Ortega y Gasset, José

MARTIN PLOT

Encyclopdia of Political Thought - Second Edition

Wiley-Blackwell

Lugar: Hoboken; Año: 2014;

In this paper I discuss the work of Spanish philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist, José Ortega y Gasset. His relevance did not translate into a significantly broad global or regional influence, however. The reasons for this limited influence are probably related to three aspects of his work. The first one is too obvious to require elaboration: he wrote in Spanish, and this fact made it difficult for his thought to successfully engage the major--both past and contemporary--philosophers that were his desired interlocutors: Cohen, Nietzsche, James, Croce, Dilthey, Simmel, Husserl, Heidegger. The second reason is philosophical or, more specifically, of the order of the history of ideas: a phenomenologist, an existentialist, and a pragmatist, Ortega y Gasset was one of the many casualties of the structuralists and post-structuralists´ generalized rejection of Sartre´s phenomenological existentialism and, with him, that of any author with a family resemblance to his work--the most notable victim of this intellectual attitude was probably Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an author with whom Ortega y Gasset´s late work shares an astonishing number of themes and philosophical positions. Thirdly, the most relevant reason why Ortega y Gasset did not become broadly influential in the Spanish speaking intellectual world is probably political. Spain, from the defeat of the Republic in the Civil War on, was relegated in the concert of Hispanic American societies, cities, and academic milieus. More seriously though, it was the lack of an explicit and sustained condemnation of the Franco regime on his part that made him a kind of pariah in a Latin American continent in which being an intellectual, denouncing the Franco dictatorship, and identifying with the philosophical and political left were overlapping features of cultural life.