Gasset writes about the nature of man in the age of modernity and how he can never free himself from the chains of history. He begins, “Man cannot take a single step without anticipating more or less clearly his entire future, what he is going to be; that is, what he has decided to be throughout his life. But this means that man, who is always obliged to do something in the circumstances that surround him, has in deciding what he is going to do no other course than to pose to himself the problem of his own individual being…. For when each one of us asks himself what he is going to be, and therefore what his life is going to be, he has no choice but to face the problem of man’s being, of what it is that man in general can be and what is it that he must be.” Man cannot help but be embedded within the particular milieu in which he happens to be born. “Life is not solely man, that is to say, the subject which lives. It is also the drama which arises when the subject finds himself obliged to fling his arms about, to swim shipwrecked in that sea which is the world. History, then, is not primarily the psychology of man, but the refashioning of the structure of that drama which flares between man and the world.”
History is lived subjectively by each individual, but it is also experienced simultaneously and similarly by each age cohort within society. “Contemporaries are not coevals. In history it is important to distinguish between that which is contemporary and that which is coeval…. This is what I usually call the essential anachronism of history. Thanks to the internal disequilibrium, it moves, changes, wheels, and flows.” It matters if one experiences an historic event when a man is a baby, in the prime of his years, or in his dotage. Coevals live the same factual events in a more similar reality. Man cannot escape his age. “At any given moment man lives in a world of convictions, the greater part of which are the convictions common to all men who dwell together in their era. This spirit of the times we have called the world “in force,” the ruling world, in order to show that it has not only the reality which our conviction lends to it, but also that it imposes itself upon us, whether we like it or not, as the most important ingredient in our surroundings. Just as man finds himself encased within the body which has fallen to him by chance and must live in it and with it, so he finds himself with the ideas of his time, and in them and with them—even though it be in the peculiar fashion of contending against them—must he live.”
Gasset begins to tackle the problems embedded within the twin concepts of modernity and scientific knowledge. “Only theology and philosophy are creators of faith on their own account…. Life is different from the perspective of science. During the modern age, the two have been confused: this very confusion is the modern age. In it man makes science, pure reason, serve as a basis for the system of his convictions. He lives on science…. To confuse the perspective of science with the perspective of life has its inconveniences, that it creates a false perspective, just as did the acceptance of the religious, the theological, perspective as the vital perspective. We will see that life does not tolerate being supplanted either by revealed faith or by pure reason.” In modernity, man is seen through the lens of a scientific species, not as a living individual. “Human life is not more nor less real, it does not cease to have its own exclusive character merely because it happens to be illustrious or mediocre.”
Gasset contends that we have reached the epoch where modernity is gripped in crisis. “An historical crisis occurs when the world change which is produced consists in this: the world, the system of convictions belonging to a previous generation, gives way to a vital state in which man remains without these convictions, and therefore without a world. Man returns to a state of not knowing what to do, for the reason that he returns to a state of actually not knowing what to think about the world…. One does not know what new thing to think—one only knows, or thinks he knows, that the traditional norms and ideas are false and inadmissible. One feels a profound disdain for everything, or almost everything, which was believed yesterday; but the truth is that there are no new positive beliefs with which to replace the traditional ones…. During periods of crisis, positions which are false or feigned are very common. Entire generations falsify themselves to themselves; that is to say, they wrap themselves up in artistic styles, in doctrines, in political movements which are insincere and which fill the lack of genuine convictions.” Man lives outside himself. “We have abandoned ourselves to other people and we live in a state of otherness, constantly deceiving and defrauding ourselves. We are afraid of our own life, which is synonymous with solitude, and we flee from it, from its genuine reality, from the effort it demands; we hide our own selves behind the selves of other people, we disguise ourselves behind society…. Culture is only the interpretation which man gives to his life, the series of more or less satisfactory solutions which he invents in order to handle his problems and the needs of his life.”
Modern man is lost in a sea of technical knowledge. He is so smart that he knows nothing. “The man who knows many things, the cultivated man, runs the risk of losing himself in the jungle of his own knowledge; and he ends up by not knowing what his own genuine knowledge is. We do not have to look very far; this is what happens to the modern average man. He has received so many thoughts that he does not know which of them are those that he actually thinks, those he believes; and he becomes used to living on pseudo-beliefs, on commonplaces which at times are most ingenious and most intellectual, but which falsify his own existence.” Crisis breeds this homogenization. “It is strange that all historical crises produce at the start an age of uniformity, in which everything has in it a little bit of everything, and nothing is boldly and solely something specific and definite.” Society sinks to the lowest common denominator. “The man who despairs of culture turns against it and declares its laws and its norms to be worn out and abolished. The mass man who in these days takes on the directing of life feels himself deeply flattered by this declaration, because culture which is, after all, an authentic imperative, weighs on him too heavily; and in that abolition of culture he sees a permit to kick up his heels, get out himself, and give himself over to a life of licentiousness.”
Man in crisis is always prone to conversion. “Given this mode of life characterized by instability, extremism, controversy, the sudden and complete shifts which are called conversion will be very frequent. Conversion is man’s change not from one idea to another, but from one definite point of view to its exact opposite: life suddenly seems to us turned upside down and inside out. That which yesterday we were burning at the stake we adore today…. Deny what you were up to this very moment and affirm your truth, recognize that you are lost. Out of this negation comes the new man who is to be constructed…. Metanoia, or conversion and repentance, is therefore none other than what I call ensimismamiento—withdrawal into one’s self, return to oneself.”
However, man can never escape from history, even modern man, despite his best attempts. “Man is never original man, the first to arrive on the scene, but always a successor, an inheritor, a son of the human past.” History, and therefore man, moves forward and back again in fits and starts. “The historic reality, the human destiny, advances dialectically, although that basic dialectic of life is not, as Hegel believed, a conceptual dialectic composed of pure reason, but the dialectic of a reason much broader, deeper, and richer than pure reason—the dialectic of life, of living reason.” This is not what modern man wishes to hear. “The modern believes that he can suppress realities and build the world to his liking in the name of an idea.”
