José Ortega y Gasset on the Idea of Life (Part 5)

By way of concluding this all too brief sketch of Ortega’s idea of life, perhaps it is worth taking account of “that anxiety both dolorous and delicious contained in every moment” of the present age.[1] If the essential and naked being—or not yet being—of humanity has been laid bare, are all people conscious of the fragility of life? In the context of a heightened vital altitude, are we all going to now choose to take up the task of life in inventing projects of being? Unfortunately, such optimism will inevitably lead to disappointment, for the present age is only now being ushered in. Just as the modern epoch began with the revolutionary insights of an minority, so too will our present age begin with a select minority long before vital awareness trickles down to all. In each generation, a “constant interval” separates the minority from masses.[2]

Ortega submits that before one can feel oneself disoriented and lost, one must make the initial effect to feel oneself, to meet oneself. But not all are willing to even take this initial treacherous step. The first answers we tend to seek whenever a crisis arises are those that are ready-made within our social environments. We often seek solutions from people without withdrawing from our environment momentarily in order to find our actual reality. But a “people” is not charged to invent itself, to decide its own being. A “people” does not think or choose for itself, it does not have responsibility for itself. Thus, the social “I” is inauthentic. Yet if I constantly rely upon the repetition of thoughts communicated by the “people,” I join myself to the amorphous and inauthentic masses; “I supplant my individual ‘I’ with the social ‘I’; I cease to live my genuine life and make this conform to a mold that is common, anonymous, ownerless. From being individual, I move to become communal; in the realm of thought, I practice vital commonality.”[3] To become inauthentic, to become mass is to live life on a derivative level, to make no demands of oneself for improving one’s circumstance, to avail of the effort to invent one’s being. Rather than being aware of the shipwreck, the masses perceive themselves as mere “buoys that float on the waves.”[4] In rather harsh terms, Ortega describes this life of inauthenticity: “Human necessity is the awesome imperative of authenticity. Whoever freely chooses not to abide by it falsifies his life, he unlives it, becomes a suicide.”[5] The masses ignore their ontological disorientation, substituting in its a place a fictitious and second-hand situation of orientation.

At the first light of the dawning epoch, Ortega concedes that only the minority will follow the double imperative to create their existence and to accept the demands of their circumstancia. The minority, facing the problem life poses, will not blindly and blithely accept the fleeting answers of the social environment, those residual ideologies of bygone eras. The minority demands more of itself than the masses, following the duty to create in the ontological situation of disorientation. Feeling itself able to create, the minority is composed of “spiritual scouts” and “vigilant souls” and is “in continual danger, both from the new districts it has to conquer and from the rank and file harassing its rear.”[6] The minority takes up the imperative of realization, occupied always with the future, refusing to fall back upon the tradition, inertia and boredom that define the masses. The truer and more faithful we are to our vocation to realize and actualize ourselves through the drama of possibilities, the more authentic our lives truly are. To whimsically trudge along with the caprices of the present moment and to harness oneself to the social customs of the day is to falsify life, to de-vivify one’s self, to become a statue. “When his freedom induces him to deny his irrevocable I and arbitrarily substitute some other for it—arbitrarily, even though in accordance with the most respectable “reasons”—he leads a spectral, unsatisfied life between…‘poetry and reality.’”[7]

The key to becoming a minority, to excelling in authentic living, is to retreat into oneself in order to encounter oneself, to make a question of oneself. Then one may return again to one’s circumstancia in order to decide how to make oneself, how to continually actualize one’s being within the world. Ortega adheres to neither pure perspectivism nor pure vitalism—reason is an imperative of the authentic life. But this reason is not separate from the vitality and spontaneity of human reality. It is a vital reason which recognizes that human life is always a reality of interdependence and coexistence of spontaneity and culture, of “I” and my circumstancia, of indigent being and future fulfillment. Within the drama of becoming and happening, nothing is a matter of indifference.
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[1] Revolt of the Masses, 45.
[2] The Modern Theme, 15.
[3] Some Lessons in Metaphysics, 106.
[4] Revolt of the Masses, 15.
[5] “Preface to the Germans,” 35.
[6] The Modern Theme, 12.
[7] “Goethe from Within,” 164.