Search for Values
Peters, Robert Louis
Search for Values Man and Crisis, by Ortega y Gasset, translated from the Spanish by Mildred Adams. Norton. 217 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Robert Louis Peters This book, like the author's The Revolt...
...It would be difficult to classify the bombs as the results of an overwrought idealism...
...It is curious that the author's own experience as a political refugee did not compel him to face this issue...
...and the special attitude with which he approaches his entire topic is provocative and unsentimental...
...Reviewed by Robert Louis Peters This book, like the author's The Revolt of the Masses, is an excursion into thematic history: by drawing hypotheses from earlier periods of Western culture, Ortega in this posthumous work seeks in a provocative but highly general way to characterize our time...
...He maintains, for example, that the modern era "made a terrible blunder by clinging to the belief that man's primary being consists in thinking, that his basic relationship with things is an intellectual relationship...
...This error is "idealism," and our crisis is exactly what we have to pay for that error...
...Even the perplexing elusiveness of the book at times is a refreshing antidote to the writing of smaller, less synthesizing minds who rarely do more in their social histories (some of which, I suggest, derive in good measure from Ortega's own Revolt of the Masses) than illustrate a borrowed idea or two...
...One wonders also how he is expected to account for such recent pseudo-intellectual political manifestations as Nazism and fascism, with their emphasis on the physical, and especially on the brutal side of man...
...Once, however, we have asked these and similar questions, the experience of reading the book is its own enveloping fact...
...Equally meaningful, and worthy of continual restatement, is Ortega's profound humanistic concern for the "true nobility" of the individual, a nobility that he first defined so unforgettably in The Revolt of the Masses...
...Presently, however, the reader wishes that Ortega's great conjecturing mind had employed illustrations more liberally and had accounted for notable exceptions to his theories...
...The beliefs that ours is a time of crisis and that a cyclical view of history is a legitimate one are obviously not original...
...The chapters on the "idea of generations" (the mature years—45 to 60—of a representative great man are taken as the foci around which are grouped the corresponding years of lesser men) as the dividing limits of history may prove to be highly seminal...
...Was there, in truth, in the latter heavily mystic age, more of a sense of balance between body and brain...
...Neither does Ortega allude to the generally agreed upon morality that in the interest of "pure" science man developed the hydrogen bomb...
...his gently skeptical treatment of historical Christianity is highly persuasive...
...for if one shares Ortega's basic skepticism, he is likely to read along, held believing by the writer's verbal and intellectual charm...
...When a culture overloaded with many stereotyped views dominates the cultivated man, smothering his power to fashioh an ethical and social world after his own thinking, he rebels and attempts once more, "in the live flesh," to face his universe...
...It seems here that the reader has a right to expect Ortega to suggest how we might have proceeded, and how such periods of non-crisis, of "certainty," as classical Greece and medieval Europe, differed from our own...
...the special worth of these lectures appears in the author's quiet, often wistfully humorous desire to assure us that our cultural hunger will in time be sated, even though we may have to pass first through valleys of agony and despair...
...The difficulties of such a study as Man and Crisis lie primarily in its generalized hypothetical nature...
...We are, he believes, undergoing a "profound historic crisis," and are in a period of transition like that undergone by the late Romans confronting the emergence of Christianity, and by the men of the late Middle Ages facing the new social and political assertions of the Renaissance—times when men were "moving from living attached to and leaning on one set of things to living attached to and leaning on another set of things...
...Ortega's mind, by contrast, is the proverbial anvil flashing sparks...
...the many paragraphs analyzing the importance of the self to a man's awareness of his world are among the best written on the subject...
Vol. 22 • December 1958 • No. 12
