SANTAYANA (RUIZ), GEORGE. – Spanish philosopher and writer, born in Avila on 16 Dec. 1863, died in Rome on 27 Sept. 1952. Having lived from childhood in the United States of America, where his family had moved, he pursued his studies there and was, among other things, professor of philosophy at Harvard University (1907); after leaving teaching (1912), he lived in England, France, and, during the last fifteen years, in Italy.
A prolific and effective writer, author of literary works (notably the novel The last puritan, 1935) and philosophical writings, he was less a thinker than an essayist, an acute observer, a moralist and, ultimately, a sceptic. Among his most important philosophical works are: the 5 vols. of The life of reason (1905–1906; 2nd ed. 1922), on 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 system of philosophy; Platonism and the spiritual life (1927) and the 4 vols. of Realms of being (1928–40), devoted respectively to the realm of essence, matter, truth, and spirit.
S. belongs to the so-called American «critical realism», of which he is the most ingenious representative. Plato’s (v.) dualism between the world of ideas and the sensible world is intensified to such a degree that S. is, at the same time, a «Platonist» and a «naturalist». He draws a radical distinction between the world of pure essences and the world of existence, or of things. The former is infinite, outside space and time, the realm of «pure being», in which each essence («idea», in the Platonic sense) is individual and identical with 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), reasoning (v.) and discourse (and not of intuition [v.]). Human and cosmic existence is matter in evolution; spirit (in man) is rooted in the organic body (soul), not «per accidens», but by nature and necessarily. Yet for S. it 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); we admit its existence for vital reasons, through a kind of animal faith. The intuition of essences frees us from this world, in which our will to live and expand roots us, not so much in the Platonic sense of detachment from it as in the other sense of liberation from ignorance of its essence: not liberation from suffering and death, but, as Christianity teaches through the dogma of the Passion and Death of Christ, through suffering and death. To Christ S. dedicated one of his last published volumes (in addition to the first two parts of his Autobiography), Persons and places (1944); The middle years (1945); L'idea di Cristo nei Vangeli o Dio nell'uomo (Italian trans., Milano 1949), heterodox in many of its theses: underlying it is his philosophy with its dualism of the realm of matter and the realm of essences or pure possibilities, of the realm of truth and the realm of spirit. More precisely, for S., the idea of Christ represents the intrinsic ideal of spirit, that is, the summit of disinterested intelligence and disinterested love.
Michele F. Sciacca