José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955)

It really speaks to the power of Ortega y Gasset's prose that one of the most deplorable acts to watch, at least in my experience, is rendered by him as one of the most sublime and invigorating. He describes dog hunting as adding a 'symphonic majesty' to the hunt, with the bright idea of bringing greyhounds, mastiffs, bassets etc. into the fray as being an achievement comparable to the 'discovery of polyphony' in music.

His view communicates the idea that Paleolithic man, who conducted show more himself as a hunter as a means to an end rather than as a leisurely pursuit, was saturated by instinct and had only brief flareups of primitive reason. Modern man feels a sense of nostalgia concerning this prior state and, in the meantime, remains somewhat resentful of his domestication, so decides to allocate time to an artificial return to it so as to lose himself within the bosom of Nature and demonstrate (through the game of the hunt and his self-imposed limits warranting off undue excess - dynamiting a lake doesn't qualify as hunting) the clear order he manifests in his action as possessing a supremacy over the prey he hunts.

This short book reminds me greatly of a terrible night of hunting I carried out as a boy on the eve of my adolescence. Such an event pretty much consisted of me laying prone in a bush during a deep fog and randomly flashing a torch on and off to see whether or not I would catch a rabbit off guard. I was positively freezing my nuts off in the midst of some poor bastard's aristocratic private estate while my father and his mutual friend wandered off into the woods, maybe he's still in denial, because I definitely heard some strange noises echo throughout that infernal night which belonged to neither fox nor hare. Alas, I begrudgingly shot at a rabbit around an hour or so later and to this day still have no idea if I hit him or not, after this book I wish I had hit that fuzzy little fucker. I don't think anyone felt like they possessed much supremacy that night.... show less

I recently read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. Ortega y Gasset's book is delightful on its own, but the contrast with Haidt's book really brings out its excellence. Of course Ortega y Gasset is as profound as Haidt is shallow, but it goes much further. A cornerstone of Ortega y Gasset's book is the notion of civilization, in contrast with natural man. Civilized man conceives the project of living with strangers in order to pursue some greater mission. Haidt's book is essential an show more apology for natural man. Haidt views civilization as a fraud. Here, Ortega y Gasset is an eloquent champion of civilization.

Along the way there are just wonderful insights. An authentic person will face the chaos and uncertainty of life, while an unauthentic person will paper over all that with platitudes.

Here around 1930, Ortega y Gasset is proposing the European Union as the proper next step in the European project. The struggles between the European nations were part of the process of negotiation, accommodation, etc. It's looking like nowadays the big conflict brewing might be the USA versus China. Certainly since 1930, China has continued to wrestle with Western ways, adopting and integrating and transforming. Are Europe and the USA incorporating Chinese values and practices? I don't have the perspective to be able to see any answer. Hmmm, how much is the current Trump mania a produce of the red scare of the 1950s, driven by Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Well then too, look at the influence of the newspaper The Epoch Times, controlled by the Falun Gong cult out of China.

Anyway, Revolt of the Masses is a jewel! show less

This book describes transitions in thinking in cultures. There is a traditional phase, a rational phase, and a mystical phase. Ortega hardly describes the mystical phase, which would seem to be the phase we have been shifting into for the past century since this book was written. It is interesting to think about the present 2016 US election cycle in these terms. The candidates seem so unreal. The debates seem more like professional wrestling matches, i.e. like the circus, like a cartoon... show more like some kind of fairy tale come to life. Perhaps the shift in media that McLuhan studied was not so much a matter of technology but a result of an underlying shift in cultural spirit. Ortega describes here Einstein's theory of relativity in that way.

On the one hand, Ortega sees a transition from one where culture, i.e. adherence to Platonic ideals, is the focus of society and spontaneous life is neglected. Now we can value life too, and put in in a proper relationship with culture. But if we are actually shifting to a mystical phase, a spiritual phase, where people believe anything just for the sense of comfort and security of belief, a phase dominated by the spirit of slavery... is that actually a kind of overshoot? Presumably societies are constantly in orbit, one sort of instability moving into another.

It's interesting reading a book like this, 100 years old more or less. In some ways it can be seen as a product of its time, a time quite distinct from ours. Hitler hadn't taken power yet. The Spanish Civil War... I don't know my history, but it certainly cannot have heated up much at all. On the other hand, to what extent does the momentum of social transformation tend to be preserved across such time spans?

Looking e.g. at mathematics, surely the sense of mathematical limits was already taking form at the beginning of the 19th Century with Abel's exploration of solutions of polynomials and with Riemann and Lobachevsky creating alternate geometries. That trajectory has continued through Godel and Turing and on into chaos theory etc. Politically, how much of today's politics grows directly out of Hitler's synthesis of mass media, corporate power, racism, etc.

This is the kind of philosophy book I like to read! Not a lot of technical jargon. It's not a book for any kind of inner circle. Any reasonably literate person can read this and get a lot out of it. show less

L’uomo nuovo descritto nel 1930 da Ortega Y Gasset da ha la presunzione di sentirsi “come tutto il mondo”, senza darsene pensiero. La mancanza di responsabilità è la sua natura; la barbarie la condotta tramite cui attua la “ribellione” che dà titolo il libro:

«Interverrà dovunque, imponendo la sua volgare opinione, senza miraggi, senza contemplazioni, senza tramiti né riserve, vale a dire, secondo un regime di “azione diretta”».

L’uomo-massa è un “saggio ignorante”, show more forte delle sue conoscenze parcellizzate ma del tutto all’oscuro dei saperi che la sua specializzazione non esplora, verso i quali si pone tuttavia con la petulanza di chi sa di sapere. show less