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WorkGeorge Santayana

Egotism in German Philosophy

A war book by an Oxford resident, tracing a line from Kant to Nietzsche's superman and calling the thread egotism.

by George Santayana137 passages held

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First published
(aged 52)
Original language
English

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Overview

When war broke out in 1914, Santayana was in England, and he stayed there, with Oxford as his base, until 1919. The preface to this book admits that it is one of the many the war had produced, while insisting that its judgments had been forming over more than twenty years of teaching German philosophy at Harvard. Its charge is the one in the title. From Kant onward, Santayana argued, German philosophy had made the self the author of its world. Kant's mind supplies the forms that experience must take, and Fichte's ego sets up the world as the field for its own moral striving. A philosophy that treats everything outside the self as its own projection, the book contends, trains a will that acknowledges no reality and no law beyond its own purposes, and Santayana followed that thread through Hegel to Nietzsche's superman and its consequences in practice. Schopenhauer he set apart: Nietzsche inherited his romantic will, but Schopenhauer himself, the book insists, was no egotist. Scribner's published the book in New York in 1915, Dent brought it out in London in 1916, and Dent reissued it in 1939. The charge was in the air on both sides of the Atlantic: in 1915 John Dewey, the leading American pragmatist, published German Philosophy and Politics, which also traced German political habits back to Kant.

Key concepts

Is ‘egotism’ in this book just another word for selfishness?

No; it is a theory of knowledge before it is a vice. Egotism is the inference that, because knowledge and will must be seated in some person, a person can know only his own ideas and live only for his own benefit. Santayana grants the premise and denies the inference. Carried through, he says, egotism becomes individualism and threatens to become selfishness, the step he finds in Max Stirner.

What does ‘transcendentalism’ mean in Santayana’s charge against German philosophy?

The method that treats every object as something the ego posits. For the adept, existence is an inferior category: what the self posits is nothing already existing, only whatever terms express its attitude at the moment. Striving to remember, it posits a past; planning, a future; being eloquent, an audience. Knowledge then discovers nothing, because there is nothing outside the mind for it to find.

What does Santayana mean by the ‘absolute will’?

A will that deems itself the ground of everything, answerable to no reality and no law beyond its own purposes. Santayana calls it, together with the theory of a world merely imagined by the ego, a desperate delusion, and a new religion, heathen beneath its Christian dress. He even grants it genius: learned, industrious, moral men recovering the primitive soul’s belief in will and a blind battle with chance.

What has the Protestant heritage to do with German egotism?

It supplied the premise that every man must settle the highest questions for himself. Santayana credits that precept with Germany’s great zeal for learning, but because the original motive was to save one’s soul, the issue was prejudged and an apologetic manner survived even in science. German philosophers, he concludes, carried Protestantism beyond itself, until the self that judged became the self that made its world.

What is the superman, on Santayana’s reading of Nietzsche?

Not a possibility but a protest. Santayana argues that neither the philosophy Nietzsche inherited nor his wayward imagination could suggest a nobler race of men; the superman expresses how much human life as it is, and his own life especially, repelled him. Like the utopias of satirists, it names a dissatisfaction without a direction: the emancipated individual must master himself, but to what end Nietzsche cannot say.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Self That Authors Its Own World

Is the world found by the mind, or made by it? Santayana holds that German philosophy from Kant onward chose the second answer, and names the choice egotism.

Kant’s mind supplies the forms experience must take; Fichte’s ego sets up the world as the field for its own moral striving. Santayana, who had taught this tradition at Harvard for over twenty years, does not dispute its brilliance but its starting point. A philosophy that treats everything outside the self as the self’s projection has lost the one thing a living creature cannot do without: a world it did not make and must answer to. The realism he opposes to it here receives its full statement in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

  • egotism
  • idealism
  • subjectivism
  • transcendentalism
  • german idealism
  • epistemology
  • truth
  • skepticism
  • naturalism

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From Absolute Will to the Superman

What does a will become when it recognises no reality and no law beyond its own purposes? The book follows the answer from Fichte to Nietzsche, and sets Schopenhauer apart.

Once the world is the self’s projection, the self’s striving becomes the measure of everything, and a will that owns the world has nothing to obey. Nietzsche inherited Schopenhauer’s blind, romantic will, but Schopenhauer, Santayana insists, was no egotist; the superman who wills without apology is Nietzsche’s alone. Santayana’s objection is not squeamishness about power: a morality with no nature to respect has no way of telling a good aim from a merely strong one, and so cannot say what happiness would even be.

  • will
  • absolute will
  • nietzsche
  • romanticism
  • power
  • ethics
  • moral psychology
  • happiness
  • human nature

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When a Philosophy Becomes a Nation’s Creed

Can a theory of knowledge shape how a nation behaves at war? Written in wartime Oxford, the book says it can, and traces the thread into history, the state and religion.

Hegel’s history is the self-unfolding of spirit, and the state its highest achievement; a people that believes it carries that spirit forward can treat its own expansion as progress. Santayana finds the same pattern in religion, where a faith turned wholly inward ends by making the believing self the measure of its God. The preface concedes the book is one of many the war produced, and the charge was in the air: John Dewey published a similar genealogy the same year. What Santayana adds is the claim that the error was philosophical first.

  • nationalism
  • state
  • hegel
  • historicism
  • progress
  • religion
  • christianity
  • faith
  • tradition

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Within this work

passages held
137
distinct concepts
287
by passages held, corpus-wide
#441

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “egotism” and “subjectivism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 86 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
egotismsubjectivism5
ethicsnietzsche5
egotismromanticism4
egotismwill4
hegelsubjectivism4
idealismwill4
romanticismwill4
ethicsromanticism3
idealismromanticism3
ethicshegel2
hegelidealism2
idealismsubjectivism2
nietzscheromanticism2
nietzschewill2
egotismethics1
egotismhegel1
egotismidealism1
egotismnietzsche1
ethicssubjectivism1
ethicswill1
hegelnietzsche1
romanticismsubjectivism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1896 The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory

    The earliest of Santayana's prose books, following a volume of sonnets, and the one he later dismissed most bluntly; the psychological method it relies on is one his later philosophy moved away from.

     EN
  2. 1900 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

    Essays that carry the approach of The Sense of Beauty over from art to religion, and first set out the reading of religion as imaginative truth that The Life of Reason would develop at length.

     EN
  3. 1905 The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress

    His chief work from the Harvard years and the fullest statement of his moral philosophy; the Realms of Being, published two decades later, supply the account of knowledge and existence that lies beneath it.

     EN
  4. 1910 Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe

    Lecture-hall criticism from his last Harvard years, testing on three poets the claim of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion that poetry at its height is philosophy made vivid.

     EN
  5. 1913 Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion

    A companion to Character and Opinion in the United States, which returns to the American subject of its closing essay; the rest of the book weighs the philosophies then in fashion, from Bergson to Russell.

     EN
  6. 1915 Egotism in German Philosophy you are here EN
  7. 1920 Character and Opinion in the United States

    The American sequel to "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" in Winds of Doctrine, and the fullest record Santayana left of his Harvard teachers before his memoirs.

     EN
  8. 1922 Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies

    The short pieces of the English years, standing between the wartime Egotism in German Philosophy and the system that begins the next year with Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
  9. 1923 Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy

    Announced by its subtitle as the doorway to the late system, it sets out the two terms that the four Realms of Being then build on: essence and animal faith.

     EN
  10. 1923 The Unknowable

    One short lecture, given in the year Scepticism and Animal Faith appeared, that carries the book's theory of knowledge into an argument with Herbert Spencer.

     EN
  11. 1925 Dialogues in Limbo

    His philosophy in dialogue form, published in the years between the introduction to his late system and its first volume.

     EN
  12. 1927 Platonism and the Spiritual Life

    Published seven months before the system's first volume, a first sketch of the spiritual life that The Realm of Spirit would treat at length in 1940.

     EN
  13. 1927 The Realm of Essence

    Here the late system proper begins: the first of the four Realms of Being, giving full treatment to the vocabulary introduced in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
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