José Ortega y Gasset - Ramiro de Maeztu: Correspondence (1908-1926). Part One

Abstract

The first stage of the epistolary collection between José Ortega y Gasset and Ramiro de Maeztu includes their intense epistolary exchange of 1908, concentrated between the months of July and October, when the well-known public polemic between the two took place regarding men and ideas. The two intellectuals, leading figures in Spanish thought in the first third of the 20th century, had known each other since 1902 and their correspondence shows an intimate, affectionate relationship and an enormous mutual intellectual recognition, although not to the same degree in both directions. Despite the difference in age and public prestige, Maeztu regarded Ortega with intellectual reverence, even in occasional disagreement. We do not have Ortega's replies to Maeztu in the summer of 1908, but from the letters of Maeztu and the press articles in which the polemic developed we can deduce that Ortega professed great respect for what Maeztu had meant as a political and intellectual revulsive in Madrid at the end of the 19th century, although he was not at the philosophical level of the good news that Ortega had just discovered in Germany: neo-Kantianism.