Customer Reviews

Man & People

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I would rate this book as Ortega y Gasset's best, even better than his celebrated masterpiece 'The Revolt of the Masses'.

This book was supposed to be volume one of a two-part treatise on sociology that never got completed. It draws heavily from Husserl's phenomenology and is one of the earliest attempts at a phenomenological sociology. Ortegay y Gasset seeks to answer the question 'Why man needed society?' His analysis resonates with that of George Herbert Mead in some resepcts.

He proceeds by reflecting on the relationship between self and others, and the mystery of the human need for other human beings. He offers numerous phenomenological arguments to explain why society is needed and why our consciousness presupposes others.

Particularly brilliant are his observations on the psychology of handshake (Why does a person feel awkward if he/she gets a lukewarm handshake?), interpretation of eye gaze (What makes a certain gaze so alluring and tempting?) and animal anxiety.

He rests his argument for society by reflecting on animal anxiety which is too pre-occupied with danger to be able to concentrate. Animals therefore cannot develop society or have higher mental functions. It is the leisure of human beings and their freedom from such anxiety that makes civilization possible. And it is society that reduces anxiety to allow human beings their 'mindspace'.

I quote from this book:

"The instant we see a woman, we seem to have before us a being whose inward humanity is characterized, in contrast to our own male humanity and that of other men, by being essentially confused." (p. 130)

"Confusion is not a defect in woman, any more than it is a defect in man not to have wings." (p. 130)

"[I]t does not make sense to want woman to stop being "substantially" confused. This would amount to destroying the delight that woman is to man by virtue of her confused being." (p. 130)

"For by virtue of it [weakness], woman makes us happy and is happy in herself, is happy in feeling that she is weak." (p. 135) [last 12 words in italics in the book]

"Indeed, only a being inferior to man can radically affirm his basic being" (p. 135)

The world will never look the same once you have read this book. A wonderful study in social philosophy!