Showing posts with label Jose Ortega y Gasset. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jose Ortega y Gasset. Show all posts

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Shipwrecked

It's been a couple of days since I've watched The River of Vision - On the Works of Daniel Quinn, Author of Ishmael. It's got me thinking about the effects of reading Ishmael. One thing that I think happened to me after I read Ishmael is that I became one of the shipwrecked. Ortega y Gasset once said:

"The [person] with the clear head is the [person] who frees himself from all fantastic 'ideas' and looks life in the face....Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he looks round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only geniune ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest rhetoric, posturing, farce...."


Come to think of it, right now I would say that I was shipwrecked before I read Ishmael and still am over a decade later. The possibility of the human species going extinct still looms on the horizon.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Mr. Gasset

Yesterday, I was paging through James Hillman's book The Force of Character, and in it he quoted Jose Ortega y Gasset and mentioned that he was a great philosopher. I thought to myself I really need to get to learn more about Gasset's work. So this morning I get up, flip open my notebook to some notes and quotes from the past and what is the first thing I come across:

Written on 10/31/11: "Most people cannot 'say' what the person before them is like, but being unable to 'say' does not imply that one is unable to see."--Jose Ortega y Gasset

I'll be learning more about Mr. Gasset.