The Modern Theme

Introduction

“The Modern Theme” grew out of Ortega’s university lectures of 1921–22 and appeared as a book in 1923. It argues that the task of the time is to overcome the opposition between rationalism, which sacrifices life to abstract reason, and relativism, which gives up truth for the sake of life. Reason must be understood as a function of life, a “vital reason”, and culture should serve life rather than the reverse. The doctrine of the point of view gives the book its best-known thesis: reality can be seen only from individual perspectives, each of which grasps something true, and error lies in taking one perspective for the whole. An appendix reads Einstein’s theory of relativity as an example of this perspectivism. The book was soon translated into German and English and made Ortega’s perspectivism widely known.

More works by José Ortega y Gasset

• 1914Meditations on Quixote
• 1930The Revolt of the Masses