GEORGE SANTAYANA: Literary Philosopher

GEORGE SANTAYANA: Literary Philosopher.

By Irving Singer. Yale Univ. Press. 256 pp. $25

For the dwindling handful of readers acquainted with the elegant, offbeat writings of the Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana (1863–1952), the appearance of a serious publication about him is cause for celebration. It is both astonishing and tragic that the works of such a talented thinker should have fallen so quickly into obscurity. Tragic, but indicative—and therefore not entirely unpredictable. Santayana was that rarest of beasts, a philosopher who was also a cultivated man of letters, with a superlative gift for producing vivid and evocative writing across the full range of forms—philosophical treatises, essays, sketches, dialogues, literary criticism, poetry, the best-selling novel The Last Puritan (1935), and the three-volume autobiography Persons and Places (1944–53). By the standards of most contemporary philosophers, who seem to regard a commitment to impenetrability, abstractness, academicism, and inaccessibility as the badge of professionalism, Santayana would appear to be not only a lightweight but an impostor and a traitor to his class. How could a refined, playful, jargon-free writer who gives so much literary pleasure have anything profound to convey?

To his credit, Singer, a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of valuable studies of the philosophy of love, has little patience for such narrow perspectives. He has been a serious student of Santayana for many years, and with this small book he sets out to guide us to the heart of Santayana’s achievement. In his view, the philosopher’s flair is a matter of substance as well as style: Santayana, "more than any other great philosopher in the English language," sought to "harmonize" literary and philosophical styles of writing, making the centrality of the humanistic imagination "a fundamental resource in his doctrinal outlook." The magnificent prose was not mere ornamentation serving to soften the harsh lines of an otherwise unadorned philosophy. The literary and the philosophical components were inseparable for him.

The novelist Somerset Maugham lamented that "it was a loss to American literature when Santayana decided to become a philosopher rather than a novelist." Maugham was paying tribute to the philosopher’s prodigious gifts of imagery and metaphor, as well as hinting that the writing might have been even better had it not been so laden with ideas. But that, as Singer argues, misses the point of Santayana’s work, which aimed to transcend the divide that both literati and professional philosophers have been intent on preserving. Singer applies this argument to some of Santayana’s chief works, reinforcing the case for the creative imagination while weighing the strengths and weaknesses of the oeuvre.

Most of the book’s contents have been published before, at different times and in diverse places, and so the text often has the unfortunate feel of a collection of fugitive essays. Had Singer reshaped some of the essays and put a bit more effort into harmonizing the others, the result would have been a far better book. But one should still be grateful for the intelligence and judiciousness of the book we do have. One should acknowledge, too, that writers who have the temerity to write about Santayana are doomed to be outshone by their subject. We can be grateful to Singer for showing just such temerity, and thereby helping to keep Santayana’s vision alive.

—Wilfred M. McClay

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