Ortega y Gasset’s Philosophy: Life, Reason, and Historicism
The Meaning of Life
Life is the coexistence of subject and world, and it is the radical data. Life has the following attributes: it is found in the world, and it involves taking care of something—that is, living *for* something.
Life is a continuum of doing. Life is not given to us, but we have to make it, freely.
Life is a problem; it is a clue to thought.
Life is a continuous decision. Freedom and decisions allow us to create our life project.
Life is coexistence.
Vital Reason
Ortega advocates for reason as the ability to capture what is right in life. Reason is, definitively, a living and spontaneous function. To reason, to think about something, is to refer it to all of life.
Historicism
Life is a ‘doing’.
This ‘doing’ is given in time, and this is the foundation of history. Man is essentially historical because his life is given in time, and he is aware of it.
Man replaces nature with culture, which is historical. Time, to man’s task, is a mission; it is innovation. Man is not nature, but history.
Influence and Impact
Ortega’s thought in philosophy is an integrated overcoming of different perspectives that have succeeded in this.
- First, Ortega’s philosophy stems from German idealism. But while establishing itself in opposition to its origin, it is also exposed to realism.
- Second, while Ortega was formed in neo-Kantian philosophy and acknowledges his debt to German idealism, the starting point and the main focus of his thought is individual human life, which is totally away from Kant’s concept of Pure Reason.
- Third, from Nietzsche, he is interested in the concept of life, that is, in a reality where knowledge can only take place in perspective, involving non-universal interpretations, but rather particular ones.
- Fourth, the idea of historicism reflects his historical reason, at any time subject to certain inevitable prejudices, from which theories are always tentative.
- Fifth, an important theory in Ortega’s philosophy is phenomenology (Husserl). He took the ideal of a philosophy without assumptions, a thought on its way to the things themselves and describing them as they appear. The discovery of the intentionality of consciousness is also important.
- Sixth, existentialism is another relevant theory for Ortega. His concept of man as a being whose essence is not completed is also a key feature in Ortega’s thought.
Impact
Ortega is considered the most important Spanish philosopher. His impact within philosophy can be seen in the continuation of his thought with authors such as Joseph Gaos, Maria Zambrano, Francisco Ayala, and Julian Marias. Before the Civil War, Ortega played a leading role in Spanish cultural life with his lectures and newspaper articles. His publishing house and the *Revista de Occidente* served to introduce the principal authors of the Generation of ’27 and leading European intellectuals, especially Germans. After his return to Spain, academia was sidelined. Ortega was no longer committed to Spanish politics: he opposed the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and was a deputy in the Constituent Cortes of the same year.