Mission of the University

Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136272059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1930, the great Spanish philosopher Jos Ortega y Gasset set forth a program for reforming the modern Spanish university. Aware that the missions of the university are many and often competing, Ortega built his program around a conception of a "general culture" that knows no national boundaries or time limits and could fit into any national system of higher education. His ideas are especially pertinent to contemporary debate in America over curriculum development and the purpose of education.

In this volume Ortega sought to answer two essential questions: what is the knowledge most worth knowing by all students and what is the function of the university in a modern democracy? Basing his answers on his own deep personal culture and an extensive knowledge of the various European university systems, Ortega defined four primary missions: the teaching of the learned professions, the fostering of scientific research, training for political leadership, and finally the creation of cultured persons with the ability to make intellectual interpretations of the world. Ortega's understanding of "general culture" is set out in great detail here. He meant an active engagement in ideas and issues that were both historical and contemporary. His concern is with the classical problems of justice, the good society, who should rule, and the responsibilities of citizenship.

This edition first published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315008059-1

If we could solve the problem of general education, we could confidently strike any third world war off the calendar. General education means the whole development of an individual, apart from his occupational training. It includes the civilizing of his life purposes, the refining of his emotional reactions, and the maturing of his understanding about the nature of things according to the best knowledge of our time.

In this sense general education is the fundamental problem of modern society. Other problems must of course be solved too, before we can achieve the good society which now clearly lies within the reach of man’s imagination. Among the others are the problems of international organization and democratic control, the problems of economic co-operation and the freedom of the individual. But we are going to be able to carry out our best plans for all these things, in the years ahead, only so far as they are understood and supported by the people of many countries, particularly countries like America which wields a frightful power for good or evil.

Since World War I many books have been written on general education. Most of them have added impetus to a healthy reform. Some of them have made welcome additions to our repertory of techniques. A very few, however, have clarified our vision of a larger strategy, a mission that might enable us to marshal our techniques, so as to make an adequate attack on the fundamental problem of modern society. Among those very few books is this little one by the Spanish thinker, José Ortega y Gasset. His may prove in fact to have been the boldest and yet the soundest contribution of our times, striking at the very heart of the problem.

For the heart of the problem appears to be a matter of compatibility among the aims of the myriad individuals who make up the modern world. Their orientation must be such that their collective choices will bring about certain conditions of civilized society, on which the individual, though supremely important, is totally dependent for his opportunity to live a happy or even a peaceful life. As modern world society brings us together in a growing dependence on one another, more and more of the choices we make have a rebounding effect on other individuals and other nations: for example, the choices that will nourish or destroy the seeds of a third world war. What we need is to make possible a general working agreement on choices of this far-reaching sort. Now any agreement imposed by a “master-folk”, or even a group of experts irresponsible to the people, is absolutely useless. It fails to square with the best knowledge we have of ethics, government, anthropology, and human psychology. The agreement must be voluntary, then. But how is voluntary agreement to be reached unless we can agree on the basis for picking the best alternative that is open to us? In real life the trouble usually is not any disagreement on such ultimate objectives as freedom from disease, the self-fulfilment of the individual, or liberty and justice for all. The disagreement is rather over the question as to which alternative will best lead to these objectives, which one will work the best. Voluntary agreement therefore must rest on a common understanding of the physical and social conditions under which we are striving to carry out our objectives. If someone objects that the trouble is selfishness rather than ignorance, the answer is that narrow, socially harmful purposes are merely secondary effects of ignorance. For in our time at least, these narrow purposes are not defensible even on grounds of self-interest.

We find around us, obviously, too little common understanding and no ready means by which diverse cultures, or even diversely trained individuals in our own culture, can bring themselves to a common plateau of knowledge from which they might reason their way on together to a working agreement upon a next step. Modern knowledge does not make this common understanding an easy matter. In fact, it almost defies the capacity of the human intellect, not only because it is constantly expanding at such a dizzy rate, but still more because in the past, at a number of successive stages, it has emitted conflicting interpretations, and these survive in the present world to add to our confusion. The commonest human reaction to this difficult heritage has been, as we might expect, to evade the challenge and not attempt any comprehensive grasp of it. Most of us have dodged the greater part of our many-sided responsibility for being enlightened citizens of the modern global community. In the momentous choices of the last two decades, we have “rebelled” against the burden of knowing what would be the wisest next step, according to the best knowledge of our times. We have acted not as responsible individuals but as a part of “the masses”.

Ortega’s restless genius was already analysing this very problem in La Rebelión de las Masas, published in 1929, and was pushing on to seek a solution of the problem in the present study, which was completed and published in 1930. This was before the Depression had led the rest of us to look for the deeper significance of World War I in the underlying cultural disequilibrium of our whole civilization. It is only now in fact that our general-education movement, spurred on by a third upheaval, is penetrating to the deeper questions of the problem. How can the present partial insights be synthesized to form the basis of some common understanding, evolving yet stable? How can a synthesis be taught without undermining the very freedom it is intended to serve?

The general-education movement in the United States stands out for its advances in pedagogical techniques, guidance, survey courses, integration of courses, and even general curricula, which however belie one another’s claim to any comprehensive integration. We have been developing these techniques in a spirit of unrealistic optimism despite all our protestations to the contrary. It took a blow that shattered our faith in automatic progress to make us buckle down to the basic questions that worried Ortega a decade and a half ago. Thus for a second time the hardy, practical-minded pioneers of our country, as they push back one of the great frontiers of history, find stretching on before them the trail of an imaginative Spanish explorer.

This suggestion of the book’s importance and timeliness would be sufficient introduction were it not that the sketchy little volume takes on much of its meaning from a very complex background in the life and thought of its author. To project the sketch against an imagined background would fill it in with wrong colours—all the more so, if one has sensed that the colouring ought to be good and bold.

The life of Ortega is complicated by no less than five parallel careers. He is at once a teacher, an essayist, a publisher-editor, a philosopher, and a statesman. And his life has been further complicated by the turbulent surrounding history and a web of causal interconnections. Clearly, therefore, the best judgments we can make at present must be put forth very modestly—a caution which not all writers on the subject have observed. Furthermore the present introduction will have to skip here and there in the large subject, in order to pick out the points that shed the most light on Ortega’s theory of cultural education.

For the life of Ortega from 1883, the year of his birth, to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, we may fortunately refer to an excellent biographical sketch by Mrs. Helene Weyl, one of his translators who knows him well. This is available in the University of Toronto Quarterly of July, 1937 (pages 461–479). For the years from 1936 on, the world will probably have to wait a number of years for a definitive biography. It would be easy enough to enlarge upon the salient events of his life during this period, which Professor Federico de Onis, the eminent Columbia bibliographer and a friend of Ortega’s from boyhood, has graciously summarized for us in a letter of August, 1943. Ortega was deathly ill when he left Spain, shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, and made his way to Paris where he underwent a serious operation. He moved on next to Holland to recuperate, thence to Portugal, and to Argentina for a longer stay. In 1942 he decided to return to Portugal.

What matters most, however, is not the narrative of his life but its interpretation, and this grows the more precarious after 1936 for a new reason: Ortega himself has been comparatively silent during this period of protracted illness. Hence the editorial reactions of the press, which have sometimes been stormy, are more difficult than ever to evaluate. They not only may be biased; they may even rest upon an inexact knowledge of what Ortega had said in the first place. This is particularly true of the documents relating to Ortega’s last visit to the western hemisphere. The inner explanation of all tempests must await the reflective analysis of some very level-headed historian.

These last eight years, however, are comparatively unimportant as background for Mission of the University. The period that concerns us here is the quarter of a century stretching from about 1910 up to 1936. During those years Ortega enjoyed full opportunity to express his torrential flow of ideas, and so he has left us a very complete record. But here again the critics seem unable to agree on any elements of an evaluation. Why is it that judgments of Ortega range from such ardent devotion to almost equally ardent deprecation, with such a comparatively sparse distribution of opinions over the middle ground? It is true that we are all more narrowly specialized than Ortega and so we naturally incline to focus our attention on one side or another of his vast activity. But that does not explain why each of his activities is so variously judged. The essential explanation seems to be less a matter of reason than one of emotion. The fact is that it is impossible for Ortega’s contemporaries to view him dispassionately. His fiery personality, and his persistent relevance to the burning questions in our own lives, make him a controversial subject. Even within himself, his several careers and the characteristics they have developed in him react on one another, and generate an imbroglio of epic proportions. The spectator loses all spirit of detachment as he takes sides in this one-man drama of the modern mind.

Ortega’s volubility and varied public contacts as a journalist might have passed as natural to the type, if only the teacher in him were not so prone to correct the misconceptions he encountered. The same pedagogical trait, reacting with his developed social consciousness, gave rise to an unusual amount of friction even in his teaching career. For he was so keenly aware of the practical consequences of ideas that he could never be satisfied to teach social ethics as merely pretty theories. Again, Ortega was undeniably skilful as a political figure, yet in that career his propensity for instructing people made him quite unable either to compromise suavely with his opponents or to let himself be led expediently by his followers.

Even these careers might not have clashed as they did, were it not for the philosopher’s loyalty to a many-sided truth that satisfies no partisan mind. Ortega is to be classed as a conservative in politics, but one who has his own independent ideas on what is most worth conserving in our complex heritage. As a result he has been severely critical of the left and the right alike, and both sides have taken his criticism for evidence that he had joined the opposing camp. In the Civil War he objected bitterly to the use of Spain by both fascists and communists as the unlucky testing ground for the implements of the next world war. He condemned the leaders at home, the leaders abroad, and even the foreigners themselves, for as he saw it they were intruding in Spain with their public opinion, grossly ignorant of what Spain and the Spanish people really needed. Communism and fascism alike, transplanted into the Spanish mind, simply clouded the issue and delayed the solution. Subsequent history appears to reveal considerable truth in his views, however distasteful they were to both leftists and reactionaries at the time.

From the beginning of his long public life, Ortega exhibits the same explosive combination of keen analysis and a fearless readiness to show his-contemporaries the error of their ways. He antagonized people in power by assailing their abuses of privilege, and he disturbed the champions of the underdog by pointing to the incompetence of the “mass man” for true democracy, and deducing that modern society needed the leadership of some aristocracy of the intellect. Obviously an intellectual himself in the best sense, a critical and independent mind, he stood aloof from the practising anti-intellectuals of his time, the totalitarians. Yet he offended his fellow intellectuals constantly by berating “the frivolity and irresponsibility which are frequent in the European ‘intellectual’, which I have denounced as a factor of the first magnitude amongst the causes of the present disorder.” ¹

¹ “Concerning Pacifism,” Nineteenth Century, 134 (July, 1938), p. 32.

That is why it is so difficult for us of to-day to see Ortega dispassionately. If he rises above partisan or professional boundaries, he does so by way of showing up the inadequacies of many types of credo, among which those of most of his critics are necessarily distributed.

And then Ortega’s manner of expressing himself makes him difficult to read in an objective spirit. He is skilful in the art of arousing the ordinary reader to think along with the printed page, even when he has a highly sophisticated and complex idea in his own mind. Yet the rhetorical devices he uses for this purpose are sometimes irritating to the seasoned critic—devices like the striking paradoxes which he resolves by an unexpected redefinition of terms; or such a fiction as the “mass-man”, the economic man’s posthumous brother; or his way of tussling with the meanings of words, or with the supposed stubbornness of the reader, forms of dramatization which are extraneous to the essential line of thought. Good critics have been led to misjudge Ortega, I think, under the influence of negative effects produced by all this technique on their educated taste. Mr. Henry Hazlitt, who was literary editor of the New York Nation when The Modern Theme was first published in America, in 1933, took that occasion to express his wonderment at the extravagant praise which had greeted The Revolt of the Masses a year before, and went so far as to judge Ortega not a real thinker but a ‘rhetorician-thinker’. It seems nearer the truth to regard him as a rhetorician and a thinker.

The Revolt has been so successful as rhetoric, that in many an American public library it is the most battered volume of all those which have attempted, in the past decade, to convince the ordinary citizen of his cultural incompetence. It has done its part towards obtaining the public support on which the general-education movement depends. Ortega the journalist has been a shrewd judge of that wide public which demands dramatized ideas and induces the writer to press home main points rather than to draw fine distinctions and weigh each cautious allegation.

On the other hand, The Revolt has not appealed to the uncritical reader alone. Among the American educators who have referred to it with appreciation in their own writings are George Edgar Vincent, Norman Foerster, Robert Shafer, and Henry M. Wriston. Its essential line of thought has been generally reaffirmed, not only by thinkers, but by subsequent history. Certainly the decade of the thirties has been one unhappy chronicle of the retreat of humane values and enlightened ideas, weakly defended, and brutally misunderstood and derided by geniuses educated to gross ideals.

Ortega the thinker is not to be dismissed, therefore, either because Ortega the journalist writes in a showmanlike style or because Ortega the political figure invokes our partisan feelings. If his tempestuous combination of careers makes him difficult to evaluate coolly, perhaps his very breadth of experience may have led him to some larger insights that a narrower view of life would never have inspired. In the field of education there is particular reason to look to such a background as Ortega’s for some fruitful ideas. To-day few thinkers can venture into the wider reaches of school and society without becoming dangerously unskilled amateurs. And so it is not amiss for us to approach with expectation and humility this extraordinary thinker, whose personal experience spreads to the four comers of the vast subject.

Few other modern philosophers, and possibly none, have achieved such popular leadership as Ortega exerted during the Spanish Republic of the nineteen-thirties. He came, in fact, to be called by many of his fellow citizens “the father of the Republic”. On the fall of the dictator Primo de Rivera in 1931, Ortega organized a number of Spanish intellectuals into a “League for the Service of the Republic”. This took him into politics, for as the delegate of this League he was elected to the Constituent Cortes. Thus he gained a valuable knowledge of public affairs, the possibilities and limitations of the governing process, and the nature of political leadership.

This knowledge he added to an already rich experience of active life as a publisher and journalist. For he had founded and edited the world-famous magazine, Revista de Occidente; and he had helped to found the newspaper El Sol and the publishing house Espasa-Calpe, both of which likewise earned a worldwide reputation. As an essayist, he has appealed to a very wide public with scores of delightful adventures of ideas. They begin often with some everyday experience common to all of us, and carry the reader to some pregnant idea about life—twentieth-century Spectator Papers, which in fact are collected into a series of volumes called El Espectador. He has succeeded too in getting the general public to consider his more ambitious theses. The wide appeal of his Revolt of the Masses and Modern Theme we can observe in the United States.

So Ortega is well aware of that general public which condemns to death educational institutions that forget their dependence on the society outside. And this fact intercepts any hasty judgment one might be led to make of the present essay. Despite the caveat Ortega introduces on pages 37–8, 40 and 76–8, several readers of the manuscript have still remained unconvinced. They express the opinion that Ortega seems, at points, to regard culture as a river that takes its rise in the lofty university and flows down over the plains and swamplands below. Yet it is safe to assume that he is thoroughly conscious of society, and that in building the skeletal structure he presents here, he has had in mind how it would lend itself to a fruitful ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I. A Tempered Spirit of Reform
• II. The Fundamental Question
• III. The Principle of Economy in Education
• IV. What the University must be Primarily: the University; Profession and Science
• V. Culture and Science
• VI. What the University must be “in Addition”
• Index