Reading Jose Ortega Y Gasset in 21st Century

Ramin Jahanbegloo

Jose Ortega y Gasset is one of the finest contributions Spain has made to this planet’s intellectual culture in the last 100 years. What Ortega y Gasset wrote is not only valid for his time but it is also relevant to our post-Cold War world of globalization and diversity. As it is a timeless thinking, surely it can be read and thought by the learned individuals in the 21st century as well and in many more centuries to come.   Though today almost forgotten, Ortega y Gasset is probably the most important Spanish philosopher whose ideas could guide the crisis- ridden world of the 21st century. In this time of crisis, our world has never had more need for the critical insights of a thinker like Ortega y Gasset. Over the past 50 years the word “crisis” has become part of our everyday vocabulary. We often hear people talking about a “political crisis” or an “ecological crisis” or more simply a “crisis of faith”. We use the word “crisis” as if it is some thing that happens to us, over which we have no control, an unwanted enemy. But there is much more to this word. The most basic definition of “crisis” is that it is an internal reaction to an external event. This is the first and most frequent mistake we make in talking about crisis; we define an event as a crisis, rather than our reaction to the event as the crisis. The word “crisis” derives from the Greek verb “krinein” which carries meanings such as to separate, to distinguish, to decide and to judge. When properly understood, a crisis is “to be at a crossroad.” But it is also an opportunity to make new commitments or bolster old ones. In a crisis, the critical faculty as an activity that both distinguishes and judges takes on a voluntaristic momentum. In the context of ethics, epistemology and politics, the good must be distinguished from the bad, the true must be separated from the false, the innocent and the guilty must be told apart. By distinguishing and separating a critique always appeals to a position or criterion that lies outside of that which is criticized. By virtue of its outsiderhood, every critique opens up a window out to a future. In other words, the outside is deployed as the ground of critique. As a matter of fact every critique, at its time of crisis prepares its own “ground”, its own “standpoint”, its own “base”, and its own “topos”—in order to have a better view of the events it intends to interfere with. This critical “topos” is actually an “utopos”, a “no place” or an “out of place” from which the real place, the present is criticized by the critique. The present is incapable of criticizing itself—as long as it has no insight into or notion of something outside itself. Without a crisis and a critique the present extends indefinitely into the future without break. Therefore, crisis is the presently experienced possibility of a break. It is a situation in the lived world which presents alternative possibilities that demand to be addressed.

It is in the spirit of this idea of crisis that the critical standpoint of Ortega y Gasset finds all its pertinence and relevance. The task that he set for himself as a philosopher was to address the problem of a crisis of European mind in particular and of Western civilization in general. “Thinking is a dialogue with circumstances,” wrote Ortega y Gasset in 1942 in his Notes on Thinking. Twelve years before making this declaration, Ortega had published The Revolt of the Masses, in which he examined the political and social crisis of Europe. He was not the only thinker to recognize this crisis, but his analysis of the situation was particularly important since it located the root cause in the widespread distribution of social power to the masses. It goes without saying that his evaluation, highly critical when it was written, is perhaps even more critical and relevant if applied to our time. As such, the “revolt of the masses” is not a unique phenomenon which belonged to the 20th century. It has found its way in the 21st century and is gaining momentum. The “revolt of unreason” is now a world problem. We are confronted with it in our everyday life through different forms of absolutism and fundamentalism that endanger the basic foundations of human civilization. The revolt of unreason in contemporary society has also led to the one-dimensionality of thought and this, in turn, has led to the eclipse of an explicit public realm and the abject conformity found among the democratic masses who have become apolitical in their orientation toward the world.

Ortega understood well that that the rule of unreason coexists with the predominance of the masses and the mass rule “crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select.” That is to say, for Ortega, intellectual excellence and political exemplarity went hand in hand. In his eyes, the life of the mind and the life of society were parallel. Thus, reason and culture were directly related to each other and each required the presence of the other to exist. Therefore, within our society, which Ortega would contend is a mass ruled society, it is necessary to address the problem of the culture of the mind and the creation of a genuine morally cultured community for public action. For the simple reason that, according to Ortega, freedom cannot exist without responsibility and the root of the problem of mass rule is the absence of such a principle. In a world in which there is an absence of reason in human affairs, there is a misunderstanding and misapplication of the principle of rights. Ortega goes further in noting that the modern masses believe that they have rights but no duties. Such a state of mind will lead them to ignore all obligations while maintaining unlimited rights. There is a strong parallel here between Ortega and Mahatma Gandhi. For Gandhi, there is no right in the world that does not presuppose a duty. For Gandhi, rights and duties are complementary and a citizen who is not conscious of his duties has no right to think of his rights. He was skeptical about human rights which were not derived from human duties. But for him the right of self-respect is fundamental, because without it there cannot even be recognition of human duties. Both Ortega y Gasset and Mahatma Gandhi believed that society and civilization must operate within a moral principle that takes its bearing from an understanding of the exemplary aspects of human nature. For Ortega, the revolt of unreason can only be corrected by that which is not unreason, commonplace and mass rule. Therefore, in opposition to what he considered as an “egalitarian hyperdemocracy”, he made a distinction between the reign of ignorance and the reign of excellence. In other words, for Ortega, the solution to the problem of our age hinged upon whether philosophy can create and illuminate the distinction between mere opinion (doxa) and true knowledge (episteme), between how the world is and what it ought to be. Philosophy, for Ortega, had a role of educating democracy. The rise of thoughtless individuals, he suggested, led to the advent of the new barbarian and the eclipse of culture. Hence, Ortega cherished thinking, which included for him questioning life in general. Ortega described civilization in The Revolt of the Masses, as “the will to live in common”. Therefore, according to him, “A man is uncivilized, barbarian in the degree in which he does not take others into account.” The process of not thinking and not listening to the other reached its height precisely in the mass-man. Against this state of thoughtlessness and what he called “spiritual barbarism”, Ortega suggested the idea of living and thinking. Ortega did not accept the dichotomy of life and thought, and his main philosophical effort was directed to the formation of a convincing synthesis of these polarities. In Ortega’s philosophy, thinking finds its ultimate metaphor in the act of living; it is an insertion of one's self into the world. But thinking, for Ortega, is less of this world than for this world. It is not only through thinking but also through dialogue with the world that the meaning of life was revealed. Ortega insisted on the fact that life is a struggle and a fulfillment of the self. Therefore his premise that life is essentially movement and activity accounts for the moral superiority to the “state of becoming” over the “state of being”. In his brilliant essay which he wrote in 1932 for the centenary of Goethe’s death, he affirmed: “ living is precisely the inexorable necessity to make oneself determinate, to enter into an exclusive destiny, to accept it-that is, to resolve to be it. We have, whether we like or not, to realize our “personage”, our vocation, our vital program, our “entelechy”-there is no lack of names for the terrible reality which is our authentic I.” This means that for Ortega, life is always in the process of being made. So, unlike masses that live in the given and “lived” reality, an authentic person who thinks is engaged in the process of creating a new reality and therefore is bound to move away from established concepts and views. That is why Ortega compared the authentic life to the life of a shipwrecked man: “Life is, in itself and forever, shipwreck. To be shipwrecked is not to drown and die. The poor human being, feeling himself sinking into the abyss, moves his arms to keep afloat. This movement of the arms which is his reaction against his own destruction, is culture -- a swimming stroke.... But ten centuries of cultural continuity brings with it -- among many advantages the great disadvantage that man believes himself safe, loses the feeling of shipwreck, and his culture proceeds to burden itself with parasitic and lymphatic matter. Some discontinuity must therefore intervene, in order that man may renew his feeling of peril, the substance of his life. All his life-saving equipment must fail, then his arms will once again move redeemingly.” Thus, with Ortega y Gasset, the instant of shipwreck conveys a fearful recognition of freedom. He emphasized this instant not as cause to despair, but as cause to self-realize and to self-create. The ability to choose, to judge and to act is the radical difference between a human being and an animal. For Ortega, “ A human being can, from time to time, suspend his direct concern with things, detach himself from his surroundings, ignore them, and subjecting his faculty of attention to a radical shift-incomprehensible zoologically-turn, so to speak, his back on the world and take his stand inside himself, attend his own inwardness or, what is the same thing, concern himself with himself and not with what is other, with things.” Therefore, the great danger is to lose one’s sense of risk. Without it history resembles “a peaceful tourist trip”. That is to say, human condition is “ essential uncertainty” where “no human acquisition is stable”. According to Ortega, the aim of human life is to “humanize the world” by relating his self to the things of the world and giving meaning to them. A human being is, therefore, more than a subjective self. For Ortega, an authentic “I” is never constituted by “myself”. As he wrote in the famous passage of his book, Meditaciones del Quijote, published in 1914, “I am myself plus my circumstance”. By that he means that “I” am made up of more than myself. Hence, a link between the self and the world through “reciprocal interdependence”.  It is clear that Ortega’s philosophy is more than a simple subjectivism which concludes in the affirmation of a subjective self. As the condition of the subject is circumstantial, therefore the person has a disposition and a readiness for the future. The essence of human being is to determine the future, even by not acting on it.  For Ortega, a person continually makes new projects to do his or her life, because human life is action and it is to be made. Therefore, Man posses the power to choose what he will do and be. In other words, he is obliged to exercise his liberty of choice. We are forced to choose what we will be in this world. Furthermore, destiny imposes itself on us as our destiny, and our destiny is what we are. “Man’s destiny”, says Ortega, “ is primarily action. We do not live to think, but on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving”. According to Ortega, Man is a living problem. Life is a drama, because life is walking along the precipices. It is a struggle with oneself and with the world. In other words, “To live is to be outside oneself, to realize oneself.” For Ortega, life is the foundation which needs to be made, to be realized and to be lived. Self-realization is the ultimate goal. Thus, Ortega’s philosophy is designed to treat culture as a path to self-realization. Moreover, in Ortega’s eyes, culture is an “exegesis of life.” Culture is the moment of clarity and security in the midst of chaos. According to Ortega, in his Meditaciones, “culture-art, science, or politics-is the commentary, it is that aspect of life in which, by an act of self-reflection, life acquires polish and order. That is why the work of culture can never retain the problematic character pertaining to all that is merely living. In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.”

Ortega’s prospective patriotism recognized his country’s traditional weaknesses, and the goal of what we can call a “nueva cultura” was for him to create the conditions for a Spanish Renaissance. While impressed and influenced by the German culture, that he considered as a culture of clarity as opposed to Mediterranean imprecision, Ortega was nonetheless torn by his need to affirm his Spanish destiny. As a Mediterranean, he had lived with “the harsh fierceness of the actual”, one of his own expressions and he had refused as a philosopher to confine his thoughts within the rigid framework of a system. As such, Ortega’s “metaphysics of life” remained a philosophy of dialogue and diversity. Historians of philosophy have a tendency to place Ortega in the traditions of phenomenology and existentialism. Of course, as in Husserl’s case, Ortega stepped out of Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” and affirmed “I live therefore I think”. His idea of “reason” is that of a new type of reason which is constantly engaged as much in individual life as in historical life.  From Ortega’s point of view “ Man is happenstance.” Things happen to him, but he also happens to life because he lives life as a dialogue. Therefore, one can say that Ortega is more of a dialogical philosopher who upholds a radical dialogue with life. His perspectivist method of understanding reality as a multidimensional phenomenon produced tolerance and plurality.  In Ortega’s opinion, open-mindedness suited the cultivated spirit and encourages creativity. Ortega, therefore, rejected a narrow-minded view which is convinced that there is only “one way of seeing “ reality. According to him, “the excellent man (was) urged, by internal necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself…” That is to say, Ortega saw a danger in by a form of homogeneous view that puts in jeopardy Europe’s diversity within unity. “The abundance of European modes…is the treasure of the West”, declares Ortega, but today “this treasure threatens to be devoured by a form of homogeneity that has triumphed over the entire continent.” For Ortega, the crisis of European culture could end in only one of two ways: in the ruin of a Europe fallen into a state of barbarism through a process of de-individualization and massification or through a philosophical heroism that would overcome the sovereignty of the average man. Since the “mass-man” is a person emptied of history and has no appreciation of culture, the task of the philosopher is to take the society out of “total politicalism” ( politicismo integral). The solution, Ortega asserted, “is to find one’s self, to get back into agreement with one’s self, to be very clear about one’s sincere attitude toward each and every thing.” The philosopher should be able to take upon his shoulders the process of civilization. He needs to stay alert, for a truth may bound into sight from anywhere. He is like a tragic hero who frees himself by a conscious act of will from the unconscious forces of instinct and custom, thus realizing his true self. What is important here, according to Ortega, lies not in the hero’s defeat, but in his liberating act of will. It is the fact that he can escape the determinism of the material world in which the “mass-man” finds himself as a prisoner. This means, as Ortega explained in his Meditaciones del Quijote, that man could achieve freedom only by rejecting necessity and by refusing like Don Quijote to be “ como las cosas”. Consciousness, then, is the keystone of freedom, because it separates self-determination from other forms of determinism. The result is that each person has his or her personal way of experiencing his or her consciousness. Each life holds a different perspective on the universe, and one complements the other as partial visions of a total reality. As we can see, Ortega’s perspectivism acknowledges the validity of the individual viewpoint, but also recognizes its limits by requiring its integration with other points of view. In his appraisal of metaphysics of life, Ortega often takes a dialogical stand.

It is true that individual life is the radical foundation of Ortega’s metaphysical work. However, philosophy for him arises from a need for dialogue with the other. On emerging from Husserlian phenomenology, Ortega came not to rest in some type of “existential philosophy”, but in a dialogical thought concerned with understanding all things in term of a reality as a perspective and the subject as a being in dialogue with the world. In his “Commentary on Plato’s Banquet” of 1946, he wrote: “ The world is toward us and we are towards the world…” Thus, an interpretation of being as “the mutual and reciprocal existing of man and the world” is brought into view by Ortega ‘s dialogical philosophy. The self, far from being a closed subject, is “par excellence the open being.” Ortega went on to say later in Man and People, that “Being open to the other, to others, is a permanent and constitutive state of mind.” So, Ortega made an effort to overcome a static view of being and existing. That is to say, Ortega manages to think consistently of human reality as reciprocity and mutuality. Even if, according to Ortega, “my life” is the radical reality, because “Human life in its radicality is only mine.”, but,  “to speak of man outside of and apart from a society is to say something that is self-contradictory and meaningless…” Unlike Martin Buber , who made dialogue one of the principal subjects of his philosophy, Ortega rarely wrote bout dialogue per se. But his philosophy can be considered as a “dialogical” thinking because it is in search of a continual exchange between a human being’s self and his circumstances. Therefore, to be able to cultivate one’s “meditativeness” a self needs to enter into a dialogue with the world. It is only through a dialogue that we can get to a synthesis and philosophy presupposes a “passion for synthesis”, for binding everything together as Ortega paraphrases Plato’s Symposium. This the reason why, in Ortega’s view, humanity as such, “does not appear in solitude…man appears as the reciprocator.” In other words, man, in order to be what he is, needs first to find out what he is, and ask himself what the things around him are. As we can see, the dialogical implications of Ortega’s philosophy are obvious. Ortega steps out of Descartes’ subjectivism and asserts and grounds the concept of life as the ontological foundation of thinking. European modernity thus unfolds for him in the figure of Don Quijote and not Descartes or Shakespeare’s Prospero who by his return to Naples and Milan introduces a conception of power (gained in his relationship with Caliban) that would gradually open up a new conception of European civilization and of its relationship with the rest of the world. For Ortega, Don Quijote is not a chivalresque novel but a book which shows that human life is permanent struggle. For him, “ every novel bears Quijote within it like an inner filigree, in the same way as every epic poem contains Illiad within it like the fruit its core.”

Ortega saw in Don Quijote the destiny of Spain but also the borderline to a new Spain. Don Quijote is, therefore, an open path, on which one can travel. It represents an infinite hermeneutics of the Spanish culture. Such is the power of this novel that no reader with personal experience of love, of overcoming difficulties, of struggling to reach a goal can come through this journey untouched, but identifies with it. But Don Quijote’s radical modernity is completed by the genuinely Spanish character of Sancho Panza: between the real and the ideal world, eager to believe but incapable of doing so, longing for higher goods but unwilling to abandon earthly possessions. Thus Don Quijote is the myth of a disjointed Spain. “To be Spanish”, proclaimed Ortega in his Meditaciones, “means for me a very lofty promise which has been fulfilled only in extreme rare cases (…) In one huge painful bonfire we ought to burn the inert traditional mask, the Spain that has been and then, among the well-sifted ashes, we shall find the iridescent gemlike Spain that could have been.” As an educator and a social reformer Ortega saw the transformation of Spain through its incorporation into European culture. His intellectual strive was to place Spain on an equal cultural footing with Europe. The driving force behind Ortega’s thinking, focused on the problem of Spain, is the constant search for what he called “an all-embracing connection.” It is in this spirit that he defines philosophy as “general science of love” and a mode of thinking against hatred which “leads to the extinction of values.” “ I suspect”, Ortega wrote in Meditaciones, “ that, owing to unknown causes, the inner dwelling of the Spaniards was captured long ago by hate, which remains entrenched there, waging war against the world…In this way the universe has become for the Spaniard something rigid, dry, sordid and deserted.” Therefore, for Ortega, the first step towards solving the problem of Spain would be to recognize the absence of philosophy—meaning, amor intellectualis—in Spanish life.  “I have observed”, affirms Ortega, “ at least, that we Spaniards find it easier to be aroused by a moral dogma than to open our hearts to the demand of veracity.” Ortega’s reasoning is rigorous and straightforward. The Spanish crisis is a crisis of culture and the goal is to provide Spain access to the cultural patterns prevailing in the rest of Europe. Ortega saw intercultural dialogue as the main process of attaining this cultural transformation. In other words, Ortega suggested that in culture, a nation not only has to determine what it is, but also to determine what it wants to become. Keeping the problem of Spain as the basis of his thought, Ortega’s fundamental aim was the cultural transformation of his society as the means to achieve the cultural reconstruction of Europe. As he delved deeper in this direction, Ortega was led to an interpretation of life as an intercultural dialogue. Consequently Ortega, in the opening lectures of his university courses, insisted that the students had to begin with the culture in which they found themselves; but that, in the same way as the creators of culture, they should analyze it critically and change it by understanding other cultures. As such Ortega defined “culture”, as the system of living ideas belonging to each period: “What I call living ideas, or the ideas on which we live, are those that contain our basic convictions regarding the nature of the world and our fellow human beings, the hierarchy of values for things and actions: which ones are worthy of esteem, which ones are less so.”  Ortega was aware that his views on the cultural crisis of Spain would not be well received. In 1936, the problem of Spain that concerned Ortega changed tragically into the Civil War and Ortega set out on his voluntary exile. Ortega wrote in the early twentieth century, and so some will think his ideas are dated. But Ortega’s oeuvre not only remains “relevant”, it's absolutely essential reading for any thoughtful person who wants to have a wider view of life and an overall understanding of today’s world.

One of the features of the world situation today is that we are all inextricably interconnected and it is not possible for any nation or community to opt out. Examples such as global warming and terrorism affect everyone; therefore we are bound up as one world today.  Today the national public sphere is largely regarded an outflanked and inadequate political mechanism for present-day politics, and in some cases, the national framework is seen as a stubborn impediment to cosmopolitanism. There is, thus, a sense of urgency about the need to trans-nationalize the public sphere, to turn away from the national framework that cannot provide a terrain for the contestation of certain processes and representatives of globalization. In other words, we need to preserve the dialogical nature of our world. The dialogical character of Ortega’s writings has proven very influential and powerful in our world of diversities. Great men like Jose Ortega y Gasset have the courage to go against the wind because they are thinkers of time of crisis. By living and thibnking against the current, Ortega knew that he would be defined as an unsettling thinker. But as an unsettling thinker, he left many marks on the intellectual scene of our time. Consequently, his ideas will carry fruit for decades to come.