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Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator
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A1 — I:a: SPAIN FERMENTED WITH IRREVERENT DISCONTENT.
Spanish social history is intriguingly complicated. Three good general histories are Raymond Carr's Spain: 1808-1939, Salvador de Madariaga's Spain: A Modern History, and Rhea Marsh Smith's Spain: A Modern History. Gerald Brenan does an excellent job unraveling the different popular movements in early twentieth-century Spain in The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War. Juan Díaz del Moral's Historia de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas is a marvelous book, rich in detail but circumscribed in scope; it is essential for giving a sense of the grass-root reality of the movements. James Joll's The Anarchists, an intrinsically less valuable work, nevertheless is useful in locating one of Spain's popular movements in its European context. The ferment was not only socio-political, but cultural as well, and this side of Spanish life was depicted excellently by J. B. Trend for the years immediately following World War I in his Picture of Modern Spain. A sense of how the cultural and the political interpenetrated is communicated well in certain memoirs, such as those of Julio Álvarez del Vayo in The Last Optimist. My sense of this period has been greatly enriched by going through long runs of El Imparcial, Faro, Europa, and España.
The intellectual history of the time is very important. For the condition of Spanish thought in the first decade of the twentieth century see Julián Marías, Ortega—I: Circunstancia y vocación, pp. 33-72, 113-173. Perhaps the fullest and best study of the effect of 1898 on Spanish cultural life is España como problema by Pedro Laín Entralgo. Another shorter, excellent work, which did much to give a scholarly definition to the "generation of 98," is by Hans Jeschke, Die Generation von 1898 in Spanien, in Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, 1934.
A2 — I:b: TRADITIONALLY "EL SITIO" GAVE A HEARING TO UNORTHODOX THINKERS.
The best characterization of "El Sitio" that I have been able to find is Ortega's own, which he gave in his introductory remarks to "La pedagogía social como programa político," 1910, Obras I, pp. 503-4. Meetings of "El Sitio" were usually covered by El Imparcial and other serious Madrid newspapers. Ortega wrote two articles on addresses by Unamuno to "El Sitio," "Glosas a un discurso" and "Nuevas glosas," El Imparcial, September 11 and 26, 1908, Obras X, pp. 82-5, 56-90. Ten months after Ortega spoke there, "El Sitio" listened to Alejandro Lerroux, who was at that time becoming notorious as an anti-clerical demagogue. See "Lerroux en Bilbao: Conferencia en El Sitio," El Imparcial, January 9, 1911. For Lerroux's ideas see Raymond Carr, Spain: 1808-1939, pp. 534-5. Ortega addressed "El Sitio" a second time on October 11, 1914, "En defensa de Unamuno," bitterly protesting the dismissal of Unamuno as rector of the University of Salamanca. See Obras X, pp. 262-8.
A3 — I:c: "EL IMPARCIAL," WHICH HAPPENED TO BELONG TO ORTEGA'S FAMILY.
For a first-hand account of Ortega's family, see the book by his brother, Manuel Ortega y Gasset, Niñez y mocedad de Ortega y Gasset. A shorter account is in Marías, Ortega, pp. 113-122. See Manuel Ortega y Gasset, "El Imparcial": Biografía de un gran periódico español, for an account of El Imparcial and its place in Spanish intellectual life.
A4 — I:d:ORTEGA'S EDUCATION.
Manuel Ortega, Niñez y mocedad de Ortega, gives a good account of Ortega's intellectual development prior to his trip to Germany; see especially p. 11. There is a detailed account of Ortega's education in Marías, Ortega, pp. 116-122, 165-170. Domingo Marrero, El Centauro: Persona y pensamiento de Ortega y Gasset, also has a good discussion of Ortega's education. For Ortega's relation to Unamuno as a student, the best source is Unamuno's "Almas de jóvenes," 1904, in his Obras I, pp. 1145-1159. For an excellent history that emphasizes the importance of the Institute, see Yvonne Turin, L'éducation et l'école en Espagne de 1874 a 1902: Libéralisme et tradition, especially pp. 204-267. A short but sound account of the Institute is in The Origins of Modem Spain by J. B. Trend, pp. 67–70. For the Institute and related developments, see also Mazzetti's Società e educazione nella Spagna contemporanea, which carries the account further into the twentieth century than does Turin, but without the depth and insight Turin gives. A good summary of the work of the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios is in Salvador de Madariaga, Spain: A Modern History, pp. 51–4.
A5 — I:e: KRAUSISMO SUBTLY IMPEDED THE DEVELOPMENT Of PHILOSOPHY IN SPAIN.
For Krausismo see Juan López-Morillas, El Krausismo español: Perfil de una aventura intelectual; Pierre Jobit, Les éducateurs de l'Espagne contemporaine, Vol. 1, "Les Krausistes"; and J. B. Trend, The Origins of Modem Spain, pp. 37-49.
A6 — I:f: ORTEGA'S CHANCE TO WIN THE CHAIR OF METAPHYSICS AT MADRID.
In a letter to Unamuno, December 30, 1906, Ortega chided his former teacher for shunning a chair at Madrid; see Revista de Occidente, October 1964, p. 9. On Unamuno's professorial career see Yvonne Turin, Miguel de Unamuno, Universitaire. María de Maetzu, who was a student in Ortega's first course, described it and his petition for the Chair of Metaphysics in María de Maetzu, ed., Antología siglo XX: Prosistas españolas, pp. 79-82.
A7 — I:g: WORD OF ORTEGA'S PERSONAL APPEARANCE.
For this description of Ortega I have relied on impressions gathered from a large picture album kept at the offices of the Revista de Occidente; pictures in Manuel Ortega y Gasset, Niñez y mocedad de Ortega, and in Guillermo Morón, Historia política de José Ortega y Gasset; descriptions of his presence as a speaker as in Madariaga, Spain, pp. 309-310; and conversations with persons who knew Ortega.
A8 — I:h: EVER SINCE MACHIAVELLI PUT POLITICAL THEORY IN THE SERVICE OF PRINCES.
The nature of Machiavelli's influence on later political theory is an extremely difficult question for intellectual historians. The point is well taken that Machiavelli was interested in the foundation of an Italian state; see The Prince, Chapter XXVI; The Discourses, Chapter IX; Hegel, "The German Constitution," in Political Writings, T. M. Knox, trans., pp. 210-223; and Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 177-180. But as Hegel suggested sympathetically, Machiavelli was so convinced of the overriding expediency of unifying Italy, and as Strauss suggested critically, Machiavelli was so desirous of success, he concentrated on the practicalities of getting and preserving power, rather than on the determination of the fit uses of power as classic political theory had done (in addition to the above, see Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies, pp. 40--9, 286-290). As a lawgiver, Machiavelli seems to have panicked from the pressure of events. In this context, as Hegel said, he must be read with the history of the Italian principalities clearly in mind. However, Machiavelli has had the most significant influence, not on men such as Hegel or Fichte, but on practical politicians, the lawmakers, and on the political science they utilize. These men were not interested in Machiavelli's law-giving; they have been struck by his rationalization of political practice and have carried his inquiry much further in this direction, not in order to found better states, but to administer and preserve the given ones. Machiavelli began the confusion between practical and pedagogical politics by introducing the techniques of the former into the pursuit of the latter. Unfortunately, studies such as Friedrich Meinecke's Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d'Etat and Its Place in Modern History, Douglas Stark, trans., have preserved and deepened this confusion. The way towards overcoming the difficulties is pointed out by Alberto Moravia in his brilliant characterological critique, "'Machiavelli," in Man as an End: A Defense of Humanism, Bernard Wall, trans., pp. 89-107.
Obviously, my conception of classical political theory has been deeply influenced by Plato, primarily by the Republic and Gorgias, and secondarily by Protagoras, Meno, Apology, and Crito. I have been initiated into a study of Plato by Martin S. Dworkin through many long conversations and through his courses at Teachers College, Columbia University, on "'Aesthetics and Education"' and "Education, Ideology, and Mass Communication." The conception of Plato he nurtured in me has been reinforced by Eric A. Havelock's Preface to Plato and by Werner Jaeger's Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, 3 vols., Gilbert Highet, trans.
A9 — I:i: PEDAGOGY WAS NOT DIDACTICS.
This confusion has arisen in most modern languages, but it has been especially serious in English. In the late nineteenth century, the word "pedagogy" was identified with a system of didactics that reformers wanted to destroy. They at least managed to do away with the phrase "pedagogy." For a typical example of the educationist's attitude towards pedagogy see the entry under that heading in Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education. The article laconically proclaimed that the term had a dubious past and that wherever possible "education" should instead be used to escape the stigma of pedagogy. At the time the author was right, for "pedagogy" had generally been used as a synonym for "didactics," as "education" is now used carelessly as a synonym on the one hand for "training" and on the other for "propaganda." Perhaps we can steady the pendulum of fashion by insisting that both "pedagogy" and "education" be used rightly and whenever appropriate. Another amusing indication of the educationists' distaste for the word "pedagogy" is the metamorphosis of The Pedagogical Seminary into The Journal of Genetic Psychology, Child Behavior, Animal Behavior, and Comparative Psychology!
A10 — I:j: CIVIC lDEAL5 GAVE A COMMUNITY ITS CHARACTER.
Ortega rather fully explained the importance of governing goals in Vieja y nueva política, 1914, Obras I, pp. 267-308. See also "Asamblea para el progreso de las ciencias," 1908, Obras I, pp. 106-110, where Ortega contended that training in particular, practical social skills would not really have an effect unless their underlying cultural principles were previously mastered. The conception of civic ideals introduced in this section was characteristic of Ortega's thought. See, for instance, "La pedagogía social como programa político," 1910, Obras I, pp. 507, 514-7; Vieja y nueva política, 1914, Obras I, especially pp. 271--6, 288-294; and Mirabeau, o el político, 1927, Obras Ill, pp. 601-637. The influence of Ernest Renan on Ortega was important concerning the concept of civic ideals; see "La teología de Renan," 1910, Obras I, pp. 443- 467; and La rebelión de las masas, 1930, Obras IV, pp. 265- 270.
It is worthwhile to note the similarity of Ortega's conception of a civic ideal as something that points to the infinite and Edmund Husserl's conception of the telos of European man as an infinite, rather than a finite goal, "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man," in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, Quentin Lauer, trans., pp. 157-8.
A11 — I:k: RATHER THAN A POST-HISTORIC ERA, IT WOULD BE MOST HISTORIC.
The literature that seeks to declare an end to history seeks to do it on several levels; thus there is a literature of cosmic acceptance and a related one of a technocratic millennium in both of which there is manifest the desire to declare the resolution of some long-standing historical conflict. For cosmic acceptance see Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, Bernard Wall, trans., and L'avenir de l'homme; Roderick Seidenberg, Post-Historic Man: An Inquiry; and Kurt W. Marek, Yestermorrow: Notes on Man's Progress, Ralph Manheim, trans. For the technocratic millennium, see the last mentioned and Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. A practical result of the belief that the end of history is nigh is the increasing interest in describing the future, not only the issues that should be dealt with in the future, but the character of the solutions that will be arrived at in the future. An excellent debunking of these efforts is "The Year 2000 and All That" by Robert A. Nisbet, Commentary, June 1968, pp. 60–6.
For Ortega's expectation of a most historic era, see especially En torno a Galileo, 1933, Obras V, pp. 69-80, which gives the fullest development of his contention that Western history was going through a crisis. Ortega's essay "El ocaso de las revoluciones," 1923, Obras III, pp. 207-230, in which he argued that violent, rapid social revolutions were no longer possible, should not be taken to mean that historical change would stop.
A12 — I:l: THE RATIONAL NECESSITY EXPLICATfD BY CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
This matter is properly the subject of another book, but some remarks may be ventured. Rational necessity leads to the justification or rejection of assertions on educational grounds. In order to develop such educational justifications and critiques, we need to remaster philosophical idealism, for idealism alone yields an educational ethic, and idealism is comprehensible only if reason, thought, intellect, mind, or spirit are understood essentially as educational achievements of man. Men do not think because they are endowed with a physical apparatus capable of gathering and processing information, but because they have learned to think. Thus, as Hegel said, "it is education which vindicates a universal." (Hegel's Philosophy of Right, T. M. Knox, trans., Addition to #20, p. 281.) See also on this point the observation by W. H. Auden that ethics are to be implemented through pedagogy in "Die Bombe und das menschliche Bewusstsein," Merkur, August 1966, p. 707. The significance of this tradition for American educational theory and practice should be great but it is a complicated question that can only be outlined here.
American law proceeds on the basis of a practical ethic: One may do more or less as one pleases provided the concrete consequences of an act do not infringe on the rights of others. This procedure is well and good, for positive law must deal with concrete instances, which cannot be ordered on the basis of universal principles. This point is basic in the idealistic tradition, a fact that is often overlooked by critics of idealism. (See Plato, Statesman, 294 f., Republic, IV, 425 f., and Laws, 788, 807.) However, besides positive law, with its courts and police power, there is a moral or spiritual law, which is enforced by criticism, exhortation, self-discipline, and the real, but mysterious, nemesis. Whereas the weakness of Continental rationalism has been a tendency to attempt to legislate the moral law into a positive law, the failing of Anglo-American pragmatism has been a tendency to judge the moral law on the basis of its practical positive ethic, when in fact a spiritual, educational ethic has been in order. Thus many contemporary rhetoricians do not understand criticism of their persuasive practices. The criticism is pitched on the spiritual level and it objects to the rhetoricians' debasement of the standards of truth, beauty, and propriety. The rhetoricians understand the criticism on the practical level and quickly wrap themselves in the Constitutional defenses against those who would deprive them of their freedom of speech. For instance, note how, in Edward G. Bernays, ed., The Engineering of Consent, especially p. 8, a problem of educational ethics is reduced to one of practical ethics: surely the critics of public relations would not want to do away with our rights to speak freely? But the objection was not against the practice, but against the principle implicit in practice. The critics are really asking the PR men to decide freely to speak in a different manner. Bernays does not entertain this possibility in his breathless justification of the persuader's rights. A practical ethic passes on whether a concrete act infringes on the rights of others; an educational ethic examines the general rule implied by a concrete act. To be sure, the categorical imperative cannot replace common sense as the guide to our practical actions, nor one may add, was it meant to do so. The categorical imperative is, however, the formal principle of educational ethics. In our concrete activities we not only accomplish specific acts, but we also make existential affirmations of general principles, even though we may not be aware of it. Now, we should act so that the principles thus affirmed are ones that we would be willing to uphold as general rules of moral conduct, of aesthetic creation, and of intellectual activity. Thus, we should conduct our activities on the practical basis of common sense within the spiritual limits of a categorical imperative. Practical matters are not divorced from questions of principle any more than are real questions of principle independent of practice. Thus, in The Vocation of the Scholar, Fichte put the matter this way: "I may here ... express the fundamental principle of morality in the following formula:—'So act that thou may est look upon the dictate of thy will as an eternal law to thyself'." William Smith, trans., The Popular [sic!] Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1889, p. 152.
A13 — I:m: THE GOALS OF EDUCATION COULD NDT BE FOUNO IN BIOLOGY.
In "Biología y pedagogía," 1920, Obras II, pp. 273-307, Ortega seemed to renounce this contention that pedagogical goals cannot come from biology. However, in "La pedagogía social como programa político," 1910, Obras I, pp. 411-2, Ortega had had in mind traditional, materialistic biology, whereas in "Biología y pedagogía" he was discussing the method of inquiry developed by vitalistic biologists like the German Jacob von Uexküll. The results, when Uexküll's method was used to analyze the child's view of life, Ortega found applicable to pedagogy.
A14 — I:n: HUMAN MATTER5 REQUIRED A CIRCULAR DESCRIPTION.
Martin Heidegger made a similar point in a more difficult but more systematic manner in Being and Time, I: 5, 32; and II: 3, 63; John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans., pp. 193-5 and 262-3. The actual issues that are raised with this question are immense. The fundamental issue concerns the type of rigor that the human sciences should pursue. The choice is between the rigor characteristic of abstract and natural science or that of a dialogue between two intelligent, informed men about a problem of common concern. Ortega, Heidegger, and many others were strongly in favor of the latter type of rigor. Any other, less anthropocentric rigor would put too great a strain on the tenuous bonds between principles and practice. At the time of his "El Sitio" speech Ortega would have been influenced by Fichte's Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik and Phänomenologie des Geistes, as well as by Georg Simmel and the Marburg neo-Kantians. Later he would be, like Heidegger, deeply influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey.
A15 — I:o: HERACLITUS EPIGRAPHS.
The fragments quoted at the end of Chapters III, IV, V, X, XI, and XV have been translated by Kathleen Freeman in her Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. The fragments quoted at the end of Chapters I, VI, VII, VII, and XVI have been translated by Philip Wheelwright in his Heraclitus. By Wheelwright's numbering system the fragments quoted are 10, 83, 88, 70, and 45. The fragment quoted at the end of Chapter IX has been translated by G. 5. Kirk and J. E. Raven in The Pre-Socratic Philosophers where it is numbered fragment 254. The fragment quoted at the end of Chapter XII has been translated by John Burnet in his Early Greek Philosophy, fragment 7. The fragments at the end of Chapters II, XIII, and XIV have been translated by W. H. S. Jones in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Heraclitus, fragments I, CXXVI, and XIX.
A16 — II:a: RECOURSE TO LOVE ••• IS NEEDED TD EXPLAJN TWO FEATURES Df LEARNING.
In addition to Ortega's writings on the subject discussed below, my views have been influenced by Plato and Goethe. Plato's Symposium is, of course, fundamental but his attitude also is insinuated through most of his works and a familiarity with these is helpful in trying to follow Diotima's teaching as it is recounted by Socrates in the Symposium. There are useful discussions of Eros in Plato's philosophy in Paul Friedländer, Plato: An Introduction, passim and esp. pp. 32-58; F. M. Cornford, The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays, pp. 68-80; G. M. A. Grube, Plato's Thought, pp. 87-119; and Julius Stenzel, Platon der Erzieher, pp. 191-248. Goethe's great examination of the relation of love and self-culture is in Wilhelm Meister, passim. An excellent study by Ortega's contemporary, Max Scheler, is Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, a book that Ortega was quite familiar with. A striking book on Eros and Education could be written.
A17 — II:b: FOR ORTEGA, LOVE YEARNED FOR UNION WITH BEAUTY, TRUTH, ANO GOODNESS.
Some of the more important essays by Ortega concerning his theory of love were "Psicoanálisis, ciencia problemática," 1911, Obras I, pp. 216-238; Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914, Obras I, pp. 310-4; "Leyendo el Aldolfo, libro de amor," 1916, Obras II, pp. 25-8; "Vitalidad, alma, espíritu," 1924, Obras II, pp. 451-460; "Para un psicología del hombre interesante," 1925, Obras IV, pp. 467- 480; and Estudios sobre el amor, 1941, Obras V, pp. 551-626. In her dissertation, "José Ortega y Gasset: The Creation of a Literary Genre for Philosophy," Sister Mary Terese Avila Duffy includes some interesting observations on Eros in Ortega's style, but for the most part, the importance of Eros for Ortega's thought has been ignored by commentators.
A18 — II:c: PHILOSOPHY IS A TRADITION OF SPECULATION.
See Ortega's "Prólogo a Historia de Ia filosofía de Karl Vorländer," 1922, and "Prólogo a Historia de la filosofía de Emile Bréhier," 1942, Obras VI, pp. 292-300, 377-418, as well as Origen y epílogo de la filosofía, 1943, 1960, Obras IX, pp. 349-434, for his views on the history of philosophy, which have influenced my views here. One of the better histories of philosophy for studying Ortega's preparations is The Spirit of Modern Philosophy by Josiah Royce, for in it he treats idealism as a living tradition rather than as a series of closed systems.
A19 — II:d: THE DOUBT THAT CAVE RISE TO THE WIENER KREIS.
For the impact of science on late nineteenth-century thought see Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner, esp. pp. 115--126. On the origins and impulse of the Wiener Kreis see H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reconstruction of European Social Thought, 1890-1930, esp. pp. 397-401. The view that Ortega almost took up is clearly expressed by A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic, esp. pp. 57, 151-3.
A20 — II:e: AT LEIPZIG ORTEGA TOYED WITH AN EMPIRICAL SPECIALTY.
Domingo Marrero said that Ortega was enrolled in these courses in El Centauro, p. 184. Marrero seems to have checked the registration records at Leipzig and Marburg and on such matters he is good authority. However, writing in 1951, he had access to neither Prólogo para alemanes nor the letters. He tried, imaginatively but mistakenly, to reconstruct from Ortega's later work which professors Ortega must have been influenced by in Germany. He imagined an influence by Wundt, whom Ortega did not treat kindly in "Sobre el concepto de sensación," 1913, Obras I, pp. 246-8; he exaggerated the influence of Simmel, whose significance Ortega did not seem to appreciate until two decades later; and he underemphasized the influence of Cohen and Natorp. In Ortega, pp. 204-220, Julián Marías gives a good secondary account of Ortega's experience in Germany. Marías is better than Marrero on influences and not as good on chronological details, and Marías also wrote his account before Ortega's letters from Germany were available. For Ortega's own views of his experience at Leipzig, see Prólogo para alemanes, 1933, 1958., Obras VIII, p. 26., and Ortega., "Cartas inéditas a Navarro Ledesma," Cuadernos, November 1961, pp. 3-18. For the scientific emphasis at Leipzig, see Ortega's "Una fiesta de paz," 1909, Obras I., pp. 124-7, in which he commemorated the 400th anniversary of the University of Leipzig and especially commended its physics and chemistry. For Ortega"s views of Berlin., see Prólogo para alemanes, 1933, 1958, Obras VIII., pp. 26-7, and "'En la Institución Cultural Española de Buenos Aires," 1939, Obras VI, p. 235.
A21 — II:f: AT MARBURG ORTEGA ENTERED A TRUE SCHOOL or PHILOSOPHY.
See Henri Dussort, L'école de Marburg, which is the best work on the school of Marburg although it is fragmentary and unfinished owing to its author's untimely death. For the place of the school, or at least of Hermann Cohen, in modem thought, see Jules Vuillemin, L'héritage Kantien et la revolution Copernicienne. Ortega's fullest description of his experience at Marburg is in Prólogo para alemanes, 1933, 1958, Obras VIII, pp. 26-42.
A22 — II:g: HERMANN COHEN WAS AN ELDERLY, CONVIVIAL PHILOSOPHER.
For a good introduction to Cohen's character and thought, see the appreciation of him by Ernst Cassirer, "Hermann Cohen: Wörte gesprochen an seinen Grabe am 7 April1918," in Cohen, Schriften zur Philosophie und Zeitgeschichte, Vol. I. pp. ix–xvi. Cohen's capacity to contend systematically with a subject is well exemplified by his major works, three commentaries to Kant's three critiques and then three critiques of his own, one on pure reason, one on ethics, and one on esthetics. See Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 1871; Kants Begründung der Ethik, 1877; Kants Begründung der Aesthetik, 1889; Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 1902; Ethik des reinen Willens, 1904; and Aesthetik des reinen Gufühls, 2 vols., 1912. The last three books make up Cohen's System der Philosophie. In addition to discipline, Cohen imparted certain ideas to Ortega, for the latter mentioned that Cohen's logic supported his own idea of life; see "Pidiendo un Goethe desde dentro," 1932, Obras IV, p. 403.
A23 — II:h: COHEN STOPPED WORK FOR SEVERAL WEEKS IN ORDER TO STUDY DON QUIJOTE
The account of this incident is given most fully by Ortega in "Meditación del Escorial," 1915, Obras II, p. 559. It is noteworthy that Cohen's discussion of Don Quixote treated it as an Erziehungsroman in a class with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister; see Aesthetik, Vol. 2, pp. 112, 119-123. Historians of education should make a study of the pedagogical ideas imparted through the Erziehungsroman. For Cohen's conception of system, see particularly, Die systematischen Begriff in Kants vorkritischen Schriften, 1873; Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, pp. 601---612; and Aesthetik des reinen Gefühls, Vol. I, pp. 3-67.
A24 — II:i: AS PHILOSOPHY TURNED ANALYTIC ....
Basic examples of the impulse towards analysis are A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, and The Problem of Knowledge. The absence of an historical interest on the part of those moved by an analytic impulse can be measured by comparing the last-mentioned work by Ayer with a book on the same subject written by a man moved by the systematic impulse, The Problem of Knowledge by Ernst Cassirer (Woglom and Hendel, trans.) For an example of how the conception of reason as a mental faculty still persists, see the article "Reason" by G. J. Warnock in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7, pp. 83-5. In contrast to systematic philosophers who seek to discover the proper standards of reason, Warnock contended that it would be better to proceed directly to "the logical and epistemological analysis and classifications." But how, without first at least an implicit critique of reason, can professional philosophers set forth to themselves acceptable logical and epistemological standards of analysis and classification?
A25 — II:j: IN THE SYSTEMATIC TRADITION, REASON IS RECOGNIZED AS A CULTURAL CREATION.
Thus there is an awesome succession of critiques of reason. An excellent history of this elaboration of reason up to the twentieth century is Léon Brunschvicg, Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale. Nor is this succession of critiques by any means a dead tradition. For important twentieth-century contributions, see Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, especially Volumes I, V, and VII; Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ralph Manheim, trans.; Ortega, La idea de Ia principia en Leibniz y la evolución de la teoría deductiva, 1947, 1958, Obras VIII, pp. 61--356; and Jean Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique. An example of the analytic bias in favor of the critique of knowledge rather than the critique of reason is to be found in the long article by D. W. Hamlyn on "Epistemology, History of" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3, pp. 8-38. Hamlyn defined epistemology as the critique of Knowledge; he treated Kant as an epistemologist in this sense, ignoring the whole problem of how reason is possible; and he completely ignored Dilthey, among other systematic epistemologists.
A26 — II:k: GOADED BY WARTIME GERMANOPHOBIA, ANGLO-AMERICAN CRITICS ATTACKED SYSTEMATJC PHILOSOPHY.
During World War I, German philosophy came under severe attack from American and British philosophers who were trying to contribute to the war effort by showing that German philosophy was to blame for the war. The Oxford Pamphlets that the Oxford University Press distributed widely were most influential. Typical examples were "'How Can War Ever Be Right?" and "Thoughts on the War" by the classical scholar Gilbert Murray; "Nietzsche and Treitschke: The Worship of Power in Modern Germany" by the student of Greek political theory, Ernest Barker; and "German Philosophy and the War" by the philosopher, J. H. Muirhead. See also, Muirhead's German Philosophy in Relation to the War, 1915. American thinkers contributed to the same kind of literature. See John Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics, 1915; and George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy, 1916. Similar works appeared in France; see, for instance, Léon Daudet, Contre l'esprit allemand: De Kant à Krupp. The French critics did not have the prestige of the English and American writers, however, and this might help explain why Anglo-American philosophy veered so sharply from the Continental tradition and why British idealism was unable to withstand the postwar attack by analytic writers, several of the more important of whom, ironically, were German. It was in this climate of putting philosophy in the service of the war efforts that Ortega said that in time of war the thinker must be silent, for that is the only way he can maintain his allegiance to the truth. See "Una manera de pensar–1," España, October 7, 1915, Obras X, p. 337. The most influential Germanophobe work of World War II was The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper, 1950. Charles Frankel, The Case for Modern Man, 1959, contributes to this critique of the continental tradition, but without direct connection to the war. Many other books might be mentioned. My characterization of the position draws from these and others, as well as from conversations with colleagues, but it is not given concisely by any of them.
The effectiveness of this critique of systematic philosophy has permitted some thinkers to ignore the real alternatives. Here let us mention only John Dewey's The Quest for Certainty, 1929, for it lacks some of the partisan drawbacks of the wartime books, but is, nevertheless, a systematic critique of the systematic effort to construct a prescriptive conception of reason. Dewey made the same error as Russell did later and as many anti-systematic philosophers do: he imputed a prescriptive theory of knowledge to thinkers in the grand tradition who expounded a prescriptive theory of reason. To prescribe how reasoning should proceed if it is to be cogent is not to prescribe a set of true beliefs that all must mouth. Furthermore, it is one thing to go along with Dewey and to give up prescriptive standards with respect to knowledge, standards that purport to lay down eternal certainties forever valid for all, but it is quite another thing to give up prescriptive standards with respect to reason, standards that describe the mental steps by means of which we can think about the phenomena we perceive with reasonable certitude. The irony of Dewey's critique is that most of his own speculation is a good example of "the quest for certainty" reasonably understood.</p
A27 — II:l: THE SCEPTER OF FORCE HAS NOT STOOD FOR A STABLE REIGN.
There is a substantial literature on the relation between philosophical and ethical nihilism and political brutalism. On this matter, of course, Ortega's La rebelión de las masas, 1930, Obras IV, pp. 113-31, is one of the essential references. The other three are Friedrich Nietzsche, Aus dem Nachlass der Achtzigerjahre, in Werk in drei Bänden, Vol. 3, 491ff., 507ff., 530, 533, 546, 548ff., 553ff., 557ff., 567ff., 583, 617–23, 625f., 634f., 638ff., 666, 670, 675, 676ff., 737f., 774f., 792f., 852f., 854ff., 881f., 893f., and 896; Alfred Weber, Farewell to European History, Or the Conquest of Nihilism, R. F. C. Hull, trans.; and Rudolf Pannwitz, Der Nihilismus und die werdende Welt, especially pp. 104-127. In addition to these works, see Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War. On the general problem of maintaining a sense of principle, see Wolfgang Köhler, The Place of Value in a World of Facts, and Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner. In Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay by Stanley Rosen, there is a spirited critique of contemporary philosophical movements that end in nihilism. Rosen argues that the solution is a return to past modes of thought; I think Nietzsche was more acute when he argued that the only way to solve the problem of nihilism is to pass through and beyond it.
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A28 — II:m: NATORP TAUGHT A VERSION OF IDEAUSM THAT PROVOKED ORTEGA.
The best introductory essay on Natorp is by Ernst Cassirer, "Paul Natorp: 24. Januar 1854-17. August 1924," in Kant-Studien, Band 30, 1925, pp. 273-298. Natorp's conception of civic pedagogy was developed in his Sozialpädagogik: Theorie der Willenserziehung auf der Grundlage der Gemeinschaft, 3rd. ed., 1909; and Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Sozialpädagogik, 2nd. ed., 1922. A closely related work was Sozialidealismus: Neue Richtlinien sozialer Erziehung, 2nd. ed., 1918. Natorp's conception of philosophy is presented on a popular level in his Philosophie: Ihr Problem und ihre Probleme, 2nd. ed., 1918; and on a more systematic level in Vorlesungen über praktische Philosophie, 1925, and the posthumous Philosophische Systematik, edited by Hans Natorp, 1958. Perhaps Natorp's best known work, and one that is very important for his theory of civic pedagogy and of philosophy, is Platos Ideenlehre: Eine Einführung in den Idealism us, 1903. For a good discussion of Natorp's views, see Heinrich Levy, "Paul Natorp's praktische Philosophie," Kant-Studien, 31, 1926, pp. 311-329.
A29 — II:n: WHAT NATORP PROCLAIMED ABOUT PLATO, KANT, ANO PESTALOZZI, ORTEGA RECOGNIZED IN FlCHTE, RENAN, AND NIETZSCHE.
The last three authors were the ones Ortega most frequently referred to in his early writings and his letters of the time. See "Cartas inéditas a Navarro Ledesma," Cuadernos, November 1961, pp. 3-18; "'El sobre hombre," 1908, Obras I pp. 91-5; "La teología de Renan," 1910, and "Renan," 1909, Obras I, pp. 133-6, 443-467; and in "Asamblea para el progreso de las ciencias," 1908, Obras I, p. 108, the lament that nowhere in Spain were the works of Fichte available. Natorp made only scattered references to these men, although their work could be viewed as civic pedagogy.
A30 — II:o: AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL THEORISTS HAVE FORGOTTEN NATORP.
In 1900, a short review by Arthur Allin of the first edition of Natorp's Sozialpädagogik appeared in the Educational Review, Vol. 19, March 1900, pp. 290-295. A more substantial essay, "Paul Natorp's Social Pedagogy," by M. W. Meyerhardt was published in The Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. 23, March 1916, pp. 51-62. One of the few other significant pieces on Natorp published in the United States is the short, lucid article by Horace L. Friess, "Paul Natorp," in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 11, p. 283. Another excellent review of Natorp' s accomplishments is the translation of an article, "Paul Natorp," by Mariano Campo in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5, pp. 445-8.
A31 — III:a: ORTEGA'S PRECOCITY WAS TO REALIZE THAT SPANISH RENOVATlON WAS AN EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM.
This conviction was apparent in some of Ortega's earliest essays. See "La pedagogía del paisaje," 1906; "Sobre los estudios clásicos," 1907; "'Pidiendo una biblioteca," 1908; and "Asamblea para el progreso de las ciencias," 1908; in Obras I, pp. 53–7, 63–7, 81–5, and 99–110. See also "Reforma del carácter, no reforma de costumbres," El Imparcial, October 5, 1907, Obras X, pp. 17–21. In the letter of May 28, 1905, to Navarro Ledesma, Ortega wrote about the educational responsibilities of the Spanish reformers; see "Cartas inéditas a Navarro Ledesma," Cuadernos, November 1961, especially p. 12.
A32 — III:b: UNAMUNO AND ORTEGA SHOWED MANY POINTS IN COMMON IN WRITING ABOUT SPANISH REFORM.
There is need for a a study comparing the view of Spanish reform held by the two critics. Paulino Garagorri's excellent work, Unamuno, Ortega, Zubiri en la filosofía Española, is confined, as the title suggests, to a comparison of philosophical views. A study of their theories of reform should be encouraged by the recent appearance of Ortega's political writings in Obras X and XI and of the definitive edition of Unamuno's works. Such a study would stretch from the 1890's up to 1936 and might point out similarities and dissimilarities between the reactions of the two to events. I have made a much less ambitious comparison, confining myself to the period up to World War I for the most part, comparing views on more general political. economic, and social matters, not particular events. Unamuno seems to me to have dealt with these matters more explicitly, but with less commitment.
Both favored an effective political system responsive to the popular will but not necessarily following familiar parliamentary procedures. Such a position was an integral element in most views of Spanish reform because one very important aspect of Spain's difficulties was that its population had never been integrated into a single body of citizens all of whom had an equal stake in the community. With numerous elements of the people effectively excluded from participation in national life, democratic machinery frequently served very undemocratic ends. In 1898, Unamuno sounded these themes in "Architectura social," OC XI, pp. 53–9 i "Mas sociabilidad," OC XI, pp. 60–7; and "Renovación," Obras I. pp. 686–8. (The abbreviation OC is used for the 1958 edition of Unamuno's Obras completas published by Afrodisio Aguado; the abbreviation Obras is used for the Definitive Edition of Unamuno's Obras completas published by Escelicer, beginning in 1966. For some essays it has been necessary to use the earlier edition, as the later one is not yet complete.) Some of Unamuno's clearest statements on the form of politics he would like are in "La civilización es civismo," 1907, Obras III, pp. 303–7, and "Glosas a la vida: sobre la opinión pública," 1904, Obras III, pp. 308–310. In the latter article Unamuno contended that the great problem in Spanish politics was the difficulty of building up an effective system of public opinion about public affairs in the Spanish populace; and he was not sanguine because with such a large portion of the populace composed of illiterates and semi-literates, the spread of public opinion was greatly impeded. In the former article Unamuno condemned the tendency in Spanish politics to over-represent rural areas because the rural populace could not then hold its representatives accountable; popular government turned into an irresponsible government. Urbanization and the mechanization of farming were conditions of the reform of Spanish politics, he suggested. For somewhat later views along parallel lines, see "Los profesionales de la política," 1914, OC IX, pp. 797–801, and "Hacer política," 1915, OC IX, pp. 843–7.
Ortega's views of political reform will be treated at some length in the text. His major pre-World War I statement on politics is Vieja y nueva política, 1914, Obras I, pp. 265–307. Earlier expressions may be found throughout Obras X, passim; especially in "De re política," El Imparcial, July 31, 1908, Obras X, pp. 62–7; "Pablo Iglesias," El Imparcial, May 13, 1910, Obras X, pp. 139–142; "Sencillas reflexiones," El Imparcial, August 22 and September 6, 1910, Obras X, pp. 162–170; "De puerta de tierra: la opinión pública," El Imparcial, September 19 and 20, 1912, Obras X, pp. 186–194; "Ni legislar ni gobernar," El Imparcial, September 25, 1912, Obras X, pp. 195–199; and "De un estorbo nacional," El Imparcial, April 22, 1913, and El País, May 12, 1913, Obras X, pp. 232–7, 241–5.
Both Unamuno and Ortega desired a stronger economy and a more egalitarian distribution of the national product. This was a fundamental concern for anyone aiming at Spanish reform. As early as 1896 Unamuno came out strongly in "La dignidad humana," Obras I, pp. 971–7, for a more humane, egalitarian use of the economic product. In this essay Unamuno spoke out against nineteenth-century liberalism in both economics and culture, for laissez-faire individualism expended energies destructively in efforts by each to differentiate himself from others. The proper measure of the value of things material and spiritual was not the degree to which they differentiated one man from the others, but the degree to which they facilitated each man's effort to fulfill his human dignity. Such views lead to the twentieth-century liberalism of the welfare state. For other essays by Unamuno explaining his economic views, see "Doctores en industria, 1898, Obras III, pp. 692–7; "La conquista de las mesetas," 1899, Obras III, pp. 702–711; "Hay que crear necesidades," 1899, OC XI, pp. 71–4; "La dehesa Española, 1899, OC XI, pp. 75–82; "Examen de conciencia," 1900, OC XI, pp. 95–101; "Pan y letras: el campo y la ciudad," 1908, OC XI, pp. 163–7; and "Campaña agraria," 1914, OC XI, pp. 300–313.
In a letter to Ortega, Salamanca, November 21, 1912, in Revista de Occidente, October 1964, p. 20, Unamuno contended that for liberalism to be relevant to twentieth-century Spain, it had "to make itself democratic and socialist." This was a position Ortega had himself been developing at some length. Ortega's development of this argument can be followed in the following: "'La reforma liberal," Faro, February 23, 1908, Obras X, pp. 31–8; "El recato socialista," El Imparcial, September 2, 1908, Obras X, pp. 79–81; "La ciencia y la religión como problemas políticos," lecture in the Madrid Casa del Partido Socialista, December 2, 1909, Obras X, pp. 119–125; "Pablo Iglesias," El Imparcial, May 13, 1910, Obras X, pp. 139–142; "La herencia viva de Costa," El Imparcial February 20, 1911, Obras X, pp. 171–5; "Miscelánea socialista," El Imparcial, September 30, and October 6, 1912, Obras X, pp. 200–206; and so on.
Perhaps the essay that best shows the link between Unamuno's economic and educational views is "La pirámide nacional," 1898, Obras III, pp. 689–691. In it Unamuno contended that as the production of goods for popular consumption was the basis of the strength of a national economy, so the creation of culture for popular consumption was the foundation of a nation's intellectual strength. Spain needed a great extension of popular education, but it lacked the teachers, Unamuno observed. In the face of this situation, it was important that many teachers on the higher levels convert themselves into primary school instructors. This emphasis on the broadening of popular education went along with another emphasis, one on the qualitative improvement of higher education, a concern that both Unamuno and Ortega were intimately involved in. At first the stress on wider popular education and more thorough higher education may not seem to go together. Unamuno put the theory well in "Los escritores y el pueblo," 1908, Obras III, pp. 294–8. It was not essential that high culture be popular if it was to have a public effect; to do so it needed to be inwardly virile, robust, powerful. A literate populace would not directly consume high culture, but they would contribute to it and be affected by it indirectly if that culture were powerful, not weak and diluted. Thus the best condition of a nation's culture would be achieved with very extensive popular education and very rigorous higher education.
Unamuno produced many essays on education. A good study of his work as a leader in the university is Miguel de Unamuno, Universitaire by Yvonne Turin. In "La educación, prólogo a la obra de Bunge," 1902, Obras I, pp. 1021–2, Unamuno made a distinction, similar to that which was important for Ortega, between the education of the person, "pedagogía," and the education of the community, "demagogía" in the Greek sense or "demopedía." Because Unamuno used his essays to conduct demopedía, a number of those concerning the preservation of Spanish virtues and dealing with the problem of separatism in the provinces were about education. This holds especially for Unamuno's views of the catalán question, for he primarily feared linguistic localism as a threat to the full development of Spanish culture. In addition, however, to his many acts of demopedía, Unamuno published much on pedagogy per se. The long essay, "De la enseñanza superior en España," 1899, Obras I, pp. 734–772, is an excellent introduction to the problems of higher education in Spain. In "Los cerebrales," 1899, OC XI, pp. 89–94, and "Cientificismo," 1907, Obras III, pp. 352–7, he raised questions about the unreserved pursuit of pure intellect. In "Recelosidad y pedantaría," 1912, OC XI, pp. 197–200; "No hipotequeís el pensamiento," 1913, OC XI, pp. 251–3; "Arabesco pedagógico" and "Otro arabesco pedagógico," 1913, OC XI, pp. 290–300; and "¿Barbados? ¿Pedantes?", 1914, OC XI, pp. 806–810 he entered into polemics of the time for and against trends that were attracting attention.
Ortega also devoted much attention to both popular and higher education, agreeing that the former should be greatly extended and the latter substantially improved. For Ortega the most objectionable feature in popular education was the split between schools for the rich and schools for the poor, a phenomenon that he decried in "Reforma del carácter, no reforma de costumbres," El Imparcial, October 5, 1907, Obras X, p. 20; "La pedagogía social como programa política," 1910, Obras I, p. 518; and elsewhere. Ortega's educational views are discussed throughout the text; representative sources for this period include "Catecismo para la lectura de una carta," El Imparcial, February 10, 1910, Obras X, pp. 133–8; "Diputado par la cultura," El Imparcial, May 28, 1910, Obras X, pp. 143–6; "Sobre los estudios clásicos," 1907, "Pidiendo una biblioteca," 1908, and "Asamblea para el progreso de las ciencias," 1908, Obras I, pp. 63–7, 81–5, and 99–110.
Both Unamuno and Ortega sought to preserve Spanish virtues and to avoid materialism in Spain. This point is crucial for Unamuno. Well before 1898 he had developed it at length in En torno al casticismo, 1895, Obras I, pp. 775–869. In 1898, in "De regeneración: en lo justo," Obras III, pp. 700–I, Unamuno put very well the task of the enterprise that would occupy Spanish critics for many years: "Today, the first duty of the directing classes in Spain is, more than teaching the pueblo physics, chemistry, or English, to study it, à fond and with love, drawing from it its unconscious ideal of life, the spirit that moves it through its passage on earth, comprehending its regional differences in order to conserve them by integrating them, and studying the prospects of capital and labor." In "Afrancesamiento," 1899, OC XI, pp. 68–70, Unamuno spoke out against the inflated copying of French mores at the sacrifice of the Spanish; in "De patriotismo," 1899, Obras III, pp. 712–4; "El pueblo español," 1902, Obras III, pp. 715–7; "El individualismo español," 1903, Obras I, pp. 1085–1094; and "Sobre la independencia patria," 1908, Obras III, pp. 730–2, he analyzed aspects of Spanish character he believed essential to Spain's future; and in "Escepticismo fanático," 1908, Obras III, pp. 358–362, and "Materialismo popular," 1909, Obras III, pp. 363–7, he warned against intellectual outlooks that were easily adopted yet that were threats to Spanish culture. In "La supesta anormalidad española," 1913, Obras III, pp. 733–7, Unamuno criticized Ortega for calling Spain an abnormal nation.
Despite this criticism, Ortega's views were not far from Unamuno's, as I explain in the text. For Ortega's concern for Spanish character, see "Reforma del carácter, no reforma de costumbres," El Imparcial, October 5, 1907, Obras X, pp. 17–21; "La cuestión moral," El Imparcial, August 22, 1908, Obras X, pp. 73–8; "El lirismo en Montjuich," El Imparcial, August 10, 1910, Obras X, pp. 159–161; and "Moralejas," 1906, "La epopeya castellana," 1910, "Nuevo libro de Azorín," 1912, and "AI margen del libro Los Iberos," 1909, Obras I, pp. 44–57, 146, 239–244, and 494–8.
On the question of separatism, both Unamuno and Ortega saw the source of the problem to be, not in regional malevolence, but in the weakness of the capital. Both would solve the problem by recognizing authentic diversities and making Castile more worthy of pre-eminence. Unamuno was deeply concerned by the problem. In contrast to Ortega, Unamuno, a Basque, had to face the problem in his inner character. Unamuno clearly gave his allegiance to Castilian, and owing to this, he was in some ways less sympathetic to linguistic separatism than Ortega. Thus, in "La cuestión del vascuence," 1902, Obras I, pp. 1043–1062, Unamuno was not sympathetic with those who wanted to preserve Basque as a living language at any price. Different aspects of Unamuno's view of the whole question can be found in "La crisis del patriotismo," 1896, Obras I, pp. 978–984; "Injustia inútil," 1899, OC XI, pp. 83–5; "La reforma del castellano," 1901, OC III, pp. 273–280; "Contra el purismo," 1903, Obras I. pp. 1063–1073; "La crisis actuel del patriotismo español," 1905, Obras I, pp. 1286–1298; "Mas sabre la crisis del patriotismo," 1906, Obras III, pp. 865–875; "Sobre el problema catalan," 1908, OC XI, pp. 147–162; "Sabre el regionalismo español," 1915, OC XI, pp. 357–361; "La soledad de la España castellana," 1916, Obras III, pp. 763–7; and "Los solidos y los mestureros," 1917, Obras III, pp. 768–770; and so on.
Unamuno put great store in the cultural value of Castilian Spanish, which he hoped would become a great inclusive, linguistic tool, binding all of Spain and Spanish America together. Ortega put less store on a language as the foundation of a culture; thus he wrote far less about the genius of languages than did Unamuno and he looked on separatism more as a political problem than did Unamuno. Unamuno's linguistic view of the separatist question came out very clearly in his essay "Política y cultura," 1908, Obras III, pp. 299–302. In it Unamuno recognized the political strength and value of Catalán nationalism, but he contended that it was not a strong force culturally, for what little would be gained by resurrecting Catalán would be far outweighed by what would be lost by making Castilian a second language in the Catalán provinces. Since Spanish progress depended primarily on cultural improvement, Unamuno thought that, over all, Catalán nationalism was not a constructive force.
Like Unamuno, Ortega aimed to preserve Castilian preeminence in Spain, and he thought that the main source of separatist sentiment was the weakness of the center. However, Ortega did not think that the cultural strength of a nation should be based on linguistic unity; for Ortega, a nation was more properly an articulation of diversities. Consequently, he was a bit more receptive to Catalán nationalism than Unamuno was. Early views of Ortega's appreciation of diversity within a nation may be found in "Sobre el proceso Rull," Faro, April 12, 1908, Obras X, pp. 47–50; "Diputado por la cultura," El Imparcial, May 25, 1910, Obras X, pp. 143–6; and "Ni Legislar ni gobernar," El Imparcial, September 25, 1912, Obras X, pp. 195–9.
That both Unamuno and Ortega envisaged a cultural commonwealth with Spanish America is clear, not only from what they wrote, but from what they did. Unamuno published a significant portion of his essays in Argentine newspapers and in them he often responded to queries and criticisms made to him by Spanish American correspondents. Furthermore, Unamuno wrote voluminously about Spanish America; see especially La lengua Española en América, Obras IV, pp. 569–703, and Letras de América y otros lecturas," Obras IV, pp. 709–1054. See also, "Sobre la argentinidad," 1910, Obras III, pp. 543–7, and "Algunas consideraciones sabre la literatura Hispano-Americana," 1906, Obras III, pp. 900–924. Ortega had similar involvements. He started writing for La Prensa at least as early as 1913, as a reference by Unamuno (OC, IV, p. 1099) shows. A thorough examination of that paper and La Nación might turn up earlier articles. In "Nueva España contra vieja España," España, February 19, 1915, Obras X, pp. 252–3, Ortega noted that Spain was not respected in Latin America, a sign of the need for Spanish rejuvenation. Soon afterwards he went on a lecture trip to Buenos Aires, the success of which was reported with some pride in España. See: J. M. M. S., "Ortega y Gasset en America," España, March 7, 1917, p. 11.
Unamuno was much more explicit than Ortega about the place of the church in Spain. For Unamuno's views see "Mi religión," 1907, Obras III, pp. 259–263, and "Verdad y vida," 1905, Obras III, pp. 264–5, in which he explained his conception of religion—finding truth in life and life in truth—using it to criticize both the dogmatic Catholicism and the dogmatic anticlericalism prevalent in Spain. See also "La Fe," 1900, Obras I, pp. 962–970; "Religión y patria," 1904, Obras I, pp. 1108–1115; and "El Cristo español," 1909, Obras III, pp. 273–6. Ortega said very little about the Church in Spain. In some of his early essays he criticized the Church for making religion into a divisive, anti-social force; on this point see especially "La ciencia y la religión como problemas políticos," 1909, Obras X, pp. 119–127. In this lecture, which Ortega gave in response to an invitation to give an "anticlerical" lecture, he observed that people were too frequently against things and too seldom for things. This feeling probably explains why Ortega said so little about the Church. Years later Ortega stated his attitude concisely: "Gentlemen, I am not Catholic, and since my youth I have tried, even in the humblest official duties of my private life, to order my life in a non-Catholic way; but I am not disposed to let myself be inspired by the figurehead of an archaic anti-clericalism." Rectificación de la República, 1931, Obras XI, p. 409.
A33 — III:c: PRESCIENCE HAS BEEN THE GIFT OF HUMANISTIC HISTORIANS.
Much remains to be done by historians in America if the potentialities of idealistic historiography are to be realized. What is needed is not a history of ideas, as such, but a history of character as it is oriented by ideals and limited by particular circumstances. The works of Tocqueville, Burckhardt, and Dilthey provide substantive examples of what can be expected of idealistic historiography. None of the three spent much time examining the material causes of events. Each was interested in the ways that tradition and custom, thought and art influenced history. In The Old Regime and The French Revolution, Stuart Gilbert, trans., Tocqueville examined how easy it was to proclaim a change in ideology and how hard it was to transform ingrained patterns of thought and the concomitant patterns of action. The historical consequences of ideas is a constant theme in The French Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, John Lukacs, ed., especially pp. 33–45, 226–230. Finally, Tocqueville's method in writing Democracy in America was to seek the characteristic ways of thinking of Americans and to project the probable historical consequences of these ideas. Needless to say, this is a far more humane version of historicism than are those grounded in materialistic or ethnic theories. Like Tocqueville, Burckhardt based his interpretation of The Civilization of The Renaissance in Italy on an examination of the way men thought. He made this method explicit in Force and Freedom by making man's three great intellectual creations—the state, religion, and culture—the fundamental determinants of historical change. Dilthey's great historical work is his Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2. His views on history will be dealt with at more length in later chapters. Werner Jaeger's great work, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, 3 vols., Gilbert Highet, trans., points the way for bringing this historiographical tradition to bear on the history of education.
A34 — III:d: WITHOUT PRINCIPtES, INNOVATION DEPENDS ON SELF-CONFIRMING MYTHS.
Ernst Cassirer's The Myth of the State is a profound history of the function of myth in Western politics from Plato through Fascism. Cassirer perceived that Plato was the basis of our struggle against political myths, rather than the source of these. His is a far more lucid examination of our tradition, especially with respect to Plato and Hegel, than is that of Sir Karl Popper with its mythical horde of historicist bogeymen who seek to subvert the champions of the open society. See Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies and compare the sections on Plato and Hegel to those by Cassirer. Paul Natorp's Sozialpädagogik, for all its rigorous idealism, is a profound and rather hard-headed appreciation of the function principles play in public affairs. Political theory could be greatly improved if, prior to the study of "who-gets-what-when-and-where," there was a study of "who-will-do-what-why"; that is, if a study of possible motivations preceded a study of actual rewards.
A35 — III:e: THE DIALECTIC OF SPANISH REFORM . . . .
It is important that careful consideration be paid to the chronology by which various positions developed. Pedro Laín Entralgo based his examination of Europeanization on the work of Ortega with little reference to earlier theories; see España como problema, pp. 648–666. This procedure is convenient but deceptive if it causes Unamuno' s writings on Spanish renovation to be read as if directed at Ortega's views. First of all, Unamuno's writing was addressed to Spanish–speaking people, not simply to Spaniards; a major portion of it appeared originally in Argentina: qualifications Unamuno introduced for Latin Americans did not mean that national regeneration was not as central a concern to him as it was to Ortega. Second, the critic should note how Unamuno used other people's opinions in constructing his essays; he very frequently made his essay a critique of someone else's view, not to combat that view, but to develop his own. Unamuno's one essay giving an extended critique of Ortega's view is a good case in point. "La supuesta anormalidad española," was published in Hispania, a British magazine, and it criticized a single observation that Ortega made—Spain is an abnormal nation—in an article published in the Buenos Aires newspaper, La Prensa. Unamuno was simply using Ortega's remarks to raise questions about what one means by a nation and how these meanings should be applied to Spain; neither agreement nor disagreement with Ortega's view of Spanish reform was really implied. (See Obras III, pp. 733–7.) Third, as was suggested in the bibliographical remarks above, Unamuno and Ortega were not that far apart on substantive questions of reform. Although Unamuno did not direct his essays at Ortega, it does not mean that the nonchalance was reciprocal. Throughout his early essays Ortega appreciatively, yet distinctly, referred to Unamuno as a chief exponent of a view to be combated. Examples of this practice are "Glosas a un discurso," El Imparcial, September 11, 1908, Obras X, pp. 82–5; "Nuevas glosas," El Imparcial, September 26, 1908, Obras X, pp. 86–90; and "Unamuno y Europa, fábula," 1909, Obras I, pp. 128–132. By 1910, however, Ortega was claiming that whatever Unamuno's doctrine, his example was the inspiration of Europeanization; and in 1914 Ortega vehemently expressed his outrage at the removal of Unamuno as rector of the University of Salamanca. See "La guerra y la destitución de Unamuno," 1914, "La destitución de Unamuno," 1914, and "En defensa de Unamuno," 1914, Obras X, pp. 256–7, 258–261, 261–8.
<span id="A36"A36 — III:f: LIKE MANY CURRENT THEORIES OF MODERNIZATION, EUROPEANIZATION . . . .
The literature on modernization has gone through something of the same dialectical development that the Spanish Europeanizing literature went through. For many, modernization is seen as a simple transfer of the external characteristics of industrial societies to industrializing ones. Typical of this outlook is Industrialism and Industrial Man by Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick H. Harbison, and Charles A. Myers. The authors treat industrialism as a set of attitudes and outlooks that should be substituted through education, training, and manipulation for the sense of life that arises from the traditional mode of living. In real life, change is much more complicated, for the traditional sense of life does not disappear; it cannot be pushed out by a new, industrial view; it must be transformed. The example of Nigeria, which used to be Professor Harbison's favorite example of the power of formal, Western education to induce industrialism, shows well how ineffective this view is in the face of cultural complexity. A more recent school of thought about modernization is well represented by C. E. Black's The Dynamics of Modernization. Black does not indulge in the simplicities of cultural transfer. However, there are problems that arise from his attempt to plot several patterns of modernization by abstracting from historical generalizations. This effort purports to define direction in development without making value judgments. But the concept of development, when not based on rationally defended value judgments, becomes dangerous: either the future is reduced to the fulfillment of an inevitably as with Marx, or the person is asked to pattern his actions on the basis of hypostatized theory that does not really tell the person anything about the real conditions under which he acts.
A37 — III:g: COSTA'S CONCEPTION OF EUROPEANIZATION DEALT WITH SUPERFICIAL MATTERS.
My statements radically condense selections from Costa's works that were themselves a major reduction and simplification of his thought. Hence, I present them, not as a characterization of Costa, who was a serious thinker and complicated man, but as indications of views to which overly optimistic Europeanizers responded. Although Costa's views were more complicated than those of popular Europeanization, he did much to feed that movement. For sea power, see Costa, Ideario, pp. 55–82; for education see Ibid., pp. 93–106, and Costa, Maestro, escuela y patria; for industrialization and agriculture see Ideario, pp. 107–120, 145–172; for the social and administrative revolution see Ibid., pp. 121–144; and for the policy towards regionalism see Ibid., pp. 209–245, 274–282. There is a good characterization of Costa in Trend, The Origins of Modern Spain, pp. 153–168. For Ortega on Costa, see "La herencia viva de Costa," El Imparcial, February 20, 1911, Obras X, pp. 171–5.
A38 — III:h: UNAMUNO KNEW EUROPE BETTER THAN THE EUROPEANIZERS DID.
In "La europeización como programa," Pedro Laín Entralgo pointed out that Unamuno was able to criticize the more superficial Europeanizers because he understood the genius of Europe better than they did; see España como problema, p. 649. Unamuno particularly despised French materialism and he denounced it sharply in "Afrancesamiento," 1899, OC XI, pp. 68–70. His general opposition to materialism is well expressed in "Cientificismo," 1907, "Escepticismo fancático," 1908, and "Materialismo popular," 1909, in Obras III, pp. 352–367. The fear that the importation of European externals might destroy the traditions of Spanish character was expressed very early by Unamuno and Ángel Ganivet in their exchange El provenir de España, 1898, Obras III, pp. 637–677. Other essays by Unamuno pertinent to Europeanization are "Sobre la europeización," 1906, OC III, pp. 783–800; and "Programa," 1906, OC XI, pp. 137–142. The extent of Unamuno's knowledge of Europe can be estimated from his Letras italianas, Obras IV, pp. 1087–1131; Letras inglesas, Obras IV, pp. 1135–1203; Letras francesas, Obras IV, pp. 1237–1316; Letras portugesas, Obras IV, pp. 1319–1364; Letras alemanas, Obras IV, pp. 1367–1394; and Letras rusas, Obras IV, pp. 1397–1405. Most of the essays dealt with in these collections date from a period somewhat later than that with which we are here concerned, yet they indicate Unamuno's interests well. His earlier essays show a remarkable knowledge of European literature, as well as several marked preferences that compare interestingly with Ortega's. Of non-Spanish writers Unamuno was clearly most influenced by Carlyle, Kierkegaard, and William James, three men about whom Ortega had very little to say. On the other hand, Nietzsche and Renan, whom the young Ortega referred to frequently, were not central to Unamuno.
A39 — III:i: ANOTHER SUPERFICIAL ATTEMPT AT EUROPEANIZATION: MODERNISMO.
On Modernismo in Spain see Guillermo Díaz-Plaja, Modernismo frente a noventa y Ocho. At the turn of the century there was also a reform movement called Modernismo in the Catholic Church. This movement was based in Italy, but it was influential in Spain and it was quite different from the literary and artistic Modernismo. For Ortega's approbation of the religious Modernismo, see "Sobre 'El Santo'," 1908, Obras I, pp. 430–8.
A40 — III:j: ORTEGA LIKED THE POETRY OF DARÍO AND VALLE-INCLÁN.
In a letter to Unamuno, Marburg, December 30, 1906, in Revista de Occidente', October 1964, p. 7, Ortega adopted a verse by Rubén Darío as "my verse." For sympathetic critiques of modernist poetry see "La 'Sonata de estío' de Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán," 1904, Obras I, pp. 19–27; "Algunas notas." 1908, Obras I, pp. 111–123; and "Los versos de Antonio Machado," 1912, Obras I, pp. 570–4.
A41 — III:k: HISTORY WAS REVEALED IN THE SELVES OF LIVING MEN.
"No ser hombre de partido," 1930, Obras IV, pp. 75–83, was Ortega's most pointed rejection of ideological commitment, but it is characteristic of all his writing. For the period here in question, see Vieja y nueva politica, 1914, Obras I. especially pp. 285–8. In "¿Hombres o ideas?", 1908, Obras I, pp. 439–443, Ortega expressed a complicated theory of how history revealed itself in the selves of living men, for he was careful to make thought an important determinant, in some ways a more important one than the act. Nevertheless, the person's self was essential as is perhaps showed best in his analysis of historic individuals: Mirabeau, o el politico, 1927, Obras III, pp. 601–637; and "Maura, o la politica," El Sol, December 18, 19, 22, and 31, 1925, and January 7 and 10, 1926, Obras XI, pp. 71–91.
A42 — III:l: ORTEGA'S WRITINGS CONTAIN PHRASES THAT REPEL AMERICAN LIBERALS AND ATTRACT REAOIONARIES.
When The Revolt of the Masses was first published, several American conservatives reviewed it, greeting it as a polemic against democratic government. For instance, Ralph Adams Cram, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1932, "Bookshelf," found it somewhat perplexing "that one who courageously proclaims himself an aristocrat by conviction and a dissentient from the works of democracy should be a supporter of the present republican regime in Spain and a member of the democratic Cortes .... " But this perplexity was not sufficient to make Cram question whether The Revolt of the Masses might be something other than a conservative tract. From then on the book has had high standing with right-wing writers.
Thus, conservatives, such as Albert J. Nock in Our Enemy, the State, have drawn on Ortega's work for their criticism of the expansion of American government. Ralph Adams Cram relied heavily on Ortega's writings for his critical analysis of The End of Democracy, pp. 10–1, 24–5, 66, 86–8, 102–4, 112–9, 249–250. Both Nock and Cram quoted passages from The Revolt of the Masses that coincided with their own views without trying to give an analysis of Ortega's complete argument. Francis Stuart Campbell bolstered his very reactionary contentions in The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large, pp. 18, 35, 92, 100, 105, 330, 337, 340, 344, and 356, with references to Ortega, especially the American compilation called Invertebrate Spain. Norman L. Stamps referred to Ortega's Revolt of the Masses in Why Democracies Fail: A Critical Evaluation of the Causes for Modern Dictatorships, but he reduces Ortega's argument to a paraphrase of Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd. Representing a younger generation of conservatives, William Buckley, Jr., is reported to be writing a book on Ortega; see Ronald Martinetti, "I've Been Reading: Wild Bill Buckley," The Columbia University Forum, Fall 1967, p. 45.
With such friends, it is not surprising that Ortega has made enemies among American enthusiasts of democracy. In Patterns of Anti-Democratic Thought, pp. 96, 106–7, and 132, David Spitz identifies Ortega among the enemy, mainly on the basis of Cram's praise of Ortega in The End of Democracy. In The Revival of Democratic Theory, pp. 41, 85–6, and 144–5, Neal Riemer characterizes Ortega as an opponent of democracy, contending that the doubts Ortega raises about the average man lead logically to an espousal of a paternal, totalitarian dictatorship. In The New Belief in the Common Man, p. 246, Carl J. Friedrich includes Ortega among those who impede democracy by casting excessive doubt on the common man. In The New Democracy and the New Despotism, p. 75, fn. 2, Charles E. Merriam included Ortega among the anti-democrats, but on pp. 203–5, he used Ortega's ideas as an effective aid in analyzing the totalitarian problem. In The Accidental Century, pp. 213–219, 220, 223, 228, 229, Michael Harrington criticizes Ortega as an aristocratic spokesman whose theory of the masses was a reactionary impediment to the development of egalitarian democracy.
The ideological use of Ortega's work is not, by any means, always negative by American liberals and always positive by conservatives. The most critical book in English on Ortega was written by a conservative Catholic priest, José Sánchez Villaseñor, S.J., Ortega y Gasset, Existentialist: A Critical Study of His Thought and Its Sources, Joseph Small, trans. Several enthusiasts of democracy have drawn effectively on Ortega's ideas. T. V. Smith, in The Democratic Way of Life, quoted Ortega in his explanation of the intellectual responsibilities of the democratic citizen. Sigmund Neumann, in Permanent Revolution: Totalitarianism in the Age of Civil War, 2nd. ed., pp. 96–7, 247, sees Ortega as a liberal philosopher who analyzed the spiritual source of totalitarian dynamism. Perhaps the most eloquent and profound use of Ortega's thought on the democratic side is by Charles Lam Markmann in his justification of "letting every voice be heard" as the basis of making democracy work; see his excellent book, The Noblest Cry: A History of the American Civil Liberties Union, pp. 242–3.
A43 — III:m: SCHOLARS CALL ORTEGA AN "ARISTOCRATIC" OR "CONSERVATIVE" THEORIST.
Both liberal and conservative social theorists casually refer to Ortega as an "aristocratic" theorist. See Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, p. 23, where Ortega is found to be against modernity; p. 26, where he is against science; and p. 298, where he is an exponent of an aristocratic conception of culture; William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society, pp. 22, 26, etc., where Ortega is a major example of the "aristocratic" critics of mass society; Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain, p. 69, where Ortega is classed as a conservative; and Francis G. Wilson, "The Anatomy of Conservatives," in W. J. Stankiewicz, ed., Political Thought Since World War II, p. 347, where Ortega is offered as a specimen. Sir Herbert Read, himself anything but a reactionary, saw the matter differently: "Ortega was not, in any way, a reactionary figure ... ;" "Mediodía y noche oscura," Revista de Occidente, July 1966, p. 1.
A44 — III:n: THE LEAGUE fOR SPANI5H POLITICAL EDUCATION.
Salvador de Madariaga, Spain, pp. 309–310, gives an account of the first meeting of the League and Ortega's address to it, and this account is particularly interesting since Madariaga was present at the event. Julián Marías, Ortega, pp. 235–244, devotes a section to the League. He rightly states that the League was important because it was the first time Ortega tried to conduct, rather than just think, politics. But he tells us little more about Ortega's conduct and is content to summarize Ortega's thoughts about the league. A very interesting contribution to comparative politics and education might be made through a study of the various organizations for political education that have arisen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the course of national fonnation and reconstruction.
A45 — III:o: THE BIAS TOWARDS INSTITUTIONALlZED ACTION UNDERLIES A SIGNIFICANT CRITIQUE Of ORTEGA.
Because it would be an exercise in "useless" polemics, this critique is usually not explicitly stated, but one will frequently hear it in the course of discussion, especially among social scientists. The criticism has been put to me vigorously in conversation with Professor Juan Linz. With respect to Ortega, the criticism comes down to a lament that Ortega should have been someone other than the historic Ortega, but the criticism is most interesting not for what it tells us about Ortega, but for what it tells us about ourselves. It would be very illuminating if someone would do an extensive study of the different ways various influential scholars in the diverse disciplines conceive that historically significant actions are brought about, for a good part of our disagreements over the significance of various men and events may well be rooted in our confusions about how history gets made.
A46 — III:p: ORTEGA WAS NO TECHNOCRAT.
Ortega showed a keen appreciation for the importance of high technical competence within industry and government ministries. Thus, in saying that he was no technocrat, one is not saying that he scorned technical excellence. The question, rather, concerned the kind of shared· aspirations that might bring about and sustain technical excellence. To achieve technical excellence, a people had to aspire to much more than technical excellence, for the truly competent technician was the man who had set out to master the pinnacles of science and who found along the way that his proper contribution was working somewhere short of that goal. This view was fundamental to Ortega's analysis of the dangers to modern civilization inherent in a general lowering of aspirations, and he gave a good early expression of it in "Asamblea para el progreso de las ciencias," 1908, Obras I, pp. 99–110. The greatest menace to technology was the technocrat who believed that technology would alone suffice.
A47 — IV:a: ORTEGA'S PURPOSES ARE REFLECHD IN HIS PROSE STYLE.
There have been several studies of Ortega as a writer. A rather technical but useful work is Lengua y estilo de Ortega y Gasset by Ricardo Senabre Sempere, although Senabre goes too far towards considering Ortega's style independent from his thought. Sister Mary Terese Avila Duffy does not do this in her interesting dissertation, "José Ortega y Gasset: The Creation of a Literary Genre for Philosophy"; but Ortega's style was more than a philosophical genre. Julián Marías has a thoughtful section on Ortega as a writer in Ortega—I: Circunstancia y vocación, pp. 259–353. In Origen y epílogo de la filosofía, 1943, 1960, Obras X, pp. 400–2, Ortega briefly discussed the importance of style for comprehending philosophy, and it is a subject that merits much further study. It is surprising, in view of all the attention that has been paid in recent years to language in philosophy, that the techniques of the literary critic have not been more fruitfully applied to the works of past philosophers. A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives by Kenneth Burke indicate the possibilities that might arise for systematic philosophy and Preface to Plato by Eric A. Havelock the possibilities for historical interpretation.
A48 — IV:b: IN NO SINGLE WORK DID ORTEGA GIVE A COMPLETE STATEMENT OF HIS DOCTRINE.
Ortega's posthumous works, generally not devoted to the task of Europeanization, were more systematic than his earlier writings. But only La idea de principia en Leibniz y la evolución de la teoría deductiva, 1947, 1958, Obras VIII, pp. 59–356, approaches being a systematic work of philosophy, and even it has many features that suggest a series of occasional essays. Ortega's discussion of the character of books and of reading in the opening part of his "Comentario al Banquete de Platón," 1946, 1962, Obras VIII, pp. 751–767, are very important for studying why Ortega chose to present his philosophy in the form that he did.
A49 — IV:c: BERTRAND RUSSELL, TO CHOOSE A PHILOSOPHER KNOWN FOR HIS UNIVERSAL CURIOSITY . . . .
For the range of Russell's interests see Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn, eds., The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell. In many of Russell's excursions into topics outside his central epistemological interests one can sense that his analysis of the topic has benefited from the continual sharpening of his intelligence in his analyses of philosophical problems; but one often finds no direct carry-over from his technical to his general concerns. Thus Power: A New Social Analysis and Education and the Good Life might have been written by any lucid thinker, not necessarily by a man of Russell's particular philosophic convictions. A complicated problem arises when there is no integral relationship between different aspects of a man's work, for if he achieves greatness in one matter, his reputation will carry over and affect the way all his work is received, even though the ideas responsible for his reputation are irrelevant to his other concerns.
A50 — IV:d: UNLIKE BUBER, ORTEGA RARELY WROTE ABOUT DIALOGUE.
For Buber's conception of dialogue see I and Thou, 2nd. ed., R. G. Smith, trans., passim; and Pointing the Way, Maurice 5. Friedman, trans., esp. pp. 63–105, 237–9. Also, unlike Ortega, Buber wrote literary dialogues; see Daniel: Dialogues on Realization, Maurice Friedman, trans. The following from Ortega's "La pedagogía social como programa política," 1910, Obras t p. 520, raises the question whether the I–Thou philosophy was not very much "in the air" in early twentieth-century thought in Germany before Buber's fame. "In this way Jesus softly admonishes us: do not content yourself with making your I high, wide, and deep; find the fourth dimension of your I, which is your neighbor, the Thou, the community."
Most of Ortega's explicit statements about dialogue will be quoted below, but these alone do not give a sufficient idea of the importance of dialogue for him. To grasp the full importance of dialogue it is necessary to keep in mind Ortega's perspectivist epistemology as it is explained in El tema de nuestra tiempo, 1923, Obras III, pp. 145–242; his conception of the history of thought as a creative, dialectical development as he explains in "Prólogo a Historia de la filosofía de Emile Bréhier," 1942, Obras VI, pp. 377–412, and Origen y epílogo de la filosofía, 1943, 1960, Obras IX, pp. 349–434; and his sense for the problems of writing and reading as they are explained in "Prólogo a una edición de sus Obras," 1932, Obras VI, pp. 342–354; "Miseria y esplendor de la traducción," 1937, Obras V, pp. 433–452; and "Comentario al Banquete de Platón," 1946, 1961, Obras IX, pp. 751–767.
A51 — IV:e: ORTEGA'S WRITING WAS CIRCUM5TANTIAL.
This was true not only of the way Ortega's writing was meant to be encountered by his audience, but also of the way it was composed. While I was researching at the offices of Revista de Occidente, Ortega's method of composition was explained to me by his daughter. Ortega had special note cards on which he would record a single thought whenever it occurred. He would study these cards, and in the light of his basic convictions, he would arrange various thoughts into an argument on a subject, carefully elaborating this skeleton of thoughts into a developed work, each thought becoming a short essay. Many scholars consider it a mark against a man's intellect that he should cultivate conversation. This prejudice underlies a criticism of Ortega. Thus, Raymond Carr writes: "This emphasis on conversational exchange and journalism was one of the main weaknesses of Spanish intellectual life: conversation was the essential foundation of Ortega y Gasset's work." (Spain, p. 60 n.) This suggestion depends, like Father Sánchez's argument, on an improper inference from style to substance. The two founts of Western intellectual life, Greek philosophy and Judea-Christian religion, generated from conversational exchange. No form of intellectual exchange is, in itself, good or bad, strong or weak; such qualities depend on how well the form in question serves its intellectual functions. There is more to this matter, moreover, than a mere qualification to a criticism of Ortega. We are too much in the habit of identifying the quality and even the content of thinking with the style of thinking, and in doing so, we greatly confuse the problem of absorbing new aids to thinking. Except for a few studies like The Art of Memory by Frances Yates, Immagine e parola nella formazione dell'uomo by M. T. Gentile, and Preface to Plato by Eric A. Havelock, educational historians have failed to entertain the possibility that modes of thinking in past times differed from those now dominant. As a result, it has been possible for contemporary critics such as Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media to spread much confusion by not discriminating between changes in modes of thinking and continuity in the basic problems of judgment.
A52 — IV:f: THUS, ORTEGA COULD USE THE PEDAGOGY OF ALLUSIQN.
Owing to the narrowness of our present conception of pedagogy, important dimensions of comparison between the work of various thinkers are difficult to perceive. For instance, there are difficulties explaining how the philosophical views of Ortega and Heidegger differed; yet these difficulties would disappear if we could compare the allusive pedagogy Ortega used in explaining his position with Heidegger's pedagogy of specification. Compare how Ortega and Heidegger handled the problem of ensuring that philosophy referred to life as it was lived. Whereas Ortega chose to explicate his ideas by means of references to everyday situations, Heidegger conceptualized the everyday and insisted that the problem for ontology was to understand the Being of Dasein "in its average everydayness." (Being and Time, Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., pp. 37–8.) Both men began with the same insight into the transcendent primacy of personal existence, and from there one proceeded to convert the technical into the everyday and the other the everyday into the technical. By considering the pedagogical dimension, the way a philosopher chooses to present his views, certain significant questions open up. For instance, what part of the human consequences of a doctrine stems from the doctrine itself and what part from the pedagogy chosen by the philosopher to inform his presentation of his doctrine? This question is significant, for many choose their philosophies according to the human consequences they believe these bear, and it is not always clear whether objectionable consequences derive from the doctrine or the teaching of the doctrine. Thus, in Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay, Stanley Rosen severely criticizes Heidegger for nihilism, suggesting that Heidegger equated silence with the source of significance. One comes away, however, from Rosen's critique with an unsatisfied question: do the doctrines themselves lead to silence or the modes of presenting the doctrines chosen by particular adherents to them?
A53 — TO CULTIVATE INTELLECTUALITY IN SPAIN.
In giving Ortega the Chair of Metaphysics, the university was taking a surprising step, for Ortega had been outspoken about the existing inadequacies of the university and had made known his intention to try to change things. Articles unlikely to endear Ortega to the complacent academic establishment were "Sobre los estudios clásicos," 1907; "Pidiendo una biblioteca," 1908; "Asamblea para el progreso de las ciencias," 1908; and "Una fiesta de paz," 1909, Obras I, pp. 63–7, 81–5, 99–110, 124–7. Other essays that reflect the same views are "La reforma liberal," Faro, February 23, 1908, Obras X, pp. 31–8; "La conservación de la cultura," Faro, March 8, 1908, Obras X, pp. 39–46; "Sobre la pequeña filosofía," El Imparcial, April 13, 1908, Obras X, pp. 51–5; "La cuestión moral," El Imparcial, August 27, 1908, Obras X, pp. 73–8; "Catecismo para la lectura de una carta," El Imparcial, February 10, 1910, Obras X, pp. 133–B; "Pablo Iglesias," El Imparcial, May 13, 1910, Obras X, pp. 139–142; "Diputado por la cultura," El Imparcial, May 28, 1910, Obras X, pp. 143–6; and a lecture given in La Casa de Partido Socialista Madrileño, December 2, 1910 on "La ciencia y la religión como problemas políticos," Obras X, pp. 119–127. It is interesting to compare Ortega's views in this lecture with those of some radical students and professors today who are suggesting with some basis that in times of deep division even the seemingly most disinterested studies are not really apolitical. Somehow we need to learn how to claim protection for originating and exploring ideas without asserting the sterile pretension to disinterestedness.
A54 — TO DEMAND RADICAL IMPROVEMENT IN THE SPANISH UNIVERSITIES.
... (p. 122). For the condition of the Spanish universities and especially their philosophy instruction at the start of Ortega's career, see Marías, Ortega, especially pp. 125–173; and Manuel García Morente, Ensayos, pp. 201–7. For a more general view of the situation see Yvonne Turin, Miguel de Unamuno, Universitaire.
A55 — MEMBERS OF THE SCHOOL OF MADRID HAVE A WIDE RANGE OF CONCERNS.
For a general discussion of the school, see Julián Marías, La escuela de Madrid in Obras de Julián Marías, V, pp. 207–507. Marías concentrates on Ortega's work in the studies included in this book, and he locates the school more in Ortega and certain of Ortega's contemporaries, whereas I locate it primarily in the students of these men who are now carrying on their work. For representative works by the members of the school see the following. Pedro Laín Entralgo has produced a variety of studies in intellectual history, medical history, and philosophy; Ortega's influence shows clearly in Laín's series of major studies: La espera y la esperanza: Historia y teoría del esperar humano, 1957; Teoría y realidad del otro, 2 vols., 1961; and La relación medico-enfermo: Historia y teoría, 1964. Julián Marías has written extensively on numerous subjects, but his most important work is Historia de la filosofía, which gives a good account of the philosophic tradition, showing how Ortega and other twentieth-century thinkers relate to it. José Ferrater Mora is one of the most cosmopolitan of contemporary thinkers. His El ser y la muerte: bosquejo de filosofía integracionista, in Obras selectas, II, pp. 297-484, draws effectively on both Anglo-American and continental philosophic traditions as well as on both theological and scientific studies of life and death. This ability to draw on all the current schools of thought is also reflected in Ferrater's La filosofía en el mundo de hoy, in Ibid., pp. 13-171, which is a very useful study for placing Ortega in twentieth-century philosophy. Finally, his El hombre en la encrucijada, Obras selectas, I, pp. 369-579, is a substantial essay in the history of philosophy. On the surface of things, Paulino Garagorri's work looks less substantial than that of those already mentioned, but such an appearance is deceiving. His studies of Ortega in Ortega, una reforma de la filosofía and Unamuno, Ortega, Zubiri en la filosofía española are useful contributions. In addition, the essays gathered in Ejercicios intelectuales show a wide range of interests, a lively style, and a capacity for penetrating criticism. These qualities, plus his work as managing editor of Revista de Occidente and his involvement in the reform movement in contemporary Spanish public affairs, make him one of the closest followers of Ortega, the only one who preserves the spirit as well as the letter of the master. Simply one work by Luis Díez del Corral need be mentioned, El Rapto de Europa: una interpretación histórica de nuestro tiempo, which contributes in important ways to extending Ortega's concern for Europe's future.
A56 — FOLLOWING ORTEGA'S DEATH, NUMEROUS ESSAYS COMMEMORATED HIS POWER AS A TEACHER.
See, for instance: Julián Marías, "Ortega: historia de una amistad," Obras de Marías, V, pp. 377-381; Antonio Rodríguez Huéscar, "Aspectos de magisterio orteguiano," Con Ortega y otros escritos, pp. 19–30; Manuel Granell, Ortega y su filosofía, pp. 27-35; Paulino Garagorri, Ortega, una reforma de la filosofía, pp. 170-181. There were a number of commemorative issues of various journals dedicated to Ortega. Among them see La Torre of the University of Puerto Rico, No. 15-16, July and December 1956, and Homenaje a Ortega y Gasset, Institute de Filosofía, Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1958. The controversy over Ortega's allegiances at his death may be sampled even at the distance of the New York Times. The obituary in the October 19, 1955, issue stressed Ortega's part in overthrowing Alfonso XIII and founding the Second Republic and drew attention to Ortega's work as a Europeanizer (p. 33, col. 1). An editorial in the October 20 issue said that he had been a great Europeanizer, a liberal opponent of Fascism, a man whose hopes for Spain had been disappointed, but whose ideas lived on. In the October 25 issue an official of the Franco regime objected to these points, claiming Ortega was a man who had fled in terror from the Republic and who had seen the organic virtues of the Franco state. In the November 4 issue Victoria Kent who had participated with Ortega in the Constituent Cortes, objected to these claims, stressing Ortega's commitment to democratic liberalism.
A57 — THE TERM'S THEMSELVES WERE MEANINGLESS.
This fact is the basis of a vexing problem in the theory of language; for the terms to be invested effectively with meaning, they must be conventionally dependable and personally significant, a double criterion that is not easily met. With respect to philosophical terms, Ortega put greatest weight on the second criterion. On this importance of a fine sense of understanding in philosophy, see especially the beginning of Origen y epílogo de la filosofía, 1944, 1953, 1960, Obras XI, pp. 349–351. These very late strictures against knowledge without comprehension are completely consistent with his youthful deprecation of mere erudition in Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914, Obras I, pp. 316–7. The issue is well put from the opposite perspective by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, in The Meaning of Meaning, p. 19, where they stipulate that "we should develop our theory of signs from observations of other people, and only admit evidence drawn from introspection when we know how to appraise it." Although I would not like to argue that we learn how to observe other people only by using evidence drawn from introspection, I would contend that Ogden and Richard's formulation, if followed to the letter, would lead to a rather inexpressive realm of discourse. The tension between objective denotation and personal comprehension might be better maintained if we kept in mind (if I may so speak) that denotation is a conventional feature of speech that permits the communication of factual statements stripped of their human import. Comprehension can then be seen as something additional to the mechanism of communication, through which the recipient of a statement converts it into a thought. Since the listener must always invest the statements he hears with comprehension, the conception of the plastic pupil that is the basis of contemporary educational theory is inappropriate, fundamentally false.
A58 — ORTEGA'S HISTORICISM WAS A MODE OF EXPLANATION, NOT A SET OF ONTOLOGICAL ASSERTIONS.
Karl Popper has caused great confusion by giving an idiosyncratic definition of historicism in his influential book, The Poverty of Historicism. He proclaimed: "I mean by 'historicism' an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principle aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms' or the 'patterns,' the 'laws' or the 'trends' that underlie the evolution of history" (p. 3). The serious difficulty with Popper's position is that his definition excludes those historians who would admit to being historicists and who have generally been considered historicists. The great historicists—Dilthey, Rickert, Croce, Meinecke, Ortega—are among the leading opponents to that approach to the social sciences that Popper called "historicism." Hans Meyerhoff has effectively identified the general features of historicism, and his proper meaning is antithetical to Popper's meaning. "(1) The denial of a systematic approach to history; (2) the repudiation of any single, unified interpretation of history, and (3) the positive assertions (a) that the basic concepts of history are change and particularity, (b) that the historian has a special way of explaining things by telling a story, and (c) that history is all-pervasive, that historical categories permeate all aspects of human life, including morality and philosophy." (Meyerhoff, ed., The Philosophy of History in Our Time, p. 27.) Ortega was a historicist in Meyerhoff's sense.
For Ortega, freedom was an intrinsic component of the process of historical determination, and human thought was central to freedom as an historical reality, for thought was man's free response to his circumstances. Major works pertinent to this matter are "Historia como sistema," 1936, Obras VI, pp. 11-50; "Guillermo Dilthey y la idea de la vida," 1933, Obras VI, pp. 165-214; "Prólogo a Historia de la filosofía de Karl Vorländer," 1922, Obras VI, pp. 292-300; "Prólogo a Historia de la filosofía de Emile Bréhier," 1942, Obras VI, pp. 377-418; En torno a Galileo, 1933, Obras V, pp. 13-164; and Origen y epílogo de la filosofía, 1944, 1953, 1960, Obras IX, pp. 349-434.
A59 — TO COMMUNICATE PRINCIPLES, ONE EXEMPLIFIED THEIR HUMANE USES.
This procedure was used by Ortega in the many philosophical lectures that are transcribed in his works. His recently published lectures, Unas lecciones de metafísica, give an excellent example of this effort. In addition, see "La percepción del prójimo," 1929, Obras VI, pp. 153-163; "Por qué se vuelve a la filosofía," 1930, Obras IV, pp. 89-109; "Sobre el estudiar y el estudiante," 1933, Obras IV, pp. 545-554; En torno a Galileo, 1933, Obras V, pp. 13-166; ¿Qué es filosofía?, 1929, 1957, Obras VII, pp. 275-438; "Conciencia, objecto y las tres distancias de este," 1915, Obras II, pp. 61-6; "Sensación, construcción e intuición," 1913, in Ortega, Apuntes Sobre el pensamiento, pp. 99-117; and "¿Qué es el conocimiento?", El Sol, January 18 and 25, February 1 and 22, and March 1, 1931. Ortega's ability to exemplify the uses of principles is described first-hand by Rodríguez, Con Ortega, "Aspectos del magisterio orteguiano," pp. 19-30. See also, Paulino Garagorri, Relacciones y disputaciones orteguianas.
<span id="A60"A60 — A PERSON'S MISSION WAS AN ACTIVITY THAT HE HAD TO DO.
The best discussion of this topic is in "No ser hombre de partido," 1930, Obras IV, pp. 75-9. See also Misión de la universidad, 1930, Obras IV, pp. 313-353; and "Misión del bibliotecario," 1935, Obras V, pp. 21-234. On the hero see especially Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914, Obras I, pp. 389–390. On the relation of destiny to the history of a community see especially Lección VI and VII of En torno a Galileo, 1933, Obras V, pp. 69-92. A corollary of Ortega's idea that a mission had great positive importance in a man's life was his conviction that stereotypes were of great danger to the authentic life. See "Qué pas a en el mundo," El Sol June 1 and 3, 1933, for an excellent example of Ortega's concern that the young resist the influence of stereotypes. In "Sobre las carreras," 1934, Obras V, pp. 167-183, Ortega tried to indicate the very limited, proper use that stereotypes might have in the service of authentic life. Later, his distrust of stereotypes came to the fore in his assertion that the social (properly understood as usages, dead conventions) was actually the basis of the "anti-social" in human life, imposing meaningless separations that hindered meaningful, interpersonal exchange; see El hombre y la gente, 1949, 1957, Obras VII, pp. 268–9.
A61 — THE GREEK DEBATE WHETHER VIRTUE CAN UE TAUGHT.
Plato's texts are fundamental: first Protagoras; then Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo; then Gorgias; then Republic; then Statesman, Sophist, and the Laws. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is also essential for showing how events operate as a powerful pedagogue, slowly destroying the public virtues of a people. Werner Jaeger's Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Gilbert Highet, trans., is a profound contribution to our understanding of the Greek debate. It is too often treated, however, as the last word on the matter, which it is not. There is a useful review of the idea of areté in Robert William Hall, Plato and the Individual, pp. 34–66. Three general studies that help expand our understanding of the Greek debate are Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values by Arthur W. H. Adkins; Sophrosyne: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature by Helen North; and Ilustración y política en la Grecia clásica by Francisco Rodríguez Adrados.
A62 — ORTEGA AS A SPOKESMAN FOR THE FACULTY.
See "Ortega y Gasset, candidato a la senaduría por Universidad de Madrid," El Sol, April 10, 1923, p. 4; notices concerning Ortega's public course "¿Qué es filosofía?" given in defiance of Primo de Rivera's order closing the University of Madrid, El Sol. March 23 and 27; April 6, 9, 1Z, 16, 19, 23, 26, and 30; May 3, 7, 10, 14, and 16, 1929; "De la 'Gaceta' de hoy: Se admite la renuncia de sus cátedras," El Sol, May 10, 1929; articles by Luis de Zulueta, El Sol, May 10, 1929, and by Manuel García Morente, El Sol, June 2, 9, 25, and 30, 1929; "Keyserling y Ortega y Gasset, al Ateneo guipuzcoano," El Sol, March 15, 1930; a pamphlet by a group of young intellectuals, Madrid, April 1929, ("Señor Don ... ," Obras XI, pp. 102–6); and so on.
A63 — EDUCATIONAL THEORISTS HAVE PLUNGED INTO PEDAGOGICAL PATERNALISM.
The central question in the tension between liberal and paternal education concerns whether the student is considered to be a free, responsible agent prior to his education or whether his education is considered to be that which turns the slavish soul into a free autonomous person. The assumption, characteristic of the liberal tradition—that the student seeks to educate himself because he is a free man—has come under severe criticism in the past century. Herbart denied the compatibility of education with the doctrine of transcendental freedom. This incompatibility exists only if education is hypostatized and made into something independent of the student; into something that is done to him, not something that he does to himself. Having denied transcendental freedom, Herbart rightly made the science of education, the science that the teacher preeminently needed, into the major problem of pedagogy. Paternalism pervaded Herbart's pedagogy because of his denial of transcendental freedom. The child was seen to be a plastic being that lacked its own will and was to have a will molded in it. See The Science of Education: Its General Principles Deduced from Its Aim, Felkin and Felkin, trans., pp. 57-77, 83–90, 94-5, etc. To be sure, p. 61, Herbart tried to guard against the more extreme consequences of his denial but to little avail. He said that the teacher was not to create the pupil's power of choice, but merely to act upon the pupil's potential for choice in such a way that "it must infallibly and surely" come to fruition. In either case, Herbart began the fatal practice of thinking out of existence the pupil's right and power to refuse education and instruction. Cf. Herbart, Letters and Lectures on Education, Felkin and Felkin, trans., pp. 102-8. Of this passage, the question should be asked: is inner freedom the result of education or the condition of education? For Ortega on Herbart, see "Prólogo a Pedagogía general derivada del fin de la educación, de J, F. Herbart," Obras VI, pp. 265-291.
Even in classical times the rationale for the circle of studies that became known as the liberal arts was not easy to maintain. Plato made it clear in the Republic that their purpose was not to teach virtue, but to equip men to search for virtue. See especially VI:502–VII:541. Traditionally this has been the basis of the liberal position: rather than assert that the truth will make men free, the liberal recognizes that because a man is free, he must seek the truth. The goal of instruction in the liberal tradition is to make the student independent of his teachers.
Epistle 88 of Seneca's Epistulae Morales, Richard M. Gummere, trans., is of great importance for understanding this pedagogy of the liberal arts. The liberal arts are "useful only insofar as they give the mind a preparation and do not engage it permanently. One should linger upon them only so long as the mind can occupy itself with nothing greater; they are our apprenticeship, not our real work." (88:1) "'We ought not to be learning such things; we should have done with learning them." {88 :2) "'What then,' you say, 'do the liberal studies contribute nothing to our welfare?' Very much in other respects, but nothing at all as regards virtue. For even these arts of which I have spoken, though admittedly of a low grade—depending as they do upon handiwork—contribute greatly toward the equipment of life, but nevertheless have nothing to do with virtue. And if you inquire, 'Why, then, do we educate our children in the liberal studies?' it is not because they can bestow virtue, but because they prepare the soul for the reception of virtue. Just as that 'primary course,' as the ancients called it, in grammar, which gave boys their elementary training, does not teach them the liberal arts, so the liberal arts do not conduct the soul all the way to virtue, but merely set it going in that direction." (88:20) The importance of being able to follow studies without a teacher was subtly implied in Augustine's description of how, even though he did not need to rely on a teacher, he mastered the liberal arts yet derived little from them; Confessions, Bk. IV, Chapter 16. Unless we recognize the virtue of going without a teacher, his statement is absurd. Even more explicit is the Renaissance educator, Battista Guarino, in "Concerning the Order and the Method to be Observed in Teaching." He wrote: "A master who should carry his scholars through the curriculum which I have now laid down may have confidence that he has given them a training which will enable them, not only to carry forward their own reading without assistance, but also to act efficiently as teachers in their turn." W. H. Woodward, trans., in his Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, p. 172.
This rationale of the liberal arts gives the basis for a revision of our understanding of the old-time collegiate curriculum and of the significance of its demise. As I have pointed out very briefly with Jean McClintock in our essay "Architecture and Pedagogy," The Journal of Aesthetic Education, October 1968, especially pp. 69-71, 75-6, the purpose of the old-time pedagogy was to equip the student as efficiently as possible for self-education. This rationale is well explained in the much maligned, but little comprehended "Yale Report of 1828," in Hofstadter and Smith, eds., American Higher Education, Vol. I, pp. 275-291. The way this curriculum functions is exemplified in Perry Miller's study of Jonathan Edwards, pp. 54-68. As Perry Miller makes obvious, there was very little substantive content in the old college curriculum, despite its ambitious "technologia." Jonathan Edwards was not the only young man who was effectively prepared by a narrow, formal curriculum to be able to get a rich general education by his own devices through the extracurriculum.
In addition to whatever academic value it had; the replacement of this old-time curriculum keyed to the self-education of each student, with an elective system, was a development that clearly served the needs of a growing, paternal, industrial state. The elective system was a system introduced in the name of the students' freedom: each could choose what subjects he would study. At the same time the system was extremely useful in distributing socially beneficial skills. The American educator, Francis Wayland, explained the rationale for this system well in "Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System," 1842, and his "Report to the Corporation of Brown"; see Hofstadter and Smith, eds., American Higher Education, Vol. I, p. 341; Vol. II, pp. 478-487. For these tendencies in the European university, see Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, pp. 59–62, but whereas Wayland was enthusiastic, Nietzsche was bitterly critical for Nietzsche saw that a specialized education not only disseminated useful skills, but it also made the acquirer rather dependent on that skill, increasing the moral inertia of men in high places. Owing to the paternal idea that an education is to provide a student with a certain set of skills, we have seriously hypostatized and even personified the curriculum. It is a standard assumption in schools of education that a well-designed curriculum has causal power over those who study it, and even friends of the liberal tradition create difficulties for themselves by putting their hope in the curriculum, not the student.
An indication of how contemporary educators attribute purposes to the curriculum rather than to students is to be found in Daniel Bell's excellent critique of general education, The Reforming of General Education, p. 152. Purposes that are properly embodied in men are spoken of as embodied in the curriculum. "In the more limited and specific ways that such purposes can be embodied in a curriculum, the content of liberal education ... can be defined through six purposes: 1) To overcome intellectual provincialism; 2) To appreciate the centrality of method; 3) To gain an awareness of history; 4) To show how ideas relate to social structures; 5) To understand the way values infuse all inquiry; 6) To demonstrate the civilizing role of the humanities." Take the first purpose, to overcome intellectual provincialism. If it is to be embodied in the curriculum, many intellectual provinces will have to be presented sympathetically. If it is embodied in the student, the curriculum will need to give effective instruction in the many languages, the use of which will permit the student to chart his own course through the various provinces. A cosmopolitan curriculum is a kind of intellectual Disneyland, whereas a true cosmopolitan has really made the Grand Tour, learning to use a rich inheritance—monetary or spiritual—with effect. I have discussed the rationale of study and the liberal arts more fully in "On the Liberality of the Liberal Arts," Teachers College Record, Vol. 72, No. 3, February 1971, pp. 405-416; and "Towards a Place for Study in a World of Instruction," to be published in Teachers College Record, Vol. 73, No. 2, December 1971.
A64 — ORTEGA EARLY BROKE WITH EL IMPARCIAL.
My account of Ortega's break with his family's paper diverges from the usual accounts. Both Lorenzo Luzuriaga, in his "Las fundaciones de Ortega y Gasset," Instituto de Filosofía, Homenaje a Ortega y Gasset, and Evelyne López-Campillo,in her "Ortega: El Imparcial y las Juntas," Revista de Occidente, June 1969, pp. 311–7, base the chronology of their account almost solely on a remark by Ortega in La decencia nacional, 1932. Ortega's remark, a note explaining why he included "Bajo el arco en ruina" in the book, was as follows: "This article was published in El Imparcial on June 11, 1917. A few days before, in Barcelona, the Juntas de Defensa del Arma de Infantería had declared themselves in rebellion. The disputes to which this article gave rise had, as a result, the founding of the newspaper El Sol by D. Nicolás María de Urgoiti." (Obras XI, p. 265, n. 1). On this basis, both Luzuriaga and López-Campillo contend that Ortega's break with El Imparcial came at this time. This contention, however, is unsatisfactory.
The most useful evidence for understanding Ortega's relations with El Imparcial is a rather complete listing of his journalistic articles. Such a list shows rather clearly the following chronology: up until April 22, 1913, with "De un estorbo nacional" Ortega was quite content to write for El Imparcial; "De un estorbo nacional" provoked a break with El Imparcial and Ortega switched to El País, for which he wrote through 1914, a year in which he wrote few newspaper articles undoubtedly because of his preoccupation with the League for Spanish Political Education and Meditaciones del Quijote. From then until his Argentine tour in late 1916, Ortega was content to publish through España and El Espectador. During his joint lecture tour with his Father, a tour trough which he established many contacts with Argentine newspaper publishers and writers, Ortega was probably convinced to give El Imparcial another try, for in the Spring of 1917 Ortega wrote two articles for El Imparcial, first "Bajo el arco en ruina" and two weeks later "El verano, ¿sera tranquilo?"; and finally, in the Fall of 1917 Ortega wrote brief1y for El Día and then, starting in December, he devoted himself to the newly-founded El Sol. From these facts, it is clear that when El Imparcial refused the second part of "De un estorbo nacional" Ortega decided to go it on his own. It takes time to organize an enterprise on the scale of El Sol, and it is probable that Ortega's short rapprochement with El Imparcial in 1917 came when María de Urgoiti was negotiating for the purchase of El Imparcial and that Liberal displeasure over Ortega's articles on the Juntas may have prevented the purchase. This interpretation is as consistent with Ortega's remarks in La decencia nacional as is that of Luzuriaga and López-Campillo, more 50 because Ortega's remarks speak only of disputes that led to El Sol (by blocking the purchase of El Imparcial) and nothing of disputes causing El Imparcial to close its columns to Ortega. As a matter of fact, two weeks after "Bajo el arco en ruina" El Imparcial published another essay by Ortega. Fuller evidence on Ortega's relations with El Imparcial and El Sol, and all his other publishing ventures, for that matter, would help greatly.
A65 — AFTER RETURNING FROM GERMANY, ORTEGA HELPED FOUNO FARO.
Ortega mentioned his participation in its founding in "El Señor Dato, responsable de un atropello a la constitución," El Sol, June 17, 1920, Obras X, p. 654. His articles in Faro were "La reforma liberal" in the first issue, February 23, 1908; "La conservación de la cultura," March 8, 1908; "Sobre el proceso Rull," April 12, 1908; and "La moral visigótica," May 10, 1908; Obras X, pp. 31–8, 39–46, 47–50, and 56–8. My account of Ortega's involvement in publishing is based on a survey of the publications in question. The Hemeroteca Municipal of Madrid has an excellent collection of newspapers and magazines from the late nineteenth century on. With the publication of Vols. X and XI of Ortega's works, his contributions to Faro, Europa, España, El Imparcial, El Sol, and other papers are now available, but to get a feel fer the type of publications that those were it is important to go to the archives. The best available study of Spanish journalism is by Henry F. Schulte, The Spanish Press, 1470–1966: Print, Power, Politics. It is not a good study, however¡ some of my disagreements with it may be found in a review of it in the Comparative Education Review, June 1969, pp. 235–8. In addition to the initiatives discussed in the text, Ortega took part in the mass journalism of Crisol and Luz, for which he wrote in 1931 and 1932. The papers were backed by the El Sol group. Their format was more popular, close to that of a tabloid, although their content was of high quality. Unlike El Sol, which in addition to politics devoted much attention to cultural events, these papers concentrated mainly on politics, and they seem to have been intended as popular, partisan papers for the Republicanism of the Group in the Service of the Republic. In addition, Ortega had close relations with the Argentine press, not to my knowledge involving the creation of any publications, but using them to publish numerous articles. Although Ortega had, prior to 1916, published in Argentine papers, he established close connections with them in 1916 when he went on a successful lecture trip to Buenos Aires with his father. The trip was sponsored by the Institución Cultural Española and it is described in detail in its Anales, Tomo primero: 1912–1920, pp. 149–208. A careful cataloguing of Ortega's writings that appeared in La Prensa and La Nación might add significantly to his bibliography.
A66 — WRITERS HAYE CONFUSED THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE.
The erroneous belief, unfortunately propagated by T. S. Eliot in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 1949, that there is a divergence between the so-called "literary" idea of culture and the "anthropological" has freed too many writers who should know better to play fast and loose with the idea of culture. If "culture" is to denote human artifacts, the word itself is meaningless, for it will denote everything. Hence, it will become significant only when qualified: aristocratic, democratic, proletarian, mass, high, middle, low, popular, unpopular, primitive, and so on ad infinitum. There are, taking up this procedure, many interesting essays on the problems of popular or mass culture. Many of these are gathered by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. See also Dwight Macdonald, "Masscult and Midcult," in Against the American Grain. Most of this writing seems to have missed the reality of culture, which is not in the artifact, but in the man. Both the literary humanist and the anthropologist seem to be nearing agreement that culture is man's symbolic means for giving a particular character to himself. The important book here is not the overrated compendium by A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, but Eric R, Wolf's Anthropology. Wolf shows that anthropologists need to view the culture of any particular people as a hierarchical symbolic system by which those people give themselves their unique character. As soon as culture can again be seen as an hierarchical system, the disjunction between different strata of culture can be overcome, and we can make the concept serve as a powerful tool for fashioning a better understanding of education. In this context, John Dewey's Freedom and Culture will be found to be a much more effective examination of the function of culture in industrial democracies than the confused talk about mass culture. There is an immense literature on the idea of culture. Raymond Williams' Culture and Society is a useful survey of the development of these two concepts in English intellectual history. Such a study should be made of how ideas of culture and education have developed since 1750, for it may well be that many of the current difficulties with the idea of culture have arisen because educators, in the name of democratic egalitarianism, have avoided dealing with "culture," which can only be defined properly in relation to education. Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism is an excellent companion to Ortega's Revolt of the Masses. Arnold's conception of culture as the pursuit of perfection (see especially Chapter 1) is still valid; it is consistent with current anthropological findings; and it is crucial to developing an alternative to the continued aggrandisement of the contemporary state, a state very different from the one Arnold so revered.
A67 — ROUSSEAU'S PRE5ENTATION OF THE WILL OF ALL AND THE GENERAL WILL WA5 FLAWED.
From the beginning Rousseau has suffered at the hands of critics who will substitute a Bon mot for an argument. To me, Rousseau's writings are second only to Plato's in their heuristic value; and being inclined to approach Rousseau's writings as heuristic stimulants, not epitomes of some dogma—romantic, democratic, totalitarian, or anti-intellectual—I find most of the debate about Rousseau incomprehensible. Rousseau's writing reflects a deep sympathy with the thought of Plato and the Stoics; Rousseau had internalized their work, and surely the greatness of the "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" is that it displays the proper use of civilization in the course of condemning the abuse of civilization. Rousseau should be read, responded to, reflected on; he does not provide doctrines: he may, however, stimulate thought. Since my sophomore year in college I have found Rousseau to repay careful, recurrent reading. I am closest to the two "Discourses," Emile, and The Social Contract, and have learned much from having dealt with the last two works in a Colloquium I have given over the past five years. I think, as a brief commentary, Jacques Barzun's discussion of Rousseau in Classic, Romantic, and Modern, II, i-ii, pp. 18-28, is without match. It is especially valuable for driving home the point that The Social Contract does not concern the mode of conducting practical politics—Rousseau was neither a democrat nor a totalitarian—but the conditions under which any system of conducting practical politics can be considered legitimate. The two books by Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Peter Gay, trans., and Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe, Gutmann, Kristeller, and Randall, trans., are helpful, especially in locating Rousseau in the history of ideas. For those who want a check on the Confessions, Jean Guéhenno's Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2 vols., John and Doreen Weightman, trans., is excellent, although it does not try to assess Rousseau's intellectual background in much depth, an assessment that seems to me crucial in deciding how to read Rousseau. The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Rousseau's Oeuvres complètes is excellent, presenting his works in a readable format, with sufficient critical apparatus to inform oneself of the issues but not so extensive or intrusive that it interferes with following Rousseau's argument.
A68 — ORTEGA'S PREROGATIVES AS A CLERC EXISTED NO MORE.
An indication of the difficulty that Ortega had in acting as a clerc after he had participated in politics is found in the reaction of his fellow intellectual-turned-politician, Manuel Azaña. Thus, in the Memorias intimas de Azaña, edited by Joaquín Arrarás, 1939, pp. 179–180, Ortega's criticisms of partisanship in the Republic were dismissed as an attempt to appease the Jesuit backers of El Sol for the passage of Article 26, which closed the religious orders. El Sol, which had long crusaded for better lay education, was anything but a pro-Jesuit paper! Care, however, should prevent one from taking the Memorias to be an accurate indication of Azaña's views and character; the book was an extremely fragmentary selection from Azaña's diary, and the selection was made by an enthusiast of Franco and published just after the Civil War. It is a masterpiece of political satire, and the added Falangist caricatures show that not all of the Spanish wits were on the loyalist side.
A69 — IN 1928 ORTEGA HAD A SUCCESSFULL TOUR IN LATIN AMERICA.
For Ortega's activities in Argentina and Chile at this time see articles about him in La Nación, September 1, p. 1; September 1, p. 6; September 6, p. 6; September 12, p. 6; November 24, p. 1; and December 6, p. 6. For the excellent reports of his lectures with extensive transcripts, see La Nación, September 25, p. 7, October 1, p. 4; October 9, p. 8, October 15, p. 11, October 29, p. 7, November 10, p. 8, November 14, p. 8, December 25, p. 6; and December 28, p. 6. There are good records of his tour and lectures in Institución Cultural Española, Anales, Vol. III, pp. 185–248. For the Madrid interest in Ortega's lectures see the news reports in El Sol, April 3, May 30, September 1, November 9 and 15, 1928; and January 3, 19, and 22, 1929. In addition, see the commentaries in El Sol: "Un discurso: Ortega y Gasset en la Argentina," January 8, 1929: "Impresiones de Hispanoamérica: Hoy llega a Madrid D, José Ortega y Gasset," January 20, 1929, and Luis Echavarri, "Ortega y Gasset y la joven intelectualidad argentina," February 16 and 22, and March 6, 1929. The text of Ortega's "Discurso en el parlamento chileno," 1928, 1955, is in Obras VIII, pp. 377–382.
A70 — WITH "THE COURSE" AN ELITE SEEMED TO PRESENT ITSELF.
For press coverage of Ortega's lectures see El Sol, April 10, 13, 17, 23, and 27; May 4, S, 11, 15, and IS, 1929. The lectures were also reported carefully in Voz, same dates. In addition to the commentaries cited in footnotes, see Victoriano García Martí, "Comentarios del día: Las conferencias de Ortega y Gasset," Voz, April 30, 1929; and Manuel García Morente, "El curso de D. José Ortega y Gasset," El Sol, June 2, 9, 25, and 30, 1929. For transcripts of the lectures see ¿Que es filosofía?, 1929, 1957, Obras VII, pp. 275–438.
A71 — THE GROUP AIMED TO PUT INTELLECT IN THE SERVICE OF THE REPUBLIC.
There are a number of documents of and about the Group in the Service of the Republic in Ortega's Obras XI, especially pp. 125–143, 291–300, 425–431, 516–8. Other important documents on the Group are in Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Escritos políticos, especially pp. 214–236.
A72 — THE ACTUAL CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY DID NOT PROCEED AS ORTEGA PRESUMED.
I rely for my knowledge of the Constituent Assembly on Mori, Crónica, especially Vols. 1–4, 6, 7, and 9; and on Rhea Marsh Smith, The Day of the Liberals in Spain, which is the best study of the Assembly in English. The judgments, however, about how it might have succeeded are my own. There is a good, concise chapter on the Constituent Assembly by Gabriel Jackson in The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1936, pp. 43–55.
A73 — "LA VIEJA POLÍTICA" IN THE NEW CONSTITUTION.
For Ortega's position on the Catalan Statute, see Mori, Crónica, Vol. 6, especially pp. 112–153, 331–429; and Vol. 9, especially pp. 402–468. This source is much more useful than the text of Ortega's speeches as they were reproduced in El Sol or in books, for Mori included the whole development of the issue, other important speeches, comments from the floor, etc. The transcripts of Ortega's speeches are also in Obras XI, pp. 455–488, but Mori is still a better source. Unamuno's position may be found in "Discurso sobre la lengua española," his Obras III pp. 1350–1361, the transcript of his statement on the issue shows that he was allied with Ortega's position. For Ortega's views on the welfare state as they were expressed in the Assembly see "En el debato político," "Sobre lo de ahora," and "La rectificación de la República," Obras XI, pp. 348–356, 360–6, 398–417. For Ortega's view of the relation of church and state, see his speech in the Assembly, "Proyecto de Constitución," September 4, 1931, Obras XI, especially pp. 382–3. For his view of anti-clericalism and the Monarchy after its fall, see "La rectificación de la República," December 6, 1931, Obras XI, especially pp. 407–9, and "Antimonarquia y República," Luz, January 7,1932, Obras XI, pp. 418–9. As can be seen from Mori, Crónica, Vol. 3, pp. 280–6, the Law of the Defense of the Republic went through with surprisingly little discussion. For the feelings raised by the trial see Ibid., Vol. 4, pp. 295–370.
A74 — ONLY A NON-PARTISAN PARTY COULD PREVENT POLARIZATION.
For the publicity campaign leading up to Ortega's speech, see "En vísperas de un discurso: Ortega y Gasset y el futuro de España," El Sol, November 17, 1931; "Una cuartilla de Don José Ortega y Gasset," El Sol, November 18, 1931; "Notas políticas: El esperado discurso de Don José Ortega y Gasset," El Sol, November 27, 1931; and "El discurso de Don José Ortega y Gasset: Un llamamiento para la creación de un partido de amplitud nacional" El Sol, December 8, 1931. Cf. "Hablando con el Sr. Ortega y Gasset después de su discurso," Crisol, December 7, 1931. The last two articles have very useful information on judging the effect of Ortega's speech. For his desire for a national party prior to the fall of the Monarchy, see "Organización de la decencia nacional," El Sol February 5, 1930, Obras XI, pp. 269–273. Ramón Pérez de Ayala's essays "Sobre los partidos políticos," Escritos políticos, pp. 237–252, are also pertinent.
A75 — ORTEGA TRIED TO CONVERT THE GROUP IN THE SERVICE OF THE REPUBLIC INTO A NATIONAL PARTY.
For speeches made in this effort, see "Nación y Trabajo: he aquí el tema de la Agrupación al Servicio de la República: 'Hoy no es possible un partido conservador': Elocuente brindis de Don José Ortega y Gasset en Granada," El Sol, February 5, 1932; and "Don José Ortega y Gasset en Oviedo: 'La política Republicana se ha de cimentar sobre dos principios: Nación y Trabajo'," El Sol, April 12, 1932. For articles written about a national party, see "Hacia un partido de la nación," Luz, January 7, 15, and 29, 1932; "Estos republicanos no son la República," Luz, June 16, 1932; and "Hay que reanimar a la República," Luz, June 18, 1932. Ortega's withdrawal from politics was first made public in "Conferencia de Don José Ortega y Gasset en la Universidad de Granada: 'Tras dos años de exorbitancia política—dice—vuelvo plenamente a la conciencia intelectual'." El Sol, October 9, 1932. See for all except the first and last mentioned Obras XI, pp. 425–450, 489–493.
A76 — ORTEGA CONTRIBUTED TO THE GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN.
There is an immense literature on the human sciences, much of which is egregiously unfamiliar to American scholars. As the exposition unfolds, many works will be cited in more particular contexts. Here mention should be made of the best introduction to the subject so far written in America, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933, by Fritz K. Ringer. Unfortunately, this work does not give a sympathetic treatment to the human sciences; it subjects them instead to a reductive sociological explanation. Nevertheless, until a writer comes forward who is willing to take the subject seriously, contending rigorously with the substance as well as the social source of the human sciences, Ringer's book will stand as the most useful introduction to the literature.
A thorough study of the different modes of applying knowledge to life would help define the mission of various disciplines. For a study of this question with the human sciences, a provocative source is Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und Graf Paul Yorck von Wartenburg. A lack of subtlety on this matter has impeded the ability of some contemporary philosophers to maintain confidence in the "relevance" of their enterprise. Thus, a good antidote to efforts to make philosophy a propaedeutic to science is Der pädagogische Beruf der Philosophie by Günther Böhme, a book which is excellent background reading for understanding the centrality of education to Ortega's reflective effort.
A77 — "EXEMPLARITY AND APTNESS".
The Spanish is "ejemplaridad y docilidad." I have translated docilidad as "aptness" because the latter lacks the connotations of passivity that "docility" has in English, and the meaning of "aptness," "quick to learn," is very dose to Ortega's usage of docilidad. The Spanish meaning has remained dose to its etymological meaning of "teachable, willing to be taught" (from the Latin, docilis). This sense has been lost in current English usage of "docility." "Exemplarity" has different connotations in English than in Spanish. American scepticism about the "good example" is quintessentially reflected in Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt. Harry S. Broudy and John R. Palmer have stressed the idea of exemplarity in their book Exemplars of Teaching Method, but their use of exemplar is not the same as Ortega's, for Broudy and Palmer find a quality, teaching method, to be given and they seek exemplars of it, whereas Ortega finds the exemplar given, a person cf great spiritual force, and others seek the qualities the exemplar manifests. Those interested in the idea cf exemplarity should consult Kant's Critique of Judgment, #17–22, in addition to the novels by Cervantes and Unamuno mentioned in the text. In later paragraphs, I have used "connoisseurs" to translate "dociles" since the English neologism "dociles" sounds badly, as does "apts." Since translating the passage, I have encountered Michael Polanyi's remarks on "connoisseurship" in his Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, pp. 54–8. The coincidence of usage is fortunate, and a comprehension of either Polanyi or Ortega adds to an understanding of the other.
A78 — EXEMPLARITY AND APTNESS REAFFIRMS THE CLASSIC CONCEPTION OF COMMUNITY.
Two subjects should be distinguished here: the history of Greek political theory and the history of Greek influence on political theory. My remarks on Homer and later Greeks might engender objections if they are taken as part of the former subject; they are unobjectionable, I think, as part of the latter. Homer is usually touched on but lightly in histories of Greek political thought. Compare the treatment he receives in Sir Ernest Barker's great works: in The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (1906), Homer is allotted a single sentence, "Homer is a believer in the divine right of monarchy ..."; whereas in Greek Political Theory (1917), the same sentence takes on more cautious form, "Homer is sometimes quoted as a believer in the divine right of monarchy ..." (p. 18), and a few remarks follow suggesting that it might not have been so (p. 47). T. A. Sinclair devotes a brief chapter to Homer in A History of Greek Political Thought, pp. 10–8, but his account is, as it must be, tentative.
Much more leeway for imagination arises when one deals with the Greek influence on political theory. One may look on Jaeger's Paideia as a treatise on the Homeric influence on later Greek political and educational theory. The potential excess of this influence is pointed out profoundly in The Tyranny of Greece over Germany by E. M. Butler. But it is not only "the Germanic mind," if that exists, that can draw fruitfully from the Greek example, as is shown by Herbert J. Muller in Freedom in the Ancient World and Eric A. Havelock in The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, two worthy books with which I have learned to have basic disagreements.
My conception of Homer has been influenced primarily by Bruno Snell through The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought and Cedric H. Whitman through Homer and the Homeric Tradition, as well as secondarily by M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus, T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer, and G. S. Kirk, Homer and the Epic. Rhys Carpenter's brief essay Discontinuity in Greek Civilization is stimulating if read with caution.
A79 — SPENGLER'S DECLINE OF THE WEST EPITOMIZED THE LITERATURE OF DECAY.
For other such writers see Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation, pp. 336–343; and Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, passim. The assumption common to arguments of decay, as well as to many about progress, is that society or civilization is an organic creature, something that can grow, develop, become diseased, and die. Recently, the sociologist Robert Nisbet has subjected such assumptions to an extensive critique in Social Change and History. He has chosen a target that needs to be severely criticized, but his criticism is sadly unconvincing. Nisbet shows that theories of organic development in history are based on a metaphor; so far so good. But then, he is not content to show that the metaphor is inappropriate, a cause of more confusion than clarity; he argues that metaphor itself has no place in historical theory. To suppress metaphor, however, simply heightens our vulnerability; the solution is not to avoid all metaphor, but to recognize that all works of intellect can at most be metaphorical: none can give us positive knowledge of the social reality, not even the most dogmatically empirical. If Nisbet had looked further in his research, he might have found Tocqueville using such an argument quite subtly against Gobineau: no historical theory can be established conclusively, and when there is a danger that a doctrine will have destructive consequences, exaggerated claims for its truth should be resisted. See Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, especially, pp. 221–3, 226–9, 231–2, 266–8 (a masterpiece of irony), 268–270, 290–5, and 303–310.
A80 — THERE IS AN ELEMENT Of TRUTH IN THE GERMANOPHOBE-ANGLOPHILE CRITIQUE OF EUROPEAN POLITICS.
Some of the sources of this critique have been discussed in a note to II: k. Many other works might be added to it; for instance, Eric Bentley, A Century of Hero-Worship. The Marxian rejection of English liberalism was fundamental. It may be sampled, for instance, in Marx's "The Future Results of British Rule in India" (1853), Marx-Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1, pp. 352–8. In some ways, however, Marx's most explicit and influential criticism of the English type of liberalism is not in his writings on England, but in his polemics against more reformist tendencies in the Continental workers' movements; see The Communist Manifesto, Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 21– 65, especially 54–64; and The German Ideology, passim. Nietzsche's rejection was more rhetorical. See, for instance, The Will to Power, Walter Kaufmann, trans., sections 31: "that gruesome ugliness that characterizes all English inventions"; 382: "the shopkeeper's philosophy of Mr. Spencer; complete absence of an ideal, except that of the mediocre man"; 926: "Against John Stuart Mill—I abhor his vulgarity ... "; 944: "happiness as peace of soul, virtue, comfort, Anglo-angelic shopkeeperdom à la Spencer"; etc.
No adequate study of the political implications of contemporary European philosophy has been made. It is also far from clear what significance these have for judging philosophies qua philosophies. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty are usually treated positively for having backed the resistance in World War II, whereas Gentile has been largely dismissed as a Fascist and Heidegger has been severely criticized for originally cooperating with Hitler. On this matter, I have found Merleau-Ponty's Humanisme et terreur: essai sur le probleme communiste, H. Stuart Hughes' The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought, 1930–1960, and Stanley Rosen's Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay to be instructive.
A81 — IDEOLOGY, BUREAUCRACY, AND MASS COMMUNICATIONS HAVE COMPLICATED THE FUNCTIONING OF LIBERALISM.
The literature pertinent to these matters is immense, and I can only indicate those small parts of it that have entered into my reflections on Ortega's conception of the European crisis. In particular, Martin 5. Dworkin's course "Education, Ideology, and Mass Communications" and ensuing conversations have done much to deepen my reading in these areas.
The first aspect of the matter to raise fundamental questions is that the liberal theory of toleration does not adequately anticipate ideological criticism as it has developed in the past two hundred years. For the basic theory, see Locke, "A Letter Concerning Toleration," and John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, especially Chapter 2. The assumption that free discussion can only strengthen truth is in theory unobjectionable; what theories of ideology do is to raise the question whether discussion can in fact be free, and doubts to this effect lead to very serious consequences. For good introductions to the development of the concept of ideology see Henry D. Aiken, "Philosophy and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century," The Age of Ideology, pp. 13–26, and George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays, pp. 3–46.
Three of the most significant examples of committed ideological criticism are The German Ideology by Marx and Engels, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Veblen, and The Illusions of Progress by Georges Sorel. These critics used their powers to expose the rationalization of interests by the established groups and to advance the interests of those who were exploited. This tradition of ideological criticism has by no means died out, but it has been complemented by another which aspires to be more disinterested. The best known work of this sort is Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, in which a program for the sociology of knowledge is set forth. There is much more work along these lines that deserves to be better known. For instance, Theodor Geiger gives a rather different, more open value to ideology in his Ideologie und Wahrheit and other works. For a good introduction to his work see Paolo Farneti, Theodor Geiger e la coscienza della società industriale. Whereas Geiger sees ideological differences indicating real differences that should not be destroyed through reductionism, much of contemporary thought on the subject leads in the opposite direction, indicating a hope that ideology will disappear. This is the theme sounded in the conclusions to The Opium of the Intellectuals by Raymond Aron and The End of Ideology by Daniel Bell. Both writers are learned and humane, yet one should ask whether a purported end of ideology is not itself an ideological rationalization of interests of technicians, bureaucrats, and social scientists: ideological conflicts are the most serious impediments to their rational control of society. But is it perfectly rational? This question is put movingly by Alberto Moravia in Man as an End.
For the purposes of this study, these and other works that might also be mentioned add up to a serious difficulty for liberal political theory. What is the relation between opinion, interest, and truth? How can men who are convinced that discussion between ordinary persons leads to the imposition of falsehood, not the uncovering of truth, be persuaded to defend political freedoms and liberal procedures? For a clear statement of the direction in which such convictions lead see A Critique of Pure Tolerance by Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse.
If the theory of ideology tends to release the opponents of the established system from the restraints of liberalism, the facts of bureaucracy do the same for the members of the established system. The classic presentations of liberal theory on this matter are the discussion of faction and its dangers in The Federalist Papers and the analysis of the unchecked power of the majority in chapters 15 and 16 of Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Government should be conducted by responsible individuals if the rights of minorities are to be defended. Tocqueville argued that one of the few factors mitigating the natural power of the majority was the lack of a centralized administrative apparatus in the United States; that check has disappeared.
By the development of bureaucracy, I mean something more inclusive than a particular form of administrative organization: in that sense bureaucracy has always existed. What is important is the application in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of highly formalized, rational group organization to major military, economic, and political institutions. A number of general histories are useful in following the development of these organizations and attempts at alternatives to them. In Western Civilization Since the Renaissance: Peace, War, Industry, and the Arts, John U. Nef puts some of the central questions concerning the relation of war, industry, and impersonal organization, raising the suspicion that the so-called civilian benefits from military development may not be worth the cost. Friedrich Meinecke's Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison D'Etat and Its Place in Modern History, Douglas Scott, trans., is an excellent study laying bare the arguments by which the responsible public servant converts himself into an irresponsible servant of the state. In a less profound work, European History, 1789–1914: Men, Machines, and Freedom, John McManners charts the economic and political developments behind the growth of national administrative systems and in pp. 403–6 he indicates some of the dilemmas that arose with the modem state, namely, that it brings mixed blessings. Guido de Ruggiero in The History of European Liberalism, R. G. Collingwood, trans., traces the development of the liberal view of the state and shows how it culminates in parallel conflicts between individualism and bureaucracy as well as between Liberalism and Socialism.
One of the central matters that should be considered in reflecting on the impact of bureaucracy upon our political forms is the character of war and the military. An excellent introduction to this subject is Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, edited by Edward Mead Earle. A great work for clarifying the impact of war on twentieth-century life is Quincy Wright's A Study of War, and a more popular work covering some of the same ground is Raymond Aron's The Century of Total War. The background informing a reading of these works should be an involvement as a citizen in the national debates concerning arms expenditure, disarmament, and foreign commitments. To me, such a combination of concerns quite undercuts the whole system of political theory upon which the nation-state is based; we should go back to fundamentals and seriously consider the question whether sane men can responsibly hold mere nations to be sovereign.
The problem of bureaucracy is not confined to war and international politics. Various aspects of the problem are brought out, with varying personal reactions to the phenomena they uncover, by James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World; Joseph A. Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy; William H. Whyte's The Organization Man; Milovan Djilas' The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System; Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society; C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite; Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem; and Sebastian de Grazia's Of Time, Work, and Leisure. All these have, in one way or another, influenced my view of the question.
The problems that bureaucracy raises for our inherited political principles are compounded by the closely related problem of mass communications. Liberal political theory has been traditionally cautious about the contagion of opinion. For instance, those who would blame Rousseau for the excesses committed in the French Revolution in the name of the general will overlook the fact that the acts ensued from political deliberations antithetical to those Rousseau commended. Rousseau insisted that each have full information and that each deliberate alone, the authenticity of his opinion protected from contamination by that of others. Whether or not we can preserve the approximate possibility for such deliberations is the great conundrum of mass communications.
One group of studies, which suggests difficulties in preserving autonomous deliberation, is the study of crowds, which actually goes back very far into our tradition as readers of Heraclitus, Thucydides, Plato, and Seneca know. In more recent times, the issue has come back to the fore. Gustave Le Bon's work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, is often connected to Ortega's Revolt of the Masses although they are about quite different phenomena: the latter concerns a chronic condition of personal character; the former, the characteristics regularly manifested by crowds, groups in which men lose their individuality. Since Le Bon's book, there have been a number of popularizations, connecting the crowd or mob to American culture, especially popular culture; among these are Gerald Stanley Lee's Crowds: A Moving Picture of Democracy (1913); Frank K. Notch's King Mob: A Study of the Present-Day Mind (1930); and Bernard Iddings Bell's Crowd Culture: An Examination of the American Way of Life (1952). On a quite different level of ambition is Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti, Carol Stewart, trans., a far-reaching, profound study of the nature of crowds and their relation to political power throughout world history.
Studies of propaganda and mass communication are legion. Propaganda by Jacques Ellul strikes me as the best introduction to the subject, for Ellul does not shirk the difficult aspects of the matter: he shows that propaganda is an established element of everyone's way of life, that it has definite effects, some good and many bad, and that there is a tremendous, perhaps impossible, problem in reconciling the facts of propaganda with our political heritage and hopes. An earlier work that also excels as an introduction to the matter is Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, which expresses greater optimism about the ability of reason to control and absorb propaganda than does Ellul's work. Both Lippmann and Ellul raise questions ultimately reflecting doubts whether the recipient of propaganda and mass communications can maintain his autonomous powers of judgment, whether the recipient can keep from being drawn into a crowd. Wilbur Schramm in his important book Responsibility in Mass Communication looks at the matter from the other end, asking whether open, responsible access to the means of communication can be maintained. Although this is itself a crucial question, on which there is a great deal of discussion that may be found by using Schramm's bibliography, the questions raised by Ellul and Lippmann seem to me more fundamental.
Many other works have contributed to my understanding not only of the problems raised by mass communications, but also by bureaucracy and ideological criticism. Among them are The Bias of Communications by Harold A. Innis. Le temps hacerlant by Enrico Castelli; The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt; Man in the Modern Age by Karl Jaspers; The House of Intellect by Jacques Barzun, and many others. In calling attention to these difficulties, one is not foretelling doom or condemning traditional aspirations. One is, however, asking for the reinvigoration of the theoretical imagination. The empirical obsessions of social science seem to me to indicate a deep-seated death wish. The political forces in the midst of which we live have little to do, integrally, organically, with our national institutions; yet our conceptions of what political procedures are proper, which ones will allow the human spirit to flourish humanely, are all keyed to the nation-states. The productive capital of political theory that we have inherited from the Enlightenment is fast wearing out, yet very few people have been trying speculatively to construct replacements. The defense of freedom and reason must find an arena other than national politics, and its- absurd extension in inter-national politics, in which to conduct its campaign. Political and pedagogical theorists have before them the task of setting forth such a supranational community.
A82 — FOR AGES THE WISE HAVE KNOWN THAT LUXURY WEAKENS THE WILL.
By reading this proposition as a statement about the effects of wealth on individual character, with the only social effects seen being certain invidious aspersions on the nouveau riche, one can ignore its most serious import. In such a form, the idea is quite uninteresting; but its more profound exponents have been concerned not with wealth as an individual attribute, but with wealth as a social attribute. Thus Heraclitus wished riches not on his individual enemies, but on Ephesus as a whole. The debilitative effects of wealth may develop even though the wealthiest are very active and far from debauched. What is unhealthy is not the effect of wealth on the particular individuals who hold it, but use of the category "wealth," by both rich and poor, as the basic means of making judgments of human worth. For this practice of making wealth a major standard of value, modern Western civilization has been roundly condemned by a series of critics who have not opposed the existence of material well-being, but who have rejected the common practice of using distinctions between the degree of well-being various persons enjoy as means of judging the relative worth of those persons. Thus the spiritual power of money is decried. Witness Nietzsche: "money now stands for power, glory, pre-eminence, dignity, and influence ... " (The Dawn of Day, #203, J. M. Kennedy, trans.); " ... what was once done 'for the love of God' is now done for the love of money, i.e. for the love of that which at present affords us the highest feeling of power and a good conscience" (Ibid., #204). Witness also Jacob Burckhardt: "money becomes and remains the greatest measure of things, poverty the greatest vice," in his On History and Historians, Harry Zohn, trans., p. 222.
Ortega's criticism of the use of wealth as a criterion for judging our highest values was paralleled by his contemporaries. For instance, in "Mass Civilization and Minority Culture" (1930), F. R. Leavis objected to the practice of denoting the goods that the average man could buy as "the standard of living." Leavis, of course, was not arguing, as critics like Lord Snow seem to suggest, that the poor should be made to persist at poor subsistence; Leavis' argument was against the arbitrary elevation of income statistics into the most common arbiter of values. To argue against wealth as a standard of value is not to argue against the value of wealth. Instead, the concern was with the extra-economic significance attached to economic criteria. No economist had demonstrated that, of all possible standards, the measure of purchasing power was the only valid valuation of life, the standard of living. See: Leavis, Education and the University, pp. 146, 149; cf. p. 119.
A83 — IBN KHALDÛN PERCEIVED HOW POVERTY BEGAT VIRTUE . . . .
While Ortega was preparing The Revolt of the Masses he wrote about Ibn Khaldûn and his philosophy of history; see "Abenjaldun nos revela el secreto: pensamientos sobre Africa menor," 1928, Obras III, pp. 669–687. In The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Ibn Khaldûn developed a cyclic theory of history based on the complementary social systems of the nomads and the city dwellers. On the desert a pedagogy of scarcity, a subsistence economy, maintained the elemental vital virtues of the Bedouin; he remained tough, adaptable, courageous, honest, and religious, as well as brutal, uncouth, and uncivilized. In the city a pedagogy of abundance, a luxury economy, inculcated a hedonistic view of life. The urbanite became sensitive and civilized, as well as wily, dishonest, base, and profane. The pleasures of the city always attracted the Bedouin; and once the urbanite's moral decline went too far, the city would not be able to defend itself from the desert dwellers. The Bedouins would take the city over in stages; and slowly the city would urbanize its barbarian masters, and convert them from their elemental virtues. Eventually, these new city dynasties would fall before the pressures of another wave of nomadic hordes. See The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Franz Rosenthal, trans., especially Vol. 1, pp. 71–86, 249–310, Vol. II, pp. 117–137. Ibn Khaldûn's system was quite similar to Ortega's except that the North African's pedagogy of scarcity and pedagogy of abundance were in effect at the same time but in different places (the desert and the city), whereas Ortega's operated in the same place (Europe) but at different times (nineteenth century and twentieth century). The main difference between the two was that Ibn Khaldûn's cycle was closed, whereas Ortega saw a way to break his.
A84 — HISTORIC DEVELOPMENTS OCCUR AS CRITICS ALTER A PEOPLE'S VIEW OF LIFE.
An example of this critical power has become manifest on a small scale in recent years: the reluctance of many talented college graduates to consider business careers. This reluctance can be traced back to critical assessments of corporate culture such as The Organization Man by William H. Whyte, Jr. The antipathy for business may turn out to be simply the leading edge of a much deeper shift in aspirations and expectations, one on a par with the Renaissance and Reformation or the democratic revolution.
There is need for a truly "critical" history of modern Europe, that is, a history that shows the constructive effects of criticism over time. Such a history would be neither an account of political development nor of ideological development; rather it would lay bare the underlying systems of expectation that sustain politics and inform ideology. So far, the closest to such critical history is the Weltanschauung analysis initiated by Wilhelm Dilthey. His fullest effort is his Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2, but this work is hard to differentiate from an intellectual history of the period. What is needed, as Dilthey suggested in his Pädagogik: Geschichte und Grundlinien des Systems, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 9, is a means of showing the effect of a world view on historical development; one place to look for this is in the history of education. A major effort influenced by Dilthey's historiography was Hermann Leser's Das pädagogische Problem, which tries to show how, from the Renaissance through Romanticism, changes in world views affected people's conceptions of pedagogical aims and methods. It is a history that has been unduly ignored by American historians of education.
A85 — THE MORE PEOPLE CONSUME CRITICISM, THE LESS5 CRITICAL THEY BECOME.
An interesting subject for historical inquiry would be a study of how criticism has been presented to the public at different times in history, for the current commercialization of criticism may be a unique, portentous phenomenon. What connection is there between the present penchant for socio-political criticism and the taste for sermons in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries? Perhaps a zeal to be reproved is the harbinger indicating that the concerns in question will soon be considered irrelevant, for to maintain their waning place, people must remind themselves daily that doom is nigh.
A86 — THERE HAS BEEN LITTLE AGREEMENT ABOUT THE PLACE OF LIFE IN THE LIFE SCIENCES.
On the basis of the name, life should be the central concern of biology, but life is a difficult substance to work with scientifically. At the edge, with certain viral bodies, it is difficult to distinguish a living system from certain inanimate molecules; hence vitalists have been hard put to give an adequate operational definition of life. At the same time, despite some progress towards the synthesis of living substance, the chemist is still a long way from the creation of complicated living forms.
Philosophers such as Ernest Nagel have condemned vitalism for scientific infertility—a fatal flaw according to those who account for truth by its cash value; see Nagel's "Mechanistic Explanation and Organismic Biology," in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. II, 1951, p. 327. Basically, Nagel's argument is that vitalism is dead because it has given rise to no significant research. It is not dear, however, whether such a conclusion is founded on an observed lack of research or whether the observed lack of research is founded on the conclusion. This alternative should be considered seriously because there have been a number of vitalistically inclined researchers whose work has not been considered in a spirit of "sweetness and light" by members of the dominant schools. In Modern Science and the Nature of Life, pp. 291–2, William S. Beck scornfully dismisses vitalistic dissenters from his materialistic interpretation of the nature of life. His method is not scientific. Thus Beck responds to the work of Edmund W. Sinnott: "The author presents 'scientific' evidence for the existence of the soul...." A pair of well-placed quotation marks thus substitutes for an argument, and Beck goes on to exclaim at Sinnott's imbecility for considering a vitalistic position as possibly scientific: "This from within our scientific ranks. This in a discussion of the very subject upon which our ultimate understanding of cancer must depend, the nature of the organism." A soul, indeed!
Despite the hostile response vitalism has received in twentieth-century biology, it has not died out. There is no adequate survey of early twentieth-century vitalism. H. S. Jennings' article "Doctrines Held as Vitalism," The American Naturalist, Vol. XLVIII, No. 559, July 1913, pp. 385–417, is a useful survey. During the 1920's the Italian magazine Scientia carried over thirty articles about different aspects of vitalistic thought; see Vols. 33–40. Three fairly recent books written from a non-mechanistic point of view are E. S. Russell, The Directiveness of Organic Activities, 1945; Raymond Ruyer, Néo-finalisme, 1952; and Edmund W. Sinnott, Cell and Psyche: The Biology of Purpose, 1950. These synthesize a good deal of twentieth-century vitalism, but they do not agree on what is important in it. The work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, especially as reflected in Modern Theories of Development: An Introduction to Theoretical Biology, carries on Uexküll's tradition of inquiry.
On the basis of the name, life should be the central concern of biology, but life is a difficult substance to work with scientifically. At the edge, with certain viral bodies, it is difficult to distinguish a living system from certain inanimate molecules; hence vitalists have been hard put to give an adequate operational definition of life. At the same time, despite some progress towards the synthesis of living substance, the chemist is still a long way from the creation of complicated living forms.
Philosophers such as Ernest Nagel have condemned vitalism for scientific infertility—a fatal flaw according to those who account for truth by its cash value; see Nagel's "Mechanistic Explanation and Organismic Biology," in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. II, 1951, p. 327. Basically, Nagel's argument is that vitalism is dead because it has given rise to no significant research. It is not dear, however, whether such a conclusion is founded on an observed lack of research or whether the observed lack of research is founded on the conclusion. This alternative should be considered seriously because there have been a number of vitalistically inclined researchers whose work has not been considered in a spirit of "sweetness and light" by members of the dominant schools. In Modern Science and the Nature of Life, pp. 291–2, William S. Beck scornfully dismisses vitalistic dissenters from his materialistic interpretation of the nature of life. His method is not scientific. Thus Beck responds to the work of Edmund W. Sinnott: "The author presents 'scientific' evidence for the existence of the soul...." A pair of well-placed quotation marks thus substitutes for an argument, and Beck goes on to exclaim at Sinnott's imbecility for considering a vitalistic position as possibly scientific: "This from within our scientific ranks. This in a discussion of the very subject upon which our ultimate understanding of cancer must depend, the nature of the organism." A soul, indeed!
Despite the hostile response vitalism has received in twentieth-century biology, it has not died out. There is no adequate survey of early twentieth-century vitalism. H. S. Jennings' article "Doctrines Held as Vitalism," The American Naturalist, Vol. XLVIII, No. 559, July 1913, pp. 385–417, is a useful survey. During the 1920's the Italian magazine Scientia carried over thirty articles about different aspects of vitalistic thought; see Vols. 33–40. Three fairly recent books written from a non-mechanistic point of view are E. S. Russell, The Directiveness of Organic Activities, 1945; Raymond Ruyer, Néo-finalisme, 1952; and Edmund W. Sinnott, Cell and Psyche: The Biology of Purpose, 1950. These synthesize a good deal of twentieth-century vitalism, but they do not agree on what is important in it. The work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, especially as reflected in Modern Theories of Development: An Introduction to Theoretical Biology, carries on Uexküll's tradition of inquiry.
A87 — THERE IS NOTHING VITAL ABOUT UNPERCEIVED FORCES THAT DETERMINE THE OUTCOME OF CERTAIN ACTIVITIES.
This distinction between absolute "problems and perceived or vital problems explains much about the humor of animated cartoons, which usually depends on the audience's perception of the ridiculous irrelevance of the disasters that the protagonists unwittingly encounter. It is significant that these cartoon disasters are never final; after having been squashed by a falling safe or overrun by a speeding steamroller, Puddycat can always peel himself off the pavement and return to the vital drama of chasing Tweety. To go from the ridiculous to the sublime, one should consult Book I, Chapter I, of Arrian's Discourses by Epictetus, "On things which are under our control and not under our control." Both comic humor and stoic sobriety remind us that the important things in life are things of which the living being is aware.
A88 — IN THESE THOUGHTS ORTEGA DREW OH THE BIQLOGY OF UEXKÜLL.
The most concise statement of Uexküll's work is his Die Lebenslehre, 1930. A translation of his major book, Theoretical Biology, is the only one available in English. Ortega published an article by Uexküll, "La Biología de la ostrea jacobea," Revista de Occidente, March 1924, pp. 297–331, in which Uexküll's fundamental ideas were presented. Uexküll's major research findings were summarized in his Umwelt und Innenwelt des Tiers, 1909.
Commentators who were not familiar with the particular theories that Ortega drew from have misunderstood his use of biological thought. Thus, in his Ortega y Gasset, pp. 32–33, José Ferrater Mora was embarrassed by Ortega's predilection for biological theories "of the von Uexküll-Driesch brand." In "Ni vitalismo, ni racionalismo" (1924, Obras III, pp. 271–280) Ortega denied that Driesch had influenced him. He said nothing about Uexküll, whose influence he warmly acknowledged elsewhere. We can conclude that Ortega was influenced by Uexküll and that he did not consider Uexküll to be a vitalist of the Driesch brand. Writers such as Ferrater Mora think that Ortega's use of Uexküll's ideas needs to be defended because it seems inconsistent that an anti–positivist philosopher like Ortega would use biological science to support his philosophy. The inconsistency is an appearance that arises with the erroneous assumption that Uexküll's biology was positivistic. It was not. Uexküll was a neo–Kantian transcendental idealist who began his biological theory with a meditation on the Critique of Pure Reason. Uexküll's idealistic conception of science, rather than his vitalism, seems to have been the major difficulty that other biologists encountered in his work, for most of them were positivists. Even vitalistic writers, such as Raymond Ruyer (Néo–finalisme, p. 217, fn. 1) criticized Uexküll's conception of science. The following quotation from Uexküll's Theoretical Biology, (Mackinnon, trans., p. x) gives a sense of his anti–positivism and of his agreement with Ortega's idea of science: "In Nature everything is certain; in science everything is problematical. Science can fulfill its purpose only if it is built up like a scaffolding against the wall of a house. Its purpose is to ensure the workman of a firm support everywhere, so that he may get to any point without losing a general survey of the whole. Accordingly, it is of first importance that the structure of the scaffolding be built in such a way as to afford this comprehensive view, and it must never be forgotten that the scaffolding does not itself pertain to Nature, but is always something extraneous." Surely, there was no inconsistency in an anti–positivist drawing on Uexküll's theories.
Thus far, Uexküll's thought has not had great influence on biology, except perhaps on the speculations of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who is laconic, however, about his sources. Uexküll did influence a number of twentieth–century humanists besides Ortega, in particular Ernst Cassirer. For the influence of Uexküll on Cassirer see the latter's The Logic of the Humanities, Clarence Smith Howe, trans., pp. 71–77, especially pp. 72–3: "This task for modern biology, which is set forth with great originality and carried out with extraordinary fruitfulness in Uexküll's writings, also affords us a path that can lead to a clear and definite delineation of the boundary between 'life' and 'spirit', between the world of organic forms and the world of cultural forms." Besides Cassirer and Ortega, it is altogether probable that Henri Bergson knew of Uexküll's work when he wrote The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. But Bergson's reticence about his sources makes it hard to trace influences. Further, Josef Pieper made use of Uexküll's work in "The Philosophical Act," in Leisure, The Basis of Culture, pp. 83–7.
A89 — THE DUTY OF THE CRITIC WAS TO REMIND MEN TO FORM INTELLIGIBLE REASONS FOR THEIR VIEWS.
See En torno a Galileo, 1933, Obras V, pp. 295–315; El hombre y Ia gente, 1949, 1957, Obras VIII, pp. 99–196; and 1Que es filosofía?, 1929, 1957, Obras VII, pp. 277–438. Ortega's critique of rationalism and relativism has similarities to positions Immanuel Kant adopted in "Criticism of the Fourth Paralogism of Transcendental Psychology." Both the rationalists and the relativists were transcendental realists who therefore had to treat phenomena with either a dogmatic, or a skeptical empirical idealism. In contrast, Ortega was a transcendental idealist whose doctrine of perspectivism elaborated the fact that all knowledge was of phenomena. With reference to phenomena Ortega could maintain an empirical realism that was neither dogmatic nor skeptical. Also, in "Considerations on the whole of Pure Psychology" Kant showed that dogmatic and skeptical criticism both claimed to have enough knowledge about an object to assert or deny anything about it. Critical criticism, much like Ortega's canon, claimed no knowledge of the object but examined the adequacy of the claims made by others. Critical objections established no doctrine, they simply indicated where others erred. See The Critique of Pure Reason, first edition, Chapter I of Book II of the Second Division, "Transcendental Dialectic." Ortega differed from Kant on the possibility of an ontology; see below. It is interesting that at about the same time, Walter Lippmann contended that the complications of public policy had become so great that voters should no longer attempt to judge the rightness or wrongness of various policies. Instead, they should try to evaluate whether or not the policy was arrived at by means of proper procedure. See Public Opinion, 1922, Part VII, pp. 369–418.
A90 — HERE, ORTEGA PUT HIMSELF IN THE RANKS OI TWENTIETH-CENTURY VISIONARIES.
The literature that might be mentioned with respect to this point is vast. In contemporary public affairs there are a number of visionary strands interwoven in current reform and protest movements; these are not all based on the same values and procedures. The problem for all is to work out a program and locus of action. On this question, many are proving unable to develop any vision; their program of action is negative, self-pitying, and potentially very destructive. At this stage, any program of visionary reform that makes the state and the economy the central locus of action—whether the action be negative or positive—is futile, destructive, and intrinsically insignificant. Our Kinderland lies in creating a more inclusive arena of action than the nation-state.
To create such an arena, however, one needs more than a good will. One needs first to define the issues that will be at stake within it, and one needs second to locate the institutions by means of which men can make effective decisions about the issues at stake. To me., it seems increasingly clear: the issues will be those that might be denoted as the problems affecting the humane quality of life in this world; the institutions will be the cultural and educational institutions, with the university developing in the future a place in public affairs somewhat like that which the state now holds, except that the university will not be national. Somewhere in the current academic turmoil, the foundations for such developments may be building up.
Ortega's work was an element in the ongoing effort to define the issues affecting the humane quality of life in this world. This effort, of course, has a rich history. But in the twentieth century, it has become the central concern in a great number of works, some good, some bad, and each with its unique bent. Among those pertinent to reading Ortega, I would include the following: Albert Camus, L'Homme revolté, 1957, as well as most of his other writings; M. Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, Cinquième édition, 1965; Jacques Maritain, Humanisme integral, Nouvelle édition, 1936; Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, Eden and Cedar Paul, trans., 1931, Philosophy and the World, 1963, and The Future of Mankind, E. B. Ashton, trans., 1961; Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, Natalie Duddington, trans., 1960; and so on. From such studies—and many more might be listed—agreement about the quality of life is not to be expected; rather what is happening is that the issues are being sharpened, our awareness of the connection between seemingly separate concerns is building up, and out of this awareness new issues for concerted action may emerge.
A91 — THERE IS AN END OF CERTAIN SORTS OF IDEOLOGY.
Throughout The End of Ideology and especially in the epilogue, "The End of Ideology in the West" (p. 373), Daniel Bell makes points similar to Shklar about the condition of political theory. A difference, however, is that Shklar sought a rebirth of political theory, whereas Bell was content to see it pass, to be replaced by the techniques of administration. Bell's view, which itself can be considered as a widely shared ideology in a rigorous sense of the word, a body of ideas reflecting the interests of a group, in this case the students and practitioners of social, economic, and political technique, is not convincing. In the essays that Bell gathered under the heading "The End of Ideology," he did not really come to grips with the important subject that the phrase announced, and it is regrettable that such a weak book carried such an influential title.
Ideological conflict is no closer to ending than is political theory, but the categories of both are going through transformations. To come to grips with these transformations, we need a truly post-Marxian social theory, one that can go beyond the categories that Marx set forth. We do not need more neo-Marxian theories, ones that rely on Marx's categories and that find, as a result, an end of ideology. The means of production have arrived at a point at which class warfare in its Marxian sense is disappearing. The great issue in the resultant situation is the one about which Marx was prophetic and obscure: the withering away of the state. The state will not wither unless it is made to do so—that has become clear in recent decades—and it has become equally clear that certain people have an interest in maintaining the state apparatus and others have an interest in dismantling it. Contemporary ideologies will be found to be arising from conflicts engendered by these divergent interests, not between the rich and the poor, but between the governors and the governed.
A92 — FROM HIS YOUTH, ORTEGA HAD A DUAL CONCEPTION DF SOCIETY.
See "Los dos patriotismos," in "La pedagogía social como programa político," 1910, Obras I, pp. 505–6; and "La España official y la España vital," in Vieja y nueva política, 1914, Obras I, pp. 271–5. In El tema de nuestro tiempo, Ortega applied his dual conception to civilization rather than to society, in the three chapters "Cultura y vida," "El doble imperative," and "Las dos ironías," Obras III, pp. 163–178; in La rebelión de las masas, 1930, the world of the noble man is close to that of the vital society, whereas that of the mass man is like the official society, ·"Vida noble y vulgar, o esfuerzo e inercia," Obras IV, pp. 180–5; in En torno a Galileo, 1933, the dual conception was used to analyze historical crises, in which the official society collapses and men are forced to live in a vital society or perish, see especially "Cambio y crisis," Obras V, pp. 69–80; the duality is in Ensimismamiento y alteración, 1939, in which the idea of being inside oneself (vital) and being outside oneself (official) is set forth, Obras V, pp. 293–316; finally, this essay developed into E! hombre y Ia genie, 1949, 1957, Obras VII, pp. 71–272, the significance of which for this problem is apparent from its title. The similarity with Henri Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion is not due to mutual influence, as shown by the fact that Ortega's division between official and vital society goes back to his very earliest writings, which appeared long before Bergson published his essay on morality and religion. Both were drawing on a tradition of thought that suggested such a distinction.
A93 — THE NATIONAIST SUBTERFUGE IN THEORIES OF INTERNATIONALISM.
Internationalism has generally been deemed "good" by the liberal spirit, and it has hence not received its due share of constructive criticism. To be meaningful, government must have direct contact with the people it governs; for this reason, existing world institutions are far from satisfactory: they have no basis, no power, no constituency. The question that should be asked is what world-wide institutions have direct involvement with persons in every country and have potentially universal functions. One set of institutions does meet these criteria: the educational institutions. For this reason, a significant world community, one populated by people, not secretaries of state, will be a cultural community with its institutional reality in the educational agencies. Consequently, the truly historic issue of our time concerns the relationship between the state and the school and the hope for a world community depends largely on our ability to free intellect from state control. For a preliminary, very sketchy adumbration of these matters see Robert Oliver, "Towards the Separation of School and State," Teachers College Record, Vol. 70, No. 1, October 1968, pp. 73–6.
A94 — A THEORY OF SOCIAL CONTRACT WAS MORE PERTINENT THAN A KINSHIP THEORY.
Variations on the kinship theory of the state have long been the standard historical interpretation of man's social origins. For instance, it was asserted forcefully by Woodrow Wilson: "'What is known of the central nations of history clearly reveals the fact that social organization, and consequently government ... , originated in kinship." The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics, p. 2. The kinship theory of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis is notorious. Less well known are Hesiod's descriptions of the beginnings of the human community in the gift of Pandora to Epimetheus (Works and Days) and to Prometheus (Theogony). The Hesiodic version of the original family is curiously consistent with Ortega's contention that the family came as a defense against bands of young men, for Hesiod described a time before women existed, when there were roving tribes of mortal men: "For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness which bring the Fates upon men .... " Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, Hugh G. Evelyn-White, trans., p. 9; cf. p. 123. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, Book II, "The Family," pp. 40–116, makes good, albeit exaggerated, use of the kinship theory in historical explanation. In De l'inégalité parmi les hommes, Rousseau raised some serious questions about the more anachronistic versions of the kinship theory, and anthropological research has borne out his suspicion that the family as it was known in Europe was not necessarily natural to primitive man. Be that as it may, the source of most types of social organization was one or another arrangement for the birth and nurture of infants.
In Plato's Republic Glaucon presented a social contract theory in Book II, 358–360; and the just state, especially in its early stages, is described as the result of an "as if" social contract in 368–374. See also: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part One, Chapter XIV; John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, Chapter VIII; and Rousseau, Du Contrat social, Livre I. In "Conjectural Beginning of Human History," Kant used both theories and in "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View" and in "Perpetual Peace" he relied mainly on the contract. See Kant, On History, pp. 11–26, 53–68, 85–135. Ortega's own conception included several contracts. There was a contract between the virile males, and contract between the less active groups to control the virile males. See "El origen deportivo del estado," 1924, Obras II, especially pp. 616–9.
A95 — THE STATE ORIGINATED IN AN EXUBERANT OVERFLOW OF ENERGY.
Evidence for Ortega's theory was considerable. The legendary rape of the Sabine women was an obvious example. Historical examination of Sparta, with its association of male warriors, and anthropological study of primitive societies, in which "houses of the unmarried" and other male associations were important, bore out Ortega's theory. Ortega mentioned Rome and Sparta: "El origen deportivo del estado," 1924, Obras II, pp. 619–620, and the houses of the unmarried, p. 617. A German anthropologist, H. Schurtz, had previously used the male associations as the basis for a theory about primitive societies, Altersklassen und Miinnerbünde, 1902. There is no evidence that Ortega was familiar with this work, although in 1937 ("Ictiosauros y editores clandestinos," Obras VIII, p. 386) Ortega praised Robert H. Lowie's Primitive Society, in which Schurtz's theory was criticized at length, pp. 257–337. But this was well after Ortega composed his essay on the origin of the state.
A96 — ORTEGA ON FASCISM.
Each time Ortega dealt with the problem of Fascism he took it seriously; he assumed that there was some positive significance in it that could be uncovered. This is the true characteristic of the "open minded" person. He does not pliantly accept anything that comes his way; he tries to turn everything that comes his way to the best use he can. Thus Ortega used Fascism and other extreme movements to learn something about the problems that underlay twentieth-century politics. See "Sobre el fascismo," 1925, Obras II, pp. 497–505; La rebelión ... , Obras IV, pp. 189–192, 205, 211–5; "No ser hombre de partido," 1930, Obras IV, pp. 75–83; "¿Instituciones?", 1931, Obras IV, pp. 362–5; and "Un rasgo de la vida alemana," 1935, Obras V, pp. 184–206.
A97 — FREE, PRINCIPLED EFFORT ORIGINATED IN EXUBERANT SPORT.
Huizinga developed this idea at greater length in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. His chapters III–V are the most relevant to Ortega's conception and Huizinga referred to Ortega's "Sportive Origin of the State." Ortega thought highly of Huizinga's book. He referred to it twice, both times appreciatively: Idea del teatro, 1958, Obras VII, p. 489, and "Comentario al Banquete de Platón," 1946–1962, Obras IX, pp. 753–4. In 1943, Homo Ludens was the one book that Ortega, the unsuppressible publisher, put out in a Spanish translation, through Editorial Azar, which he had established in Portugal. Ortega's writings on sport and exuberance preceded Huizinga's by several years, and he claimed (Obras VII, p. 490, fn. 1) an important influence on his Dutch friend. But priority matters little, for the work of each makes a significant whole and both were surely familiar with Friedrich Schiller's "play impulse" that he found essential to art (see Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, Revised edition, pp. 366–8).
A98 — WEALTH WAS ACQUlRED THROUGH SPORTING EFFORT.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber showed that it would be difficult to find a "sportive origin" of modern capitalism. The worldly asceticism of the Protestant ethic had extremely serious motives. Rather than disprove Ortega's theory, this difficulty gives a clue to the historical function that his exuberant ethic was to perform. Ortega believed that the spirit of industrialism, along with that of democracy, was in crisis. One of the causes of this crisis was the bankruptcy of the Protestant ethic and of its offspring—rationalist individualism. To put the matter another way, since the Reformation, Western civilization had been inspired essentially by serious motives, which the Protestant ethic typified. In the twentieth century the faiths that had justified this seriousness-belief in God, confidence in Reason, the lawfulness of Nature—were collapsing. These collapses plunged many Europeans into a deep nihilism. Ortega shared the general skepticism about the old justifications, but he was remarkably free of the despair and anguish that generally accompany contemporary skepticism, for he was deeply engaged in an attempt to transvalue our values. Ortega's position was premised on the belief that Western civilization could draw inspiration from a sense of the superfluous as well as it had from the serious. Whereas the Judeo-Christian fount of Western civilization was predominantly serious, the Greek heritage was essentially sportive. Unlike the Christian, the Greek basis for ethics was not invalidated by contemporary skepticism. Hence, the importance of Weber's analysis was not that it was an invalidation, but that it posed a challenge: will it ever be possible for a future Weber to consider "The Agonistic Ethic and the Spirit of Humanism"?
Ortega's statement that even wealth is a sporting achievement does not necessarily conflict with Weber's reflections about the relation of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Salvation was the truly serious matter for the Protestant because it was so difficult. Weber's analysis of the relation of Calvinism to the spirit of capitalism unwittingly brought the latter very close to a form of sport, however. Calvinists believed in predestination, and therefore there was no earning grace through good works. One gained nothing of personal significance through business activity. "The life of the saint was directed solely toward a transcendent end, salvation. But precisely for that reason it was thoroughly rationalized in this world and dominated entirely by the aim to add to the glory of God on earth" (p. 118). As in sport, honor and glory were the end, only it was the glory of God rather than of the contestant. Also, there was another sportive quality to Calvinistic capitalism. The athlete seeks to prove to himself that he can perform the feat he attempts. Likewise, "in the course of its development Calvinism added something positive to this [confrontation of the ascetic with the world by ending monasticism], the idea of the necessity of proving [to oneself and one's peers, for God knew] one's faith by worldly activity" (p. 121). In general, see Weber, The Protestant Ethic, pp. 99–154. The possibility of a sportive interpretation of Weber's thesis does not contradict the observations in the previous paragraph; it is to pursue an answer to the concluding question.
A99 — "A DAILY PLEBISCITE," A CONCEPTION ORTEGA BORROWED FROM RENAN.
Renan used the image in his address "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" Ortega used the image at least three times in his writings: La rebelión de las masas, 1930, Obras IV, p. 265; España invertebrada, 1921, Obras III, p. 71; and Vieja y nueva política, 1914, Obras L p. 291. Each time he used it to point out that a society had to be based on a project that would win the commitment of the participants in it. Hans Kohn's conception of the nation is similar to Ortega's. For Kohn, nationality was not a natural phenomenon; it was formed by means of the decision to create a nation: n Although some of these objective factors (tradition, geography, etc.] are of great importance for the formation of nationalities, the most essential element is a living and active corporate will. Nationality is formed by the decision to form a nationality." The Idea of Nationalism: A Study of Its Origin and Background, p. 15. In conjunction with this point, Kohn, like Ortega, cited Renan's statement about the daily plebiscite (see p. 581, n. 13). Further, Kohn contended that some kind of supranationalism was necessary because democracy and industrialism had outgrown the national structures.
A100 — YOUTH WAS THE CHANTAGE.
Ortega's polemic was against a caricature of youth, depicting it as a period with no duties—those good old college days, the best ones of your life. Consequently, in "Juventud," 1927, Obras Ill, pp. 463–471, Ortega was more favorable to the youth of his time, but he reminded his readers that youthfulness was an obligation to set one's course for maturity. See also En torno a Galileo, 1933, Obras V, pp. 46–50, for more on the missions of youth, maturity, and old age. At the end of "Pasado y porvenir para el hombre actual," 1962, Obras IX, p. 663, Ortega made a dramatic appeal to youth, but it was an appeal that threw great obligations on the young. According to the stages of life Ortega gave in En torno a Galileo the mature man had to contend against those both younger and older than himself in order to realize his aspirations in the world. The old man, having attempted the active fulfillment of his destiny, would instead try to incite the young to define their destinies in view of the problems that the aged had found to be important. Curiously, the difference between somewhat skeptical attitudes toward youth in The Revolt of the Masses and the very enthusiastic attitude in "The Past and Future of Present Man" may be accounted for by Ortega's own transition from maturity to old age. In keeping with his own description of the stages of life, at 45 Ortega was skeptical and at 68 he was enthusiastic. Who says that Ortega was not systematic?
A101 — ORTEGA SPOKE OF AN INSUFFICIENCY IN EUROPEAN CULTURE.
European writers have been less moved than American and English writers by the development of anthropology to absorb the traditional, pedagogical conception of culture into a scientific one. Thus, whereas Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy is good background for studying Ortega's position, Raymond Williams' Culture and Society and T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture are not particularly useful. The German conception of culture is fundamental to understanding Ortega. In Force and Freedom Jacob Burckhardt pointed out some of the public functions of culture in this sense. For the development and use of the idea by some of Ortega's contemporaries, see Georg Simmel The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, K. Peter Etzkorn, trans.; Max Scheler, Man's Place in Nature, Hans Meyerhoft trans., and Probleme einer Soziologie des Wissens in Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 8; and Eduard Spranger, Cultura y educación. Two historical works are particularly useful: Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, and Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Gilbert Highet, trans.
A102 — MEN WERE UNABLE TO NOURISH THEIR MORAL SENSE.
My discussion of the problem of amorality as Ortega saw it owes a great deal to Kant and Nietzsche, as did Ortega. For Kant see particularly the Critique of Practical Reason and the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals, and in general the Critique of Pure Reason, the method of which is essential to understanding the other two works. For Nietzsche see in particular Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals.
A103 — THAT MEPHISTOPHELEAN CREATURE, TECHNOLOGY.
Numerous books are coming out on the subject of technology; see for instance Victor C. Ferkiss, Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality. One of the best is still Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization, which, along with Ellul's Technological Society, provides a solid introduction to the humane issues raised by our technical creativity. For the historical development of technology in its socio-economic setting, see the excellent study by David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change, 1750 to the Present.
A104 — ORTEGA'S CONCEPTION OF TECHNOLOGY DIFFERED FROM THOSE ELLUL DEALT WITH.
Technology was explicitly the subject of Ortega's "Meditación de Ia técnica," 1939, Obras V, pp. 319–375; "El mito del hombre allende Ia técnica," 1951, Obras IX, pp. 617–624. In the shape of "organization" it was the topic of "Un rasgo de la vida alemana," 1935, Obras V, pp. 184–206; "Individuo y organización," 1953, Obras IX, pp. 677–690. Technology was a subject that Ortega mentioned frequently in many other writings. One can fall into a semantic morass by trying to compare definitions of technology used by different writers. For a useful attempt see Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, pp. 13–22. For a helpful analysis of the differences between the philosophical and the historical modes of theorizing see Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy and Other Studies, especially pp. 17– 27, 52–55, 56–77.
A105 — ORTEGA WAS NOT A PRAGMATIST, IF ONE THINKS THAT A PRAGMATIST BELIEVES THAT TRUTH DEPENDS ON USEFULNESS.
In "Para dos revistas argentinas," 1924, Obras VIII, pp. 372–6, Ortega discussed the differences he had with pragmatism. It was precisely that utility had nothing to do directly with ideas—actions were useful or harmful depending on whether the ideas that guided the activity were true or false, as well as significant or trivial. Ortega scorned pragmatism as an inferior philosophy. Nevertheless, there are possibilities for comparing Ortega and Dewey and American pragmatism on this question of the instrumentality of knowledge. However, again it would be important to resist the ubiquitous danger of assimilating the whole to one of its parts. "American" pragmatism is not a whole and it would be wrong to draw a direct connection between it and Ortega. Instead, the similarities between them should eventually be explained by showing that both were part of a larger Western intellectual movement. During the nineteenth century faith in a purposive, meaningful universe was undermined by the flood of scientific knowledge. Purpose was expelled from nature, but the human mind rebels at thinking of itself as a meaningless, purposeless interloper in a gratuitous universe. Therefore, during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many philosophers and psychologists tried to salvage the situation by locating purpose in our ways of knowing, which were anterior to our conception of the universe. Ortega and the American pragmatists were both parts of this larger whole.
A106 — IN ADDITION TO BEING TRUE, ALL KNOWLEDGE SHOULD BE INSTRUMENTAL.
A short statement of this is in the section "Acción y contemplación," in Ideas sabre la novela, 1925, Obras III. pp. 403–7. It is so basic in Ortega's outlook that it will be found wherever he wrote about culture, thought, reason, or intelligence; all these had vital functions. Nietzsche took this position when he argued that beliefs that were necessary for life might be false; see The Will to Power, 483, 487, 493, and 497 (cf. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche, pp. 305–6). Hans Vaihinger developed a similar position in Die Philosophie des Als Ob, especially pp. 1–20. Both Nietzsche and Vaihinger, however, contended merely that the false or fictional was important nevertheless for its instrumentality, for the fact that it guides beneficent action. Ortega's instrumentalism was more fully akin to Socrates when he renounced the study of the natural philosophers because they did not answer the questions that he thought were important; see Phaedo, 96–100. Ortega frequently criticized positivism for being obsessed with finding "Truths" even when they were far too insignificant to be worth the effort.
Ortega should be carefully compared to Dewey on three points: the present one of their respective views of the instrumentality of knowledge, Ortega's use of perspectivism as a means of overcoming the difficulties that led Dewey to criticize all forms of dualism, and their common emphasis on education as the foundation of public affairs. These problems were touched on only obliquely by José Arsenio Torres in his dissertation "Philosophic Reconstruction and Social Reform in John Dewey and José Ortega y Gasset."
A107 — THE TECHNICIAN NEEDED A THEORY OF VALUATION.
Although popular interpretations of pragmatism do not acknowledge it, certainly James and Dewey reasoned in a similar way from the practical to the ethical. For James see The Will to Believe; and for Dewey, Theory of Valuation. The press of progress is making the scientist come around to a similar position. Scientists have realized that there are more possible research problems than there are researchers. To judge wisely which problems will receive effort one must resort to nonscientific ethical and political considerations. See Derek J. de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon, pp. 92– 124; and J. Robert Oppenheimer, "On Science and Culture," Encounter, October 1962, pp. 3–10. For some of the political problems that arise from having to guide scientific inquiry by means of a policy see Science and the Federal Patron by Michael D. Reagan.
A108 — PRACTICAL PLANNERS WILL DISLIKE ORTEGA'S CONCEPTION OF TECHNOLOGY.
Ortega will fall under the heading of the apocalyptic rebels that Daniel Bell sees as one pole of the contemporary academic view of the post-industrial world, for Ortega was willing to see that world fall apart in a rather profound social transformation based on an ineluctable transvaluation of values. See Bell's "The Scholar Cornered: About The Reforming of General Education," The American Scholar, Summer 1968, pp. 401–6. For the planners' views of such issues see Toward the Year 2000, Daedalus, Summer 1967. The complacency of the practical outlook on technology and related problems is well criticized by John McDermott, "Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals," The New York Review of Books, July 31, 1969. The complacency McDermott castigates is quintessentially exemplified by Irving Kristol, "American Intellectuals and Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs, July 1967.
A109 — VICO AND THE GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN.
Recently an important contribution to the understanding of Vice's place in the history of thought has been made through the substantial volume Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, edited by Giorgio Tagliacozzo. For Vico's works in English, see The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch, trans., and On the Study Methods of Our Time, Elio Gianturco, trans. In Immagine e parola nella formazione dell'uomo, M. T. Gentile indicates the pattern for a reinterpretation of the history of educational theory that assigns a very important place to Vico.
A110 — NIETZSCHE IS STILL CONDEMNED AS AN IRRATlONALIST.
See for instance, George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology, pp. 16–7, 26–30. For criticism of Ortega as an irrationalist, see J. Roland Pennock, Liberal Democracy: Its Merits and Prospects. In "Ni vitalismo ni racionalismo," 1924, Obras III, pp. 270–280, Ortega protested that El tema de nuestro tiempo had not been meant as a defense of irrationalism. In the usage of the time, "vitalism" meant the irrational assertion of life against intellect, and not the philosophical-scientific question of whether or not there is a vital principle distinct from physical principles. Ortega contended that instead of irrationally asserting the claims of life against reason, men should reasonably assert the claims of life against rationalism, which he considered to be an unfounded, mystical, irrational belief in the power of reason to know objective reality. For Ortega, reason, reasonably conceived, was a function of life, not something in opposition to it.
A111 — YET REASON HAS A HISTORY.
The book that most made me aware of this fact is Bruno Snell's The Discovery of Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought. An important study for the theme, one that does much to outline a history of moral reason, is Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale by Leon Brunschvicg. Also very valuable as a prelude to a history of reason is Ernst Cassirer's great work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Enlightening as these studies are, the history of reason as such is still largely to be written. The key step in the undertaking would be, I think, correlating the developing forms of thinking rationally with the crucial problems of life at various historic periods. Thus, the modern tendency to dismiss the intellectual life of the middle ages as one dominated by blind belief, dogma, and superstition, may be due to a failure to grasp the connections between the formulaic, liturgic, symbolic modes of reasoning then common with the human difficulties that men authentically felt.
A112 — THE RELATION OF HERACLITUS AND PARMENIDES.
The pre-Socratics present an interesting historiographical problem, for they make us confront the question whether history refers to the past or to the sources. The sources for the pre- Socratics are in such fragmentary condition that it is probable that any account that adheres strictly to the sources will falsely depict the past actuality to which it purportedly adheres. At the same time, without strict adherence to the sources, there ceases to be any way to evaluate the historical truth of an interpretation. Because of this problem, it seems most sound to distinguish two forms of scholarship with respect to the pre-Socratics, which, although distinct, should inform one another. The first is the well established tradition of the philological study of the sources; the second a speculative, synthetic return from the corpus of post-Socratic philosophy to imagining what might have come before it. With this endeavor, one should treat discussions of the pre- Socratics as as if constructions that can be put forward within limits set down by the philological reconstruction of the fragments. Although frankly speculative, such constructions can be very helpful in explicating the possible meaning of Plato and Aristotle, and one can distinguish between the value, if not the truth, of such constructions according to how well they help one explicate post-Socratic philosophy.
Although completely devoid oi technical expertise in philology, I have found that meditating on the possible meaning of the pre-Socratics to be a fruitful heuristic. With respect to all periods, the problem for the educational historian is to appreciate the eventual rationality of diverse, very strange modes of thinking. I do not believe that there are any conclusions, in a real sense, to this process; it is, if you will, a continuous entry. Yet, although no conclusions develop, there is real progress; layer after layer of possibility appears and unexpected systems of connections unfold.
My reflections on the pre-Socratics have been based on rather standard sources: Kathleen Freeman's Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers and her Companion to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers; John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy; G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven's The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts; Philip Wheelwright's Heraclitus; Werner Jaeger's Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers; and W. K. C. Guthrie's History of Greek Philosophy, Vols. I and II.
A113 — TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALS WERE USED AS IF THEY TOLD ABOUT REALITY IN ORDER TO ESTABLISH INTELLECTUAL STANDARDS.
A great deal of ensuing Continental philosophy turns on this point and the problems for reason that it gives rise to. The transcendental ideal is discussed by Kant in Critique of Pure Reason, I, Pt. 2, Oiv. 2, Ch. 3, Sec. 2; see especially pp. A576, A580 (Norman Kemp Smith, trans.):
But the concept of what thus possesses all reality is just the concept of a thing in itself as completely determined.... It is therefore a transcendental ideal which serves as basis for the complete determination that necessarily belongs to all that exists. This ideal is the supreme and complete material condition of the possibility of all that exists—the condition to which all thought of objects, so far as their content is concerned, has to be traced back....
If, in following up this idea of ours, we proceed to hypostatize it, we shall be able to determine the primordial being through the mere concept of the highest reality, as a being that is one, simple, all-sufficient, eternal, etc. In short, we shall be able to determine it, in its unconditioned completeness, through all predicaments. The concept of such a being is the concept of God, taken in the transcendental sense.... In any such use of the transcendental idea we should, however, be overstepping the limits of its purpose and validity. For reason, in employing it as a basis for the complete determination of things, has used it only as the concept of all reality, without requiring that all this reality be objectively given and be itself a thing. Such a thing is a mere fiction....
A114 — WERE THIS A BOOK ON THE REFORM OF REASON, NUMEROUS CONTRIBUIDRS WOULD HAVE TD BE DISCUSSED IN ADDITION TO ORTEGA.
Speculative philosophy faces forward; it is not, as Alfred North Whitehead would have had us believe, a series of footnotes to Plato, or it does not at least arise in this retrospective manner. On the contrary, speculative philosophy is our effort to solve in the future certain problems we perceive in the present; and only when we are searching for a day yet to come can we usefully write footnotes to Plato, for in this way they gain a prospective significance. Present problems and future hopes are the foundation of all historical valuations: history is the teleological science par excellence; and anachronism is an historical sin, not because it violates the past, but because it diminishes our sense of the future. Since history is a teleological study, historians often overturn the valuations of their predecessors, and historical figures are usually most comprehensible when they are seen, not as the genetic product of their past, but as the teleological creation of their future. The continuity of culture lies, not in the mysterious power of great works to mold their progeny in the pattern of the past, but in the magnificent capacity of great men to appropriate their patrimony in the work of the future. Since we have by no means finished appropriating the patrimony of the last hundred years, the intellectual history of this period is still indeterminate.
^pWhat is it that a creative thinker appropriates from his peers? It is not primarily a series of particular points; men of large mind take in so much from their past and present that one would lose control of one's work trying to identify each bit and assign it to its proper source. A creative thinker primarily appropriates a set of central concerns from his peers; in communicating with them in fact and fancy, he comes to see certain problems as the ones that must be mastered if he is to take a leading part in the thought of his time. The job of the intellectual historian is to make manifest the great systems of concern that give rise over time and space to an intellectual community.
So far, only H. Stuart Hughes has essayed a full assessment of the concerns uniting European social thinkers since the late nineteenth century. Consciousness and Society: The Reconstruction of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 and The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought in the Years of Desperation, 1930–1960 are the first two of a three part survey of the situation. These are competent works. Hughes has, unlike many popularizers of particular movements, acquainted himself with the full range of what was written. This is especially true of Consciousness and Society, but even in this book there is discernible an obtrusion of American behaviorism onto the controlling definition of social thought, which prompts the author to ignore significant thinkers. In the sequel, the complete omission of Jacques Ellul and Georges Gurvitch from his assessment of French social thought is a serious flaw, which could on the proper occasion lead into a full-scale critique of Hughes' division of the social thought of 1930 to 1960 into "French" and "anti-Fascist emigré" schools.
A less satisfactory general survey is After Utopia by Judith N. Shklar. This book was criticized in the text, pp. 327–30. Its weakness is integral, arising it seems to me because the author did not have a thorough acquaintance with any single writer with whom she dealt; as a consequence, she did not really understand her subject. A scholar develops a much surer sense of the issues of a time after he has contended with the complete work of one of its representatives. My own conception of European social philosophy is shaped by my study of Ortega: my knowledge of Ortega has affected the way I read others, and a reading of other writers has informed my understanding of Ortega. I have become convinced that the lines along which the social philosophy of the last hundred years have been described are wrong and arbitrary and that we should ignore these and construct alternatives. This is not the right occasion to develop the theme that I think holds together the divergent lines of inquiry during this period; namely, the desirability of creating a system of normative discourse equal to the scope, range, and intimacy of our actual, normative relations. My sense of this problem is still dominated by Ortega; I see him at the center of a large group that is united by a common concern for the disjunction between our ability to act upon each other and our ability to assume reasonable responsibility for the consequences of these actions. Whether after the full study of this group I will still find Ortega central to it, is for the future to tell.
Men have never been able to anticipate perfectly the consequences of their actions, and thus philosophers have always been concerned to improve our capacity to think through the implications of our deeds. But in recent times, the scale of human action has greatly expanded, which has intensified the age-old problem of understanding our personal and collective responsibilities. This concern has unified the work of many recent thinkers, all of whom have worried intensely about what might best be described by a phrase of Wolfgang Köhler, "'the place of value in a world of facts." The literature that developed from this concern is variegated and profound. A full discussion of it here would take us too far afield; I hope in the future to take up such a discussion on the scale it merits in a three volume study of cosmopolitanism and nationalism in modern thought, Power and Pedagogy. Here I shall merely note the contributions to the concern that have informed my understanding of Ortega. For the sake of brevity, these writers can be grouped as Ortega's elders, peers, and juniors. I mention those who, although not necessarily an influence on Ortega or influenced by Ortega, have contributed to my understanding of Ortega.
Foremost among Ortega's elders was Wilhelm Dilthey. I do not agree with interpreters who think that Dilthey's form of historicism ends in a relativism; whenever locally circumscribed systems of value come up against evidence of the diversity of human mores, the first step is to recognize the dependence on locality of every particular precept and to find the highest values not in the particular precepts, but in the quality of the relation between different precepts and the situations to which they pertain. The works by Dilthey I have consulted are given in the bibliographical list. Most illuminating of them for displaying the concern animating Dilthey's reflection is Briefwechsel zwischen Dilthey und Graf Yorck.
Although a biologist, Jacob von Uexküll was deeply concerned with finding a place for value in biological science by uncovering its place in life. For Uexküll see the bibliographical annotation XI:e.
Neo-Kantianism, in the version of the Marburg school and in Hans Vaihinger's work, was an effort, among other things, to provide a foundation for rational valuation. Cohen's works cited in annotation II:e and Natorp's mentioned in II :m have already been discussed. Die Philosophie des Als Ob by Hans Vaihinger seems to those of a naturalistic orientation to lead to skeptical consequences; but in its context of replying to a naive overconfidence in positivistic science, it should be seen as a rather successful and influential effort to put reasoning about fact and reasoning about value on an equal footing, on which the proponents of one cannot denigrate the other as "mere speculation."
The important work of Brentano, Meinong, and Ehrenfels in searching for a rigorous conception of value as it is manifest in life is well surveyed by Howard 0. Eaton, The Austrian Philosophy of Values.
Also of great importance in giving a common basis to our reasoning about facts and values is the work of Edmund Husserl, which I am acquainted with through Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, Quentin Lauer, trans.; Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, W. R. Boyce Gibson, trans.; and "Phenomenology," in the 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. XVII, pp. 700–22.
Although German thinkers such as these were most influential on Ortega, others contributed to the clarification of the place of values in a world of fact. I have learned much from the works of Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, Arthur Mitchell, trans.; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Andrea and Brenton, trans.; Time and Free Will, F. L. Pogson, trans.; and Matter and Memory, Paul and Palmer, trans.
My own introduction to the problem of values has been in large part through American writers. Henry Adams is, I think, more important with respect to this question than is generally recognized. In addition to The Education of Henry Adams, a sustained treatise on the dilemmas arising from the disjunction between power and our understanding, see The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, Democracy, and many of his letters, which all have penetrating insights into the problem of values in industrial democracies.
For William James, see The Will to Believe, Varieties of Religious Experience, and Pragmatism.
For Dewey, see Art as Experience, Democracy and Education, Experience and Nature, Freedom and Culture, The Quest for Certainty, and Theory of Valuation. It is important to treat serious pragmatism in its European, neo-Kantian context, rather than in the usual one of "American" pragmatism. James and Dewey both had the problem of value at the center of their concern, a fact inexcusably obscured by Dewey by his cant about scientific method, which opened his ideas to debasement by a horde of hangers-on.
Three books by Santayana have been useful to me in forming my ideas about Ortega: Scepticism and Animal Faith, The Life of Reason, and The Sense of Beauty. Unlike many, Santayana was far less concerned to apply the great tradition to contemporary problems and developments as he was to give a contemporary restatement of the tradition; thus his work lacks a pretension to novelty, a lack that repels some, but it has a grasp of the fundamentals and a literary grace that are an invaluable propaedeutic to a study of Ortega
Another writer of this era whose work is pertinent but not as well known to me is Alfred North Whitehead.
The thought of Ortega's peers has been presented in English in a way that reveals the herd instincts of the scholar. Neither phenomenology nor "existentialism" is a self-contained movement; and the attention that has been lavished on these has been way out of proportion to the relative lack of interest in closely related developments. To right the balance we need a work that will bring out the community of concern between men like Ernst Cassirer, Eduard Spranger, Friedrich Meinecke, Martin Buber, Theodor Litt, Werner Jaeger, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, Johan Huizinga, and many others.
Unlike his fellow neo-Kantians, Cassirer was not interested in writing and re-writing fundamental critiques of reason; he seems to have agreed tacitly with the Hegelian position that the true phenomenology of mind is to be found in the historical unfolding of reason. Hence, his epistemology owes more to history than to logic. For instance, many of his works at first seem to be dispassionate historical reports, and rather dry reports at that. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Koelln and Pettegrove, trans., does not preserve the wit characteristic of Enlightenment thinkers; but it performs a much greater service, that of making present-day readers contend with the systematic convictions upon which Enlightenment thinkers based modern politics and philosophy, for these convictions are usually ignored by historians. By laying bare these convictions, as Cassirer said (p. xi), we confront not only our history, but the implicit premises of our living orthodoxies; and when we find these premises to be difficult and obscure, the intellectual history of the Enlightenment becomes the occasion for our critical examination of our present. This integral combination of history and philosophy characterized Cassirer's other major works—Substance and Function, Swabey and Swabey, trans.; The Problem of Knowledge, Woglom and Hendel, trans.; The Myth of the State; An Essay on Man; and The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols., Ralph Manheim, trans. These works have provided important background for my study of Ortega; both the subjects they deal with and the discipline they engender are valuable in understanding Ortega.
Eduard Spranger was well known to Ortega and he is of much greater importance than is recognized in the United States. His Types of Men: the Psychology and Ethics of Personality, Paul J. W. Pigors, trans., has never found an American audience, partly because the translation, although "authorized," is far from the best one possible, and partly because Spranger's thought, like that of so many Europeans of his time, is too wide ranging to fit neatly into any of America's academic niches. In addition to Types of Men, I have found Spranger's Cultura y educación useful in my study of Ortega.
Of Buber's work, I have studied I and Thou, R. G. Smith, trans.; Daniel: Dialogues on Realization, Maurice Friedman, trans.; and Pointing the Way, Maurice Friedman, trans. In addition, Friedman's biography, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, is well worth consulting. Buber' s place in neo-Kantianism has not yet been adequately studied, and an inquiry into the relations between Buber and Cassirer, Spranger, Litt, and others would be fruitful.
Max Scheler was highly respected by Ortega, who memorialized Scheler's death in 1928 in "Max Scheler," Obras IV, pp. 507–511. I am familiar with Scheler's work through his On the Eternal in Man, Bernard Noble, trans.; Man's Place in Nature, Hans Meyerhoff, trans.; Philosophical Perspectives, Oscar A. Haac, trans.; and Probleme einer Soziologie des Wissens. John Raphael Staude's Max Scheler, 1874–1928: An Intellectual Portrait is an adequate introduction to Scheler's work, although Scheler's complicated and everchanging relations to the intellectual developments of his time still need further elucidation.
There is no escaping the fact, no matter how much one may dislike his character, style, or politics, that Heidegger's Being and Time is a most important book for anyone engaged in the study of systematic philosophy in the twentieth century. For such a person, the discipline of following Heidegger's reasoning leads to a tremendous clarification of certain problems discussed in the text above. However, let us be wary of Heideggerians who find his language a handy means for making a claim to personal profundity by aping their master's obscurity without matching his mission. Heidegger's ideas are not all that difficult, and it is these, not his jargon, that the student needs to master. In addition to Being and Time, I have studied Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, James S. Churchill, trans., and Existence and Being, Werner Brock, trans. The most helpful secondary source on Heidegger is, I think, Thomas Langan's The Meaning of Heidegger: A Critical Study of An Existentialist Phenomenology.
The work of Karl Jaspers has been less satisfactorily presented in English. More of Jaspers' writing has been translated than of Heidegger's, but until recently the major works by Heidegger had been translated whereas only the minor and middling works of Jaspers had been published here. Two books by Jaspers are closely related in concern and subject to books by Ortega, Jaspers' Man in the Modern Age (1931) to Ortega's Revolt of the Masses (1930), and The Idea of the University to The Mission of the University. In addition, I have found The Future of Mankind, E. B. Ashton, trans.; Philosophy and the World, E. B. Ashton, trans.; and The Origin and Goal of History, Michael Bullock, trans., significant in my work on Ortega. The recent publication of E. B. Ashton's translation of Jaspers' Philosophy, Vol. I, is a major addition, which begins to bring the English presentation of Jaspers into balance with that of Heidegger.
The important relation of Huizinga's Homo Ludens to Ortega's thought is discussed in annotation XII :g.
Among the books by Ortega's juniors that illuminate his thought, I would single out the following. Ortega himself pointed to similarities and differences between his thought and that of French existentialism, which meant to him primarily Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. For Sartre, see L'être et le néant, and for Merleau-Ponty see Phénoménologie de la perception, La structure du comportement, Humanisme et terreur: essai sur le probleme commumiste, and Sens et Non–sens. Two secondary works that are competent analyses are Joseph P. Felt III, Emotion in the Thought of Sartre, which goes beyond the strict limits of its title, and Albert Rabil, Jr., Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World. The two most interesting writers carrying on Ortega's concern for the relation between technique and the humane value of life are Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society, Propagandes, and The Political Illusion, which are all discussed in the bibliographical annotations, and the Italian, Enrico Castelli, in Le temps harcelant, Introduction a une phénoménologie de notre époque, and L'enquête quotidienne. Of the two, Ellul is the more substantial and systematic thinker. There is a good review article on Ellul by William Gorman, "Ellul—A Prophetic Voice," in The Center Magazine, October–November 1967, pp. 34–7.
Martin S. Dworkin has directed me to many of the writers already discussed, and a number of others whose work needs to be taken into account, some of whose books I deal with in the text or bibliographical annotations. Among these are Gustave Le Bon, Julien Benda, Alain, Léon Brunschwicg, Alexandre Kojève, Alfred Schütz, Maurice Blondel, Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Marcel, Georges Gurvitch, Heinrich Rickert, Georg Simmel, Theodor Geiger, Karl Mannheim, Werner Sombart, Wilhelm Flitner, Friedrich Meinecke, Kurt Riezler, Florian Znaniecki, Alfred Weber, Nicolai Hartmann, Otto F. Bollnow, Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Guido de Ruggiero, R. G. Collingwood, and so on.
A115 — ORTEGA'S ATTEMPT AT A NEW ONTOLOGY.
Most of the important sources are mentioned in the notes. It may be helpful, however, to list here the major sources for this effort along with their approximate dates of composition: ¿Qué es filosofía? (1929), "¿Qué es el conocimiento?" (1931), Unas lecciones de metafísica (1932), En torno a Galileo (1933), "Guillermo Dilthey y Ia idea de Ia vida" (1934), "Historia como sistema" (1936), Ideas y creencias (1940), "Apuntes sobre el pensamiento" (1941), "Prólogo a veinte años de caza mayor, del Conde de Yerbes" (1942), Origen y epílogo de Ia filosofía (1943), "Commentario al Banquete de Platón" (1946), and La idea de principia en Leibniz y la evolución de la teoría deductiva (1947).
A116 — LITERATURE ON THE REFORM OF THE CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS.
This literature is immense and can be merely introduced here. In keeping with the analysis below, it can be divided into two kinds: prescriptive and protreptic. Representative examples of the prescriptive are: F. R. Leavis, Education and the University: A Sketch for an 'English School'; the Committee on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society, General Education in a Free Society; Howard Mumford Jones, Education and World Tragedy; The American Assembly, The Federal Government and Higher Education; Charles G. Dobbins, ed., Higher Education and the Federal Government; The Commission on the Humanities, Report of the Commission on the Humanities; James Bryant Conant, The Education of American Teachers; and Daniel Bell, The Reforming of General Education. Leading examples of the protreptic group are, besides Ortega's Misión de la universidad, Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America; Mark van Doren, Liberal Education; Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University; Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America; Jacques Barzun, The House of intellect; C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures; and James A. Perkins, The University in Transition. These groups, of course, reflect similarities of method, not of aim.
A117 — SOURCES FOR ORTEGA'S VIEWS ABOUT THE CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS.
In 1932, speaking at the centenary of the University of Granada, he suggested that the university was one of the basic European institutions that with a reform of reason might again be of crucial historic importance. "En el centenario de una universidad," 1932, Obras V, pp. 463–474. In 1934, writing "On Careers," he observed that the idea of a career could be a very useful historical concept to the young if they did not hypostatize it, seeking thoughtlessly to fit themselves to the form it suggested; if they used it as a mere idea they could map great new possibilities for their personal programs of life. "Sobre las carreras," 1934, Obras v, pp. 167–183.
In 1935, speaking about the "Mission of the Librarian," Ortega contended that, owing to the profusion of books, that venerable instrument of thought was falling into crisis; "from now on it will be necessary to care for the book as a living function; it will be necessary to control books by means of a policy and to become the tamers of the tumultuous tomes." Here was the librarian's mission. "Misión del bibliotecario," 1935, Obras V, p. 227, cf. pp. 209–234.
In 1935, speaking in the P.E.N. Club of Madrid, Ortega stated that "the mission of the writer, the biped with a pen, is to elevate towards the heights everything inert and dull. When the writer does not succeed or, at least, when he does not manage to do this, ah!, then the writer is not the writer because then the pen is not a pen, but a gun." Fateful words, these! "En el P.E.N. Club de Madrid," 1935, Obras VI, p. 233.
In 1937, musing on "A Quarrel in Physics," he contended that physicists should accept a systematic philosophic discipline in order to settle disagreements that were significant but insoluble by physical experiment; and if the physicists developed such intellectual foundations they would point the way to the rebirth of a European concord. "Branca en la fisica," 1937, Obras V, pp. 271–287.
In 1937, reflecting on "The Misery and Splendor of Translation," Ortega perceived a great educational mission for the translator: as Goethe had observed, the humane can live fully only among all men, and the task before the translator was to enable each of us, everyman, to live among all men, regardless of historic and linguistic barriers. "Miseria y esplendor de la traducción," 1937, Obras V, pp. 433–452. In 1943 and 1946, celebrating Velazquez, Ortega suggested to painters that men who had the capacity like Velazquez to reshape fundamentally the office of the painter are basic influences in the evolution of society: "they transcend, thus, the history of art and consign us to history in its entirety, the only one that is truly history." Velázquez, 1943, 1946, 1959, Obras VIII, p. 501, cf. pp. 484–5.
In 1946, writing on The Idea of the Theater, Ortega called it "a visible metaphor" that, like any metaphor, should allow men to go beyond themselves, intuiting things presently outside their powers of apprehension, for a few hours achieving "the supreme aspiration of the human being: managing to be sublime." Idea del teatro, 1946, 1958, Obras VII, pp. 459, 471, cf. pp. 443–501.
In 1948, in the "Prospectus of the Institute of the Humanities," Ortega proposed that those interested band together to partake in "man's most constitutive sport, that is theorizing," in this case theorizing in an atmosphere of healthy calm about how men can further humanize themselves. "Prospecto del Instituto de Humanidades," 1948, Obras VII, pp. 11–23.
In 1951, at a conference at Darmstadt on Man and Room, he called on the architect to free himself, like the technician, from reasoning from necessity and to fantasize new forms within which men might live. "El mito del hombre allende a técnica," 1951, Obras IX, pp. 617–623.
In 1953, at another Darmstadt conference, this time on The Individual and Organization, he contended that organization for its own sake was a threat to human life, that the welfare state, which aims to make life good for the individual, tends by virtue of its paternalism "to asphyxiate the individual," but that contemporary organization, if used as a basis, not a substitute, for individual effort, could be the groundwork of tremendous improvement in the quality of life. "Individuo y organización," 1953, Obras IX, pp. 677–680.
In 1954, speaking about "The Liberal Professions," he called on lawyers, doctors, engineers, financiers, and other professionals to resist the "hermeticism," the tendency to close themselves to larger issues, which they had recently manifested, and to "create new forms of individual activity," to invent ever more demanding realms of practice, and thus to preserve the "variety of situations" that characterized Europe. "Las profesiones liberales," 1954, Obras IX, pp. 691–706.
In 1954, in his last public speech, "A Look at the Situation of the Director or Manager in Present Society," Ortega reiterated his characteristic concerns: the manager had to resist specialism for he possessed enormous social power; the times were ones in which the limits of the nation-states had been reached and the vitality of public life was declining in sloth, politicians were ineffective, intellectuals could only theorize; the only potentially dynamic, constructive enterprise was a movement towards European unity, a unified Europe was a prerequisite of a stable world, and leadership in the movement towards unity was the managers' mission: "Peace—and not this or that little peace like so many that history has known, but peace as a stable form, almost definitive, of living together among the countries—is not a pure desire; it is a thing, and as such it therefore requires being fabricated. For this, it is necessary to find new and radical principles of law. Europe has always been prodigious in inventions. Why not have the hope that it can succeed as well in this?" "Una vista sobre la situación del gerente o 'manager' en la sociedad actual," 1954, Obras IX, p. 746, cf. pp. 727–746.