Ortega’s Cosmic Hospital

Known in America as the author of The Revolt of the Masses, respected as an acute diagnostician of the decline of the West, José Ortega y Gasset is principally thought of on the Continent as a metaphysician. It is a good thing that the American philosophical public has an opportunity to inspect Ortega’s thought in the recently published Man and People (Norton, $4.50). Aided by a remarkably brilliant translation executed by Mr. Willard R. Trask, Man and People is the work of a mind lucid in its Latinity, sane in its cynicisms, and cocky in its humility. Ortega was a man sure of himself, dead certain that the philosophy of antiquity was false, convinced that the philosophy of modernity was inadequate, blessed with a profound ignorance of the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages: he was therefore permitted the luxury of being original.

This book will bewilder those Americans who go to it expecting another Revolt of the Masses. The latter was a psychology of what until yesterday was the modem world; Man and People is a work in strict meta-physics. Those American reviewers who have disguised this fact out of deference to the ignorance of their readers have done neither Ortega nor philosophy a service.

FW

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Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

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Known in America as the author of The Revolt of the Masses, respected as an acute diagnostician of the decline of the West, José Ortega y Gasset is principally thought of on the Continent as a metaphysician. It is a good thing that the American philosophical public has an opportunity to inspect Ortega’s thought in the recently published Man and People (Norton, $4.50). Aided by a remarkably brilliant translation executed by Mr. Willard R. Trask, Man and People is the work of a mind lucid in its Latinity, sane in its cynicisms, and cocky in its humility. Ortega was a man sure of himself, dead certain that the philosophy of antiquity was false, convinced that the philosophy of modernity was inadequate, blessed with a profound ignorance of the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages: he was therefore permitted the luxury of being original.

This book will bewilder those Americans who go to it expecting another Revolt of the Masses. The latter was a psychology of what until yesterday was the modem world; Man and People is a work in strict meta-physics. Those American reviewers who have disguised this fact out of deference to the ignorance of their readers have done neither Ortega nor philosophy a service.