Ortega y Gasset's philosophy in one line: I am me and my circumstance
In 1914 the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset declared that a self cannot be pulled apart from the world around it: I am me and my circumstance. That maxim anchored all his later thought, and his 1929 book The Revolt of the Masses, warning of a mediocre majority, made him internationally famous.
Born in Madrid on 9 May 1883, he grew up in a liberal, journalistic household; his father ran El Imparcial, a paper owned by his mother's relatives. After a Jesuit schooling and a Madrid doctorate, he studied in Germany from 1905 to 1907, above all at Marburg with the neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. In 1910 he took the chair of metaphysics in Madrid, and in 1923 he founded the Revista de Occidente, which brought Spanish readers translations of thinkers from Husserl to Bertrand Russell.
His major essays first ran in the newspaper El Sol. The Revolt of the Masses defended a merit-based liberalism close to John Stuart Mill against communists and right-wing populists alike, echoing Mill's fear that majorities could tyrannise. He also charged that nineteenth-century capitalism had demoralised humanity. Critics nonetheless read him as anti-democratic and treat the book as a conservative classic. Elected to the Second Republic's constituent assembly for León, he soon left politics disillusioned; the Civil War sent him into exile in Buenos Aires, and after returning to Madrid in 1948 he privately called his views incompatible with Franco.
Ortega rejected both idealism, which puts the ego at the centre of reality, and older realism, which places reality outside the subject. The one radical reality, he argued, is each person's life, made of a self and its circumstance, locked in a tug between necessity and freedom. Fate hands us a fixed menu of possibilities, and within it we must choose a project of life rather than drifting through convention. Turning Descartes around, he held that I live, therefore I think, and called his approach vital reason, which was also historical, since grasping anything requires knowing its past.
Because he wrote for general readers, his influence spread widely, from Luis Buñuel to Pierre Bourdieu, and his students formed the Madrid School, among them María Zambrano and Xavier Zubiri. The Ortega hypothesis, drawn from a line in The Revolt of the Masses, holds that ordinary scientists contribute substantially to progress. A German grape breeder even named the Ortega variety after him. He died on 18 October 1955.
Source: José Ortega y Gasset
