José Ortega y Gasset

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (b. 1883–d. 1955) engaged with questions of national identity, cultural regeneration, the arts, history, and the nature of reality. His extensive corpus impacted, primarily, the intellectual thought and politics of Spain, but also, more broadly, of Latin America and Europe. University teaching, lectures, letters, and involvement with influential periodicals likewise remain inseparable from his legacy. Ortega enjoyed a mythic public persona, whose voice sounded the tumultuous, often violent upheavals of his day, spanning the 1898 Spanish-American War, World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the outset of the Franco dictatorship. As a young man, his studies in Germany cemented an indebtedness to and, ultimately, complex positioning against idealism, and his three extended stays in Argentina at distinct moments of his personal history have importance for his transatlantic reach and association with writing of exile. Though his philosophical production can appear unsystematic or incomplete because so disparate in its breadth, the trajectory of his career shows coherence. Above all, Ortega maintained that reality depends on a dynamic, relational exchange between self and circumstance. It is not surprising, therefore, that he found himself fascinated by Einsteinian relativity, believing his own views on history and perspective to be parallel to coetaneous advances in physics. Ortega sought to define and regenerate the national conscience of Spain, immersed himself in its politics, and saw some of his most malleable ideas appropriated for the rhetoric of emerging far-right factions. His later years of political reticence and withdrawal further complicate this association. In time, he developed a notion of reality founded on the premise of ratio-vitalism, which would constitute the hallmark of his understanding of being. In brief, the external world is non-rational and only becomes rational when subjected to human reason, as ratio, that is, when it comes into being by means of reflection, while that same consciousness cannot be separated from the biological forces of living, as vitalism, in the world. Thus, Ortega bridges subjective idealism with positivist materialism, neither of which he believed could alone account for subject-object codependence of existence. Wide-ranging and open-ended, Ortega’s writings have an enduring interdisciplinary appeal rooted in his stylistic ambiguities, the imagination, issues of modernity, and sweeping subject matter.