This talk attends to a rich but largely unexplored aesthetic discourse of the interwar period by highlighting some ideas of two representative participants. When José Ortega y Gasset diagnosed the new literature, music, and painting of the post-World War I generation as an art of “dehumanization,” he celebrated Claude Debussy as a formative example. But what did this slogan actually mean? The question can be answered in part by considering the mode of aesthetic engagement Ortega called “outward concentration” (concentración hacia afuera), drawing upon sources in early phenomenology.