Background
D’Ors y Rovira, Eugenio was born in 1884 in Barcelona.
D’Ors y Rovira, Eugenio was born in 1884 in Barcelona.
Barcelona, Paris. Brussels, Heidelberg, Geneva and Munich.
Secretary General, Instituto d’Estudis Catalans, 1911. Professor of Science and History of Culture, Escuela Social, 1923. Perpetual Secretary. Instituto de España.
Professor of Science of Culture, University of Madrid, 1932. One of the most influential Spanish thinkers of this period.
In 1945 d’Ors remarks that every philosophy is governed by ‘a central and principal intuition' and this is certainly true of his own thought, at the centre of which is an unchanging vision of a universe which is dynamic, creative and irreducibly complex. The entities which compose the dorsian universe are interrelated in many ways, and often endowed with internal, germinal tensions. He sees everywhere a creative tension between that which is trying to express itself and an ambient medium which is resistant to this expression and so must be moulded if the expression is to come to fruition. This resistive tension, which he regards as beneficial, between will to expression and medium d'Ors calls dialectic, and its description forms one of the three major divisions of his thoughtThe other two correspond to the analysis of the will to expression and to the description of the resistive features of the universe. An important element in the Poética is the dorsian analysis of the self. Unsurprisingly in view of the profoundly dynamistic vision underlying d’Ors’s thought, he rejects the view that the self is an unchanging thing. The self is better regarded as a function characterized by a dynamic hunger for work and play. Moreover, the human soul includes in its constitution a directing principle which d'Ors calls an angel, and his works on the operations of these angels makes up a large part of his Poética. D'Ors’s irrefragible conviction of the dynamism and sheer complexity of what there is underlies his best-known doctrine concerning philosophy itself. It leads him not only to reject us oversimple all types of mechanistic thought and pragmatism, but also to insist that even vitalism, to which he was in many ways highly sympathetic, could not do justice to the richness °1 the rerum natura. Philosophy is in need of 'Keplerian reform’. It must have two key poles, not just one: philosophy must do justice not only to life, but also to the operations of the mind or spirit—hence the summary description of his thought as spiritualistic vital- 'sm. The aspect of the mind whose function it is to do justice to both d’Ors calls the intelligence, which he distinguishes sharply from reason. The latter operates mechanically, on the basis of the Principles of identity, excluded middle and noncontradiction. By contrast the intelligence, in order to do justice to the wealth of the universe, must adopt subtler principles, for example, that of necessary function’, according to which the world is organized not like a mechanism but like a harmonious syntax.