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

Jose Ortega y Gassett, The Revolt of the Masses

Excerpts selected by ELLOPOS  - Complete text also available

Em. Macron, Rediscovering the Path to Europe

Page 2

To live is to feel ourselves fatally obliged to exercise our liberty, to decide what we are going to be in this world.

The Crisis of the Mind That is not all. The burning lesson is not yet complete. It was not enough for our generation to learn through its own experience how the most beautiful, most ancient, most marvellous and best ordered things can perish by accident; it has seen, in the nature of thought, common sense and feeling, extraordinary phenomena, sudden paradoxes, brutal disillusionment take place. I shall quote just one example: the great virtues of the German people have caused more harm than idleness ever created vices. We have seen with our own eyes the most conscientious work, the most solid instruction, the most serious discipline and application, adapted to appalling ends. Such horrors would not have been possible without such virtues. It undoubtedly required a great deal of science to kill so many people, destroy so much property, wipe out so many cities in so little time; but it required no less moral qualities. Knowledge and Duty, are you then suspect? Thus the spiritual Persepolis is ravaged equally with the material Susa. All is not lost, but everything has felt itself perish. An extraordinary tremor has run through the spinal marrow of Europe. It has felt, in all its thinking substance, that it recognised itself no longer, that it no longer resembled itself, that it was about to lose consciousness - a consciousness acquired by centuries of tolerable disasters, by thousands of men of the first rank, by geographical, racial, historical chances innumerable. Paul Valery, The Crisis of the Mind, 1919.  Cf. Valery, What is to Become of the European Spirit?

Not for a single moment is our activity of decision allowed to rest. Even when in desperation we abandon ourselves to whatever may happen, we have decided not to decide ...

Such has public power always been when exercised directly by the masses: omnipotent and ephemeral. The mass-man is he whose life lacks any purpose, and simply goes drifting along. Consequently, though his possibilities and his powers be enormous, he constructs nothing ... By reason of the removal of all external restraint, all clashing with other things, he comes actually to believe that he is the only one that exists, and gets used to not considering others, especially not considering them as superior to himself.

our life is no other than our relations with the world around ... it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. ... it is not the father who ennobles the son, but the son who, by acquiring noble rank, communicates it to his forbears, by his personal efforts bringing fame to his humble stock ... 

Civilisation is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the ultima ratio ... Barbarism is the tendency to disassociation ... The day when a genuine philosophy once more holds sway in Europe- it is the one thing that can save her- that day she will once again realise that man, whether he like it or no, is a being forced by his nature to seek some higher authority. If he succeeds in finding it of himself, he is a superior man; if not, he is a mass-man and must receive it from his superiors. ... 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 man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.

First Page ||| Next Page

The Revolt of the Masses : Complete text

Cf.  David Turner, Byzantium : The 'alternative' history of Europe

IN PRINT