The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One

Life of Reason

by George Santayana

Santayana (1863-1952) was a philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist. Originally from Spain, he was raised and educated in the US from the age of eight and identified himself as an American. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters. Aged 48 he left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently, never to return to the US. Although an atheist, he treasured the Spanish Catholic values, practices and worldview in which he had been raised. A broad-ranging cultural critic spanning many disciplines, he was profoundly influenced by Spinoza's life and thought. He studied under the philosopher William James at Harvard and after graduation studied for two years in Berlin. He then returned to Harvard to teach philosophy himself, becoming part of the Golden Age of the philosophy department, his students including T S Eliot and Gertrude Stein. From 1896-97 Santayana studied at King's College, Cambridge. In 1912 he resigned his position at Harvard to spend the rest of his life in Europe, eventually settling in Rome. The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress, published in five volumes from 1905-06, was the high point of his Harvard career. It consists of Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Religion, Reason in Art, and Reason in Science. The work is considered to be the most complete expression of his moral philosophy, whilst his later magnum opus, the four-volume The Realms of Being, more fully develops his metaphysical and epistemological theory. Many believe The Life of Reason to be one of the most poetic and well-written works of philosophy in Western history.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Classics, Art, History, Science

620 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1906

About the author

Philosopher, poet, literary and cultural critic, George Santayana is a principal figure in Classical American Philosophy. His naturalism and emphasis on creative imagination were harbingers of important intellectual turns on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a naturalist before naturalism grew popular; he appreciated multiple perfections before multiculturalism became an issue; he thought of philosophy as literature before it became a theme in American and European scholarly circles; and he managed to naturalize Platonism, update Aristotle, fight off idealisms, and provide a striking and sensitive account of the spiritual life without being a religious believer. His Hispanic heritage, shaded by his sense of being an outsider in America, captures many qualities of American life missed by insiders, and presents views equal to Tocqueville in quality and importance. Beyond philosophy, only Emerson may match his literary production. As a public figure, he appeared on the front cover of Time (3 February 1936), and his autobiography (Persons and Places, 1944) and only novel (The Last Puritan, 1936) were the best-selling books in the United States as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. The novel was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Edmund Wilson ranked Persons and Places among the few first-rate autobiographies, comparing it favorably to Yeats's memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Remarkably, Santayana achieved this stature in American thought without being an American citizen. He proudly retained his Spanish citizenship throughout his life. Yet, as he readily admitted, it is as an American that his philosophical and literary corpuses are to be judged. Using contemporary classifications, Santayana is the first and foremost Hispanic-American philosopher.

Reviews

[Roy Lotz · Rating 5 out of 5]

George Santayana, in both his life and mind, was the embodiment of several contradictions. He was a European raised in America; a Spaniard who wrote in English; a philosopher who despised professional philosophy. He was an atheist who loved religion, a materialist who loved ideals. His writings seem somehow both strangely ancient and strikingly modern; he cannot be comfortably assimilated into either the analytic or continental traditions, nor dismissed as irrelevant. He stands alone, an intellectual hermit—like an embarrassing orphaned child that history can’t decide what to do with.

What is, at first, most conspicuous about Santayana is his writing style. His prose is elegance and balance itself. His style is, in fact, so supremely balanced that it seems to stand stock-still; the reader, instead of being drawn from sentence to sentence by the usual push and pull of connectives, must guide her own eye down the page, just as one might guide one’s eye across a painting. Will Durant summed this up quite nicely when he called Santayana’s writing “statuesque”; I can think of no better word it. Yet if his prose be a statue, it is a beautiful one; like a Greek nude, Santayana’s writing seems to both represent something real, as well as to capture the ideal essence hidden within—and this, you will see, is a feature of his mind as well as pen.

A dream is always simmering beneath the conventional surface of speech and reflection. Even in the highest reaches and serenest meditations of science it sometimes breaks through. Even there we are seldom constant enough to conceive a truly natural world; somewhere passionate, fanciful, or magic elements will slip into the scheme and baffle rational ambition.

This book, his most influential, is about the Life of Reason. It is a simple idea. We all know from experience that every desire we possess cannot and will not be satisfied. Even the richest and most powerful are saddled with unrealizable dreams. And these dreams and desires, Santayana notes, are not in themselves rational; in fact, there is no such thing as a rational or irrational desire. All desires, taken on their own terms, are simply givens.

Rationality comes in when we must decide what to do with our various wishes and wants. The Life of Reason consists in selecting a subset of our desires, and pruning off all the rest; more specifically, it consists in selecting the subset of our desires that consists in the greatest number that do not thwart one another. No single desire is itself rational, but a combination of desires may be:

In itself, a desire to see a child grow and prosper is just as irrational as any other absolute desire; but since the child also desires his own happiness, the child’s will sanctions and supports the father’s. Thus two irrationalities, when they conspire, make one rational life.

This is what we all already do—at least, to a certain extent. The key is to think of everything we desire, and to select those desires which go harmoniously together, neglecting all discordant impulses; and this harmony is our ideal towards which we strive. There is, indeed, a certain tragedy in this, for the Life of Reason requires that we choke off all incompatible desires, and thus eliminate a part of ourselves; yet this tragedy is unavoidable. All life, even exceedingly happy life, has some tragedy; our lives are too short and the universe too indifferent to satisfy our every whim:

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

All this seems very commonsensical, and it is. But note that this commits you to a certain type of moral relativism: relativism of the individual. Santayana is in agreement with Aristotle in thinking that happiness is the aim of life: "Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."

And since happiness is achieved by satisfying certain desires—somatic, sensual, or spiritual—and since desires spring from irrational impulses that we cannot control, every person’s happiness will, or at least might, be different. What would be the ideal Life of Reason for one man is a living nightmare for another. We can only prune and harmonize the desires we are given; we cannot manufacture desires and change our natures. We are given a set of propensities and potentialities, and it is the task of a reasonable life to realize them as best we can.

This, I think, is the core of this book; yet it is far from being the only attraction. Santayana’s mind is curious and roving, and in this volume he covers a huge territory. Just as Santayana’s style transforms imperfect bodies into perfect statues, so his mind is concerned with finding the ideal form in all things human. He commences a survey of governments, and concludes that a timocracy (or meritocracy) is the best form. Santayana would have total equality of opportunity, not in order to establish a perfect communism, but to select those whose natures are the best fitted to advance. Thus, he advocates a kind of natural aristocracy. (Not being a very practical man by nature, Santayana doesn’t speculate how such a perfect state could be realized.)

Santayana explores the history of morals and the morals of history; he discusses science and its purported rivals. He is an ardent naturalist, and espouses a rather pragmatic view of truth: “Science is a bridge touching experience at both ends, over which practical thought may travel from act to act, from perception to perception.” Yet I think Santayana is most refreshing when he discusses religion.

When Santayana wrote this book, he was living in a time that was, in one respect at least, very similar to our own: there was a bitter clash between science and religion. Like now, there were several thorny atheists ridiculing and dismissing religion as nonsense; and, like now, there were dogmatists who took their myths literally. Santayana is at home in neither camp; he thinks both views miss the point entirely.

Religious rituals and myths should be treated like poetry; they do not represent literal truths, but moral ones. To mistake the story in the Book of Genesis for a scientific hypothesis would be as egregious as mistaking Paradise Lost for a phonebook. The myths and stories of religions are products of culture, which express, in symbolic guise, deep truths about one’s history, society, and self. Thus, both the bilious atheists and the doctrinaire devotees were overlooking what was beautiful in religion:

Mythical thinking has its roots in reality, but, like a plant, touches the ground only at one end. It stands unmoved and flowers wantonly into the air, transmuting into unexpected and richer forms the substances it sucks from the soil.

This brings me to my original point: that Santayana was the embodiment of several contradictions. He holds no supernatural beliefs, yet admires religions for their deep artistic power. He is a materialist, yet thinks that life must be organized around an ideal. He is a naturalist in thinking that science is the key to truth; but he holds that science is a mere efficacious representation of reality, not reality itself. He seems antiquated in his love of aristocracy, yet modern in his relativism. He seems, from a modern point of view, analytic in his pragmatic attitude to truth and his emphasis on reason; yet he is, unlike analytic philosophers, greatly preoccupied with aesthetics, ethics, and history.

Certainly, Santayana is not without his shortcomings. Although his prose is beautiful, his concern for beauty often leads him to select a phrase for being tuneful rather than clear; the reader often expresses the half-wish that Santayana would write with less prettiness and more directness. His concern for beauty affects the content as well; he very seldom puts forward careful arguments for his positions, but more often resorts to putting them forth as attractively as possible. But I cannot help forgiving him for his faults.

For me, reading this book was a sort of thoughtful meditation; one must read it slowly and with great attention, carefully unwrapping the germinal thoughts from the flower petals in which Santayana enfolds them, so that they may bloom in your mind's soil. Santayana may indeed be a hermit of history; yet because of his solitude, reading him is an escape from the bustle and noise of the world, a reprieve from the normal tired controversies and paradoxes, a diversion as refreshing and revitalizing as cool water.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

I keep my copy close at hand, as a mental tonic. Santayana has the same worldly, disabused tone, and the same lucid 'Augustan' English, as Gibbon and Hume:

It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the havoc wrought by such artificial conditions. The monotony we observe in mankind must not be charged to the oppressive influence of circumstances crushing the individual soul. It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing on them some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career, first plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort of racial or professional soul. Their only character is composed of the habits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayed in childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dying words that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave.But these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint to some typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, as Schopenhauer said, Fabrikwaaren der Natur

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Santayana too easily gives the presumption of reason even for the irrational by justifying the stupid while seeing only through his own myopic eyes.

The series of five volumes can be entertaining and Santayana’s big picture does come through with his attempt at seeing reason across five different spheres of being human.

Here’s a typical absurdity that Santayana writes “Hume would never have thought the Catholic religion as a philosophy of life, but merely as a combination of superstition and policy, well adapted to the lying and lascivious habits of Mediterranean peoples”. Come on, “well adapted to the lying and lascivious habits of Mediterranean peoples”. That kind of thought belongs in the garbage bin of history. This quote popped up in the reason of science section.


Santayana will say “the ideal immediate is intelligibility and the barbarian races lack that” and therefore can’t really appreciate the finer things in life (“Charlie they don’t want tuna with good taste, they want tuna that taste good”, Charlie the Tuna never understood that his refined taste would never be enough for the refined upper crust Harvard educated self-selected superior beings and at best to them Charlie belongs in a crusted bread sandwich). He really did love the Teutonic people and how they were so special and he said the pagan spirit does not conform well with the Christian principles. These kinds of absurdities are stated all through out the book, he thinks he’s praising women by considering them as they were in his day and they were never meant to be anything more than that, or he says weird things about Jews, and that some races are more civilized than others. He tries to be reasonable in his statements, but he is not really using reason. He implicitly assumes his privileged self-identified identity as the only real identity without an identity.


The Thorstein Veblen (he wrote before Santayana) or the Oswald Spengler (he wrote after Santayana) prideful cultural superior ethnocentricity gets in the way of Santayana and the arguments he is trying to make about reason. This book belongs in the canon for how fascist ideas get metastasized.


At his best, Santayana knows the world is made of things (materials) and that the concept of a non-material entity is self-contradictory. Santayana explains the way we humans take the ideal to create the real is how we orient ourselves in an universe that has become self-aware of its own existence while still being a part of the universe itself. Also, Santayana really leverages himself off of Aristotle and values character, community, and positing meaning teleologically thus outsourcing our meaning to a fictional end point of an infinite jest, just as Aristotle does.


I don’t really think myths are good or are necessary for understanding our meaning or values as he will argue while forcing reason on to their structures and he thinks the world needed them thus leading to the prophets giving us a rational basis for religion or what I would refer to as making shit up about things that are better understood by being human in a human world than appealing to fairy tales or to Santayana’s skewed view of reason.


Santayana provides great quotes and quips when he is taken out of context, but in context, as in this series of five books one has a hard time swallowing his unreasonableness regarding reason.

[David Withun · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[Jack Fleming · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." These twelve words are perhaps George Santayana's most lasting gift to posterity. They can be found in books and posters in school classrooms worldwide and on t-shirts worn by the arch and the knowing. They are often featured at the start of History documentaries to induce a sense of foreboding and are regularly invoked by people on the left and right to rail against whatever particular evil they are lamenting that day. It is a shame that most people do not even know Santayana's name, but would recognise his most quoted axiom immediately. Firstly because the cliche, like most cliches, is untrue. Knowing something of the past is no guarantee against it happening again, and anyway, History never happens exactly the same way. Mark Twain was fond of misquoting Santayana to the effect that "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." The second reason it's a shame is that Santayana's work is one of the most brilliant examples in American, nay, all Philosophy, of embodied Naturalism, the philosophical position which he is most associated with. Everyone would benefit from reading his work, especially this, his masterpiece, and reducing him to one pithy adage is a cruel disservice to a great thinker.

George, or Jorge Santayana, was Spanish by birth but American by upbringing. Moving to Boston as a child he quickly showed his prodigious talent even in his second language, and went on to study Philosophy at Harvard before returning as a Professor there in just his mid-20's. He taught there for a couple of decades, interrupted by brief stints in Berlin and Cambridge and whilst at Harvard he taught some of those who would go on to become the biggest names in American letters, including TS Eliot, WEB DuBois and Wallace Stevens. In 1912, still only in his late 40's he left America for good to return to Europe, travelling around on an inheritance left to him by his mother. He finally settled down in Rome in 1941, living at a Convent on one of Rome's seven hills, to share his last few years surrounded by Nuns, by the quiet and by his books, until he died in 1952. He had no children, was never married, was infact probably a closet homosexual, and he died largely unmourned, meanwhile most of his major works lay gathering dust in libraries until they eventually fell out of Copyright and then slowly grew mildewed and forgotten like the man himself.

Reading Santayana can be a little difficult at first but he repays the effort many times over. He is not infact an aphoristic writer, or rather, aphorisms are not the aim of his work but usually come at the end of sometimes pages of densely argued philosophical writing, as if as rewards for following him so far into the weeds. He writes lyrically but cogently and makes the case throughout his work for Philosophical Naturalism, that is, a Materialist view that no Supernatural dimension exists in the universe. Santayana argues that human nature, society and its institutions can be understood as, at base, rational, not divine. In The Life of Reason Santayana follows this Naturalist principle or (Reason) in five key areas, Art, Science, Religion, Society and Common Sense. His most interesting sections are on Society and on Religion. In his section on politics he argued for a sort of Natural Aristocracy among human beings with the wisest and most intelligent at the top, and the drones below. He was a sort of Conservative Liberal, hoping for the State to protect his rights but not much more, and certainly he was not given to Political any more than Philosophical Idealism.

On religion he reveals a certain contradictory nature. Whilst remaining a life-long Materialist and Atheist, he was very receptive to the practices of Religion, especially his own Catholicism, in attempting to reconcile the human to the Sacred. He greatly enjoyed the beauty and sophistication of religious myths and considered them essential to human functioning. He was especially critical of those "worm-eaten old satirists" who mocked the religious impulse, but had no sense for its lyricism or glory. He believed that "The Bible is Literature, not Dogma" and had little time for fundamentalists of whatever creed, be they Protestant, Islamic, or Scientific. Though a Naturalist he pointedly chose to end his days surrounded by Women of the Cloth, as if in gentle rebuke to his tediously materialist peers in Academia, who made no secret of their distaste for Christianity.

In summary, Santayana is a writer who deserves to be better known than he is. A philosopher of genius, he should be considered in the first rank of thinkers of the 20th century along with Wittgenstein, Russell, Camus, Dewey and the others. His works demand rescuing from the dustbin of History and given their place in the Canon. He certainly does not deserve to be relegated to one aphorism, no matter how pithy or memorable. Indeed one could almost say that those who do not remember Santayana are doomed to learn nothing of value from him.

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could have kept this under Currently Reading for many moons, as herein is that rare occasion whence one half of my brain was consolidated beforehand in Seneca's letters, the summary of the other half, the equatorial crux of Watercolor Ashbery's balance beam(s), &c. Perhaps one day in my Memoirs I'll sum up my twenties' literary endeavours thusly: Dylan Thomas, Schopenhauer, Seneca, Santayana. Then some sentences explaining just what that meant, and 30 odd pages citing several hundred others in this crazy life of travel, study, historic inquisition.

Concerning The Life of Reason, it would be depressingly strenuous to think of someone I know who would disagree any one of these five unabridged philosophical statuesques was worth the price of admission, and a second copy for a friend, alone. Thou may asketh thyself, With Whom to Dance? I sayeth unto thee, George Santayana, for he hath been alone long decades, dwelling within the bowels of the cauldron of philosophy, drowned in the kitchen sea of our modern, castrated bacchic orgy of complaints, O liberal fascist Death of Reason.

Weep, O defeated children! Thy mother shall still fill thy bank account when you've been caught throwing bricks at banks with China-woven, cotton vaginas about thy skull!

Abandon all hope for the futile, ye who enter here.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read it quickly because, clearly, it was a relic of pre-World War II thinking. But, all the same, I think Santayana is America's greatest philosopher.

[Deb W · Rating 1 out of 5]

It seems it could be interesting but his stilted, obscure writing makes the message unintelligible.

[Carlos RUiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quieres avanzar cómo persona para conocer a la raza humana y lo límites aparentes de lo personal este es tu libro

[Mommalibrarian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I spend more than 20 hours reading this book. I got past half way and into parts later. The beginning volume and I think some of his ideas would be consistent with the latest neurobiological findings. I skipped the parts that seemed to be political science. The sections on religion were interesting. I made copious use of Google Bard to follow up on his many comments on other philosophers, mythology, and history. He obviously had a much better education than I did. I finally bailed. Not sure who would enjoy this book.

Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times miss his signals and stare vacantly when he might well act, while at other times he will run off into convulsions and raise a dust in his own brain to no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we should hardly recognise ourselves if we could shake them off altogether. Not to retain any dulness would mean to possess untiring attention and universal interests, thus realising the boast about deeming nothing human alien to us; while to be absolutely without folly would involve perfect self-knowledge and self-control. The intelligent man known to history nourishes within a dullard and holds a lunatic in leash. He is encased in a protective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps him from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world; but that integument blinds him at the same time to many of his nearest and highest interests. He is amused by the antics of the brute dreaming within his breast; he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amusement which sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human intelligence is still decidedly barbarous; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool at court.

[Rick Edwards · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, I read this book in Maurice Natanson's course on Philosophy in Literature; the two were paired for a "bi-focal" perspective on the thought of Santayana. Combining the two reads offers a challenging perspective on "the life of reason."

[Avital]

Eric's recommendation