This year 2021 we celebrate the centenary of the publication of Invertebrate Spain, by Jose Ortega y Gasset (1921). It was translated into English in 1937 by Mildred Adams (1894-1980).
Download Invertebrate Spain in English:
A collection of essays from one of Spain’s leading intellectuals. They were first published in 1921 with a fourth edition appearing in 1934, and form an analysis of the many ills from which the author sees his country to be suffering.
The conclusions he arrives at are as gloomy as the future which he sees to be inevitable. It is indeed remarkable how the events of 1936 have justified his fears of 1921. But one cannot help a feeling of surprise that the author, having shown that he possessed such a clear realisation of the dangers that beset his country, should have made no attempt to suggest a way out.
Essayist and philosopher, a thinker influential in and out of the Spanish world, Jose Ortega y Gasset was professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid from 1910 until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The Revolt of the Masses, his most famous work, owes much to post-Kantian schools of thought. Ortega’s predominant thesis is the need of an intellectual aristocracy governing in a spirit of enlightened liberalism. Although Franco, after his victory in the civil war, offered to make Ortega Spain’s “official philosopher” and to publish a deluxe edition of his works, with certain parts deleted, the philosopher refused. Instead, he chose the life of a voluntary exile in Argentina, and in 1941 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru.
He returned to Spain in 1945 and died in Madrid. Ortega’s reformulation of the Cartesian cogito displays the fulcrum of his thought. While Rene Descartes declared “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), Ortega maintained “Cogito quia vivo” (I think because I live). He subordinated reason to life, to vitality. Reason becomes the tool of people existing biologically in a given time and place, rather than an overarching sovereign. Ortega’s philosophy consequently discloses affinities in its metaphysics to both American pragmatism and European existentialism in spite of its elitism in social philosophy.
Read Invertebrate Spain, in Spanish, first edition of 1921, in this link.
