Character and Opinion in the United States

George Santayana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780887388903
• eBook ISBN: 9781351529389
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

George Santayana was one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers. Because of his broad-ranging interests and lack of any permanent home in one particular country, he has often been stereotyped as a meditative philosopher removed from the world, living in what he himself called the "realm of spirit" among eternal essences. While there is some truth in this characterization, it is also true that Santayana was a penetrating analyst and critic of contemporary societies.'Character and Opinion in the United States' is his comprehensive critique of American thought and civilization and reflects the detached cosmopolitan perspective that lent his criticism its characteristic objectivity and strength. Santayana's subject here is the conflict of materialism and idealism in American life. In his view there exists a dualism in the American mind: One side, dealing with religion, literature, philosophy, and morality, tended to stay with inherited, old doctrines-the genteel tradition-and failed to keep pace with the other, practical side and its new developments in industry, invention, and social organization. Santayana traces the first mentality to Calvinism and its sense of sin, an attitude out of keeping with a new civilization and the dominance of practical interests. As a consequence of separating philosophy from everyday life, its study merely served religious and moral interests cut off from the free search for truth. At the heart of the book is Santayana's examination of the influential thought of William James and Josiah Royce, who typified for him the dilemma of American thought. The subordination of thought to social form and custom underlies Santayana's sharp critique of academic philosophy at Harvard where he early on studied and taught. He was disturbed by the very idea of philosophy as an academic discipline. Philosophy, he felt, should be an individual, original creation, "something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be taught" Santayana's analysis of how social imperatives may impede the pursuit of knowledge remains pertinent to contemporary intellectual debate. This volume ill be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, and American studies specialists.

INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION

George Santayana (1863–1952) was one of the most fascinating twentieth-century philosophers in Britain or the United States. He had his biological roots in Europe; he was born in Spain, lived in England for a time, and died in Italy. From 1872 to 1912 he lived and went to school in America, received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, and then taught at Harvard for twenty-three years. His time at Harvard, as student and member of faculty, placed him in close association with two of America’s most important philosophers, Josiah Royce and William James. These two figures marked a watershed in American philosophy, Royce looking back to the great system-builders, James breaking loose and running in the new directions then developing in this country and Britain: pragmatism and close analysis of concepts. Even the large figures in Britain, Russell and Moore, began their intellectual activities with nineteenth-century idealistic systems (e.g., represented by Bradley and Bosanquet), only to experience radical revulsion from that style of philosophy early in the twentieth century. American figures such as Emerson and Royce took their inspiration from Germany. Santayana’s doctoral thesis was also on a German system-builder, Rudolf Hermann Lotze.¹

By the early years of our century, English-speaking philosophy was breaking away from its attention to systems and was exploring new avenues for dealing with old problems. Santayana’s intellectual roots grew in this mixed soil, his own thought sought a systematic understanding of man and the world, but he was also imbued with the importance of scientific and analytic investigations into the nature of mind and awareness, knowledge and action. Both components of his thought—the part that built a system for understanding and the other part that sought for precise clarification of the growth of human consciousness—were influenced by Santayana’s keen literary interests and talents. Poetry and literary expression, even for metaphysical concepts, were never far from his pen. What he called “literary psychology” (similar to what today is called “humanistic psychology”) became a central concept for his methodology.

One stereotype often applied to him was that of the meditative philosopher removed from the world, living in what he called in his metaphysical system the “realm of spirit” among eternal essences.² There is considerable truth in this characterization. Santayana himself said late in life, “I was not bound to any type of society by ideal loyalty nor estranged from any by resentment.”³ Nevertheless, this independence from society should not blind us to the fact that Santayana was a penetrating analyst and critic of contemporary societies. He had a certain objectivity stemming from his not having any firm, permanent home in one particular country; but the strength and accuracy of his analyses of British and American societies grew out of his living in those countries, longer in America than in Britain, and in America at an especially propitious time when life and thought were undergoing changes while still being influenced by older, British traditions.

The attraction of British traditions is evident in Santayana’s writings. Of course, the ancestry of American thought and customs lies in Britain, so writing about the America of the late nineteenth century required Santayana to trace some of those parent-country influences and differences. But his interest in English literature, thought, customs, political ideas, and even the countryside was more than just historical. The English intellectual atmosphere appealed more to him than did anything in America. He often wrote about “things British” with wit and satire, but also with praise. The essays collected in his Soliloquies in England (1922), some of his finest, testify in their magical brevity and pithiness to Santayana’s admiration for “the British character,” the title of one of those essays. We can hear the tone of Santayana’s own voice when he says of the Englishman that “He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind” . Earlier in that essay he had said, “what governs the Englishman is his inner atmosphere, the weather in his soul.” Santayana spent a lifetime of writing and thinking trying to maintain the weather of his soul at a constant, cool, unruffled temperature.

Finding himself in England shortly after leaving America for good in 1912, the out-break of World War I in 1914 increased his isolation from society. In his “Prologue” to Soliloquies, he describes his walks during those war years (1914–19) to “Iffley and Sandford, to Godstow and Wytham, to the hospitable eminence of Chilswell, to Wood Eaton or Nuneham or Abingdon or Stanton Harcourt” while he made notes for or wrote those essays. The very title for that collection emphasizes the singularity and autonomy Santayana experienced and apparently cherished. While not unaware of the war or its casualties (he wrote three sonnets about the war, one on the loss of a close friend), he describes how “nature and solitude continued to envelop me in their gentleness, and seemed to remain nearer to me than all that was so near.” When, in one of the essays in this volume written in the 1918–21 period, he writes about St. Bernard’s happiness in the “substitution of an ideal for a natural society, in converse with thoughts rather than with things,” Santayana’s own preference is evident again. The kind of intellectual he saw himself becoming followed that substitution.

To substitute the society of ideas for that of things is simply to live in the mind; it is to survey the world of existences in its truth and beauty rather than in its personal perspectives, or with practical urgency. It is the sole path to happiness for the intellectual man, because the intellectual man cannot be satisfied with a world of perpetual change, defeat, and imperfection.

Still, society continued to fascinate him, even as he increased his isolation from it. Both early and late in his career as philosopher and writer, he wrote about society. The five-volume The Life of Reason (1905–06) devoted one volume to Reason in Society. His last book, Dominations and Powers, returns to the study of society. We may not like his own social philosophy. In his last book especially it has many features that offend our ears. That work is in many ways a potpourri of his thoughts and prejudices on culture and society, but there are many of the central themes of his philosophy to be found there, as they are in the work reprinted here. What is important about his study of character and opinion in the United States is the dominating interest he shows with social structure, with the interconnections between individual values, needs, and attitudes and their social expression or suppression. Santayana recognized that he wrote from a particular perspective, with his own set of values that might constrict his analyses.

I have become aware that anyone’s sense of what is good and beautiful must have a somewhat narrow foundation, namely, his circumstances and his particular brand of human nature; and he should not expect the good or the beautiful after his own heart to be greatly prevalent or long maintained in the world.⁴

Bruce Kuklick believes that Santayana’s own ideals and values, together with a certain bitterness he had from his Harvard experiences, “distorted his appraisal of intellectual life, and his narrow range of experience curtailed the usefulness of his comments on the United States.⁵ But Kuklick also points out that, “As one of the few men of letters the United States could claim, his writings became authoritative statements on national character and the state of fin de siècle culture.”⁶ He was referring specifically to Character and Opinion in the United States.

I

In his preface to Character and Opinion, Santayana says, “The major part of this book is composed of lectures originally addressed to British audiences.” Chapters 3 and 4 are revised versions of lectures at the Local Lectures Summer Meeting of the University of Cambridge in 1918. Chapter 5, under the title, “Philosophical Opinion in America,” was the Henrietta Hertz Lecture given at and published by the British Academy in January 1918. Chapter 7 under the same title, with some changes, was given at Bedford College in London on 1 January 1919, and was separately printed. Some of the chapters have been reprinted from 1934 to 1977 in edited collections of American writings. Portions have also been translated into German (1936) and Italian (1939).⁷

The book received numerous reviews in England and America. The Times Literary Supplement of London for 25 November 1920 carried a long review. The anonymous reviewer remarked on the “intimate knowledge [of] and complete detachment” from the intellectual life of America that Santayana had recently left. The book was characterized as “very original” and as “one of the best he has written.” The two chapters on James and Royce were identified as belonging to “a new genre of literature.” In October of the same year, Alvin Johnson wrote in the New Republic that “Santayana has remained to this day alien as he was when he first touched American soil,” but Johnson goes on to characterize Santayana as “one of the long line of distinguished foreign observers who have helped us to understand ourselves” (27 October 1920). Johnson adds: “A clearer-sighted or wiser observer never wrote about America.” He too singled out the chapters on James and Royce for special praise: they are “two of his most remarkable chapters.” Ben Ray Redman, writing in the New York Times for 7 August 1921 speaks of “the swift incisive style of Santayana, lighted by flashes of telling humor.” The most interesting chapters for Redman are also those on James and Royce: “The portraits of William James and Josiah Royce that we find here are warm, loving, and clear-featured, and the analysis of their contrasted methods is characterized by the data of personal contact.” Redman goes on to present Santayana’s characterizations of American thought and attitudes. In the New Statesman and Nation (26 March 1921, pp.729–30), Owen Barfield reviewed Character and Opinion along with Little Essays, the latter collected by Logan Pearsall Smith, mostly from The Life of Reason. Barfield devotes most of his attention to Smith’s collection, but he characterizes Santayana as “the greatest living critic” of ideas and society. About Character and Opinion he writes: “It would be difficult to read a chapter of Character and Opinion without perceiving at once that the author is no journalist cleverly showing the surface of a nation’s foibles.” He praises “the light he flashes on American psychology.” Of Santayana’s writing style, Barfield says “it is a thing of permanent joy. He writes, in fact, great prose.”

Perhaps the most interesting review was that written by Ralph Barton Perry, the historian of American thought. In The Dial (May 1921), Perry speaks of Santayana’s “reflections on” rather than his “impressions of America, reminding the reader of Santayana’s remove from that country. Perry finds that the book reveals Santayana’s feelings and hints of his opinions. His feelings “are two, pro-Paganism and anti-Protestantism.” There are two parts to the opinions revealed in that work: “a dislike of liberal Christianity as having assumed the name while rejecting the substance of Christianity” and “a dislike of moral strenuousness as being intolerant, chilling, and impoverishing.” Perry also tells us that Santayana thinks “the intellect should retreat from affairs and devote itself to contemplation.” He thinks Santayana’s general characterizations of character and life in America “are probably as accurate as such generalizations ever can be.” The book is, Perry concludes, “good-tempered throughout; distinguished, and at times brilliant, in style,” the style being that of an essayist.⁸

The chapters in Character and Opinion on James and Royce, which were given attention in several of these reviews, were not Santayana’s first analyses of philosophers. He published a series of insightful articles on Russell in 1911, in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, later reprinted in Winds of Doctrine (1913). These articles were a review of Russell’s Philosophical Essays. Russell had many critical remarks on James, giving Santayana a chance to write about James and pragmatism in his review. Winds of Doctrine also contains an essay on Henri Bergson, whose philosophy was then popular in France and America.⁹ James had published his A Pluralistic Universe, lectures he gave at Oxford in 1908, discussing and using some of Bergson’s ideas. James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism (originally articles in the Journal of Philosophy, 1904–05) were collected and published as a book in 1912. His Pragmatism appeared in 1907. There was, thus, much intellectual activity revolving around James’s doctrines. Russell wrote on James, Santayana wrote on Russell writing on James, and Santayana continued to write about James in later essays.

Santayana’s long critique of Russell was a fine bit of philosophical analysis.¹⁰ His discussion of Bergson in Winds of Doctrine is not as detailed but reveals aga...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• I The Moral Background
• II The Academic Environment During
• III William James
• IV Josiah Royce
• V Later Speculations
• VI Materialism and Idealism in American Life
• VII English Liberty in America