Understanding Life’s Core Concepts: A Philosophical Lexicon
Understanding Life’s Core Concepts
Cast: This metaphor means that we, living beings, did not choose our circumstances, our world, nor the time to enter it. Suddenly and fatally, without our decision, we are in the world.
Knowledge: All knowledge is an elaboration of the continuing revelation that consists primarily of living, a development of the first fundamental attribute of life. The theory of knowledge of Ortega’s perspectivism posits that all knowledge, including mathematical-experimental science, is a historical perspective on the universe. There is no absolute knowledge. In the West, philosophy offers a radical and inclusive perspective on the universe that guides human life.
Decide: The third fundamental attribute of life. Living is projected into the future, each time choosing what we will do next between the possibilities offered to us by circumstances.
Meet: The basic relationship of the living self with the world. Not the position of a body in space, but the living self’s relationship with things and people that make up the world of life. The basis of human sensibility is found here, so our emotions and feelings tell us how we are in the world.
Evidential: The first fundamental attribute of life is the immediate manifestation of the self living, realizing everything he does. Life is looking, and vision manifests itself internally and cannot be perceived from the outside.
Existence: Ortega used Heidegger’s conception (the fundamental constitution of existence by developing the structure of being in the world) to expose their intuition of life as a fundamental reality.
Doom: Refers to the second fundamental attribute of life and suggests the worldly condition and circumstance of living. It does not imply a specific philosophy of history, as if human life were predetermined from the beginning, let alone a fatalistic view of human life.
Futurition: Life is inexorably in every moment forward; it continually has to decide what will be done by choosing among available possibilities. The future is the primary mode of historical time because life is essentially decided.
Freedom: It consists in deciding what will be done at any time, choosing among the possibilities given our circumstances. It is identified with the third fundamental attribute of life, but far from being separable from the second, it is intertwined with the very existence of life: Freedom in fate and destiny in freedom.
World and circumstances: Not the cosmos or the physical world of the Greeks, nor the material universe of modern science. Rather, it refers to the world of our daily lives, i.e., the social and historical world. The world is common, but the living self is immersed in it within their own circumstances, so life is circumstantial.
Concern or cure: To live is to decide what we will do in the world, where we are already busy at all times with daily issues, bearing in mind in advance that with these decisions we project ourselves.
Disclosure: This metaphor suggests that being evidential of life has its own guiding principles without recourse to transcendent principles of religious background.
Time: It is the succession of instants or time clocks that measure. Time does not refer to physical or biological time but the historical time that passes over it. This time is the joint modal fundamental of living. Because living is ultimately decided, the future is the primary mode of time. We do not know why we repeat the past, and each generation faces the challenge of overcoming it, projecting its own future.
Universe: The totality of what a philosophy has when facing this subject is quite problematic because no one knows what it is, if it is multiple, if you can know it, or if it is chaotic.
Me: It’s me who lives their circumstances in the world, which is inseparable. Not the thinking subject of Descartes, or Kant’s transcendental apperception, but a living self, worldly and historical, who reveals his life thrown into the circumstances of the world and projects to continue with their action to the world.