Sound Research WIKINDX

This book is a collection of translated essays by Ortega who died in 1955. The chapter An Essay in Esthetics by Way of a Preface (1914) on pp.139–149 has something about the work of art making it seem as if we can know what it is like to be another living object (in this case, a cypress tree) but this is fallacious: we can never know what it is like to be that cypress from the point of view of the cypress. This, from 1914, is a very anthropocentric opinion echoed later by the likes of Heidegger (1962) (can only understand the world through our own structures) and Nagel (Nagel 1974).