José Ortega y Gasset

• 1. Introduction

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  José Ortega y Gasset was born on the 9th of May 1883 in Madrid, into a family that sat at the center of Spanish public life. His father ran the newspaper El Imparcial, which belonged to the family of his mother, Dolores Gasset. That combination of liberal tradition and journalistic engagement shaped everything that followed.

  Ortega grew up to become one of the most widely read philosophers of the 20th century. His masterwork, The Revolt of the Masses, made him internationally famous. His ideas touched democracy, individuality, history, and the meaning of human life.

  He lived through monarchy, republic, civil war, and dictatorship, and he spent years in exile. When he finally came home to Madrid, he declared his beliefs incompatible with Francisco Franco's regime.

  How did a philosopher with roots in Madrid journalism come to challenge the foundations of Western thought? What did he mean when he said that life itself, not reason, is the true starting point for understanding reality? And what lasting mark did he leave on the minds that came after him?

• 2. Formation and the German Years

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  Ortega's first schooling came from the Jesuit priests of St. Stanislaus Kostka College in Málaga, where he studied from 1891 to 1897. He then moved through the University of Deusto in Bilbao and on to the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the Central University of Madrid, earning his doctorate in Philosophy in 1904.

  What changed his thinking most profoundly was Germany. From 1905 to 1907, he studied in Leipzig, Nuremberg, Cologne, and Berlin, but it was Marburg that left the deepest mark. There, the neo-Kantian philosophers Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp shaped his understanding of what reason could and could not do.

  The same German influence carried social and political weight. Cohen and Natorp were social democrats, and through them Ortega developed what his biographers describe as a communitarian outlook. He could be openly critical of capitalism, especially its laissez-faire variant, and he once declared that nineteenth-century capitalism had demoralized humanity and impoverished the ethical consciousness of man.

  Back in Spain in 1908, he took up a post teaching Philosophy, Logic and Ethics at the Escuela Superior del Magisterio de Madrid. Two years later he married Rosa Spottorno Topete, a Spanish translator and feminist, and was named full professor of Metaphysics at Complutense University of Madrid, filling a chair that had previously been held by Nicolás Salmerón.

• 3. The Revolt of the Masses

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  In 1917, Ortega began contributing to the newspaper El Sol, and it was through that paper's pages that two of his most important works first appeared as series of essays: Invertebrate Spain and The Revolt of the Masses.

  Published in its final form in 1930, The Revolt of the Masses became his most read and most debated book. In it, he argued for a meritocratic liberalism in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, defending it against attack from both communist movements and right-wing populists. He shared Mill's concern about what Mill had called the tyranny of the majority, and he worried that what he termed the collective mediocrity of the masses threatened individuality, free thought, and protections for minorities.

  Ortega called liberalism a politics of magnanimity. That framing put him at odds with the Spanish Conservative Party under Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and suspicious of both the Spanish monarchy and the Catholic Church. Yet the same book has been widely regarded as a conservative classic, and his political thought has been characterized as anti-democratic and conservative by many readers.

  The book traveled. The first English translation appeared in 1932, by a translator who chose to remain anonymous and is generally accepted to be J.R. Carey. A second translation followed in 1985, published by the University of Notre Dame Press in association with W.W. Norton and Co. That version was translated by Anthony Kerrigan and edited by Kenneth Moore, with an introduction written by Saul Bellow.

• 4. I Am Me and My Circumstance

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  In Meditaciones del Quijote, published in 1914, Ortega y Gasset set down the maxim he would return to throughout his life: "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" - I am me and my circumstance.

  The phrase emerged from a specific philosophical argument. Ortega believed that both idealism, which placed reality inside the ego, and ancient-medieval realism, which placed reality entirely outside the subject, had failed to describe human experience truthfully. The only genuine starting point, he argued, was my life, the life of each individual person.

  This was not solipsism. Ortega insisted there is no me without things, and things are nothing without me. The self and its circumstances cannot be separated. That relationship is not comfortable or static; he described circumstances as oppressive, creating a constant dialectical tension between what a person is and the world pressing in around them. Life, for Ortega, was a drama played out between necessity and freedom.

  From that diagnosis came a practical demand. Because fate gives each person what he called an inexorable repertory of determinate possibilities, individuals must choose actively. People who drift through life on custom and given structures, unwilling to face the duty of choice, were, in his view, failing the fundamental task of being human. The duty was to form what he called a project of life.

  For Descartes, thought was the proof of existence: cogito ergo sum. Ortega reversed the emphasis and wrote instead, I live therefore I think, placing lived experience prior to abstract reason.

• 5. Ratiovitalism and Historical Reason

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  The philosophical system Ortega built from those foundations earned a name he coined himself: ratiovitalism, from the Spanish raciovitalismo. It rested on the idea that knowledge must be grounded in the radical reality of life, with reason understood as one essential component of that life rather than its master.

  Ortega called this mode of thinking vital reason, razón vital in Spanish, meaning reason with life as its foundation. The key distinction from Nietzsche's vitalism was that Ortega refused to let life be governed purely by impulse. Reason remained essential; it was the tool by which a person constructs and pursues the project of life.

  He introduced this system in History as a System, first published in English in 1935. The Spanish version, Historia como sistema, followed in 1941 and added an essay on the Roman Empire.

  For Ortega, vital reason was also historical reason. He drew here on the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, whose influence he acknowledged directly. Individuals and societies cannot be understood apart from their pasts; to grasp a reality, one must trace its history. That conviction tied his epistemology to his political writing: Invertebrate Spain, for example, was precisely such an attempt to diagnose a society through its historical formation. A course he gave in Lisbon in 1944, later published in 1979 as On Historical Reason, extended those arguments into systematic form.

• 6. Exile, Return, and the Institute of Humanities

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  When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Ortega left Spain. The years that followed took him to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he remained until 1942, and then back to Europe. By mid-1945 he had settled in Portugal, and from there he made cautious, short visits to Spain before returning to Madrid in 1948.

  Back in the capital, he founded the Institute of Humanities, where he resumed lecturing. The course he gave there from 1949 to 1950, Man and People, was published posthumously in 1957; Willard Trask's English translation appeared the same year, with portions published earlier in the Partisan Review in 1952.

  In private, Ortega did not hide his contempt for the Franco government. He stated that the regime did not deserve anyone's confidence and that his own beliefs were incompatible with Franco. These were views he expressed privately rather than publicly, an index of the constraints under which Spanish intellectual life operated.

  He continued to write, lecture, and travel during this last period. In 1949 he delivered a lecture in Berlin under the Latin title De Europa meditatio quaedam, later published in 1960 as Meditation on Europe. He gave lecture series in Germany, Switzerland, and England between 1951 and 1954. The wider philosophical conversation continued: American philosopher Graham Harman acknowledged Ortega y Gasset as a source of inspiration for his own object-oriented ontology, a recognition that reached well past the mid-century world in which Ortega had worked.

  José Ortega y Gasset died on the 18th of October 1955.

• 7. Legacy and Reach

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  Ortega y Gasset's influence spread in ways that outlasted his lifetime and crossed disciplines. Among those who counted themselves strongly influenced by his work were the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, philosophers Xavier Zubiri and María Zambrano, historian John Lukacs, and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

  The Madrid School, also known as the Escuela de Madrid, grew directly from his teaching. Its members, students of Ortega who argued against naturalism and positivism, included José Gaos, Julián Marías, and Xavier Zubiri. Ortega also shaped the Generation of '27, a group of poets who emerged in Spanish literature in the 1920s.

  His influence extended in unexpected directions. One of the ideas that circulates in the philosophy of science under his name is the Ortega hypothesis, drawn from a passage in The Revolt of the Masses. It holds that average or mediocre scientists contribute substantially to the advancement of science, a counterintuitive claim that has generated its own scholarly debate.

  German grape breeder Hans Breider named a grape variety Ortega in his honor.

  Much of his writing came to English readers through the work of a single translator, Mildred Adams, whose work included Invertebrate Spain, Man and Crisis, What is Philosophy?, Some Lessons in Metaphysics, The Idea of Principle in Leibniz and the Evolution of Deductive Theory, and An Interpretation of Universal History. The Revista de Occidente, which Ortega founded in 1923 and directed until 1936, had earlier done comparable work in Spanish, translating and commenting on Oswald Spengler, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Husserl, and others. A street in Madrid, Calle José Ortega y Gasset, now bears his name.