José Ortega y Gasset on the Idea of Life (Part 1)

José Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher and politician, is one of the more exhilarating theorists to read. Commenting on themes philosophical, political, aesthetic and cultural, Ortega was perhaps the first modern Spanish thinker whose ideas made up a true export. Uniquely original, masterfully didactic and unusually perspicuous, Ortega is a genuinely enjoyable read. However, he has been eclipsed in existentialism by the likes of Sartre, Heidegger and Marcel, so few, even among the philosophy crowds, are aware of his thought. This is unfortunate, for his ideas under-gird a large part of twentieth century philosophy. Perhaps no other idea of his is as compelling, insightful and inspiring as his idea of life, which is the foundation of every tenet of his philosophy.

“One of the things life has taught me is that nothing is a matter of indifference if one has a moderately clear view of reality.”[1] These words, taken from a verbose but certainly not prolix self-introduction, never reached their intended German audience in the lifetime of their author, yet they perhaps capture in exemplary fashion his entire philosophical purview better than any other phrase he ever penned. José Ortega y Gasset insisted that life must be lived intentionally, not in the cognitive sense born out of the phenomenological tradition to which he remained loosely tied, but in its mundane sense of common parlance. For Ortega, one either chooses one’s destiny with deliberation, intention and execution or one resolves to consent and to concede to living at the derivative plane. There is no tertium quid or, in this case, no tertia vita. Indifference is not an option for life. I choose to realize my destiny or I choose to supplant my destiny with the cheap construct.

In this series of posts, I will touch on one of the main themes of Ortega’s thought, namely the idea of life. In the first section, I describe Ortega’s diagnosis of his present age in which he detects a fundamental need to return to the question of life. In the second, I treat in summary fashion Ortega’s idea of life. Finally, in the third, concluding section, I touch upon Ortega’s charge that the person of the present age must face the full reality of human life and respond to its imperative of realization. While my intent is primarily expository, my hope is to portray Ortega’s idea of life as what, in my opinion, it is within the history of philosophy: the departure point of twentieth century existentialist thought.

The Coming Age

As a conclusion to a piece laden with both irony and insight, which was written on the occasion of the centenary of Goethe’s death, Ortega writes: “There was a time when people believed that culture did not need roots. . . . It was only recently—yet it was long ago. . . .”[2] Such an utterance can only be made from the vantage point of a present looking back upon a distinguishable, discernable past. The present age, Ortega tells us, is chronologically proximate to this past, and yet is so ideologically distinct that it is not altogether inappropriate to speak of it as a distant epoch. This short line, appropriately bringing to a close a piece that is at once a eulogizing and a resurrecting of Goethe’s life and thought, bespeaks of the acuity and sensitivity of Ortega’s historical awareness. There was an age, near his own, that is descending before the rising lights of a new age, one which the European of Ortega’s time senses but does not yet cognize. This closing epoch is what historians and philosophers have dubbed “modernity,” whose definitive form has plowed the intellectual, social and cultural landscape of Europe since the time of Galileo.

As early as 1914, when his first book, Meditaciones del Quijote, first fell from the presses, Ortega announced the coming of a new dawn of reason, but it was not until the 1923 programmatic El tema de nuestro tiempo that he unleashed his full prophetic vision of the future course of European history. Nuestro tiempo—our age—stands upon the earth of deep crisis, marking the close of one age and the opening of another, “not that which has just come to an end but that which is just beginning.”[3] What marks the advent of this new age, this burgeoning crisis, is the diminishing of the evidential power of modernity’s system of values. Ortega sketches the current state with poignancy in his En torno a Galileo, whose English translator invoked a bit of narrative license in rendering the title Man and Crisis:

There are many reasons for surmising that European man is lifting his tents from off that modern soil where he has camped these three hundred years and is beginning a new exodus toward another historic ambit, another manner of existence. This would mean that the ground of the modern age which begins beneath the feet of Galileo is coming to an end beneath our own. Our feet have already moved away from it.[4]

In brief, the European of Ortega’s time senses a softening and a shifting of the ground upon which he/she has stood for nearly 300 years, packed firm by the generation of those titans of modernity, Galileo, Copernicus and Descartes. These pioneers themselves moved through a persistent crisis of their own, emerging from a withering age of faith in revelation and inaugurating a new age of scientific rationality. The desire to fulfill the swelling ambition of reason led to a new age of belief where the “Western man believes, then, that the world possesses a rational structure, that is to say, that reality possesses an organization coincident with the organization of the human intellect, taking this, of course, in its purest form, that of mathematical reason.”[5] But for Ortega, it is none other than the traditionally celebrated father of modern philosophy, Descartes, who manifested the scope of what would become the modern age. What Descartes bespoke was not only the subjection of the mundus to the auspices of rational inquiry, but also the possibility of examining psychological life, reducible to the sheer presence of cogitatio, by means of pure intellectual principle:

The physics and psychology of Descartes were the first manifestations of a new spiritual state which, a century later, came to overspread all the forms of human life and predominated in the drawing-room, the law court and the market-place. The convergence of the features of this spiritual state, produced the sensibility which is specifically “modern.” Mistrust and contempt of everything spontaneous and immediate. Enthusiasm for all the constructions of reason.[6]

This novel and overtly ambitious “mediator between man and the world,”[7] physico-mathematical reason, posed as the placating presence of ultimate intelligibility, seeking to leave nothing unexamined by its principle. The Cartesian tree of knowledge extends out of its roots of metaphysics and reaches to the canopy of morality, leaving no element of life and the world outside its encompassing reach.[8]
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[1] José Ortega y Gasset, “Preface for the Germans,” in Phenomenology and Art, trans. Phillip W. Silver (New York: Norton, 1975), 19.
[2]Ortega, “In Search of Goethe from Within,” trans. Willard R. Trask, in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1968), 174.
[3] Ortega, The Modern Theme, trans. James Cleugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 12.
[4]Ortega, Man and Crisis, trans. Mildred Adams (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1958), 10.
[5] Ortega, “History as a System” in History as a System and Other Essays toward a Philosophy of History, trans. John William Miller (New York: Norton, 1941), 171. Published in Spanish as Historia como sistema in 1941.
[6] The Modern Theme, 34.
[7]“History as a System,” 174.
[8] Descartes’ tree of knowledge is outlined in the French preface to his Principia Philosophiae: “Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals.” (AT IX.2 14; CSM I 186).