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Excerpt from The Modern Theme In giving the lecture its present form I took advantage of the detailed and extremely accurate notes taken in the hall itself by a member of my audience, my esteemed friend Don Fernando Vela. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.… (more)
User reviews
On the one hand, Ortega sees a transition from one where culture, i.e. adherence to Platonic ideals, is the focus of society and spontaneous life is neglected. Now we can value life too, and put in in a proper relationship with culture. But if we are actually shifting to a mystical phase, a spiritual phase, where people believe anything just for the sense of comfort and security of belief, a phase dominated by the spirit of slavery... is that actually a kind of overshoot? Presumably societies are constantly in orbit, one sort of instability moving into another.
It's interesting reading a book like this, 100 years old more or less. In some ways it can be seen as a product of its time, a time quite distinct from ours. Hitler hadn't taken power yet. The Spanish Civil War... I don't know my history, but it certainly cannot have heated up much at all. On the other hand, to what extent does the momentum of social transformation tend to be preserved across such time spans?
Looking e.g. at mathematics, surely the sense of mathematical limits was already taking form at the beginning of the 19th Century with Abel's exploration of solutions of polynomials and with Riemann and Lobachevsky creating alternate geometries. That trajectory has continued through Godel and Turing and on into chaos theory etc. Politically, how much of today's politics grows directly out of Hitler's synthesis of mass media, corporate power, racism, etc.
This is the kind of philosophy book I like to read! Not a lot of technical jargon. It's not a book for any kind of inner circle. Any reasonably literate person can read this and get a lot out of it.