George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States

The re-publishing of George Santayana's two most significant works on America and American culture in Rethinking the Western Tradition series makes a great deal of sense. Santayana (1863–1952), philosopher, best-selling author, poet, man of letters, and humanist, in his numerous books provided us not only with a system of philosophy but also with a profound criticism of Western culture. As a Spanish-American thinker, he skillfully applied his cultural in-betweenness, not to mention his genial insights, to make his readers reconsider the tradition of the Western World and the contemporary challenges that had to be faced. He devoted much attention to American culture and, in this regard, he shaped his thought predominantly in relation to transcendentalism (It should be added, however, that Santayana also sought a redefinition of his native Spanish culture—so that his intellectual links with Generation 1898, Spain's momentous philosophical and literary movement, have frequently been studied by Spanish scholars. Last but not least, he focused on other cultural issues in terms of their ethnic character, cultural background, and national context; thus, he wrote, for example, about egotism in German philosophy The present volume presents an important part of Santayana's cultural criticism of America, that is " The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy " (1911) and Character and Opinion in the United States along with commenting essays by some excellent scholars. Although this is not all that Santayana had to say about America— his lengthy novel The Last Puritan (1935) should be remembered here in the first instance—, we can say that the present volume is rich enough to elaborately show Santayana's approach to America and American culture in a broad and penetrating way. For example, we can read in these two works, Santayana's attempt to re-interpret American culture by famously saying that " The American Will inhabits the skyscraper ; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. (…) The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition (p. 4). " His idea of " the Genteel Tradition, " as opposed to the " crude but vital America, " can be helpful in understanding the American mind in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. What he witnessed upon his arrival in New England as a child in 1872, was the passage from the old genteel Boston to the new industrial one along with the growing split in values, aims, and experiences, …