Life, Reality, and the Self: A Perspective on Ortega’s Philosophy
Categories of Life
1. To Live Is to Know and Understand
To live is to know and understand. “All life is lived, to feel alive, known to exist.” Life is found, a self-learning. Physical objects do not feel or know of their being, not for themselves, but we do. Although, of course, we must not identify this characteristic known to live with the knowledge that we find in science, the intellectual knowledge. The “knowledge” characteristic of life is related to a presence, an immediate awareness of what we are experiencing, what we are doing or suffering or wanting. It is whole. Our life would be nothing if we did not realize it, “without knowing that, without realizing that the toothache does not hurt us.” And this knowledge not only of ourselves but, as befits Ortega’s inseparable thesis of self and the world or circumstance, is also heard around the world, is a noted and a notice of what surrounds us: “I realize myself in the world, me and the world.” One aspect of this innate knowing of life is the real appetite that always accompanies humans. Without man, there is no truth. Ortega defines man as the being that definitely needs the truth, and in The Theme of Our Time as a “devourer of truths”: “Thus, we should try to classify man not as a carnivore, but as a truth-eater.” This theory separates the “vitality” of Ortega from that found in Nietzsche. For this latter philosopher of self-consciousness, being conscious, knowing, is a fortuitous superfluity of life, because at its most basic level, life is essentially unconscious and instinctive.
2. Life is Our Life
This attribute is a consequence of the above. “When we perceive and feel, we take possession of ourselves. This presence in my life, before me, allows me to take possession of it, make it mine.” To illustrate this thesis, Ortega gives the example of the insane: the presence of the live feature is missing from the insane; the crazy life is not his and “is no longer really living.” The madman, not knowing himself, is estranged, alienated, does not belong. This also means that life is non-transferable, that no one can live for me, which, at bottom, means I find myself alone with life, because everything I do, even what I do for others, is part of my self as its primary focus.
3. To Live Is to Be in the World
“To live is to be against the world, within the world.” The world is not something external to our lives; it is part of it as an ingredient, as part of our self. Ortega notes several reasons for the impossibility of separating the two poles of our life, the world and our self. One is the fact that the world is paramount to us even before we realize it ourselves. Another equally important reason is that all living “is to deal with the other self that is not us; all life is to live with a circumstance.” Our life is such that we take care of things, so that our life depends as much on what is our personality as on what is our world. This dimension of life as being outside oneself, a being in the other and toward the other, clearly shows the desire, “the vital role that best symbolizes the essence of all others, a constant mobilization of our being to further it: tireless archers, we shoot without rest on the inflammatory white” (The Theme of Our Time, III). The world present in our life is not just the world described by science. The world present in our lives is the physical world, but also the world of values; it is a world of pleasant or unpleasant, terrible and benevolent; it is the world full of things that affect us, “that concern us, we cherish, and threaten us, torment us.” In a strict sense, the world is what affects us. But just as it is not possible to understand the self without the world or circumstance, it is not possible to understand the world without the ego, as the world, the world of each one, the only real world, consists only of what affects each, and this is possible because each one is predisposed by their sensitivity and personality to meet it and be affected by it. The world is inseparable from us. Ortega insists on the inseparability of these two dimensions of life—and therefore of reality—a view that he considers one of the great contributions of his philosophy and the overcoming of ancient and modern philosophy.
4. Life Is Inevitable
Ortega does not defend determinism, but does not believe that our freedom is absolute. The world in which we live, our circumstances, is not something we can choose. We have not decided the historic moment, nor the culture or society that we live in, nor our bodies, nor our psychology; we have not decided the world or circumstances in which our life unfolds. Furthermore, Ortega says, life is always unexpected, at least in its radical lines. We have a certain number of possibilities and we can have some reassurance about what can occur, but we cannot choose the basic framework of our world. The possibilities of my life are influenced by my circumstances. Life is always in the circumstances; we do not live in an abstract, indeterminate world, and the life world is always this world, our here and now. The fact, in this sense, is something specific, closed. But Ortega is far from defending determinism; on the contrary, it is precisely this fact that will allow freedom: we act because we have in our hand a finite number of possibilities. If these were infinite, this would be pure indetermination, and in a world where everything is possible, we would not opt for anything.
5. Life Is Freedom
The fatality in which our life unfolds is not so extreme as to completely determine the behavior that we will follow. We do not feel that our life is predetermined; we even see what will happen to us as a possibility among many, hence we necessarily have to choose and decide, and also no one can do it for us. Life does not come already made; it is a constant deciding what we will be, the things we do, our occupations. We cannot choose the world, the basic circumstances in which we live, but at the same time, this fact offers a range of possibilities: “life is freedom in fate and destiny in freedom.” We have to decide what we are going to be; life is “to hold oneself in one’s being.” Life is a problem that no one except us can solve. And being forced to choose and be responsible for what is going to happen does not occur only in extreme cases, in situations of conflict or distress, but is always given. As a result of life being found hopeless and without remedy, having to choose, Ortega stressed the dramatic nature of life, using expressions that later will be present in Sartre’s existentialism: in What is Philosophy? he offers a metaphor for human life that perfectly anticipates Sartre’s idea of our existence as being thrown into being: our presence in life is like what would happen to a person who, being asleep, is transferred to the stage of a theater, with a few spectators; he wakes up and is told, “Now act!” He has to invent the role, as we have to invent our lives, without any script already preset. We meet with our lives; they have not been given to us. “But life in its totality and in each of its moments is something we are thrown into at close range.” “Life is not given to us; rather, we are thrown out or are thrown into it.” In setting up our life, we cannot choose just any project; we must choose the one that corresponds to our deepest being, and thus to our destiny. Life is freedom, but it must also be authentic.
6. Life Is Futurition
Our situation, Ortega says, is paradoxical: our being is not what is but what is going to be, so it is not yet. Since our life is to decide what we will be, we put at the root of our life a temporary attribute: the future. “Our life is primarily run into the future. Neither the present nor the past is the first thing we live; no, life is an activity that runs forward, and the present or the past is discovered later, in relation to that future. Life is futurition; it is what it is not yet.” In Lesson 11 of What is Philosophy? Ortega distinguishes two types of time: time of things or cosmic time, and the time of life. Cosmic time is only present because the future is not yet and the past is no longer. Given this time, the time of living is the future. It is true that our life is anchored in the present, but our mind is peculiar because it is a being that points to this future; it is a future project. Ortega gives so much importance to this dimension of time that he even considers that the past and the present only make sense from the future. To illustrate this point, he gives the example of speaking: when we speak, what we say is present, but this present is determined by what we are going to say, and to say it, we use the words that our past gives us. “My future, then, makes me discover my past, to perform. The past is now real because we relive it, and in my past, when I find the means to realize my future is when I find my present. And all this happens in an instant; every moment of life expands in all three dimensions of internal real time.” Because of the importance of this aspect of temporality in life, Ortega puts the appetitive dimension of our self and of desire over the cognitive: first we covet, desire, our dreams, and all our desires determine or direct our attention, which determines what we see or know. “The heart, a tireless machine preferring and neglecting, is the support of our personality.”
Critical Realism
Realism is an intellectual attitude that assumes that the true reality of things-in-themselves is independent of thought. This attitude prevents the self from focusing on the things around it and realizing itself. It is, says Ortega, the natural attitude of the ego for whom there is only the cosmic world, consisting of tangible property.
The ‘natural realism’ of the self involves an apparent contradiction: things are perceived as being subject to continuous change, but are thought of as realities that remain unchanged over time. The explanation given by realism is based on the concept of substance: that which serves to support these changing data, which is below, what does not change, the permanent subject of variations or accidents. The error is born, says Ortega, from a philosophical naiveté that supposes that this substance is the true reality of the thing and not an assumption made by thought. And the old realism, that of the Greeks, assumes the existence of things, does not doubt them at all, and believes that consciousness is secondary and therefore the ego is absorbed by the outside world. But we cannot admit that the self is one thing, a piece of reality: the subject is what receives impressions, that selects them, that lives them, and that makes concepts like substance.
Critical Idealism
Modern philosophy, says Ortega, is subjectivism, and its foundations were laid by Descartes, in criticizing realism and establishing true idealism. Descartes says:
- Things are not safe; I can be wrong. The senses deceive me and I cannot distinguish waking from sleep; as a result, I admit realities that are not and I have no other choice but to doubt the truth of all that is not me.
- But the only thing I cannot doubt is my thought, because although I doubt the truth of everything, since I can think of everything as doubtful, I cannot doubt my thinking, or as Descartes says, think of me. I think, or I think, therefore I am, is the only thing that I am sure of; it is the first absolutely true data, more so than that I perceive things and just as I think.
- Hence the key statement of his philosophy: I am a subject, a substance that thinks. So, with this shift, being subsisting, the substance of realism, is not being of external things, but being the subject who thinks, thinking substance, the inner self of man.
This is true subjectivity: the self, the subject, swallows the outside world, so that it disappears and only the self remains. But this is very serious, because external reality is reduced to my thinking about things. Of things, I can only be assured as soon as I think of them, as far as I witness them; then their being, their reality, is both for me, as are my ideas. The radical truth is I, my thoughts; the being of things depends on myself.
Against Cartesian idealism, Ortega makes these two statements: thought is not independent of things and thought is not a thinking substance. On the first argument: ‘We need to fix the starting point for philosophy. The radical figure of the universe is not simply: there is thought—or thinking, I exist—but if there is thought, there are, ipso facto, I think and the world we think—and there is one and the other without being separated.’
On the second, he states: “But neither I am a substance nor the world either; both are in active correlation: I am the one who sees the world and the world is seen by me. I am for the world and the world is for me. If there were no things to see, think, and imagine, I would not see, think, and imagine, that is, I would not be.” There is, therefore, no permanent existence of self, but only as you think and just as you think. The key statement of idealism fails.
Ortega criticizes idealism because it goes against life. If things exist only insofar as they are intended, everything that surrounds man is a mere image of his thought and life becomes an optical illusion. This criticism is manifested in the need for a radical reform of philosophy that goes beyond the false dilemma of idealism. The dilemma can be formulated in these terms: things are an absolute reality outside of me or they are within me. And that dilemma is false: the world, things, are part of my self, the subject of my thoughts. I am not detached from things, but there is no me without my things, alone, self-contained. Neither the world nor myself alone: we are the world and I, I with things, that is, life, which is the radical figure of the universe.
Ortega clarifies this statement with a Cartesian example like this: I am sure of this room and what is in it as long as I am in it and I think about it, but if I leave and stop thinking about it, I am no longer sure of its existence and that things stay the same. So being in the room is what it is for me while I think.