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José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1956) | |
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Spanish philosopher and essayist, professor of the University of Madrid and founder of the magazine Revista de Occidente. 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 1929 Ortega published one of his best known works, The Revolt of the Masses, where he characterized the 20th-century society as dominated by masses of mediocre and indistinguishable individuals. Ortega's ideas converged those of other 'mass society' theorists such as Karl Mannheim, Erich Fromm and Hannah Arendt. "Minorities are individual or groups of individuals especially qualified. The masses are the collection of people not specially qualified." (from The Revolt of the Masses, 1930) José Ortega y Gasset was born in Madrid. He studied at a Jesuit school in Miraflores, Málaga (1891-97) and University of Deusto, Bilbao (1897-98), University of Madrid (1898-1904), receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1904. 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. In 1910 he was appointed professor of metaphysics at Central University of Madrid (1910-1936). Ortega married Rosa Spottorno Topete in 1910; they had three children. In 1908 Ortega founded the journal Faro. He was founder of Espãna review (1915-23), and Revista de la Occidente (1923-36), and cofounded El Sol. 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. With Ramón Pérez de Ayala and Gregorio Marañón, he founded Group at the Service of the Republic in 1931. 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. Ortega was convinced that the monarchy could not any more unite the Spaniards toward a common goa, and he became a Republicanl. After 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. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) Ortega was a voluntary exile in Argentina and Europe, unwilling to support either side or hold academic office under Franco. From 1941 he was a professor of philosophy at the University of San Marcos, Lima. After the World War II he returned in Spain and founded the Institute of Humanites in Madrid, but lack of support led to its closing after two years. He lectured frequently in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. In 1949 he was invited to the Center for the Humanites in Aspen, Colorado. Ortega died in Madrid on October 18, 1955. "Conversation is the socializing instrument par excellence, and in its style one can see reflected the capacities of a race." (from Invertebrate Spain, 1922) As an essayist Ortega y Gasset was one of the finest of the 20th century in any language. Most of his books were collections of articles and essays. He wrote in lucid Castilinian with mastery of the language. Most of his writings were originally published in Spain's leading newspapers and journals, or delivered as lectures. As a lecturer and orator Ortega was charismatic and his expressiveness is apparent throughout his writings. Ortega hoped to incite readers to take up and develop the issues under discussion - life was for him an intense dialogue between oneself and one's environment. The Revolt of the Masses presented that society is composed of masses and dominant minorities. The 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 wanted to dominate. Bolshevism and fascism were symptoms of usurpation of power by the "mass man." Ortega sees that the mass man demands nothing and lives like everyone else, without vision or compelling moral code. The distinction does not correspond "upper" or "lover" classes, but goes between people who live in the service of ideals and myopic scientists, the prototype of "learned ignoramus." 'The modern world is a civilized one; its inhabitant is not.' Ortega's main literary criticism is in his book IDEAS SOBRE LA NOVELA (1925). He saw that literature is disguised philosophy. He was shocked by writers like Pirandello and the disappearance of human characters familiar from the works of Dickens. Artists should be content to be artists and not try to be prophets. He condemned the new art as a flight from reality and from humanity. Ortega saw Goethe as an example of a writer who was not true to his calling. A writer must have a vision. "A novelist, for instance, who tells me that a character is morose makes me work to imagine a morose person, but he should show me and make me discover that so-and-so is morose without telling me." Similar lines of thought he presented in The Dehumanization of Art (1925), in which the term "dehumanization" referred to the emergence of the modern painting, which has eliminated the human figure and human metaphors, and the notion that the quality of art is not based primarily on its content but on its form. Philosophically Ortega moved from neo-Kantianism to a form of existentialism that he expounded unsystematically in a pungent, popular style. Ortega's metaphysics began with a critique of both realism and idealism. Neither view is acceptable, prior them is the category of life: "I am not my life. This, which is reality, is made up of me and of things. Things are not me and I am not things: we are mutually transcendent, but both are immanent in that absolute coexistence which is life." (from Unas lecciones de metafisica, 1966) Ortega identified reality with "my life", which is "myself" and "my circumstances" (yo soy yo y mi circumstancia - I am I and my circumstances). 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. 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 often stressed. Under the influence of Spengler, he saw that European civilization and Spanish in particular, was falling into decay. 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 culture. From the late 1920s Ortega's thought showed the influence of Martin Heidegger, whose major work, Sein und Zeit (1927, Being and Time), was not transparently political but was later interpreted against his Nazi sympathies. For further reading: Ortega y Gasset: an Outrline of His Philosophy by J. Ferrater Mora (1956); El sistema de Ortega y Gasset by C. Morón Arrayo (1968); Ortega y Gasset by A.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 R. McClintock (1971); Phenomenology and Art: José Ortega y Gasset, ed. by P. Silver (1975); José Ortega y Gasset by Victor Quimette (1982); Ortega y Gasset and the Question of Modernity, ed. by Patrick H. Dust (1989); The Imperative of Modernity by Rockwell Gray (1989); José Ortega y Gasset's Metaphysical Innovation by Antonio Rodríguez Huéscar (1995) - Suom.: Suomennettu myös valikoima Historian kriiseistä ja muita esseitä (1950). - Other writers in the Spanish Civil War: Federico García Lorca Selected works:
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