Word: ortega
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...looks at him in a way he does not like; the late great Joselito who killed 1,557 bulls, was gored badly three times, killed the fourth time; the almost crippled Belmonte (retired), "greatest living bullfighter"; Villalta, brave but "awkward looking as a praying mantis" with a difficult bull; Ortega, at present one of Spain's most acclaimed matadors, whom Hemingway characterizes as "ignorant, vulgar and low"; Lalanda. "unquestionably the master of all present fighters"; Freg, the Mexican veteran who has 72 wounds, has been given extreme unction five different times...
Though economists now have the floor and philosophers are, as Philosopher Ortega y Gasset admits, anything today rather than philosophers, this penetrating analysis of the world's state is not economic. No fatalist, Ortega y Gasset, searcher for the truth about Western civilization, believes that something may still be done with the truth when it is found. A yea-saver, his gloomiest proph ecy is still hopeful in a sardonic Spanish way: ''Before long there will be heard throughout the planet a formidable cry, rising like the howling of innumerable dogs to the stars, asking for someone or some thing...
...proclaim the right of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the U. S. : 'to be different is to be indecent.' " It is a crowded age, especially in Europe, whose population has increased from 180,000,000 to 460,000,000 since 1800. Ortega y Gasset denies that Europe is being Americanized, says "Americanization" is a worldwide, spontaneous growth...
Making a vital distinction between "mass" and "class," he defines "mass-mind" as the commonplace mind, no matter in what class it is found. The massman is barbarian, only concerned with his own wellbeing, content to plunder civilization, not labor intelligently to continue it. By his definition of "barbarian" Ortega y Gasset covers a multitude of public "leaders": "If anyone in a discussion with us is not concerned with adjusting himself to truth, if he has no wish to find the truth, he is intellectually a barbarian. That, in fact, is the position of the massman when he speaks, lectures...
...become tyrannical. In former times "the masses asserted no right to intervene in [government] ; they realized that if they wished to intervene they would necessarily have to acquire those special qualities and cease being mere mass." A fierce believer in aristocracy of intellect and character, not of heredity, Ortega, y Gasset calls such organized mass-government as Fascism and Bolshevism "two false dawns . . . mere primitivism." Europe's answer, he thinks, is to build itself into one great state in which, he implies, the massman will...