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5 A Aesthetics and Institutions Writing from London in 1915 to his one-time Harvard student Horace Kallen, and with the First World War in brutal progress, George Santayana articulated an exile’s suspicion of nationality. Kallen had delivered an address, “Nationality and the Jewish State in the Great War,” the previous year, and Santayana’s letter was a response to its appearance in The Menorah Journal, one of the leading publications for Jewish intellectuals. Nationality, Santayana writes, seems to be behind the restlessness, ambition, and obduracy that brought the war about, behind the endurance and zeal of the combatants, and also before their eyes (in every camp) in so far as they see anything at all before them to aim at. . . . If ninetenths of a man’s individuality are his nationality, nationality must cover a good deal that is common to all men, and much that is common to very few. And I hardly see how nationality, in this moral and inward sense, is to find political expression. Such national movements as the Italian, Balkan, or Irish are movements to establish what you call nationhood; so is Zioniosm, I suppose. Yet you hardly look to seeing the various nationalities in the U.S. establish special governments; I am not sure (I am so ignorant) whether the Pale is a district so preponderantly Jewish that a Jewish local government could be hoped for there. In these cases Nationality would have to be a voluntary and hazy thing: the degree to which anyone possessed it, the intensity and scope of his nationalism would be impossible to fix.1 160 / thinking america Spanish-born, Harvard-educated and, from 1912 until his death in 1952, permanently resident in Europe, Santayana exhibited the kind of cosmopolitan re­ luctance to subscribe to affiliations of nationality or religion that would ensure his permanent sense of dislocation from both the Catholicism of his European ancestry and, as he would famously characterize it, the “genteel” New England Puritanism of the United States. In his letter to Kallen, Santayana acknowledges nationality’s role in self-definition, yet he is keen to distinguish, somewhat awkwardly , between an expression of nationality that is “moral and inward” and its translation into political expression, that is to say its institutionalization into structures of adherence and control. The United States, he suggests, offers a good example of where the diversity of national identities has not resulted in the construction of a government or governments that reflect that. As we saw in chapter 4, the problem of how to reconcile transnational diversity with the political—and practical—expediency of national unity preoccupied William James, Santayana’s colleague at Harvard. Whereas for James the idea of an “atomistic constitution” holds in productive tension the twin impulses of coherence and plurality, Santayana is more skeptical of declarations of unity that are based on assertions of shared national identity. He suggests instead that strength of national affiliation is difficult to assess, so that the formation of political structures would be entirely based upon something “voluntary and hazy,” the “intensity and scope” of which would be “impossible to fix.” Of all the figures discussed in this book, Santayana could claim to be the most explicitly transnational in both his biographical narrative and his intellectual disposition. His own sense of national dislocation, accentuated by adolescent years moving between the Castile of his father and his mother’s Boston, ensured that his philosophical and political outlook remained resolutely cosmopolitan, if, at times, also doubtful of the possibility of a widespread cosmopolitan conversation . His “complex allegiances,” being “a child born in Spain of Spanish parents to be educated in Boston and to write in the English language,”2 resulted in a double estrangement. Looking back on his formative years, Santayana writes of feeling “like a foreigner in Spain” where his “Yankee manners seemed outlandish ” (6), yet also at such a remove from his acquired Americanness that he could “set out to say plausibly in English as many un-English things as possible” (7). In an anthology of writing that includes pieces by Santayana, collected under the rubric of “Conservative Critics of American Culture,” the volume’s editor identifies superfluity as the disposition common to his chosen authors, an alienation from the political, economic, and cultural motors that were driving the nation. While the credentials of Santayana’s conservatism might be contested—indeed, as this chapter will show, his position of voluntary detachment often enabled a [18.217.67.225] Project MUSE (2024...

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