Ortega y Gasset — Lao Tzu

Combing the shelves a few days ago in the midst of some extended "social distancing," I happened upon a row of aging paperbacks published by W.W. Norton, all of them bearing on the spine the name José Ortega y Gasset.

No one reads Ortega nowadays—at least no one that I know. And the titles, most of which appeared between the two world wars, have an old-fashioned and slightly generic ring: Man and People, Man and Crisis, The Modern Theme, The Dehumanization of Art, History as a System. Ortega wrote his most famous work, The Revolt of the Masses, in 1914.

Considered all in all, these titles conjure a point of view galaxies removed from the issues and perspectives that excite young people and academics today. What they fail to suggest in how wide-ranging Ortega's interests were and how comfortable he was raising basic metaphysical issues without feeling the need to explore every possible objection that we might present or burdening his thoughts with obscure and portentous terminology. Ortega often referred to philosophy as a form of noble sport, and his writings almost invariably carry a jaunty, even journalistic flair.

I ended up reading a short essay from the collection Concord and Liberty.  It carries the ambitious title "Notes on Thinking—It's Creation of the World and It's Creation of God."

According to Ortega, much of Western philosophy, building on the Greek notion of "aletheia," concerns itself with establishing convincing connections between our thoughts and the things "out there." We take that to be "thinking."

But in his view, this orientation isn't a necessity. Rather it's a choice we make about the relative importance of things. Other people, other cultures, have made different choices.

As a young man Ortega studied for quite a while in Marburg, Germany, which was then a locus of Neo-Kantian thought, which (to oversimplify) explored alleged a priori principles governing thought. He later took an interest in phenomenology, which attempted to make an end run past the problems of verification posed by the empirical approach by focusing, not on how we experience things, but on how we experience our experiences of things. By solipsistically avoiding the challenges and vagaries of the world "out there" Husserl and his students felt they had somehow purified their inquiry. Ortega may have been trained in this discipline, but he's long since outgrown it.

"The sphere of absolute reality —Husserl's reine Erlebnisse (pure experiences)—has, in spite of its juicy name, nothing to do with life; it is, strictly speaking, the opposite of life."    

Ortega eventually brings us around to the point that at different times and places, the "ground" of belief upon which individuals build their thoughts differs, and therefore, their notions  of w hat truth looks like also differs. He points to the Buddhists by way of example. Their basic belief in the immortality of the  ego, doomed to live an endless succession of lives, shapes their ideas about life and behavior. 

The Hebrews, he argues, believe in the indomitable will of God, out of which everything flows. That being the case, for them no purpose is served in investigating the static "being" of particular things. To a Jew the Greek concept of "aletheia," the discovery of hidden being, is entirely beside the point. What interests him is "emunah," the Hebrew word for truth, which is rooted in the future, and also in the notion of firmness—the truth, the firmness, of God's will. Amen. So shall it be.

In a footnote Ortega observes that Aristotle, in his effort to describe what the "substance" of a thing is, finds it necessary to concoct an entire sentence by way of naming it: "a-thing-being-what-it-was." Though a being is what it is now, Aristotle's definition refers to its durability through time.

In the space of a few pages Ortega has given us a good deal to think about. Especially the importance of time. Whether the connections he draws between the static, thing-oriented philosophy of Greece and the general aridity of modern thought are entirely valid I couldn't say, but he was certainly not alone in working to establish a more dynamic approach to describing thought and its purposes, as a means to get a handle on "life itself." Over the course of a long career as one of Europe's most eminent philosophers he  employed several concepts in turn—vital reason, trajectory, perspectivism, historical reason—to explain how thinking works and what it's for, though he developed none of these concepts to the extent that it became philosophical common coin.

(Then again, philosophers seldom take an interest in conducting exchanges in the currency of their colleagues. They'd rather mint their own.)

To my ear, most of what Ortega has to say here is true, but I found the most interesting points to follow from his acknowledgment that there is more than one set of assumptions available to us as we struggle to construct a coherent picture of our place in the world.

He mentions the Buddhists, the Hebrews, the Greeks. A few days after reading this essay, I ran across a book on the book cart at my local library, Dao De Jing: a Philosophical Translation. I had checked this book out years ago, but never took a serious look at it. (I don't think it was the very same volume; this one had a sticker indicating it was a used textbook from the University of Wisconsin / Eau Claire.)

Now, for only a dollar, I could have a second chance.

I bought it, and, struggling under the burden of a tenacious cold, I read the introduction. Brilliant! Here, I said to myself, is a description of life and an approach to experience that Ortega would have approved in every detail. First and foremost among its underlying beliefs or parameters is the rejection of the idea of "being." Second is the understanding that self and circumstances are inextricably intertwined. (Ortega: "I am myself and my circumstances.")

There is eloquence in the prose of  the translators who wrote the introduction, Roger Ames and David Hall, as they attempt to convey the unique qualities of the Chinese manuscript without falling into the many traps that common language usage in Western tongues present. Here is a typical passage from that introduction, which might have been lifted directly out of one of Ortega's essays: 

"What encourages us within a Western metaphysical tradition to separate time and space is our inclination, inherited from the Greeks, to see things in the world as fixed in their formal aspect, and thus as bounded and limited. If instead of giving ontological privilege to the formal aspect of phenomena, we were to regard them as having parity in their formal and changing aspects, we might be more like classical China in temporalizing them in light of their ceaseless transformation, and conceive of them more as “events” than as “things.” In this processual worldview, each phe­nomenon is some unique current or impulse within a temporal flow."

But Ames and Hall have an advantage over Ortega. He's trying to wrench a long-standing tradition from its path, while remaining within it. They're merely saying, "Hey, take a look at this entirely different way of approaching life and experience." They're referring, of course, to the text of the Dao De Jing. Also known as the I Ching, and the Lao Tzu.

 As for their translation itself, it strikes me as more meaningful that some of the others that I have laying around the house, but also wordier and less "poetic."

One or two examples will have to suffice. Here are a few lines from verse five, as translated by Stephen Mitchell:

The Tao doesn't take sides;
It gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn't take sides;
she welcomes both saints and sinners.

In the version from Ames and Hall, the first few lines run as follows:

The heavens and the earth are not partial to institutionalized morality.

They take things (wanwu) and treat them all as straw dogs.

Sages too are not partial to institutionalized morality.

They treat the common people as straw dogs.

In a footnote they explain that "straw dogs" refers to sacrificial objects that are treated with reference during a ceremony, but are afterwards discarded to be trodden underfoot.

Mitchell  translates the final line of this verse as simply "Hold on to the center." Ames and Hall give us a much wordier version:

It is better to safeguard what you have within

 Than to learn a great deal that so often goes nowhere.

 A second set of philosophical assumptions also came to mind as I read Ortega's essay: those of Hegel. Hegel is well-known for having remarked, "Nothing can be predicated of Being." He replaced that concept with the concept of Spirit, and a restless spirit at that, developing dialectically through time. The "things" that may interest us he construes as "objective spirit," which is to say, they're concrete deposits—institutions, works of art, historical narratives, feats of engineering—that reflect the condition of spirit at that time and nourish its further development. They are to be admired and utilized but also to be risen above as new circumstances call for new creations and iterations.

Why Hegel felt the need to attach the word "absolute" to the concept of Spirit is beyond me. That was a big mistake. 

After finishing Ortega's little essay, I was inspired to pull another book off the shelf, The Imperative of Modernity: an Intellectual Biography of José Ortega de Gasset by Rockwell Gray. It's a brilliant and eloquent work. One of the passages that really appealed to me, during my random perusal, compared Ortega to the French philosophes of the eighteenth century.

"Although much of the thematic content of Ortega’s mature philo­sophical work came from outside Spain and must be seen within the larger history of European neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and existentialism, his early work and his lifelong concern for the con­dition of Spain cannot be understood without reference to major Spanish reformists of the later nineteenth century.

Gray adds that

 "the original model for the essay of social criticism came into Spain from the French Enlightenment and the philosophes.[They] provided the more distant historical precedent for the kind of far-ranging essay writing that Ortega was ultimately to refine in his modern Spanish prose. It is also among [them] that we find an early source of modern historicist philosophy—the assertion that man lives in time with no guarantee of a beginning or a destiny beyond this world. ..In this broader view, it is pos­sible to consider Ortega a latter-day philosopher despite his very considerable indebtedness to various German thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."

A very good point, with respect not only to Ortega's choice of themes, but also to his cheery and  accessible style. Diderot and Ortega, for example, would make a good College Bowl team.

But during these strange and difficult times, perhaps the Dao has something less intellectual but more appropriate to offer us. I just now opened the translation of Hall and Ames at random to verse eleven.

Extend your utmost emptiness as far as you can
And do your best to preserve your equilibrium.
Now as for equilibrium—this is called returning to the propensity of things,
And returning to the propensity of things is common sense.
Using common sense is acuity,
While failing to use it is to lose control.
And to try to do anything while out of control is to court disaster.