Saving Europe in Spain: José Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Quixote and the politics of self, nation and Europe

Abstract

This article examines the Spanish and German contexts of philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s Europeanizing cultural mission before the First World War, culminating in his first published book Meditations on Quixote (1914). Ortega saw in the genius of Cervantes’ Don Quixote both a source of latent European cultural ideals preserved in Spain’s past and an exemplar of tragicomic heroism fit to defend these ideals in the face of twentieth-century modernity. Using Georg Simmel’s concept of ‘the tragedy of culture’ as a way to give shape to the problem of decadence and the idea of cultural salvation in Spain and Europe in and around 1914, I show how Ortega seized on the German ideal of Bildung as the European cultural ideal to regenerate Spain, after which Spain would save Europe. Here the idea of Europe served as both the vehicle and the aim of cultural salvation. By analysing Ortega’s project of overcoming decadence and saving culture in the decade leading up to the war, I show how the discourse of European identity took shape in relation to the search for the authentic identities of self and nation.