Ortega must be the only philosopher since Socrates who ever had an
athlete praise his work. "Since I have been reading Ortega's
philosophy," said Domingo Lopez, "I have been a better torero." But
this is not surprising: Ortega was a muscular and incandescent
thinker, terrifically bookish and wide-ranging, yet always
concerned with struggle, tension, the cry in the street,
spiritedness as well as the spirit. He called his first book
Meditations on Quixote, and it is that coupling of mind with the
will, pensiveness with adventure ("If life is a spring unwinding,
it must first be a spring wound up"), that marked his career as a
journalist and savant, educator and member of Parliament during the
great days of the Spanish Republic, and which ultimately places him
closer to Existentialism, of the humanist variety, rather than the
neo-Kantian school, the influential movement of his youth. Some
Lessons in Metaphysics, a transcript of the course which Ortega
gave when he occupied the Chair of Metaphysics at the University of
Madrid in 1932-33, is both academic and informal, a specialized
study of the traditional knotty problem of things and essences,
realism and idealism, ideas and beliefs, built up around the key
concept of Circumstantia: "I am myself plus my circumstances. . .
the surrounding reality forms the other half of my person. . . .
The things are not I, nor am I the things. We are mutually
transcendent, but we are both imminent in that absolute coexistence
which is life." Life, its value, was in process, in becoming, not
in being - this was Ortega's departure from tradition, a radical
break which, as he developed it, seemed so dynamic an enterprise in
the decades before World War II. (Kirkus Reviews)
Ortega's entry into the writing world came by way of newspaper
essays that are still read by generations seeking revelations and
interpretations of the world. He wrote on varied subjects: love,
bullfighting, hunting, education, and Don Quixote. His incessant
search for knowledge led him into political theory and practice and
metaphysics as well. This present book represents Ortega's
incursions into a field of thought along which anyone curious
enough to travel will find leads him into a succession of ideas
that extend his vision and his understanding of himself. If
generations of men have puzzled over man's role in the universe and
have tried to put it into words, Ortega's phrase "I am myself and
my circumstances" is so simply and appealingly true that it may
come as a great surprise to find it hailed as an important
philosophic contribution. In this day of alienation, when the young
have difficulty finding out who they are, Ortega's venture into
metaphysics is a lit lamp in the first chapter, of the student's
role will shed light on the reason for present student disorders.
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