Post by lurker4now on Jun 15, 2005 6:07:27 GMT -5
What is Europe? Views from Spain
1. José Ortega y Gasset
2. Ángel Ganivet
3. Miguel de Unamuno
1. José Ortega y Gasset on Europe
- Biography and Context -
José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), Spanish philosopher and essayist, made famous for his humanist critic of the contemporary civilization, turning into one of most significative and influential thinkers of the 20th century.
Born on 9 May, 1883 in Madrid, Ortega y Gasset studied at the University of Madrid from 1898 to 1904, completing his studies in Philosophy and Arts with a thesis titled “Fears of the one thousand year. Critic of a legend”. Then, from 1904 to 1908, he completed his education in the German universities of Leipzig, Berlin and Marburg. After coming back to Spain, he was appointed to the chair of Metaphysic in the Central University of Madrid, in where he taught from 1910 to 1936. In 1914, he published Meditaciones del Quijote, where he showed the big lines of his first philosphical thought (in which was very clear the influence of Immanuel Kant) and his reflexions about the artistic fact (extended in 1925 with the publication of La deshumanización del arte).
At the beginning of 1920s, his writings took on a less subjectivist point of view and they were more directed to analyse social behaviours of the “masses”, that shaped for him the base of the characteristic society of the contemporary age. So, in this way, started the called “etapa perspectivista” of his thought, in which we can find works such as España invertebrada (1921), El tema de nuestro tiempo (1923) and his distinguished and of more significance work, La rebelión de las masas (1930). In this last essay, he criticized the destructive influence of the general mentality and, therefore, of the mediocre person (who he defined as “hombre-masa”, that if he wasn’t guided by an intelectual and morally superior minority, would encourage the rise of the authoritarism. Towards the last decade of 1920, began the called “etapa raciovitalista” of his philosophy, in which he tackled a new deepenning that show, between other works, Kant (1724-1924): Reflexiones de centenario (1929), En torno a Galileo (1933), Ideas y creencias (1940) and Historia como sistema (1941).
Ortega y Gasset also published some comentaries and articles in newspapers to what he felt very joined: “El Imparcial” (created in 1867 for his grandfather, Eduardo Gasset y Artime) and “El Sol”. He was likewise founder of the magazines “España” (published from 1915 to 1924) and “Revista de Occidente” (mensual; his first number appeared on July 1923 and the last, on June 1936), which were useful to transmit the philosophical and cultural tendencies of the first quarter of 20th century., principally those of german source and the works of spanish people (like Manuel and Antonio Machado brothers, or young poets which formed the “Generación del 27”). Their comentaries in newspapers and magazines were recopilated in El Espectador (8 vols., 1916-1934).
Opposite to the dictatorship og General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), his articles, conferences and essays (of philosphical character, but also politic) contributed to the high intelectual rennaissance that knew Spain during the first decades of the 20th century. The political consequences of all this situation arrived in 1931, with the fall of king Alfonso XIII, of the own monarchical institution and the proclamation of the II Republic. Ortega took part in these facts of the spanish history in a propitiatory way. He created a political group, “Agrupación al Servicio de la República”, in which also took part Gregorio Marañón and Ramón Pérez de Ayala (with whom he signed the called Manifiesto de los Intelectuales, favourable to the arrival of the republican régimen) and for whom lists was elected member to the Constituent Courts in 1931. Discontented with the orientation of the constitution came from those ones in December of that same year, he left his bench.
After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, Ortega left Spain, living in France, Netherlands, Argentine and Portugal, and not coming back till 1945. During the last period of his life he founded the Humanities Institute (1948) in Madrid and wrote his famous studies about spanish painters, in special Papeles sobre Velázquez y Goya (1950) y Velázquez (1955). José Ortega y Gasset died the 18 of October of 1955 in Madrid. After his death appeared, with posthumous character, some distinguished works like Meditaciones sobre Europa (1957), El hombre y la gente (1957) y Qué es filosofía (1958). In 1978, Foundation Ortega y Gasset was established to the difussion of his thought and work.
Regardless of his writings of social and historical critic, very influentials in his epoch, and of his activity of cultural animation of the Spain of the first third of 20th century, some ideas ocuppied a central position in the thought of Ortega y Gasset. Between them, the concept of perspective and his peculiar idea of reason, that considered joined to the life, have a special importance.
Ortega set out the concept of “perspectiva” in his essay Verdad y perspectiva, that appeared published in 1916 in the first volume of El Espectador. It’s a concept that have repercussions in the work of the german philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gustav Teichmüller, but in the work of Ortega had an original tone. He thought that the reality is offered to the persons in a great variety of singular perspectives. Each one of them is a way of reality and, at the same time, form a posibility of knowledge of the real. That is, a perspective suposse always the combination of an ontological and epistemological level, and the reality would be equal to the sum of posible perspectives in which is presented and according to those that can be analysed. To a certain extent, the perspective is similar to “point of view” or to the parcial comprension of something. It must be noted that the perspective eliminate the posibility of instant access toi an inmutable reality, what is found very joined to the concept of “circunstancia”, that Oretga made famous in his expression: “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia”. In fact, Ortega held the essential principles of his perspectivism in later moments of his thought.
From the last of the decade of 1920, he developed a concept of reason that is joined to a new consideration of life: the “raciovitalism”. This combination supossed one of the main contributions of his thought and became in one of the essential features of this one. For Ortega, life is the truthful radical reality, from that arise any problem that can be relevant and any posible phylosophical system. For each human being, life takes a concret and certain shape, that is built itself according to different circunstancies (or perspectives that life takes for each one). In fact, life is a radical and last reality; still more: she has her own finality, and there is no reality that can leak out her. For this, each human being’s life is, for him, hisher own finality and must devote to his elucidation if he hope to save himself.
Join to this afirmation of life and the need of elucidate or answer the problems that life brings up, he showed the need of a new type of reason, that go away of the abstract and merely theoric reason, always apart and “abstracted” of the vital circunstancies, that has been common in the tradition of western philosophy. He named “razón vital” to this new type of reason and “raciovitalismo” to the way of thinking that is based on his new concepto of reason. The vital reason is a reason that is sustained constantly on the life from which has appeared. That is, life, as a dinamic reality, that is always in proccess of elaboration, is an incesant source of problems and relevant questions and force always, to whom live her, to “saber a qué atenerse”, to get one’s bearings continually in his decisions. So, this orientation demand a reason that goes with life and finds on her his fundament. That is, a “razón vital”.
- Sinopsis -
The first excerpt of Ortega y Gasset’s work Meditación de Europa makes reference to the term “equilibrio de poder”, and to the opinion that the author has about the same term. According to his words, “the balance of powers is a reality that consists essentialy in the existance of a plurality”. And inside that plurality, a charancter of unity.
In the second excerpt, Ortega y Gasset distinguishe between “european nations” (for instance, France, Germany, Great Britain) and “european society”. In his opinion, nations don’t livetogether, unless the persons are who cohabit. The difference between Europe and european nations with regard to the “society” is based in the fact of european coexistence sensu extricto is more tenuous, less dense and complete. That is, each nation has own characteristics, but, in his opinion, all of them presents characteristics of homogeneity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY ABOUT JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
ABAD PASCUAL, Juan José: El método de la razón vital y su teoría en Ortega y Gasset. Madrid: Teatropoe, 1992.
ABELLÁN, José Luis: Ortega y Gasset en la filosofía española. Madrid: Tecnos, 1960.
ACEVEDO, Jorge: La sociedad como proyecto en la perspectiva de Ortega. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1994.
AGUADO, E.: Ortega y Gasset. Madrid: Épesa, 1970.
AGUILERA CERNI, Vicente: Ortega y D’Ors en la cultura artística española. Madrid: Ciencia Nueva, 1966.
ALFARO LÓPEZ, Héctor Guillermo: La filosofía de José Ortega y Gasset y José Gaos. Una vertiente del pensamiento latinoamericano. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma, 1992.
ALLUNTIS, F.: The Vital and Historical Reasons of J. Ortega. Nueva York: Franciscan Studies, 1955.
Excerpt 1, pp 86–87.
It would be a relapse into ancient limitations not to recognize units of public power except where they wear the well-known and, as it were, solidified masks of the State; that is, in the various nations of Europe. I roundly deny that the decisive public power acting in each of these consists exclusively of an interior or national public power. Let us realize once and for all that for many centuries – consciously for the last four – all the peoples of Europe have lived under a public power that by its dynamical purity can only be described in terms borrowed from mechanical science: the "European balance" or balance of Power*.
This is the authentic government of Europe, which regulates in their flight through history the swarm of peoples, as solicitous and pugnacious as bees, who escaped from the ruins of the ancient world. Europe's unity is not a fantasy, but reality itself; the fantasy is precisely the opposite: the belief that France, Germany, Italy or Spain are substantive realities, and therefore complete and independent.
It is nevertheless understood that the proof of the reality of Europe is not clear to everyone, because Europe is not a "thing", but an equilibrium. As early as the 18th century the historian Robertson called the European balance the greatest secret of modern politics*.
A great and paradoxical secret, without doubt! Because the balance or equilibrium of powers is a reality that consists essentially in the existence of plurality. If this plurality were lost, that dynamical unity would vanish. Europe is, in effect, a swarm: many bees, one flight.
This unitary character of the magnificent European plurality is what I would call the good homogeneity, which is fecund and desirable, which has made Montesquieu remark: L'Europe n'est qu'une nation composée de plusieurs, and more romantically, made Balzac talk about la grande famille continentale, dont tous les efforts tendent á je ne sais quel mystère de civilisation.
If we look, then, at the nations – holding them up to the light, let us say – we discover European society in them like the watermark in the paper. Some will fail to see it. Where does this blindness come from? It is not accidental and is not limited to this case, but we find it applied to all the dimensions of history; moreover, it is congenital to the very exercise of intelligence; the latter reacts to reality by creating a schema, which we are in the habit of calling an "idea" or concept; the idea is encapsulated in a name. Most of our companions in the human race, when they have the name of something, with its attached idea, become unable to see this thing, that is to say, the reality that they name and ideate. Name and idea intervene between the things and us like an opaque screen. It is curious that ideas, made to facilitate our clear perception of the realities, for many men do the opposite: to frighten away realities, as a defence against a true vision of them. They go through life like sleepwalkers, prisoners within the skin and bone of their ideas, of their "common places". Because of this, it is vital that we train a new vision that allows us to see through the names and the formulae that until now tried to fence in and represent the diverse realities of the human collective, the body...
Excerpt 2, pp121–125.
Each of the European nations is a society in the most intense sense of this word – that of a national society. It consists of the close coexistence of Germans on one side and the no less close coexistence of the French in their France, of the English in their England. But it so happens that besides these national societies - Germany, France, England – there is another society in which these float or sink: European society. To be clear on this point: this does not mean to say that European society consists of the coexistence of the European nations. This does not exist. Nations do not coexist. Believing this was the elementary mistake of sociology represented by the League of Nations. Only individuals coexist. European society also consists of the coexistence of the individuals that inhabit the continent and its adjacent islands. This coexistence is different from national coexistence, but no less effective, no less real. So much so that, in rigorous terms, European coexistence is prior to national coexistence, predating the nations, which have formed inside it like denser clots. Therefore, not all is said and done when Germany, France, Spain, England, etc., have been presented as prominent figures of the historical drama. Another personage must be added to them, as operative as they are: Europe. The difference between Europe and the European nations with respect to "society" is based on the fact that European coexistence sensu stricto is more tenuous, less dense and complete. On the other hand, it is older and more permanent. It has never managed to be condensed in the superlative form of society that we call a State, but has always acted, ceaselessly although with varying vigour, in other forms characteristic of a "collective life" such as the intellectual, aesthetic, religious, moral, economic, technical forces. If we were to cut out the specifically European ingredients of any of those nations we would have excised two-thirds of their entrails.
The complete reality of a European nation, then, has not been seen, if it is considered as something in and of itself. No; each of these nations has its particular profile, raised like a mountain on a common plain of basic coexistence, which is European reality. The peoples are separated and isolated above, but unified and undifferentiated below in a common subsoil that goes from Iceland to the Caucasus. Unfortunately – as I have remarked several times –, a history of European society in this strict sense has never been essayed. If the attempt was made with some rigor, I believe that it would become clear that European history has not consisted merely of the struggles of some Western peoples with others, but that there has also been a struggle, a flood of vicissitudes, between a few, many or all of the European nations and Europe itself as an undifferentiated and all-embracing unit. Sometimes the plurality of the nations prevails over its underground unity; at other times, on the contrary, the European unity forces the divergent nations to submit to a very marked homogeneity. Without taking this into account it is not possible to see with satisfactory clarity the image of certain epochs and of certain great events. For example, the early Middle Ages, a time at which Europe prevails. The then embryonic peoples live by adapting themselves to the forms that Rome had left in the European area. Is it possible, without underlining this, to understand what the Sacred Roman Empire was, and what it aspired to be? Does this enormous, and rather blurry idea, not rest in Haller's pages? And if this is not sufficiently clear, can the ideas with which Carlos V and his counsellors face the situation of Germany in 1519 be understood? A Spanish reader can not remain calm when one sees Haller classify Carlos V, with no whys or wherefores, as a Spaniard, because the Spanish we know very well what it cost him to Hispanize himself, and that as he did so he was progressively leaving aside the medieval idea of the Holy Empire and agreeing – though reluctantly – to the idea of the nations in plural and of the "European balance" which, replacing the Empire, would prevail for the next three centuries.
The same thing happens with the Reformation. Without saying so openly, Haller feels that Protestantism, though it culminates in the figure of Luther, is not exclusively nor specifically German, but strictly a European movement, a civil war that explodes in European society, as such. Does it not come as a surprise to us that Haller hesitates before a fact of this magnitude, which opens a whole epoch of German history? Also the Counter-reformation is an originally European fact and not Spanish, as some absent-mindedly maintain, despite being so decisive for Spanish national history.
It is not possible to look carefully at the nations of the West without stumbling over the unity operating behind them; nor is it possible to observe this European unit concretely, and not merely in a phrase, without discovering within it the perpetual agitation of its inner plurality: the nations. This incessant dynamic between unity and plurality constitutes, to my mind, the real perspective necessary to define the destinies of any Western nation.
The most solid proof of this is in front of us in the very period in which we are living. The German people has for the first time attained complete unity. This was the goal of all Haller’s work. But in the same moment in which the German people finds itself united, it finds that its problem is not resolved, because ipso facto it is revealed to the German people that it and its unity were only a partial problem of its own life, beyond which is raised, as a problem no less its own, the problem of Europe. In other words: German reality does not end in the seemingly exempt, isolated profile of German collectivity, but extends beyond this profile and, underground one could say, is one with the problem of France, Italy, Spain, England, etc. Every Western people on coming to full integration in the hour of its prevalence has had the same surprising and gigantic experience: That other European peoples were also itself or, vice versa, that it belonged to the immense society and unity of destiny that is Europe.
Given the choice, I would have wished that Haller's work anticipated a bit more of the horizon that we have in sight today. Again, and more than at any other time, the historical genius now has this formidable task before it: to advance European unity, without losing the vitality of its constituent nations, the glorious plurality of which has consisted the unequalled wealth and vigour of its history.
June, 1941.
Source: : José Ortega y Gasset, Meditación de Europa. Revista de Occidente (Madrid, 1960)
2. Ángel Ganivet on Spain, Christianity and Europe
- Biography and Context -
Ángel Ganivet (1865-1898), Spanish essayist and narrator, was the precursor of the called “Generación del 98”.
Borned in Granada the 13 of December of 1865. Because of an accident, he left his studies at 12 and began to work in a notary’s office. Later he continued his studies in Granada’s Institute. The same institute gave him the Extraordinary Award of Literature in 1877. He finished his doctoral studies in Philosophy and Arts and Law in 1890. In 1891, he applied for the post of headmaster of Greek’s Department in University of Granada, fact that mark an affinity which he share with Unamuno. The post was refused. In 1892, he began his diplomatic career when he was named Vice Consul in Antwep, Belgium. His first publication dated from this same year with an article in the newspaper “El Defensor de Granada”. In 1895, he was promoted to the post of Consul in Helsinki, Finland. Between his works, we can distinguish the novels La conquista del reino de Maya por el ultimo conquistador español Pío Cid (1897) and Los trabajos del infatigable creador Pío Cid (1898) in which, using the starring like alter-ego, he makes a satire of the process of colonization. His most important theoretical work is the Idearium Español (1895), where his anti-capitalistic point of view is in line with an utopia sited in the medieval past: craftsmanship against industry, usurers against bankers. Some ideas were already presents in his youth philosophical work, España filosófica contemporánea (1889), an essay in which he attacked the lack of mother ideas and the resulting extreme apathy, responsible of the lack of a Spanish vertebral project. Next his thought to En torno al casticismo of Miguel de Unamuno, senequism, individualism and pessimism, which get on for the apocalyptic, are constants of the work of Ganivet. He was also author of Cartas Finlandesas, Granada la bella (published in book’s format, at the first time, in 1895), Hombres del Norte y El porvenir de España; he also made mystic drama, like El escultor de su alma. Important is the Epistolario, which contains letters directed to Francisco Navarro Ledesma.
The case of Ganivet is very interesting. Although he died in 1898 and didn’t attend the beginning of the century with all the new members and casualties that entailed, is considered as part of “Generación del 98”. What wins him affiliation to the group is the desire of regeneration of Spain, which is present in his works.
His diplomatic career went on in Latvia when he was named consul of that country in 1898, date in which finished the colonial war between Spain and United States. This year was when Ganivet and Unamuno kept up openly in what later would be published under the name of El porvenir de España. His bibliography includes essays, novels, a play and poems, some of which he wrote in French.
A life pursued by tragedy begins when he was hardly 10, dieing his father. One year later, his disposition was threatened having a fall that destroyed one of his legs. His life was in danger because of the seriousness of the injury. As soon as his health was right, he had to clash with the sad reality that his leg would be amputated. The young Ganivet opposed totally to the amputation, and in the next three years, he fought against his body trying to win the difficulties he had to walk and continuing his life normally. At the end of that three years, time in which he joined still more to his mother, Ganivet had won, not only the use of crutches, but also the difficulty of walking. In 1892 Ganivet met Amelia Roldán, who was the mother of his children, but never his wife. One year later, his daughter borned, but, unfortunately, three months later she died. In the same year he had his second child and came back Granada where he lived during more than a year. Ganivet lived the death of his mother, who was the one who inculcated him the love for the arts and he used it as an inspiration. She was the one who had the dream of his son being writer. Unfortunaly, at the time of the death of his mother, Ganivet hadn’t still published any of his most significant works. His grandfather, who had played the role of paternal authority in the life of Ganivet after the death of his father, also died in theses years. But the worst tragedy, the one which finished a period of literary fertility and which produced a vacuum in Spanish arts of 1898, was what he induced himself. In that same year of 1898, 11 days before the signature of Paris’ Treaty and being abandoned by his lover and son, Ganivet committed suicide drowning in Dwina River in Riga, Latvia.
1. José Ortega y Gasset
2. Ángel Ganivet
3. Miguel de Unamuno
1. José Ortega y Gasset on Europe
- Biography and Context -
José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), Spanish philosopher and essayist, made famous for his humanist critic of the contemporary civilization, turning into one of most significative and influential thinkers of the 20th century.
Born on 9 May, 1883 in Madrid, Ortega y Gasset studied at the University of Madrid from 1898 to 1904, completing his studies in Philosophy and Arts with a thesis titled “Fears of the one thousand year. Critic of a legend”. Then, from 1904 to 1908, he completed his education in the German universities of Leipzig, Berlin and Marburg. After coming back to Spain, he was appointed to the chair of Metaphysic in the Central University of Madrid, in where he taught from 1910 to 1936. In 1914, he published Meditaciones del Quijote, where he showed the big lines of his first philosphical thought (in which was very clear the influence of Immanuel Kant) and his reflexions about the artistic fact (extended in 1925 with the publication of La deshumanización del arte).
At the beginning of 1920s, his writings took on a less subjectivist point of view and they were more directed to analyse social behaviours of the “masses”, that shaped for him the base of the characteristic society of the contemporary age. So, in this way, started the called “etapa perspectivista” of his thought, in which we can find works such as España invertebrada (1921), El tema de nuestro tiempo (1923) and his distinguished and of more significance work, La rebelión de las masas (1930). In this last essay, he criticized the destructive influence of the general mentality and, therefore, of the mediocre person (who he defined as “hombre-masa”, that if he wasn’t guided by an intelectual and morally superior minority, would encourage the rise of the authoritarism. Towards the last decade of 1920, began the called “etapa raciovitalista” of his philosophy, in which he tackled a new deepenning that show, between other works, Kant (1724-1924): Reflexiones de centenario (1929), En torno a Galileo (1933), Ideas y creencias (1940) and Historia como sistema (1941).
Ortega y Gasset also published some comentaries and articles in newspapers to what he felt very joined: “El Imparcial” (created in 1867 for his grandfather, Eduardo Gasset y Artime) and “El Sol”. He was likewise founder of the magazines “España” (published from 1915 to 1924) and “Revista de Occidente” (mensual; his first number appeared on July 1923 and the last, on June 1936), which were useful to transmit the philosophical and cultural tendencies of the first quarter of 20th century., principally those of german source and the works of spanish people (like Manuel and Antonio Machado brothers, or young poets which formed the “Generación del 27”). Their comentaries in newspapers and magazines were recopilated in El Espectador (8 vols., 1916-1934).
Opposite to the dictatorship og General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), his articles, conferences and essays (of philosphical character, but also politic) contributed to the high intelectual rennaissance that knew Spain during the first decades of the 20th century. The political consequences of all this situation arrived in 1931, with the fall of king Alfonso XIII, of the own monarchical institution and the proclamation of the II Republic. Ortega took part in these facts of the spanish history in a propitiatory way. He created a political group, “Agrupación al Servicio de la República”, in which also took part Gregorio Marañón and Ramón Pérez de Ayala (with whom he signed the called Manifiesto de los Intelectuales, favourable to the arrival of the republican régimen) and for whom lists was elected member to the Constituent Courts in 1931. Discontented with the orientation of the constitution came from those ones in December of that same year, he left his bench.
After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, Ortega left Spain, living in France, Netherlands, Argentine and Portugal, and not coming back till 1945. During the last period of his life he founded the Humanities Institute (1948) in Madrid and wrote his famous studies about spanish painters, in special Papeles sobre Velázquez y Goya (1950) y Velázquez (1955). José Ortega y Gasset died the 18 of October of 1955 in Madrid. After his death appeared, with posthumous character, some distinguished works like Meditaciones sobre Europa (1957), El hombre y la gente (1957) y Qué es filosofía (1958). In 1978, Foundation Ortega y Gasset was established to the difussion of his thought and work.
Regardless of his writings of social and historical critic, very influentials in his epoch, and of his activity of cultural animation of the Spain of the first third of 20th century, some ideas ocuppied a central position in the thought of Ortega y Gasset. Between them, the concept of perspective and his peculiar idea of reason, that considered joined to the life, have a special importance.
Ortega set out the concept of “perspectiva” in his essay Verdad y perspectiva, that appeared published in 1916 in the first volume of El Espectador. It’s a concept that have repercussions in the work of the german philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gustav Teichmüller, but in the work of Ortega had an original tone. He thought that the reality is offered to the persons in a great variety of singular perspectives. Each one of them is a way of reality and, at the same time, form a posibility of knowledge of the real. That is, a perspective suposse always the combination of an ontological and epistemological level, and the reality would be equal to the sum of posible perspectives in which is presented and according to those that can be analysed. To a certain extent, the perspective is similar to “point of view” or to the parcial comprension of something. It must be noted that the perspective eliminate the posibility of instant access toi an inmutable reality, what is found very joined to the concept of “circunstancia”, that Oretga made famous in his expression: “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia”. In fact, Ortega held the essential principles of his perspectivism in later moments of his thought.
From the last of the decade of 1920, he developed a concept of reason that is joined to a new consideration of life: the “raciovitalism”. This combination supossed one of the main contributions of his thought and became in one of the essential features of this one. For Ortega, life is the truthful radical reality, from that arise any problem that can be relevant and any posible phylosophical system. For each human being, life takes a concret and certain shape, that is built itself according to different circunstancies (or perspectives that life takes for each one). In fact, life is a radical and last reality; still more: she has her own finality, and there is no reality that can leak out her. For this, each human being’s life is, for him, hisher own finality and must devote to his elucidation if he hope to save himself.
Join to this afirmation of life and the need of elucidate or answer the problems that life brings up, he showed the need of a new type of reason, that go away of the abstract and merely theoric reason, always apart and “abstracted” of the vital circunstancies, that has been common in the tradition of western philosophy. He named “razón vital” to this new type of reason and “raciovitalismo” to the way of thinking that is based on his new concepto of reason. The vital reason is a reason that is sustained constantly on the life from which has appeared. That is, life, as a dinamic reality, that is always in proccess of elaboration, is an incesant source of problems and relevant questions and force always, to whom live her, to “saber a qué atenerse”, to get one’s bearings continually in his decisions. So, this orientation demand a reason that goes with life and finds on her his fundament. That is, a “razón vital”.
- Sinopsis -
The first excerpt of Ortega y Gasset’s work Meditación de Europa makes reference to the term “equilibrio de poder”, and to the opinion that the author has about the same term. According to his words, “the balance of powers is a reality that consists essentialy in the existance of a plurality”. And inside that plurality, a charancter of unity.
In the second excerpt, Ortega y Gasset distinguishe between “european nations” (for instance, France, Germany, Great Britain) and “european society”. In his opinion, nations don’t livetogether, unless the persons are who cohabit. The difference between Europe and european nations with regard to the “society” is based in the fact of european coexistence sensu extricto is more tenuous, less dense and complete. That is, each nation has own characteristics, but, in his opinion, all of them presents characteristics of homogeneity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY ABOUT JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
ABAD PASCUAL, Juan José: El método de la razón vital y su teoría en Ortega y Gasset. Madrid: Teatropoe, 1992.
ABELLÁN, José Luis: Ortega y Gasset en la filosofía española. Madrid: Tecnos, 1960.
ACEVEDO, Jorge: La sociedad como proyecto en la perspectiva de Ortega. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1994.
AGUADO, E.: Ortega y Gasset. Madrid: Épesa, 1970.
AGUILERA CERNI, Vicente: Ortega y D’Ors en la cultura artística española. Madrid: Ciencia Nueva, 1966.
ALFARO LÓPEZ, Héctor Guillermo: La filosofía de José Ortega y Gasset y José Gaos. Una vertiente del pensamiento latinoamericano. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma, 1992.
ALLUNTIS, F.: The Vital and Historical Reasons of J. Ortega. Nueva York: Franciscan Studies, 1955.
Excerpt 1, pp 86–87.
It would be a relapse into ancient limitations not to recognize units of public power except where they wear the well-known and, as it were, solidified masks of the State; that is, in the various nations of Europe. I roundly deny that the decisive public power acting in each of these consists exclusively of an interior or national public power. Let us realize once and for all that for many centuries – consciously for the last four – all the peoples of Europe have lived under a public power that by its dynamical purity can only be described in terms borrowed from mechanical science: the "European balance" or balance of Power*.
This is the authentic government of Europe, which regulates in their flight through history the swarm of peoples, as solicitous and pugnacious as bees, who escaped from the ruins of the ancient world. Europe's unity is not a fantasy, but reality itself; the fantasy is precisely the opposite: the belief that France, Germany, Italy or Spain are substantive realities, and therefore complete and independent.
It is nevertheless understood that the proof of the reality of Europe is not clear to everyone, because Europe is not a "thing", but an equilibrium. As early as the 18th century the historian Robertson called the European balance the greatest secret of modern politics*.
A great and paradoxical secret, without doubt! Because the balance or equilibrium of powers is a reality that consists essentially in the existence of plurality. If this plurality were lost, that dynamical unity would vanish. Europe is, in effect, a swarm: many bees, one flight.
This unitary character of the magnificent European plurality is what I would call the good homogeneity, which is fecund and desirable, which has made Montesquieu remark: L'Europe n'est qu'une nation composée de plusieurs, and more romantically, made Balzac talk about la grande famille continentale, dont tous les efforts tendent á je ne sais quel mystère de civilisation.
If we look, then, at the nations – holding them up to the light, let us say – we discover European society in them like the watermark in the paper. Some will fail to see it. Where does this blindness come from? It is not accidental and is not limited to this case, but we find it applied to all the dimensions of history; moreover, it is congenital to the very exercise of intelligence; the latter reacts to reality by creating a schema, which we are in the habit of calling an "idea" or concept; the idea is encapsulated in a name. Most of our companions in the human race, when they have the name of something, with its attached idea, become unable to see this thing, that is to say, the reality that they name and ideate. Name and idea intervene between the things and us like an opaque screen. It is curious that ideas, made to facilitate our clear perception of the realities, for many men do the opposite: to frighten away realities, as a defence against a true vision of them. They go through life like sleepwalkers, prisoners within the skin and bone of their ideas, of their "common places". Because of this, it is vital that we train a new vision that allows us to see through the names and the formulae that until now tried to fence in and represent the diverse realities of the human collective, the body...
Excerpt 2, pp121–125.
Each of the European nations is a society in the most intense sense of this word – that of a national society. It consists of the close coexistence of Germans on one side and the no less close coexistence of the French in their France, of the English in their England. But it so happens that besides these national societies - Germany, France, England – there is another society in which these float or sink: European society. To be clear on this point: this does not mean to say that European society consists of the coexistence of the European nations. This does not exist. Nations do not coexist. Believing this was the elementary mistake of sociology represented by the League of Nations. Only individuals coexist. European society also consists of the coexistence of the individuals that inhabit the continent and its adjacent islands. This coexistence is different from national coexistence, but no less effective, no less real. So much so that, in rigorous terms, European coexistence is prior to national coexistence, predating the nations, which have formed inside it like denser clots. Therefore, not all is said and done when Germany, France, Spain, England, etc., have been presented as prominent figures of the historical drama. Another personage must be added to them, as operative as they are: Europe. The difference between Europe and the European nations with respect to "society" is based on the fact that European coexistence sensu stricto is more tenuous, less dense and complete. On the other hand, it is older and more permanent. It has never managed to be condensed in the superlative form of society that we call a State, but has always acted, ceaselessly although with varying vigour, in other forms characteristic of a "collective life" such as the intellectual, aesthetic, religious, moral, economic, technical forces. If we were to cut out the specifically European ingredients of any of those nations we would have excised two-thirds of their entrails.
The complete reality of a European nation, then, has not been seen, if it is considered as something in and of itself. No; each of these nations has its particular profile, raised like a mountain on a common plain of basic coexistence, which is European reality. The peoples are separated and isolated above, but unified and undifferentiated below in a common subsoil that goes from Iceland to the Caucasus. Unfortunately – as I have remarked several times –, a history of European society in this strict sense has never been essayed. If the attempt was made with some rigor, I believe that it would become clear that European history has not consisted merely of the struggles of some Western peoples with others, but that there has also been a struggle, a flood of vicissitudes, between a few, many or all of the European nations and Europe itself as an undifferentiated and all-embracing unit. Sometimes the plurality of the nations prevails over its underground unity; at other times, on the contrary, the European unity forces the divergent nations to submit to a very marked homogeneity. Without taking this into account it is not possible to see with satisfactory clarity the image of certain epochs and of certain great events. For example, the early Middle Ages, a time at which Europe prevails. The then embryonic peoples live by adapting themselves to the forms that Rome had left in the European area. Is it possible, without underlining this, to understand what the Sacred Roman Empire was, and what it aspired to be? Does this enormous, and rather blurry idea, not rest in Haller's pages? And if this is not sufficiently clear, can the ideas with which Carlos V and his counsellors face the situation of Germany in 1519 be understood? A Spanish reader can not remain calm when one sees Haller classify Carlos V, with no whys or wherefores, as a Spaniard, because the Spanish we know very well what it cost him to Hispanize himself, and that as he did so he was progressively leaving aside the medieval idea of the Holy Empire and agreeing – though reluctantly – to the idea of the nations in plural and of the "European balance" which, replacing the Empire, would prevail for the next three centuries.
The same thing happens with the Reformation. Without saying so openly, Haller feels that Protestantism, though it culminates in the figure of Luther, is not exclusively nor specifically German, but strictly a European movement, a civil war that explodes in European society, as such. Does it not come as a surprise to us that Haller hesitates before a fact of this magnitude, which opens a whole epoch of German history? Also the Counter-reformation is an originally European fact and not Spanish, as some absent-mindedly maintain, despite being so decisive for Spanish national history.
It is not possible to look carefully at the nations of the West without stumbling over the unity operating behind them; nor is it possible to observe this European unit concretely, and not merely in a phrase, without discovering within it the perpetual agitation of its inner plurality: the nations. This incessant dynamic between unity and plurality constitutes, to my mind, the real perspective necessary to define the destinies of any Western nation.
The most solid proof of this is in front of us in the very period in which we are living. The German people has for the first time attained complete unity. This was the goal of all Haller’s work. But in the same moment in which the German people finds itself united, it finds that its problem is not resolved, because ipso facto it is revealed to the German people that it and its unity were only a partial problem of its own life, beyond which is raised, as a problem no less its own, the problem of Europe. In other words: German reality does not end in the seemingly exempt, isolated profile of German collectivity, but extends beyond this profile and, underground one could say, is one with the problem of France, Italy, Spain, England, etc. Every Western people on coming to full integration in the hour of its prevalence has had the same surprising and gigantic experience: That other European peoples were also itself or, vice versa, that it belonged to the immense society and unity of destiny that is Europe.
Given the choice, I would have wished that Haller's work anticipated a bit more of the horizon that we have in sight today. Again, and more than at any other time, the historical genius now has this formidable task before it: to advance European unity, without losing the vitality of its constituent nations, the glorious plurality of which has consisted the unequalled wealth and vigour of its history.
June, 1941.
Source: : José Ortega y Gasset, Meditación de Europa. Revista de Occidente (Madrid, 1960)
2. Ángel Ganivet on Spain, Christianity and Europe
- Biography and Context -
Ángel Ganivet (1865-1898), Spanish essayist and narrator, was the precursor of the called “Generación del 98”.
Borned in Granada the 13 of December of 1865. Because of an accident, he left his studies at 12 and began to work in a notary’s office. Later he continued his studies in Granada’s Institute. The same institute gave him the Extraordinary Award of Literature in 1877. He finished his doctoral studies in Philosophy and Arts and Law in 1890. In 1891, he applied for the post of headmaster of Greek’s Department in University of Granada, fact that mark an affinity which he share with Unamuno. The post was refused. In 1892, he began his diplomatic career when he was named Vice Consul in Antwep, Belgium. His first publication dated from this same year with an article in the newspaper “El Defensor de Granada”. In 1895, he was promoted to the post of Consul in Helsinki, Finland. Between his works, we can distinguish the novels La conquista del reino de Maya por el ultimo conquistador español Pío Cid (1897) and Los trabajos del infatigable creador Pío Cid (1898) in which, using the starring like alter-ego, he makes a satire of the process of colonization. His most important theoretical work is the Idearium Español (1895), where his anti-capitalistic point of view is in line with an utopia sited in the medieval past: craftsmanship against industry, usurers against bankers. Some ideas were already presents in his youth philosophical work, España filosófica contemporánea (1889), an essay in which he attacked the lack of mother ideas and the resulting extreme apathy, responsible of the lack of a Spanish vertebral project. Next his thought to En torno al casticismo of Miguel de Unamuno, senequism, individualism and pessimism, which get on for the apocalyptic, are constants of the work of Ganivet. He was also author of Cartas Finlandesas, Granada la bella (published in book’s format, at the first time, in 1895), Hombres del Norte y El porvenir de España; he also made mystic drama, like El escultor de su alma. Important is the Epistolario, which contains letters directed to Francisco Navarro Ledesma.
The case of Ganivet is very interesting. Although he died in 1898 and didn’t attend the beginning of the century with all the new members and casualties that entailed, is considered as part of “Generación del 98”. What wins him affiliation to the group is the desire of regeneration of Spain, which is present in his works.
His diplomatic career went on in Latvia when he was named consul of that country in 1898, date in which finished the colonial war between Spain and United States. This year was when Ganivet and Unamuno kept up openly in what later would be published under the name of El porvenir de España. His bibliography includes essays, novels, a play and poems, some of which he wrote in French.
A life pursued by tragedy begins when he was hardly 10, dieing his father. One year later, his disposition was threatened having a fall that destroyed one of his legs. His life was in danger because of the seriousness of the injury. As soon as his health was right, he had to clash with the sad reality that his leg would be amputated. The young Ganivet opposed totally to the amputation, and in the next three years, he fought against his body trying to win the difficulties he had to walk and continuing his life normally. At the end of that three years, time in which he joined still more to his mother, Ganivet had won, not only the use of crutches, but also the difficulty of walking. In 1892 Ganivet met Amelia Roldán, who was the mother of his children, but never his wife. One year later, his daughter borned, but, unfortunately, three months later she died. In the same year he had his second child and came back Granada where he lived during more than a year. Ganivet lived the death of his mother, who was the one who inculcated him the love for the arts and he used it as an inspiration. She was the one who had the dream of his son being writer. Unfortunaly, at the time of the death of his mother, Ganivet hadn’t still published any of his most significant works. His grandfather, who had played the role of paternal authority in the life of Ganivet after the death of his father, also died in theses years. But the worst tragedy, the one which finished a period of literary fertility and which produced a vacuum in Spanish arts of 1898, was what he induced himself. In that same year of 1898, 11 days before the signature of Paris’ Treaty and being abandoned by his lover and son, Ganivet committed suicide drowning in Dwina River in Riga, Latvia.
