Abstract
In his Prólogo para alemanes (Prologue for Germans), written in 1933 and published posthumously in 1958, José Ortega y Gasset describes his disenchantment after a decade or so of association with the Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg school and the enthusiasm he initially shared with others of his generation for Husserlian phenomenology. The following passage is especially revealing:
There was no choice but to row toward an imaginary shore even though a safe arrival was unlikely. Yet fortune had given us a prodigious instrument: phenomenology. Strictly speaking, that youthful group had never been Neo-Kantian; and neither did it surrender completely to phenomenology. Our wilful attachment to system prevented it. Because of its very consistency phenomenology is incapable of reaching a systematic form or configuration. Its incalculable value lies in the “fine structure” of meaty tissues that may offer the architecture of a system. This is why instead of being a philosophy for us, phenomenology was…a stroke of good fortune.1
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Notes
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press LTD, 1962 ), p. 62.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings. Edited and with an introduction by David Ferrell Krell (New York: Harper and row, 1977 ), p. 389.
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Raley, H.C. (1990). Phenomenological “Life”: A New Look at the Philosophic Enterprise in Ortega Y Gasset. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Man’s Self-Interpretation-in-Existence. Analecta Husserliana, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1864-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1864-1_8
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