Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 25 Fall 2007

              Philosophy as a Way of Life
Santayana filosofo. Lafilosofia como forma de vida
By Daniel Moreno Moreno
Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2007, 229 pp.
The time has most definitely come to treat Santayana more universally and more
comprehensively, and I believe that Spanish scholars have, at least
theoretically, greater opportunities to do it better than American ones, for at
least one reason: American commentators usually, I suspect, do not speak/read Spanish
and have little access to Spanish books and papers on Santayana, not to mention any
understanding of the Spanish mentality, whereas all or nearly all Spanish scholars read
English books by Santayana and on Santayana, and, additionally to the native or
national spirit they intuitively feel very deeply, they know much more about America,
including Pragmatism and the Genteel Tradition, than Americans do about Spain,
which, at the very beginning makes the Spaniards' panorama broader. Daniel Moreno
Moreno's book Santayana filosofo. Lafilosofia como forma de vida (Madrid: Editorial
Trotta, 2007) is a good and the latest example. Firstly, Moreno is Spanish himself, but
does not promote Santayana's Spanishness by any means, as some of his compatriot
scholars have tended to do. He tries to make his presentation well-balanced, and his
references include all significant secondary literature, both in English and Spanish,
which makes the whole thing actual, fresh, and timely. Secondly, he recognizes the
broad spectrum of sources and inspirations one can trace in Santayana's philosophy,
including the Ancient Greeks (Democritus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle), Spinoza,
Germans (Lotze, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche), Americans (Emerson, Royce, James,
Dewey, Critical Realists), British (Russell, G.E. Moore), and Spaniards (Cervantes,
John of the Cross). Thirdly, he detects the political circumstances, cultural
backgrounds, and social tensions of and in the places Santayana happened to stay, for
instance the US under McKinley, England during the Boer War, Italy under Mussolini,
and Spain during the Civil War, although, I personally would love to read much more
about Santayana in the context of the domestic bloodshed in his beloved motherland in
the 1930s, much more than that his age and the geographical distance kept him on the
margin of affairs over there (p. 154). Fourthly, he embraces Santayana's thought from
the points of view of his philosophical output, literary work and literary criticism
(although Santayana's poetry has been excluded from the investigation) as well as
practical life. Fifthly, he presents Santayana's philosophy as a system of thought
rather than a position on, say, aesthetics, epistemology or ontology. Sixthly, he
presents external points of references for Santayana's thought, for instance, the
American Genteel Tradition and Dilthey's Geisteswissenschaften, although, strangely
enough for a Spanish scholar, hardly anything about La Generacion del 98, except a
briefly expressed reservation about Santayana's connection with the movement due to
his indifference to Spain's tragic lot during the military conflict with America (p. 153).
Within this, Moreno's narrative through much of his book points up binary
oppositions. Thus: in Chapter I on philosophy as way of life, he has, among others,
such subchapters as Ironic Nihilism, Platonic Materialism, and Spiritual Atheism; in
Chapter II on cognition and reality, he has Scepticism and Animal Faith; in Chapter IV
on LP, he has Reality and Fiction as well as Transcendentalism and Platonism; in the
final chapter on Santayana's spiritual testament, he has subchapters on Apollo and
Dionysius, on the Life of Reason and the Life of Spirit, and on Spiritual Life and