Javier Zamora Bonilla's "Ortega y Gasset" (2 of 2)

José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)

This is a discussion of Javier Zamora Bonilla's biography Ortega y Gasset (2002) continued from Part 1.

The Franco dictatorship is another matter. And Ortega's record on that matter contributes heavily to the ambiguity of his legacy. Ortega's political and philosophical orientation throughout his adult life was that of classical liberalism, which stood for "free markets and free men." (And, yes, until well into the 20th century that meant free men.) Ortega had living experience of four major periods in Spanish political life: the Restoration (1875-1923), the Primo de Rivera dictatorship of 1923-1931, though Rivera didn't head it at the end; the Second Republic (1931-1939); and, the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975).

In the Restoration, Spain was a monarchy with the King having strong Executive power and a functioning Parliament, but a highly corrupt and unresponsive political system. Ortega in that period favored retaining the monarchy but was attracted by the parties of the left: republicans, democrats and social-democrats (PSOE). He favored a form of socialism which he saw as the necessary social component of democratic liberalism. Even though he was influenced by Ferdinand Lasalle's thought as well as by English Fabian Socialism, he always rejected the dominant Marxism of the Social Democratic Parties in Europe (and later of the Communists, though of a different kind) and the idea that the working class or any other class needed a party distinctly representing their interests.

His position under the 1923-31 military dictatorship was more complicated. Initially, the Spanish left viewed Rivera's seizure of power with some optimism, as did Ortega. The PSOE and the socialist-allied UGT labor union maintained partially-friendly relations with the Rivera government. Ortega initially hoped the military regime would be a transitional one, which would relatively quickly step down in favor of a revitalized electoral system that would allow for free, competitive elections of more genuinely representative politics than that of the "old politics" of the Restoration. He saw fairly soon that wasn't happening, and he maintained a critical posture in public (to the extent censorship would allow) to the military regime. Raymond Aron's general characterization of Ortega's liberalism - that "Ortega is an anti-revolutionary" who "detested the revolutionary attitude" - is not fully descriptive of his position, either during the Restoration or during the military dictatorship.

When the Republic took power in 1931, Ortega was an active supporter. In this period his liberalism lead him to insist on a secular state - while opposing dogmatic anti-clericalism, which played an important role in Spanish politics - and opposing a monarchy. King Alfonso XIII had voluntarily left the country in April 1913, when elections showed a clear victory for the pro-Republic parties, explaining in seemingly self-reflective terms that "espero que no habré de volver, pues ello sólo significaría que el pueblo español no es próspero ni feliz" (I hope I don't have to return, because that would mean that the Spanish people are neither prosperous nor happy).

Ortega served in the Cortes Constituyentes for several months in 1931, but stepped down of his own choice. As Zamora explains, Ortega decided that the day-to-day business of politics was not suited to him. But Ortega gave a fairly haughty twist on it, talking grandly about how the role of the intellectual is to be analytical and reflective rather than making the quick decisions often called for in political life. A realization of his own gifts and limits, or an unwillingness to make up his mind and take responsibility for his decisions on public policy? It's hard to say which was more persuasive for him, but it seems clear even from Zamora's sympathetic account that that the latter consideration weighed heavily. "La política es analfebetismo" (Politics is illiteracy)m Ortega said in justifying his decision to quit the Cortes.

Civil wars are complicated and very messy. The Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 was no exception. Zamora's account of the politics of the Republic is unfortunately flawed by his treatment of the position of the PSOE, a Social Democratic party and part of the Socialist (Second) International, as essentially identical to that of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), a Comintern-line party. Suffice it here to say that establishing a democratic government and political culture turned out to have a higher ratio of vital to razón than Ortega preferred. He came to view the Popular Front government under Manuel Azaña of the Left Republican Party, which came to power in the elections of February 1936, as an illegitimate one. The military rebellion lead by General Francisco Franco began in July 1936. Gabriele Ranzato in The Spanish Civil War (1999 American edition) explains:

Some of the most widely respected figures of Spanish culture, such as José Ortega y Gasset, Pérez de Ayala and Pio Baroja, repelled by the violence in the Republican area, adhered to the rebel cause with some reservations but then were unable to live in the clerico-fascist environment of the Nationalist zone, and moved abroad.

As far as Ortega's position goes, that's an exceptionally generous account. Even though Zamora's account is sympathetic to Ortega in general and he goes to some lengths to depict Ortega's thinking in 1936, he doesn't hide the fact that Ortega sympathized with the Franco rebellion. Civil wars are not only messy, they are also civil wars. Ortega fled Spain to France with his family in September 1936 with the assistance of the pro-Republican militia of which his brother Eduardo was a member. Both his sons fought voluntarily for the Rebel cause.

But he was never considered a desirable figure by the Franco regime or its conservative and reactionary supporters in the Catholic Church hierarchy. Some Franco supporters took some of his ideas about the identity and destiny of the Spanish nation to justify the Rebel cause. Ortega's own thinking had brought him to a position of opposing the Republic and supporting Franco. That was one feature of his classical liberalism that should not be whitewashed out of his history and legacy. As early as 1915, the same year he began calling his approach a system of to razón vital, Zamora notes that in an essay called "¡Libertad, divino tesoro!", Ortega explicitly prioritized liberalism over democracy.

Ortega was not a fascist and never identified directly with Spanish political tendencies that understood themselves as fascist. It's worth noting that the German writer and committed democrat Thomas Mann praised La rebelión de las masas just after it was published and supported Ortega in his numerous German appearances after the Second World War. Though I certainly see Ortega's decision to support Franco over the democratic government of the Second Republic as both wrong as a moral and political matter, and also as a reflection of flaws in his philosophy, his liberalism viewed a representative democratic republic as the most desirable form of government. It's just that his abstract brand of liberalism, especially his refusal to recognize the political significance of social class, put him in the reactionary camp in 1936. Which is where those who revere an abstract or superficial Centrism as a supreme political value sometimes find themselves winding up.

Zamora puts it this way:

No es de extrañar que muchos fascistas españoles tuvieran algunas ideas orteguianas como fuente de inspiración. El demérito de Ortega no está en que éstos utilizaran sus ideas, lo que no podía evitar, sine en que él no las hubiese explicado suficientamente.

[It's not surprising that many Spanish fascists had some Ortegian ideas as a source of inspiration. The demerit of Ortega is not in that those people utilized his ideas, which he could not have prevented, but rather in that he did not make them sufficiently explicit.]

Or, as Leon Uris once said of Frederick Nietzsche's work, the Nazis quoted him out of context to make it appear he would have supported their ideas. But he often wrote in ways that were awfully easy to take out of context.

Ortega contributed a great deal toward encouraging education in general in Spain and the study of science, especially. He encouraged much broader philosophical thinking in both Spain and Argentina, where he was also widely known and respected for most of his life. More particularly, he encouraged the study of German philosophy, which he considered the most advanced philosophical thinking in Europe and essential for developing a greater appreciation of science.

His philosophy suffers from its chronic evanescence and its desire to paper over essential differences rather than understand them. This is why he is one of the most important exponents of classical liberalism from the last century but also a cautionary tale about the bad places to which a too-abstract liberalism can lead. His razón historica gives him a sense of history as a process that behaves according to some kind of laws provides him material for provocative observations and relevant questions, even though the limits of his liberalism also puts limits on the amount of realism he can apply to his accounts of history.

Ortega's elegant writing style has allowed his ideas to be broadly heard and discussed, and not only in Spanish. And his long-time advocacy of the political unity of Europe has come a long way toward becoming a reality.

Articles by Javier Zamora Bonilla:

Vueltas y revueltas del problema catalán El Imparcial 29.06.2010 Talks about Ortega and other intellectuals sympathizing with the Franco rebellion.

Por un nuevo impulso progresista del proyecto europeo El Imparcial 15.08.2010 Discusses current issues of European unity.

Cesar Güemes, (interview with Javier Zamora Bonilla) Como filósofo, José Ortega y Gasset "no ha entrado del todo a la academia" La Journada 20.04.2003

Tags: ortega, ortega y gasset, spanish civil war