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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 26
He does not see it, just as the colour-blind do not see red. But, on the other hand, he lives rooted in the past. Before doing anything now, he gives a step backwards, like Lagartijo, when preparing to kill. He searches out in the past a model for the present situation, and accoutred with this he plunges into the waves of actuality, protected and disguised by the diving-dress of the past. Hence all his living is, so to speak, a revival. Such is the man of archaic mould, and such the ancients always were. But this does not imply being insensible to time. It simply means an incomplete "chronism"; atrophy of the future, hypertrophy of the past. We Europeans have always gravitated towards the future, and feel that this is the time-dimension of most substance, the one which for us begins with "after" and not "before." It is natural, then, that when we look at Graeco-Roman life, it seems to us "achronic." This mania for catching hold of everything in the present with the forceps of a past model has been handed on from the man of antiquity to the modern "philologue." The philologue is also blind to the future. He also looks backward, searches for a precedent for every actuality, which he calls in his pretty idyllic language, a "source." I say this because even the earliest biographers of Caesar shut themselves out from an understanding of this gigantic figure by supposing that he was attempting to imitate Alexander. The equation was for them inevitable: if Alexander could not sleep through thinking of the laurels of Miltiades, Caesar had necessarily to suffer from insomnia on account of those of Alexander. And so in succession. Always the step backwards, to-day's foot in yesterday's footprint. The modern philologue is an echo of the classical biographer. To imagine that Caesar aspired to do something in the way Alexander did it- and this is what almost all historians have believed- is definitely to give up trying to understand him. Caesar is very nearly the opposite of Alexander. The idea of a universal kingdom is the one thing that brings them together. But this idea is not Alexander's, it comes from Persia. The image of Alexander would have impelled Caesar towards the East, with its past full of prestige. His decided preference for the West reveals rather the determination to contradict the Macedonian. But besides, it is not merely a universal kingdom that Caesar has in view. His purpose is a deeper one. He wants a Roman empire which does not live on Rome, but on the periphery, on the provinces, and this implies the complete supersession of the City-State. It implies a State in which the most diverse peoples collaborate, in regard to which all feel solidarity. Not a centre which orders, and a periphery which obeys, but an immense social body, in which each element is at the same time an active and a passive subject of the State. Such is the modern State, and such was the fabulous anticipation of Caesar's futurist genius.