“Tell Me What You Pay Attention to and I Will Tell You Who You Are.” †Jose Ortega Y Gasset free essay sample

I also like other quotes by Ortega y Gasset like: â€Å"Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality, the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else†, but I decided to write about the quote mentioned above because along my childhood my mother always pointed out to me that people will judge me for my friends, my looks, for what clothes I will wear, for what I read, I say or do, in conclusion, for everything. As the years goes on, I found out this sad truth and how people can very easy judge us for a dress or what car we drive or worse, for what college we attend to and what friends we choose to have by our side. What Jose Ortega y Gasset wanted to say is that if you know what a person reads, listens to and watches, you can make a more than educated guess about his political leanings, I say political leanings because when Ortega y Gasset said this quote Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and dictatorship, religious bent, educational background and to a certain extent, his intelligence. We will write a custom essay sample on â€Å"Tell Me What You Pay Attention to and I Will Tell You Who You Are.† – Jose Ortega Y Gasset or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page I agree with the part that say’s that we can guess the intelligence. We can difference a person with a high IQ by the language that person use, by his results at school, by the places he likes to go: opera, library’s, bookshops, by the book’s he reads and the theme the book has, like: philosophical or psychological themes, about history or science and the list can go on. I also agree with the idea that you can define some features of somebody’s personality by knowing what they read, listen, what kind of clothes they wear, what places they frequent, but I don’t agree with the fact that we can define that person, because we can’t, we can only put them in some kind of category, class or section that everyone of us have our own, I have my way of classing people and seeing things and others have their way. To maintain my idea I will give an example. In my first year of studying psychology I have a teacher that I loved very much, she was young, very agreeable and open to us and her teaching was perfect, at classes she was dressed formal, but in her personal life she was the rock type kind of girl and with â€Å"rock type† I’m talking about her clothes and the type of music she listen to; she has tattoo’s all over her back. What I am trying to say is that if someone saw her, with her rock looks and style and the tattoo’s all over her back will, maybe, say what the majority thinks about people who listen and adopt the rock style, that she is a â€Å"trashy† person, that she maybe don’t take showers very often and that she is a weird person, listening to weird music with a low interest to culture, art, school/studies. A few will think positively about her and her career, but that’s the way the majority of us people think nowadays and it’s a sad and also wrong way of seeing things. Of course, from my example I can deduce that the person who is putting this â€Å"label† on my teacher without knowing her in person is a superficial person. I say superficial because, based on what Jose Ortega y Gasset says in his quote: â€Å"tell me what you pay attention to†¦ † the person who thinks wrong about my teacher is paying attention to her looks, what she is wearing, what clothes and footwear she has and when someone is so interested in the appearance and classes people by the clothing that people are for sure superficial and shallow. Shallow is the feature that means judging a person based strictly on looks, not factoring in their personality whatsoever. So if you pay attention to looks, you are shallow and superficial, if you pay attention to what car a person drives, what label has his clothes, what mansion he haves, you are a materialist person, this means that you are chiefly interested in material comfort and you are hostile or indifferent to art and culture, a materialist knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, if you pay attention to others needs, if you jump to help them, if you make friends easily, you are a warm and pleasing person, who is very agreeable and wanted around. If you prefer buying books instead of clothes or making a gift a book for a friend and you like going to the cinema to see a lot of movies, if you like going to museums or at the opera to see theatre or ballet, this means your attention is going to art and culture, if your attention goes to reading news papers and watch the news on television or if you belong to a political organization, then your interests goes to political leanings, you like to be well informed about your country and what is happening in the world. If your attention goes to helping poor people, going to the church, volunteering at hospitals or at orphanages and doing good stuff for people in pain, hurt, need, you are a compassionate, softhearted and humble person, marked by meekness or modesty in behavior, attitude or spirit. If you like speed (when you are driving), riding a motorcycle, action games and movies, extreme sports, you are an adventure person with no fear and in love with adrenaline, you are a perfect person to go in a vacation in the mountains and make good memories and have fun with. If your interests and attention are for experiments, science, chemical substances and reactions, nature, explaining some reactions or things that happens in the world, like global warming or some kind of nature hazards, like tsunami or hurricanes, then you are a science person, interested in theories and how the world and nature works. The list can go on with many other examples, the important thing is that knowing our interests and what are we paying attention to is how we can class a person or why not, judge someone. We can guess very easy what kind of education that person has and how intelligent she or he is, but we can never know how the person really feels inside, or what kind of heart he or she has, we can only presume or speculate about the feelings the person has and his capacity to love and care about others but we can never tell for sure until we really get to know the person close and spend time with. My grandmother has a word: â€Å"you can’t know a person in a lifetime† so it’s difficult to make a image about a person just based on some simple attentions and going by appearances, you have to want to know a person deeply and give your time and interest for this so you can finally know who he really is. However is not so bad to make predictions on a person’s character and interests, in fact, these predictions are indicated if you ask me, because in this way we can choose if that someone is good for us to have in our life. In all kind of relationships we are looking and seeking for compatibility, to have similar thoughts, to want and dream at the same things, to have the same expectations, habits so we can do things together and have fun, so we can have discussions, future plans and have a person who we know in what situation we can count on and when not. In conclusion, we can’t tell for sure how a person is, but by seeing or knowing their tastes and interests in very much everything, from books, music to clothes, art, science, we can make a image of what that person is and how intelligent, educated, kindhearted, bad/evil he is or not. Sometimes, as I said above, that image can be wrong or half true, but we can built a idea about that person and we can see if we are compatible for friendships or relationships, we can choose if we want that person to be by our side or ignore them according to their attentions or comparing them to our own. Jorz Janett-Sorina Universitatea de Vest Timisoara Facultatea de Sociologie si psihologie An II, semestrul I, grupa I