José Ortega Y Gasset Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) of Spain was a leading philosopher during the first half of the twentieth century. He had a considerable influence on the works of other sophisticated thinkers such as German philosopher Martin Heidegger, but his ideas and publications were also accessible to larger sections of educated citizens not necessarily trained in technical philosophy.

Ortega was born in Madrid, Spain, into a family with a liberal and patrician background. He was educated at a Jesuit college and the University of Madrid, where he was awarded his doctorate in philosophy in 1904. He then went to Germany and spent the next five years in universities in Berlin, Leipzig, and Marburg. In 1910, Ortega was appointed professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid, where he taught until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), at which time he went into exile. He returned to Spain in 1945 and died in Madrid ten years later. In addition to being a prominent philosopher and social thinker, Ortega was also a prolific writer and an active journalist and politician during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939).

For Ortega, the task of the philosopher is to propose new ideas and to explain reality, leaving behind previously existing beliefs and prejudices. He put forward the idea that human beings are nothing without the social milieu around them, or, as he put it:“Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia” (I am myself and my circumstance.) In this sense, life is the result of the interaction between freedom and constraints. Humans ought to be active in order to create a “project of life” and, by so doing, avoid a conventional life of habits and pre-established structures.

In his The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Ortega’s focus of attention is the mass-man and the new forms of meanness and brutal behavior that he saw as the result of changes in the social structure of contemporary times. As a consequence of these changes, mass-men lack the mediation of the traditions and institutions of civility and, in situations of acute crises, they engage in frenzied and destructive activism against the political parties they dislike, which is contrary to what creative action is meant to be. Mass-men take the state for granted and do not regard it as the creation of centuries of civilization and, in modern times, the product of a certain bourgeois rationality which seeks to guarantee freedom, privacy, and social variety. Massman is a barbarian, yet this barbarity is based on the technological phenomenon of the specialization of knowledge. There is a correlation between the increase of the aggregate body of knowledge and the increase of the relative ignorance of the human beings. For Ortega, the specialist as a “learned ignoramus,” not the proletarian, is the epitome of the mass-man.

Ortega coined the expressions razón vital (vital reason), referring to a new dimension of reason that has life as its paramount basis, and raciovitalismo (rational vitalism), a theory in which knowledge is based upon the reality of life, one of the essential components of which is reason itself. To Ortega, reason is essential to plan and develop the project of life, and vital reason is also historical reason, as individuals and societies cannot detached from their past. It follows from this perspective that, in order to comprehend reality and create a future for themselves, human beings need to look into the past and understand their history.

Bibliography:

Ferrater Mora, J. José Ortega y Gasset: Etapas de una filosofía, Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1973.
Giner, S. Mass Society, London: Martin Robertson, 1976.
Gray, R. The Imperative of Modernity: An Intellectual Biography of José Ortega y Gasset. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Ortega y Gasset, J. La rebelión de las masas, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1929.
Obras Completas, Madrid: Editorial Taurus, 2007.
Rodríguez, Huéscar A. Con Ortega y otros escritos, Madrid:Taurus, 1964.

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