SANTAYANA (RUIZ), GEORGE. — Spanish philosopher and writer, b. at Avila on Dec. 16, 1863, d. in Rome on Sept. 27, 1952. Having lived from childhood in the United States, where his family had moved, he pursued his studies there and, among other roles, served as professor of philosophy at Harvard University (1907); after resigning from teaching (1912), he lived in England, France, and, in his final fifteen years, in Italy.
A prolific and effective writer, author of both literary works (notably the novel *The Last Puritan*, 1935) and philosophical writings, he was more a thinker in the form of an essayist, keen observer, moralist, and, fundamentally, a skeptic than a systematic philosopher. Among his most important philosophical works are the five volumes of *The Life of Reason* (1905–1906; 2nd ed., 1922), which examines the stages of human progress (reason in common sense, society, religion, art, and science); *Scepticism and Animal Faith* (1923), presented as an introduction to a philosophical system; *Platonism and the Spiritual Life* (1927); and the four volumes of *Realms of Being* (1928–1940), devoted respectively to the realm of essence, matter, truth, and spirit.
Santayana belongs to the so-called “American critical realism,” of which he is the most brilliant representative. Plato’s (v.) dualism between the world of ideas and the sensible world is here rigidified to the point that Santayana is, at once, both a “Platonist” and a “naturalist.” He draws a radical distinction between the world of pure essences and the world of existence or things. The former is infinite, outside space and time, the realm of “pure being,” in which every essence (“idea,” in the Platonic sense) is individual and identical to itself, a pure object of immediate intuition; the latter is the world of sensible, material existence, of becoming, struggle, chance, and necessity, the realm of matter (of action and vital energy), of reasoning (v.), and of discourse (and not of intuition [v.]). Human and cosmic existence is matter in evolution; the spirit (in man) is rooted in the organic (animated) body and “per accidens,” yet by nature and necessity. For Santayana, however, the spirit is the intermediary between the realm of matter and that of essences, which it intuits. There is no objective proof that the sensible world exists (from the fact that it “appears,” one cannot logically infer that it exists); he admits its “existence” only out of vital exigencies, by a kind of animal faith. The intuition of essences frees us from this world, in which our will to live and expand is rooted, not so much in the Platonic sense of detachment from it as in the sense of liberation from ignorance of its essence: not liberation from suffering and death, but (as Christianity teaches with the dogma of the Passion and Death of Christ) a passage through pain and death. Santayana devoted one of his last published volumes (in addition to the first two of his autobiography) to Christ: *Persons and Places* (1944); *The Middle Years* (1945); *The Idea of Christ in the Gospels or God in Man* (Italian trans., Milan 1949), in which many of his heterodox theses are set forth. Underlying them is his philosophy with its dualism of the realm of matter and the realm of essences or pure possibilities, the realm of truth and the realm of spirit. Precisely, for Santayana, the idea of Christ represents the intrinsic ideal of the spirit, that is, the summit of disinterested intelligence and disinterested love.