Start ||| The Philosophical Europe ||| The Political Progress ||| European Witness European Forum ||| Blog  |||  Special Homages :  Meister Eckhart  /  David Copperfield

Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses

CHAPTER XI: THE SELF-SATISFIED AGE

Page 2

The spoiled child is the heir who behaves exclusively as a mere heir. In this case the inheritance is civilisation- with its conveniences, its security; in a word, with all its advantages. As we have seen, it is only in circumstances of easy existence such as our civilisation has produced, that a type can arise, marked by such a collection of features, inspired by such a character. It is one of a number of deformities produced by luxury in human material. There might be a deceptive tendency to believe that a life born into a world of plenty should be better, more really a life than one which consists in a struggle against scarcity. Such is not the case, for reasons of the strictest and most fundamental nature, which this is not the place to enlarge upon. For the present, instead of those reasons, it is sufficient to recall the ever-recurrent fact which constitutes the tragedy of every hereditary aristocracy. The aristocrat inherits, that is to say, he finds attributed to his person, conditions of life which he has not created, and which, therefore, are not produced in organic union with his personal, individual existence. At birth he finds himself installed, suddenly and without knowing how, in the midst of his riches and his prerogatives. In his own self, he has nothing to do with them, because they do not come from him. They are the giant armour of some other person, some other human being, his ancestor. And he has to live as an heir, that is to say, he has to wear the trappings of another existence. What does this bring us to? What life is the "aristocrat" by inheritance going to lead, his own or that of his first noble ancestor? Neither one nor the other. He is condemned to represent the other man, consequently to be neither that other nor himself. Inevitably his life loses all authenticity, and is transformed into pure representation or fiction of another life. The abundance of resources that he is obliged to make use of gives him no chance to live out his own personal destiny, his life is atrophied. All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself. The difficulties which I meet with in order to realise my existence are precisely what awakens and mobilises my activities, my capacities. If my body was not a weight to me, I should not be able to walk. If the atmosphere did not press on me, I should feel my body as something vague, flabby, unsubstantial. So in the "aristocratic" heir his whole individuality grows vague, for lack of use and vital effort. The result is that specific stupidity of "our old nobility" which is unlike anything else- a stupidity which, strictly speaking, has never yet been described in its intimate, tragic mechanism- that tragic mechanism which leads all hereditary aristocracy to irremediable degeneration.  

First / Next Page of this chapter

Previous chapter  | Index  | Next chapter