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Professor Ferrater Mora is one of the few contemporary philosophers who can write wittily and well on themes as diverse as the thought of Wittgenstein, Ortega, Unamuno, Bergson, Suárez, Cervantes; irony, wonder, and poetic language. (A sample of his wit: The Germans have produced good philosophy, as modern armies win battles by saturation (p. 18).)
In Cuestiones disputadas he has brought together ten of his most substantial philosophic essays; it is a shame that so few of them have appeared in English (“Wittgenstein on Destruction” and “Pierce's Conception of Architectonic . . .”—which only partly reproduces the content of “Filosofía y arquitectura”—in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research; “The Intellectual in Contemporary Society” in Ethics).
Ferrater Mora's discussion of irony (pp. 27-42) is characteristically sensitive. He begins with a dilemma: the ironist cannot treat irony seriously, i.e., un-ironically, while the non-ironist cannot understand its peculiar nature. He distinguishes carefully (but, I think, not un-ironically) between irony, caricature, and humor. Classical irony—as in Socrates—is “revealing”; romantic irony—as in Schlegel—“distorting.” Actual irony moves between these limits, functioning to undermine promiscuous belief and to neutralize fanaticism. Ferrater Mora's own preference is for “enthusiasm tempered by irony” (p.42).
As the title of his book suggests, Ferrater Mora is very much concerned with the formulation of, as well as the Assumptions involved in, philosophic problems. Clear formulation of a problem, he maintains, is a long step toward its solution. Agreement as to what the problems are is much more important than agreement about their specific solutions. Wittgenstein is a “genius of destruction” precisely because he proscribes the very formulation, not just the solution, of philosophic problems; he wants to dissolve problems, to cure the “sick” thinker who persists in posing and trying to solve them. Wittgenstein is thus, for Ferrater Mora, an “anti-Socrates”—since Socrates aimed to raise and sharpen, not eliminate, problems. But Wittgenstein and Socrates stand at opposite poles of the same (problem-oriented) historical tendency.
The author pursues this and related themes in a perceptive essay on the intellectual and society—e.g., the relation of the intellectual's attempts to understand, to justify, and to change society. In the essays on Cervantes (pp. 75-80) and poetry (pp. 93-102) Ferrater Mora has many revealing things to say about literature and literary language. He characterizes Cervantes' undesperate and “charitable” irony as a forgiveness, justification, and, in some sense, “salvation” of things as they are. In discussing Spanish philosophy (pp. 81-92) he distinguishes two pure and limiting cases—philosophy as (1) a system of propositions, and (2) a human attitude and activity. Existing philosophies are always a blending of the two. Philosophy in the first sense is never “national”; philosophy in the second sense often is.
Ferrater Mora's essay on the “degrees of wonder”—astonishment, surprise, intellectual love—(pp. 103-109) is as rewarding as that on irony, and I am sorry not to have space to discuss it here. His substantial essay on Bergson (pp. 113-150)—he calls it “an introduction to an introduction” (p. 122)—is a counterpoint of sympathetic exposition and pointed criticism. The history of philosophy, Ferrater Mora suggests, exhibits a continual vacillation between the extremes of philosophy of being (Parmenides) and philosophy of becoming (Bergson).
Only occasionally does the author advance questionable historical claims, e.g., in relating the “functionalism” of modern architecture to the “anti-substantialism” of contemporary philosophy (p. 47). “Functional” as here used would appear to be critically ambiguous. The opposite of architectural “functionalism” is not “substantialism” but, say, “ornamentalism” (excessive use of “non-functional” elements).
Ferrater Mora's study of Ortega y Gasset is admirably concise and adequately comprehensive; and Ortega is a thinker about whom it is not easy to be both concise and comprehensive. One could more readily write a short book about Spinoza or Kant; for Ortega is not a system-builder. The author traces three main stages of Ortega's philosophic development: (1) “objectivism” (1902-1914), (2) “perspectivism” (1914-1923), (3) “ratio-vitalism” (1924-1955). The first was a reaction against the extreme subjectivism of many Spanish intellectuals of the Generation of '98, including Unamuno. Ortega went so far as to assert (in 1909) that “an algebraic theorem or a huge old stone in the Guadarana Sierra is more meaningful than all the employees in a government office.” But his more characteristic, second, position focuses upon circumstances and points of view: “I am myself and my circumstances.” Ferrater Mora comments: “As Kant began his Critique of Pure Reason by considering the factum of physical science, Ortega begins his philosophy by considering the factum of human life existing among circumstances” (p. 27). “Each life,” says Ortega, “is a point of view directed upon the universe”; the “strict coincidence,” of any two points of view would yield a “pure abstraction” (p. 30).
In the early 1920's, a new theme—the conflict between culture and life—appears in Ortega's writings. During his last period (that of “the philosophy of vital reason”) it becomes dominant. Ortega's cognito of 1929 reads, “I think because I live.” And, with Nietzsche, he resists the “growing tendency to superimpose culture [what Nietzsche would call 'civilization' or 'domestication'] on life” (p. 35). In one place Ortega makes almost the same distinction as Nietzsche between authentic liberating culture (Nietzsche's “Civilization”) (p. 54). Ortega sounds even more Nietzschean—although Ferrater Mora does not point this out—when he describes reason as “a tiny island afloat on the sea of primeval vitality” and “a form and function of life” (p. 37). Beliefs, for Ortega, are not ideas that we hold, but ideas that we are; contemplation is a “project for action” (p. 44). Life is a “faciendum”—in Spanish, “que-hacer”—rather than a “factum” (p. 48).
Ferrater Mora notes that Ortega is close to Bergson in his stress on process and possibility, but that he was suspicious of Bergson's “irrationalism.” It would appear that Ortega was unfamiliar with Whitehead's rationalistic “process philosophy.” At least Ferrater Mora says nothing of Whitehead in this connection.
Much in Ortega's later writings sounds very “existential”—e.g., his assertion that man has no fixed nature, only a history; that men are compelled to be free; that only decisions made in “existential” solitude are authentic; that the tyranny of society, including (inauthentic) social rules and customs “stifle and oppress” the individual, causing a “petrification of personality” (p. 59); that one must follow one's individual vocation even in defiance of “the conventional rules of morality” (p. 51). Though social and cultural alienation are inevitable, according to Ortega, men should strive to withdraw into themselves, to effect an “ensimismamiento.” But Ortega seems closer to Heidegger than to Sartre, admitting a kind of community of persons (“convivencia”—cf. Mitsein) which, unlike rule-bound society, permits individual authenticity and spontaneity.
Ferrater Mora's English is occasionally unidiomatic, and he uses a great many “-ism” words, including “confusionism” (p. 22) and “abstractionism” (p. 23). There is a transposition which reverses the sense of Ortega's comparison of Descartes with St. John of the Cross (p. 22). The book is provided with a bibliography of Ortega's works in both Spanish and English; but, unfortunately, it has no index. Since this volume appeared, posthumous works important for Ortega's philosophy have been published in Spanish, including a large volume on Leibnitz and the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which is much broader in content than its title suggests. It is to be hoped that Professor Ferrater Mora will soon have an opportunity to prepare a new edition of Ortega y Gasset which will draw upon these posthumous works. For he is an exemplary expositor and commentator of Ortega's thought.
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