George Santayana

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.”