Ortega Y Gasset, José | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was born in Madrid on May 8 and became the most influential Spanish philosopher of the twentieth century, with a reputation and influence that extended from Spain to Latin America and beyond. Ortega was the first professional philosopher to make technology an explicit theme for critical reflection. He died in Madrid on October 18.

Ortega earned a doctorate at the University of Madrid in 1904, after which he did postdoctoral work in Germany. His course of study included not only philosophy but also comparative literature, law, biology, and psychology. Having been influenced by the Generation of 98 (1898, the year in which Spain lost the last of its colonies to the United States and a period in which Miguel de Unamuno [1864–1936], Pío Baroja [1872–1956], and other writers responded with new visions of the nation), Ortega became a leading figure of the Generation of 27 (1927, the year of the emergence of a literary and artistic avant garde that included Federico García Lorca [1898–1936] and Pablo Picasso [1881–1973]).

Outside the academic world Ortega worked as a journalist, publisher, and politician and served as a member of parliament between 1931 and 1933, during the Second Spanish Republic. After the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) he went into exile, initially in Argentina, but in 1945 he settled in Portugal and then returned to Spain in 1948 to found the Institute de Humanidades, where he lectured until his death.

The basic theme of Ortega's philosophy was announced in Medicaciones del Quijote [Meditations on Quixote] (1914), in which he argued for understanding human beings in relation to their circumstances. "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancias" [I am myself and my circumstances] was the formative statement with which he placed razón vital (living reason), a kind of existentialist vitalism, at the center of philosophical reflection. It was in an attempt to understand living reason at work in his own circumstances that Ortega, over the course of hisphilosophical career, analyzed the historical condition of Spain (Espan˜a invertebrada [1921]), the character of modern art (La deshumanización del arte [1925]), the transformation of politics (La rebelión de las masas [1930]), the dynamics of history (Historia como sistema [1936]), and the post–World War II destiny of Europe (Meditación de Europa [1949]).

Ortega's philosophy is a critique of the rationalism that has been dominant since the eighteenth century. As an affirmation of life that nevertheless acknowledges the essential character of reason in human beings, his philosophy is fundamentally ethical in its orientation. The primordial reality is life, in which individuals find themselves as castaways struggling not to drown. This is the basic human activity: not contemplation or science but rather "staying alive," with one of the instruments in the struggle being technology.

It is this perspective that Ortega brought to bear on technology in a number of works but especially in a 1933 university course that appeared in book form under the title Meditacióndela técnica [Meditation on technics] (1939). More partial contributions to this analysis can be found in works as diverse as The Revolt of the Masses; En torno a Galileo [Around Galileo] (1933), translated as Man and Crisis; La idea principio en Leibniz [The idea of principle in Leibniz] (published posthumously in 1958); Una interpretación de la historia universal [An interpretation of universal history] (published posthumously in 1959); and lectures such as "Goethe sin Weimar" [Goethe minus Weimar] (1949) and "El mito del hombre allende la técnica" [The myth of humans outside technics] (1951).

Meditación de la técnica begins with a prophetic pronouncement about the future of philosophy and technology: "One of the themes that in the coming years is going to be debated with the most determination is the sense, advantages, dangers, and limits of technics" (Obras completas 1946–1983, Vol. V, p. 319). According to Ortega, technology does not so much help humans adapt to and be able to live in the natural world that surrounds them as it is an instrument that permits them to adapt nature to the satisfaction of their needs. Those needs include not only those of the primary type (food, shelter, etc.) but also those, which produce well-being, not just life but a vision of the good life. For example, the bow is an invention created both to hunt and to play music.

Whereas an animal can live only in a manner that is dependent on nature, humans are capable of distancing themselves from nature, becoming introspective, and, from the point of this self-absorbtion, performing the act of inventing. Technological innovation creates a "supernature" that becomes a mediator between humans and nature. In the historical development of this technology Ortega distinguishes three stages: accidental technology, crafted technology, and the technology of the technician.

In the first stage technology appears in limited and rudimentary forms; human beings view technological innovation as the result of chance, not of their capacity for invention. In the second stage craft techniques have a greater presence and complexity, although invention and production are not clearly distinguished. More important, humans do not realize their capacity for invention because the technical advances they produce are considered not innovations but variations within a craft tradition.

In the third stage humans finally recognize that technology is the fruit of their ability to invent. They dissociate the moment of invention, which belongs to the inventor or engineer, from the act of application, which belongs to the worker. In this stage humans begin to create not only instruments or tools but also machines that replace human work: the set of "invention factories" (as the inventor Thomas Edison [1847–1931] called his laboratory) and systems for research and development leading to new and imaginative technologies.

It is in this third stage, Ortega argues, that humans now find themselves and in which they discover a horizon of unlimited possibilities. Before the modern period most people were limited by the circumstances in which they both inherited a vision of how to live and adopted the apparently unchanging technical means to realize it. In the contemporary world, however, with the emergent ease of external technical invention, human attention is distracted by ever more superficial activity. In Ortega's words, in the modern world "before having some particular technics one has technics itself" (Obras Completas 1946–1983, p. 369).

However, at this point human beings must face two temptations. On the one hand, they tend to lose interest in the science on which technology depends because it seems so readily available that producing it does not seem to be required any longer. On the other hand, they specialize, thus abandoning any comprehensive view of reality that might provide a basis for orienting or focusing technological developments. Able to become anything they want, they cease to want to become anything at all.

Ortega presents a defense of technology as an element that makes human life human. However, he points out that the capacity, in principle unlimited, that technology now offers to humans may tempt them to believe that they live from technology and not with it, that they are merely forms of technological life, not creatures that use technology to live. Insofar as human beings allow themselves to give in to that temptation, human life eventually will become meaningless and living reason will wither and die.

More than other seminal philosophers of technology in the European tradition, such as Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Jacques Ellul (1912–1994), Ortega appreciated the positive aspect of technology, its intimate engagement with what it means to be human. At the same time, more than some people today who enthusiastically celebrate the achievements of technology, he recognized the dangers of what might be called "technology only technology." Whether and to what extent Ortega's thought can be brought to bear in specific discussions about science, technology, and ethics remains to be seen.

Conservatism;; Existentialism;

Gray, Rockwell. (1989). The Imperative of Modernity: An Intellectual Biography of José Ortega y Gasset. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ortega y Gasset, José. (1946–1983). Obras completas, 12 volumes. Madrid: Alianza. Volume V contains Meditación de la técnica in Ensimismamiento y alteración (1939). An incomplete translation is available as "Thoughts on Technology" in Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology, ed. Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey. New York: Free Press, 1972, pp. 290–313. Though Ortega's reflections on technology can be found in many of his writings, Meditación de la técnica gives a comprehensive vision of his thoughts on the matter.

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