THE HUMAN AND THE MODERN
pective on his problem, and to inquire whether, in the past, a dehu–
manized art was in fact accompanied by the lack of transcendence, the
divorce from any profound strata of extra-aesthetic values, that Ortega
attributes to modem art. Those art historians who have studied this
matter most intensively, like Wilhelm Worringer, have come to con–
clusions exactly opposite from Ortega. Far from denoting a lack of
transcendence, Worringer tells us in his famous book,
Abstraktion und
Einfuhlung,
dehumanization in art appears in cultures with a deep
sense of the supernatural and the extra-terrestrial. The dehumanized art–
world of these cultures bodies forth the stability, the order, the harmony
of the transcendent values to which they aspire; dehumanization and
transcendence, contrary to Ortega, have historically always gone hand
in hand so far as art is concerned. It is in periods of so-called realism,
of immersion in the human world of common-sense experience, that art
lacks transcendence in the broader meaning of this word; for the values
on which this art is based are those immanent to biological existence. In
the light of history, then, it would seem far more plausible that instead
of indicating a lack of transcendence, the dehumanization of modem
art is an advance symptom of the spiritual dislocation of modem man,
searching for a new transcendent source of values now that the religion
of progress--a truly immanent religion !-has begun to reveal its emp–
tiness. Certainly, the revival of interest in recent years in theology and
metaphysics, as well as the influence of such writers as Kafka and
Kierkegaard-not to mention the later T. S. Eliot-would appear to bear
out this latter view. Ortega's hypothesis, in any event, is at variance
with the known historical facts, and is supported by nothing except the
symmetry it enables him to construct between his overall analysis of
modem culture and the meaning of modem art. That Ortega's essay
is still a landmark in the discussion of modem art, despite its weakness
on this key issue, is ample evidence of the abundant insight it contains.
Especially striking are those sections where Ortega explores the attitude
of the modern artist before reality, and attempts to sketch a "scale of emo–
tional distances between ourselves and reality" to illustrate this attitude.
His second essay, "Notes on the Novel," is an excellent example of
how Ortega can take what is largely a commonplace and make it the
occasion for some subtle and suggestive intellectual arabesques. Starting
from his impression that a novelist like Stendhal, who uses a minimum
of plot, seems to impart more lived reality to his characters than Balzac,
with all
his
details and denouements, Ortega swings into an account of
the difference between French classical tragedy and Spanish tragedy of
the Golden Age. Like Stendhal, French tragedy uses a minimum of plot
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