José Ortega y Gasset

José Ortega y Gasset ( born May 9, 1883 in Madrid, † October 18, 1955 ) was a Spanish philosopher, sociologist and essayist.

Life and work

José Ortega was born in Madrid as a scion of a family journalists. He attended the Jesuit school of San Estanislao de Miraflores in Malaga and studied from 1897 to 1898 at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, and then at the University of Madrid philosophy, where he in 1904 received his doctorate with a thesis on the millenarianism in France. From 1905 to 1911, he stayed to study in Germany, including Leipzig, Berlin and priority in Marburg. In Marburg he was influenced among others by the neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, where he received in 1952 an honorary doctorate. 1909 Ortega returned back to Spain.

Ortega was the founder and publisher of magazines España (1915-1924) and Revista de Occidente (1923 ), employees of the newspaper El Sol and participated in the Spanish Constitution of 1931.

Under the impression of the Weimar Republic in 1929, he wrote his seminal work The Revolt of the Masses. From 1910 to 1936 he held professorships at metaphysics, logic and ethics at the University Complutense of Madrid, in 1936, he condemned as a signatory of the manifesto Adhesiones de intelectuales (ABC 31 July, 1936) together with other intellectuals of the coup by the military and declared loyalty with the democratically elected popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic. Shortly after the start of the Civil War, he left Spain and lived in France, Argentina, and from 1943 in Portugal, before returning to Spain in 1948, where he regularly stayed until his death in 1955 ( in Madrid). As a philosopher he built on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey and the philosophy of life.

The sociological work: The Man and the people

The most important sociological book Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses applies. It is attributed to the elite sociology and the sociological diagnoses of our time. Starting from an aristocratic order, he describes the "rise of the masses full of social power ". In it he sees a fundamental change in the society of the 20th century. The declaration of the equality of all men was a reason that modern civilization had changed into a " non-directed aggression ", which had come under fascism expressed. This was also in the mechanism of exclusion:

'Difference is indecent. The mass destroyed everything what is otherwise noted, personal, intrinsically talented and exquisite. Those who do not ' like all ' is, who does not ' like all ' thinks is in danger of being eliminated. "

However, he also recognized the opportunities for a new, " incomparable organization of mankind."

Ortega sought as his main work on a comprehensive sociology, where he worked until his death. His sociological doctrine was established in 1957 as El hombre y la gente ( Man and the people ) from the estate issued. This idea is developed that the customs have basic essence of the social. His understanding of industrial corresponds rather to that of habit:

" The customs are forms of human behavior that takes the individual and takes place because he - now in this, now in that way - no other option remains. You are him, imposed by the environment with which it is living by the rest, the people, the society. "

Certain customs ( habits ) - probably the most extreme among them - are actions that are performed by social pressures (ie, mechanically acting coercion ); Actions whose root content is the performer incomprehensible (ie irrational ); Actions that are outside of one's own person but also beyond all others (ie extra- individual realities ). Customs have stored social past.