The Essential Santayana, and: The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States: George Santayana, and: Values and Powers: Re-Reading the Philosophical Tradition of American Pragmatism (review)

1. As indicated in the Acknowledgments, the sourcebook, The Essential Santayana, is the product of the input of a short list of scholars who, give or take a few names, constitute the “Santayana revival” heralded on the back-cover. Martin A. Coleman has acted as the clearing house for their suggestions, while also writing an Introduction, arranging the readings into five general headings, and providing thumb-nail synopses of each of the readings in each category. While all this is a solid contribution on Coleman’s part, the back-cover contains two questionable if not plainly fallacious “advertisements.” The first is the claim that Santayana, along with William James and Josiah Royce, ranks as “one of the founders of American pragmatism.” This mis-representation is egregious considering that Indiana University Press is also publishing the writings of Peirce, the real founder of Pragmatism. The second is a blurb of John Lachs claiming that “Santayana now stands ready to assume his rightful place among the truly important philosophers of the last several hundred years.”

With respect to the first advertisement, Santayana’s status in “classical American philosophy” remains problematic. He himself resisted such a classification, as attested by Coleman’s own published article (in Cognitio) in the same year of 2009. Both “commercial” statements go beyond the normal degree of promotional hyperbole in a market flooded with sourcebooks and “companion books” to authors.

The volume opens with a frontispiece photograph of the fountain of the Tritons in Trevi of Rome accompanied by a short excerpt from Santayana’s “Ultimate Religion.” But his words do not account for the essential feature of the fountain. Even if he ingeniously treats the fountain complex as a symbol of a “chance cosmology” in which the admiring but impotent spirit finds itself, it is actually a historical work of science and art, the creative design of its Italian makers. The passage itself is an example of Santayana’s own literary artistry. Each of these considerations threatens his official doctrine of the impotence of spirit (or consciousness) which is one of the principal contentions of the readings.

Coleman configures source materials under the five headings of Autobiography; Skepticism and Ontology; Rational Life in Art, Religion, and Spirituality; Ethics and Politics; and Literature, Culture, and Criticism. Problems abound with these overlapping configurations, which are not placed in the standard chronological sequence. The readings start from Santayana’s carefully crafted autobiography of the 1940s; they then turn back to “Philosophical Heresy” (1915), followed by an inordinately long string of chapters of Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923). The last three general segments juxtapose earlier and later materials as well. The last segment, “Literature, Culture, and Criticism,” is a motley mixture of caricatures of other philosophers and writers.

Among other things, a sourcebook functions as a handy reference book. (Indiana University Press’s two-volume edition of The Essential Peirce, ed. Houser and Kloesel, furnishes an excellent example of very detailed chronological information to which a scholar can repeatedly refer.) This volume only contains an “abridged and adapted” chronology that unaccountably leaves out references to Three Philosophical Poets and Soliloquies in England, with Later Soliloquies, if not other writings as well. The five segments of source materials contain no entries from The Sense of Beauty (1896), Three Philosophical Poets (1910), Soliloquies in England with Later Soliloquies (1922), Platonism and the Spiritual Life (1927), and The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (1946). Vintage selections from these four works would have served the reader better, I think, than the excessive representation of Scepticism and Animal Faith which...