SOME LESSONS IN METAPHYSICS

by Jose Ortega y Gasset ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

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.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 0393005143

Page Count: -

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1969

Categories: NONFICTION