The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings

About This Book

xxv About This Book Given George Santayana’s exquisite style and prolific output, it was difficult to condense his important writings into a single volume. But this wealth of material ensures that everything included in The Essential Santayana is a significant piece of work by an extraordinary thinker. In consultation with the other editors of the Santayana Edition, I composed an initial list of essays and chapters to include in The Essential Santayana. We selected works based on their traditional influence and popularity, their representativeness with respect to Santayana’s philosophical vision, or their importance according to Santayana’s comments in his correspondence. I grouped the selected titles under thematic heads corresponding to his philosophical and literary interests to produce a provisional table of contents, which I then shared with an international group of Santayana scholars. Based on the comments and recommendations of these scholars, I refined the table of contents and began working with the other editors of the Santayana Edition to compile texts for the volume. The texts of the selections in The Essential Santayana were taken, when possible , from The Works of George Santayana (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London), an unmodernized, critical edition of the philosopher’s published and unpublished writings. An “unmodernized” edition retains outdated and idiosyncratic punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and word division in order to reflect the full intent of the author as well as the initial texture of the work. A “critical” edition allows the exercise of editorial judgment in making corrections, changes, and choices among authoritative readings. The goal of the editors of the criticial edition is to produce texts that accurately represent Santayana’s final intentions regarding his works, and to record all evidence (in textual apparatus that lists all variants and emendations) on which editorial decisions have been based. In case a selected text had not yet been published in the critical edition, it was typically drawn from a first edition. The source text was then scanned and the transcription was proofread against the original. Details of the source of each text are provided in an accompanying head note and the bibliography at the front of this book. The editorial approach in this volume takes Santayana’s philosophical writing to be the heart of his work, and the heart of this book consists of three sections addressed to traditionally philosophical themes. The contents of the first and last sections treat personal origins and cultural prospects respectively, but they are not detached from Santayana’s philosophy. He claimed that he stood “in philosophy exactly where [he stood] in daily life;” to do otherwise, he thought, would be dishonest (ES, 51). The five sections of The Essential Santayana—I. Autobiography; II. Skepticism and Ontology; III. Rational Life in Art, Religion, and Spirituality; IV. Ethics and Politics; V. Literature, Culture, and Criticism—reflect the range of Santayana’s thought. Martin A. Coleman ...