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This article explores Santayana's critique of Modern philosophy and its connections with his views of Nietzsche. The aim is to highlight, primarily, the importance of Santayana's critique for contemporary philosophers working in the shadow of Nietzsche. The resounding view of Nietzsche is that he is an anti, and/or postmodern thinker. Santayana's critique interestingly challenges this view.
George Santayana engages Modern philosophy from various critical standpoints and brings his thinking to bear on several schools and figures steeped in its Cartesian beginnings.1 His general critique maintains that Modern thinkers increasingly (regrettably) moved philosophy in the direction of what he terms "psychologism," which is the attempt to conceive mind and its attendant features as though severed from natural life. Santayana applies this interpretation to the tradition of German philosophy following Kant, and criticizes Friedrich Nietzsche, arguably the most enigmatic and contrary of post-Kantian Germans, as a tragi-romantic egotist. In what follows I examine Santayana's critique of Modern philosophy and establish its connections with his views of Nietzsche. I aim to highlight, primarily, the importance of Santayana's critique for contemporary philosophers working in the shadow of Nietzsche.
Santayana's commentaries on Modern philosophy are peppered throughout several works at different junctures of his thinking. The earliest of these commentaries appears in the influential five-volume work, The Lift of Reason. The following passage-long, but well worth considering in full-comes from the second edition of Reason in Common Sense, and finds Santayana engaging the modus operandi of the British empiricists:
The English psychologists who first disintegrated the idea of substance . . . had a more or less malicious purpose behind their psychology. They thought that if they could once show how metaphysical ideas are made they would discredit those ideas and banish them for ever from the world. If they retained confidence in any notion-as Hobbes in body, Locke in matter and in God, Berkeley in spirits, and Kant, the inheritor of this malicious psychology, in the thing-in-itself and in heaven-it was merely by inadvertence or want of courage. The principle of their reasoning, where they chose to apply it, was always this, that ideas whose materials could all be accounted for in consciousness and referred to sense or to the operations of mind were thereby exhausted...