The Two Sides of Spanish Essays: The Influence of Ortega and “Mairena”

Abstract

The Spanish philosophical thought culminates in its contemporary period without having overco­me, nor resolved, a double tribulation, with roots in old myths and some legend, and that it harms its health and vitality: the litigious with the literature about their dependences and servi­tudes and the theoretical and practical prejudices that it suffers the philosophical essay as gender. In this paper are compared two ways of expres­sing this circumstance, with the own name: the phi­losophical work of Ortega y Gasset and Antonio Machado's book Juan de Mairena. Both reflect with clarity the two faces of the problem that I analyze here, or perhaps the heads and the tails.