Being left-wing is, just like being right-wing, one of the infinite ways man chooses to be a moron. The persistence of these labels contributes much to falsify reality. As evidenced by the fact that today the right promises revolutions while the left promises tyranny. One of the things being said nowadays is that, even at the cost of mental clarity, everyone has to be part of politics. This being said, of course, by those who have nothing else going on in their lives. Integral politicism, the absorption of all things and man as a whole by politics responds to the phenomenon of the masses that is described here. The masses in rebellion have lost their capacity for religion or knowledge. Nothing can fill its void but frenetic and exorbitant politics. Politics empties man of solitude and intimacy.
(...)
Everything, everything is possible in history, both triumphal progress and periodical regression. Because life -individual or collective, personal or historical- is the only entity on the universe whose substance is danger. It is, strictly speaking, drama.
-Revolt of the masses. 1930
Climate crisis, migrant crisis and the COVID-19 health crisis are challenging human culture. These are crisis on global and national levels. Surging number of people coping with a mental health crisis signal challenges on an individual level. How tempting it may be to quench our present misery in nostalgic, dystopian or utopian thinking, we need to think realistically about culture to help us further.
José Ortega Y Gasset (1883-1955) ideas on culture and crisis are interesting. His ideas are academic and polished by personal experiences of crisis, war and exile. In this short recommendation of this work I will base myself upon the work En Torno A Galileo that has appeared under the name Man and Crisis(1958) in English. Man and Crisis is a lesser know work in contrast to The Revolt of the Masses. The Revolt of the Masses always gets attention in times of political crisis. Man and Crisis covers the general idea of what a crisis is and how to act in times of crisis. I will clarify some essential thoughts in Man and Crisis by using other writings of Ortega Y Gasset: Meditations on Quixote (1963b), History as a System (1961) and Man and People (1963a).
Three Concepts Describing Human life As a starter, let me highlight three key concepts of Ortega Y Gasset in thinking about individual human life. We need to start at this point in order to make sense of culture as concept related to social life.
"Life is drama...it is made up of the fact that each one must go on doing for himself, moment after moment, in a perpetual tension of affliction and hardship, without ever having complete security within himself (1958, p. 32)."
A first key concept to understand Ortega Y Gasset is this concept of life as being a drama. Is seems a bit easy and it lacks any philosophical fanciness. However, it is clear and simple. A second concept stresses the fundamental nature of this drama. This second concept is ‘life is solitude’.
"...each one of us lives through himself alone...life is solitude basic and essential solitude. And nevertheless, or perhaps for that very reason, there is in life an inexpressible eagerness for company (1958, p. 67)."
Coping with that solitude people console themselves with company. Especially in times of crisis people are looking for commonplaces like slogans and songs. Moreover, people are looking for solutions to their problems. In times of crisis individual knowledge is exposed as insufficient to make sense of the world or even to survive.
... keep reading on reddit ➡In Renata Adler's novel "Speedboat", she writes:
>“Ortega tells us that the business of philosophy,” the professor was telling his class of indifferent freshmen, “is to crack open metaphors which are dead."
I'm assuming this is a reference to José Ortega y Gasset, unless she made it up entirely. I'd like to find where Ortega makes this claim. I haven't read much of his work and my google-fu is failing me. So askphilsophy can you point me to the source? (Either in English or Spanish). Thanks in advance.
To cut straight to the chase, I'm stuck on these two sentences:
>The new cerebral writing [read: contemporary conceptual poetry] implies that the conceiving head is superior to the intuitive heart, to use the old words. It reinstates the ages-long assumption of the supremacy of culture over biology, the scheme that modern art and thought, as José Ortega y Gasset argued in The Modern Theme (1931), set out to overturn with pagan gusto.
That's from a 2013 essay about conceptual poetry by Calvin Bedient in the Boston Review.
The José Ortega y Gasset SEP page by Oliver Holmes seems to be articulating this same sort of idea:
>Husserl and the phenomenological movement, and Freud and the psychoanalytical movement, presented for Ortega the new “intellectual tendency of our times—subjectivism, or subjectivistic relativism” (Obras, XII: 417). [...] For Ortega, the “principal theme of our time”, the essence of which “modernity” had to confront, comprised the concept that “human life is in an eminent degree psychological life” (Obras, III: 152–156).
>
>The phenomenon of human life thus possesses a “double character”: the physiological and the psychological. In the modern movement of culture, each dimension of human character has to find its expression within the “spirit of the time” (Obras, III: 165–66, 68, 297–98). The transformation of the modern sense of human life may be understood best from the new art of his time. Ortega perceived the artists of his day as creating a much more radical alteration in the subjective attitude of art. From the point of view of the new sense of art, human reality possesses its inner perception. This shift of emphasis in the realm of aesthetics countervailed the earlier emphasis on “naturalist”, “materialist” or “realist” factors in human life. The transition in aesthetic sensibility from nineteenth-century “realism”, and its corresponding concern with human reality, to the “new” perceptions of the early twentieth century creativity, marked for him the “dehumanization of art”. The “modern” movement culminated in a new aesthetic sensitivity—what Ortega labeled a “pure”, “artistic art”—which consciously separated its audience into groups: the “specially gifted minority” who comprehended modern art and the majority of those who found it incomprehensible. **The new aest
Someone I know, who is anti-communist, recommended me "The revolt of the Masses" by José Ortega y Gasset. From what I read on his wikipedia page, he supported Franco during the Spanish civil war and founded a centre-right party. Is the book worth my time, or is it reactionary drivel?
This 190 page book is covered better in this article than I can articulate, but one of his main theories (and something that has seen a lot of words spilled on it) is disdain for experts.
The anti-intellectualism that many people are upset about today was called almost a century ago in this book. The guy feels dang near precognitive with some of the stuff he says.
I'm unsure of the source on this one. As usual, many sites don't mention a source, but one that comes up a lot is his The Dehumanization of art and Ideas about the Novel.
Es una pregunta, mi abuelito me decía estas frases y me las explicaba. Pero no entendí muy claro el “y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo” Entiendo la primera parte pero a qué se refiera la 2da?
It was one of the great Stoics who said that if you live with a lame man, soon enough you will walk with a limp. My father told me something similar as a kid: “You become like your friends.” It is true not just with social influences but informational ones too:
If you are addicted to the chatter of the news, you will soon find yourself worried, resentful, and perpetually outraged. If you consume nothing but escapist entertainment (obviously, it's porn for us) you will find the real world around you harder and harder to deal with. If all you do is watch the markets and obsess over every fluctuation, your worldview will become defined by money and gains and losses.
But if you drink from deep, philosophical wisdom? If you have regularly in your mind role models of restraint, sobriety, courage, and honor? Well, you will start to become these things too. Tell me who you spend time with, Goethe said, and I will tell you who you are. Tell me what you pay attention to, Gasset was saying, and I can tell you the same thing. Remember that the next time you feel your finger itching to open up your porn bookmarked page.
According to the following book (Page 207),
Ortega y Gasset was an early critic of [ modern art ] as avoidance of living forms, ( dehumanization of art ) and exaggerated attention to the minutest detail -- citing e.g. Joyce, Proust
https://www.amazon.com/African-Revenge-Michio-Kitahara/dp/1591097525
> The African Revenge: The Age of Regression and the Decline of the West ( 2003 )
> by Michio Kitahara --------- (Author)
-
Prof Kitahara (in Sweden) --- his old Yahoo email adrs is not working.
-
Does anyone have (or can find) his recent email address?
HH
https://www.europapress.es/economia/noticia-amancio-ortega-ingresara-12936-millones-dividendos-inditex-cobrar-6468-millones-martes-20211102080742.html
Resulta insultante como los medios guardan un "silencio irresponsable". A este Amancio, lo que hay que hacerle es escupirle si uno lo ve.
Francisco.
"We cannot put off living until we are ready." — Jose Ortega y Gasset
I'm working on understanding Hegel through hermeneutics presently, and came across Ortega y Gasset's study of Kant, Hegel and Dilthey. Unfortunately, it has yet to be translated into english from spanish afaik (and I can't read enough spanish to get through a philosophy book :( )
Does anyone know of any english copies of this book, or of anyone who's presently working on translating it? I know similar small-scale projects exist for Mainlander and Zapffe.
Thanks!
