began to take his summer vacations in Spain. Although Santayana was raised and educated in the United States from the age of eight and identified as an American, he always retained a valid Spanish passport.Santayana, George, "Apologia Pro Mente Sua", in P. A. Schilpp, The Philosophy of George Santayana (1940), 603. Sometime during this period, his first name Jorge was anglicized to its English equivalent: George.
Education
Santayana attended Boston Latin School and Harvard College, where he studied under the philosophers William James and Josiah Royce and was involved in eleven clubs. He was founder and president of the Philosophical Club, a member of the literary society known as the O.K., an editor and cartoonist for The Harvard Lampoon, he joined one of Harvard's "Final Clubs", the Delphic Club, and co-founded the literary journal The Harvard Monthly.Parri, Alice Two Harvard Friends: Charles Loeser and George Santayana In December, 1885, he played the role of Lady Elfrida in the Hasty Pudding theatrical Robin Hood, followed by the production Papillonetta in the spring of his senior year.Garrison, Lloyd McKim, An Illustrated History of the Hasty Pudding Club Theatricals, Cambridge, Hasty Pudding Club, 1897. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in 1886 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa student fraternity.Who Belongs To Phi Beta Kappa , Phi Beta Kappa website, accessed October 4, 2009 In 1886, Santayana studied for two years in Berlin. He then returned to Harvard to write his dissertation on German idealist Hermann Lotze (1889).George Santayana, Lotze's system of philosophy, Ph.D., 1889. Although schooled in German idealism, Santayana was critical of it and made an effort to distance himself from its epistemology.George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1915, pp. 5–8.
He was a professor at Harvard from 1889 to 1912, becoming part of the Golden Age of the Harvard University Department of Philosophy. Some of his Harvard students became famous in their own right, including Conrad Aiken, W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Horace Kallen, Walter Lippmann, and Gertrude Stein. Wallace Stevens was not among his students but became a friend.Lensing, George S. (1986). Wallace Stevens: A Poet's Growth. LSU Press. 313 pp. . pp. 12–13. From 1896 to 1897, Santayana studied at King's College, Cambridge.
Later life
Santayana never married. His romantic life, if any, is not well understood. Some evidence, including a comment Santayana made late in life comparing himself to A. E. Housman, and his friendships with people who were openly homosexual and bisexual, has led scholars to speculate that Santayana was perhaps homosexual or bisexual, but it remains unclear whether he had any actual heterosexual or homosexual relationships. Some historians would disagree with this assessment. For example, Santayana's biographer concluded that he had "an intense physical affair" with Frank Russell, 2nd Earl Russell, older brother to philosopher Bertrand Russell. The historian Douglass Shand-Tucci included an extensive discussion of Santayana's sexuality in his book on Boston's homosexual subculture in the late 19th century.
In 1912, Santayana resigned his position at Harvard to spend the rest of his life in Europe. He had saved money and been aided by a legacy from his mother. After some years in Ávila, Paris and Oxford, after 1920, he began to winter in Rome, eventually living there year-round until his death. During his 40 years in Europe, he wrote 19 books and declined several prestigious academic positions. Many of his visitors and correspondents were Americans, including his assistant and eventual literary executor, Daniel Cory. In later life, Santayana was financially comfortable, in part because his 1935 novel, The Last Puritan, had become an unexpected best-seller. In turn, he financially assisted a number of writers, including Bertrand Russell, with whom he was in fundamental disagreement, philosophically and politically.
Santayana's one novel, The Last Puritan, is a Bildungsroman, centering on the personal growth of its protagonist, a Puritan named Oliver Alden. His Persons and Places is an autobiography. These works also contain many of his sharper opinions and bons mots. 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, human nature, morals, the influence of religion on culture and social psychology, all with considerable wit and humour.
While his writings on technical philosophy can be difficult, his other writings are more accessible and pithy. He wrote poems and a few plays, and left ample correspondence, much of it published only since 2000. Like Alexis de Tocqueville, Santayana observed American culture and character from a foreigner's point of view. Like William James, his friend and mentor, he wrote philosophy in a literary way. Ezra Pound includes Santayana among his many cultural references in The Cantos, notably in "Canto LXXXI" and "Canto XCV". Santayana is usually considered a U.S. writer, although he declined to become a U.S. citizen, resided in Fascist Italy for decades, and said that he was most comfortable, intellectually and aesthetically, at Oxford University. Although an atheist, Santayana considered himself an "aesthetic Catholic" and spent the last decade of his life in Rome under the care of Catholic nuns. In 1941, he entered a hospital and convent run by the Little Company of Mary (also known as the Blue Nuns) on the Caelian Hill at 6 Via Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome, where he was cared for by the sisters until his death in September 1952."George Santayana, 88, Dies in Rome". Harvard Crimson death notice of September 29, 1952. . See also Harold Kirker (Fall 1990), "Santayana in Rome", Bulletin of the Santayana Society, pp. 35–37 for Kirker's wartime visit with Santayana in Rome. Upon his death, he did not want to be buried in consecrated land, which made his burial problematic in Italy. Finally, the Spanish consulate in Rome agreed that he be buried in the Pantheon of the Obra Pía Española, in the Campo Verano cemetery in Rome.
Philosophical work and publications Santayana's main philosophical work consists of The Sense of Beauty (1896), his first book-length monograph and perhaps the first major work on aesthetics written in the United States; The Life of Reason (5 vols., 1905–06), the high point of his Harvard career; Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923); and The Realms of Being (4 vols., 1927–1940).
Although Santayana is roughly regarded as a pragmatist or as beginning his philosophy in pragmatic thought, his views depart from fellow American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce and even more significantly from the others like William James, Josiah Royce, or John Dewey.Saatkamp, Herman; Coleman, Martin (2002; revised 2024). "George Santayana". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.). Santayana's The Life of Reason arguably is the first extended treatment of pragmatism written. However, like many of the classical pragmatists, Santayana was committed to metaphysical naturalism. He believed that 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 also admired the classical materialism of Democritus and Lucretius. (Of the three authors on whom he wrote in Three Philosophical Poets, Santayana speaks most favorably of Lucretius). He held Spinoza's writings in high regard, calling him his "master and model".George Santayana (1948–1952), The Letters of George Santayana, Book Eight, p. 8:39
Although an atheist,"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe, and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests." George Santayana, "On My Friendly Critics", in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 1922 (from Rawson's Dictionary of American Quotations). Accessed August 1, 2008."Santayana playfully called himself 'a Catholic atheist', but in spite of the fact that he deliberately immersed himself in the stream of Catholic religious life, he never took the sacraments. He neither literally regarded himself as a Catholic nor did Catholics regard him as a Catholic." Kai Nielsen (July 1974), "Empiricism, Theoretical Constructs, and God", The Journal of Religion, Vol. 54, No. 3, pp. 199–217 (p. 205), published by The University of Chicago Press. he held a fairly benign view of religion and described himself as an "aesthetic Catholic". Santayana's views on religion are outlined in his books Reason in Religion, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, and Interpretations of Poetry and Religion.
He held racial supremacist and eugenic views. He believed superior races should be discouraged from "intermarriage with inferior stock".
Legacy