Santayana (Ruiz), George

SANTAYANA (RUIZ), GEORGE. - Spanish philosopher and writer, b. in Avila on 16 Dec. 1863, d. in Rome on 27 Sept. 1952. Having lived in the United States of America since childhood, where his family had moved, he completed his studies there and was among other things professor of philosophy at Harvard University (1907); having left teaching (1912), he lived in England, in France and, during the last fifteen years, in Italy.

A prolific and effective writer, author of literary works (notable is the novel The last puritan, 1935) and of philosophical writings, he is, more than a thinker, an essayist, a keen observer, a moralist and, at bottom, a skeptic. Among the most important philosophical works are: the 5 vols. of The life of reason (1905-1906; 2nd ed. 1922), on the phases of human progress (reason in common sense, in society, in religion, in art, in science); Scepticism and animal faith (1923), presented as an introduction to a system of philosophy; Platonism and the spiritual life (1927) and the 4 vols. of Realms of being (1928-40), respectively devoted to the realm of essence, of matter, of truth, of spirit.

S. belongs to the so-called "critical realism" of America, of which he is the most brilliant representative. Plato's (v.) dualism between the world of ideas and the sensible world is stiffened to such a point that S. is, at the same time, a "Platonist" and a "naturalist." He distinguishes radically between the world of pure essences and the world of existence or of things. The first is infinite, outside space and time, the realm of "pure being," in which every essence ("idea," in the Platonic sense) is individual and identical with itself, a pure object of immediate intuition: the second is the world of sensible, material existence, of becoming, of struggle, of chance and of necessity, the realm of matter (of action and of 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 body (soul) not "per accidens," but by nature and necessarily. Nevertheless it, for S., is the intermediary between the realm of matter and that of essences, intuited by it. There is no objective proof that the sensible world exists (from the fact that it "appears" one cannot logically infer that it exists); we admit its existence out of vital needs, out of a kind of animal faith. The intuition of essences frees us from this world, in which our will to life and to expansion is rooted, less in the Platonic sense of detachment from it than in the other 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) through sorrow and death. And to Christ S. devoted one of his last published volumes (in addition to the first two of the Autobiography), Persons and places (1944); The middle years (1945); L'idea di Cristo nei Vangeli o Dio nell'uomo (It. trans., Milan 1949), heretical in many of its theses: underlying it is his philosophy with the dualism of the realm of matter and the realm of essences or pure possibilities, of the realm of truth and the realm of spirit. Precisely, for S., the idea of Christ represents the intrinsic ideal of the spirit, that is, the summit of disinterested intelligence and of disinterested love.

Michele F. Sciacca