Regarding dreaming

The Spectator II, 1917. Complete Works, II, page 143.

“...we must learn to respect the rights of dreaming and to consider it as one of the essential and essential bundles of life”

Prologue to “From Francesca to Beatrice”, 1924. Complete Works, III, pages 325-326.

“The ideal is an organ of all life in charge of exciting it. Like the ancient gentlemen, life, madam, uses a spur. (...) Sometimes we suffer from a vital decline that does not come from illness in our body or in our soul, but from poor hygiene in ideals. [The latter connects with the concept of demoralization]

With this we come to the following conclusion: for something to be an ideal, it is not enough for it to be worthy of it for reasons of ethics, taste or convenience, but rather it must have, in effect, that gift of charming and attracting our nerves, of fit perfectly into our sensibilities. Otherwise, it will only be a ghost of an ideal, a paralytic ideal incapable of tending the crossbow of momentum. [Links with the simile of the Aristotelian archer] Of the two faces that the ideal has, so far only the one that faces the absolute has been attended to and the other has been forgotten, the one that faces the interior of the vital economy. With the most vulgar word of "derams" we usually express that attractive ministry that is the essence of the ideal" [This is how the concept of deraming is perfectly defined as the experience of an authentic ideal]

[In this same text, Ortega exposes an important and “politically incorrect” part of his ethical theory: the fundamental moral role of women as inspiration and generator of dreams, of vital ideals. It does not say that the role of women is reduced to this – she can be everything she wants and can – but that, as a woman, her mission is to contribute to the development of a fit life around her. It is a controversial issue, which will irritate many feminists, but Ortega was clear and insisted on the matter.]

Galapagos, the end of the world, 1927. Complete Works, III, page 527.

“I do not believe much in the obligation, as Kant believed; I expect everything from the enthusiasm. A dream is always more fruitful than a duty. (Perhaps the role of obligation or duty is subsidiary; they are needed to fill the gaps of dreaming and enthusiasm). For Europe today, the great question is not a new system of duties, but a new program of appetites.”

Meditation of our time, Conferences of Buenos Aires, 1928. ed. FCE, pages 201-205 (Not included in the Complete Works)

“There is therefore no escape from the radical condition of life [life as concern] and the best thing is to accept it happily, to recognize that with it we are given the theme for a creation. It is sad to think how much existence could be beautiful, full, graceful, with just the thumb stroke that represents this imperative to worry, to see one's own life as a possible work of art! The favorable or adverse situation does not matter, because the beauty of life is not in its argument but in the grace and fervor that informs it.

[...] our life is made up of two ingredients that fight each other: it is first of all the future that in one way or another is always presented to us open to our freedom, and as depending on our choice. This choice emanates from desires, desires or ideals that exist in us. Secondly, the present where we have to realize that future. The present is our fatality, it surrounds us and envelops us with its resistant structure and limits the horizon of our dreams at all times.

Hence we should not value our neighbors for what they do. In the best case, everyone does what they can, what fate tolerates. Our esteem or rejection of each man of each woman must be fixed not on what he does but on what he aspires to, not on achievement but on desire. Our true and deep personality is made up of the desires, efforts, desires and desires. These are the vital springs that keep our soul tense and shape. The true being of each one is in the profile of their desires. We value according to what we want. The quality of our aspirations sets the rank of our soul because they are the pure and spontaneous emanation that rises from our intimacy like vapors from still waters.

Due to the optical error alluded to above, psychologists have not yet realized that psychology can only abandon the vague and abstract air in which it still moves, beginning by defining the pre-existing system of desires in each person. Everything else in it is there as a means and activity to satisfy those; it is therefore its consequence. But we naively continue to suffer from the mirage that makes us consider this satisfaction of desires as the most important and difficult thing, when in pure truth it is much more difficult than achieving them, supplying them. The primary function of the whole organism is the secretion of dreams, and nothing in the world is more difficult to invent than an ideal or a wish. During these convulsive last years that have brought so much change in fortunes and wherever they have favored the curious plant called "nouveau riche" it could be observed on a large scale that it is more difficult to desire than to satisfy. Finding himself suddenly in possession of large means, the nouveau riche finds himself in anguish because his appetites have not kept pace with him. He cannot create original desires and sticks to certain topical preferences. The "nouveau riche," in short, does nothing more than immediately buy himself a car, a player piano, and a gramophone. There is no doubt, it is a more difficult task than what is supposed to be improvising a wish. On the other hand, by a mysterious law it seems that the great desirers, the geniuses of desire, that is to say, the men of high fantasy and creative inspiration, have usually gone through their existence without the means to fulfill their wonderful appetites. In general, he who strongly desires it has money, but he who strongly desires money, the oven oeconomicus, does not know how to desire what to spend it on. Whereas Balzac, surrounded by misery and drunk with creation and coffee, invents new-style furniture in his novels that he will never have; the wealthy of the faubourg who read him order the furniture Balzac dreamed of from his cabinetmakers.

But it is not exactly this kind of desire that I have in mind when I say that each person is constituted above all by the profile of their dreams. These are only imaginary desires in which it is pretended or imagined to desire and that serve us only to stealthily escape for an instant from our daily existence. A pseudo-wish is that of the comptoir lady who, back in Europe, would like to be a duchess. When someone, in fact, deeply desires it, it is not too difficult for them to obtain it. But usually the image of the duchess attracts the industrious little woman only because it is the other way than hers, because it is not her daily regimen. But it is the case that the duchess sometimes also wishes to be a miss de comptoir, because she needs, like her, to escape from herself with an effort of fantasy: and for the duchess being a duchess is, after all, one of the daily forms that existence takes. .

The desires to which I allude come from deeper zones in our being and, almost always, they possess and inundate us in such a way that we are not aware of them: they are life itself for us because they are what we have set our lives on as to a letter his fortune the player. Well, we all have our lives attached to one or several things and whatever we do and are, we are and we do in service of radical dedication. This, this is the profile of desires that defines us and that is always discovered against the light of our flesh, our physiognomy, and our gestures. We think we are dragging them into the deep secret of our intimacy when, strictly speaking, we are shouting at them just by presenting them. Well, superlative insight is not necessary to feel the first time we see another being, beyond his bodily face the face of his eagerness, to glimpse in the depths of his eyes the cards to which his life is set. In such a way is this so that it happens to us not only with man but with animals and even with every living being. A man who had never seen animals would of course behave differently in front of the lion, the sheep and the dog, and receives with different repercussions the image of the cypress and that of the rosebush.

The nobility or vileness of a soul shows clearly in its desires. And this is the same in the case of an individual, that of an entire era or an entire nation. I cannot enter Buenos Aires without immediately noticing that the porteño carries within himself or, rather, is carried by a repertoire of desires that are very different from those of the old man from Castile. This dynamic of dreaming acts on destiny and predetermines the history of a people in all orders and all directions, it is the a priori factor of its history. And the same thing happens within each age. Not to allude but in passing to a theme that I have developed in several places [see the Epilogue quote to "From Francesca to Beatrice" ] I will recall the enormous influence it has on what a nation will be in twenty years, whatever the type of man that women prefer today. What the domestic atmosphere will be like, what the body and soul of the children will be like, what the new generation will be like, and therefore the history to come, the world that is born Perhaps Shakespeare meant something like this in his famous saying: "We are of the same fabric as our dreams." [...]

But on the other hand, it is necessary to pay attention to what is not desire but imposition in this present, what is fatal in it. You have to learn to accept it to take advantage of it and correct it. There is no bad weather Wherever the plant of life knows how to flourish and bear fruit. Let us not complain, then, about reality and destiny. Instead of getting irritated against the insufficiency of life, against the wickedness or clumsiness of men, it should be noted that being, in the end, reality, it is only discreet to underline it with irony.

What is philosophy?, 1929. Complete Works, VII, page 436.

“I have always been repelled by the frequent character whom we constantly hear say that he believes in a duty to do this or that. I have rarely believed in duties during my life. I have lived it and I live it almost completely pushed by dreams, not by duties. What's more: the ethics that perhaps next year he will expose in a course before you [why didn't he do it?!] differs from all the traditional ones in that it does not consider duty as the primary idea in morality, but rather the dreaming. Duty is important but secondary - it is the substitute, the Ersatz, of dreaming. It is necessary that we do even out of duty what we should not do out of dreaming."

[Following this quote, Ortega announces that he will dedicate some articles to the serious responsibility of Spanish women in the state of prostration in which the country finds itself. Having said that, she goes on to deal with other matters and the announcement remains a bit enigmatic, since it does not explain what this responsibility consists of or what women and ethics have to do with it. I think Francesca's Afterword quote to Beatrice clarifies this point.]