I put up the final installment of my brief survey of José Ortega y Gasset’s philosophy of life over at The Crowd is Untruth. If you are interested in modern societal/political structures or in the foundations of Sartre’s and Heidegger’s existentialism, you really ought to pick up a book or two by Ortega. He is not widely appreciated in the U.S., most likely because his works were written in Spanish and many were published in local newspapers in Spain and Argentina, despite that some philosophers have placed his political and social thought on the same plane of importance and influence as that of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Here’s a snippet from my final post:
Ortega submits that before one can feel oneself disoriented and lost, one must make the initial effect to feel oneself, to meet oneself. But not all are willing to even take this initial treacherous step. The first answers we tend to seek whenever a crisis arises are those that are ready-made within our social environments. We often seek solutions from people without withdrawing from our environment momentarily in order to find our actual reality. But a “people” is not charged to invent itself, to decide its own being. A “people” does not think or choose for itself, it does not have responsibility for itself. Thus, the social “I” is inauthentic. Yet if I constantly rely upon the repetition of thoughts communicated by the “people,” I join myself to the amorphous and inauthentic masses; “I supplant my individual ‘I’ with the social ‘I’; I cease to live my genuine life and make this conform to a mold that is common, anonymous, ownerless. From being individual, I move to become communal; in the realm of thought, I practice vital commonality.”[3] To become inauthentic, to become mass is to live life on a derivative level, to make no demands of oneself for improving one’s circumstance, to avail of the effort to invent one’s being. Rather than being aware of the shipwreck, the masses perceive themselves as mere “buoys that float on the waves.”[4] In rather harsh terms, Ortega describes this life of inauthenticity: “Human necessity is the awesome imperative of authenticity. Whoever freely chooses not to abide by it falsifies his life, he unlives it, becomes a suicide.”[5] The masses ignore their ontological disorientation, substituting in its a place a fictitious and second-hand situation of orientation.
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