Ortega y Gasset’s Ratio-Vitalism: A New Metaphysics
Ortega y Gasset’s Dynamic Metaphysics
However, this data is not a static, hieratic, substantial radical, which allows capture of the categories of traditional metaphysics. Its essential dynamic nature requires that we try to grasp it with a new terminology, one that explores language to give meaning to those words that allow us to express this dynamic property, which presents the most radical and incontrovertible truth.
In his essay “What is Philosophy?”, Ortega explains that we must pursue new, radical categories to capture this reality. Thus, the first word he chooses from colloquial language to refer to the radical coexistence between thought and the thing thought is “life.” Through it, Ortega expresses the coexistence of the self with the world. The most fundamental aspect is not the thing itself or the idea of it, but rather my being there in direct relation to the thing, which encourages my thoughts. Between the real thing and my mind, there is an interdependence, a correlation, a coexistence, which Ortega refers to as “life.”
From here, he reveals the basic features, the new categories that allow us a deeper understanding and articulation of this basic fact. Ortega states that the first essential attribute to keep in mind when we speak of “life” as a basic fact is that it is the self coexisting with the thing, but this happens when I am hearing, noticing, noting, knowing, and understanding that I am there with the thing. This is finding oneself in the world and, while well-known, is seen in full relationship with the thing, in full occupation with it, taking care of it and all those around it that love me and shape my circumstantial world.
Another feature Ortega highlights is the suddenness and unexpectedness of life, which ends unexpectedly and is affected without choice, as if having been cast into existence.
This means that, to live well and come to grips with our surroundings, we must choose between the possibilities open to us. We cannot avoid making use of our freedom, deciding at any time how we engage with what is not us, but which we set up and inevitably mediate. Living is a constant act of deciding what to be, and in that sense, it is also an ongoing project into the future, revealing the inherent time lag in our lives, an inherent attribute of this fundamental reality.
These new categories articulate the logic of this vital reason: being in the world, dealing, being thrown, freedom, screening. At the time of ratio-vitalism, Ortega proposed this as an alternative to traditional rationalism, which is ineffective when accounting for the new dynamic conception of being proposed by the Spanish philosopher.
Ortega y Gasset: Ratio-Vitalism, Realism, and Idealism
Ortega y Gasset was a philosopher who, in line with most 20th-century thinkers, attempted to overcome the problems posed by idealism. This demonstrated his distance from both current realism and idealism.
Realism can be summarized as the philosophical attitude that assumes true reality lies in things themselves, independent of whether or not they are intended. In this current, reflection on intended things is direct. Therefore, it is essential for realist philosophers to access the substantiality of natural things, that which allows them to maintain their identity beyond all change.
However, for Ortega, naive realism is a philosophy that Descartes undertook to expose, thus laying the foundations of genuine idealism and modern subjectivism. The French philosopher teaches us that thought never lies about things directly, but about the ideas we have about them. Therefore, we must concentrate our efforts on finding which ideas may have some knowledge value, finding the idea that cannot be doubted, even as I propose it, which epitomizes an external reality. It is the very idea of thought, the cogito, the only thing of which Descartes gains absolute certainty. However, by viewing thinking as the original act, driven by the inertia of over two thousand years of realism, he substantializes and reduces all reality to ideas, to the thinking subject, generating a significant problem for idealist philosophy: how to connect ideas to the reality to which they point.
Ortega proposed a solution: to return to the Cartesian discovery and understand it properly, in a strictly radical way. According to the Madrid philosopher, Descartes fails to complete his discovery due to the weight of the realist tradition. What is truly original, authentic, and radical, which under no circumstances can be doubted, is not the thing itself or the idea of it, but the act of thinking about it, the realization that you have thought of something previously, that something has to be considered as “something”: “The outside world does not exist without my thinking, but the outside world is my thought… we are the world and I… with each other without being separated.”
Therefore, the basic fact of the universe is not thought, but thought and things, the self with things.