Transcendence and the Historical Imagination in Santayana and James

Santayana developed a post-Hegelian view of the history of philosophy, one that allows for different “moments”—a technical term in Hegel’s philosophy of history—to become synthesized into a single philosophical perspective. Unlike Hegel, who thought that there existed a single historical synthesis for each philosophical era, however, Santayana argues that his synthesis expresses his own vital philosophy, and that it was not the only possible synthesis for any historical period. Santayana’s Spanish background remains an important determining factor of his vital philosophy. And arguably shares some interesting commonalities with how linguists develop grammatical theories based on a “tacit knowledge a priori.” On this basis, he develops a radically opposed view of transcendence to that of James, who consistently expresses a total disregard for intellectual history. This is most clearly to be seen in his radical development of America’s popular philosophy, which allows for him to stress the volitional component of reflex action and to thereby minimize the role of theory.