Understanding Perspectives: Embracing, Orb, and Outlook
Understanding Perspectives
Embracing: This refers to something that understands everything.
Orb: The outer limit of the world. It differs from the horizon; the world means a closed limit and conclusive, while the horizon is open and mobile.
Outlook: Point of view from which we see or understand something. The view depends on the ability and intention of the person who sees and understands. Because subjects are many and peculiar, prospects are many and varied.
Portion of truth: There is no absolute and total truth that the individual can know, as rationalism suggests. We can only know a piece, a part of the truth, which is our part from our perspective. In every age, culture, or individual belongs to its own portion of truth which each only can know, because their perspective is indispensable.
Viewpoint: Location from which we contemplate or spot something. Depending on the place we occupy, so will the vision we have of the object. The location determines and limits what we see of the object. In philosophy, the term “perspective” has been intellectualized in reference to knowledge and reality captured through it. In Ortega’s doctrine, the view is a fundamental doctrine, which is twofold: epistemological and ontological. Absolute knowledge is unattainable because all knowledge is knowledge of a subject, which is located in one place and at any given time, or in a circumstance. But not only knowledge varies depending on the point of view. It is also a different portion of reality that the point of view allows us to know.
Abstract point of view: This is a contradictory expression. An abstract point of view is a separate view of the place and time that all knowledge is made, in order to become universal. But this is impossible. The abstraction and universality that abstraction aims to deny the notion of view. Obtaining an abstract point of view by rationalism is misleading and fictitious claims, which condemns it to ignore reality.
The same is true of a ubiquitous view or absolute. It is impossible to have a ubiquitous point of view, which is everywhere. It is also impossible to have an absolute point of view. In the first case, because a view is always located in one part, not all. In the second case, because a view cannot reflect all points of view.
Quattrocento: Name which designates the Italian literary and artistic movement of the fifteenth century.
Rationalism: A philosophical doctrine that affirms the right or complete body of knowledge is reason, so that all true knowledge is sound. This is what rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century said.
Absolutely right: This is a reason that is sufficient unto itself to know the whole truth, which is universal and unchanging.
Pure Reason: This is a reason for which concepts have no empirical content, i.e., not getting its concepts from experience. It is an abstract reason, a priori, independent of experience.
Vital reason: Ortega’s fundamental concept in stating that reason is not a simple addition to life, but one of its constituents, without which it cannot be understood. Life is, in one of its key dimensions, in knowing, or rather, in “knowing what to expect.” The reason for life is not abstract and universal reason, but concrete, referring to the contents of everyone’s life. It has three characteristics: it is historical, narrative, and retrospective. It is historic because it will not accept anything as terminated, but picks up things as they become, in their development. It is narrative because they understand life as a narrative, as