Ortega’s Exiles

Ortega was exiled for 10 years, after leaving Madrid in the first months of the Spanish Civil War. Besides the immediate reason of his escape from Spain—the fear of being arrested by the Republican Government—Ortega’s exile may be linked to his overall view of the failure of a liberal program for Spain, i.e., a program that would respect the autonomy of the individual regarding state power. While the French exile was unimportant from a philosophical point of view—due to its brevity and the poor health conditions of Ortega at the time—the Argentinian and Portuguese exiles were much more fruitful. Important Lectures in Buenos Aires and Lisbon were made about the concept of historical reason. The first drafts of the future (and only posthumously published) book El Hombre y la Gente were written during this epoch. One of the most important of Ortega’s writings, also posthumously published, La Idea de Principio en Leibniz, was began in his Lisbon exile. The chapter will end with an examination of Ortega’s conference on the theater, held in Lisbon in 1946, some months before his return to Spain. We will show that Ortega addressed the theme of this conference as a means to extend the phenomenological method beyond its original domains.