Meditations on Quixote

Introduction

“Meditations on Quixote”, Ortega’s first book, appeared in 1914 as the beginning of a planned series of “meditations”, of which only this volume came out. Ortega calls the essays exercises in “intellectual love”: one should seek the full meaning even of the nearest things. Here he formulates the sentence “I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself”: human life is always life in a concrete situation, and understanding that situation is a task rather than a burden. The book contrasts a Mediterranean culture of impressions with a Germanic culture of concepts and finds in Cervantes’s novel a way to think Spain anew. The sentence on circumstance became the starting point of his later philosophy of life and, through José Gaos, of the Mexican reflection on one’s own circumstance.

More works by José Ortega y Gasset

• 1923The Modern Theme
• 1930The Revolt of the Masses