Jose Ortega y Gasset 1883 – 1955

Jose Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish philosopher, essayist, and the most influential Spanish thinker of the twentieth century. Educated in Marburg under the neo-Kantians, he returned to Madrid to teach metaphysics and to lead the philosophical review Revista de Occidente, which introduced contemporary European thought to the Spanish-speaking world. His Meditations on Quixote opened with the celebrated formula yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, and The Revolt of the Masses offered a critical diagnosis of mass society. He spent the years of the Civil War and Second World War in exile in Argentina and Portugal.

Jose Ortega y Gasset was born in 1883 in Madrid into a family of liberal journalists. He read philosophy at the Universidad Central de Madrid and pursued postgraduate studies at Berlin, Leipzig, and Marburg, where he came under the lasting influence of the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen. In 1910, at twenty-six, he was elected to the chair of metaphysics at Madrid, which he held until the Civil War.

Through his lectures, his newspaper El Sol, and the journal Revista de Occidente that he founded in 1923, Ortega became the central public intellectual of pre-Civil War Spain. His major works include Meditations on Quixote (1914), Invertebrate Spain (1921), The Modern Theme (1923), The Dehumanization of Art (1925), The Revolt of the Masses (1930), Man and Crisis, and the late What Is Philosophy? Elected deputy to the Constituent Assembly in 1931, he soon withdrew from active politics and spent the war and its aftermath in exile in France, the Netherlands, Argentina, and Portugal, returning to Spain only after 1948.

Ortega's ratio-vitalism — captured in the formula 'I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save it I do not save myself' — sought to overcome the opposition of idealism and realism by treating life itself as the fundamental philosophical category, while his analyses of mass society and the nature of generations marked Spanish-language thought for the rest of the century. He died in Madrid in 1955.