SPAIN: Death of a Philosopher

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At the turn of the century a young Spanish philosopher, home from the German universities, used to walk the stone terrace before the great Escorial palace proclaiming to himself: "I am I plus my circumstances." Looking up at granite reminders of bygone imperial glory and reflecting on the fresh memory of Spain's ignominious defeat in Cuba, José Ortega y Gasset decided that the circumstances of Spanish life demanded drastic overhaul. For 300 years, he wrote, Spain had been sinking into a "long coma of egotism and idiocy . . . Today we are not so much a people as a cloud of dust that was left hovering in the air when a great people went galloping down the high road of history."

The Revolt of the Masses. For the next 25 years José Ortega y Gasset, a small smoldering son of Socrates exuberantly engaged in the circumstances of Republican revolution, held sway over the liveliest minds of the Spanish-speaking world. Disagreeing sometimes with his great fellow philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, he was to be found in Madrid salons surrounded by poets and duchesses, fulminating at Iberian decadence till hostesses swept the whole lot out at dawn. To lead Spain out of its self-centered provincialism into fruitful communication with the rest of Europe, Ortega founded the most famous Spanish newspaper (the liberal El Sol) and the most widely quoted Spanish review (Revista de Occidente) of the day. He launched political manifestoes ("Spaniards, our nation does not exist. Reconstruct it. The monarchy must be destroyed"). And all the while, in the most exquisitely modulated Castilian prose of the 20th century, he wrote about Spain, art, bullfighting, modern poetry and the timeless problems of moral philosophy.

An individuality so tautly drawn between the twin Spanish columns of dignity and passion could never conform to the crude consequences of his own controverting eloquence. His victories defeated him. Three years before Hitler came to power, Ortega wrote a famous book with the prophetic title: The Revolt of the Masses. In the U.S., and in Europe as well, it was a Depression-time bestseller, whose striking Nietzschean phrases punctuated parlor talk and political arguments about whether, in the 20th century technological civilization, mass man tends to supplant the elite.

Lesser men seized on his exalting of the "select minority" to forward the Nazi cause, conveniently disregarding his characteristic distinction that "the select man is not the petulant person who thinks himself superior to the rest but the man who demands more of himself than the rest . . ." When Spain overthrew the monarchy, against which he had inveighed so powerfully, Ortega took a seat in the new Cortes but almost immediately found the new republic "sad and sour," nothing like the enlightened instrument of civilization that he had envisioned.