Spain in the Early 20th Century: Society and Thought
Spain at the Beginning of the 20th Century
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Spain had a large, majority rural population. Between 1882 and 1914, one million people left the Peninsula for the Americas. A wave of migration from rural to urban areas occurred. The countryside suffered from an unequal distribution of land, and appropriate techniques to improve production were not used.
Three Fundamental Concerns
Three concerns were fundamental to the country in the early twentieth century:
- The issue of nationalism, inherited from the nineteenth century.
- The Moroccan War, reflecting a desire to counter colonial losses.
- The social problem, which mainly affected peasants and the proletariat of the big cities.
Reforms and Social Radicalization
After the fall of the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera and the proclamation of the Republic, the new Constitution initiated reforms affecting the countryside, education, regional policy, labor legislation, etc. The progressive nature of some reforms provoked a reaction from the conservative right and the army. The reforms also intended to curb and suppress the aspirations of Basque and Catalan nationalism. The result was social radicalization into two opposing poles, ultimately leading to civil war.
Ortega y Gasset’s Perspectivism
In this context, Ortega’s work intends to illustrate the collective problems and the social and historical reality of Spain. He proposed that, to face the truth asserted against others, we must recognize the value of individual perspectives: “Instead of arguing, integrate in generous collaboration in our spiritual lives.”
For Ortega, if the fundamentals are the self and the circumstance, the individual point of view seems the only point of view from which one can look at the world in its truth.
The Doctrine of Perspectivism
Human beings only access the truth by being consistent with their own view and can only know that part of reality that is accessible based on their circumstances: the individual perspective is the only way of apprehending reality. Ortega’s doctrine of perspectivism seeks to overcome both skepticism and rationalism. While accepting, like the skeptic, that the concrete is mutable and subject to different perspectives, and like rationalism, claiming to establish a relationship with reality beyond its mutability, it rejects the universal set as the only mode of access, minimizing the personal perspective.
Ratiovitalism: Life and Reason
Ortega proposes ratiovitalism, an attempt to examine the two most important outlooks for man: life and reason. With Ortega’s vital reason, he avoids the discredit that vitalist philosophers subject reason to (irrationalism), proposing a new concept of reason to replace pure reason, which degenerates into rationalism. Reason cannot be separated from life; therefore, the reason why man is vital. Applying reason to life means that man tries to understand the elements of reality, including reason itself, from the vital role that reason plays. In this process of analysis, human beings discover that their way of being, knowing, thinking, and acting depends on the heritage of ideas and beliefs that humanity has developed throughout its history and that each man encounters in his historical moment.
The Theory of Perspective
The central thesis of the chapter in which this text is inserted is the theory of perspective or “perspectivism.” This theory plays a key role in a certain understanding of life and reason, and that is how the subject’s apprehension of truth is not a “pure, transparent ego,” but exerts a “selective” character. This perspectivistic character of reality and the essential vital and historical dimension of reason are the basis for the criticism of all “utopian” thought and philosophy.