Texts:1971 Man and his circumstances part 2: Difference between revisions

<blockquote>It is patently evident that during the last ten years Spain has relapsed into a perfect mental inertia; everywhere indolence and stupidity have triumphed. But this time I know that the defect, however undeniable, did not proceed from our own character. This time its cause was in Europe. Someday we shall understand how the great gust of discouragement that blew across the continent grounded Spain at the very moment that the nation launched itself on its first spiritual flight after centuries of slumber. Now the problem goes beyond our frontiers, and it is necessary to transfer our efforts there.... Hence, I begin a new task, To sea once again, tiny ship! I begin what Plato called "The Second Voyage!"<p class="source">Ortega<br/> "Prólogo a una edición de sus <i>Obras</i>,"<br/><i>Obras</i> VI, pp. 353–54.</p></blockquote>

<h3>IX — On the Crisis of Europe</h3>

<blockquote>The best choose one thing in place of all else, "everlasting" glory among mortals; but the majority are glutted like cattle.<p class="source">Heraclitus, 29</p></blockquote>

<h3>X — Scarcity and Abundance</h3>

<p>Ortega addressed himself to these questions in The Revolt of the Masses. Through his answers, he diagnosed the problem of leadership in Europe, which prepared him for his second voyage in which he would seek a cure for the problem of leadership. In a normal community the average person would be the apt student of various excellent types. In a crisis, an abnormal situation, the excellent types were ignored and the community ceased to operate as an apparatus for perfecting its members. Ortega contended that, until recently, European history had described a community that was by and large normal; Western leaders had been effective because men of ordinary character, the masses, attended to the excellent. Something had changed, however. To find what it was, Ortega took the perspective of the average man,<ref><i>La rebelión de las masas</i>, 1930, <i>Obras</i> IV, p. 149.</ref> to see the show from the inside."10 He looked for a view of life that would suggest aptness to the unprepossessing person. He found one, and another view that would give rise to inaptness.</p>

<p>"To start with, we are what our world invites us to be." The world that a man perceived ineluctably pressed its features into the character he formed in response. To live was to deal with one's circumstances i and thus the world was the sum of impressions that a man received in dealing with the circumstances he found himself in. During the past—for the situation had recently changed—almost everyone had discovered that the world offered them only a narrow range of possibilities. Therefore, the world invited men to become aware of their limitations: "round about him the average man encountered difficulties, dangers, scarcities, limitations of destiny and dependence" that he could neither avoid nor surmount. As a consequence of perceiving scarcity and difficulty in life, the mass man became aware of his dependence on . those who were more competent than himself; hence he became apt and was willing to accept authorities external to himself. "Before anything, our life is our continuous consciousness of what is possible for us"; and in the past men were, at every instant, aware that it was possible to encounter some crushing difficulty. Man's perception of life as an arduous undertaking culminated in "the supreme generosity," liberal democracy, in which the masses freely gave their power to the minorities that offered the best "programs."<ref>Ibid,, pp. 180, 180, 165, 191–2.</ref></p>

<blockquote>Every creature is driven to pasture with a blow.<p class="source">Heraclitus, 11</p></blockquote>

<h3>XI — The Critic's Power</h3>

<p>To have effect1 critics need, among other things, both a cause and a canon. The cause is most important and the one that moved Ortega, Europe, will occupy us throughout later chapters. In addition to the cause, however, the canon is also significant, for if the canon is faulty, the cause is likely to die without effect. By a canon, one means a conception of how criticism can and should influence those criticized. Today, critics easily find an audience for their views, for people seem to believe that on listening to exposes of their faults, those faults will disappear effortlessly, as if by magic. This belief creates the paradox that makes a canon important: the more people listen to criticism, the less critical they seem to become.[[#A85|(A85)]] This paradox is a serious phenomenon, for it means that people are building up a strong resistance to one of the more significant forms of power presently available. To counteract this resistance, the competent clerc needs a means to make his hearers inwardly critical of themselves and their world, rather than mere consumers of criticism. Ortega sought a canon of criticism that would explain how people become critical of their own situation, for he understood that the significant achievements of criticism had been wrought when an altered view of the world was internalized by many men: then they began to sing lustily "give me ten stout-hearted men and I'll soon give you ten thousand more."</p>

<p>Commonly, people think that the object of criticism is to demonstrate the error of a belief or practice. In doing so, the critic is expected to demonstrate the wrongness of one position and the rightness of another; and thus the critic is drawn into absolute judgments that consign some to heaven and others to hell. All this is a misunderstanding that stems, in part, from the ubiquity of bad criticism and, in part, from a misreading of the sting that is properly present in the prose of a good critical stylist. Rightly understood, criticism necessarily ceases to be criticism as soon as it begins to propound imperative judgments, positive or negative; criticism concerns the possible relation between an object outside itself and people other than the critic, and to influence this relation, the critic should respect the autonomy of both the object and the audience of his criticism. In keeping with such restraints, Ortega's conception of criticism had little to do with passing judgment.</p>

<blockquote>It is hard to fight against impulse; whatever it wishes, it buys at the expense of the soul.</blockquote>

<h3>XII — Towards an Exuberant Europe</h3>

<blockquote>If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out and difficult.<p class="source">Heraclitus, 18</p></blockquote>

<h3>XIII — The Reform of Technique</h3>

<p>In the conviction that life was amoral, Ortega saw one of the most dangerous misapprehensions of his time. "How have men been able to believe in the amorality of life?" Ortega asked incredulously.<ref><i>Ibid</i>., p. 278.</ref> By putting this question to people, he hoped to elicit an awareness of how absurd the amoral sense was. Such awareness would help refurbish the European's capacity to envision a significant future, a Kinder/and.</p>

<p>Life as life is lived, Ortega believed, is a continual moral effort, an attempt to achieve, one after another, various things that the person recognized as "good." A man cannot act without being aware of a goal, and when he is in form, the goals of all his acts aggregate into a life project that, he recognizes, is his self-made destiny. This destiny is a demanding regimen. To sustain the great, constant effort that the pursuit of a life project entails, a man needs to believe in its significance; hence, to assure himself of the worth of his work, he resorts to moral reasoning, crude or subtle, naive or sophisticated, as the case may be. To be sure, he could accept his project as a mere preference, a hobby, an amusement, a pastime; in that case his personal life itself becomes a pastime, and in the inevitable moments of trial he will be unlikely to remain true to such an insignificant project. But the widespread sense that life is amoral does not even allow a man this reduced justification, for it makes the personal preference pale to insignificance in comparison with objective necessities.</p>

<p>But did such a natural, neutral object so excite the scientist's concern and solicitude? Should man make himself into a natural creature, oblivious to ethical choice, a purely responsive being for whom morality, purpose, and value are meaningless conceptions? Could man make himself into a celestial mechanism that was, itself, its own watchmaker? Ortega thought not, and he contended that the conception of reason that suggested such a possibility was inadequate.</p>

<blockquote>And to these images they pray, as if one were to talk to one's house, knowing not the nature of gods and heroes.<p class="source">HERACLITUS, 5</p></blockquote>

<blockquote>Wisdom is one thing—to know the thought whereby all things are steered through all things.<p class="source">Heraclitus, 41</p></blockquote>

<h3>XV — The Dawn of Historic Reason</h3>

<blockquote>I searched into myself.</blockquote> <p class="source">Heraclitus, 101</p>

<h3>XVI — On the Past and Future of Present Man</h3>

<blockquote>Soul has its own principle of growth.<p class="source">Heraclitus, 115</p></blockquote>

<h3>¡Pensar en Grande!</h3>

<p>Abstract generalities about pressing problems of public affairs do not define a Kinderland. The constant call to public action does little to help any man define his personal aspirations with respect to the definite realities of his life. In our actual lives, the great, established institutions—the corporation, union, church, school, and state—are all too often experienced as imperious, bumbling intruders. Thus men have ceased to experience the state as a mere idea, a hope, that they can freely use in their personal lives to orient their independent activities. Instead, men have grown accustomed to experiencing the state as a deficient monolith, a magisterial entity beset by overriding needs. Hence authority is on the verge of dissolution, for a deficient monolith is absurd. Delenda est imperium! Sentient men cannot live as self-respecting human beings by solely aspiring to solve abstract difficulties, those of the public and its problems, the one that, as officials might say, "functional analyses and statistical projections reveal as threats to the viability of the complex, dynamic processes that sustain modern societal and economic systems." Ecce homo! Our task is to nurture our spontaneity and to channel it towards a Kinder/and of common, personal significance.</p>

<p>We reach the climax of Ortega's thought. Throughout his later works, he spread prophetic utterances inviting men to turn away from concern for sustaining the established order and to join in founding radically new forms of life. Recently, we have become surfeited by the frivolous use of such phrases by professional puffers and are nearly incapable of seriously contemplating substantial changes in our way of life. We expect the newness of the new to be described in attractive detail and our empirical sensibility rebels at expecting the unexpected. Those modern augurs, the futurologists, assure us that the year 2000 will be much more like 1970 than 1984. Ortega, instead, foresaw aspects of the future, not by projecting present trends ahead, but by anticipating trends that were not now present. He called explicit attention to the radicalism of his views, for his radicalism, which was based on the only real radicalism possible, a philosophical revision of first principles, was easily overlooked.<ref>See <i>La idea de principia en Leibniz</i>,1948, 1958, <i>Obras</i> VIII, pp. 281–5.</ref> If first principles were transformed, a coherent yet spontaneous transformation of everything else becomes probable especially in the seemingly fundamental realm of politics. This Emerson understood: "the history of the State sketches in coarse outline the progress of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy of culture and aspiration."<ref>Emerson, "Politics," <i>Works</i>, Vol. 1, p. 368.</ref></p>

<blockquote>We have arrived at a moment, ladies and gentlemen, in which we have no other solution than to invent, and to invent in every order of life. I could propose no task more delightful. One must invent! Well then! You the young—lads and lasses. Go to it!<p class="source">Ortega<br/>"Pasado y porvenir para el hombre actual,"<br/>1951, 1962, <i>Obras</i> IX, p. 663.</p></blockquote>