José Ortega y Gasset
By Juan Pablo Fusi Aizpurua
His face had “an earthy tone, chiseled by deep crags”; “his head noble, powerful”; “a diaphanous gaze, at times penetrating, lost in thought”, “a deep persuasive voice”, “his speech was precise, accurate”. Some people found José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) cold, arrogant, distant; to his disciples (Julián Marías, Rodríguez Huéscar, to whom we owe the above portrait of Ortega), he was warm, luminous, understanding, hospitable, both proud and extremely kind (Julián Marías). A monumental writer — sometimes exceptional as in his “Prologue” for Veinte años de caza mayor [Twenty Years of Big Game Hunting] written by the Count of Yebes in 1942 — he used a “brilliantly incisive, energetic, sensitive and non-rhetorical language”, as the German historian of European literature E.R. Curtius said as early as 1924, in the first of his two essays about Ortega (included in his book Essays on European Literature, 1950). Ortega was above all a philosopher, and should thus be understood exclusively from a philosophical point of view: his life, wrote Marías in ORTEGA** Las trayectorias (1983), “was defined, shaped, and guided by philosophy”. “Intellectuals — wrote Ortega in 1922 — are only useful as such (intellectuals), that is, in their unpremeditated search for truth or when pursuing elusive beauty”.
Ortega, who studied in Marburg, Germany, a most influential experience in his philosophical education, enunciated the seminal idea of his thought in his first book, Meditaciones del Quijote [Meditations on Quixote], 1914): “I am myself and my circumstance, and if I don’t save it I don’t save myself”. His philosophical world arose, as he put it in 1932, from having uncovered two different truths: that life is “the radical fact”, and that “life is circumstance”. In short, life, “what we do and what happens to us”, emerged as man’s main and radical reality: “my life consists”, he said in 1932, “in my being forced to exist in a specific circumstance.” Individual life, my life, each person’s life, was for Ortega the essential point of view: “the individual point of view”, he wrote in 1916, “seems to me the only point of view from which one can consider the world in its truth”. For Ortega, and for a large part of the first half of 20th-century philosophers — Dilthey, Bergson, Scheler, Jaspers, Heidegger, etc. — life (being and time in Heidegger’s words), the mere fact of existence, had an urgent, peremptory character: “the radical problem of philosophy”, Ortega said in 1929, “is the definition of that mode of being, that primal reality which we call our life”; “life means”, he added in 1932, “the inexorable obligation to realize the project of existence that each one of us is.”
In other words, man’s problem was understanding life. Immersed in a new and complex modernity (industrialization, science, new technology, large cities, mass society, growth of the state, political and social pluralism, secularization, nationalism, labor unrest…) for 20th century man life had become equivocal, seriously problematic, and especially since World War I (1914–1918), presided over by insecurity and uncertainty. This, the crisis of the new modernity, is what Ortega tried to explain in The Revolt of the Masses (1930), his best known essay, built around a fruitful, if provocative, thesis: that the ultimate reason for contemporary unrest lay in the rise of the masses that had resulted from 19th century’s social changes and improvements in the standards of living, and also in the emergence of the mass-man, the new social type, gregarious and amoral, which had come to prevail in collective life in the 1920s and 1930s. European nations had failed miserably in 1914; having lost its former moral strength, Europe no longer ruled the world. In Revolt of the Masses, an enormous international success, Ortega called for the creation of the United States of Europe, as the last hope for Europe’s and the world’s salvation.
Born in Madrid in 1883, Spain was Ortega’s national circumstance. Undisputed leader of the Spanish intelligentsia ever since his brilliant first public appearance with the lecture “Vieja y nueva política” [Old and new politics] delivered in Madrid, in the Teatro de la Comedia, on March 28, 1914, and the publication also in 1914 of his book Meditaciones del Quijote, for Ortega Spain was a dramatic problem, that is, both a historical and a political problem. Ortega saw the history of Spain as an endless decline since the 16th century, an idea put forward in his España invertebrada [Invertebrate Spain], 1921, another of his widely read books. Spain, whose values and collective beliefs Ortega saw deeply impregnated by popular traditions and mentality, had always lacked eminent ruling minorities. Disrupted as a result by regional and class particularisms, modern Spain — that is, 19th century Spain — was a failed nation-state, as shown in the so called “disaster of 98”, the insurrection in Cuba, the Spanish-American War, the defeat of Spain, and the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. As Ortega argued in “Old and new politics” and in numerous newspaper articles from 1904 to 1923 — first in El Imparcial, then in El Sol, the two most influential Spanish newspapers at the time — all that had resulted around 1914 in the flagrant divorce that he saw between “official” Spain — a “perished” regime, a landscape of “phantoms”, a “dead” nation — and “vital” Spain: “aspiring”, “germinal”, “new”, “industrious”. Spain was the problem, Ortega said in Bilbao in 1910, and Europe the solution. Spain demanded “liberalism” and “nationalization”, the great task Ortega called upon “vital” Spain to fulfill, in his lecture of March 1914 (a task he would contribute to with the foundation in 1914 of the Liga de Educación Política [League for Political Education] and later in 1930, of the Agrupación al Servicio de la República [Association for the Republic] as well as with his important cultural undertakings: the weekly journal España in 1914, the newspaper El Sol from 1917, the collection “Biblioteca de Ideas del Siglo XX” for the publishing house Espasa Calpe, the journals Revista de Occidente (1923), Crisol (1931), and Luz (1932).
For a long time Ortega believed all his hopes for Spain could be fulfilled within the current (1876–1931) constitutional monarchy. Later, in 1927–1930, when he created the above mentioned Association for the Republic [Agrupación al Servicio de la República] with Marañón, Pérez de Ayala, Antonio Machado and other well known intellectuals, he became convinced that Spain required a different kind of state, a truly national state, an embodiment of the “vital”, “germinal” Spain he had defined in 1914, which in 1930–1932 he actually saw in the Republic brought about by a vigorous opinion movement and proclaimed on April 14, 1931. For this reason, even if the Republic of 1931 would soon disappoint him, as he stated in his resounding lecture “Rectificación de la República” [Revision of the Republic] delivered in the Cine de la Ópera, in Madrid, on December 6, 1931, Ortega remained involved in politics from 1930 to 1932, writing articles, putting forth his ideas for a decentralized Spanish state (Spain as a regional state), his answer to “invertebrate” Spain, the idea he had posed in 1929 in La redención de las provincias [The Redemption of the Provinces], and with his ideas and reflections in the constitutional debates of 1931 as member of the Republican Parliament.
Ortega nonetheless always felt he was “transient” in politics. Politics for him, as he once put it, was “a domain of deception”. Politics, he said in 1923, “does not aspire to understand” anything (i.e., life and society). In any case, once he left active politics in 1932 Ortega started what he termed “my second navigation”, one of the most fruitful periods in his life, unexpectedly and tragically cut short, as was everyone else’s life in Spain, by the outbreak of the civil war of 1936–1939, after the military rising of July 18, 1936 put an end to the II Spanish Republic. In April of 1932 Ortega published Pidiendo un Goethe desde dentro [Goethe from Within], an extraordinary work, perhaps one of his best writings, and a “Prólogo” for the first edition of his complete works (Obras completas), a very brief text but essential for understanding his work (as was his very important “Prólogo para alemanes” [A Prologue for Germans] which he wrote in 1934 but which remained unpublished until 1958). In 1933–34 he worked simultaneously on several projects: Meditación de la técnica [Meditation on Technics] (published as book in 1939), “En torno a Galileo”,1933 (published as Esquema de la crisis [Anatomy of Crisis] in 1942, and with the original title En torno a Galileo [About Galileo] from 1947 onwards) and Historia como sistema, published in English in 1935 (as Philosophy and History) and in Spanish in 1941. All these diverse projects were nonetheless utterly convergent. Ortega was returning to, and expanding, his theories about life as the radical reality (which he posed in Goethe desde dentro), as drama, as shipwreck. In his philosophy man was thus a biographical being, that is, everything a human being successively is throughout his life. To put it differently: “man has no nature, he has… history”, an idea first enunciated in Philosophy and History (Historia como sistema), 1935, to which Ortega would repeatedly return to in later writings and lectures. For Ortega, life only became transparent, intelligible, in the context of “historical reason”, and this on account of, to his mind, one essential fact: that man is a historical being. This was the new and major concept in his philosophy, one that Ortega, increasingly closer to history since the 1920’s, definitely developed after reading Dilthey, and powerfully argued in Historia como sistema (1935) and En torno a Galileo (1933), an analysis of the idea of “historical crisis — which he defined as a change in the world’s system of beliefs — and the concept of “generation” as a fact in historical change.
The tragedy has been mentioned. With the Spanish Civil War and Second World War (1939–1945) Ortega’s world, shaped around philosophy’s guiding and saving functions, would crumble. Economic thought — Keynes General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was published in 1936 — , political science, sociology, history, displaced philosophy from the center of scholarly interest and became major tools for studying, reflecting upon, and analyzing man and society. Worse, postwar philosophy — French existentialism, Anglo-American analytic philosophy — never appealed to Ortega. Except for Germany, perhaps Argentina, and certainly for the brilliant Madrid School of philosophy built around him (José Gaos, Julián Marías, Rodríguez Huéscar, Paulino Garagorri, Manuel Granell), postwar philosophy ignored Ortega. For most of the intellectual world, Ortega would become simply the writer of The Revolt of the Masses.
In 1945 liberal Spain no longer existed. From 1936 to 1945 Ortega lived in exile in Paris, Argentina and Lisbon. However he refused to become reconciled to a hopeless exile. He was soon convinced that his philosophy, his ideas, his thought, had no place in Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975). Isolated from public life, excluded from the university where his philosophy was unmentionable), from 1949 Ortega renounced any regular or permanent work in his own country.
This however did not mean that Ortega’s capacities were exhausted or his ideas no longer valid. On the contrary, from 1945 to 1955 he was active teaching courses and giving lectures. His lectures “Idea del teatro” [About Theater] (Madrid 1946), and “Una meditación de Europa” [Reflections on Europe] delivered in Berlin in 1949, for instance; his course on Velázquez ( San Sebastián, summer of 1947), and his courses on Toynbee and world history, or “El hombre y la gente” which he taught in the Instituto de Humanidades, a private institution founded together with Julián Marías. He published En torno a Galileo in 1947, a rewriting of the above mentioned Esquema de la crisis, and Papeles de Velázquez y Goya [Papers on Velázquez and Goya] in 1950. Ortega also left entirely ready for publication Una interpretación de la historia universal [An interpretation of World History], El hombre y la gente [The Man and the People]—his view on sociology—and La idea de principio en Leibniz y el origen de la teoría deductiva [Leibniz’s Idea of Principle and the Origin of Deductive Theory]—his most systematic book on philosophy — , three works of undoubtful substance and ambition that would appear after his death.
In his twilight years Ortega remained thus an attentive, alert man (as he thought man should be), a great mind. His subjects were always capital: history and historical reason (Una interpretación de la historia universal. En torno a Toynbee [An Interpretation of Universal History. About Toynbee]); man as biographical being (Papeles sobre Velázquez y Goya); Spain and Europe, as problem, as coexistence, as salvation (“Una meditación de Europa”); the structure of collective and social life (social usage and values, the role of the law… El hombre y la gente); the evolution of “modes of thinking” in history (Idea de principio en Leibniz). As already mentioned, he would not expound these ideas in Spain. From 1950, the year of his last public intervention in Spain, until his death in 1955 (October 18), Ortega lived in accordance with the demands of his scholarly life and his great prestige: writing and speaking publicly in Europe, mainly in Germany, and in the United States. In 1955 shortly before he died, he delivered his last lecture, about Europe, at the Cini Foundation in Venice, the city that in so many ways was the symbol of a vanished civilization.
Juan Pablo Fusi is Professor Emeritus of Contemporary History at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. Trained at Oxford University with Professor Raymond Carr, he was from 1976 to 1980 director of the Centre for Iberian Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. PhD in History from the universities of Oxford and Complutense de Madrid, in 1987 he received an honorary doctorate in Humanities from New York University. Between 1986 and 1990 he was director of the National Library of Spain. Fusi is an expert Spain’s contemporary history and, in particular, on the study of nationalism and democracy. He has received the Espejo de España (1979) and Montaigne Prize (2001) for his book España, de la dictadura a la democracia [Spain, from Dictatorship to Democracy], written in collaboration with Raymond Carr. He has been the researcher in charge of the program of the Ministry of Education and Science for the publication of the complete works of José Ortega y Gasset. He was the Academic Director at the Instituto Universitario de Investigación Ortega y Gasset and at the Fundación José Ortega y Gasset. He is a full member of the Basque Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters-Jakiunde and the Royal Academy of History.
Books by José Ortega y Gasset
- (1914) | Meditations on Quixote, New York, Norton, 1961.
- (1921) | Invertebrate Spain, London, Allen and Unwin, 1937.
- (1930) | The Revolt of the Masses, London, G. Allen & Unwin, 1932.
- (1932) | “In Search of Goethe from Within”, in José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1968.
- (1957) | Man and People, London, Allen & Unwin, 1957.
- (1958) | The Idea of Principle in Leibnitz and the Evolution of Deductive Theory, New York, Norton, 1971.
- (1960) | An Interpretation of Universal History, New York: Norton, 1973.
