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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER X: PRIMITIVISM AND HISTORY
Page 5
Whoever aspires to create a new social or political reality must before all concern himself to ensure that these humble commonplaces of historical experience will be invalidated by the situation which he brings into being. For my part, I shall reserve the title of "man of genius" for the politician who has hardly begun his operations when the professors of history in our colleges begin to go mad, as they see all the "laws" of their science interrupted in their action, falling to pieces, reduced to dust. By changing the sign proper to Bolshevism, we might make similar statements in regard to Fascism. Neither of these experiments is "at the height of our time." They do not represent the whole of the past in foreshortening, a condition which is essential in order to improve on that past. The struggle with the pist is not a hand-to-hand fight. The future overcomes it by swallowing it. If it leaves anything outside it is lost. Both Bolshevism and Fascism are two false dawns; they do not bring the morning of a new day, but of some archaic day, spent over and over again: they are mere primitivism. And such will all movements be which fall into the stupidity of starting a boxing-match with some portion or other of the past, instead of proceeding to digest it. No doubt an advance must be made on the liberalism of the XIXth Century. But this is precisely what cannot be done by any movement such as Fascism, which declares itself anti-liberal. Because it was that fact- the being anti-liberal or non-liberal- which constituted man previous to liberalism. And as the latter triumphed over its opposite, it will either repeat its victory time and again, or else everything- liberalism and anti-liberalism- will be annihilated in the destruction of Europe. There is an inexorable chronology of life. In it liberalism is posterior to anti-liberalism, or what comes to the same, is more vital than it, just as the gun is more of a weapon than the lance. At first sight, an attitude "anti-anything" seems posterior to this thing, inasmuch as it signifies a reaction against it and supposes its previous existence. But the innovation which the anti represents fades away into an empty negative attitude, leaving as its only positive content an "antique." When his attitude is translated into positive language, the man who declares himself anti-Peter does nothing more than declare himself the upholder of a world where Peter is non-existent. But that is exactly what happened to the world before Peter was born. The anti-Peterite, instead of placing himself after Peter, makes himself previous to him and reverses the whole film to the situation of the past, at the end of which the re-apparition of Peter is inevitable.