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

Javier Zamora Bonilla's "Ortega y Gasset" (1 of 2)

"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

Frankfurt School (related): Raymond Aron on Ortega y Gasset's "Revolt of the Masses" (2 of 2)

José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)

(Continued from Part 1 yesterday) Aron argues that the question of Europe, the unity of Europe, is the "central question which this book poses to us." Revolt of the Masses does stress the identity of Europe, which in the 1920s was far, far away from the European Union of today. For Ortega, this was connected with the need for Spain to raise itself to the level of educational and economic development of the rest of western Europe. In particular, Ortega believed that raising the level of Spanish education was vital, including promotion of the sciences.

Spain at this time still had a very large illiteracy rate, which is likely one of the factors that weighed heavily on Ortega's conception of the elite and the masses which he discusses in Revolt of the Masses. I say discusses rather than develops, because in my reading it remains a murky concept in this book. Aron himself recalls that the book had a very mixed reception on publication, which he first read around 1931 in its German translation. He recalls that it was unclear in the reception of the book among German intellectuals whether Hitler should be regarded as belonging to Ortega’s elite, or whether he should be considered a representative of "mass man" defined by such qualities as "primitive, violent, unprepared for a genuine culture". The fact that even today the correct interpretation would be difficult based on the text of the book itself is a measure of how unclear the concept was.

Ortega himself was never an admirer or sympathizer of Hitler. In the mid-20s, he was wrestling politically with the Spanish dictatorship of Primo de Rivero, which had taken power in 1923 in the wake of various labor and regionalist upheavals, including outbreaks of popular fury against the Catholic Church and the operation of what we today would call rightwing and leftwing death squads. Ortega was personally opposed to the Rivero dictatorship, which lasted until 1930. And Aron observes that it was clear in the book that "Ortega accepts the democratic revolution; that is, the progressive realization of the ideal of the rights of man as the principle of equality."

Still, Revolt of the Masses conveys a classical liberal distrust of popular government and popular culture. He looked to an elite to provide leadership, but Revolt doesn't make it clear what he thinks the appropriate role for this elite to play. Aron characterizes Ortega's basic concept in the book this way:

Le positif de cette conjuncture, c’est que la vie de l’homme moyen est maintenant constituée par l'ensemble des possibilités vitals qui, autrefois, caractérisait seulement les minorités dominantes. Le negative, c'est que l'homme-masse, l'homme sans qualification impose sa valonté, ses goûts, sa médiocrité.

[The positive side of this circumstance is that the life of the average man is now constituted by the conjunction of vital possibilities that in another time characterized only the dominant minorities. The negative is that the "mass man", the man without qualifications, imposes his will, his desires, his mediocrity.]

But, true to his classical liberalism, he doesn't place this in the class terms that define the political and social as well as economic elite. Which means that underlying his often intriguing observations in the book on elites and masses, there is the implicit assumption that the factual social elite is an elite by reason of their virtues.

At the same time, Ortega recognizes that what Europe was experiencing in the 1920s was a failure of the elites in many ways. And he – in common with Marcuse'’s later work cited by Aron – recognized one of the symptoms of the negative side of "mass man" in the tendency to reduce science to the applications of technology, with a corresponding extreme specialization in education. As Aron puts it, Ortega’s "rebellion of the masses can also be understood as the desertion of the elite." And, "The masses just won’t obey an elite in which they do not believe. And neither will the elites believe in themselves when they cease to have a project [mission]. A nation needs a future just as much as a past."

Much of the unclear and unsatisfying nature of Ortega's Revolt of the Masses comes from his shrinking from the risks of revolutionary change, even thought he economic, political and cultural changes he wanted to see in Spain during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship implied revolutionary change in some form or another. Aron writes that Ortega's antifascism is not in doubt. But a change in the one fascist regime in power in 1924-6, or in 1930 when the book was published – Mussolini's regime in Italy – would have meant a revolutionary change in regime, as well, and likely not an entirely peaceful one.

But, for all his humane concepts and his support of parliamentary democracy and opposition to the Rivero dictatorship, as Aron puts it with reference to Revolt of the Masses, "Ortega is an anti-revolutionary" who "detested the revolutionary attitude." And, “Ortega, who detests revolutionaries, remains true to liberalism."

And this creates the dilemma that remains unresolved in Revolt of the Masses. Liberalism in its classical form demands rule by the people in the form of representative government. The aspect of liberalism that is committed to the dominance of capitalists in society is in tension with democracy. And the fascist movements, including National Socialism in Germany, largely rejected classical liberalism except for the dominance of capitalists part. How does one stay true to the humane and democratic values of liberalism, which for Ortega was an integral part of European culture, in the face of dictatorships while at the same time detesting "the revolutionary attitude"? Could the Primo de Rivero dictatorship have been replaced by the Second Republic in 1931 without some Spaniards taking a "revolutionary attitude", though that obviously didn't have to mean imitating the pre-1923 anarchists in Barcelona assassinating hated individuals? Could the peaceful and legal transition from the Franco dictatorship to democracy under a constitutional monarchy have taken place in 1975 without some kind of "revolutionary attitude" among the people and their potential leaders?

Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, ortega, ortega y gasset, raymond aron

Frankfurt School (related): Raymond Aron on Ortega y Gasset's "Revolt of the Masses" (1 of 2)

Raymond Aron (1905-1983)

French political scientist Raymond Aron was primarily famous as a Cold Warrior and a liberal in the European tradition (which is quite different than what we mean by "liberal" in American politics). In his post-Second World War career, he can hardly be said to be a practitioner of Critical Theory, the outlook known as that of the Frankfurt School.

However, in the 1930s, the Frankfurt School’s flagship journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung featured Aron’s writing on numerous occasions, e.g., "La sociologie de Pareto" ZfS 1937, pp. 489ff. This essay/post is not about Aron’s biography. But the evolution of his thought is part of the story of the Frankfurt School. His was particularly known in the Cold War as an advocate of the Realist school of foreign policy thought. Pierre Hassner wrote in 2007 that Aron "single-handedly introduced this academic discipline in France" and that he had written "still the only real French contribution to the field", Peace and War (1966). Hassner calls it "probably the most exhaustive treatise on war and on international relations in general which appeared in the 20th century." (Raymond Aron: Too Realistic to Be a Realist? Constellations 14: 4; 2007)

Aron advocated what we might call a robust version of containment of the Soviet Union and defended American foreign policy against French critics on the left. But he sympathized with anti-colonial nationalism and criticized France for its Algerian War.

My interest here is an essay Aron did in about the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, which first appeared as "Ortego y Gasset et la revolte des masses" Commentaire 11:40 (Hiver 1987-88). It was published in Spanish in the Revista de Estudios Oreguianos 12-13/2006 as, "Una lectura crítica de La rebelión de las masas". He first presented it at a conference honoring Ortega in May 1983.

In it, he makes a comparison of Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses (published 1930, though Aron notes it was written in 1924-6) to one of the most famous works associated with the Frankfurt School:

La Revolté des masses appartient au genre que l’on appelle Kulturkritik. Or ce genre n'a pas disparu avec le développement de la sociologie. Le livre de Herbert Marcuse, L’homme unidimensionnel, comporte aussi des jugements de valeur sur les hommes, leur manière de vivre et de penser. Un rapprochement peut illustrer la permanence de certains thèmes de la Kulturkritik. Pour Ortega, les hommes-masses sont comme des enfants gâtés; ils jouissent d'avantages matériels et même moraux jadis resérvé â une étroite minorité, mais ils veulent tout, tout de suite; ce qui est donné à quelquesuns doit 1'etre â tous; les innovations se répandent à travers la masse et éveillent les désirs de tous. Marcuse, lesté de son vocabulaire hégélien et freudien, présente les individus de la société industrielle avancée comme aliénés, victimes des médias, assoiffés de biens, parece que les producteurs suscitent la passion de consommer, faute de laquelle la machine économique cesserait de tourner. Le premier dit que les hommes des sociétés riches sont devenus des enfants gâtés qui veulent obtenir tout sans comprendre les causes de leur opulence, sans se soumettre à des commandements moraux. A cette analyse de moraliste s'oppose 1'analyse freudo-marxiste : c'est le régime qui crée les hommes dont il a besoin.

[Revolt of the Masses belongs to the genre called Kulturkritik. Now, this genre has not disappeared with the development of sociology. The book by Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man {1964}, also makes value judgments about men, their way of living and of thinking. A comparison can illustrate the persistence of certain themes of Kulturkritik. For Ortega, mass men are like poorly raised children; they take pleasure in material advantages and the same morals once reserved to a strict minority, but they want it all, all at once: what is owed to one is owed to everyone; innovations are disseminated among the masses and aware the desires of everyone.

Marcuse, burdened with the Hegelian and Freudian vocabulary, presents the individuals of advanced industrial society as alienated, victims of the media, asphyxiated by goods, because the producers sustain the passion of consumption without which the economic machine would cease to function. The first says that the men of rich societies have converted themselves into spoiled children that want to obtain everything without understanding the causes of their opulence, without submitting themselves to moral mandates. To this moralistic analysis, is opposed the Freudo-Marxist analysis {of Marcuse}: it is the regimen that creates the men it needs.]

I'm not sure Aron's description of either book is especially generous to their respective authors. But it's an interesting comparison. Both Ortega and Marcuse wrestled with the phenomena associated with mass movements and how the available means of communication can be used by unscrupulous leaders to generate mass support for policies and movements that are destructive to the interests of the majority. Both focused great attention on the implications of the fascist political movements of their times. They were contemporaries, though Ortega was 17 years older than Marcuse. Both were adults in the 1920s when Mussolini’s Fascist movement came to power in Italy and when Communism, following the lead of the ruling Communists in the Soviet Union, developed as a distinct political movement from Social Democracy.

Aron is correct that Ortega worked from a liberal philosophical position and Marcuse from a Marxist one. (Ortega was a classical European liberal, not a liberal in the present-day American sense.) But in the context of Spain of Ortega’s early adulthood, which was the period of corrupt semi-democracy knows as the Restoration of 1874-1923, he was less attracted to the two established parties, the Partido Conservador and the Partido Liberal, than to the more militant republicans, democrats and socialists who were pressing for a more genuinely representative government. In his earlier years, Ortega argued in favor of socialism in theory, though he never embraced Marxism as a political or philosophical outlook and rejected the notion of a class party of the working class, which was the idea of the social democratic parties in Europe in his time. Ortega's early concept of socialism was focused on the modernization and Europeanization of Spanish society; he was heavily influenced by the socialist ideas of Ferdinand Lasalle and of English Fabian Socialism.

Both Ortega and Marcuse were heavily influenced by German philosophy, though Ortega was more attracted by the thought of Kant than of Hegel. Both engaged with the philosophies of phenomenology and existentialism and the issues they raised. Both were deeply interested in the implications for philosophy and mass culture of developments in the hard sciences.

And both experienced political exile in their lives starting in the 1930s, though that experience for Ortega came after the first publication of Revolt of the Masses; Ortega did write a long prologue from exile for the 1937 French edition of the book.

(Continued in Part 2 tomorrow)

Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, ortega, ortega y gasset, raymond aron

Shipwrecks

The Shipwreck by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828)

"Life is, in itself and forever, shipwreck. To be shipwrecked is not to drown. The poor human being, feeling himself sinking into the abyss, moves his arms to keep afloat. This movement of the arms, that is his reaction against his own destruction, is culture - a swimming stroke. When culture is no more than this, it fulfills its function and the human being rises above his own abyss." - José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), "In Search of Goethe From Within"

Tags: goya, ortega, ortega y gasset

Is the past in front or behind?

Zoltán Balázs makes an intriguing point at the Telos blog in 1968: The Birth of Secular Eternity 01/28/08. I have the impression that the political tilt of that blog is pretty much neoconservative. But Balázs deals with a theme that fascinates me, the perception of time.

The ancient Greeks had a similar view of the past and present as Balázs describes here:

One of the most idiosyncratic features of human communities is the way they think of time, even though there has been little reflection on that in political theory. To mention just one example that indicates how different the collective experience of time may be, I allude to the South American Aymara people, who associate the past with the spatial front, and the future with the spatial back. That is, past is ahead of us, and future is behind us. In this framework progress in time makes perhaps less sense, since the very concept of progress is, at its root, advance in space, and we can hardly move back to the past. (In science fiction, time travel to the past is a problem just because we presuppose that in the past we would be as free to act as we are in the present, and shall be in the future—that is, we take our present back with us to the past!)

In terms of methaphors of position, there is a definite physical, spatial logic to this. We can see what is in front of us, and we can see the past. We can't see the future, and we can't see what is physically behind us.

Balázs observes, "The dominant Western vision of time is, obviously, the opposite. We look forward and constantly move to the future, whereas the past becomes more and more distant."

Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in his betst-known work, La rebellión de las masas [Revolt of the Masses] (1929-30), also discussed changes in the European perception of time. People of ancient Europe saw their own time as a progressive diminution in the quality of society from an earlier Golden Age. He quotes Horace's Odes describing successive generations becoming progressively more depraved. in the 19th century, Europeans developed a strong view of the times progressively improving. This optimistic future-oriented viewpoint was shattered by the Great War of 1914-18.

Ortega described the postwar attitude as one in which Europeans no longer expect infinite progress. Instead, a more complex and pessimistic attitude prevails, which also provides a sense of liberation from previous certainties. Europeans feel, he wrote, as though they "had escaped, and are going forth anew beneath the stars of the authentic world, a deep, terrible, unpredictable and inexhaustible world where everything, everything is possible: the best and the worst." The feeling of the new era was like the joy and excitement "of kids who have escaped from school".

He identified this feeling as a dissociation from the past, a perspective "that the dead didn't die in a joke, but rather completely; that they can't support us". And therefore we must rely on present resources as never before in solving the problems of the time. And yet pride in their own power sometimes alternates with insecurity about the destiny. Postwar Europeans, he argued, felt the present to be "more than other times and inferior to itself". (Philosophers write that way.)

But Ortega also believed a strong orientation toward the future is necessary. To live is to act, and to thereby orient oneself toward the future. He even believed that the essence of national patriotism was such a future orientation. "When we defend the nation we are defending our tomorrow, not our yesterday."

Balázs argues that the view of progress that became part of the Western view of seeing the future as in front of us was shared widely in political theory. Liberals and conservatives accepted it, and the Communist offshoot of democratic theory as embodied in the Soviet Union accepted it.

He then makes this suggestion:

This is, I think, what the 1968 revolutionaries failed to see at first. Contrary to their presuppositions, the forces of the past did not exist any more. Contrary to their perceptions, the present was not pregnant any more. Hence, and this is my thesis, put inevitably in rough terms, 1968, at least in Europe, essentially changed the conception of time and introduced the present as the ultimate category of political thinking. However, this is not a present related to the past or to the future, that is, a present favored against past or future, yet still understood in their terms. This is an eternal present, characterized by a consciousness cleansed from any reference either to the past or to the future. (my emphasis)

Although 1968 is viewed as a highly eventful year in the US, in Europe it is probably seen as a more decisive period. The May-June uprising in Paris and the "Prague Summer" in Czechoslovakia were the two most outstanding political events there.

Balázs then proceeds to make an argument which I don't understand that somehow the proposed new Constitution for the European Union failed because EU leaders failed to relate it sufficiently to the new, prevailing sense of time:

But politics is made within time, it presupposes time, being a joint business of past, present, and future. In the eternal present, however, time is unreal, and there is no room for politics, for collective action. European governments look more and more like ghosts on the stage of world politics, and whereas they have agreed upon a constitution that proclaims its independence from past and future, they simply lacked the political power to tie it up with the present.

He also makes a point that I think is important, "We, the heirs of 1968, are fully accustomed to the comforts of modern life, and rarely think we enjoy them."

That latter point is one that Herbert Marcuse - an Hegelian philosopher that was published and commented upon in the Telos journal - also stressed. In An Essay on Liberation (1969), he wrote:

This same trend of production and consumption, which makes for the affluence and attraction of advanced capitalism, makes for the perpetuation of the struggle for existence, for the increasing necessity to produce and consume the non-necessary: the growth of the so-called "discretionary income" in the United States indicates the extent to which income earned is spent on other than "basic needs." Former luxuries become basic needs, a normal development which, under corporate capitalism, extends the competitive business of living to newly created needs and satisfactions. The fantastic output of all sorts of things and services defies the imagination, while restricting and distorting it in the commodity form, through which capitalist production enlarges its hold over human existence. And yet, precisely through the spread of this commodity form, the repressive social morality which sustains the system is being weakened. The obvious contradiction between the liberating possibilities of the technological transformation of the world, the light and free life on the one hand and the intensification of the struggle for existence on the other, generates among the underlying population that diffused aggressiveness which, unless steered to hate and fight the alleged national enemy, hits upon any suitable target: white or black, native or foreigner, Jew or Christian, rich or poor. This is the aggressiveness of those with the mutilated experience, with the false consciousness and the false needs, the victims of repression who, for their living, depend on the repressive society and repress the alternative. Their violence is that of the Establishment and takes as targets figures which, rightly or wrongly, seem to be different, and to represent an alternative.

Balázs also points out that the notion of the present as eternity also reinforces the strong European support for the social state, which is far stronger and more effective in Europe than in the US:

... in eternity there cannot be suffering. The dominant, that is, essentially 1968-type of liberalism tends to think that cruelty and coercion are the greatest vices for they cause suffering which is absolutely intolerable and unacceptable. The main purpose of society is to minimize or avoid suffering. The classical liberal maxim, the harm principle, which permits everything for everybody provided that no harm to others is caused, is now generally thought to be inefficient. The political community has a primary duty to alleviate or terminate suffering, without regard to its causes and circumstances, and without regard to the scope and depth of intervention. The ground for it is that suffering and pain dehumanizes and thus makes us unfit for eternity. They are not simply bad, they are outrageous. The right for euthanasia is most firmly grounded in the emotions the sight of suffering elicits in us. (my emphasis)

In a vaguer point, Balázs says that the European sense of the present-as-eternity is also connected to "the idea that human rights, and especially human dignity, overrides any other moral and political value".

And he writes:

... we tend to favor the present in everyday practices, too. Again, this is not a hedonistic and individualistic feeling of carpe diem. This is a collective, rather than an individual, obsession with time, or with being up-to-date. Unlike Faust, we do not want to stop time because our goals have been achieved. We are already lords of time, hence we must make it pass. Our communication means, mobile phones, Internet access, reality shows, news channels, digital and web cameras, our passion for watching sporting events, especially those where new records can be expected, serve this collective purpose: to make time pass together, and prove to be masters of time.

And, as philosophers are inclined to do, he raises a question about the implications of this view:

This is why anguish and sadness fills the earthly eternal present, lurking behind the joy of the saved. The inhabitants of the earthly eternal present are nowhere. They are not anxious and agitated by fear. Rather, they are sad and anguished by their powerlessness. For those living in the eternal present lack the basic human political, i.e., community-creating, capacities, recorded by Hannah Arendt: the power to forgive and the power to make promises. By forgiving, we have power over the past. By promises, we have power over the future. But in order to forgive, we need the past; and to make promises, we need the future. Without them, we lose our power. And since we have no past, we cannot remember, we cannot enliven it, we cannot forgive - we cannot act. Since we have no future, we cannot make plans and anticipations, we cannot justify our actions, we cannot make promises - again, we cannot act. Only God, who alone is Lord of Eternity, knows where the way back to time lies. (my emphasis)

Tags: ortega, ortega y gasset, time, zoltán balázs