Volume 35, Number 5 · March 31, 1988
The Sense of Santayana
By Jonathan Lieberson
George Santayana
by John McCormick
Knopf, 612 pp., $30.00
Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography
by George Santayana, edited by William G. Holzberger, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., with an introduction by Richard C. Lyon
MIT Press, 761 pp., $35.00
John McCormick's biography of George Santayana—a long and detailed account of a slow and rather uneventful life—is part of a recent effort to revive, or exhume, the thought and reputation of the philosopher, whose autobiography, Persons and Places, was republished last year. One senses that this effort may be an uphill struggle. While we are told in older textbooks and histories of philosophy that Santayana was a literary genius and sage, the author of a famous novel, The Last Puritan, and in some ways an important philosopher, no one seems to know quite how to describe what his genius consisted in, or where to place him today. His philosophy of nature—at once materialist and Platonist—and his unsentimental views of human nature and politics were once prized not only by young aesthetes and opponents of pragmatism but also by hard-nosed political realists and enemies of do-goodism. They are no longer widely read. Something in Santayana's work does not communicate with us anymore; and when we read it today, we find again and again that it does not have those profuse reverberations we associate with philosophy and literature of the first rank.
Review, 9629 words
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