20th Century Europe: Cultural Shifts, Philosophical Context, and Spanish Intellectuals
Historical and Cultural Context of the 20th Century
The 20th century is characterized by multiple breaks and fractures, where economic value overrides political, ethical, and religious values. Scientific advances led to a fascinating and terrifying new world. Chemical bombs, machine guns, and tanks in World War I turned people into fodder. The Europe of scientific progress and economic prosperity disappeared on the battlefields.
Communism rose in Russia, and the U.S. and Japan gained importance as great powers. The early 1920s led to huge inflation and economic collapse. At the social level, nations suffered economic crises, and the unemployed had no hope for a better world. Feeling belittled by France and England, and possessing a strong army, Germans saw Nazism as a solution to their problems, while Italy embraced Fascism. Economic and military successes hid Hitler’s delusions from the eyes of the world.
Europe was full of concentration camps where anyone not considered Aryan, such as Jews, Gypsies, and those deemed ‘useless lives,’ were exterminated. After World War II, Europe lay razed, and the U.S. acquired the importance it holds today. The artistic world gained much importance in the 1920s, with the rise of avant-garde artistic movements characterized by innovation in aesthetic methods. Dadaism, abstract art, cubism, and surrealism emerged, raising questions about the meaning of art and language, where the viewer must identify signs and reconstruct the real meaning or seek meaning in the world of dreams.
The scientific world abandoned intuition and based itself on pure mathematical abstraction. Quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity revolutionized physics and gave scientists great importance. Spain lagged behind industrial, economic, and cultural progress in Europe, suffering from high illiteracy, political corruption, and the great power of the Church. After the disaster of 1898, there was an overall feeling of failure and a widespread idea of regeneration. Important intellectuals emerged, including the Krausism movement promoting free education, the Generation of ’98 (Baroja, Unamuno), the Generation of ’14 (Ortega y Gasset, Madariaga), and the Generation of ’27 (Lorca, Alberti). Three cultural hubs existed: the Ateneo de Madrid, the Residencia de Estudiantes, and the West.
Philosophical Context: The Work of Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset was born in Madrid in 1883 into a political and intellectual family and died there in 1955. He studied philosophy and letters at the Central University of Paris and was a professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid from 1910 until his exile at the beginning of the Civil War. He lived in exile in France, Holland, and Argentina until the end of World War II. The imperative of modernization was a major driving force in his work. He saw German philosophy as a necessary source of culture for Spain. At the University of Marburg, he delved deeper into neo-Kantian philosophy and Natorp and Cohen, but his knowledge of Simmel and Max Scheler brought him closer to Husserl’s phenomenology. His cultural projects included the El Espectador and Revista de Occidente magazines.
His most important works include Meditations on Quixote, in which he made public his enriched draft of Mediterranean culture with the clarity of Germanic concepts. The theme of his work, Our Time, echoed European philosophical or scientific-German thought of his generation (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, etc.), whose meaning was to overcome idealism and build a culture of life. In his book The Revolt of the Masses, he warned that the rise of the masses was the cause of totalitarianism. This book, along with Invertebrate Spain, made him an observer of the social upheavals of the Second Spanish Republic.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, he left Spain, not favoring any side. From 1939, he had already expressed opposition to totalitarianism and fascism and knew that the fate of Spain depended on the new international order that would emerge from World War II. The triumph of the Allies led to the political isolation of Franco’s Spain, dominated by Catholic national culture. Ortega and his work were the most exquisite examples of German culture and French intellectual literary culture. He is infamous in Spain and revered by Americans and Germans as one of the great figures of European culture. Europe and its privileged scientific-technical culture became the subject of his meditation. His death served as a catalyst for the first group of authors resistant to Catholic national culture.