Life as Radical Reality: A Vital and Historical Perspective
Life as a Radical Reality
Life is what we are and what we do. It encompasses everything, intimately interconnected. Our fundamental reality is our individual life. Even thought is subordinate to life, as it is a fragment of the lived experience. Behind any reality lies another: our lives. To understand life, we must define the categories that characterize it. These categories represent the properties that make something real. Therefore, the categories of life express the properties of living.
A. Existence in the World
Living is being in the world, aware of oneself and one’s surroundings. Living is what we do and what happens to us. Self-awareness is the first essential attribute of every human life. We find ourselves entangled in issues that affect us; we are in a world. The world is what affects us. Life is the individual’s interaction with things. Our life depends on our personality and our world, both simultaneously.
B. Engagement with the World
To worry is to seize, to be involved in the world. The world consists of all the things we deal with and worry about. Dealing with things is to act, to occupy time.
C. Purposeful Action
All action is caring for something for a reason. Occupation exists for a purpose.
D. Decision and Anticipation
We decide what is best for us among the available possibilities. Life is unexpected, requiring us to make decisions. Our decisions are our own and cannot be transferred to another person. In this sense, life is to anticipate and project.
E. Freedom within Constraints
We decide because living exists within a defined world that offers opportunities. We are thrown into our lives and must act each day on our own. We are always anticipating, choosing, and deciding between options. If we choose, we have freedom.
F. Circumstances and Limitations
While possibilities are limitless, decisions require limitations, relative determinations. This is expressed by the category of circumstances. Life is always within specific circumstances. To live is to be here and now. The here and now is fixed yet broad. Life is both inevitable and free; it is being free within fatality. This fatality offers a range of given possibilities.
G. Futurization
Life is a reality that involves becoming what we are not yet, starting by being future. Unlike other beings, humans begin with futurization. This is the category of futurizations.
Historical Reason: Ratiovitalism
Life transcends biological history and connections. Each generation inherits a set of beliefs and ideas. Starting from scratch is impossible; we are history. Our historical consciousness involves understanding received beliefs, being aware of them, and preserving, transforming, or destroying them. To avoid repeating past mistakes, we must know them. Only then can we face the future with the aim of making it better than the past. Ahistorical behavior is suicidal; it kills a part of our reason, our life. Reason, life, and history are inseparable, ultimately the same thing. Reason is living elevated. Any person’s un-being diminishes life. Living gains a new perspective through the lens of historical reason: the human being is an unfinished project. My life is history. My life is circumstance, and thus historical circumstance. Reason is vital and concretely historical, part of a subject with a historical reality. We are talking about the same reason because life is essentially temporal, understanding reality in its evolution.
Ortega y Gasset says that man has no nature, but history. Life is not static, finished, or immutable. It is time, futurizations; it becomes history. History belongs to the life of each individual. We live in a specific moment, immersed in the season of our life. But time is innovation, mission, always turned towards the future. Humans cannot ignore history because their lives are already history, a historical fact. Ultimately, man is history.
Different historical periods are characterized by particular sensibilities. These variations in sensibility manifest as generations. Each season has its way of life and its time. Thus, in a historical moment, generations overlap. Generations are contemporary, yet not identical. This generational difference allows for innovation, as each generation receives what came before but allows its spontaneity to flow. Rebellion is natural and necessary since young people are called to different duties and tasks than their predecessors.