Reviews for Interpretation of Universal History

The average rating for Interpretation of Universal History based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-03-20 00:00:00 Don Dutcher I had more fun reading this book than I have had for a long time. It was not a light frivolous kind of fun, but a deeper more satisfying enjoyment. Partly this was the reward for taking my time, rereading paragraphs or several pages to find a fuller understanding of the shotgun pattern of ideas and concepts. Also closing my eyes and mentally integrating the new ideas with my present conception of current events. But mostly just taking the time to savor the almost poetic flow of precise, absolute language made the time spent here a nice interlude. As always Jose Ortega y Gasset has opened new avenues of understanding history and life that no other academic has done for me. If this will be your first Jose Ortega y Gasset “course” then you are in for a treat that can open vast vistas of perspective and understanding of the human condition. If you have met Jose Ortega y Gasset before then you will definitely want to read this book. I would suggest that this be a precursor to “Man and Crisis” and/or “Revolt of the Masses” but, of course, this is not a prerequisite.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-29 00:00:00 Angie Yturbe As with anything written by Ortega, the style is as engaging as the content is profound. In this work, Ortega bull-rushes British historian Arnold J. Toynbee. Toynbee argues that civilizations begin as a challenge-response to an environment, and that all but six primordial civilizations are inheritors of said civilizations (Andean, Yucatan, Egyptian, Aegean, Mesopotamian, and Chinese). Toynbee maintains that civilizations follow three laws - barbarian invasion (external proletariat), Which affects the destruction of the civilization (internal proletariat), and third, that during the centuries of chaos involved in this, a religion of the proletarian arises. Ortega addresses all of these points in his own way, mingling fact, theory, philosophy, history, and etymology. A notable idea is that challenge and response as Toynbee understands it is almost right, but horribly insufficient. Challenge and response are terms defined by ourselves, reflecting what it is we want to be. Some notable quotes: > “Man is a fantastic animal; he was born of fantasy, he is the son of "the mad woman of the house." And universal history is the gigantic and thousand-year effort to go on putting order into that huge, disorderly, anti-animal fantasy. What we call reason is no more than fantasy put into shape. Is there anything in the world more fantastic than that which is the most rational? Is there anything more fantastic than the mathematical point, and the infinite line, and, in general, all mathematics and all physics? Is there a more fantastic fancy than what we call "justice" and the other thing that we call "happiness"? We see, then, that even from the zoological point of view, which is the least interesting and—note this—not decisive, a being in such condition can never achieve a genuine equilibrium; we also see something that differs from the idea of challenge-response in Toynbee and, in my judgement, effectively constitutes human life: namely, that no surroundings or change of surroundings can in itself be described as an obstacle, a difficulty, and a challenge for man, but that the difficulty is always relative to the projects which man creates in his imagination, to what he customarily calls his ideals; in short, relative to what man wants to be. This affords us an idea of challenge-and-response which is much deeper and more decisive than the merely anecdotal, adventitious, and accidental idea which Toynbee proposes. In its light, all of human life appears to us as what it is permanently: a dramatic confrontation and struggle of man with the world and not a mere occasional maladjustment which is produced at certain moments. Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, which, glimpsed only a little after my twentieth year, made write in those days that what is most valuable in man is his eternal and almost divine discontent, a discontent which is a kind of love without a beloved, and like an ache which we feel in members of our body that we do not have. Man is the only being that misses he has never had. And the whole of what we miss, without ever having had it, is never what we call happiness. From this one could start a meditation on happiness, an analysis of that strange condition which makes man the only being who is unhappy for the very reason that he needs to be happy. That is, because he needs to be what he is not.” > “The terrain in itself does not determine history. There is a factor which we might call the "the historic inspiration of the peoples" which cannot be explained zoologically. And that factor is the decisive one in a people's destinies. With the same geographic and and even anthropological material there may be produced different histories. There is in addition another phenomenon of great importance, the migration of peoples. The autochthonous condition is always problematical and utopian. In fact we do not know more in history than that peoples who have set themselves in motion and then settled themselves temporarily—"temporarily" in terms of thousands of years, at times—in one place on the planet, have there created history. If we then cling to the strictness of events, what is important to understand is why a people which which displaced itself will suddenly stop and identify itself with with a landscape. It is like a man who moves forward among a group of women and suddenly stops, caught by one of them. It is vain to take refuge, as is customary, in utilitarian considerations, in facts. One must end by recognizing an affinity between the soul of a people and the style of its landscape. Hence one fastens on this—because he likes it. For me, then, there is a symbolic relation between nation and territory. Peoples migrate in search of their ideal landscape, which, in the secret depths of their soul, has been promised them by God. The promised land is a promised landscape.” > “For the first time after so many years I come back to cry aloud in the desert. Because this is the mission of the intellectual who is truly a prophet—to cry in the desert. The greatest of the prophets, Isaiah, made it notable, of course, when he spoke of himself as the voice of one "crying in the wilderness." Because the mission of the intellectual is to be the man who, from his desert, his basic solitude—and man is only man amid his truth, only himself when he is alone—cries aloud to others and invites them to each into his own solitude.”