Ernst Robert
Curtius
ORTEGA
Intellectual culture is a vital continuum which embraces
centuries and millennia.
It
is a mistake to suppose that culture can be
rebuilt out of the blighted resources of the present alone-a hopelessly
impoverished and ruined present. We must restore our broken con–
nection with the past. "To forget the past, to turn our backs on it,"
says Ortega in a book which appeared in 1942, "produces the result
we are witnessing today: the re-barbarization of humanity." But, we
may add, there is such a thing as a European intellectual tradition.
We must find our way back to it. That is more important, and
will
be more effectual, than any re-education and any experiment.
Ortega had many and enthusiastic readers in the Germany of
the twenties. They found in him the analysis of our mass-age, the
diagnosis of our intellectual situation. Here was a thinker whose philo–
sophy remained in contact with the reality of our existence.
Philosophy has come to be a science which can be studied in
universities. Philosophy is a subject, a profession. There are men who
pursue philosophy officially, sometimes throughout their entire lives.
But is this the only form in which philosophy can exist? Is there not
something in this which arouses our suspicions? What has been our
personal experience with this socially pigeonholed, this emasculated
form of philosophy? I should like to see a German student who did
not have the same experience as Goethe's Faust:
I've studied now Philosophy .
..
From end to end, with labor keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before.*
• Faust
(Bayard Taylor's translation).
