Ratio-Vitalism and Perspectivism: Ortega y Gasset’s Philosophy
Ratio-Vitalism: Ortega’s Philosophy
The basic concept of ratio-vitalism is the contribution of Ortega y Gasset. This stage is a development and concretization of the previous perspectivism. It establishes the need to overcome the false dichotomy between reason and life:
- Reason has been regarded as the foundation of true knowledge.
- Life, by contrast, represents the particular, the mutable.
These two poles are inseparable. Ratio-vitalism is intended to be a middle ground between vitalism and rationalism: it recognizes the value of reason, but also the irrational, rooted in the service of life. That is, there is a close and intimate union between reason and life. Living rightly is taking account of vital events, not only of purely biological ones. Life is the ultimate reality within which other realities are found. Life is the particular and concrete existence.
The Thesis of Ratio-Vitalism
Let’s see:
a) Life as a fundamental reality. Life is the first and primal reality, prior to thought. The viewpoint of Ortega’s philosophy is not the external world. Therefore, the first thing to do to philosophize is to define the meaning of my life, to look for concepts that express the uniqueness of human life. The sense that life has for Ortega can be summarized as follows:
- “To live is the radical way to be.”
- “Living is being in the world. My life is to take care of this world of mine.”
- “To live is something to worry about: our decision via a constant, and always decided for something. This is something to live for my future. To move towards.”
- “Living is a continuous task. So life is a project and man is forced to choose. Life is liberty.”
- “Living is a problem: each of us is found in a life that is a problem.”
- “Life is aware of oneself and the world that surrounds you.”
- “Coexistence and cohabitation: living a thing from another, supporting each other. The isolated individual and the community are pure generic abstractions.”
b) The life that interests Ortega is not any kind of life but one that meets certain conditions: human life is personal life. My life is solely my responsibility.
c) The introduction of thinking makes human life distinguishable from any other life. There is a dialectical relationship between reason and life.
d) Human thinking is a work in continuous expansion. There is nothing worse than an ignorant person who thinks he knows everything. However, for the man who knows his ignorance, with each new knowledge, new horizons are opened, new unknowns requiring attention again for his knowledge.
Vital and Historical Reason
Since Greece, reason has been understood as a faculty that captures the essence of things. This position culminates in mathematical reason. But this becomes unable to capture changing realities. Thus emerged the irrationalities which prefer life to reason. Ortega y Gasset gives another meaning. Above pure reason is vital reason, which is one with living. Reason is the same vital human life that goes beyond mere reason. Ortega is not against reason, but against rationalism. For Ortega, reason means something to refer all of my life. That reason is vital to understand man in a more complex dimension than the static definition of pure reason: I am myself and my life is my circumstance. My circumstance is, therefore, a historical circumstance. Vital reason consists of historical reason, as part of a subject with a particular social and historical reality. In no way are we talking about two distinct reasons. Ortega says that human beings have no nature, but history. His life is not static but it is time. We live in a given time; it is the essential attribute of our lives. It is impossible to start from scratch; we are history. We need to know why he came to wander to avoid repeating the same mistakes of the past.
Perspectivism
Realism
For realism, the real reality is the things themselves. It says that things are independent of my thinking, of my self, which becomes another thing. In realism, I focus attention on the things around me. It is the attitude of the self, for which there is only the cosmic world, consisting of tangible things, but also the attitude of science. When it attempts to address human life, it eludes him. Critical Realism, the old realism of the Greeks, according to Ortega, starts from the existence of the cosmos, of things, and does not doubt them at all. However, this is a philosophical naivete, for in their privacy, something very minor has occurred. We cannot accept that the subject is a mere piece of reality. Realism has failed to give importance to the self and has been absorbed by the outside world.
Idealism
It must be borne in mind that Ortega’s first training was idealistic: hence some of their critical realism. He later criticized very personal idealism. The senses deceive me and I cannot distinguish dream from waking. The only thing I cannot doubt is my thought. This subjectivism is true: the self is swallowed by the outside world, so that it disappears. The whole philosophy is built on reason. Idealism proposes to suspend my belief in the reality outside my cogito; it is a secretive reality: only I can be sure of things in the mind. That is, it reduces external reality to outside experience. The self is the radical fact: things are as they are for me. The radical truth is I, my thoughts. The being of things depends on myself. Critical to Idealism: Overcoming idealism is a need of our time. Idealism is right in saying that I do not know things only as they are designed by me. But it cannot assert the independence of the subject about things. There is no self without things; I am inseparable from things.
Therefore, the radical fact of the universe cannot be thought but thought and things, I with things, that is, life. Neither the world nor myself alone: we are the world and I, I with things. Idealism goes against life. The discovery of life, as the fundamental reality, is the overcoming of idealism and realism.
The Fact of Circumstantiality
Circumstantiality will be the key to Ortega’s philosophy and under that light, it takes the entire subsequent development of his thought. “I am myself and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself.” This formula must express the relationship of self to the world as a concrete whole and undivided, unique, that must be the beginning to understand man and the world. The core is the very life of man:
- I am me: Ortega’s philosophy of life is individualized. Man tends to his ego, to the very same. The human person must be authentic and preserve his intimate life.
- And my circumstance: this term includes the physical realities that surround us and the society around us, with their history and their life projects. The fact is all that is involved in human life and is used by him to be himself.
In this way, life is a continuous exchange between self and circumstance. For Ortega, living is reasonable. However, this reasoning needs a touchdown after: in this lies the story.
The Outlook
The fact, what is around me, makes my life possible, and the same, is the particular perspective from which to sample the truth of things. Thus, he condemns both dogmatism and skepticism: “It is no valid dogmatic position, for which the truth is one.” Nor is the skeptical posture valid that concludes that no truth can pretend the character of such. The correct position is different: the truth has many faces, depending on the perspective from which to look. We offer different ways. Utopia is false; the truth is not localized. The subject serves as a grid interposed in a stream and passes some things and retains others. The subject does not deform the truth; it is to assimilate reality. The perspective through which I interpret without rejecting the insights and visions of others. It is therefore futile to attempt to reach it. In result, we can say that there can be a clash of perspectives. Ortega speaks about the need to assess in any other than us an eigenvalue. This value will lie in their disagreement with me.