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accomplishes its task, it will be equivalent to a "new revelation."
These are ideas of great audacity. They are utopian ideas. But
Ortega would refuse to consider that a valid objection.
Let us go back. The starting point of Ortega's philosophy is the
basic situation of man.
If
I ask myself what, as a thinking man, I
find, the answer must be: I am myself and my environment. All
reality which is not the reality of my life is secondary reality. My
life consists in the fact that I find myself under the necessity of
existing in a particular environment or a particular situation-in a
particular "circumstance" as Ortega puts it. There is no life
in
abstracto.
I do not find myself to be merely a thinking consciousness,
as idealism has taught since the time of Descartes. Rather, life means
being the prisoner of surroundings that cannot be changed. We live
here and now. In this sense, life is absolute actuality, bound to a
particular point in space and time. Everything that I do is determined
by that unique situation. And my life consists in what I do. One
is what one does. At every instant we are faced with the necessity
of deciding what we want to do. Among the possibilities for action,
man must choose that which he comprehends to be his task. Man
is his task. But most men flee before their task, because it is laborious.
They fail to achieve their being, they falsify themselves. The genuine
man realizes the design which he finds in himself.
.
For Ortega, the first moral postulate is sincerity. He advocates
it with an absoluteness which leads to extreme consequences. What I
cannot sincerely accept on the basis of my personal sense of life, I
must reject. Hence there is no eternal pattern. There are no classics.
"A Greek statue," Ortega says, "impresses me as perfect, but that
Greek perfection leaves me unsatisfied. And what I experience, all
people experience, although almost no one is capable of seeing that he
is experiencing it. The classics exercise an unmannerly terrorism over
the poor souls of this age, which are so unsure of themselves. . . .
Classic life is composed of commonplaces.""-'
*
La vida cldsica se compone de t6picos. Topos
is the Greek word for "com–
monplace." There is a rhetorical and a philosophical "topics." The First en–
cyclopedia of the Middle Ages, the
Etymologiae
of Bishop Isidore of Seville
(died 636) discusses topics as "a wholly wonderful kind of performance"
(mirabile plane genus operis).
A more extended treatment of topics will be
found in my
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
In English,
except
in
technical contexts, the meaning of "topic" has degenerated to "subject
of conversation."
