I picked up Man and people by Jose Ortega y Gasset randomly at the library, after failing to find the book I was looking for. The library was closing and I had to chose one book 13 and there it was, by this philosopher I had vaguely heard of, but heard of enough to figure I 19ll have to read something by him one day.
Criticising sociology for not having defined what the social is, the book (based on a course tought by him) is an attempt of doing a better job of it. The first chapters try to define very clearly life as we experience it, from our solitary point of view 13 the radical reality of OUR, and by that he means, each his own, life. Ortega y Gasset stresses our existence as an act that happens in radical solitude, separate from the other things or other people, because life happens only to one person at the time, only one person sees and feels it, radically. What is truly real is what one can see for sure, everything else is assumed 13 the city outside of this room, the planet, the galaxy, or even the other half of a car you 19re seeing as it passes.
The other, for a person, cannot be a stone, not even an animal, for we do not presume them to act in response to our actions in a way in which we could, maybe, act ourselves. Even if we only see a body, an expression, its gestures, we presume what we know in ourselves: thoughts, feelings. From our radical solitude we always try to emerge, to encounter the Other, and the other 19s radical reality. In fact, we encounter the other before meeting ourselves 13 the other is always present, always there, and we recognize ourselves as humans through him.
Because the author regards ar real only the concrete, when meeting the other, he is very susceptible to his appearance, his body. This particular chapter is filled with theory on the 1Esexes 1D, mostly the women as compared to the man, and very vaguely held up by arguments. Ortega y Gasset writes that inside women there is the essence of feminity, which radiates and makes them feminine. Which is that essence? He summarizes it into three main parts: 1. The confusion of the mind (as opposed to the clarity of a man 19s mind), 1Ea woman is a secret to herself 1D 13 this is not to be understood as a fallout for women, but as part of their very being, therefore indispensable; 2. The inherent weakness (of the body, as I understood, but he seems to argue for a general weakness) 13 here he jumps into a critique of Simone de Beauvoir 19s Second Sex, which, to me, doesn 19t make much sense. He mentions he uselessly wrote such a long book, as the women is a creation of history 13 this, to me, is a contradiction, for that is exactly why she wrote the book, to show how the concept of womanhood was created. Also, he states that a 1Ehuman being 1D can chose its future, but still goes on explaining the nature of the sexes as they should be. 3. Her physical presence, much more attached to the body, very earthly, explained by the fact that women have always worn garments as decoration more than man. While I can understand, partly, why the body is so important in determining one 19s life in Ortega y Gasset 19s philosophy, I find his arguments on women to be very frail, and, generally, contradictory. His book also fails to take into account any other human that doesn 19t fall into the biological 1Etwo 1D sexes, not to mention the gender spectrum. Secondly, he ignores any kind of disability, physical or mental, which would create, I think, on the basis of how I understood his philosophy, a completely different 1Eradical reality 1D.
Only in the last chapters of the book does he begin to deal with the social. He starts by a meditation on the greeting, which he uses as the perfect example of a social action 13 one that is neccessary, that we do not do because we really want to, and we do not understand exactly why we do it. Afterwards he mentions language as the unifying social experience, the main channel for communication between beings, which has to follow some rules to work 13 rules we do not choose and do not understand. This language is alive, it changes because people change it, gradually, and with it you can talk about two kinds of speeches: the personal speech, the personal opinion of a man or a group of people, and the public opinion, the general opinion. It is here that he pin-points the essence of the social facts, into the public opinions. He wants to stress how different his view is of Durkheim 19s, regarding society and social fact, however I think I misunderstood him here, as I could not grasp the essential difference. They both argue that a society, as it is, must have a certain amount of dis-sociation (as Ortega calls it), of deviance (Durkheim), to work 13 in fact there would be no society without some deviance. Ultimately, the usual institutor of social order is the State.