Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 20 Fall 2002

              Santayana on Culture and Religion
I am grateful to James Seaton and H. T. Kirby-Smith for their fine papers, and for the
opportunity to contribute, in however limited a manner, to this session of the
Santayana Society. The two papers you have heard are noteworthy and important in
ways that go beyond my book. They merit your attention on their own. I will make
some comments about the suggestive thoughts each paper contains, but in the process
I will also exercise an author's right to quibble about statements that seem misleading
or unfortunate in view of what I wrote.1
In "Santayana after September 11, 2001" Seaton complains that my book
"neglects" the Santayana that was a "cultural critic, [a] shrewd commentator on
politics and society." Though this is true in some degree, I should point out that
my preface describes the book's contents as a testament to "the part of Santayana that
meant the most to me" (p. xii). I also believe that the part of Santayana that issued
into his cultural and political writings was not the part of himself that meant the most
to him. This does not diminish the value of studying that other part as carefully and
precisely as Seaton has. But I also think that Seaton's statements may need to be
modified in a few places.
First of all, I must remark that when I spoke of Santayana's imperfect
appreciation of romanticism I did not ascribe it to any "willed detachment from
personal ties." On the contrary I have always rebelled against the common opinion
that Santayana's work is vitiated by his quasi-monastic isolation from mass
movements or the daily passions of other people.
When I wrote that the Romantics, unlike him in this regard, "saw the world in
terms of moral and interpersonal problems," I was not questioning the brilliance and
the profundity in many of Santayana's reflections about humankind's moral and
interpersonal problems. Throughout the book I cite a large sample of those
reflections. In the place that Seaton refers to, I argue that Santayana's outlook differs
from the Romantics because he constantly demands a clarity of thought and even
systemization of belief which they found less relevant to their lives than the need to
respond to whatever confronted them in nature or society by means of deep, and
sometimes unfathomable, feelings they experienced at that particular moment.
My commentary occurred in a chapter about Santayana's literary criticism. In
The Last Puritan Santayana exceeds the boundaries of his literary criticism by
creatively portraying and evaluating the emotional problems of people who were
different from himself. In doing so, he reveals how great a talent he had for what
Keats called "negative capability." While he wrote about the world as he knew it, the
joys and agonies of his characters were not identical with his own.
This phenomenon is characteristic of Santayana's writings as a whole, and it is
especially pertinent to the cultural and political issues that Seaton calls attention to.
If some imaginary critic so desired, he or she might easily score points against
Santayana by putting side by side the different judgments he utters from book to book
1 This paper was presented to the Santayana Society at its annual meeting in Atlanta on December
29,2001, in response to the two previous papers. It was written by Irving Singer and read by Glenn
Tiller. The paper is under copyright.