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His attitude toward this intrinsic aspect of thought becomes apparent when he remarked: The most important and obvious connection, then, between intellectual currents in Europe and Ortega's thought was the influence, in general, of German philosophy and, in particular, his studies at the University of Marburg. Neo-Kantianism in general and Cohen in particular provided a broad influence on the intellectual development of Ortega. He studied closely with both Cohen and Natorp, and the former served as Ortega's primary mentor.

An attempt to distinguish philosophy from the assumptions and assertions—whether idealistic or positivistic—of speculative metaphysics characterized his general philosophic position. This distinction drawn by Ortega between his vitalistic perspective and Cohen's all-embracing logic suggests that Ortega's experience at Marburg brought him closer to a critical than to an absolute Neo-Kantianism.

The critical approach to philosophical issues became an important factor in influencing Ortega's thought and in the philosophical training that he received. Ortega's return to Marburg in signaled another turn in his intellectual interests and in his philosophical development: He recalled in his later writing that, while studying at Marburg during those months, he and his fellow- students of Cohen and Natorp were deeply immersed in Neo-Kantian idealism. Ortega, Hartmann, Heimsoeth, and Scheffer, often discussed amongst themselves their agreements, disagreements, and dissatisfaction with the Neo-Kantianism of their mentors.

In , they challenged collectively, as a group of students, the positions of their teachers; on leaving Marburg, they had to pursue as individuals whatever intellectual autonomy they were able to discover in phenomenology, and to put together whichever architectonic of a system was attainable from it. After , evidence points to how both Ortega and Hartmann pursued particular interests of phenomenology.

Three of the five sections of the review elaborated on certain aspects of Husserl's phenomenology, in a general sense, as the pure description of essences. Ortega's dissatisfaction with this psychological understanding of the Ideas anticipated, in part, statements made by Husserl in In his Crisis for European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology , Husserl remarked in passing that several of the paragraphs and locutions of transcendental phenomenology may have misled several readers to understand his thesis in a psychological sense.

This becomes as much the case of the mention of consciousness as what remains after all transcendence has been bracketed, as of the thesis of noesis-noema correlation. According to Ortega, Husserl presented phenomenology as a descriptive manner in which one philosophizes without presuppositions and without empirical statements. Thus, for Ortega, Husserl's position reduces phenomena as entities in the natural posture of our world:. This sympathetic discussion of Husserl's Ideas inspired Ortega to pursue the new science of phenomenology as a method of inquiry.

The method of the inquiry became crucial especially in view of his expressed objective to make a distinction between descriptive and explanatory psychology and, thereby, to clarify the concept of the mental status of consciousness. Ortega expanded these lectures into a manuscript entitled Psychological Investigations , which has been published posthumously. These psychological investigations constituted for him a philosophical basis upon which to define mental phenomena, very much in the manner Husserl had set out to perform in his Logical Investigations.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the emergence of psychology as an independent discipline, liberated from the traditional tutelage of philosophy, led to intense investigations of human behavior which soon revealed the need for subtler methods of analysis than those provided by the physical sciences.

José Ortega y Gasset (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Spring Edition)

Gradually, a new conception of the individual emerged, as different from the traditional conceptions as new mathematical physics was different from its mechanistic predecessor. For certain authorities, knowledge attains legitimacy when it has been invested with power of tradition. The need to make an appeal to tradition represents one of the characteristics that grants authority to classical authors.

In his quest for a scientific methodology, with the objective of tackling new problems, Ortega sought to establish whether philosophical legitimacy was attainable without appealing to traditional authority. The formal principles for discursive justification provide the procedural basis for distinguishing new science from the classical. To be sure, he contended,. Scientific research, as a way of expanding knowledge, obliges us to overcome classicism.

The very process of apprenticeship carries within itself the requirement that it come to an end and yield to independent creation. To study or to learn from a classic ultimately impels us to emulate what its author did: From this stance, Ortega maintained that classical or traditional science possessed an aura of privilege, distance and permanence about it, but the new science, in challenging this privilege and claims of permanence with an alternative perception of reality, disintegrated that aura and allowed the inquirer to encounter reality in terms of his or her time and place.

In view of this characterization, Ortega formulated his philosophical objective within the context of the early twentieth century. Once the problem concerning the distinction between mental and physical phenomena have been established, Ortega maintains that other questions will also be resolved: The discrepancy between science and experience, though extreme for some of his contemporaries, became one his central concerns during this period. It demolished the notion of an objective reality with all that it implied: The findings of modern physics, therefore, were bound to have had an enormous impact on general culture, even greater than that, according to Ortega, of biology in the mid-nineteenth century.

Albert Einstein, he argued, struck the first telling blow against the concept of an objective reality—a concept that assumes the existence of universal time and space into which nature fits, independently of the observer. Einstein demonstrated that there is no single spatial and chronological frame of reference. Every observer is confined to a specific and relative time-space system. To establish distance between ourselves and reality as a manner of understanding these lived experiences—which are by no means absolute—we have to project ourselves into the place of another person and situation.

In doing so, we may come to distinguish between persons, things and situations, and, thereby, come to observe reality more closely Obras , 3: In this manner, Ortega's ambivalence toward the adoption of the phenomenological method, by , became apparent in his search for a coherent method of analysis. This explains the positive side of the ambivalence which prompts him to approach and to accept phenomenology.

However, on the other side of the ambivalence, he avoided phenomenology where the emphasis appears to be more abstract and in the tradition of idealism. His response to Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic pointed to his criticism of this tendency in phenomenology. Several European thinkers who were influenced in one way or another by concepts of the phenomenological movement, but who were not necessarily members of the movement, became dissatisfied with the alleged solipsistic standpoint of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology in the Formal and Transcendental Logic.

Ortega was one of these thinkers, although he did not express explicitly any dissatisfaction with what he perceived as the solipsistic implications of the transcendental idealism in the latter work until twelve years later. The observations and insights made in the lectures were amplified later in his Cartesian Meditations and Crisis. In these later writings, Descartes' ego lost its abstract, absolute status as it became correlative to the world of experience Cartesian Meditations , pp. To be sure, Ortega's ambivalence toward phenomenology became manifest throughout this section of the article.

At the time of his Cartesian Meditations and Crisis of European Sciences , Husserl proclaimed that scientific knowledge can be understood only to the extent that we first understand the notion, Lebenswelt. The Crisis became famous for its thematic treatment of the concept, life-world. Lebenswelt philosophy is primarily engaged in the elaboration of the broader question posed in Logical Investigations: Truth has been defined here as lived experience of truth—that is, evidence. Evidence is revealed exclusively in present experience, and thereby truth is always and exclusively tested in present experience as one cannot relive the flux of experience.

There is no absolute truth, as postulated by either dogmatism or skepticism. Rather, truth defines itself in process, as revision, correction, and self-surpassing. This dynamic process occurs at the heart of the living present. Also, in regard to the life-world, the innovative contribution of Crisis lies in Husserl's attempt to provide a thematic account of history and the historicity of the life-world, and of the constituting subjectivity within the overall framework of transcendental phenomenology.

History becomes mastered not by an a-historical apriorism, but by a transcendental stance which demonstrates that the process of constitution developed in history may be, in its essential structure, deciphered in reflective thinking by the reflecting ego, like the constitution of modern science. Thus, the truths of science are founded neither in Divine Providence, as Descartes thought, nor on the a priori conditions of possibility, as Kant thought.

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Rather, they are grounded in lived experiences on which the truth of the theoretical consciousness is based Crisis , pp. Upon insisting that he arrived at this position independently of Husserl, Ortega made clear his favorable response to the innovative contribution made by Husserl in the Crisis. Therefore, Husserl's later works, particularly Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis , which were attempts to resolve the difficulties inherent in transcendental phenomenology and which were representative as explicit statements of his phenomenological philosophy, were not diametrically opposed to the themes of human life.

Nor did they neglect the importance of postulating the epistemological and the ontological function of the experience of human life. Clearly, Husserl's idea of Lebenswelt was the kind of notion that Ortega discussed in his own philosophy of human life.

But this affinity in thought does not negate minor differences between the two thinkers. Man and People constitute essays which Ortega developed and presented in several lectures and courses over a period of approximately twenty years. In a Prologue to his Ideas and Beliefs , in , Ortega announced the forthcoming appearance of two major works: These variegated expositions were complied and published posthumously, This kind of discussion of the differences of opinion on the development of a particular philosophical problem does not suggest that there was not some sharing of viewpoints or that Ortega was not influenced, intellectually, by Husserl.

Through this connection, Ortega aligns himself with Husserl's repudiation of the Cartesian distinction between the interior in the mind and the exterior in the world Obras , 5: Although Ortega's own independence of thought remains controversial, his intellectual development exhibits a consistent emphasis on discerning the seams drawn between extra-historical and historical coherence in transcendental phenomenology.

In short, he attempted to characterize the nature of an individual's experience of his world and himself. There is an attempt to distinguish between the facts that one's relationship to an organism is different from one's relation to a person qua being, and that one's actions toward an organism are different from the way that one acts toward a person.

In an edition of his works , Ortega proclaimed: My work is, by its essence and its presence, circumstantial. The first book to which Ortega referred was his Meditations on Quixote , a work of essays which he viewed as propelling philosophical aspirations. The psychological interpretation of external and internal excitation, as discussed by Freud in the Outline of Psychoanalysis and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ,arrested Ortega's attention on this new scientific method between and This intellectual tendency became his philosophic concern during the succeeding years.

This concern became apparent in his lectures of —22, subsequently published as The Theme of Our Time The transformation of the modern sense of human life may be understood best from the new art of his time. Ortega perceived the artists of his day as creating a much more radical alteration in the subjective attitude of art.

From the point of view of the new sense of art, human reality possesses its inner perception. This doctrine expounds the proposition that all historical epochs participate in contributing an element of truth to reality. That is, each individual and each collection of individuals apprehends reality from the point of view of their respective perceptions of reality.

Hence every truth connects to a place in space an in time. In locating truth in space and in time, he derived both the mode of perception and the essence of reality. Ortega perceived in his perspectivist mode of apprehending reality a philosophical analogue to Einstein's physics and, subsequently, invited a comparison of his philosophy of perspectivism to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Ortega's ideas on the historical significance of relativity were derived primarily from Einstein's discussion of the Special Theory.

The principle of human life, which constituted the reality of human experience, became the philosophical category through which Ortega synthesized the universe. The emphasis placed upon the vital world of life took Ortega a step beyond the Neo-Kantian transcendental logic of Cohen.

Ortega combined his idea of human life with an emphasis on history as constituting the vital dynamics of its expression, and this viewpoint carried him closer to the humanistic side of the Naturwissenschaften - Geisteswissenschaften distinction made by the Southwest German or Baden School and Wilhelm Dilthey than to Cohen's Neo-Kantianism. The striking similarities in the historicist focus of Windelband, Rickert, and Dilthey, the early historical thought of Croce, and the historical thought of Ortega suggest that the latter was both directly and indirectly influenced by their ideas.

Where the historical ideas of Windelband and Rickert reflected those European intellectual currents which were paralleled to Ortega's intellectual development, and where Dilthey had been acknowledged by Ortega as having influenced directly his intellectual focus, Croce's early historical ideas also appeared to have exerted and influence on the historical thought of Ortega.

This ignorance, I do not hesitate to maintain, has caused me to lose about ten years of my life—ten years, in the first place of intellectual development, but that of course, means an equal loss in all other dimensions of life…. When I studied in Berlin in …Dilthey happened to have given up lecturing in the university building a few years before and admitted to courses he held in home only a few specially prepared students. By the late s and the early s, however, Ortega did incorporate the idea of human life into his philosophic viewpoint. Dilthey's Lebensphilosophie , which emphasizes openness to experience, not only denies the notion of an abstract transcendental reality, but also considers life to be more than mere biological organism.

His concept of life is not biological. In this sense, Ortega's notion of human life is quite similar. For Dilthey, life is realized empirically within the experiential process of consciousness, as lived experience, which gives the experience of the individual life and reality. Dilthey's position, like Bergson's, contains the vitalist viewpoint that our experience of the life of our own minds is a direct experience of that life, as it exists, and therefore cannot be perceived as some mechanistic physiological explanation of human organism or as some subjective neo-idealistic logical principle.

The emphasis on the active, dynamic, and historical dimension of human and social phenomena, as realized within the lived experiences of life, reveals the vitalization of philosophy and the historicization of life perspective that is reflective of historicism and the attitude that historical knowledge is unique to the realm of human affairs. Popper's title alludes to Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy , which in turn, responded to Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty and, thereby, signals his intention to formulate a philosophico-methodological criticism of Marxist and, by extension, Hegelian philosophy of history.

Through this emphasis, historicism, understood as an outlook on the world Weltanschauung , emphasizes the historical quality of human existence; as an interpretation of history and life, it concerns itself with concepts of individuality and with individual development. Historicism seeks to describe and to interpret the unsystematic variety of the reality of society and history, for the concept of individuality not only embraces individual persons but also includes the variety of historical forms, such as different peoples, customs, cultures, institutions, nation-states, and the like; and the concept of development includes the historical process—at a particular time and place—within which individuality manifest itself not by any abstract, general laws or principles but by the living expressions of the multiplicity of these unique historical forms.

This signification of historical phenomena entails the sense in which historical knowledge and reality are explained by Dilthey: With it, man attains the sovereign power to wring from every experience its content, to surrender wholly to it without prepossession…. Every beauty, every sanctity, every sacrifice, re-lived and expounded, opens up perspectives which disclose a reality…. And, in contrast with the relativity, the continuity of the creative force makes itself feel as the central historical fact.

The historicist orientation of Croce contributed to the shift from the historicization of life to the historicization of philosophy. Ortega aspirations concerning the interpenetration of history and philosophy was conveyed in his lectures: Croce and Ortega both viewed human life as embodying an essentially historical process within which the realm of human reality is perceived and understood. Historical knowledge is found in the flow of the historical process and knowledge of this very process provides an essential understanding of human reality.

Croce, History , pp. History, in this connection, provides the important function of synthesizing the theoretical and the practical levels of human activity, of synthesizing the universal and the particular, thought and action. From the point of view of these levels of human activity historical knowledge provides information about what actually happened on particular occasions, at a particular place and under a clearly specified period of time. As the synthesis of the individual and the universal, history possesses the most complete form of knowledge.

Theoretic activity consists of knowledge while practical activity is characterized by volition, and thereby within this perspective knowledge is the precondition of action. Throughout this period Ortega formulated, in a systematic fashion, his general philosophic standpoint—positing human life as the ultimate reality—which contains philosophy within history, in his book En Torno a Galileo , by way of his theory of generations, and in his essay History as a System The years surrounding Ortega's absorption of Dilthey's writings suggest that he derived from him a sense of historicity, which previously he had never possessed.

We also observe that, in addition to the influences of historicism and phenomenology, Ortega also integrated existential philosophy into his general philosophical orientation. After the publication of his lectures, What Is Philosophy? Through the influence of the basic idea of Dilthey's Lebensphilosophie , Ortega was able to link his ontological point of view with his existentialist and historicist viewpoints. Misch, Lebensphilosophie , pp. The existentialist perspective of Ortega closely resembles the Fundamentalontologie or existentiale Analytik in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit.

In What Is Philosophy? Ortega was quite sensitive to implications drawn on the affinities between his work and Heidegger's, which, in part, explains his efforts to trace the originality of his formulations to his Meditations. Where Ortega's general ontological position does bear some similarities to Heidegger's existentiale Analytik , and his idea of human life some affinities with Dilthey's Lebensphilosophie , there are also some differences between these philosophies and Ortega's fundamental philosophical position.

The important difference to point out pertains to the observation that Ortega proceeded beyond the distinctive positions of Daseinanalyse and Lebensanalyse by incorporating the two concepts. History narrates the actions of individuals in society. In the world of physical objects, things change, in the social world of individuals, events happen. References to historical reality, or to historical time, therefore, are defined in terms of human motives, actions, and reactions and therefore as unique events.

What, then, are historical facts? Historical reasoning thus, for Ortega, has a specific form of narration. In order to comprehend anything human, be it personal, or collective, it is necessary to tell its history…. These statements were based on the recognition that historical time differs from time in nature. Clearly, any natural phenomenon occurs in time.

Nevertheless, references to historical reality or to a historical time often have been defined in terms of human motives, actions and reactions. For this reason historical events have often been characterized as unique events, in contrast to the laws of nature where similar elements meet under similar circumstances.

The history of the individual therefore means more than mere change in time. Historical time becomes meaningful through human actions. In connecting historical reasoning to human actions, critical philosophy of history sought to disclose the mind's activity as a tangible process. As with Dilthey, Croce and later, Collingwood, Ortega in his philosophical orientation was affiliated with the tradition which, by way of contrast with classical British empiricism, portrayed the human mind in active terms; in other words, the Neo-Kantian tradition treated mental activity as creative and self-determining, displaying a constructive role in human experience rather than passively responding in mechanical fashion, to the promptings of external stimuli.

Kant had already established that all knowledge is a function of the human mind. The mind, by means of its own a priori forms, structures the entire domain of knowledge. This formal extension of the domain of mental activity appealed to Ortega.

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The particular importance, which Ortega ascribed to history, and his contention that its character had been radically misinterpreted by empiricist philosophers, reflected the presupposition underlying his portrayal of the individual as an autonomous historical agent. He viewed the empirical, or positivistic, objective of formulating a theory of human nature in accordance with principles drawn from the physical sciences as providing faulty findings. In this connection, the notion of a fixed human character, conforming to immutable principles which are valid for all individuals during all historical periods, was unacceptable to him.

To explain reality, Ortega continued, the natural sciences, in their concern with the existence of objects in natural phenomena, aim at discovering the general concepts or the natural laws under which these objects may be subsumes.


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This abrupt separation of the individual and nature, in addition to his rejection of rational concepts as producing any valid knowledge of reality, reaffirms Ortega's denial of universal, fundamental principles of reality and, thus aligns him on the humanistic side of the natural sciences—human sciences dichotomy. What is real and what has history comprises what has been disclosed by human beings. He has no other. Through history he has made himself such as he is. Man finds that he has no nature other than what he has done himself. The individual, thus, lives in an actively and disclosing way.

The disclosure concerns first and foremost the individual himself or herself. The individual basically understands his or her own being, an understanding of which, according Ortega, does not belong to the common life of man in general; rather, it belongs to each unique individual Obras , 6: For it is only within his or her own factual existence that the individual can fathom: But understand it well, I am free by coercion, whether I want to be or not. Thus, for Ortega, how an individual constitutes himself or herself becomes determined very much by the way in which he or she allows for the possession of either being.

We do not live to think, on the contrary: For once given his life, man's being or essence becomes an ever-changing reality. In this manner, the burden of action and of making decisions is placed upon the individual as the very essence of one's being consists in an ever-changing reality, in the making, and one's ability to be this or that being is contingent upon his or her actions and thus conveys how the individual, for Ortega, is fundamentally different from animals and stones:.

This life that is given to us is given to us empty, and man has to go on filling it for himself, occupying it. Such is our occupation. This is not the case with the stone, the plant, and the animal. Their being is given already to them predetermined and resolute…But man is given the necessity of having to be doing something always, upon pain of succumbing, yet what he has to do is not present to him from the outset and once and for all.

Because the most strange and most confounding thing about this circumstance or world in which we have to live consists in the fact that it always presents to us, within its inexorable circle or horizon, a variety of possibilities for our action, a variety in the face of which we are obliged to choose and, therefore, to exercise our freedom. The circumstance—I repeat—the here and now within which we are inexorably inscribed and imprisoned, does not at each moment impose on us a single act or activity but various possible acts or activities and cruelly leaves us to our own initiative and inspiration, hence to our own responsibility Obras , 7: Existentialist philosophers are noted for their emphasis on freedom of action and the necessity for the individual to choose what he or she will be; it becomes apparent, from the above statement, that Ortega has absorbed this intellectual tradition into his own philosophy.

Clearly, other philosophers have been concerned with the nature of human freedom preceding the philosophical activity in Europe from the late s to the s. However, the central interest which unites Ortega and Existential philosophy concerns not only the issue of human freedom, but also an emphasis on the experience and practice of it. The individual must act in life and, under such conditions, the living experience becomes a task and the individual becomes what the potential possibilities of his or her finite being exhibit him or her to be.

The essential finitude of the individual is experienced at the very heart of life itself. Could there be less choice? Ortega perceived the reality and the fact of death as essential in revealing the very essence and contingency of the individual's being, which resembles similar views expressed by Heidegger. The acceptance of death, therefore, as a possible here-and —now discloses the radical—basic—finitude of human life. The perceptible factual occurrence of death also characterizes human life as an occurrence of time as well as reality.

As the individual becomes aware of the reality of death, through experience, his or her finiteness discloses itself essentially in time:. Our vital knowledge of other men and of ourselves is open knowledge that is never stable…. Our vital knowledge is open, floating because the theme for this knowledge, life, Man, is already in itself a being ever open to new possibilities.

Our past undoubtedly weighs on us; it inclined us to be more this than that in the future, but it does not chain us nor drag us…. Life is change; it is at every new moment becoming something distinct from what it was, therefore, it never becomes definitely itself.

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Only death, by preventing any new change, changes man into the definitive and immutable himself…from the moment we begin to be, death may intervene into the very substance of our life, collaborate in it, compress it and densify it, may make it urgency imminence and the need of doing our best at every instant. This characterization of human life, then, posits the notion that time is in man, for the events in men's lives are related by their position in time. Ortega's emphasis on man as a being-that-lives-in-the-world may suggest something like a purpose, an end; however, a specific end was never his intended purpose.

The here-and-now of the individual becomes his primary concern. The future is not-here-yet and the past is no-longer-here and these two features tend to permeate the very center of man's being as their positions are related to each other in time. As death relates to the individual's internal finitude, the past and present relate to his or her finitude in its external, temporal manifestation. The present—the here-and-now—becomes understood as that moment during which the past and future are divided.

Once an individual becomes aware of himself as a being based on the facts of his or her past such facts as where one was born, or who were one's parents , and also as projected towards the future which he or she chooses, the individual will assume full responsibility for his or her life and choices. The individual directs himself toward the future and, accordingly, takes upon himself the inheritance of the past and thereby becomes oriented to his actual and present predicament. In short, the present originates from the past so as to engender the future.

Ortega's schematization of the past, present, and future is sustained in the unity of a temporality that assumes peculiar features in the experience of the individual's vital dimensions. Rather, as a continual process of being and not-being, it has to be viewed from the three-dimensional perspective of past, present, and future. The individual reflects upon the past as he or she confronts continually the situation of having to make conscious decisions with respect to the present and the future. As we have learned, life, death, free choice, and finiteness dwell together in the living experiences of individuals.

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