European Forum ||| Blog ||| Special Homages : Meister Eckhart / David Copperfield
| |
|
|
|
|
|
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 XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 16
The impulse to tackle questions of grave urgency is as vigorous as it has ever been, but it is trammelled in the tiny cages in which it is imprisoned, in the relatively small nations into which up to the present Europe has been organised. The pessimism, the depression, which to-day weighs down the continental mind is similar to that of the bird of widely-spreading wings which, on stretching them out for flight, beats against the bars of its cage. The proof of this is that the situation is repeated in all the other orders, whose factors are apparently so different from those of economics. Take, for example, intellectual life. Every "intellectual" to-day in Germany, England, or France feels suffocated within the boundaries of his country; feels his nationality as an absolute limitation. The German professor now realises the absurdity of the type of production to which he is forced by his immediate public of German professors, and misses the superior freedom of the French writer or the English essayist. Vice versa, the Parisian man of letters is beginning to understand that an end has come to the tradition of literary mandarinism, of verbal formalism, and would prefer, while keeping some of the better qualities of that tradition, to amplify it with certain virtues of the German professor. The same thing is happening in the order of internal politics. We have not yet seen a keen analysis of the strange problem of the political life of all the great nations being at such a low ebb. We are told that democratic institutions have lost prestige. But that is precisely what it should be necessary to explain. Because such loss of prestige is very strange. Everywhere Parliament is spoken ill of, but people do not see that in no one of the countries that count is there any attempt at substitution. Nor do even the Utopian outlines exist of other forms of the State which seem, at any rate ideally, preferable. Too much credit, then, is not to be given to the authenticity of this loss of prestige. It is not institutions, qua instruments of public life, that are going badly in Europe; it is the tasks on which to employ them. There are lacking programmes of a scope adequate to the effective capacities that life has come to acquire in each European individual. We have here an optical illusion which it is important to correct once for all, for it is painful to listen to the stupidities uttered every hour, with regard to Parliaments , for example. There are a whole series of valid objections to the traditional methods of conducting Parliaments, but if they are taken one by one, it is seen that none of them justifies the conclusion that Parliaments ought to be suppressed, but all, on the contrary, indicate directly and evidently that they should be reformed.