Jose Ortega y Gasset
Jose Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gassetwas a Spanish liberal philosopher, and essayist. He worked during the first half of the 20th century, while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism, and dictatorship. His philosophy has been characterized as a "philosophy of life" that "comprised a long-hidden beginning in a pragmatist metaphysics inspired by William James, and with a general method from a realist phenomenology imitating Edmund Husserl, which served both his proto-existentialism and his realist historicism, which has been compared to both Wilhelm Dilthey...
NationalitySpanish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth9 May 1883
CountrySpain
We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.
The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.
Man in a word has no nature; what he has. ..is history.
History is the science of people.
We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.
By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.
The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.
Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-sat-isfied man.
The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of "the full." For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal.
I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.