"Rosa, oriéntame. No veo claro lo que ocurre." (Rosa, guide me. I don't see clearly what's happening.)
Those were the last words of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), according to Javier Zamora Bonilla in his biography, Ortega y Gasset (2002). The words are a poignant symbol for Ortega's own ambiguous intellectual legacy.
Ortega's disciple Julián Marías in "La metafísica de Ortega", Revista de Estudios Orteguianos 12-13/2006 cites Ortega along with Fichte, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey and Bergson saying of them, "Todos estos filósofos ha tenido más o menos conciencia de la necesidad de encontrar una vía de acceso a esa realidad evanescente, figitiva, siempre haciéndose, que se llama la vida o la hisotoria." (All these philosophers were more or less conscious of the necessity to find a way of access to this evanescent reality, fugitive, always making itself, that is called life or history.)
Aside from whether that's a good description of the work of all those thinkers, the element of evanescence is an important feature of Ortega's thought. He understood himself as a man of the middle. In philosophy, he tried to development an alternative philosophy to realism and idealism without rejecting reason itself. In politics, at the time he was most directly involved at the beginning of the 2nd Republic which was established in 1931, he was elected to the national Cortes Constituyentes (which essentially functioned as the parliament at the time) as the head of the ASP (Agrupación al Servicio de la República), which he hoped to develop as the core of a national party embracing all classes, standing between the proverbial two extremes. Fleeing Spain for France soon after the start of the civil war in 1936, he was regarded by the Republic as an opponent. Remaining in exile the rest of his life, he was allowed to visit Spain but was regarded with deep suspicion by the Franco regime, reviled by the reactionary Catholic press and seen by British intelligence as a possible key leader in a transition from the Franco dictatorship to a new republic. He was kicked out of his professorship for political reasons by the military dictatorship of 1923-1931, by the 2nd Republic and by the Franco dictatorship.
Ortega was born into a prominent press family and was active in the printed press media business for much of his life, beginning his first newspaper at age 19. He is generally regarded as one of the best writers in Castillian Spanish, a gift which may have contributed to the ambiguity of his philosophical legacy. He always believed that books should be readable, and he liked the essay format suited to publishing in newspapers and magazines. He would no doubt have been a talented blogger. So he was reluctant to develop a systematic presentation of his outlook in a more traditional philosophical format. Some of the most important statements of his philosophy is a more systematic form were from lecture series that were only published after his death, including ¿Qué es filosofía? (What Is Philosophy?) (1929), Vida como ejecución (El ser ejecutiveo) (1929-30), Sobre la realidad radical (1930) and ¿Qué es la vida? (1930-31). All of these were done about the same time as the publication of what remains his most famous and popular work, La rebelión de las masas (Revolt of the Masses), published serially in the newspaper El Sol in 1929 and 1930, then as a book in 1930.
(I posted earlier on an essay by Raymond Aron on La rebelión de las masas and noted that Aron said the book was actually written in 1924-6. But Zamora's account gives no reason to think he wrote it much before it was actually published. Aron may have had in mind earlier published work of Ortega's which Ortega himself expressly considered closely related to the book, including España invertebrada. Bosquejo de algunos pensamientos histricos, though that began running in El Sol in 1920 and was published as a book in 1922.)
Zamora is a political scientist and the director of the Centro de Estudios Orteguianos of the Fundación José Ortega y Gasset. His biography does a good job of situating Ortega's developing thought in the context of the politics of Spain. Zamora focuses on Ortega's public career and on explaining his philosophy. Those were the aspects in which I was most interested and the absence of gossip in this biography is refreshing. Still, I was surprised at how very little Zamora tells about Ortega's life with his wife and children.
Ortega's theory is called raciovitalism, although his term "razón vital" (vital reason) is probably preferable. In his view, life is its own basis and reasoning, that is, thinking systematically about one's life and experiences, is part of the experience of life. One of his early and literarily pleasing formulations of this approach was, "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo." (I am and my circumstances, and if I don't redeem them I won't redeem myself.) This was his way of surpassing Cartesian rationalism (I think, therefore I am) and irrationalism.
But it's scarcely a fully satisfying solution. For instance, he argued as a metaphysical principle that each person's point of view was necessarily different because they inevitably have a perspective that brings out a different aspect of reality ("perspectivism"). He looked to Albert Einstein's theories of relativity to lend support to that view, which Ortega largely took from phenomenology. But this creates the problem of acknowledging the thing-in-itself of the Object, a problem that one might have thought such a close student of Kant as Ortega was might have taken more pains to avoid. And despite the seemingly dynamic relationship in that early formulation just quoted between the individual (or the individual ego) and the physical and social circumstances in which he lives, Ortega defended a fairly extreme form of individualism, rooted in the classical liberalism whose tradition he embraced.
Ortega formulated his approach to history as "razón historica" (historical reason), which he saw as distinct from but intimately connected to razón vital. Here his philosophy crosses into the realms of politics and sociology, as it does in La rebelión de las masas. The basic issue that Ortega formulates in that work is the one presented by social and economic developments in the early 20th century, in which large numbers of people have access to the benefits of technology and demand full democratic participation in political life. But many people aren't prepared to understand either the science behind the technology or the responsibilities of a fully-participating citizens. So we get the phenonenon of the "mass man" (hombre-masa), who is basically the mediocre person as distinct from the person of excellence.
Here's where that evanescence gets to be an obvious problem. As Zamora explains well, Ortega explicitly denied that he was referring to the working class or poor people in general in referring to hombre-masa. He defended his concept by arguing explicitly that he understood the concept in terms not of class or wealth but of personal excellence. He thought hombre-masa could be found in every class, especially in the class of small capitalists, which he could identify at the time in Europe clearly as the petit bourgeois (Kleinbürgerliche in German) and have people know what he meant. (In American English today, nobody knows what petit bourgeois means and its basically never used; "middle class" would be a sensible translation if 90%-plus of the American population didn't self-identify as "middle class".)
However, he acknowledged that the more affluent had better access to the means to acquire that excellence. Yet he stubbornly refused to look at class as an essential part of understanding history. So he wound up with vague formulations that, as Raymond Aron noted, was taken by some of his initial German readers to suggest that a Leader like Hitler represented the man of excellence, while others took it to mean that rightwing demagogues like Hitler were exploiting the worst tendencies of hombre-masa.
The latter is clearly closer to Ortega's intentions. He rejected Mussolini's Fascist form of government and that of National Socialism in Germany; Zamora's account doesn't indicate that Ortega ever expressed even the most abstract sympathy for Hitler's goals or methods. Ortega had a somewhat Romantic notion of national character, national destiny, etc. And though he apparently wasn't much bothered by Western colonialism or all the horrors it entailed, he did not conceive of hombre-masa or the people of excellence in racial terms, as the Nazis did. Even in La rebelión de las masas he was stressing the common culture of European nations and the need for European political unity, ideas not remotely on the program of Hitler and his followers. At the philosophical level, Ortega's insistence of the central importance of Reason was quite different from the approach of the Nazis even at the most "highbrow" level, where race was the central organizing concept. And, as someone whose thinking was deeply rooted in classical, 19th century and contemporary German philosophy, the anti-intellectualism of Nazism must have been particularly unattractive.
Continued tomorrow in Part 2.
Tags: ortega, ortega y gasset, spanish civil war
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