By Hume’s lights, any inquiry into aesthetics operates under the pretense that that any rule or standard associated with taste is ascertained solely by experience and not by demonstration or reasoning a priori. In “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume asserts this thesis rather than proves it (see Paragraphs 9 and 10). Perhaps for some, Hume’s suggestion may strike them as intuitively correct and without need of conceptual rigor or proof. However, a closer look reveals that Hume’s aesthetics is subservient to epistemological commitments developed and expounded independently of “Of the Standard of Taste,” and it is to these commitments that one ought to direct one’s attention in order to determine whether the premise of Hume’s aesthetics holds up under philosophical scrutiny.

Early in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume draws what is minimally a conceptual distinction between two types of knowledge. On the hand are what he calls “relationships of ideas,” which include mathematics and any other sort of thinking whereby propositions are intuitively or demonstrably discovered. On the other hand are the broad and seemingly boundless “matters of fact,” which are conclusions and assertions whose arrival necessitates moving beyond the operation of thought, as well as beyond experience: “All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be based on the relation of Cause and Effect. By means of that relation alone we can beyond the evidence of our memory and sense” (ECHU 22).

Hume’s criticism of the customary affirmation of the a priori rule of causality is well known and needs only fleeting mention here. For Hume, the relation of cause and effect arises out of experience and habitual expectation rather than out of any a priori reasoning. He rejects the notion that the mind can ever discover the effect in a given cause. And so, he reasons, the mind must “invent or imagine” each scenario of a particular and peculiar effect proceeding by necessity from a cause. Now, Hume does not deny that causality is something real; rather, he holds that the mind cannot discover this principle intuitively or demonstrably and extend it to any future event.

At the conclusion of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume places the consideration of beauty and taste within the enquiries of matters of fact. The implication, of course, is that any “standard of taste” would inevitably be denied any intuitive or demonstrative value. Accordingly, “Of the Standard of Taste” carries out an investigation of taste in a strictly empirical mode. Thus, the full scope of “Of the Standard of Taste” is premised upon an epistemological position that, incidentally, has been seriously challenged by philosophers, not least of whom is Immanuel Kant, whose discovery of the synthetic a priori threatens the validity of Hume’s position on the purely experiential arrival at any rule of causality. It seems to me that Hume’s aesthetics cannot get off the ground without the validity of his epistemological division between relations of ideas and matters of fact.

Curiously, not only does Hume assume his tenuous epistemological commitments in “Of the Standard of Taste,” but he also seems to assume an intuitive principle of causality in his formulation of that sought-after standard. He asserts: “It must be allowed, that there are certain qualities in objects, which are fitted by nature to produce those particular feelings [of beauty and deformity]” (Paragraph 16). Remarkably, it appears that Hume is stealing a card from John Locke’s deck, suggesting that there are “qualities” in objects that cause or “produce” the particular and varying feelings of beauty and deformity. Recall that Locke forwarded a casual theory of perception whereby the arrangement and power of “primary qualities” in objects produce the “secondary qualities” of perception. It appears that Hume has allowed this empiricist claim to slip in the backdoor of his aesthetics, committing him to a position that he actually rejects in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, that is, that any rule of causality is an invention of the mind and not a principle that resides in the actual objects of perception. Hume seems to suggest that the standard of taste that arises out of the “uniform consent of nations and ages” is based upon qualities in objects that consistently cause certain sentiments (albeit in those who have a rather advanced “delicacy of taste”). And yet, how can Hume make this claim in “Of the Standard of Taste” when he denied in the Enquiry that causality is a knowable fact in reality?

My intent here is only to point out that Hume’s aesthetics are problematic in at least ways: 1. His aesthetics assumes a dubious epistemological distinction; 2. His aesthetics seems to violate his theory of causality, which is a constitutive aspect of the distinction. Am I being unfair to Hume?

The New York Times published an article last Sunday on the increasing interest in philosophy at colleges and universities around the United States. I always advise my college students to pick up a second major in philosophy in addition to what they are already studying, as I have found no other discipline comparable in terms of aiding in the development of critical thinking, linguistic skills and practical application of concepts.

I was pleased to see that my own university, Texas A&M, got a nod in the article. Click here to read it.

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.
—
[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.

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]
—
[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.

“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.
—
[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.

The modern age appeared under what Ortega calls a generación, which is a general term in his philosophy that denotes a peculiar social reality marked by a decisive sort of sensibility. The generación of modernity was determined by the ascendency of physico-mathematical reason, first among its intellectual minority and later among the vast multitude of Europeans, and lives now according to what can loosely be described as “our convictions.”[1] What Ortega wants to declare is that the sensibility of his own generation is markedly distinct from that of modernity, and in so doing he brings to light what had already been dimly present: the European of his age is in a fundamental state of crisis, of disorientation. Ortega, in his typically personal, narrative style, describes the onset of the crisis:

The man who has not lost faith in the past is not frightened by the future, because he is sure that in the past he will find the tactic, the method, the course, by which he can sustain himself in the problematic tomorrow. The future is the horizon of problems, the past is the terra firma of methods, of the roads which we believe we have under our feet. Consider, dear friend, the terrible situation of the man to whom the past, the stable, suddenly becomes problematical, suddenly becomes an abyss. Previously, danger appeared to lie only before him, in the hazardous future; now he finds it also behind his back and under his feet.[2]

What had for nearly 300 years buttressed human confidence in the under-laboring of modern philosophy and the grandiose constructions of science was now being subjected, ironically, to the very doubt that initially fired the machinery of the Cartesian system. Yet, this new doubt lacks the optimism of its modern forbear; it is not intended to serve as a means to undergird a pre-established system of science. Rather, the doubt of Ortega’s age slipped surreptitiously through the backdoor of the modern edifice, initially in the form of a nagging whisper before crescendoing to a resounding clamor. “We are beginning to suspect that history, human life, cannot and ‘ought’ not to be ruled by principle, like mathematical textbooks”[3]—the European at the turn of the twentieth century is forced to confront this unsettling reality.

What led to the perception of the past as problematic? In short, Ortega tells us that humanity’s patience has run thin. For the better part of three centuries, he asserts, the new methods of the sciences had failed to yield an adequate, let alone a complete description of human life. At the helm was the Cartesian model of the res cogitans, which presented human nature as a static substance, a thing. Following was the Geist of the German idealists, which, while adjusting the view a bit in light of the recognizable limits of reason, was a bit more pliable in terms of its adaptation, but nevertheless was an identity and thing.[4] Whether it was Descartes’ raison, Spinoza’s mos geometricus or Kant’s pure reason, ultimately, the underlying error of modernity, asserts Ortega, is “our treating realities—corporeal or no—as if they were ideas, concepts, in short, identities.”[5] The notion of unchanging being, of static nature is a concept inherited from Parmenides to which the realities under the auspices of reason were referred. Imposed upon human life was res, substantia, modus, mind, Geist—varying concepts with the same tragic result: the fossilization of the vital reality of human life.

When Ortega poses the question of what science, modern reason, has to say concerning human reality in the present age, he claims no clear answer has or can be given. The audacity of reason, once capable of inspiring such unwavering hope in the realization of a comprehensive knowledge of every human reality, has been reduced to but only one modest dimension within the totality of human life: “[T]he lack of equilibrium between the perfection of its partial efficiency and its failure from the comprehensive point of view, which is final, is such in my opinion that it has contributed to the aggravation of our universal disquiet.”[6] By Ortega’s lights, modernity’s general predilection for the quantifiable, the mechanistic, the rational and the constant left the realm of spontaneity in human life unexamined and underappreciated. But such an idolization of reason consists of “our understanding functioning in the void, without let or hindrance, in contact with itself, and controlled only by its own internal standards.”[7] Hence, the lack of an answer to a question of pressing and unparalleled urgency. The sensibility of the present age, stemming from the disorientation felt by the European, is captured by Ortega in an expression of confusion: “We do not now understand how it is possible to speak of a human life in which the organ of truth has been amputated, or of a truth which requires the withdrawal of the vital stream before it can exist.”[8] The theme of the present age is the subjugation of reason to the more basic, antecedent reality of human vitality. Humanity can no longer wait idly for the fulfillment of modernity’s vacuous promises of a future knowledge of human nature.[9] The question of life itself must be confronted here and now in its full vital splendor.
—
[1] See, for example, Ortega’s chapters “The Idea of the Generation,” in Man and Crisis and “The Concept of the Generation,” in the Modern Theme.
[2] “Goethe from Within,” 134.
[3] The Modern Theme, 35.
[4] “Spirit, if it is anything in the world, is identity, and hence res, a thing—though as subtle and ethereal as you please. Spirit possesses a static consistency: it is already, to begin with, what it is going to be. . . . Hegel’s movement of the spirit is a pure fiction, since it is a movement within the spirit, whose consistency lies in its fixed, static, pre-established truth. Now the entity whose being consists in identical being evidently possesses already, to begin with, all it needs in order to be. For this reason identical being is substantive being, substance, a being that suffices to itself, sufficient being.” This is the thing. Spirit is no other than a thing.” “History as a System,” 197.
[5] Ibid., 198.
[6] Ibid., 179.
[7] The Modern Theme, 32.
[8] Ibid., 37.
[9] Ortega expresses this urgency in stunning fashion: “Life is haste and has urgent need to know what it is up against, and it is out of this urgency that truth in a vague tomorrow, has proved a dulling opiate to humanity. Truth is what is true now and not what remains to be discovered in an undetermined future.” “History as a System,” 182.

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).