FRIDAY SURPRISE: It's metaphysics time!

Friday, November 16, 2007 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Things I like, Hunting
When I was in college, it was fashionable amongst a certain segment of the student population to walk around carrying a copy of the New York Review Of Books. The aim, of course, was to appear worldly and sophisticated to people who recognized the title, but didn't themselves read it.

The great secret was that very few of the people carrying the NYROB around, treating it as an icon of sophistication, ever actually read the thing either!

Many people buy copies of Musashi and Sun-Tzu which they never read, but which certainly look good on their bookshelves and serve to create a certain image. It helps, of course, when people quote common passages from Art of War or Book of Five RIngs without ever having read them in their actual context.

So it is with Meditations on Hunting by Jose Ortega y Gasset. It has been called "the most quoted work in sporting literature", but it appears that no one has ever actually read the thing!

Allow me to digress for a moment. My own hunting experiences are relatively few compared to many who read this blog. Though my father hunted, and I accompanied him at times, it was always a subsistence kind of affair: he hunted because we needed the meat. He would go out, get his deer (or elk), and that would be the end of it. He never took pictures of his kills nor kept trophies; hunting was a means to an end (to eat) rather than an end in itself.

As an adult, I wrestle with this. I don't need to hunt, meat being readily available otherwise, and so have chosen not to (save for necessary agricultural activities, such as pest and predator control, which aren't really hunting.) Despite this self-defined comfort, there has always been a gnawing at the back of my mind: what am I missing? Did my father derive anything other than protein from his hunts; was there something more profound at work? (That my father always hunted solo, eschewing the elk camp and its beer-fueled antics, left me suspecting that there might be.)

I wanted clarity on the subject, and thought that Ortega might be able to provide it. Color me surprised when I could find no one, even seasoned and experienced hunters of my acquaintance, who owned a copy. Our library system, which spans the largest city in Oregon to the most backwood hamlet, did not list it in their holdings. How odd! Such an important work, well known and oft-mentioned, yet no one seemed to have actually encountered it.

So, when the Second Edition of the Wescott translation of Meditations recently came out, I availed myself of free shipping on Amazon and ordered it. Finally I would get to see what all the fuss was about!

The book springs from Ortega's contention that life comes to us (or we to it) essentially empty, and it derives whatever meaning it has from the choices that we make relative to each situation in which we find ourselves. To Ortega, life really exists at the boundary of man and his surroundings, those surroundings to include our own thoughts and feelings. Hunting is such an interaction, and creates meaning by virtue of what it requires of the hunter.

The chase, the stalk, and yes the kill, all have great importance to the experience; missing any one negates the hunt's meaning. Ortega contends that the tension created by the sequence is an essential part of the experience, and without the unease created by the death of the animal that sequence becomes a farce, devoid of any meaning. This is the genesis of his most famous quote: "one does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted." Do not, though, assume that quote to be a substitute for the book - there is far more contained in that simple statement than is readily apparent, for it only hints at Ortega's complete philosophy.

(Like the poseurs I mentioned at the top, walking around with the NYROB poking out of their pocket, the passage is often intoned by those who have never read it in context. Having now digested his whole treatment of the subject, the statement by itself seems a caricature.)

It's important to understand that Meditations isn't about hunting as much as it is about man's relationship to the hunt. Remember that Ortega was a philosopher by training and occupation, holding a doctorate in the subject and chairing departments at Spanish universities. Thus, he's not a hunter who waxes a bit philosophic, but a serious philosopher who looks at the act of the hunt and reconciles it with his overall point of view.

As philosophers go, Ortega is surprisingly readable. Make no mistake, though - if you hated studying philosophy in school, Meditations may not be your cup of tea. It isn't about shooting deer, but about allowing the mind to learn more about itself. It requires introspection, an ability to deal in concepts rather than kinesthetics, and thus may turn off some people. However, his work is illuminating enough - even for the average person - to make it worth the effort.

I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of Meditations on Hunting and take whatever length of time you need to digest what Ortega wrote. I think that you'll come away with a better understanding of yourself, and a clearer picture of why you choose - or not, as the case may be - to hunt.

-=[ Grant ]=-

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