Work of man

Life is work, and the truth of life, that is, the authentic life of each one, will consist in doing what has to be done and avoiding doing anything.

For me, a man is worth to the extent that the series of his actions is necessary and not capricious, but this is the difficulty of success.

A repertoire of actions that others have already executed is usually presented to us as necessary and comes to us under the aura of one or another consecration. This encourages us to be unfaithful with our authentic work, which is always irreducible to that of others.

True life is inexorably invention. We have to invent our own existence and at the same time this invention cannot be capricious. The word invent recovers here its etymological intention of finding. We have to find, to discover the necessary trajectory of our life, which only then will be truly ours, and not someone else's, or no one's, as is that of the frivolous.

How do you solve such a difficult problem? For me there has never been any doubt about it. We find ourselves like a poet who is given a forced foot. This forced foot is the circumstance. We always live in a unique and unavoidable circumstance, she is the one who marks us with an ideal profile what to do.

I have tried this in my work. I have accepted the circumstance of my nation and my time.

Spain suffered and suffers from an intellectual deficit. He had lost the skill in handling concepts, which are, neither more nor less, the instruments with which we walk between things. It was necessary to teach her to confront [sic] reality and transmute it into thought with the least possible loss. It is, therefore, about something broader than Science. Science is just one manifestation among many of the human capacity to react intellectually to reality.

Now, this trial of intellectual learning had to be done where the Spanish was: in the friendly chat, in the newspaper, at the conference. And it was necessary to attract him to the exactness of the idea with the grace of the twist. In Spain, to persuade, it is necessary to first seduce.

Texto leído por Ortega y Gasset para la colección "Archivo de la Palabra", en el Centro de Estudios Históricos de Madrid (1931-1933).