José Ortega y Gasset on the Idea of Life (Part 3)

“The new great Idea in which man is beginning to abide is the Idea of life.”[1] Ortega tells us that this new idea had its first adumbrations in the philosophical output of Nietzsche and Dilthey, who Ortega acknowledge as his guides, as well as in the literature of Goethe.[2] These great thinkers marked the beginning of the fin de siècle of modernity; Ortega is the herald of the consequent age. The imperative of this age is to permit the human reality to disclose itself as it really is in its most basic and vital spontaneity. Remarkably, Ortega’s most extended treatment of human life in its multifarious dimensions occurs in a work published posthumously under the rather unimposing title, Unas Lecciones de Metafísical.[3] In this marvelous little work, Ortega unveils human reality, in its “primary situation,” as nothing more than “living.”[4] Prior to any conceptualization and rationalization of human reality is life itself. As trivial and obvious as this description sounds, it has been forgotten over the course of Western philosophy and science, most especially in the modern age, and must be recovered and made the nucleus around which all philosophical investigations into human reality crystallize. We must unabashedly gaze at life in its nakedness, unclothed by modernity’s conceptual bonds. What this implies, Ortega asserts, is that we must dispense with the concept of being as it was developed and handed down from Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle.[5] What we are in need of is a “non-Eleatic” concept of being, a Heraclitean description of the vicissitudes of being’s going and flowing.[6]

When Ortega declares “that man is not a thing, that it is false to talk of human nature, that man has no nature,” he is not suggesting that human reality is some absence or privation.[7] Rather, he is rejecting the entire conception of humanity as a static and unchanging res or natura bequeathed by modernity. The imperative of the age is to think of human reality in terms that radically differ from those of modernity and do not obfuscate life. Perhaps no where else is Ortega’s reliance upon the phenomenological method more blatant than in his attempt to shed those assumptions and presuppositions that underlie the systems of modernity that led to conceptual catastrophes. When we permit ourselves to cast an unflinching eye on human life, we discover that life is nothing more than “what we are and what we do; it is, then, of all things the closest to each one of us.”[8] Why is this provisional definition of living enigmatically both trivial and revolutionary? The simple elegance of the basic reality of life is plain at first sight, yet what is perhaps not as apparent is the manner in which this seeming platitude overthrows centuries of philosophical constructs. Flanking Ortega’s idea of life on the one side is the Cartesian claim that my truest self is the res cogitans, which Descartes takes as synonymous with animus and mens.[9] On the other, is Merleau-Ponty’s axiom, more recently adopted by Alasdair MacIntyre, “I am my body.”[10] Contrary to both Descartes and Merleau-Ponty, Ortega rejects that mind, soul or body are the basic realities of human life. For example, in the Lecciones he says, “I am not my body, or at least I am not solely my body” and “I am not only a piece of matter; but this does not mean that I think I am made up of something immaterial—whether you call it soul, spirit, or what you will.”[11] We would be wrong to assume that Ortega is taking a similar stand as Thomas Aquinas, who likewise declared that “my soul is not me.”[12] The Thomistic conception of the human person as a composite of body and soul finds no space to roam on Ortega’s philosophical terrain. For Ortega, I find myself with a body, with a soul, with cells, with consciousness, but these are concepts arrived at posterior to the basic living that has already been happening. Life, for Ortega, is not soul, body or a composite of both. I must encounter life in its basic reality as composed of two constant and inalienable ingredients: myself and my environment or circumstancia.

Without the impediments of an imposed conceptual framework upon the basic datum of life, I discover my existence, strictly speaking, occurs in the present now and that I possess no essence that limits this existence. I am faced with an existence that is not ready-made but which must be made. Ortega curiously takes a cue from the Scholastic tradition of “being” as a putting into action when he describes the meaning of “to exist” as to “achieve my essence.”[13] My existence is actively being what am I—life is what we are and what we do—and if I must act in order that I might exist (putting my essence into action), then it is platitudinous that I do not possesses a predefined, changeless nature or essence: “Human life is thus not an entity that changes accidentally, rather the reverse: in it the ‘substance’ is precisely change, which means that it cannot be thought of Eleatically as substance.”[14] I find myself free to choice what I am going to do, what I am going to be at each and every passing now—“Man has to choose his own being at each instant; he is perforce free.”[15] I do not encounter my life as predetermined, but as open to possibility. Each now, each instant I am directed toward a future becoming, so that my life is a matter of actively choosing from a host of future possibilities. Thus, in my life I do not just make myself, but I also decide what to make of myself from among a copia of possible futures. Pulling together these attributes of life, Ortega states: “Human life is not being what it already is, but it is the having to be, having to act in order to be; therefore it is not yet being.”[16] Life is a temporal, mercurial and continual operation; ipso facto, it can never be lived on the abstract plane. What I am doing now, what you are doing now, constitutes our respective lives in the present moment.
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[1] Ortega, “A Chapter from the History of Ideas—Wilhelm Dilthey and the Idea of Life,” in Concord and Liberty, trans. Helene Weyl (New York: Norton, 1946), 132.
[2] Though he does not explicitly mention them by name, there can be little doubt that Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard, likewise, peer over Ortega’s shoulder.
[3] English translation: Some Lessons in Metaphysics, trans. Mildred Adams (New York: Norton, 1969). Perhaps appropriately, Ortega’s most concentrated work on human life was not originally penned as book, author to manuscript. Rather, Unas Lecciones were lectures given by him in 1932-33 before a living audience.
[4] Some Lessons in Metaphysics, 27.
[5] “We owe innumerable things of the highest value to the Greeks, but they have put chains on us too. The man of the West still lives, to no small degree, enslaved by the preferences of the men of Greece—preferences that, operating in the subsoil of our culture, for eight centuries turned us from our proper and genuine Western vocation. The heaviest of these chains is ‘intellectualism’; and now, when it is imperative that we correct our course and find new roads—in short, succeed—it is of the greatest importance that we resolutely rid ourselves of this archaic attitude, which has been carried to its extreme during these last two centuries.” Ortega, Man and People, trans. Williard R. Trask (New York: Norton, 1957), 30.
[6] Ortega declares: “Time has come for the seed sown by Heraclitus to bring forth its mighty harvest.” “History as a System,” 203. See Ortega’s chapter “The Attitude Of Parmenides and Heraclitus” in The Origin of Philosophy translated T. Talbot (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 75-96.
[7] “History as a System,” 185.
[8] Some Lessons in Metaphysics, 35.
[9] “I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks [res cogitans]; that is I am a mind [mens], or intelligence [animus], or intellect [intellectus], or reason [ratio]—words whose meaning I have been ignorant of until now” (CSM II 18; AT VII 27).
[10] MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 6.
[11] Some Lessons in Metaphysics, 64.
[12] Thomas Aquinas, Super Epistolam Pauli Apostoli (Turin: Marietti ed., 1953).
[13] See Some Lessons in Metaphysics, 67-68.
[14] “History as a System,” 205.In another place, Ortega writes: “But a mere elimination of this residue of rationalism will at once disclose that ‘the substance’ of man is precisely his mutable and historical consistency. Man has no ‘nature’; he has history. His being is not one but many and manifold, different in each time and each place.” “A Chapter from the History of Ideas,” 148.
[15] “Preface to the Germans,” 34.
[16] Some Lessons in Metaphysics, 121.