Ortega y Gasset’s Philosophy of Life and Perspective
How the Truth is Perspective:
Living is seeking the truth. In that search, Ortega y Gasset believes that neither skepticism nor dogmatism considers that thought is a vital function, an activity with the specific purpose of reaching the truth. As such, thought needs to operate according to particular laws.
Truth is perspective because there is no way to capture reality outside of individual perspective. Human beings have to be content with the part of the truth accessible from their position. Two perspectives may not match, but they can complement each other. Each individual should strive to faithfully reproduce their point of view. Thus, the sum of perspectives brings us closer to the truth.
Ideas and Beliefs:
With thought, we produce ideas, theories, and even jokes. We produce them, argue them, discuss them, and spread them. We access knowledge through belief; we don’t do anything with beliefs—we are in them. We live and move and exist within our beliefs. Strictly speaking, we don’t have beliefs; beliefs have us. For example, we live in the belief that the light will turn on when we flip the switch.
Questions:
Beliefs form the basis of our existence, providing security. Alongside beliefs are doubts, which, for Ortega y Gasset, are holes in our beliefs. Doubt functions in our lives exactly like belief and belongs to the same stratum. Beliefs are the land on which man stands; doubt is a liquid reality where man cannot be sustained.
To leave doubt behind, man must risk thinking. With ideas, he replaces the unstable world of doubt with a world without ambiguity.
Dissertation:
Thesis: Every era has its own beliefs. We are taught that science, human rights, and democracy are strong pillars on which to build our faith in the future and human relations. Our grandparents lived in the belief in the existence of God. However, scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Times) tell us how the “sea of doubt”—to which Ortega y Gasset referred in Ideas and Beliefs—is spreading, making it impossible to walk safely. There are no beliefs that provide certainty.
Arguments: Fear. The breakneck speed at which changes happen.
Conclusion: We are called to build new securities, different from those our parents built.
Ortega y Gasset: Data from his Life:
His family of journalists fostered a climate of interest in chronicling life. He became a deputy of the Second Republic, with which he quickly became disenchanted. He wrote numerous newspaper articles commenting on current affairs, revealing the importance of commitment to public life.
Two Main Aims:
- Freeing Spanish thought from sterility.
- Training a group of intellectuals at the height of the times. This connected him to writers and thinkers of the Generation of ’27.
Spain is the problem, and Europe, the solution: Ortega y Gasset believed in a common European foundation, from which comes the way of being and understanding the world of Spaniards, French, or Germans.
He believed that creating a European society is enjoying what one has not worked for, and that the masses have taken over.
The solution is to assume the task ahead: the construction of Europe as a nation.
Three Big Ideas:
- The simplicity and clarity of his writing, which belies the idea that philosophy must be complex and obscure.
- The idea of a philosophy born of life, which assumes the task of interpreting life. The philosopher should reflect on the events of public life. Philosophy is linked to ethical and political commitment.
- Reflection on life: The radical, first fact is neither the existence of the world (Aristotelian-medieval thought) nor the existence of consciousness (rationalism), but the coexistence of the self with the world: life (each individual’s life).
Reflection on Life:
Reality is life, and philosophy is a reflection on life—not in the abstract (as biologists study), but understood as “my life.” Philosophy is not, therefore, an abstraction.
Ratiovitalism:
This philosophy affirms the value of reason because, as held until then, knowledge is by nature rational. However, it makes a different point (and this is new): life is the focus of reason; reason is always rooted in life.
The Task of Man:
It is living, building the future with the tools of the past. The human being is a project that must be built from what is and what one has, partly free and partly fate: I am myself and my circumstance.