3 - Liberalism and democracy

Summary

The rejection of the ‘isolated individual’ noted at the beginning of the last chapter clearly puts Ortega at odds with practically all interpretations of the liberal tradition. At the heart of liberalism lies the idea of the individual's private space which no one or no thing is permitted to invade except under very specific circumstances. The circumstances vary according to the liberal tradition with which one is dealing, but the private space is common to all. Ortega's ‘man is completely social’ (OC 1, 511) denies any conception of private space – indeed it implies that any suggestion to the contrary is based on a misunderstanding of the human condition.

This phase of his thought, however, is in truth very circumscribed. In fact the structural sense he gives to the social nature of human beings by referring to it as a part of the human condition is beginning to be undermined as early as 1914 when ‘perspectivism’ makes its first implicit appearance in the Meditaciones. The individualistic implications of perspectivism (with which we shall be dealing in detail in the final part of this book) are so profound that it is sometimes hard to see anything public coming out of it at all. In 1916, in an article called Verdad y perspectiva (‘Truth and perspective’), he explains that, ‘each man has a mission of truth. Where my eye is, there is no other: what my eye sees of reality no other eye sees’, and that, ‘Reality gives itself up in individual perspectives’ (OC 2, 19).