George Santayana

George Santayana was the most literarily gifted philosopher in the history of American thought — a writer whose philosophical works are read for their prose as much as for their arguments, whose novel The Last Puritan was a bestseller, and whose aphorisms have entered the language with a permanence that most philosophers can only envy. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” “There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.” “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.” These sentences alone would secure Santayana’s reputation, but they are fragments of a philosophical career that produced, over half a century, one of the most comprehensive and most beautiful bodies of philosophical writing in the English language.

Madrid, Boston, Rome

Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás was born in Madrid in 1863, brought to Boston at eight, and educated at Harvard, where he studied under William James and Josiah Royce — the two dominant figures of American philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century. He joined the Harvard philosophy department in 1889 and became one of the most celebrated teachers at the university, counted among his students T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Walter Lippmann, and Felix Frankfurter.

In 1912, at forty-eight, Santayana resigned from Harvard, left America permanently, and spent the remaining four decades of his life in Europe — in Paris, Oxford, and finally Rome, where he lived in a nursing home run by an order of nuns at the Convent of the Blue Sisters until his death in 1952. His departure from America was a deliberate aesthetic and philosophical act: he had never felt at home in the Puritan, commercial, democratic culture of the United States, and he chose to live in the older, Catholic, Mediterranean civilisation that his temperament required.

The Life of Reason

The Life of Reason, or The Phases of Human Progress (5 volumes, 1905–1906) was Santayana’s first major philosophical work — a naturalistic account of the role of reason in human life that traced the development of reason through five domains: common sense, society, religion, art, and science. The work was a philosophical epic in the tradition of Hegel’s Phenomenology, but written in a prose of crystalline beauty that made philosophical argument a literary pleasure.

The famous dictum “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” appears in the first volume, Reason in Common Sense. The work’s central argument — that reason is not an abstract principle but an instrument of animal life, a means by which organisms navigate their environment — established Santayana as a naturalist and materialist who nevertheless took art, beauty, and religion with the utmost seriousness.

The Sense of Beauty and the Aesthetic Philosophy

The Sense of Beauty (1896) was Santayana’s first book — a treatise on aesthetics that argued that beauty is not an objective property of things but a pleasure objectified — a subjective response that we project onto the world. The argument was elegant and influential, and the book remained a standard text in aesthetics for decades.

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900) and Three Philosophical Poets (1910, on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe) extended the aesthetic philosophy into literary criticism, producing some of the finest philosophical criticism ever written in English.

The Later Philosophy

Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) was the introduction to Santayana’s mature philosophical system — a work that began with radical scepticism (doubting everything, including the existence of the external world) and then showed that animal faith — the instinctive trust in reality that every living organism must exercise — provides the practical foundation for knowledge that philosophical scepticism cannot undermine.

The Realms of Being (4 volumes, 1927–1940) was the systematic work that followed — a comprehensive ontology that distinguished four “realms” (Essence, Matter, Truth, and Spirit) and attempted to provide a complete account of the structure of reality. The work was admired for its beauty but criticized for its abstraction.

The Last Puritan

The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1935) was Santayana’s only novel — the story of Oliver Alden, a wealthy, morally serious young New Englander whose Puritan conscience makes him incapable of enjoying life. The novel was a bestseller (a Book-of-the-Month Club selection) and a National Book Award finalist, and its portrait of American Puritanism — sympathetic yet devastating — was the most personal expression of Santayana’s lifelong critique of the American character.

Collecting Santayana

The Life of Reason (Scribner’s, 1905–1906, 5 volumes) is the primary scholarly collecting target. The Last Puritan (Scribner’s, 1935), as a bestselling novel, is the most commonly collected single volume. The Sense of Beauty (Scribner’s, 1896) is collected as a philosophical first book. Persons and Places (Scribner’s, 1944–1953, 3 volumes) is sought as autobiography. Santayana’s letters — witty, elegant, and philosophically rich — are collected when they surface.