It's a good summarize of Ortega y Gasset. Some might think differently but before I read a philosopher's book, this kind of summarizing is helping me to understand that person in a better way. Yes, it gives perspective of others not author's itself but due to the lack of my knowledge of history of philosophy, I feel it's required.
Ortega rarely comes up in academic philosophy with the possible exception of Revolt of the Masses. Interesting lecture. His attempt to provide a third option (contextualism) to Realism and Idealism moves along lines of thought not too different from early Heidegger (c.f. Being-in-the-world) on the continent, and Dewey (organism-in-the-environment as point of departure in Exp & Nature, Education and Experience, et al.). "I and my circumstances taken together constitute Life"). One can say, "Oh, this isn't really a new foundation for philosophy; it presupposes that concepts like environment/nature, or for Ortega, "circumstances" don't require epistemic foundations." But for Ortega (like the other 2 I mentioned) the "quest for absolute certainty/foundations" is itself a perennial source of skepticism. Realists have, perhaps, set the bar too high-- what we must do is start our inquiries in media res, within pragmatic contexsts. Ortega writes that, "life is such that willy nilly we are forced to act, and thus forced to make judgments about the world" (paraphrase from, I think, Historical Reason). Dewey, too, says the starting point for inquiry is the "problematic situation;" and early Heidegger says much the same when he discusses "equipmental mode of being" such that we don't theorize about hammers until we're using one that breaks. Then we switch gears and take a proto-scientific, an analytic approach to objects. Knowledge, then, is more a matter of coping as effectively as possible with environmental challenges/difficult circumstances, than a quest for rock solid foundations, or statements that correspond the the way the world is precisely. The metaphysics of "propositions" (not merely sentences in natural language but propositions as such) is eschewed in favor of an account of knowing as a continuous with 'doing.' In the realm of science this often leads to Instrumentalism and a denial of the possibility of Scientific Realism. So, along with Dewey, early Heidegger and later Wittgenstein (meaning as use, etc.) Ortega is part of a philosophical trend that moves away from abstract theory and emphasizes praxis and provisional knowledge. But though he was writing before Being and Time, and was Husserl's student, his work was ultimately neglected. One of my profs used to say (I disagree here) that Ortega was a "poor man's Heidegger." But Ortega didn't just *talk about* "historicity"-- he was historically knowledgeable and insightful in wyys Heidegger (for whom history is basically the history of ontology and theology) simply was not. He criticized fascism with great insight, rather than embracing it like Heidegger. Though there is plenty to criticize in O's work, he deserves a second look 100 years later. Thanks for the introductory lecture!
This is an excellent lecture; I can learn a lot from this guy. But Ortega was a phenomenologist, having been a student of Edmund Husserl. He wrote a book titled the Phenomenology of Psychology.
a Mass man giving an accurate description of the Mass man leaves out the real value of Ortega's work, his work is functional if viewed from the perspective of the outlier as reference material to identify and prepare for social brake down due to the reoccurring emergence of the Mass man that results from an overly comfortable stability that democracy brings over the long term, context is actually left out of this summery about Ortega's work in an amazingly accurate manner even descried by the Professor in this session , the teacher proofed Ortega's work with his own example, unless of course the video goes on further after its ending to show an eye opening twist
Jose Ortega y Gasset, "The whole and the parts": "If we want to know what a leaf is and we start looking at it, we soon notice that our previous idea of a leaf does not coincide with the reality of a leaf for the simple reason that we cannot specify where what we called a leaf ends and where something else begins. We discover, in fact, that the leaf does not end in itself, but continues; it continues on the petiole, and the petiole, in turn, on the branch, and the branch on the trunk, and the trunk on the roots. The leaf, then, is not a reality per se that can be isolated from the rest. It is something that has its reality as part of something that is the tree, which, compared to what we called a leaf, now acquires the character of a whole. Without this everything is not understandable, the page is not intelligible to us. But then, when we have noticed and we have taken charge that the reality of the leaf is to be part, to be an integral part of the whole tree and we have referred it to it and we see it being born in it and we find out the function that as a whole it serves, therefore, when our mind, so to speak, leaves the leaf and goes to something larger - the whole that is the tree - then and only in then we can say that we know what the leaf is. To such an extent is this so, in such a way that the leaf has the condition of being a part that when, instead of contemplating it in the tree where it is being a leaf, we separate it from it, we say that we have cut or uprooted it -expressions that declare the violence that We have made the leaf and the tree suffer. Even more so when having it isolated between our fingers, when it could seem like a whole-given, I repeat, that it would be possible to decide where it ends and where the petiole or the branch begins-, when isolated between our fingers it could manage to be a whole, at that moment it begins to no longer be a leaf but a vegetable detritus that will soon finish disintegrating. This relation of part to all is one of the categories of the mind and of reality, without which this great operation that is knowledge is not possible. This allows us to generalize and say: all things in the real world are either parts or wholes. If a thing is a part, it is intelligible only insofar as we refer it to the whole of which it is. If a thing is everything, it can be understood by itself without more than perceiving the parts of which it is composed. This holds for all orders of the real. For example, it is also valid for the reality that is language (...) The isolated word cannot be understood because it is part of a whole, like the leaf was part of the tree, of a whole that is the sentence, like the sentence, in turn, is part of a whole, a conversation, or a book. The word, as you know, is always equivocal and to specify its meaning, apart from the perspicacity that life teaches us, we need a whole science, (...) the science of interpretation or hermenéutics. The main task of this science consists of knowing how to determine to what whole is sufficient a phrase and a word must refer so that their meaning loses its ambiguity. Hermeneuticians and grammarians call this whole in which the word is specified the "context." Well, every real thing that is a part calls for the whole, for its context, so that we can understand each other." Jose Ortega y Gasset: Una interpretación de la historia universal. Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1959, pp. 53-55 ("The whole and the parts")
