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WorkGeorge Santayana

Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion

Six essays on the ideas in fashion around 1913, ending with Santayana's diagnosis of America's genteel tradition.

by George Santayana223 passages held

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(aged 50)
Original language
English

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Overview

At the University of California in 1911, on the journey that followed his last Harvard lecture, Santayana told the Philosophical Union that American thought led a double life. The American intellect, he argued, still lived in a genteel tradition inherited from Europe, a mixture of Calvinist conscience and transcendentalist idealism, while the American will had gone off to build a new world without it; in his image, the will occupied the skyscraper and the intellect the colonial mansion. That address, printed in the University of California Chronicle the same year, became the closing essay of this book, and it is probably the best known of all Santayana's essays. Published in 1913, it was the first book he brought out after leaving America for good in January 1912. The other essays take up the intellectual temper of the age, the modernism by which Catholic scholars were trying to reconcile the Church with historical criticism, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, the ethics of Bertrand Russell, and Shelley as a poet of revolution. Russell, following the Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore, then held that goodness is an objective property, as real as any fact; in the chapter on him Santayana answered that nothing is good except in relation to some creature that wants it, a case he had first made in reviews of Russell's Philosophical Essays in 1911. In the following years Russell himself began to move toward a similar view.

Key concepts

What is ‘the genteel tradition’?

The inherited mentality in which, Santayana argued in 1911, the American intellect still lived: Calvinist conscience and transcendentalist idealism brought from Europe, while the American will had gone off to build without them. America, he said, was a young country with an old mentality, a wise child whose wisdom was a little thin and verbal. His image: the will in the skyscraper, the intellect in the colonial mansion.

What does Santayana mean by ‘hypostatic ethics’?

Treating the good as a thing existing in its own right, independent of any creature that wants it, which he found in Russell’s ethics. Santayana answers that nothing is good except in relation to some living nature. Even making the good a power would win it only a mythical independence: criticism shows that what has been projected into the empyrean is natural laws, zoological species and human ideals.

What is Catholic ‘modernism’, as Santayana describes it?

The infiltration, into minds that begin Catholic and wish to remain so, of two modern influences: rationalistic study of the Bible and church history, and idealist or mystical philosophy. Santayana credits the modernists’ honesty. But the modernist, he says, keeps the whole Catholic system while believing no part of it as it demands to be believed, and so ceases to be a Christian to become a connoisseur of Christianity.

What is Bergson’s ‘creative evolution’, and what does Santayana ask of it?

Bergson’s picture of life as a creative effort bringing new forms into being, beyond the reach of mechanism. Santayana presses on the word effort: if it is more than a figure of speech, why did it exist, why did it choose its end, and how did it conceive an end no existing nature demanded? He also finds creative evolution submitting to conditions, a deeper nature of things behind the drama.

What does ‘the poetic value of revolutionary principles’ mean in the Shelley essay?

That Shelley’s politics were impossible, but his faith in them gave his poetry its fire. He believed that what his imagination pictured was a true symbol of what human experience should and might become, and so poems like the Skylark carry the strength of a heroic conscience. Without that faith, Santayana says, his poetry would have been mere millinery and his politics mere business.

Themes of the book

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

The Genteel Tradition: Mansion and Skyscraper

Why did American thought seem to belong to a different country from American life? Because, Santayana told a Californian audience, the intellect still lived in an inherited tradition while the will had gone off without it.

The genteel tradition was a mixture of Calvinist conscience and transcendentalist idealism, carried over from Europe and kept up in colleges and pulpits. Meanwhile the American will built railways, fortunes and cities with no use for it. In Santayana’s image, the will occupied the skyscraper and the intellect the colonial mansion. The address closing the book is probably the best known of all his essays, and its diagnosis is double: a tradition too thin to guide the country, and an energy with no philosophy of its own.

  • calvinism
  • idealism
  • tradition
  • pragmatism
  • moral psychology
  • religion
  • experience
  • nature

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Bergson and the Cult of Life Itself

Is life a creative force that science cannot grasp, or a process in nature like any other? Santayana weighs Bergson’s vitalism, then the most fashionable philosophy in Europe, and finds it wanting.

Bergson set intuition against intellect and a creative vital impulse against the mechanism of the sciences. Santayana grants the charm and the psychological acuteness, but reads the doctrine as a new mysticism: a preference for flux, feeling and becoming, raised into a metaphysics and turned against the understanding. For a naturalist the move is backward. Life is a remarkable arrangement of matter, and its value lies in what it achieves and enjoys, not in a cosmic impulse that achieves nothing in particular.

  • vitalism
  • bergsonism
  • philosophy of science
  • philosophy of mind
  • consciousness
  • metaphysics
  • mysticism
  • naturalism

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Russell and Whether Goodness Is a Fact

Is goodness a property things have in themselves, as real as any fact, or only good for some creature that wants it? Against Russell, Santayana argues for the second.

Russell, following G. E. Moore, then held that goodness is an objective property, open to intuition in the way a colour is. Santayana, who shared Russell’s realism about the physical world, refused to extend it to value: nothing is good except in relation to some creature that wants it. The relativity he defended is not arbitrariness, since a creature’s nature fixes what is good for it, and it spares ethics the fanaticism of an absolute good. In the following years Russell himself began to move toward a similar view.

  • metaethics
  • ethics
  • moral psychology
  • realism
  • truth
  • naturalism
  • epistemology

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Modernism and an Age Between Faiths

Can a church reinterpret its creed in the light of historical criticism and still be the church it was? Santayana, himself no believer, doubts the Catholic modernists can have it both ways.

The modernists wanted to keep the Church and accept what history had revealed about its origins, reading dogmas as symbols of an evolving religious experience. Santayana, who read religion as poetry himself, might have been expected to welcome them. He did not: a church that admits its doctrines are symbols has given up the authority that made it a church, and the modernist ends by being neither a believer nor a free mind. The essay sits beside his broader sketch of an age unsettled in its beliefs and unsure of its standards.

  • modernism
  • christianity
  • religion
  • modernity
  • tradition
  • reason

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Shelley, or the Poetry of Revolution

What is a revolutionary poet good for, if his politics are impossible? Santayana finds in Shelley an imagination that saw the good clearly and the world hardly at all.

Shelley wanted liberty, love and justice with a purity that no actual society could satisfy, and his verse gives those longings a radiance few poets match. Santayana admires him without reservation as a poet of the ideal and without illusion as a guide to affairs: the revolutionary impulse is noble in what it desires and blind about the conditions of getting it. The poetry, on this reading, is truer than the programme it was written to serve.

  • poetry
  • revolution
  • imagination
  • aesthetics

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
223
distinct concepts
434
by passages held, corpus-wide
#324

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: “epistemology” and “idealism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 16 pairings. 91 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
epistemologyidealism8
consciousnessidealism6
aestheticsidealism4
idealismpragmatism4
epistemologypragmatism3
epistemologyreligion3
pragmatismreligion3
aestheticsmoral psychology2
consciousnessepistemology2
consciousnesspragmatism2
idealismmoral psychology2
aestheticsconsciousness1
epistemologyvitalism1
idealismreligion1
idealismvitalism1
pragmatismvitalism1

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 you are here EN
  6. 1915 Egotism in German Philosophy

    Written in Oxford during the First World War, it turns Santayana's long quarrel with idealism into a charge against a national tradition; the realism behind it gets its full statement in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     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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