Ortega y Gasset I -- History, Nature, Human Nature

Aldo Leopold agrees with Pascal in characterizing outdoor activities as a diversion. Fleeing to the out of doors is a fleeing from something. However, for Leopold, the diversion is not from unhappiness per se, nor from ourselves or our “condition.” Rather, we seek a contrast with mechanization and the factory (“Wildlife in American Culture,” p. 181), with crowding, polluted air, and the same old scenes (“Conservation Esthetic,” p. 171 -2). Outdoor recreation generally, and hunting in particular, offers freedom from modernity.

Jose Ortega y Gasset sounds a similar note. “This is the reason men hunt. When you are fed up with the trouble-some present, with being ‘very twentieth-century,’ you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain, and, without further ado, give yourself the pleasure during a few hours or a few days of being “Paleolithic” (p. 125).

As with Pascal, hunting reveals something of the human condition. But here hunting is not simply diversion because “diversion, usually indicates only comfortable situations, to the extent that, used carelessly, it connotes ways of life completely free of hardship, free of risk, not requiring great physical effort nor a great deal of concentration. But the occupation of hunting, as carried on by a good hunter, involves precisely all of those things…. Now this is a more serious matter. Diversion loses its passive character, its frivolous side, and becomes the height of activity.” (p. 30).

On the other hand, Ortega y Gasset appeals to a structurally similar account of human nature as revealed by this “active diversion.” According to Pascal, humans are a contradiction, hamstrung between their greatness and their misery; according to Ortega y Gasset, humans embody a sublimation, rising out of Nature into History.

In the realm of nature, there is no freedom. Everything is determined, if not by causal laws, then by the form of life. “The animal is given not only life, but also an invariable repertory of conduct. Without his own intervention, his instincts have already decided what he is going to do and what he is going to avoid. Therefore, it cannot be said that the animal occupies himself with one thing or another. His life has never been empty, undetermined.” The human too is an animal and so belongs to nature, and this is crucial to Ortega’s account.

However, the human is unique in that he “has lost his system of instincts or – which is the same thing – retains only instinctual stumps with residual elements incapable of imposing on him a plan of behavior” (p. 35). In one respect, this is freedom, and the human can “invent his own tasks or occupations.” It is the possibility of History, where new things might happen and where the human might remake himself or herself into something new. “Man is a fugitive from Nature. He escaped from it and began to make history, which is trying to realize the imaginary, the improbable, perhaps the impossible. History is always made against the grain of Nature” (p. 129).

Given this dichotomy between History and Nature, Ortega can situate the activity of hunting. Hunting is natural: “Hunting is not an exclusively human occupation, but occurs throughout almost the entire zoological scale…. The cat hunts rats. The lion hunts antelopes. The sphex and other wasps hunt caterpillars and grubs. The spider hunts flies. The shark hunts smaller fish. The bird of prey hunts rabbits and doves. Thus, hunting goes on throughout almost all of the animal kingdom. There is hardly a class or phylum in which groups of hunting animals do not appear. Hunting is, therefore, not even peculiar to animals” (p. 60).

That is, Nature itself contains differences of nature … differences of species or form. The cat and the rat; the falcon and the dove, the wasp and the caterpillar all differ in nature. But they also interlock with one another in an ecological system.

The hunt belongs to Nature because it is one of the primary ways that the different forms relate to one another. Ortega defines “Hunting” as “what an animal [though not only an animal] does to take possession, dead or alive, of some other being that belongs to a species basically inferior to its own” (p. 62). The hunt, then, acknowledges the difference of nature and the interrelations of nature established by Nature.

For humans to hunt, then, amounts to rebounding out of History and back into Nature. “The hunter is, at one and the same time, a man of today and one of ten thousand years ago. In hunting, the long process of universal history coils up and bites its own tail” (p. 127). Hunting is the diversion from History with Nature. “Man, projected by his inevitable progress away from his ancestral proximity to animals, vegetables, and minerals – in sum, to Nature – takes pleasure in the artificial return to it… (121). “It has always been at man’s disposal to escape from the present to that pristine form of being a man, which because it is the first form, has no historical suppositions. History begins with that form. Before it, there is only that which never changes: that which is permanent: Nature. ‘Natural’ man is always there, under the changeable historical man” (p. 125).