The Coming Age 
As a conclusion to a piece laden with both irony and insight, which was written on the occasion of the centenary of Goethe’s death, Ortega writes: “There was a time when people believed that culture did not need roots. . . . It was only recently—yet it was long ago. . . .”[1] Such an utterance can only be made from the vantage point of a present looking back upon a distinguishable, discernable past. The present age, Ortega tells us, is chronologically proximate to this past, and yet is so ideologically distinct that it is not altogether inappropriate to speak of it as a distant epoch. This short line, appropriately bringing to a close a piece that is at once a eulogizing and a resurrecting of Goethe’s life and thought, bespeaks of the acuity and sensitivity of Ortega’s historical awareness. There was an age, near his own, that is descending before the rising lights of a new age, one which the European of Ortega’s time senses but does not yet cognize. This closing epoch is what historians and philosophers have dubbed “modernity,” whose definitive form has plowed the intellectual, social and cultural landscape of Europe since the time of Galileo.
As early as 1914, when his first book, Meditaciones del Quijote, first fell from the presses, Ortega announced the coming of a new dawn of reason, but it was not until the 1923 programmatic El tema de nuestro tiempo that he unleashed his full prophetic vision of the future course of European history. Nuestro tiempo—our age—stands upon the earth of deep crisis, marking the close of one age and the opening of another, “not that which has just come to an end but that which is just beginning.”[2] What marks the advent of this new age, this burgeoning crisis, is the diminishing of the evidential power of modernity’s system of values. Ortega sketches the current state with poignancy in his En torno a Galileo, whose English translator invoked a bit of narrative license in rendering the title Man and Crisis:
There are many reasons for surmising that European man is lifting his tents from off that modern soil where he has camped these three hundred years and is beginning a new exodus toward another historic ambit, another manner of existence. This would mean that the ground of the modern age which begins beneath the feet of Galileo is coming to an end beneath our own. Our feet have already moved away from it.[3]
In brief, the European of Ortega’s time senses a softening and a shifting of the ground upon which he/she has stood for nearly 300 years, packed firm by the generation of those titans of modernity, Galileo, Copernicus and Descartes. These pioneers themselves moved through a persistent crisis of their own, emerging from a withering age of faith in revelation and inaugurating a new age of scientific rationality. The desire to fulfill the swelling ambition of reason led to a new age of belief where the “Western man believes, then, that the world possesses a rational structure, that is to say, that reality possesses an organization coincident with the organization of the human intellect, taking this, of course, in its purest form, that of mathematical reason.”[4] But for Ortega, it is none other than the traditionally celebrated father of modern philosophy, Descartes, who manifested the scope of what would become the modern age. What Descartes bespoke was not only the subjection of the mundus to the auspices of rational inquiry, but also the possibility of examining psychological life, reducible to the sheer presence of cogitatio, by means of pure intellectual principle:
The physics and psychology of Descartes were the first manifestations of a new spiritual state which, a century later, came to overspread all the forms of human life and predominated in the drawing-room, the law court and the market-place. The convergence of the features of this spiritual state, produced the sensibility which is specifically “modern.” Mistrust and contempt of everything spontaneous and immediate. Enthusiasm for all the constructions of reason.[5]
This novel and overtly ambitious “mediator between man and the world,”[6] physico-mathematical reason, posed as the placating presence of ultimate intelligibility, seeking to leave nothing unexamined by its principle. The Cartesian tree of knowledge extends out of its roots of metaphysics and reaches to the canopy of morality, leaving no element of life and the world outside its encompassing reach.[7]
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[1]Ortega, “In Search of Goethe from Within,” trans. Willard R. Trask, in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1968), 174.
[2] Ortega, The Modern Theme, trans. James Cleugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 12.
[3]Ortega, Man and Crisis, trans. Mildred Adams (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1958), 10.
[4] Ortega, “History as a System” in History as a System and Other Essays toward a Philosophy of History, trans. John William Miller (New York: Norton, 1941), 171. Published in Spanish as Historia como sistema in 1941.
[5] The Modern Theme, 34.
[6]“History as a System,” 174.
[7] Descartes’ tree of knowledge is outlined in the French preface to his Principia Philosophiae: “Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals.” (AT IX.2 14; CSM I 186).
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