Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 09 Fall 1991

              Santayana and Goethe
"William James est un reformateur, un pasteur de l'energie humaine;
Santayana est un poete et un sage, double d'un physicien cruel." Thus Jacques
Duron, in the course of an extended comparison between the two
philosophers.1 The comment situates William James in a Faustian line of
descent, and accounts for Santayana's being so unresponsive not only to James,
but also to the restless strivings of Faust, in his essay on Goethe's play in the
early Three Philosophical Poets. Santayana's view of, Goethe himself, in a section
of the polemical Egotism in German Philosophy, written shortly after the
beginning of the First World War, was also less than flattering: "(Goethe's) love-
affairs were means to the fuller realisation of himself ... . Every pathetic
sweetheart in turn was a sort of Belgium to him; he violated her neutrality with
a sigh.*2 It is one of these Santayana pieces where the iron claw thrusts most
vigorously from behind the velvet glove. Yet was his view of Goethe, let alone
his account of Faust in Three Philosophical Poets, a fair one? Fair not just to Faust
or to Goethe, but to that element of Santayana's own self which had a kinship
with Goethe, if not with Faust.
"Un poete et un sage, double d'un physicien cruel" - "A poet and a sage,
twinned with a cruel physicist"; perhaps "one who stresses the natural or
material context of all things" would be an acceptable gloss of Duron's
"physicist." It is a description that in all crucial respects fits Goethe as well as
Santayana. It may set us thinking of the irony that governs the structure of
Faust, establishing a distance between Goethe and his creation. The play is
framed in a divine perspective, tricked out with some of the panoply of a
Baroque 'Auto Sacramental', and Faust's career of glorious yet erroneous
striving is framed by the structural equivalent of an all-encompassing
speculative gaze. Goethe's is a God's-eye view. He is the puppet-master
supreme. It would, however, be barely convincing to maintain that any
orthodox religious viewpoint was being upheld. Goethe is not the interpreter of
divine transcendence, but rather an ironic naturalist with a penumbra of
religiosity, and an Olympian human being. Not unlike Santayana, in fact.
Goethe told Eckerman, concerning the religious apotheosis of Faust at the end
of Part Two, that "the conclusion, where the redeemed soul is carried up, was
difficult to manage ... . Amid such supersensual matters about which we
scarcely have an intimation, I might easily have lost myself in the vague - if I
had not, by means of sharply-drawn figures and images from the Christian
1 La Pensie de George Santayana: Santayana en Amerique (Paris, 1950) 75. The European sequel of
this masterly work was, sad to say, never written.
2 The German Mind: A Philosophical Analysis (Originally published under the title, Egotism in German
Philosophy) (New York, 1968) 49-50.