Cervantes and Ortega: “The secret of Spain”

Abstract

The author describes the state of mind of the young Ortega during the first years of the century as a consequence of the events of 1898: the catastrophic litany of a wrecked nation. He perceives something that begins to evolve in the works of the men of the generation of 1898, and before these in the men of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. Starting from the pantheistic metaphysics of the “One and All” and the fundamental link of the amor Dei intellectualis, he builds a new concept of people based on the underground currents that determine the metaphysical sensibility. Don Quixote would show the despairing love of trivial things as a way of feeling the Universe and being in the world. Based on this, a vision of things according to “perennial realities”, a “philosophical history”, could be built. There would have been, therefore, resistance to the values of modernity, not decadence, but desistance.