THE HUMAN AND THE MODERN
stylistic revolution. First published in Spanish in 1925, the essay has
had a considerable influence on the younger generation of writers and
artists in Spain and South America, who looked on it as a defense of
their efforts by one of Spain's leading men of letters. Fragments were
translated, if my memory is correct, in
The Symposium
during the
Thirties, and are now included in Melvin Rader's anthology of modem
aestheticians; but this is the first time that the entire work has been
available in English. Like all of Ortega's writings, the essay has the
merit of defining a crucial cultural problem with admirable precision,
and of opening up a variety of illuminating perspectives from which it
may be viewed. In this case the interpretative framework within which
Ortega sets the problem of modem art, however, is determined by his
more general philosophical position; and this, in my opinion, leads to a
basic distortion in his analysis of the meaning of modem art.
The new style, according to Ortega, has seven main aspects, but we
need only concern ourselves with two since the others are merely their
offshoots. These two central aspects are: a tendency "to dehumanize
ait," and to regard art as "something without any transcendence."*
In coining the word "dehumanization" to express the quality of modem
art, Ortega has undoubtedly brought into relief one of its predominant
traits. The application of this term, of course, is most obvious in the
plastic arts, where it would cover not only abstract art as such, but all
modem
art
in which the importance of recognizable human forms
is no longer dependent on their expressiveness as specifically human.
Even where such forms appear as part of a composition, they are
treated solely as aesthetic objects that may be distorted at the artist's
will to meet the artistic necessities of his work. Similarly, in the poetry
stemming from the tradition of Mallarme, Ortega finds the emphasis
placed on the creation of "lyrical objects distinct from the human
flora and fauna . . . figures so extramundane that merely looking at
them is delight." While there is a more complex problem here than in
the plastic arts, it cannot be denied that the greatest modem poets tend
toward the creation of self-enclosed poetic universes, and that their
poetry, to be understood, must be referred to these autonomous structures
rather than directly to ordinary human experience.
No doubt it is this autonomy, this lack of any immediate relationship
*
I have been forced to amend the English version of this phrase given by the
translator, which in the original reads "una cosa sin transcendencia alguna." It
is translated as "a thing of no transcending consequence." The concept of
transcendence, however, is a key one in Ortega's thought, and he uses
it
in an
exact philosophical sense. The translator's version dilutes it to a
platitud~>.
1347
