Santayana, George
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The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel
George Santayana
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ASIN: 0262193280 |
Book Description
Published in 1935, George Santayana's The Last Puritan was the American philosopher's only novel. It became an instant best-seller, immediately linked in its painful voyage of self discovery to The Education of Henry Adams. It is essentially a novel of ideas, expressed in the birth, life, and early death of Oliver Alden.
The Last Puritan is volume four in a new critical edition of The Works of George Santayana that restores Santayana's original text and provides important new scholarly information. Books in this series - the first complete publication of Santayana's works - include an editorial apparatus with notes to the text (identifying persons, places, and ideas), textual commentary (including a description of the composition and publication history, along with a discussion of editorial methods and decisions), discussions of adopted readings, lists of variants and emendations, and line-end hyphenations.
Irving Singer's new introduction to this edition takes up Santayana's philosophical and artistic concerns, including issues of homosexuality raised by the depiction of the novel's two protagonists, Oliver and Mario, and of the relationship between Oliver and the rogue character Jim Darnley. In his thoughtful analysis Singer finds the term "homosexual novel" too reductionist and imprecise for what Santayana is trying to achieve. Singer brings to light the author's skillful and inventive methods for perceiving and interpreting reality, including ideal forms of friendship, and his success in exploring the pervasive moral problems that people face throughout their existence.
Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., is Head of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at Texas A&M University. William G. Holzberger is Professor of English at Bucknell University. Irving Singer is Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Customer Reviews:
To be or not to be.......2004-03-18
Our hero has everything - intelligence, beauty, wealth, education, wisdom, steadfastness, imagination, an athlete's grace and strength - but somehow that is not enough and this is the story of his unfolding consciousness and gradual recognition of fatal spiritual strengths and weaknesses. This sounds very dull, but one is wonderfully swept along from an overprotected childhood in New England, to his father's yacht and to English student life at Oxford. Oliver cannot be called a wit, a social lion or a womanizer; but he admires those who are, and two of his close friends are merry, sophisticated men of the world. A thoughtful, well-endowed young man with time on his hands, he seeks the meaning of life from a certain distance, and we explore this theme with him from many fascinating angles. He does suffer. His father considers him weak and indecisive and his mother thinks him heartless and inconsiderate; he fights to gain his independence from them both and succeeds. He despairs and agonizes over his course of action, scrutinizes his motives for hypocrisy, dishonesty and self-delusion. Aesthetic beauty, ethics, the spiritual life and poetry are centrally recurring themes. Love also is explored. Our poor hero who has everything turns out to be the most awkward, ungainly, pathetic wooer imaginable. But Oliver is worth it all, and you emerge heartened and profoundly enriched by having known him and survived the various turns of his exacting life.
Idealist.......2003-11-11
THE LAST PURITAN is a sort of education of Oliver Alden. The atmosphere of the work is that of a Henry James novel. Initially the chief subject is Nathaniel Alden. Unitarianism has replaced prayers at breakfast with wholesome food. The book is cool and funny. Nathaniel Alden is an awful snob and is supernaturally quiet and unengaged. He has vowed to abstain from carriage travel and so must walk. He lives in Boston in the Back Bay.
His younger brother Peter is being sent to camp in the west prior to beginning preparation for Harvard at Exeter. The camp life in Wyoming is to Peter a godsend after living under the dictates of Nathaniel. Genuine cowboys would sometimes ride into the camp. Peter grows up to attend Harvard and to acquire a medical degree. He never practices medicine. His son Oliver is born. His wife is from Great Falls, Connecticut. Oliver manages to escape almost all the ills of childhood. He has a foreign governess, a German woman.
While boating with his father, Oliver is given THE LEAVES OF GRASSS to read. Oliver and his father visit an old kinsman, Caleb Wetherbee. During the winter Caleb resides on Mount Vernon Street on Beacon Hill. He is a cripple and has adopted the Catholic religion and has become highly knowledgeable about European matters. He invites Oliver to to participate in his Sunday evening parties when Oliver attends Harvard. Observers find Caleb's deep religious interests to be a clear case of sublimation.
Olivers's mother is apt to take no notice of genius or style, she is concerned with social propriety. Oliver, invited by his father to spend a year abroad, makes a decision to stay at his day school in Connecticut and live with his mother for the final year before college. He also decides that Williams College is good enough for him. He fears that universities are filled with snobs. Football more than anything else restores Oliver's conventional tone after spending time with his father and his father's companion Jim.
Oliver does spend the summer with his father and learns that his will has been ripped up and that the older man fears he is dying. Oliver promises Jim he will take care of him notwithstanding the fact that some of Jim's conduct shocks him. Oliver learns to punt. He meets his cousin Mario at Eton. Mario's grandmother is Peter Alden's sister. Oliver and Peter are detained at Eton when Peter falls ill. Peter is pleased to see that his son is so wide awake intellectually. Oliver feels a need to justify his natural sympathies theoretically. Peter dies.
Two years later Mario and Oliver see each other in Manhattan and in Cambridge. Both of the cousins are attending Harvard. Oliver, spending three years at Williams, suffers a football injury and decides to rededicate himself to his studies in the wider academic setting of Harvard. Oliver never flinches in his determination to pursue higher things. At Harvard through chance Oliver occupies the room occupied previously by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Santayana himself is a character in this tale, a member of the philosophy department at Harvard. Oliver joins in the fighting of World War I. He is described as an ascetic without faith. When Oliver dies, Mario is the executor of Oliver's will. Mario tells the supposed biographer of Oliver in the epilogue that he idealizes Oliver and makes him too complex.
The book is very satisfying. It raises issues that are still pertinent. It is scarcely dated at all.
Thinking Person's Catcher in the Rye.......2000-06-05
This is the finest coming of age novel in the known and unknown universe. It has everything..philosophy, memoirs of a world gone by, lots of quirkiness, and a great sense of heart. The best thing of all..is to have a copy of the 1936 edition. The yellowed pages of the edition are a perfect touch for a book written about time gone by.GREAT
A beautiful and moving novel of ideas.......1998-10-14
One of the finest books of the 20th century, The Last Puritan was a sensation when published in the 1930's. It tells the triumph and tragedy of Oliver Alden, a youth born into a strict, "Progressive" Unitarian family in late 19th Century Boston. As his life progesses, he struggles to reconcile the harsh idealism in which he was raised with the beautifully chaotic nature of the real world. This conflict gives Santayana the ability to discuss God, love, morality, politics and the permanence of human nature all without ever losing sight of one man's heroic and tragic attempt to find his place in a world not meant for him. The Last Puritan remains the only book that has ever driven me to tears, and the only novel that has ever truly changed my life. If you've ever counted yourself a "lost soul" in the world, this book will hit home like nothing you've ever read.
Book Description
This penultimate volume of Santayana’s letters chronicles Santayana’s life during a difficult time--the war years and the immediate postwar period. The advent of World War II left Santayana isolated in Rome, and the difficulties of wartime travel across borders forced him to abandon plans to move to more agreeable locations in Switzerland or Spain. During these years, Santayana lived in a single room in a nursing home run by the "Blue Sisters" of the Little Company of Mary in Rome, where, during the winter months, he did much of his writing in bed (wearing well-mended gloves) in order to stay warm. And yet, despite wartime deprivations, illness, and old age (he was 77 in 1941), Santayana was remarkably productive, completing both his autobiography Persons and Places and The Idea of Christ in the Gospels: or God in Man, and all but completing Dominations and Powers. He confided to one correspondent that he had "never been more at peace or more happy."
The eight books of The Letters of George Santayana bring together over 3,000 letters, many of which have been discovered in the fifty years since Santayana's death. Letters in Book Seven are written to such correspondents as his friend and protégée Daniel Cory, his financial manager and heir George Sturgis, and the American poet Robert Lowell. The correspondence with Lowell--which began when the younger writer sent Santayana a copy of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle--signals an important new friendship, which became a source of affection and intellectual engagement in Santayana's final years.
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Scepticism and Animal Faith
George Santayana
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
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ASIN: 0486202364 |
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Detailed presentation of American philosopher's pragmatic concept of epistemology, isolation of realms of existents and subsistents. Chapters include "There is No First Principle of Criticism," Dogma and Doubt," and "The Discovery of Essence."
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Dynamite.......2007-03-15
Santayana will probably never be popular among people who make their living as epistemologists, because he offers a devastating and ultimately unanswerable critique of their enterprise. The problem is that they do not take their own skepticism seriously, and so end up in "incidental sophistries," an endless, pointless verbal parlor game. His answer to Hume's backgammon comment is that one "should be ashamed to countenance opinons which, when not arguing, I did not believe." Doing that renders the whole enterprise unserious, a "limping skepticism." A worthy theory of knowledge must treat "of what I believe in my active moments, as a living animal, when I am really believing something." In other words, when it matters.
Descartes could not bring himself to be profoundly skeptical, which would have meant doubting his own principles of explanation. For example, he suggested that a malign demon might be the causing him to be deluded. "He thus assumed the principle of sufficient reason, for which there is no reason at all. If any idea or axiom were really a priori or spontaneous in the human mind, it would be infinitely improbable that it should apply to the facts of nature. Every genius, in this respect, is his own malign demon." The rest of Descartes is similarly exploded, after which Hume and Kant are taken to the woodshed for similar demolition.
What does Santayana himself offer? Starting from a truly profound skepticism in which nothing is given, he offers a sort of Platonic Darwinism in which all we have access to are intuitions of fleeting appearances, less than shadows on the wall, because no wall is given. In our struggle to survive, we learn to take some of those appearances ("essences") to signify things and events in a real world of substantial, enduring objects. This inference to existence can have no justification other than pure animal faith, without which we cannot trust our senses, discourse becomes absurd, and life cannot be lived.
This is a hugely impressive work, especially for anyone who has grown frustrated with the irrelevant cleverness of much of epistemology. That it seems to be largely ignored among epistemologists is no surprise; Santayana is out to ruin the whole party. One can easily object to his Platonism, but the fundamental aspects of his critique do not depend on that.
Something has to be said about Santayana's literary style. To say the writing is good is to convey nothing of what it's like. I started to copy out striking passages, but gave up because I would have copied out about thirty per cent of the text. Nobody in philosophy, and maybe nowhere else either, writes like this. With most writers it is possible to imagine, if only barely and only by giving yourself a huge benefit of the doubt, that with enough effort you might be able to write like they do. I was completely unable to imagine any such thing when reading Santayana. He's on a different verbal plane.
yes but.......2006-12-17
Is animal faith really that different from Hume's turn to backgammon as
a response to skepticism?
Santayana's philosophical masterpiece.......2001-03-06
This book is the most distinguished work of philosophy to emerge out of the critical realist tradition. Santayana defends the duality between ideas in the mind and the things these ideas represent in the natural world. Using this epistemological dualism, Santayana explains why all forms of idealism are unwarranted and absurd. Since human knowledge is merely symbolic (rather than literal), all the skeptical arguments claiming that, unless we can prove that our ideas are in some sense "identical" to the things they represent, then it follows that things the ideas allegedly represent must be consider as "unknowable." But Santayana shrewdly reminds us that knowledge consists in "thinking aptly about things, not in becoming like them." External reality, before it can be grasped by the mind, must be reduced to the human level.
"Skepticism and Animal Faith," along with David Stove's "The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies," represents the most effective and withering criticism that has ever been directed against the idealist creed. Where Stove attacks the positive argument for idealism, Santayana focuses his polemical guns on the negative argument--i.e., on the idealist argument against realism. Santayana shows how idealist skepticism of the existence of an external reality, if followed consistently, would deprive all our ideas of their cognitive meaning. If idealism is taken to its logical extreme, we would all find ourselves trapped in a solipsism of the passing moment, unable to understand the significance of any idea, image, or feeling experienced by the mind. The reason why human beings generally do not lapse into this state of idealist stupidity is because biological urges prompt them to assume that their ideas refer to things existing in an external, natural world. This biological urge Santayana calls "animal faith." It is a faith that is rewarded and justified in every moment of our waking existence; and even those who deny it speculatively assume its validity in action and intent.
I personally regard "Skepticism and Animal Faith" as the greatest work of epistemology ever written. This is a judgment, however, that few would agree with. Many philosophers disparage Santayana because he eschews most of the technical problems of epistemology and also because he writes more like a poet than an academic scholar. There is no symbolic logic, no arid syllogisms, no dryasdust argumentation in any of Santayana's philosophic works. Philosophy, for Santayana, is not a technique or a science, but an art. The technical epistemologies of academic philosophers are, accordingly, hopeless endeavors. "Thought can only be found by being enacted," Santayana writes. "I may therefore guide my thoughts according to some prudent rule, and appeal as often as I like to experience for a new starting-point or a controlling perception in my thinking; but I cannot by any possibility make experience or mental discourse at large the object of investigation: it is invisible, it is past, it is nowhere." In the final analysis, what makes Santayana superior to most other philosophers is his superior good sense coupled with the rare ability to express this wisdom in memorable phrases and apt metaphors. If there is a more beautifully written book of epistemology, I have yet to see it.
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The Philosophy of George Santayana
Paul Arthur (Editor) Schilpp
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George Santayana: A Biography
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Reason in Religion (The life of reason / George Santayana)
George Santayana
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The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory
George Santayana
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ASIN: 0486202380 |
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Masterfully written discussion of the nature of beauty, form, expression; art, literature, and social sciences involved. Santayana covers the nature and materials of beauty, form, expression, and much more.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent.......2003-07-05
The philosophy of Santayana is remembered mostly by his theory of aesthetics, which is discussed in detail in this book. His aesthetic theory is basically subjective, or "psychological", and if viewed from a contemporary standpoint, somewhat at odds with current developments in neuroscience, but closer than most schools of Western philosophy. All philosophical theories of aesthetics are interesting to investigate from the standpoint of comparing them to what is said about the human aesthetic faculty in modern research in neuroscience.
As in ethics, Santayana approaches aesthetics in three different ways, namely as the exercise of the aesthetic faculty, the history of art, and the psychological. The first two do not concern the author in the book, his attention devoted entirely to the third. His intention is to remove himself from the influence of the poets and of Plato, and find the out how ideals are formed in the mind, how objects may be compared with them, what properties are shared in beautiful things, and the process by which humans become sensitive to beauty and in turn value it. He is after a definition of beauty that explains its origin in human experience, and one that explains the human capacity to be sensible of beauty and the relation between a beautiful object and its ability to excite the human senses.
The author takes a different definition of aesthetics, being one that he calls "critical" or "appreciative perception", and which results from combining a notion of criticism with that of the notion of aesthetics as a theory of perception. Santayana wanted to develop a theory of aesthetics that relies on perceptions as a judgmental, critical notion. Perceptions that are not appreciations are thus to be excluded. An aesthetic theory then deals with the "perception of values".
The author's view of religion is well-known, and his atheism rare for his time. The religious imagination he says, has resulted in creations that rival those of the poets and novelists, so much so, he says, that humans believe the content of these creations to have objective reality. The ideas of these divinities are further enhanced by the realization of their natural power, with the belief in the reality of an ideal personality bringing about its further idealization, eventually spanning many human generations. History and tradition are cast by the imagination of these deities, in which peity resides and is nourished. The author of course does not excuse the God of Christianity from this, but he acknowledges the possibility that the human conceptions of Christ and Mary may in fact have real counterparts (the evidence of this not to be explored in this work).
The author states that unless human nature undergoes radical change, the main intellectual and aesthetic value of ideas will come from the creative acts of imagination. If human perceptions are not connected with human pleasures, there would be no need to look at things, no interest in them at all, and no importance would be imputed to them. It is indeed amazing how many ideas, thought to be rational, logical, or abstract, actually fit in with the author's aesthetic worldview. Concepts and results in science and mathematics in particular, after their discovery, are sometimes thought of as having their origin in logic and reason. But it was the keen human imagination that brought them about: a grand interplay of intuition and playfullness. Ugly ideas are not permissible: only the most beautiful survive...and oddly, and most interestingly, it is these that usually seem to work the best, and transcend the context in which they were discovered.
Psychological theory of beauty.......2001-03-26
In this book, Santayana rejects the Platonic conception of beauty is an intrinsic characteristic of a thing, and argues for beauty that exists only in the mind (and senses, hence the title) of the viewer. The pleasure that beauty gives its audience is universal, but what is beautiful is not universal across audiences. That may be old hat to us, but wasn't quite so old hat in his time. Santayana enumerates various types of beauty, and relates each to the pleasure it gives its audience. Santayana even claims that some of our other preferences -- for example, for youth over age -- are fundamentally aesthetic in nature.
The argument is Santayanaesque, and thus not exactly rigorous. A lot of the physiology ("Psychology is always physiological," he writes) is hokey to our "modern" medical minds. Some of the digressions seem to be just him taking the opportunity to say something clever, rather than advancing the main argument in any way.
Still, Santayana is a virtuoso of putting together large, complex "big think" arguments, and he writes subtly and beautifully. This book is worth it, even if only to see Santayana doing what he does best: arguing broadly and forcefully, this time for a new conception of aesthetics.
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- The Condition of Children and Barbarians
- Santayana
- Politically incorrect but much more
- Empty rhetoric from a jockstrap pragmatist
- Masterpiece from the 20th century's wisest philosopher
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The Life of Reason (Five Volumes in One)
George Santayana
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ASIN: 1406800406 |
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The Condition of Children and Barbarians.......2007-05-25
George Santayana
"Progress ... depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute ... and when experience is not retained ... infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians..."
Santayana.......2007-02-24
I discovered Santayana at the Little Given's Bookstore in Lynchburg VA. I have the 1936 edition of The Philosophy of Santayana, Selections from His Complete Works, edited by Irwin Edman. The owner of the book was Richard C. Rowland, a college professor (English/Philosophy)--I presume this, for I did a Google search and found his obituary. He taught at Sweet Briar College, which would make sense that his book would make it to Lynchburg.
I was unfamiliar with Santayana, and I'm not sure why I picked up this volume, but I did to my continuing delight. From every page the prose could be picked up at any point and be so poetic, elegant and lush--like being enfolded in the arms of a lover from whom you would never wish to disentangle. In my view, and certainly to my sensibilities, Santayana's views on religion are well worth reading despite the negative comment posted by another reviewer. Santayana understands well the importance of religion and is very deferential to the symbology and idealism on which it rests.
The sheer magnitude of "stand alone" phrases whose cogency and poetry leave any of us who value the written/spoken word jealous. Even more so as English was his second language. Santayana notes that "Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion. That he harbours it is no indication of a want of sanity on his part in other matters. But while we acquiesce in his experience, and are glad he has it, we need no arguments to dissuade us from sharing it, Each man may have his own loves, but the object in each case is different. And so it is, or should be, in religion."
So do get The Life of Reason for no other reason than to envelope yourself in the exquisite prose and impress your friends with your erudition to have such a book from which you can open and quote a passage that will certainly delight the ear and provoke conversation. That is the gift of Santayana, and one you will revel in receiving.
And...take this book, or any book that you lovingly own and mark the passages that provoke your passions, so that when it goes to another owner they can enjoy your insights and share in your enjoyment or provocation--for that is a priceless legacy of one book lover to another, don't you think?
Politically incorrect but much more.......2007-01-27
I am curious if anybody that is politically correct has read enough of this classic to condemn Santayana for his comments on women and blacks. There is a brief reference to blacks that I believe would get him fired at most colleges today, and more comments on women that would at least get him in very hot water. Certainly if he were alive today he would revise his thinking. But the hostile reaction to the President of Harvard recently when he was unwise enough to answer a request to explain in lecture, 'why are there not more women leaders in science'...suggests that Santayana might get in hot water today even if he changed to more modern views. The Harvard President's nightmare and similar politics suggests that America suffers from a resurgence of the sadistic Christian mentality that Santayana cites as similar to Islamic fundamentalism in his "Wind's of Doctrine" essay 'THE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY'. Calvinism, Sin exists, sin must be punished.
I get a little lost in much of Santayana's writing style sometimes but his overall outlook makes him my favorite philosopher.
Empty rhetoric from a jockstrap pragmatist.......2006-08-10
Santayana is known broadly as the guy who said that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it -- whatever that means. And therein lies, in miniature, the charm of this tireless windbag, most of whose vast output is thankfully out of print. The statement in itself means precisely nothing, and its perfect emptiness is what renders it most useful. It requires a trememdous volume of ignorance to make Santayana profound, which is, I suppose, why he was for so long America's national philosopher. If you expect philosophers to be blowhards, then Santayana will never disappoint you. For the rest of us, instead of this volume and the five-volume bolus of which it is the condensate, one can read William James' essay "The Sentiment of Rationality," the wisdom of which it, as it were, repeats.
Masterpiece from the 20th century's wisest philosopher.......2000-02-17
In a century in which philosophy has been taken over by pedants eager to "analyze" every technical problem ever devised by the perverted ingenuity of the mind of man--technical problems, moreover, which, as Santayana himself once put it, are "solved best by not raising them"--it is comforting to know that at least one major philosopher never forgot what philosophy is really all about: namely, wisdom and love of knowledge. Whereas other philosophers seek to impress by being original or controversial or obscure, Santayana merely attempts to describe things as they are. Santayana is above all a realist, not merely in the philosophical sense of believing that external objects exist outside of man's consciousness, but also in the more general sense of accepting the world as it really is and not as we might wish it could be. So many philosophers seem motivated primarily by a desire to rationalize away the disagreeable aspects of reality. Santayana's approach is different. While recognizing that reality has its disagreeable elements (Santayana was certainly no optimist), he seeks to distinguish, as he once put it, the part of this disagreeable or mixed reality "that could be loved and chosen from the reminder."
In "The Life of Reason," Santayana sought to explain how reason emerges in five separate areas of human existence: thought, society, religion, art and science. Originally, Santayana devoted one book to each subject. In this present edition, all five books have been abridged by the author and made into a single volume. The unabridged version is superior to this one. The abridged version is more difficult to follow, because in the process of condensing five books into one, gaps have been created in the exposition of Santayana's thought. Unfortunately, the original five volume edition is no longer in print.
The best two volumes of the unabridged version were "Reason in Common Sense" and "Reason in Religion." The first of these books shows how men came to discover the external reality of nature and the independent existence of other minds. There are chapters on how thought is practical, on the "malicious psychology" of philosophers like Kant, Hume and Berkeley, on how thought is practical, and on Santayana's contention that ideas are not abstractions. "Reason in Religion" is one of the most interesting books on religion ever published and ought to be read by every atheist and agonistic who regards religion as a mere tissue of delusion and irrationality. Santayana, while denying the literal truth of religion, contends that religion nonetheless represents a sort of poetic and moral truth expressed in symbols that can be grasped on a very human level. "Religion remains an imaginative achievement, a symbolic representation of moral reality which may have a most important function in vitalising the mind and in transmitting, by way of parables, the lessons of experience."
The over-riding theme of "The Life of Reason" is Santayana's conviction that only by recognizing the material world and the "conditions of existence," can the spirit become enlightened concerning the source of its troubles and the means of its happiness or deliverance. There is, I would contend, no philosophical work of the twentieth century that is more sane, that expresses better judgment on the main issues of philosophy, or that demonstrates a deeper wisdom about the nature of things than this classic work.
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- Singer, Peter
- Smith, Adam
Philosophers
Philosophers
