José Ortega y Gasset

José Ortega y Gasset (Madrid, 1883-1955) was a Spanish philosopher and essayist and the leading figure of the Novecentismo movement. He worked during the first half of the twentieth century, when Spain moved between monarchy, republic and dictatorship, and he wrote lucid prose that reached readers well beyond academic circles. His ideas on life, history and mass society are still widely read.

Born into a liberal, educated Madrid bourgeois family, he grew up around journalism, since his father directed El Imparcial, a newspaper founded by his maternal grandfather. After schooling with the Jesuits in Málaga, he studied philosophy in Madrid and earned his doctorate in 1904. Between 1905 and 1907 he worked in Germany, mainly at Marburg, where the neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp shaped his thinking. In 1910 he won the chair of metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid, vacated by the death of Nicolás Salmerón.

He saw writing as a way to shape public life. From 1917 he contributed to El Sol, where he published España invertebrada and The Revolt of the Masses. In 1923 he founded the Revista de Occidente, which introduced Spanish readers to thinkers such as Husserl, Spengler and Huizinga. Elected deputy for León during the Second Republic, he grew distant from the direction the regime was taking. When the Civil War began he left Spain, living in Paris, the Netherlands and Buenos Aires before settling in Lisbon in 1942. He returned in 1945 and founded an Institute of Humanities in Madrid, though he never regained his chair. He died in Madrid in 1955.

His philosophy starts from life rather than from consciousness alone. For Ortega, the radical reality is one's own life, which always includes a surrounding world, its circumstances. Hence his phrase 'I am myself and my circumstance', from Meditations on Quixote (1914). Truth, in his view, does not come from a single fixed viewpoint but from the sum of the perspectives of all lives, an idea he called perspectivism. Reason, he argued, must rest on concrete life and history, since neither people nor societies can be understood apart from their past. Freedom is exercised within a given fate that offers limited options, among which one must choose a life project.

Politically he defended a demanding liberalism close to John Stuart Mill's and feared that the collective mediocrity of the masses would override minorities. Readers have disagreed about whether this stance was conservative or liberal, and the debate continues. His influence reached Spanish and Ibero-American philosophy and writers such as Francisco Ayala, María Zambrano and Julián Marías, and his clear style gave him a broad audience.