Ortega y Gasset’s Ratiovitalism: Reason, Life, and History
3.1. Ratiovitalism
Ratiovitalism, Ortega’s fundamental philosophical attitude, is a theory of knowledge that considers life—that knowledge is rooted in life. It attempts to overcome extremes: not only rationalism (Plato and Descartes), nor only irrational vitalism (Nietzsche), but finds a balance where reason and life are intimately related.
Ortega believed that rationalism somehow kills the story, stopping it by abstracting time. His ratiovitalism proposes a close union of reason and life, reason and history. All reason is vital, since humans are rational beings, but reason must primarily serve life.
Ortega’s vital reason aimed to overcome both rationalism and vitalism. All knowledge is of life, and reason, as part of life, is living reason because, for humans, making sense implies concrete existence. Reason, therefore, is not an abstract construct but a way of being in the world: in its history.
3.1.1. The Meaning of Reason
Traditionally, we speak of “pure reason,” present from Greek philosophers like Plato to Kant and the Enlightenment. This is the power that grasps the essence of things—the abstract, unchanging concept.
Ancient and modern philosophers held great hopes for this rationality, believing it could help us understand and master the world, understand humanity, and establish moral and political foundations. These ideals of modernity were partly fulfilled; the Enlightenment ideal of understanding the physical world was met as this rationality allows us to understand—and master—the natural world to an unprecedented degree. But it failed in what was perhaps more important to the Enlightenment and Modernity: understanding human reality and discovering principles of rational behavior that would enable responsible, just, and free lives (even in science and math, not all is rational. Consider irrational numbers).
Ortega y Gasset, therefore, offers a different meaning to reason: “For me, reason is, in the true and strict sense, the whole intellectual action that puts us in touch with reality.”
3.1.3. Vital and Historical Reason
Vital reason invariably leads to historical reason because life is essentially change and history. Historical reason aims to understand human reality from its historical construction and categories of life, overcoming the limitations of pure reason and modernity’s mathematizing approach. Ortega often stated that a major flaw in traditional philosophy is the idea that reality must be static; what changes is not quite real.
For vital reason, there is no pure theory, only reason to interpret one’s environment. Reason is both vital and historical, capable of grasping the fluid reality of life. Reason, life, and history are linked. There is no opposition between reason and life, as previously thought. Reason is a vivid and spontaneous basis for seeing and feeling. Pure reason must yield to Ortega’s vital and historical reason.
Since ancient Greece, “reason” has been understood as grasping the essence of things—the abstract, immutable concept. This culminates in the mathematical reason of 17th-century rationalists and Kant’s Pure Reason. But this “exact,” mathematizing reason becomes unable to grasp the changing realities of life. Thus, irrationalism emerged.
Ortega is not against reason, but against rationalism. Reasoning involves placing something in context, in real life. Life itself functions as reason. Vital reason helps us understand human beings in a more complex way than the static definition of pure reason: I am myself and my circumstance.
I am myself: life is individual, subjective consciousness, intimate, selfhood (being yourself), without losing sight of the external world.
And my circumstance: my life is not just me but all surrounding reality. It is the lifeworld in which the subject is immersed, including the physical world and the entire environment (culture, history, society, etc.).
Self and circumstances are inseparable; one cannot live apart from circumstances. Human life is understood as a task, project, and invention within specific circumstances.
In short, vital reason:
1) Means that human creation, action, and thought are based in life (“…key concepts do not come from intellect or pure reason, but as a vital tax”).
2) Aims to elicit any reality as it is, in its fullness, uniqueness, and rationality or irrationality.
3) Is inevitably historical, always situated in specific historical circumstances and time.