Ortega y Gasset V, Happiness and Freedom

Ortega has followed two trails. The success of his argument depends on his ability to make them coincide. We can define each trail by its endpoints. One trail leads from Nature to History; the other trail leads from the laborious chores and jobs to the pleasing. On Ortega’s telling Nature and the pleasing coincide with one another. [actually, I don't think this is quite right, but I've got to go back to re-read to get the right nuance.] Likewise, history and the laborious designate the same destination.

This is a surprising move. Philosophers working in the wake of Hegel see humans moving from forced labor toward freedom, and this is a steady move forward. In hunting Ortega sees humans moving from forced labor to happiness, and this move is a reversal back to Nature. He makes this move in the following paragraph:

“All this indicates that man, painfully submerged in his work or obligatory occupations, projects beyond them, imagines another kind of life consisting of very different occupations, in the execution of which he would not feel as if he were losing time, but, on the contrary, gaining it, filling it satisfactorily and as it should be filled. Opposite a life which annihilates itself and fails – a life of work – he erects the plan of a life successful in itself – a life of delight and happiness” (p. 37).

This last phrase, “a life of delight and happiness,” marks the precise place where we would have expected to read “a life of freedom and liberty.” But Ortega is convinced the hunter is looking back and not forward, that he is looking for happiness and not going deeper into history and toward freedom.

Ortega y Gasset IV, Internal goods, attention

In his analysis of hunting, Ortega picks up on this distinction between actions done for their own sake (“the pleasing”) and those which lead us to external goods (“the laborious”). The dichotomy defines human life: “So here is the human being suspended between two conflicting repertories of occupations: the laborious and the pleasing.” (p. 37). This distinction, and not the distinction between “difficult and easy,” leads the philosopher to the heart of the human action: “Happy occupations, it is clear, are not merely pleasures; they are efforts, and real sports are effort. It is not possible, then, to distinguish work from sport by a plus or minus in fatigue. The difference is that sport is an effort made completely freely, for the pure enjoyment of it, while work is an obligatory effort made with an eye to the profit” (p. 42).

Now we can hunt either as work or sport. We do not violate the act of hunting if we do it for one or the other of these purposes. However, after the Paleolithic era, once humans developed agriculture and no longer had to hunt, humans continued to hunt. Aristocrats hunt, and the working masses fight for the privilege of hunting. Dick Cheney hunts, and Tred Barta hunts. We hunt in pursuit of happiness. We hunt in order to hunt.

Like Pieper’s description of festivity, the activity of hunting itself can transform our usual habits of attention. Usually, “[o]ur attention, which is what aims our vision, seizes on that spot on the horizon because we are persuaded that what interests us will appear there. This attention to the preconceived is equivalent to being absorbed in one point of the visible area and not paying attention to the other points.” However, “[t]he hunter’s look and attention are completely opposite to this. … Thus, he needs to prepare an attention of a different and superior style – an attention which does not consist in riveting itself on the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness. It is a ‘universal’ attention, which does not inscribe itself on any point and tries to be on all points. There is a magnificent term for this, one that still conserves all its zest of vivacity and imminence: alertness. The hunter is the alert man” (p. 138).