Ortega y Gasset's Initial Vision of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies - October 26, 1949

A note I shared yesterday with my colleagues on the 75th anniversary of our first strategic vision. Photos: José Ortega y Gasset in Aspen, CO, July 1949 (left, lecturing, with Thorton Wilder giving the simultaneous translation).

Dear Colleagues,

Seventy-five years ago this week marks the sketch of our first strategic vision. The draft originated not in Chicago, New York, Washington, DC, or even Aspen, but in Madrid. The author: Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset. Ortega had traveled to Aspen—by steamer, train, and car—in the summer of 1949 to speak at the International Goethe Bicentennial. The most prominent speaker after Albert Schweitzer, Ortega gave two lectures: the first written on the transatlantic crossing, the second written on the spot in Aspen. The gathering energized Ortega. The Bicentennial’s organizer, Walter Paepcke, noted the enthusiasm.

After the mountain summer had said goodbye to the thousands that had gathered, Paepcke wrote to Ortega from Chicago. Given the success of the gathering, Paepcke asked Ortega, would you join us in a brash experiment and help us found Aspen University? On October 26, Ortega wrote his reply: “As I give myself wholeheartedly to whatever I am doing—it is the only way to do things well and be oneself completely—I abandoned myself entirely to Aspen during those two wonderful weeks I spent there; that is, I absorbed that atmosphere to the very marrow of my bones.” He also issued a caution to Paepcke. You do not want to found a university, but something like what I have just founded in Madrid: an Instituto de Humanidades, an institute for humanistic studies. Why?

First, Ortega observed, universities thrive on narrow specialization. If the problems we face are fundamentally human problems, no one discipline is sufficient to address them. This school for humanistic studies should thus aim at synthesized rather than specialized knowledge. Second, universities—especially American universities—emphasize the material and technical disciplines, rather than the humanistic ones. Universities encourage silos of knowledge; professions foster silos of action. A school for humanistic studies should provide a balance to the narrow practical and transactional tendencies of American culture. It should focus on “the art of living.”

Modern people, Ortega noted, are constantly on the move and thus inattentive to what is around them. We are easily distracted because the “industrial technique has flooded the market with wonderful objects.” Consequently, we are oriented too much toward our own material comfort to the neglect of the moral and spiritual condition of ourselves and others. It is “desirable and essential” that the “human individual, free from material hindrances, can…allow his inner self to live intensely and give himself fully to thinking, imagining, loving and feeling.”

The school for the humanities should contest the modern impulse to live in and through objects rather than people:

I think I can be understood if I say that in my opinion the American handles too many objects. The circle of his personal life is too much taken up by implements, devices, gadgets. During my trip to the States I had the impression that the American runs the risk of getting lost in objects, of living on and in objects. For it is not a question only of their handling and taking care of them but of worrying excessively about them, desiring them, getting excited about them, being obsessed with their production and acquisition, sacrificing for their sake too much of oneself, of one’s excitement, imagination, attention, energy. [ital in original]

Too often, Ortega argues in his second summer lecture, we avoid ourselves because we fill our lives with “the system of our occupations—the serious ones as well as the frivolous.” Where does one go “to clash with the difficulty of being?” Where do we go to understand the world, each other, and ourselves—our flourishing, and our responsibilities to ourselves and the world?

It is easier, Ortega observed, to escape the lure of objects and occupations by removing ourselves from an urban setting. Aspen’s location, according to Ortega, combined the best of Athens (the life of the mind, of spirit, of nature, of music and culture) with the best of Sparta (the physical austerity of the valley and the town). Basic needs were met, but not excessively; the Hotel Jerome had yet to be rebuilt, and speakers and audience alike were put up in local homes. Our basic material needs must be met, Ortega affirms, but excessive comfort is a liability to the human soul—Aspen should be an antidote to materialism and consumerism. The worst thing that could happen for Paepcke’s educational project, Ortega says in so many words, would be for the town of Aspen to be taken over by luxury hotels.

Caution, then, and enthusiasm. No to a university, but yes to an institute for humanistic studies focused on an integrative approach to the human and social challenges we face. No to excessive material comfort, but yes to the physical beauty that unleashes the vitality of learning and social living. What, then, are the concrete elements of the strategic vision?

·?????? Courses and seminars: Ortega includes broadly humanistic studies, as well as the sharing of scientific (in the widest sense) knowledge, in smaller groups of peers.

·?????? Lectures: Ortega notes the value of prominent thinkers being forced to make their ideas accessible and “students” being exposed to powerful minds and exemplary character as they struggle with human problems in real time.

·?????? A library: a body of material, not too extensive, as a resource for confronting, holistically, contemporary human and social challenges.

·?????? A physical space: enough to hold a thousand people at once, terraced so that all can see the others, and where attendees can move freely, dine together, and encounter one another. Ortega stresses that such a unique architecture is “vital” to the educational project and ventures further to imagine that activities might include physical exercise, and perhaps even labor on local ranches, the maintenance of hiking trails, and the like.

The key structural elements are not unlike our seminars, policy convenings, and public programs of today, set as they often are in a campus nested in extraordinary natural beauty. And while we do not today have a library as such, we have produced over many decades a substantial repository of knowledge.

These elements, Ortega says, contribute to an atmosphere of humane learning and social living, of intellectual precision and practical application. “The subject matter of such courses, lectures and seminars should be extremely lively, deeply human, and should be of interest to the general public even if they must be treated with all scientific rigor.” Expertise should be accessible; the learning should be humane. The institute in Aspen should be a world apart from the world, a place where the human spirit could flourish, not as an indulgence, but so that it can return to practical affairs revitalized, more knowledgeable, and wiser in its choices.

For whom? Ortega imagines an audience primarily of Americans, especially “young people…a group of the leading minority who later on will be called to influence all walks of American life.” Above all, the audience should comprise people of different viewpoints, convictions, and life experiences who are broadly able to engage with one another through dialogue. The learning Ortega envisages emerges from the clash of ideas rather than the celebratory reinforcement of a status quo. The result might be a rising generation of leaders oriented toward a stronger, more supple social fabric in which the material economy was rooted in a moral ecology.

I have not seen a record of Paepcke’s reaction to Ortega’s letter. Nor do I mean to imply that our institution has followed a strategically coherent path! In early December, 1949, Paepcke incorporated “Aspen University.” Three weeks later, we were reincorporated as “The Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies”, a title we retained until 1989.

The elements and ethos of Ortega’s vision are striking and worthy of our continued reflection. He saw his work in Madrid, and his contribution to Paepcke’s work in Aspen, as a vital challenge to established orders, a distrust of cultural homogeneity and of oppressive elites, a rejection of the hyper-materialism made possible by the worship of the machine, and a belief in the power of humane learning to dignify everyone.

In his Meditations on Quixote, Ortega famously observed: ?Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo. “I am I and my circumstance, and if I cannot save it I cannot save myself.” Thought and action are a process of discovery; in wrestling with our circumstance we wrestle with ourselves, and vice versa. We cannot separate our responsibilities to ourselves from our responsibilities to the world.

Aspen, Ortega suggests 75 years ago, could be a place to explore those responsibilities through learning and human encounter rooted in the clash of ideas and experiences—challenging and creative dialogue set beneath the austerity of smiling green hills and frozen peaks. Life is not unlike that bumpy ride on the winding, uphill dirt road from the Glenwood Springs train station to Aspen which Ortega took in June 1949. Seventy-five years later, we continue that winding, bumpy journey with perhaps a clearer vision, stronger resolve, and an even bolder set of aspirations.