Ortega y Gasset on the reform of the intelligence
(Rodrigo A. de Souza Peñaloza, 2019)
Ortega y Gasset, Spanish writer of the first half of the 20th century is one of the thinkers I admire the most. Reading him is always an enlightening experience. To me, what he wrote about a century ago seems to be as modern as ever. In his 1923 essay “The reform of the intelligence”, he warned usthat Thought was out-of-fashion, so he recommended that intelligence withdrew itself from the public sphere and went back to the private solitary way of contemplation, just like the ancient Greeks taught us. It was by pure contemplation that Greeks raised us all to the heights of Thought. What we nowadays wrongly take for pure useless contemplation of the solitary mind, in reality is the very foundation of practical progress.
We let social media affect our souls in two ways. First, we unveil the boundary between private and public spheres and carelessly expose ourselves to the possibility of hurting others and being hurt. Publicity is okay, provided everyone is respectful. However, not rarely there is the unhappy person who distills unhappiness on others. Second, we often fall into the seduction of publicity and then subordinate our intelligence to the command of the crowd.
In our days in which the intelligence pullulates in the social media only for the successive microorgasms of thoughtless solitary people who dissipate their intelligence on this macro soup opera of false life and fictitious problems, what we see is nothing but the negation of intelligence: the higher the scope, the lesser the content. We should select not only the people with whom we accept to interact, but also what we should talk about. If it is not relevant, it should not deserve our intelligence. Everybody is free to act as they think right. But if we really want to think, we have to be modest, silent, absent, only to come out sometimes with something meaningful, like something unknown to some, a sentence that makes us want to be better persons, a good song, a funny joke, a fine painting, a good article, a scientific discovery, a philosophical thought, or a real solution to a real problem. Never, however, this endless chain of emptiness. To illustrate what I mean by emptiness, consider the person who spends the hours of the day, every day, on the same subject, as if subdued to a psychic obsession. This is true specially among people who believe to be the only ones to possess the political awareness that others do not.
Thought again (or still) is out-of-fashion. The more the mass writes futilities and fakes knowledge, the less it contributes to the the intelligence. So let us retreat from premature solutions to pseudo-problems, and let us instead give time to thought and real friendship, as if we withdrew ourselves to nurture a seed of Beauty, so we come out later with a gentle flower to our friends. Here is an excerpt from Ortega y Gasset’s 1923 essay “The reform of the intelligence”:
Such situation imposes on the intelligence a retreat from the social highs, a seclusion into itself. This retreat cannot be made but slowly, step by step. Intellect has intervened in too many things for it to be capable of a sudden withdrawal. However, the new path must bring no doubt. The intellectual minorities must remove from their opus every political and humanitarian pathos, and renounce to being taken seriously by the social mass. In other words, intelligence has to stop being a public issue and starts being again a private exercise for the engagement of people spontaneously akin to it.
How delicious for the Intelligence to feel free from the grave duties she frivolously took unto herself! How delicious for her not to be taken seriously and wander freely towards her fine duties! In this way, she could turn back into herself, away from businesses, without any hurry to give premature solutions to anything, allowing problems to dilate themselves according their own elastic radius. How joyful to give the way to everybody else: to the warrior, to the priest, to the entrepreneur, to the football player, and from time to time to shoot over them a magnificent, exact, well matured idea, full of light!
But this recommendation that the intelligence retreat progressively, by parsimonious steps without giving up — from serving life as «collective life» — is equivalent to inviting the intellectual to be alone, without the others, living in radical solitude. Then it is at this point, in this solitude, that the intelligence acquires a completely different aspect. The attention of the others seduces us to think about them, and like its plural — the collectivity — has no more life than the pseudolife of external interests, the subservient intelligence becomes utilitarian in the bad sense of the word, as aforementioned. Contrary to this «servitude» of the intelligence to the false life, its authentic use acquired among Greeks the «nonutilitarian» character of pure contemplation.
When the human being is alone, he finds out that his intelligence starts to work for him, to serve his solitary life which is a life without external interests, but full to the border, up to the risk of failing, with intimate interests. Then there comes the warning that «pure contemplation», the disinterested use the intellect, was but an optic illusion, that the «pure intelligence» is also practical and technical — technique to and from the authentic life, which is the «sonorous solitude» of life, as San Juan de la Cruz used to say. This will be the radical reform of the intelligence.
