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Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Reprise (And Expansion): "Was José Ortega y Gasset The Most Important Modern Philosopher?"

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Dear Jimbo and F,


The first link below provides a pdf of Ortega y Gasset's "The Revolt of The Masses."

However, before reading the text, I think it will be useful to explore my three posts about Ortega.

In his prefatory note to "La Rebelión De Las Masas," Ortega y Gasset says:  "My purpose now is to collect and complete what I have already said, so as to produce an organic doctrine concerning the most important fact of our time."

Although I will not "swear" that Ortega was accurate in identifying "the most important fact of our time," the "revolt of the masses" is a leading contender, and - in my mind - is precisely predictive of the social (or shall I say anti-social) mindset that has resulted in the ascendancy of Trumpism with its solipsistic self-centeredness, vulgarianism and boastful cruelty.

In a nutshell, "the masses" -- starting in the late 19th century -- started to become contemptuous of cultured people who actually "knew things."

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And so, newly-inebriated by selling their labor in the industrial workplace (independent of geographical rootedness or lasting commitment to one's employer) workers were soon able "to take care of themselves" and they quickly became so self-reliant that they didn't even need "the three generation family" any more. 

Without any enduring relationship to a workplace "patron," workers soon disregarded the previous social hierarchy, and too uneducated to understand the depth, breadth and critical importance of trans-epochal cultural transmission, they began (unwittingly) to destroy society itself through inordinate focus on purchaseable pleasures and creature comforts which "the masses" could afford for the first time in human history. 

Not only were "the masses" devoid of intellectual accomplishment and intellectual rigor, they quickly became hubristically proud of their ability to be self-provident, and as a corollary of their single-minded focus on - and pride in - being able to provide for themselves, the masses became implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) contemptuous of any social order that pretended to know better than they did.
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The upshot has been the ongoing decline and imminent collapse (?) of any social order at all.

"Bring on the six gun" and heap praise on every man willing to stand his ground. 

After all, self-interest to the exclusion of The Common Good, The General Welfare and a Social Contract is "just common sense."

We are all in it... alone.

I hope my rough summary does not do Ortega any unforgivable injustice.
   

Pax on both houses: Is Ortega Y Gasset The Most Important Modern ...


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This core statement expresses the western world's first realization that "we" don't end at our skin but are integrally integrated into our environment - our "circumstances."

We are not just ourselves.

We are ourselves - and the full matrix in which our presumed selves are embedded.

To the extent that we realize the seamlessness of our situation - and act accordingly - we become real.

At the same time, all humans are enriched by our enrichment of the world's circumstances.

In sum, we are not fundamentally individuals, but social creatures. And ever component of our environment --terrestrial, celestial and beyond -- is a critical component of our social reality in its fullness.


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