E-Book Overview
George Santayana wrote not only important works of philosophy but also a novel, poetry and much literary criticism. In this portrait of Santayana's thought and complex personality, Irvine Singer explores the full range of his harmonisation of the literary and the philosophical.
E-Book Content
George Santayana, Literary Philosopher Books by Irving Singer George Santayana, Literary Philosopher Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique Meaning in Life The Creation of Value The Pursuit of Love The Harmony of Nature and Spirit The Nature of Love Plato to Luther Courtly and Romantic The Modern World Mozart and Beethoven: The Concept of Love in Their Operas The Goals of Human Sexuality Santayana’s Aesthetics Essays in Literary Criticism by George Santayana (editor) The Nature and Pursuit of Love: The Philosophy of Irving Singer (edited by David Goicoechea) George Santayana, Literary Philosopher Irving Singer Yale University Press New Haven & London Copyright © by Irving Singer. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections and of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Rebecca Gibb. Set in Bembo type by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Singer, Irving. George Santayana, literary philosopher / Irving Singer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN - - - (cloth : alk. paper) . Santayana, George, ‒ . I. Title. B .S S —dc - A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. To the memory of Walter Jackson Bate and Henry David Aiken Contents Preface ix A Pilgrimage to Santayana His Host the World The Last Puritan Idealization: Santayana versus Freud Santayana’s Philosophy of Love Santayana as a Literary Critic Greatness in Art The Basis of Aesthetic and Moral Criticism Epilogue Notes Index Preface , the American philosopher who meant the most to me was John Dewey. During my early years, which coincided with the Depression and World War II, Dewey represented most of what I believed in at the time: naturalism, humanism, democratic pluralism, pragmatism as the clue to knowledge. I felt that he, better than any other philosopher I had read, understood the goodness of a healthy-minded life that combines the best in science and in art. My undergraduate honors thesis on Dewey’s theory of ix x value was a sympathetic, though somewhat critical, attempt to extend his fundamental orientation beyond the limits he had set. I never thought of myself as a disciple, and Dewey’s impoverished literary style often made me cringe.Nevertheless,I saw him as a model of how an intellectual could also be an active force in society, efficacious through his writing as well as through his devotion to liberal causes that mattered greatly to me. As the years went by, I gravitated more and more toward the work of George Santayana. I wrote my graduate dissertation on his aesthetics, which seemed to me more challenging and possibly more fertile than Dewey’s. I later realized that, among philosophers trained in the Anglo-Saxon traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuri