Key Philosophical Concepts by Ortega y Gasset

Absolute Reason

The reason that I would meet the universal reality is that the full truth would come from juxtaposing the infinite perspectives of all lives. It is not, therefore, a reason from one point of view, but reason that, to know the universal reality, would get nowhere and all possible angles. So this would be the only way God could reach the whole truth. All lie in their characters, all perspectives agglutinate.

Pure Reason

Ortega uses this expression in a broad sense. It refers not only to Kant’s conception of the power of knowing but to the different interpretations that rationalism has been the subject who is able to reach the only true and unchanging truth. It is, therefore, an expression like pure ego.

Vital Reason

Also known as ratiovitalism. This is the conception of reason that Ortega opposed to pure reason. Pure reason is overcome by vital reason, which is the subject of his time. Reason is a function or an instrument of life, not an alien power to it, as would happen in rationalism. And it is for two reasons. First, vital reason is a reason rooted in circumstances. Secondly, vital reason is not a reflection of consciousness or being, but life that has given rise.

Reality

What is true and undoubtedly in the world. The world is always the world of me. Ortega is opposed to the definition of reality as it exists regardless of whether the subject exists. With the same argument, he rejected the rational definition of reality as universal, eternal, and unchanging. He also rejects the relativist skeptical position, denying the possibility of knowing reality or even its very existence. Ortega, against this current, maintains that the peculiar character of each concrete self is not an obstacle to getting to reality but the means to access it because reality is perspectival.

Relativism

This is a philosophical position that denies the existence of universal and absolute truths. There is no more than the truth regarding the condition of each subject. Each individual lives in a historical-cultural context in which judges function that is true. Therefore, all truth is determined by the mode of being of the subject that reaches it. Consequently, there are no universal objective values such as truth, goodness, or beauty.

Utopia

Etymologically, that which is not in any place. It is taking a utopian who forgets that his knowledge is always knowledge from a point of view, who knows a side of reality and is getting only a partial truth. The rational attitude presupposes the existence of a reality from nowhere and absolute truth. Utopianism is the opposite of perspectivism.

Quality

The value of people and things that we find attractive or repulsive. Ortega groups them into culture and values of life.

Cultural Values

Truth, goodness, and beauty are the values we seek when we think, act, or contemplate a work of art. The search for truth, goodness, and beauty has created culture. This value, although it has a biological target, transcends what should flow from the values of life: the truth must emerge from the sincerity of impetuosity, goodness, and beauty of delight.

Truth

The truth is an adequate reflection of what things are. No individual or time has access to all truth, the whole truth. Only by adding to that truth would the true part come. Each individual and time you access a partial truth. So the truth is one, eternal, and unchanging but perspectival. However, this is not relativism, since the bias of every truth does not negate it but is rather the consequence of the structure of reality, which is perspectival. So an individual can only know one side of reality, which is offered from circumstances.

Life

What each is and does. All of his experiences: his feeling, thinking, suffering, loving, imagining, desiring. It is not a property because it is not nature or substance. It is continuous to it. It is the fundamental reality that the rest of reality comes from. It has common categories: 1. To live is to be conscious that we live. 2. Life is our life; it is non-transferable. 3. Living is found in the world: it is impossible to separate the world and the self. 4. Life is inevitable: we do not choose our circumstances. 5. Life is freedom: our circumstance gives us a margin of possibilities. 6. Life is futurition: it is deciding.

Vitalism

Vitalism defends the philosophy that life is the only reality and, therefore, its object of study. Its theses are: a) Knowledge is a biological process like any other, that no rational principles and laws. It is known as breathing. b) It rejects rational and conceptual knowledge, and against the proposed subjective intuition understood as the experience and private non-rational in which the subject lives intimately reality. Vitalism, therefore, results in relativism. c) It argues that culture must undergo because stagnant life destroys it. Against vitalism, Ortega proposed ratiovitalism.

Pure Ego

This is an expression with which Ortega refers to the type of subject that, as rationalism, is capable of knowing the true, eternal, and unchanging. It includes the rational souls of Plato, Cartesian thinking substance, and the pure reason of Kant. Pure states that it is a self uncontaminated by the corporeal, vital, or historical value. Therefore, that self is an abstraction because it presents a separate subject precisely what gives you access to the truth, his view. Ortega opposed to pure self the self that is me and circumstances.

Abstraction

In general, it is the action and effect of separating, uprooting, or extracting. Human beings, reality, and truth, as rationalism considers, are abstractions because it separates reason from life. Thus, it has forgotten that the self is I and circumstance and has identified with the pure. It has also forgotten that reality and truth are essentially perspectival and has been described as unique and universal.

Culture

The vital activities that transcend the individual’s biological organism only intervene in breathing, and breathing is not, therefore, culture. Thinking is a biologically relevant activity and is necessary for human beings to survive. As biological activities, there is no difference between thinking and breathing. But in thinking, we found something that is not in the breath: the individual breathes without any external referent but tries to think that their thinking is true, that is, that it reflects things; otherwise, it is useless thought. We also want what is best in a situation. If it is not objectively so, what I think could best harm me. Therefore, cultural acts have two dimensions: a purely biological and other transcendent objective, since its referent is a reality that goes beyond the biological.

God

A subject that, due to its ubiquitous nature, that is, located at the infinite human views, would consolidate all possible perspectives and, therefore, would be the depositary of the absolute truth.

Abstract Entity

This is an expression by Ortega that refers to the pure ego. That self is abstract because it abandons its vital and historical dimension of its circumstances.

Rational Being

This is an expression by Ortega that refers to the pure ego. Sound emphasizes the essential feature with which rationalism has defined the subject able to know the truth.

Philosophy

Knowledge is characterized by a) being autonomous: it does not accept any truth that it has not substantiated; b) being radical: its aim is to find the really radical; c) being universal: it does not deal with all aspects, but the universal view of everything; d) being theoretical: it is a system of concepts. To the extent that concepts are enunciable, what cannot be said is not a concept or a clue to philosophy.

Horizon

An element of life. It is the framework that limits the portion of reality that every individual has access to from their point of view. It marks each self’s circumstances. The rationalist error is in identifying, marked by the horizon, the world of a self, with the world.

Idea

A thought that human beings construct for interpreting reality. It is never experienced as part of the same, but as its interpretation. Therefore, ideas never come before man but arise from their lives and, therefore, have to discuss, defend, modify, or reject them.

World

One of the constituent elements of life, who I am, and my conditions. It surrounds what the ego is. It is the life world in which he is immersed: the physical world, society, culture, history, but also your body and mind. The world is not foreign to life but one of its ingredients. The self and the circumstances are locked. If they are separated, the radical reality that is life is destroyed, and it comes to an abstract reality, a pure ego. One cannot choose the world we must live in. It is given. Towards the world offers the range of possibilities from which to choose.

Perspective

Ontologically, it is one of the components of reality, so the structure. From an epistemological point of view of self. So the whole and individual perspective is vital, every subject, from his individuality or life, from circumstances, from his view, captures one side or face of reality.

Portion of Truth

Every partial truth can be known by a particular individual from his point of view. Each portion of a corresponding true perspective of reality.

Viewpoint

A place from which each individual knows a part of reality and gets their share of truth. It is not only a physical place that determines perception, nor the historical and sociocultural context that accompanies every human being, but essentially the principle from which man derives his premises and events, his general position to life.

Ubiquitous View, Absolute, Abstract

Nonexistent view. The three expressions are contradictory in their terms. Rationalistic hypotheses are meaningless. Every individual point of view is vital and a consequence of a circumstance. A point of view is impossible with these features would correspond to pure rationalism.

Rationalism, Rationalist

It is itself a philosophical current that developed since the seventeenth century and whose most prominent representatives were Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Ortega uses it in a broad sense, which includes currents assuming that a) reason is what defines the human being, b) reason is above the specifics of each subject, it is ultravital and extra, and c) that reason can know the truth that is eternal, unique, and unchanging.