The modern age appeared under what Ortega calls a generación, which is a general term in his philosophy that denotes a peculiar social reality marked by a decisive sort of sensibility. The generación of modernity was determined by the ascendency of physico-mathematical reason, first among its intellectual minority and later among the vast multitude of Europeans, and lives now according to what can loosely be described as “our convictions.”[1] What Ortega wants to declare is that the sensibility of his own generation is markedly distinct from that of modernity, and in so doing he brings to light what had already been dimly present: the European of his age is in a fundamental state of crisis, of disorientation. Ortega, in his typically personal, narrative style, describes the onset of the crisis:
The man who has not lost faith in the past is not frightened by the future, because he is sure that in the past he will find the tactic, the method, the course, by which he can sustain himself in the problematic tomorrow. The future is the horizon of problems, the past is the terra firma of methods, of the roads which we believe we have under our feet. Consider, dear friend, the terrible situation of the man to whom the past, the stable, suddenly becomes problematical, suddenly becomes an abyss. Previously, danger appeared to lie only before him, in the hazardous future; now he finds it also behind his back and under his feet.[2]
What had for nearly 300 years buttressed human confidence in the under-laboring of modern philosophy and the grandiose constructions of science was now being subjected, ironically, to the very doubt that initially fired the machinery of the Cartesian system. Yet, this new doubt lacks the optimism of its modern forbear; it is not intended to serve as a means to undergird a pre-established system of science. Rather, the doubt of Ortega’s age slipped surreptitiously through the backdoor of the modern edifice, initially in the form of a nagging whisper before crescendoing to a resounding clamor. “We are beginning to suspect that history, human life, cannot and ‘ought’ not to be ruled by principle, like mathematical textbooks”[3]—the European at the turn of the twentieth century is forced to confront this unsettling reality.
What led to the perception of the past as problematic? In short, Ortega tells us that humanity’s patience has run thin. For the better part of three centuries, he asserts, the new methods of the sciences had failed to yield an adequate, let alone a complete description of human life. At the helm was the Cartesian model of the res cogitans, which presented human nature as a static substance, a thing. Following was the Geist of the German idealists, which, while adjusting the view a bit in light of the recognizable limits of reason, was a bit more pliable in terms of its adaptation, but nevertheless was an identity and thing.[4] Whether it was Descartes’ raison, Spinoza’s mos geometricus or Kant’s pure reason, ultimately, the underlying error of modernity, asserts Ortega, is “our treating realities—corporeal or no—as if they were ideas, concepts, in short, identities.”[5] The notion of unchanging being, of static nature is a concept inherited from Parmenides to which the realities under the auspices of reason were referred. Imposed upon human life was res, substantia, modus, mind, Geist—varying concepts with the same tragic result: the fossilization of the vital reality of human life.
When Ortega poses the question of what science, modern reason, has to say concerning human reality in the present age, he claims no clear answer has or can be given. The audacity of reason, once capable of inspiring such unwavering hope in the realization of a comprehensive knowledge of every human reality, has been reduced to but only one modest dimension within the totality of human life: “[T]he lack of equilibrium between the perfection of its partial efficiency and its failure from the comprehensive point of view, which is final, is such in my opinion that it has contributed to the aggravation of our universal disquiet.”[6] By Ortega’s lights, modernity’s general predilection for the quantifiable, the mechanistic, the rational and the constant left the realm of spontaneity in human life unexamined and underappreciated. But such an idolization of reason consists of “our understanding functioning in the void, without let or hindrance, in contact with itself, and controlled only by its own internal standards.”[7] Hence, the lack of an answer to a question of pressing and unparalleled urgency. The sensibility of the present age, stemming from the disorientation felt by the European, is captured by Ortega in an expression of confusion: “We do not now understand how it is possible to speak of a human life in which the organ of truth has been amputated, or of a truth which requires the withdrawal of the vital stream before it can exist.”[8] The theme of the present age is the subjugation of reason to the more basic, antecedent reality of human vitality. Humanity can no longer wait idly for the fulfillment of modernity’s vacuous promises of a future knowledge of human nature.[9] The question of life itself must be confronted here and now in its full vital splendor.
—
[1] See, for example, Ortega’s chapters “The Idea of the Generation,” in Man and Crisis and “The Concept of the Generation,” in the Modern Theme.
[2] “Goethe from Within,” 134.
[3] The Modern Theme, 35.
[4] “Spirit, if it is anything in the world, is identity, and hence res, a thing—though as subtle and ethereal as you please. Spirit possesses a static consistency: it is already, to begin with, what it is going to be. . . . Hegel’s movement of the spirit is a pure fiction, since it is a movement within the spirit, whose consistency lies in its fixed, static, pre-established truth. Now the entity whose being consists in identical being evidently possesses already, to begin with, all it needs in order to be. For this reason identical being is substantive being, substance, a being that suffices to itself, sufficient being.” This is the thing. Spirit is no other than a thing.” “History as a System,” 197.
[5] Ibid., 198.
[6] Ibid., 179.
[7] The Modern Theme, 32.
[8] Ibid., 37.
[9] Ortega expresses this urgency in stunning fashion: “Life is haste and has urgent need to know what it is up against, and it is out of this urgency that truth in a vague tomorrow, has proved a dulling opiate to humanity. Truth is what is true now and not what remains to be discovered in an undetermined future.” “History as a System,” 182.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In