Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 26 Fall 2008

              Santayana on Nietzsche
Reactions to Nietzsche's philosophical writings are mixed. Although often ignored
in the English-speaking philosophical world, he is from time to time denounced
there. The pronouncements he makes are too irresponsible, when he advocates
slaves for the masters to dominate, or describes the degrees in which women might be
possessed by men, or when he favours strife and warfare over peace and harmony. Such
assertions are too reckless and unthinking to be recommended to the young. On the other
hand, Nietzsche has his devoted followers, especially in continental Europe, in part because
the virtues he describes and the things he admires are deemed preferable to the dreary life
offered by the socialist, or the degrading motivations of democratic capitalism. Not many
both appreciate Nietzsche's virtues and at the same time are uncompromising about his
excesses. One such is George Santayana, who devotes three chapters to Nietzsche in his
sweeping attack on German philosophy in his First World War monograph Egotism in
German Philosophy.1 Many have treated this book as a wartime manifesto written in
anger, a cheap shot against the Germans and their philosophical tradition. While he
concedes his strong engagement on the allied side at the time, Santayana himself considers
it a serious philosophical work whose main themes continue his general assault on
transcendental idealism.
About Nietzsche, Santayana makes two statements which, in the face of it, appear to
contradict each other. On the one hand, he praises Nietzsche for his sharply defined and
clearly expressed preferences, something Santayana holds essential to morality:
The courage to cling to what his soul loved — and this courage is the essence of morality —
was conspicuous in him. He was a poet, a critic, a lover of form and of distinctions. Few
persons have ever given such fierce importance to their personal taste. What he disliked to
think of, say democracy, he condemned with the fulminations of a god; what he liked to
think of, power, he seriously commanded man and nature to pursue for their single object.
On the other hand, in seeking to understand what Nietzsche meant by strength when
lauding the will to power, Santayana says:
By strength, then, he could not mean the power to survive, by being as flexible as
circumstances may require. He did not refer to the strength of majorities, nor to the strength
of vermin. At the same time he did not refer to moral strength, for of moral strength he had
no idea.
Although he had the courage to maintain his preferences, which is essential to morality, he
was lacking in moral strength; although the essence of morality was conspicuous in him, he
had no idea of something that must also be critical to morality. We can get closer to the
heart of Santayana's critique, perhaps, if we sort out the connection between these two
statements.
Nietzsche's "strong and sane side, his Men on the future", according to Santayana, was
his feeling "that life must be accepted as it is or may become, and false beliefs, hollow
demands, and hypocritical, forced virtues must be abandoned" (egp 139). Goethe had also
felt and practiced this "new wisdom". However, Nietzsche was mistaken to believe that his
account of morality or new and that it discredited received ethical ideas.
What Nietzsche disparaged, then, under the name of morality was not all morality, for he
had an enthusiastic master-morality of his own to impose. He was thinking only of the
Christian virtues and especially of a certain Protestant and Kantian moralism with which
perhaps he had been surfeited. This moralism conceived that duty was something absolute
1 On the cover page of the French translation of the book, the editor inserted the motto: Je suis;
done tun'es pas.