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PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHYTHE JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY IN PRACTICEwww.practical-philosophy.org.uk www.society-for-philosophy-in-practice.org |
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PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHYTHE JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY IN PRACTICEwww.practical-philosophy.org.uk www.society-for-philosophy-in-practice.org |
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What is Philosophy?
José Ortega y Gasset
1964 [translated by Mildred Adams]. New York: Norton.
Practical Philosophy (Book Reviews) March 2001 Volume 4.1
Reviewed by: Trevor Curnow
José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) is one of the most underrated and neglected philosophers of the twentieth century. While all of his major works have been translated into English, they are little read, and the secondary literature on him (in English) is appallingly thin. He is best known, when he is known at all, for one book, The Revolt of the Masses, written in 1930 when he was professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid, the city in which he was born and where he died. When the Spanish republic was founded during the following year, he also became a member of parliament, and was one of the intellectual leaders of the republican government. He left Spain when the civil war broke out, but returned in 1949.
All of his writings are coloured by a sense of time and a sense of place. His interest in metaphysics led him to reflect on what it meant to be a human being living in a world with spatial and temporal dimensions. His interest in history led him to reflect on what it meant to be a Spaniard in the first half of the twentieth century. His interest in the history of philosophy led him to reflect on the contexts in which earlier philosophers had written. However, these interests are not kept separate from each other. In his writings there is a constant movement between, and interweaving of, all three of them. The abstract is never allowed to stray too far from the concrete, and the search for universal truth is always located within a particular cultural framework.
What is Philosophy? (as is the case with many of Ortega's books) comes out of a series of lectures. They were given first in Buenos Aires, then in February 1929 he began to deliver them at the University of Madrid. When the government, nervous of the political activity there, closed the institution down in March, Ortega hired a public hall and carried on with them at the new location, charging for admission. This exercise proved unexpectedly successful.
Some of the conclusions Ortega comes to at the end of the book, such as (p.249), ‘Living consists in the process of deciding what we are going to be’, may seem unremarkable, and perhaps they are. But this is a book where the temptation to begin at the end must be firmly resisted. It is fully as important to travel as to arrive. As he himself says near the beginning (p.17), ‘Starting at this point, we will move steadily ahead toward a goal which I will not now spell out because it would not yet be understood.’ In the intervening pages the reader is led, with patience, clarity and erudition, along a path of philosophical discovery. Whether or not one agrees with Ortega, it is impossible to read him without at least learning something. If only that could be said of all philosophy books!
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