The Duty of Acting Grandly

CONCORD AND LIBERTY (182 pp.)--Jose Ortega y Gasset (translated by Helene Weyl)--Norton ($2.75).

When Alfonso XIII, last of Spain's Bourbon monarchs, espied Madrid's most brilliant and influential philosopher at a court levee, he asked lackadaisically: "And thou, what is thy profession?" Jose Ortega y Gasset retorted icily: "I am a professor of geography." A few years later, ignorant Alfonso was tossed off his throne, and Delegate Ortega--who had helped toss him--rose to address the new Spanish Cortes. "The magnificent and momentous hour has come," he cried, "when fate imposes upon Spaniards the duty of acting grandly!"

Philosopher Ortega has spent most of his 63 years urging human beings to act grandly--and in defining what he means by the phrase. In his best-known work, The Revolt of the Masses (TIME, Sept. 19, 1932) he made clear that he found no more real grandeur in the "commonplace" aspirations of revolutionary masses than he had in the decadent royalty of Alfonso. In later volumes (The Modern Theme; Invertebrate Spain; Toward a Philosophy of History) he held up as the ideal a lifestyle of "vitality," in which intellect and impulse draw their virility from both the primitive warrior and the poetic lover--the cold rationalism of Socrates enlivened by "the irreverent irony of Don Juan." To many, such respect for what one indignant critic termed "piracy" indicated Fascist leanings--until Ortega confounded his enemies by warmly supporting the Spanish Republican Government in the Civil War.

Slippery & Springy. In his new book, Ortega--who is now living in Portugal, after years of exile in Argentina--elaborates brilliantly on his favorite theme. Readers should not be deluded by the book's title: Concord and Liberty is not about Concord, Mass. It is complicated, philosophical reading. Its four long essays are devoted to the nature of the Roman state, "Notes on Thinking," "Prologue to a History of Philosophy," "A Chapter from the History of Ideas." To these complexities, Philosopher Ortega adds the paradoxical, ironical peculiarities of his own original mind--which is as slippery as an eel and as full of springy checks and balances as a cat's legs.

The remarkable stability of the pre-Empire Roman state, says Ortega, was based on a combination of concord and liberty (the words are Cicero's) that has deep meaning in our times. For almost 400 years, Rome's citizens willingly observed the tenets that Ortega believes to be essential to national harmony--i.e., they disagreed vigorously in application of the law, but they accepted without question the validity of the law--the need for "the exercise of supreme power."

"All Belief Is Blind." So great was the influence of this example that, centuries after the downfall of Rome, Europe's national states based their welfare on comparable grounds. The belief, held by nobles and peasants alike, that kings were appointed to rule by God Himself ensured the vitality and solidarity of medieval states. To those who argue that the belief was false, as well as not conducive to liberty, Ortega calmly retorts that "all belief is blind," and that liberty is nothing more than man's belief that he possesses it. "There is, in principle, no single liberty man cannot forego and yet feel as free as ever."

Ortega barely mentions the word democracy in his book; he is less concerned with what form government takes than with its need to have an acceptable illusion to govern by. Missing from Philosopher Ortega's thesis is evidence that the medieval peasants and Roman multitudes shared his enthusiastic acceptance of the conditions under which they lived. But Ortega--who is paradoxically a hater of the law and of institutions, which he accepts only because he considers them "realities"--insists that oppression can be carried to great lengths before it becomes as destructive and perilous to the life and spirit of man as "the bloody, disgusting zone of revolution." In the strongest, least ambiguous sentences of his book, he upholds the Roman thesis that national unity must rest on the inescapable "reality" of society's division into "the rich and the poor, the illustrious and the nameless, the creative . . . and the vulgar." Each of these twins should have rights; but neither have the right to split the state.

Precisely this fatal split occurs, says Ortega, when the faith that has given rich & poor a common belief grows old and dies. It is then that the philosopher must supply the world with a belief that will be both inspiring and practical enough to restore its faith in human cooperation.

Today, says Philosopher Ortega, is a time of social collapse when such a new faith is needed. He cannot tell what that new faith will be.

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