Ortega y Gasset: Stages of Thought and Key Philosophical Concepts
Ortega y Gasset
Stages of his thought:
1. Objectivism: There is the problem of Spain. He developed a doctrine that states that the saving grace necessary is science. The decline stems from the lack of science, and science is theory. Objectivity, accuracy, and reasonableness are the method. Subjectivity is error.
2. The Circumstance: The discovery is the concept of circumstances. Ortega referred to two major circumstances: Greek thought and Western Judeo-Christian thought (historical circumstances). He refers more to life around the nearby circumstances that are other things: men, one’s own family, circumstances of vitalism, and national biography. He gives biographical meaning to sound more irrational than biological. Our being is a being in the circumstance. It is possible to think and philosophize.
3. The Perspective (gnoseology, theory of knowledge): It contains his theory of knowledge, confronting rationalism (which leads to dogmatism) and empiricism (skepticism and realism). The perspective is the only way to grasp (grasp, assimilate) reality. Each individual is an essential perspective. The circumstance and perspective led him to develop a particular theory of reality. Truth only presents itself in perspective (Nietzsche’s perspectivism is individualistic, subjectivist, and relativist). The various points of view and different perspectives must be integrated into the same reality. Therefore, reality is something that is given to us, it is built. Ortega conceived it in the Greek sense, *aletheia* (disclosure or discovery). It is an objectivity to a dialoguing perspective. Objectivist truth equals the sum of perspectives. Ortega’s perspectivism is a new conception of truth that rises above rationalism and relativism, which are opposite positions given throughout history. Rationalism affirms that absolute truth exists, for reasons of Pure Reason, and eternal and immutable being is regarded as eternal, fixed, and unchanging (leads to dogmatism). Empiricism or relativism says there is no absolute truth, that reality is mutable, that the truth would be subjective and sworn to skepticism (that with certainty we can know nothing). Ortega rejects the mode of Pure Reason (in its dogmatic sense) to access things considered vital, the changing, and historical reason. He proposed vital reason against relativism. Ortega does not renounce the truth.
4. Ratio-vitalism (ontology, as opposed to realism and idealism): Your task is to overcome the dichotomy between life and reason. Ortega is not strictly a vitalist like Nietzsche. He does not intend to reduce the human to biology, nor detract from the right, against irrationalism. Nor is he strictly rational, because he does not intend to fit the structures of Pure Reason to reality. His proposal is vital reason, connecting reason with life because reason itself is a vital function. Life is not irrational, and reason is a form and function of life. There is no confrontation between reason and life. We survive not by animal instinct but because our reason makes us survive.
CRITICAL REALISM AND IDEALISM:
1. Realism begins in Greece until Descartes. It gives primacy to the thing itself. Real things are as they are in themselves, outside the knowing subject. It concedes primacy, independence, and enforcement capability to the thing about man, the object in front of the subject. Its origins are in Plato.
2. Idealism is the philosophical attitude that arises as an excess and critique of realism. Knowledge of things is always mediated. We do not know immediate reality, things in themselves, but the subject itself knows what is in his own conscience. I put the “I”… the human subject, which decisively starts the man-world relationship.
CATEGORIES OF LIFE: Overcoming these proposals as antagonistic, Ortega proposes that what is authentically real is “I” and things. This relationship is called life, the coexistence of self and the world. Life is the fundamental reality, and all others are subordinate to it. Life is what we do and what happens to us. Individual history is biography (in Nietzsche it reaches a biological sense). Life is dislocated inexorably with circumstance. My life is my circumstance. Here and now, it’s seasonal: the symbiosis of past, present, and future. It is also personal: me, my friends, my family…
1. The Circumstances: The set of things around me that are referring to me, formed by other men, ideas, customs, situations… It is all the natural and social elements that make up the world of man. The body is also a circumstance because the self inhabits a body.
2. The “I”: I am a vital project of myself. Life is possible, and if I decide, it is because I have the ability to be something. I am free to choose. What limits me and my condition is the circumstance. We choose what we want to be as a function of the circumstance. If my life is a project that is formed from elections, these can occur if I choose if I am free.
HISTORICAL MODELS OF REASON:
1. Within Greece, reason is conceived as the capacity of knowledge that captures the fixed and immutable, for example, Plato.
2. In the modern age, reason is conceived as a logical-mathematical process, for example, Descartes. This is insufficient to explain human life. In this situation, two possibilities fit: irrationalism, the negation of reason absolutely, or creating a new model of rationality, vital reason, which extends the concept of previous reason to use it strictly. Reason is an instrument of life. The function of reason is to account for that which is appropriate: life (if I think, therefore I am, against Descartes). Reason is a vital facet of historical reason, and its main dimension is historicity. It depends on the ideas and beliefs that humanity is developing, and with each man who is in his historical time. We only understand something if we understand the historical circumstances in which man is immersed. “Individual human life and collective life is the result of a historical process.” “Life is what we do and what happens to us.” It is biography. “Man has no nature, but history.” Nature is not fixed but dynamic, changing.
THOUGHT: IDEAS AND BELIEFS: The objective of intellectual activity is the need to know, namely, to stick to life. Man needs to have a world to know in life, and for that, he has ideas and beliefs.
1. Ideas: Personal creations. They are thoughts that we can analyze, adopt, imitate… It is a work of ours, never predates me, it is my life’s content. The idea exists only when we both think and when we think.
2. Beliefs: Collectively accepted ideas. They are a special kind of ideas that are in us and constitute the substance of our life. We are in them. They do not move in a mental image as ideas. Unlike them, they are never occurrences of ours, but something previous. We believe that it is something external. Every idea that has spread to a community has originally been transmitted to descendants. When faith has been lost, doubt arises, and that doubt is the condition that allows us to move from one problematic situation to another that helps us to live.