José Ortega y Gasset

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José Ortega y Gasset

José Ortega y Gasset (born May 9, 1883 in Madrid , † October 18, 1955 there ) was a Spanish philosopher , sociologist and essayist . Along with Miguel de Unamuno, he is considered the most important Spanish thinker of the twentieth century and has had a lasting influence on an entire generation of Spanish intellectuals - in particular on the so-called Escuela de Madrid ("School of Madrid"). His most important students include María Zambrano , Xavier Zubiri , Julián Marías Aguilera , José Gaos , and Antonio Rodríguez Huéscar.

life and work

José Ortega was born in Madrid into a family of journalists. He attended the Jesuit School San Estanislao de Miraflores in Málaga and studied from 1897 to 1898 at the University of Deusto in Bilbao and then philosophy at the University of Madrid , where he received his doctorate in 1904 with a thesis on millenarianism in France. From 1905 to 1911 he stayed in Germany for study purposes, including Leipzig , Berlin and primarily Marburg . In Marburg he was influenced by the neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp , among others . In 1909 Ortega returned to Spain. Ortega was founder and editor of the magazines España (1915-1924) and Revista de Occidente (1923), employee of the newspaper El Sol and worked on the Spanish constitution of 1931 with. Under the influence of the Weimar Republic , he wrote his work Der Aufstand der Massen in 1929 , which also became very well known in Germany. Ortega himself did not give the work a central position in his philosophical system, but always emphasized his so-called “circuncialism” as his decisive insight. He reduced this to the famous formula: “I am I and my living conditions” (“Yo soy yo y mis circunstancias”). In the Second Republic he was a member of the Cortes as a member of the Al Servicio de la República group .

From 1910 to 1936 he held professorships in metaphysics , logic and ethics at the Complutense University of Madrid ; In 1936, as a signatory of the Adhesiones de intelectuales manifesto (ABC, July 31, 1936), he and other intellectuals condemned the military coup and declared loyalty to the democratically elected Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic.

Shortly after the beginning of the civil war, he left Spain and lived in France , Argentina and from 1943 in Portugal before returning to Spain in 1948, where he stayed regularly until his death in 1955 (in Madrid). In 1952 the Philipps University of Marburg awarded him an honorary doctorate. As a cultural philosopher he built on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Friedrich Nietzsche , Wilhelm Dilthey and the philosophy of life and made a. a. the German literary theories about the baroque in Spain.

The sociological work: La rebelión de las masas (The revolt of the masses)

The uprising of the masses is considered to be the most important sociological book by Ortega y Gasset . It is assigned to the elite sociology. It should be emphasized, however, that from Ortega's point of view the “elite” cannot be identified with any specific class, but that there is an elite (“minoría selecta” or “minorías excelentes”) in every social class that stands out from the crowd: “The Differentiating society in masses and excellent minorities is therefore not a differentiation into social classes, but a differentiation between different classes of people. ”(“ La división de la sociedad en masas y minorías excelentes no es, por lo tanto, una división en clases sociales , sino en clases de hombres. ”) While mass people (“ hombre-masa ”) are characterized by comfort, conformity, intolerance and opportunism, people of excellent minorities stand out from the crowd because they have the discipline to continually go beyond themselves and to develop their authentic personality in their uniqueness. The work is assigned to the sociological diagnosis of the time . Similar to Sigmund Freud and under the influence of Sören Kierkegaard, Ortega looks at the phenomenon of the “mass” from a mass psychological perspective and at the same time with Martin Heidegger also from a phenomenological point of view. For him, the problem of the massing of society is characteristic of the beginning of the twentieth century in the sense that the masses are historically uprooted and thus disoriented. This uprooting and the associated lack of historical awareness make the “masses” particularly susceptible to populist ideas and ideologies, as he sees them. a. manifest in fascism and communism. Ortega y Gasset was a staunch opponent of all European nationalisms. In his essay Meditación de Europa , which emerged from a conference that Ortega held in Berlin in 1949 under the title “De Europa meditatio quaedam” at the Free University of Berlin , he advocated the dissolution of the European nation states (in their previous form) and for the establishment of the "United States of Europe". This makes him one of the most important thought leaders in the European community. Ortega sees the historical basis of European culture in European humanism, whose roots can be traced back to antiquity. Ortega's last, sociological work El hombre y la gente (Man and the people) remained unfinished due to his death and was published from the estate in 1957.

See also

Family tomb José Ortega y Gasset, Madrid, Cementerio San Isidro

Selection of works

  • Collected works in 6 volumes. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart / Munich 1996, ISBN 3-421-01848-0 .
  • Writings on phenomenology. Edited by J. San Martín, translated from the Spanish by Arturo Campos and Jorge Uscatescu, and with an introduction by the editor, Karl Alber Verlag, Freiburg, 1998.
  • Los terrores del año mil. Crítica de una leyenda. Madrid 1904.
  • Meditaciones del Quixote. Madrid 1914.
  • El Espectador. Madrid 1916 (German book of the viewer. Translated by Helene Weyl Stuttgart, Berlin 1934).
  • España invertebrada. Madrid 1921.
  • The tema de nuestro tiempo. Madrid 1923 (German Zurich 1928).
  • Ni vitalismo ni racionalismo. Madrid 1924.
  • La deshumanización del arte. Madrid 1925 (Ger. The expulsion of man from art. Munich 1964.)
  • La “Filosofía de la historia” de Hegel y la historiología. Madrid 1928.
  • ¿Qué es filosofía? Buenos Aires 1929, Madrid ²1958 (German title: What is philosophy? Stuttgart 1962).
  • La rebelion de las masas. Madrid 1929 (German: The uprising of the masses . Translated by Helene Weyl Stuttgart 1931)
  • Del imperio Romano 1941 (German about the Roman Empire, Reclam, Stuttgart 1962).
  • Prólogo a "Veinte años de caza mayor" del conde de Yebes , Madrid 1943 (German meditations on the hunt . Stuttgart 1998).
  • Pidiendo un Goethe desde dentro. Santiago 1932 (German asking for a Goethe from within. Dva, 1949).
  • Meditación de la técnica. Buenos Aires 1939 (German Stuttgart 1949).
  • El intelectual y el otro. Madrid 1942 (German Stuttgart 1949).
  • Ideas y greencias. Madrid 1942 (German in: From man as utopian being. Stuttgart 1951).
  • Miseria y esplendor de la traducción. Madrid 1956 (German misery and gloss of the translation. Ebenhausen near Munich 1948, 1964 and, German TV Munich 1976: bilingual).
  • El hombre y la gente. Madrid 1957 (German title: The human being and the people. Stuttgart 1958).
  • La idea de principio en Leibniz y la evolución de la teoría deductiva. Madrid 1958 (Ger. Leibniz's concept of principles and the development of deduction theory. Munich 1966).
  • Una interpretación de la Historia Universal. From the Spanish under the title An Interpretation of World History. by Wolfgang Halm. Gotthold Müller Verlag, Munich 1964.
  • Man is a stranger. Writings on metaphysics and philosophy of life, translated and provided with an introduction by Stascha Rohmer (Ed.), Freiburg / Munich: Karl Alber 2008, ISBN 978-3-495-48104-2 .
  • About love. Meditations. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1977, ISBN 3-421-01529-5 .
  • Signals of our time. Essays European Book Club Stuttgart Zurich Salzburg.

literature

  • Joxe Azurmendi : Ortega y Gasset. In: Espainiaren arimaz. Elkar, Donostia 2006, ISBN 84-9783-402-X .
  • A. Buck: Ortega y Gasset as a cultural critic. In: Universitas. 8, 1953, pp. 1031-1041.
  • Maria Luisa Cavanna: The conflict between the concept of the individual and the gender theory in Georg Simmel and José Ortega y Gasset. Pfaffenweiler 1991.
  • Ernst Robert Curtius : José Ortega y Gasset. In: Critical Essays on European Literature. Bern 1950.
  • Ernst Robert Curtius: Ortega. In: Mercury. Issue 5, 1949.
  • Hans Georg Gadamer : Dilthey and Ortega. In: Collected Works. Volume 4, Tübingen 1987.
  • N. González-Caminero: Between Sociology and History. In: Schopenhauer yearbook. 50, 1969, pp. 63-81.
  • Franz Niedermayer: José Ortega y Gasset, attempt at an interpretation and evaluation. In: highlands. 48, 1955/56, pp. 33-46.
  • Franz Niedermayer: José Ortega y Gasset. (= Heads of the 20th century. Volume 15). Colloquium Verlag, Berlin 1959.
  • Christoph Dröge:  José Ortega y Gasset. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 6, Bautz, Herzberg 1993, ISBN 3-88309-044-1 , Sp. 1289-1291.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )
  • Rafael Capurro : Ortega y Gasset . In: Julian Nida-Rümelin (ed.): Philosophy of the Present in Individual Representations. From Adorno to v. Wright (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 423). 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-520-42302-2 .
  • Frauke Jung-Lindemann: On the reception of José Ortega y Gasset's work in German-speaking countries. With special consideration of the relationship between philosophical and popular reception in Germany after 1945. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-631-34654-9 .
  • Marco Fuhrländer: José Ortega y Gasset. In: Joachim Kaiser (Ed.): The book of 1,000 books. Authors, story, content and impact. Harenberg, Dortmund 2002, ISBN 3-611-01059-6 , p. 830 f. (Well-founded introductory lexicon article on José Ortega y Gasset)
  • Anja Kolpatzik: Technological philosophical considerations in the work of José Ortega y Gassets. Düsseldorf 1996.
  • Julian Marías : José Ortega y Gasset and the idea of ​​living reason. An introduction to his philosophy. trans. v. Aurelio Fuentes y Rojo and Anneliese Weigel. Stuttgart 1952.
  • Gesine Märtens : »My Nietzsche«. Nietzsche's presence in the thinking of José Ortega y Gasset. In: Renate Reschke (Hrsg.): Turn of times-turn of values. Berlin 2001, pp. 171–176.
  • Udo Rusker: Basics of Ortega's philosophy. In: Journal for Philosophical Research. 19/1969, pp. 276-288.
  • Hans Poser : Ortega y Gasset, reflections on technology. In: Christoph Hubig, Alois Huning: The classics of the philosophy of technology. (= Technology – society – nature. 2). Berlin 2000, pp. 289-292.
  • E. Schadel: Understanding in diversity. Linguistic ontological glosses on José Ortega y Gasset's "Splendor and Misery of Translation". In: Salzburg Yearbook for Philosophy. 23/24, 1978/79, pp. 115-135.
  • J. de Salas: Leibniz and Ortega. In: Studia Leibniziana. 21, 1989, pp. 87-97.
  • J. San Martín: Ortega y Gasset's concept of life. In: Hans Rainer Sepp and Ichiro Yamaguchi (eds.), Life as a Phenomenon , Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg, 2006, pp. 141–148.
  • H. Schoeck: José Ortega y Gasset. In: Journal for Philosophical Research. 4, 1950, pp. 279-283.
  • A. Wagner, JH Ariso (Ed.): Rationality Reconsidered: Ortega y Gasset and Wittgenstein on Knowledge, Belief, and Practice. (= Berlin Studies in Knowledge Research. 9). de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-045441-3 .
  • Hans Widmer: Comments on the concept of philosophy in José Ortega y Gasset. In: General journal for philosophy. 9, 1984, No. 3, pp. 1-20.

Web links

Commons : José Ortega y Gasset  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: José Ortega y Gasset  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The original title of the dissertation is: Los terrores del año mil. Crítica de una leyenda. Ortega did not include this writing in his collected works. German translation: The horrors of the year one thousand. Criticism of a legend. Reclam, Leipzig 1992, ISBN 3-379-01448-6 .
  2. ↑ Stascha Rohmer : Introduction to Ortega y Gassets philosophy of life. 2008. (online)
  3. ↑ Richard Konetzke : The Iberian States from the end of the First World War to the era of the authoritarian regimes 1917-1960. in: Theodor Schieder (ed.): Handbook of European history. Vol. 7. Europe in the age of world powers. Partial volume 1. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 978-3-12-907590-6 , pp. 651-698 (here: p. 677).
personal data
SURNAME Ortega y Gasset, José
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish philosopher, sociologist and essayist
DATE OF BIRTH May 9, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Madrid
DATE OF DEATH October 18, 1955
Place of death Madrid