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José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1956) |
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Spanish philosopher, essayist, and
educator, founder of the magazine Revista de Occidente. José Ortega
y Gasset's writings range over history, politics, aesthetics and art
criticism, as well as the history of philosophy, metaphysics,
epistemology and ethics. In one of his
best known works, La rebelión de las masas (1930, The Revolt of the Masses), he
characterized the 20th-century society as dominated by masses of
mediocre and indistinguishable individuals, who cannot dstinguish
between the best and worst. Although his line of thought was not a
sociological one, it has often been bundled together with
those of other "mass society" theorists such asWilhelm Reich ( The Mass Psychology of Fascism), Karl Mannheim (Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction), Erich
Fromm (Escape from Freedom, The Sane Society), and Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism). "Society is always a dynamic unity of two component factors: minorities and masses. The minorities are individuals or groups of individuals which are specially qualified. The mass is the assemblage of persons not specially qualified. By masses, then, is not to be understood, solely or mainly, "the working masses." The mass in the average man. In this way what was mere quantity—the multitude—is converted into a qualitative determination: it becomes the common social quality, man as undifferentiated from other men, but as repeating in himself a generic type." (from The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset, authorized translation from the Spanish, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1932, pp. 13-14; original title: La rebelión de las masas, 1930) José Ortega y Gasset was born in Madrid, the son of José
Ortega y Munilla and Dolores Gasset Chinchilla. His father was
editor of El Imparcial's literary supplement El Lunes,
founded by Eduardo Gasset y Artime, the father of Ortega's mother. Due
to her influence, Ortega was enrolled in 1891 in a Jesuit school in
Miraflores, Málaga. After graduating, Ortega studied University of Deusto, Bilbao (1897-98) and University of Madrid (1898-1904), receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1904. Though he first knew no German, he continued his studies in the universities of Berlin, Leipzig and Marburg (1905-07), a center of neo-Kantianism, and worked two years as a professor of at Escuela Superior del Magisterio. At the age of twenty-eight, he was appointed professor of metaphysics at Central University of Madrid. In 1910 Ortega married in 1910 Rosa Spottorno Topete, whom he had met while finishing his doctoral thesis; they had three children. Ortega was the founder or cofounder of several journals
and newspapers, including Faro in 1908, Espãna
review (1915-23), El Sol, and Revista de la Occidente
(1923-36), which included such contributors as Rafael Alberti, Pio
Baroja, Federico García Lorca, and Ramon Pérez de Ayala. In 1914 Ortega
was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy of Moral and Political
Sciences. He was also a cofounder of League of Political Education.
During this period he developed a theory of social change based on
education. With Pérez de Ayala and Gregorio Marañón,
he established the Agrupación al servicio de la república
(Group at the Service of the Republic) in 1931. Its aim was to mobilize Spanish intellectuals to form a large band of
defenders and propagandists for the Spanish Republic. ('Individuality in the Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset' by Gerardo López Sastre, in Rethinking Society: Individuals, Culture and Migration: Volume 1: Individuals and Society, edited by Vladimir Luarsabishvili, Tbilisi: New Vision University Press, 2021, p. 71) After the outbreak of WWI, Ortega realized that the war
had
lasted a year and he could count himself among those writers who had
written least about it. Ortega sympathized with the Entente. A liberal
in politics, he opposed Primo de Rivera's dictatorship (1923-30) and
resigned from his post as professor in protest against the military
dictator, who had closed down the universities as a response to student
unrest. Convinced that the monarchy could not any more unite the
Spaniards toward a common goal, he became a Republican. In the 1920's Ortega regarded both Fascism and Communism as violent and illegitimate minority movements that had no future. Upon the fall of Rivera and the abdication of King Alfonso XIII, Ortega sat in the constituent assembly of the Second Republic from 1931 to 1932, and he was deputy for the province of León and Civil Governor of Madrid. One year as an elected representative to the parliament made Ortega disillusioned, he withdrew and kept a pointed silence about Spanish politics from then on. Ortega's son Miguel was shot at in June 1936 in a Madrid street. By that that time he was a fervent anti-Republican. Unwilling to support either side during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) or hold academic office under Franco, Ortega went with his family into voluntary exile in Argentina and Europe. In 1941 he became a professor of philosophy at the University of San Marcos, Lima. As an essayist Ortega was one of the finest of
the 20th century in any language. He was a master of style. In
1946 he said in a lecture in Lisbon: "Almost everything is in
ruins, from political institutions to the theatre, not to mention our
other litreary genres and the arts. Painting is in ruins—Cubism is the
debris, that is why
Picasso's paintings have something of the tumbled-down building about
them, of the corner of a Flea Marker. Music is in ruins—the most recent
Stravinsky is an example of musical detritus.
Economics is in ruins—both in theory and as practiced by nations. And
finally even feminity is in ruins, in a serious state of disrepair." (Phenomenology and Art, translated, with an introduction by Philip W. Silver, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975, p. 168) A much sought-after lecturer, Ortega was frequently invited to speak in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. Most of his writings were originally published in Spain's leading newspapers and journals, or delivered as lectures. In 1949 Ortega was invited by Chancellor R. M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago to Aspen, Colorado, in the celebration of the bicentenary of Goethe's birth. Ortega gave one of the two opening addresses with Albert Schweitzer. His theme was 'Experience of Life.' Ortega was paid $5,000 and travelling expenses. After his visit, the Aspen Institute took the name "Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies." In 1948 Ortega founded with Julián Marías the Institute of
Humanites
in Madrid. Partly due to his ill health and lack of
support the interdisciplinary institute was closed after two years. During the postwar years, Ortega's literary production
was uneven—his most ambitious efforts focused on concerns
of humanistic education. In 1955 he was diagnosed of having
an advanced stomach cancer. José Ortega y Gasset died in Madrid, on October 18, 1955.
One year before he died, Ortega visited Britain to give a speech, but
said before leaving that he had been feeling ill and the talk was a big nuisance. The Revolt of the Masses was written under the dictatorship of Miguel de Rivera. Ortega
presented that society is composed of masses and dominant minorities.
". . . the type of man dominant to-day is a primitive one, a Naturmensch
rising up in the midst of a civilised world. The world is a civilised
one, its inhabitant is not: he does not see the civilisation of the
world around him, but he uses it as if it were a natural force. The new
man wants his motor-car, and enjoys it, but he believes that it is the
spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree." (The Revolt of the Masses, p. 89) Some of the themes Ortega had alreary began to formulate in the second part of España invertebrada
(1921, rev. 1922 and 1934), 'La Auscencia de los Mejores' (The
Absence of the Best). The title of the book, Invertebrate Spain, referred to his belief that his country
lacked a backbone. Under the influence of Spengler, he saw that
European civilization and Spanish in particular, was falling into
decay. "The absence of the "best people," or at least
their scarcity, runs through our whole history and has kept us from
ever being like other nations under similar conditions, a completely
normal people." (Invertebrate Spain, translated by Mildred Adams, New York: H. Fertig, 1974, p. 86) Ortega's work echoed the warnings of 19th-century liberals
that democracy carried with
it the risk of tyranny by the majority. When earlier masses had
recognized the superiority of elites, in modern times masses hated the intellectual elites and wanted
to
dominate. Bolshevism and Fascism are two false dawns: today we are
witnessing the triumphs of a hyperdemocracy in which the mass acts
directly, outside the law, imposing its aspirations and its desires by
means of material pressure. . . . Now . . . the mass believes that it
has the right to impose and give force of law to notions born in the
café." (The Revolt of the Masses, pp. 17-18) The
"select man" lives in the service of ideals and demands more of himself
than the rest. Ortega argued that "mass
men" can be detected at every level of society; the
distinction does not correspond "upper" or "lover" classes. Previously
men could be divided into the learned and the ignorant. Now scientists
know little outside their area of specialization, they are learned
ignoramuses. Ortega's main literary criticism is in his book La
deshumanización del Arte e Ideas sobre la novela (1925,
The Dehumanization of Art). He argued that the new art
was as a flight from reality and from humanity. Ortega's term in the
title of the book,"dehumanization," referred to the flight from the
human person in modern art. "The young set has declared taboo any
infiltration of human contents into art. Now, human contents, the
component elements of our daily world, form a hierarchy of three ranks.
There is first the real of persons, second that of living persons,
lastly there are the inorganic things. The veto od modern art is more
or less apodictic according to the rank the respective object holds in
this hierarchy. The first stratum, as it is most human, is most
cafefully avoided." (The Dehumanization of Art, and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature, translated by Helene Weyl, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 26) When the writers of the older generation, including Miguel de Unamuno, used such vague concepts as
"national spirit" and "national psychology," Ortega emphasized
sociology based on science, rational ethics, and aesthetics. Opposing
Taine's views of the psychological, geographical, and biological forces
behind national character, he once noted that a whole generation
of Spanish intellectuals had been "badly educated by
Hippolyte Taine." Culture sets problems which each generation
must resolve. The "generation" that brings about a change of collective
vigencias,
the conforming elements of a text or a
society, is the basic historical unit. One of Ortega's root metaphors
describes life as shipwreck—stressing the human need for action and
invention in order to survive. We are in continual danger of
catastrophe, and in the struggle our chief asset is reason. "Life is a
task," he stressed. "Life, in fact, sets us plenty of tasks. . . . At
every moment of my life there open before me diverse possibilities: I
can do this or that. If I do this, I shall be A the moment after;
if I do that, I shall be B. At the present the reader may stop reading
me or may go on." (History as a System, and other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History,
translated by Helene Weyl, with an afterword by John William
Miller, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962, pp. 200-201) Like Sartre, Ortega believed that human beings are condemned to be free, but unlike Sartre, he had no need to commit himself. In the 1920s and 1930s, under the spell of Ortega y Gasset, Bergson, Spengler, Keyserling and others, a reaction arose among intellectuals against the democratic and social enlightenment. The philosopher's attempt to make the "revolt of the masses" responsible for the alienation and degradation of modern culture, prepared indirectly way for fascism. Politically Ortega favored a form of aristocracy—culture is maintained by an intellectual aristocracy because the revolutions of the masses threaten to destroy the achievements of the elite, doctors and engineers, teachers and businessmen, industrialists and technologists. From the late 1920s Ortega's thought showed the influence of Martin Heidegger, whose major work, Sein und Zeit (1927, Being and Time) was later interpreted against his Nazi sympathies. For further reading: Ortega y Gasset: an Outline of His Philosophy by J. Ferrater Mora (1956); El sistema de Ortega y Gasset by C. Morón Arrayo (1968); Ortega y Gasset by Alain Guy (1969); Ortega y Gasset: Circumstance and Vocation by Julián Marías (1970); Introducción a Ortega by P. Garagorri (1970); Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator by Robert McClintock (1971); José Ortega y Gasset by Victor Quimette (1982); Ortega y Gasset and the Question of Modernity, ed. Patrick H. Dust (1989); An Introduction to the Politics and Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset by Andrew Dobson (1989); The Imperative of Modernity by Rockwell Gray (1989); José Ortega y Gasset's Metaphysical Innovation by Antonio Rodríguez Huéscar (1995); The Social Thought of Ortega y Gasset: A Systematic Synthesis in Postmodernism and Interdisciplinarity by John T. Graham (2001); Ortega's The Revolt of the Masses and the Triumph of the New Man by Pedro Blas Gonzalez (2007); Rationality Reconsidered: Ortega y Gasset and Wittgenstein on Knowledge, Belief and Practice, edited by Astrid Wagner and Jose Maria Ariso (2016); Radical and Empirical Reality: Selected Writings on the Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset and Julián Marías by Harold Raley (2020); Ortega y Gasset, Existentialist: A Critical Study of His Thought and Its Sources by José Sánchez Villaseñor (1949/2021); Ortega y Gasset: una experiencia filosófica española by José Luis Villacañas (2023) Selected works:
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