Santayana George (1863–1952), Spanish- American philosopher and writer. Born in Spain, he arrived in the United States as a child, received his education at Harvard, and rose to professor of philosophy there. He first came to prominence for his view, developed in The Sense of Beauty (1896), that beauty is objectified pleasure. His The Life of Reason (5 vols., 1905), a celebrated expression of his naturalistic vision, traces human creativity in ordinary life, society, art, religion, and science. He denied that his philosophy ever changed, but the mature expression of his thought, in Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and The Realms of Being (4 vols., 1927–40), is deliberately ontological and lacks the phenomenological emphasis of the earlier work.
Human beings, according to Santayana, are animals in a material world contingent to the core. Reflection must take as its primary datum human action aimed at eating and fleeing. The philosophy of animal faith consists of disentangling the beliefs tacit in such actions and yields a realism concerning both the objects of immediate consciousness and the objects of belief. Knowledge is true belief rendered in symbolic terms. As symbolism, it constitutes the hauntingly beautiful worlds of the senses, poetry, and religion; as knowledge, it guides and is tested by successful action. Santayana had been taught by William James, and his insistence on the primacy of action suggests a close similarity to the views of Dewey. He is, nevertheless, not a pragmatist in any ordinary sense: he views nature as the fully formed arena of human activity and experience as a flow of isolated, private sentience in this alien world. His deepest sympathy is with Aristotle, though he agrees with Plato about the mind-independent existence of Forms and with Schopenhauer about the dimness of human prospects. His mature four-realm ontology turns on the distinction between essence and matter. Essences are forms of definiteness. They are infinite in number and encompass everything possible. Their eternity makes them causally inefficacious: as possibilities, they cannot accomplish their own actualization. Matter, a surd and formless force, generates the physical universe by selecting essences for embodiment. Truth is the realm of being created by the intersection of matter and form: it is the eternal record of essences that have been, are being, and will be given actuality in the history of the world. Spirit or consciousness cannot be reduced to the motions of the physical organism that give rise to it. It is constituted by a sequence of acts or intuitions whose objects are essences but whose time-spanning, synthetic nature renders them impotent. Organic selectivity is the source of values. Accordingly, the good of each organism is a function of its nature. Santayana simply accepts the fact that some of these goods are incommensurable and the tragic reality that they may be incompatible, as well. Under favorable circumstances, a life of reason or of maximal harmonized satisfactions is possible for a while. The finest achievement of human beings, however, is the spiritual life in which we overcome animal partiality and thus all valuation in order to enjoy the intuition of eternal essences. Santayana identifies such spirituality with the best that religion and sound philosophy can offer. It does not help us escape finitude and death, but enables us in this short life to transcend care and to intuit the eternal.
Santayana’s exquisite vision has gained him many admirers but few followers. His system is a self-consistent and sophisticated synthesis of elements, such as materialism and Platonism, that have hitherto been thought impossible to reconcile. His masterful writing makes his books instructive and pleasurable, even if many of his characteristic views engender resistance among philosophers. J.La.