Wikipedia surprise of the day

Just passing through the article on José Ortega y Gasset and saw this:

“The American philosopher Graham Harman has recognized Ortega y Gasset as a source of inspiration for his own Object Oriented Ontology.”

Heck yes, he was a source of inspiration.

Born in 1883, Ortega was obviously overshadowed by Heidegger, six years his junior. They later spoke together at the architecture event in Darmstadt where Heidegger delivered his famous “Building Dwelling Thinking” lecture. Heidegger discusses their meeting in a brief piece called “Encounters with Ortega y Gasset.”

After his lecture, Heidegger was apparently accused of having not addressed the topic, but merely “thought it to pieces” (which is my best effort at translating zerdacht). Ortega seized the microphone and responded on Heidegger’s behalf: “Our dear God needs those who think things to pieces, so that the other animals don’t sleep!” Heidegger described those words as “gallant.” In the latter part of his essay, however, he gives a mildly catty depiction of Ortega as engaged in sulky moping at a garden party. Then again, Ortega had provoked Heidegger to some extent by claiming to have had some of Heidegger’s ideas first.

In one of his books, I think it may have been The Idea of Principle in Leibniz and the Evolution of Deductive Theory, Ortega gives a retrospective description of his first encounter with Being and Time, along with the claim that he immediately predicted that Heidegger had reached a dead end would never publish volume two. His discussion of Heidegger in that context is interesting, but hopelessly quirky. It’s just the sort of critique you’d give of someone as a first gut reaction before having really assimilated their ideas enough to hit the target with your critique.

In short, I went through an Ortega phase from about ages 17-19, but then switched fully onto Heidegger for ten years.

But there are two things I took from Ortega without ever relinquishing them:

1. Philosophers should write well. Ortega did, and in fact many of his philosophical writings are newspaper articles (his father was a major newspaper editor in Madrid, so family life had already paved the way here). He was reportedly shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature a number of times, though of course he never won it. Thankfully, I was never remotely tempted to write like Heidegger, or even to mimic his emotional tonality. In large part that was because, if Heidegger is the stronger thinker, I could already see that Ortega was the stronger writer. He never ceases to connect with his reader.

2. His “Essay in Esthetics By Way of a Preface” (included as a chapter in Phenomenology in Art), a brilliant piece that Ortega never really developed, is ultimately the source of my real/sensual distinction. His sense of realism in that essay, completely absent from his otherwise purely correlationist outlook (“I am myself and my circumstances”), is about the strongest sense of realism in the 20th century until his own student Zubíri emerged.

In any case, I’m perfectly happy and delighted to be included on any list of “people influenced by Ortega y Gasset.” I can’t think of anyone with a stronger sense of the biography of ideas, how they grow out of vital needs of human life and aren’t just disembodied abstractions. Maybe Wilhelm Dilthey is another person who has that sort of sense for the rootedness of ideas in life. Ortega admired Dilthey to the point of over-admiring him (calling Dilthey a greater philosopher than Nietzsche is too much for me and most other people to swallow). But there is something to be said for his vision of Dilthey and Brentano as, jointly, the most important trailblazers of late 19th century philosophy.