Jose Ortega Y Gasset | Encyclopedia.com (2024)

works by ortega y gasset

supplementary bibliography

José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), Spanish writer and philosopher, was born and died in Madrid, where both sides of his family were closely connected with the worlds of politics and journalism. Ortega attended various Jesuit schools and studied at the University of Madrid, where he received his PH.D. in 1904. His postgraduate work was done in Leipzig, Berlin, and Marburg, during which time he was greatly influenced by the ideas of Georg Simmel, Hermann Cohen, and Paul Gerhard Natorp. Between the years 1910 and 1936, Ortega was professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid.

Ortega began writing for Spanish and South American newspapers and journals in 1902. In 1923 he founded the Revista de occidente, which he directed until its activities were interrupted in 1936. As a liberal interested in social problems, Ortega opposed the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera, which lasted from 1923 to 1930, and in 1931 he founded, together with G. Maranon and Ramon Perez de Ayala, the Agrupacion al Servicio de la Republica, a political group. Soon afterward, he was elected a deputy in the Constituent Assembly, a position he held from 1931 to 1933. At the outbreak of the civil war in 1936, Ortega, unable to support either side in the conflict, chose instead to live abroad—in France, Holland, Argentina, and Portugal. Upon his return to Spain in 1945 he kept aloof from both the government and the University of Madrid. In 1948, with Julian Marias, Ortega founded the Instituto de Humanidades in Madrid.

For forty years Ortega was one of Spain’s leading intellectual figures and the center of a broad intellectual movement that has been called the “school of Madrid.” As a writer, lecturer, educator, political guide, philosopher, and creative sociologist, he made a deep mark on twentieth-century Spanish thought and literature.

Although influenced at first by Neo-Kantianism and phenomenology, Ortega soon criticized these doctrines and evolved a metaphysics according to vital reason that went beyond philosophical idealism without slipping into realism. This metaphysics states that the ultimate or radical reality from which every other reality draws its roots cannot be reduced to any idea or theory but is “my life” in the biographical, not the biological, sense. To Ortega, “Life is what we do and what happens to us.” “To live is to deal with the world, aim at it, act in it, be occupied with it.” “I am myself and my circ*mstance, and if I do not save my circ*mstance, I do not save myself” (Meditations on Quixote1914). Things and the ego are only abstract elements in the primary reality—my life—which consists in activity. My life is given to me, not made for me: I have to make it with things. The ego is a vital project and the circ*mstance is a repertory of possibilities that require choice and the justification of choice. In order to live, I must imagine, think, and reason. Reason is a condition of human life, a requisite for living, and it is life itself that makes it possible to understand whatever has a function in life. Insofar as life apprehends reality it is reason (vital reason); in its concrete form, it is historical reason, since individual life includes its own past and all of history. Ortega had to re-elaborate the categories and forms of philosophical thought in order to arrive at a form of circ*mstantial thought according to which each individual life (as well as each society) is a point of view on the universe—a perspective that is an ingredient in, and an organizing principle of, reality.

In a strict sense, human life is individual; when several lives interrelate, the inter-individual is formed. The collective, or social, individual (no longer an inter-individual) is impersonal, unspontaneous, and without responsibility.

Society consists of those usages or customs to which the entire “people” is subject. Customs are what is done, thought, believed, and said. By means of customs, society exerts pressure on individuals, regulates conduct, and automates a large part of life. At the same time, customs transmit the heritage of the past and create progress and history. Customs put man in a position to discover what is properly his and make it possible for him to deal with the unknown. Language, beliefs, manners, and laws are diverse forms of customs. By far the strongest are law and the state. Authority is necessary for society to exist, since man’s social impulse fights with his drive toward disassociation and insociability. Authority’s goal, however, is to permit each individual freely to live his personal and irreplaceable life.

Society is composed of the masses and the minority—not in the sense of social classes, but of categories of men, or social functions. The masses consist of an unqualified majority and a minority composed of qualified men with leadership ability (who may, in most aspects and activities of their lives, be part of the unqualified masses). The revolt of the masses is not a positive attempt to gain access to superior forms of life, but the pathological striving of the unqualified to act as if they were qualified. Unlike the man of responsibility and effort, the mass-minded man demands nothing of himself at the same time that he attempts to judge and evaluate everything around him.

Historical variation takes place within each society according to the rhythm of 15-year generations which create, even though it may be small, a totalchange. Those who belong to a generation are the men born within a “region of dates,” who have to meet the same problems, in the same world, at the same level. At each moment there coexist at least three active generations, partially overlapping and producing historical change.

The enormous wealth of themes in Ortega’s thought can only be indicated in this extreme abbreviation of his theories of human, individual, historical, and social life.

works by ortega y gasset

(1914) 1963 Meditations on Quixote. With an introduction and notes by Julián Marias. New York: Norton.

(1916-1934) 1943 El espectador de José Ortega y Gasset. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva.

(1921a) 1951 España invertebrada: Bosquejo de algunos pensamientos históricos. 7th ed. Madrid: Revista de Occidente.

(1921b) 1937 Invertebrate Spain. New York: Norton. → The first three essays were first published in Ortega 1921a.

(1923) 1933 The Modem Theme. New York: Norton. →A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Harper.

(1924-1939) 1961 History as a System, and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History. New York: Norton.

(1925) 1956 The Dehumanization of Art, and Other Writings on Art and Culture. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

(1930a) 1963 Mission of the University. London: Routledge.

(1930b) 1961 The Revolt of the Masses. London: Allen & Unwin.

supplementary bibliography

Borel, Jean Paul 1959 Raison et vie chez Ortega y Gasset. Neuchatel (Switzerland): Baconniere.

Ceplecha, Christian 1958 The Historical Thought of Jose Ortega y Gasset. Washington: Catholic Univ. of America Press.

Ferrater Mora, JosÉ (1957) 1963 Ortega y Gasset: An Outline of His Philosophy. New rev. ed. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. → A bibliography appears on pages 95-102.

Hierro, JosÉ 1965 El derecho en Ortega. Madrid: Revista de Occidente.

MÁrias, Julian 1950 Ortega y tres antipodas. Buenos Aires: Revista de Occidente Argentina.

Marias, Julian 1959 La Escuela de Madrid. Buenos Aires: Emece.

Marias, Julian 1960 Ortega. Volume 1: Circunstancia y vocation. Madrid: Revista de Occidente.

Torre, Guillermo de et al. 1956 Homenaje a Ortega y Gasset. Atenea 124:1-106.