José Ortega y Gasset on the Idea of Life (Part 4)

While I possess a great deal of freedom with respect to deciding my future possibilities, in life, I am condemned to choose. On that matter, I have no say. Before Heidegger’s “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) of Dasein came Ortega’s description of the human condition as a “biological projectile launched…with pre-determined force and direction.”[1] I find that I have been “flung” into my life without any prior consent on my part,[2] and here I discover that my live is not coextensive with “I.” I am always within a particular surrounding, an environment, a circumstance. Life reveals to me that “I” am never without my environment—yo soy yo y mi circumstancia. “I” am only a single ingredient within the scope of life. “I live, and, in living, I am in the surrounding circumstance, which is not I. The reality of my being, my ‘I,’ is, then, secondary to the integral reality which is my life; I find the former—the reality of my ‘I’—in the latter, the living reality. I and circumstance both form part of my life.”[3] Before me always lie possibilities, and among these possibilities I possess a great range of freedom. However, my freedom is not limitless. Indeed, my liberty of choice transverses only the ground within the borderlands of my environment. I can never escape from my environment; it remains a constant within my life along with my “I.” In his groundbreaking La Rebelión de las Masas, Ortega succinctly captures this reality: “Our circumstances—these possibilities—form the portion of life given us, imposed on us. This constitutes what we call the world. Life does not choose its own world, it finds itself, to start with, in a world determined and unchangeable: the world of the present.”[4] To borrow Husserlian terminology, “I” and my circumstancia are moments to one another, dependent upon one another as they comprise the whole, which is my life. My awareness and conceptualization of my “I” comes only after having already been living the relationship with my circumstancia or environment.

My environment or circumstancia, made of things and people, constitutes the full range of my possibilities, and thereby sets a limit to the exercise of my freedom. I cannot choose beyond the possibilities that my circumstancia presents to me in each given moment, creating a tension between what I determine my destiny to be and how that destiny is realized in each moment. This reality is what Ortega dubs the “circle of fatality,” for the world into which I have been projected “is in every case composed of a certain repertory of possibilities, of being able to do this, that, or the other.”[5] One of Ortega’s favorite images to describe this living experience of having the freedom of choice at each moment, accompanied by the confines of a destiny offered by environment, is that of the drama:

To this extent, unlike all the other beings in the universe, man is never surely man; on the contrary, being man signifies precisely being always on the point of not being man, being a living problem, an absolute and hazardous adventure, or, as I am wont to say: being, in essence, drama! Because there is a drama only when we do not know what is going to happen, so that every instant is pure peril and shuddering risk.[6]

I am aware of myself as capable of choice, nay, as active choice itself, meeting the resistance of the world. The ensuing drama unfolds as I recognize, accept and choose the destiny proffered by my circumstancia while seeking to improve my circumstancia in order to get the very best out of it. Ortega tells us life is drama and a crossroads that happens to us, and within that drama I am an actor who is not given being, but who invents “projects of being” in light of the given circumstancia.[7] Ontological perplexity saturates all my vital phenomena, for I find myself a spontaneous, living person who is not handed a script for the drama but is nonetheless condemned to choose my being as each act plays out. But I also find that I am bound by an inner necessity to submit to the objective law of circumstancia. I am governed by a “double imperative”—I must adjust to that which is other than me, namely my environment, and I must do justice to the vital task of choice, of invention.[8] Life is a preoccupation with the future, with choosing what I am going to be at every moment, with carving out my future. All this is accomplished by me; no one can choose it for me: “Nothing that is substantive has been conferred upon man. He has to do it all for himself.”[9] Hence, life is “perplexity, constant and essential perplexity.”[10]

For Ortega, life is, at its very core, disorientation. For Heidegger, it is an ontological mood of angst; for Camus, it is being the stranger; for McDermott, it is the condition of being ontological disconnected. While these descriptions of the human reality within its environment are not completely coterminous, they touch upon a reality that seems undeniable: within my environment, my circumstancia, I am a foreigner, an immigrant, even a prisoner. Being in my environment does not mean that I am part of my environment, as the realist option would have it, but that I am submerged into something that is altogether other than I. My circumstancia is not reducible to “I” or to one of my vital functions (such as thought), as the idealist option would have it, but remains heterogeneous to “I.” I am forced, then, to work out my essence outside my essence, as it were, in something that is not “I.” Life, therefore, is always disorientation, disconnection from my circumstancia, but also a constant, continuous and vacillating attempt to orient myself, that is, to solve the problem posed by life itself. Herein, says Ortega, lies the salvation of the present age of the European in crisis. In light of the decline of modern reason, life must be narrowed down to its essential aspect so that the European may understand the problem of life and begin to seek out a solution. The European, says Ortega, needs to maintain “consciousness of shipwreck, being the truth of life,” shipwrecked humanity being a metaphor that at once captures the contemporary crisis and conveys the disorientation and alienation of being forced to make one’s self in the midst of the total other.[11]
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[1] The Modern Theme, 16. Ortega himself noted the stark similarities between his own philosophy and that of Heidegger’s, though he claims to have been influenced the great German thinker: “It would be impossible for me to say how close Heidegger’s philosophy comes to that which has always inspired my writings—among other things, because Heidegger’s work is not yet finished, nor, on the other hand, have my ideas been adequately developed in print. But I am obliged to say that I owe Heidegger very little. Of Heidegger’s important concepts, but one or two at most have not been previously expressed in one of my books, sometimes thirteen years earlier.” “Goethe From Within,” 146-147n3.
[2] Some Lessons in Metaphysics, 42.
[3] Ibid., 77.
[4] Ortega, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: Norton, 1932), 47.
[5] Some Lessons in Metaphysics, 92.
[6] Man and People, 25.
[7] “History as a System,” 202.
[8] The Modern Theme, 45-51.
[9] Man and People, 20.
[10] Some Lessons in Metaphysics, 92.
[11] “Goethe from Within,” 137.