Abstract

Carlos Astrada’s early thought is characterized by a fundamental concern: the possibility, for human beings, of establishing new “ideals” and “values” capable of supplanting the old, capitalist ones. The aim of this article is to identify the different scopes of Astrada’s concept of ideal. In the first section, some bases to consider the philosophy of life underlying the Astradian theoretical proposals are established. The article will thereafter be divided into three other sections, which follow the chronology of Astrada’s works. In the first part, the “ideal” is conceptually treated as an operative element in history, for which it is considered to what extent Jean-Marie Guyau would have influenced Astrada’s thought, something neglected by the existing literature. The second part deals with the relationship between the concepts of “ideal” and “life”. It will be shown how Astrada aimed to challenge the “idealist” and “empiricist” positions, which he considers equally unilateral to elaborate an ethics according to “the new times”. Astrada would have looked for an “intermediate position” between both perspectives, i.e., what he called “vital synthesis”. This could have been possible thanks to a philosophical dialogue with Georg Simmel, Manuel García Morente, José Ortega y Gasset, and Oswald Spengler. In the third part, the ideal is analyzed as an element capable of giving a guiding sense to the growing accumulation of human activities, marked by specialization, in an operation that can be interpreted under the romantic key of “recovering” the Totality. For this, the philosophical dialogue that Astrada had with both Georg Simmel and Rudolf Eucken is analyzed.