## 1. Biography


### 1.1 Early Life



Jose Ortega y Gasset was born on May 9, 1883, in Madrid, the
second of four children by Jose Ortega Munilla and Dolores
Gasset Chinchilla. Eduardo Ortega y Gasset, his brother, was born in
April 1882, and after Jose, Rafaela in 1884 and Manuel in 1885.
His mother was the daughter of Eduardo Gasset y Artime, founder of
*El Imparcial*, the eminent liberal daily newspaper; Ortega
divided his time between creative writing and serving as the editor of
the family enterprise from 1900 to 1906. From September 1891 to 1897,
Ortega and his brother Eduardo were enrolled in the Jesuit Collegio de
San Estanislao de Kostka in Miraflores del Palo in Malaga,
where he studied Greek and other subjects under the tutelage of Father
Gonzalo Colomer and received his *bachillerato*. In November
1897, young Ortega enrolled in the Jesuit University of Deusto, in
Bilbao, accompanied by Father Colomer, for the purpose of studying
philology and Greek under the renowned scholar Julio Cejador y Frauca.
He remained in Deusto, studying philosophy, letters, and law, until
May 13, 1898, when he was awarded distinction in his first-year
examinations at the University of Salamanca. Miguel de Unamuno, an
eminent figure in Spanish intellectual circles and dean of the
faculty, served on the panel of examiners. The following year, Ortega
transferred to the Central University of Madrid from which he received
his *licenciatura* in philosophy and letters in June 1902, and
his doctorate in December 1904. He wrote his thesis on *The Terrors
of the Year One Thousand* in which an early interest in a general
interpretive approach to history, with a view toward the sociological
manifestations of a historical period, became evident. While at the
Central University of Madrid, Ortega developed a close friendship with
Ramiro de Maeztu with whom he shared an enthusiasm for Friedrich
Nietzsche's philosophy. In 1904, the year prior to his departure for
Germany, Ortega wrote his first article for the *El Imparcial*,
the family newspaper, on the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck.


### 1.2 Ortega in Germany



In late February 1905, Ortega left Spain for Germany
"fleeing", he described later, "the vulgarity of my
country to stuff myself with whatever I can get out of it"
(*El Imparcial*, 19 January, 1908, p. 1; *Obras*, X:
24). This first trip to Germany resulted in an eight-month stay at the
University of Leipzig where he pursued the study of classical
philology and philosophy. Ortega's proficiency in German proved
inadequate to study philology, but this linguistic deficiency did not
deter his enthusiasm: he enrolled in the Indo-European language and
linguistic courses taught by professors Brugmann and Meyer. Although
the time devoted to philological studies somewhat distracted him from
the philosophical training he sought initially, Ortega was introduced
to the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ernest Renan, Hippolyte
Taine, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Darwin,
and audited anatomy, physiology and psychology courses of Wilhelm
Wundt who, despite having been appointed the chair of philosophy,
served as professor of physiology and psychology at Leipzig. He
returned to Madrid in the summer of 1906, where he received word that
he had been granted a state stipend to resume his study in Germany for
another year. Within a few weeks, he left for the University of
Berlin, where Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Paulsen, Eduard Meyer,
Heinrich Wolfflin, Georg Simmel, Carl Stumpf, Max Planck, and
Alois Riehl were teaching. However, Ortega only attended Riehl's
lectures while in Berlin, which he later came to regret as he missed
the opportunity to encounter two thinkers he would subsequently
admire: Dilthey and Simmel. Six months later, Ortega left Berlin for
the University of Marburg, where he began his philosophical studies,
joining Nicolai Hartmann, Paul Scheffer, and Heinz Heimsoeth under the
Neo-Kantian philosophers Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. Once ensconced
in "the citadel of Neo-Kantianism" (*Obras*, VIII:
32), Ortega studied Kant and the history of philosophy with Cohen and
psychology and pedagogy with Natorp. The University of Marburg, with
its inquiry into the logical foundation of the natural sciences and
its emphasis on the epistemological and methodological facets of
philosophy, provided Ortega with the kind of philosophical grounding
and training he had been seeking.


### 1.3 Ortega in Spain



In February 1908, Ortega returned to Madrid where his appointment to
the staff of *El Imparcial* and his founding *Faro*, a
weekly magazine, became the first of several publishing ventures. They
served as the vehicle through which he conveyed his critical
assessment of Spanish and European cultures. Upon his departure for
Germany in 1905, the dominant intellectual issue among the
intelligentsia had been the regeneration of Spain and the fundamental
question, "what is to be done: 'Hispanization or
Europeanization?'" Upon his return in 1908, the question
remained the central theme of protracted discussions, the only
addition being the critical ideas of Ortega. In a 1908 issue of
*Faro*, the Conservative historian and politician Gabriel Maura
y Gamazo (1879-1963) first coined the designation
"Generation of 1898", which was popularized by the
novelist Azorin (Jose Martinez Ruiz,
1873-1967), a member of the group, in subsequent newspaper
articles in 1910 and 1913. On February 23, 1908, Maura engaged in
polemical exchanges with Ortega and referred to "the generation
that arrives today; a generation born intellectually at the root of
the disaster" (*Obras*, X: 31-38). The Generation
of 1898 acquired their name as the events of the Spanish American War
unfolded, which presented the perception of national catastrophe and
provided a context for their national and social criticisms. Spaniards
perceived the war as a national disaster, and the Generation of 1898
came together to discuss what they considered to be the degeneration
of Spain.



In June 1908 Ortega was appointed professor of ethics, logic and
psychology at La Escuela Superior del Magisterio (Normal School),
which he had helped found. In late October, at the Assembly for the
Progress of Science held in Zaragoza, he spoke vehemently in favor of
regenerating Spain by broadening her horizons within European thought.
Ortega pursued these issues with his former professor of Greek at the
University of Salamanca, Unamuno, but reproached him for preferring to
"Africanize" Europe than to "Europeanize"
Spain, a conviction that led to a parting of ways the following year
(*Obras*, I: 64). On October 8, 1910, in an open competition,
Ortega appeared before a jury established to select a successor to the
chair of metaphysics, left vacant after the death of Nicolas
Salmeron (1838-1908). A month later, he received the
professorship at the Central University of Madrid, at the remarkable
age of twenty-seven. Six months earlier, on April 7, 1910, Ortega
married his fiancee, Rosa Spottorno y Topete, and from January
to October 1911, the couple spent a delayed honeymoon in Germany,
assisted by a grant issued through the Ministry of Public Education
for further study and research. His first son, Miguel German,
was born in Marburg on May 28, 1911. The symbolic name reveals the
importance of Cervantes and Germany for Ortega. At the end of
December 1911, Ortega returned to Madrid to assume his teaching
duties, and in January 1912, took up the position of professor of
metaphysics, a chair he occupied for twenty-four years, with only two
brief interruptions: once in 1929, when he resigned to protest the
encroachments on academic freedom during the dictatorship of Miguel
Primo de Rivera; and again, in 1931, when Ortega become one of the
first members of the Constituent Cortes at the beginning of the second
Spanish Republic until he was exiled from Spain at the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War in 1936.


### 1.4 Ortega as Intellectual Leader



At the outbreak of the First World War, Ortega began to contribute to
the "European cultural mission" of Spain through his
lectures on some of the major trends within the currents of European
thought. Biological thoughts of Hans Driesch, August Weissmann, and
Jakob von Uexkull, and the philosophical, economic and social
thoughts of Max Scheler, Georg Simmel and Werner Sombart were
introduced to Spanish university students for the first time. In July
1916, Ortega, his father and several other Spanish intellectuals
departed Spain for Argentina where, between August and October, Ortega
gave a series of lectures at the University of Buenos Aires on Kant
and the currents in contemporary Continental philosophy. These
lectures followed the recent arrival of Julio Rey Pastor, a noted
Spanish mathematician, who immigrated to Argentina to elevate the
mathematical and scientific level of instruction at the University of
Buenos Aires. Ortega's residence in Buenos Aires kept him away from
political affairs, save for an article in June 1917 in which he
criticized the role of the military in politics. The political
commentary precipitated his definitive departure from *El
Imparcial* and prompted his move with his brother, Eduardo, to
join a new daily newspaper *El Sol*, founded by a close friend,
Nicolas Maria de Urgoiti of La Papelera Espanola.
The first issue appeared on December 1, 1917. Five years later, Ortega
also assisted in establishing the publishing house Calpe (later named
Espasa-Calpe), which immediately made available Spanish and European
classic and contemporary literature in reasonably priced paperback
editions. Between these activities, Ortega became the founder and
director of the monthly *Revista de Occidente*, publishing the
first issue in July 1923. The *Revista*, which was directed
toward an educated readership, quickly became one of Europe's renowned
intellectual journals. The organ became a veritable "Review of
the West" as several of the articles, which were translations of
works previously published abroad, were important philosophic and
scientific trends representative of "our epoch": Spengler,
Huizinga, Simmel, Uexkull, Brentano, Heimsoeth, Driesch,
Pfander, Muller and Russell. The journal also became the
principal medium of the intelligentsia and, in conjunction with
Ortega's *tertulias* in the offices on the Avenue Pi y Margall,
assisted in fostering the poetic generation of young intellectuals,
the "Generation of 1927". The Generation of 1927
originated as a term to characterize a certain similarity of poets and
writers in 1920s Spain. The year signaled the moment when
intellectuals and students began to resist the dictatorship of General
Miguel Primo de Rivera as a prelude to the Second Republic. As with
their predecessors, the Generation of 1898, the perceived national
crisis created a spirit of collective mentality, or at least a shared
identity, in the years preceding the Spanish Civil War. Several of the
younger vanguard poets were first published by *Indice*,
founded and directed by Juan Ramon Jimenez
Mantecon (1881-1958), a nineteenth-century follower of
Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832), who had been one of
the first to reintroduce modernist themes in Spanish literature. Other
members of the Generation of 1927 found expression through the
*Revista de Occidente*. Ortega, whose major works were
published in the 1920s, served as one of the most important links
between the two generations by giving editorial assistance to the
younger poets and addressing *The Dehumanization of Art* (1925)
to their concerns. Along with Americo Castro (1885-1972),
Ramon Perez de Ayala (1880-1962), and Eugenio
d'Ors y Rovira (1882-1954), he provided an intellectual
leadership that inspired the younger Spaniards to develop fully their
own creative endeavors.



These young artists and poets were marking their careers on the crest
of a new wave that swept intellectual circles in Europe and Spain.
Politics appeared to pursue culture and art. As these young poets and
artists matured and identified with the Generation of 1927, they
became more daring and willing to experiment with new techniques and
media to produce a much wider vivid impact. Federico Garcia
Lorca's (1898-1936) friendly collaboration with painter Salvador
Dali (1904-1989), film director Luis Bunuel
(1900-1983) and composer Manuel de Falla (1876-1946)
demonstrated an appreciation for combining new techniques to extract
mysterious essences from human experience. Their works offered vivid
images of the new abstract aesthetic mysticism and surrealism in the
1920s. These new art forms and novel methods of perceiving hidden
essences were immediately associated with the aesthetic expressions
that rejected old moralities and traditional values, developed a
greater interest in politics and represented an ever-increasing
creative sensitivity. Indeed, this new found freedom in aesthetic
expression was extended to the realm of politics. In April 1929, after
Ortega resigned his chair of metaphysics at the Central University of
Madrid in protest of Primo de Rivera's repressive educational
policies, several of these young intellectuals representing diverse
political positions turned to him for political counsel and implored
him to guide their reform movement on behalf of a "modern"
and "intellectual" orientation toward
"freedom" in Spain. Ortega declined the leadership role
proposed by Garcia Lorca and the group of young intellectuals
and offered, instead, his "sympathy, support, and
comradeship".


### 1.5 Ortega and the Republic



In February 1931, the government summoned municipal elections,
preparing for the general parliamentary elections. During the same
period, Ortega, together with the physician and writer Gregorio
Maranon (1887-1960) and the novelist and poet
Perez de Ayala, published the manifesto of the "Agupacion
al Servicio de la Republica" ("Group in the Service
of the Republic"), appealing for an association of intellectuals
and professionals dedicated to the implementation of the goal that
would unite all classes and geographical regions under a national
banner. The Agrupacion proposed to pursue the path between the
"dead ends" of Communism and Fascism: a Republic. Ortega's
political vision and intellectual style provided the inspiration and
leadership sought by La Agrupacion and Lorca's intellectual
cohort after the sudden abdication of Alfonso XIII and the
proclamation of the Republic on April 14, 1931. Though limited through
legal restrictions, La Agrupacion supported the platform of
Socialist Republican candidates. Fourteen members of the group,
including Ortega, Maranon and Ayala, were elected in the
parliamentary elections in June. Ortega was elected to the Constituent
Cortes in the provinces of Leon and Jaen; he demitted
the latter seat. The election returns revealed that Republican
candidates received three times as many votes as the Monarchists. The
Constituent Cortes convened on July 14, a date chosen consciously to
symbolize the Second Republic's identity with the French Revolution of
1789. The Second Republic, when observed in the broader context of
European history, was the fifteenth and last of a series of republics
which had been installed during the first decades of the twentieth
century.



As a member of the Cortes, Ortega experienced the practical
difficulties inherent in the nature of political leadership. Manuel
Azana y Diaz (1880-1940), a dominant figure in
government at the time, and his political following continually
opposed the ideas and leadership of Ortega and his associates of La
Agrupacion. In the fall of 1932, Ortega left active politics
when communication became virtually impossible due to incessant
arguments and conflicts between the followers of Ortega and
Azana. Daunted but not distressed, Ortega returned to his chair
of metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid. Between the time
of his return to the university and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil
War, Ortega continued writing political articles in *El Sol*,
identifying and criticizing politicians he thought were primarily
responsible for veering the Republic in the wrong direction.


### 1.6 Ortega's Exile, Return and Last Years



Ortega's acrid comments failed to shield him from the Republic's
political turmoil. Thus, on August 31, 1936, during the early phases
of the Spanish Civil War, stricken with serious gall bladder issues
and not knowing what to expect from his political enemies, Ortega, his
wife, his three children and his brother Eduardo embarked on a French
boat from Alicante to Merseilles with the assistance of the French
Embassy. They settled in La Tronche, near Grenoble, until November
when they moved to Paris where they remained, the winter of 1937 to
August 1939, except for short trips to the Netherlands and Portugal.
At the invitation of Johann Huizinga, from late November 1937 to
February 1938,Ortega presented lectures in Rotterdam, Amsterdam,
Delft, Leiden and The Hague. After the lectures in the Netherlands,
Ortega returned to Paris where he underwent a gallbladder operation in
October. In February, 1939, he traveled to the south of Portugal to
recuperate from the operation. While in Portugal, Ortega's mother died
on April 21, 1939 in a small town (Puente Genil) near Cordoba;
on November 12 of the following year, his sister, Rafaela, died.
Eventually, at the end of August, Ortega left for Argentina
accompanied by his wife and daughter. He remained in Argentina during
the major part of the Second World War, lecturing at the University of
Buenos Aires until late February/early March in 1942, when he, his
wife and daughter settled in Estoril, Portugal.



In August 1945, Ortega returned to Spain for the first time since the
outbreak of the Spanish War. He passed the remainder of the summer in
Zumaya before returning to Portugal for the winter. Ortega's return to
his native country in 1945 marked the end of nine years in exile.
However, to several of his Republican compatriots who remained in
exile, a return to Franco Spain called into question his intellectual
integrity. The supporters of Franco, on the other hand, considered him
a former enemy and untrustworthy. Unable to republish issues of the
*Revista de Occidente* because of governmental intervention,
Ortega published extensively in German periodicals. Though his chair
in metaphysics was officially restored, Ortega never resumed his
teaching at the university. However, in 1948, with the assistance of
his former student and disciple, Julian Marias
(1914-2005), Ortega established El Instituto de Humanidades
("Institute of Humanities"), in Madrid, at which he
lectured and succeeded in attracting many students and liberal
intellectuals. Despite its success, the government rarely allowed the
Institute to function freely and eventually shut down their activities
in 1950.



Between 1949 and 1955, Ortega avoided the pressure of the Spanish
Government by reactivating his cultural interests in conferences and
meetings abroad where he lectured and received honors. In early July
1949, he visited Aspen, Colorado, with his good friend Ernst R.
Curtius, the cultural historian, to attend and participate in the
bicentennial commemoration of Goethe's birth under of the auspices and
direction of Robert M. Hutchins and the University of Chicago. In
September, he visited Hamburg, Berlin, Darmstadt and Munich for
similar reasons. In August 1951, he returned to Germany to participate
in a conference at Darmstadt (where he met Heidegger) and to receive
an honorary doctorate from the University of Marburg. The conference,
which Ortega was invited to attend in Darmstadt, was sponsored by
scientists and architects to discuss "Man and Space". This
brief meeting was apparently pleasant, as neither philosopher broached
the sensitive issue of originality or similarities of certain aspects
of their thought during the course of their private conversations. In
1951, he received another honorary doctorate from the University of
Glasgow. Failing health due to stomach and liver cancer curtailed his
traveling after his last lecture given in May 1955 at Venice. On
October 18, 1955, in Madrid, Ortega died in his apartment on the sixth
floor at Calle Monte Esquinza 28.


## 2. Intellectual Development


### 2.1 Neo-Kantianism and the Search for Method



Ortega dissociated himself from any particular school of thought,
though he would have been the first to acknowledge that a
philosopher's ideas become linked with previous philosophical
traditions. His attitude toward this intrinsic aspect of thought
becomes apparent when he remarked:



> 
> 
> In our present philosophical posture and in the doctrine that is
> produced by it, we view and take into account a substantial portion of
> previous thought and themes relating to our discipline. This is
> tantamount to saying that past philosophies are our collaborators,
> which survive and are present in our own philosophy. (*Obras*,
> IX: 360)
> 
> 
> 



The most important and obvious connection between intellectual
currents in Europe and Ortega's thought, then, was the influence of
German philosophy and, in particular, his studies at the University of
Marburg. Neo-Kantianism in general and Hermann Cohen in particular
provided broad influence on the intellectual development of Ortega. He
studied closely with both Cohen and Paul Natorp, and the former served
as Ortega's primary mentor. Ortega recalled this relationship in his
"Prologue for Germans" (*Obras*, VIII: 13-58) where
he referred to Cohen, in retrospect, as "my teacher". Some
of the critical influence of Marburg Neo-Kantianism is discernible in
Ortega's writings. An attempt to distinguish philosophy from the
assumptions and assertions--whether idealistic or
positivistic--of speculative metaphysics characterized his
general philosophical position. Ortega rejected speculative
metaphysical systems and, like Cohen, repudiated natural science's
approach to epistemology with its naturalistic and psychophysical
explanations of sensible reality of the "subjective"
idealists. Although Ortega hesitates to proceed as far as Cohen, that
is, to postulate the "facts" of science to be determined
completely by thought, a sort of Neo-Kantian metaphysics remains in
his fundamental philosophical point of view. For instead of positing
pure thought as solely real, Ortega replaced Cohen's logic with the
notion of "human life". In other words, Ortega's
generalized view of existence contains human life in place of human
logic as the underlying unifying principle of reality. Ortega's major
writings were concerned with the idea of life as the "dynamic
dialogue between the individual and the world"; he was not
concerned, as was Cohen, with assigning to external experience a
reality that is contingent upon the principles of logic and
mathematical physics. "The structure of life is
futurition", he wrote,



> 
> 
> the most persistent *leit motif* of my writings, inspired
> certainly by questions--raised by the logic of Cohen--which
> are very remote from the vital problem to which I apply it.
> (*Obras*, IV: 403-4)
> 
> 
> 



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 Neo-Kantianism 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. In his "Reflections on
Kant's Centenary" in 1929, Ortega, in retrospect, referred
metaphorically to his struggle with Kant and Neo-Kantian philosophy as
having occurred in a "Kantian prison", (*Obras*,
IV: 25) ; and in his "Prologue for Germans", he
acknowledged his experience at the University of Marburg to have been
an important factor in influencing his intellectual development.
"In this city", he reflected, "I passed the equinox
of my youth; to it I owe half, at least, of my hopes and almost all my
discipline" (*Obras*, II: 558-59, VIII: 20-21).



Ortega's return to Marburg in 1911 signaled another turn in his
intellectual interests and his philosophical development: introduction
to phenomenology. 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,
Nicolai Hartmann, Heinz Heimsoeth and Paul Scheffer often discussed
amongst themselves their agreements, disagreements, and
dissatisfaction with the Neo-Kantianism of their mentors. The critical
spirit of their intellectual "spontaneity" became evident
in their reactions to all the reading they had undertaken on Kant,
Parmenides, and ancient philosophy in general. In recognizing the
limits of the Kantian revival and reflecting upon the current
tendencies in art, literature and philosophy, Ortega and his
intellectual cohort proceeded beyond Neo-Kantian idealism toward
"the imaginary coast". Like any journey along imaginary
coasts, the uncertainty of the horizon demands a nautical device for
the means of navigation. For Ortega and his intellectual peers in
search of a system, the intellectual ambiance provided them "the
gift of a prodigious instrument: phenomenology" (*Obras*,
VIII: 20, 42). This "common awakening" of the young
cohort, however, also signaled their separate paths. In 1911, they, as
a group of students, collectively challenged 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.


### 2.2 Phenomenology as a Method



After 1911, evidence points to how both Ortega and Hartmann pursued
particular interests of phenomenology. Hartmann, who succeeded Natorp
as Chair at Marburg in 1924, eventually became important in the
philosophical developments of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
In 1912, Ortega began to study phenomenology "seriously"
and in 1913, he recollected years later, the *Jahrbuch fur
Philosophie und Phanomenologische Forschung*, Edmund
Husserl's *Ideen* (*Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology*, [1913, 1982]), and *Formalism in Ethics and
Non-Formal Ethics of Values* of Max Scheler were published. Later
that year, in a series of articles which were published in the
*Revista de Libros*, Ortega wrote a long review of Heinrich
Hoffman's dissertation, *Studies on the Concept of Sensation*,
which had been presented to the University of Gottingen during
the same year. In the essay, which discussed the descriptive
psychology of one of the lesser known students of the Gottingen
Circle, Ortega remarked that



> 
> 
> the influence--each time greater--of
> "phenomenology" on psychology tends to separate in the
> latter, in the most fundamental and salubrious manner, description
> from explanation. (*Obras*, VIII: 43, 47; I: 244-45)
> 
> 
> 



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. In view of this characterization of
phenomenology as "descriptive psychology," Ortega
emphasized the importance of distinguishing the essential individual
intuition of Husserl's "pure description" of essence in
the *Ideas* from what he termed the mistaken definition of
phenomenology as a descriptive psychology that some philosophers tend
to interpret in Husserl's *Logische Untersuchungen*
(*Obras*, I: 249, 251). Psychological statements, for Ortega,
have to be distinguished from the purely descriptive statements of
phenomenology on the grounds that psychology concerns itself with
facts and statements and are therefore empirical; on the other hand,
phenomenology, as formulated in a clearer formula in Husserl's
*Ideas*, concerns itself with "consciousness",
human consciousness. Through this formulation, Ortega contended,
it



> 
> 
> is very clear that the new science [phenomenology] is not psychology,
> if by psychology we mean a descriptive empirical science or a
> metaphysical science. (*Obras*, I: 253)
> 
> 
> 



Ortega's dissatisfaction with this psychological understanding of
the*Ideas* anticipated, in part, statements made by Husserl in
1935. In his *Crisis for European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology* (1936), 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 consciousness as what remains
after all transcendence has been bracketed, as of the thesis of
*noesis-noema* correlation. The transcendental nature of the
concept of *noema* easily could have been misperceived in favor
of a psychological understanding, particularly in view of the fact
that the radical feature of both the *epoche* and the
"constitution" thesis was not developed fully to his
satisfaction. The exposition of the *epoche* in the
*Ideas*, Husserl recalled in the *Crisis*, appeared too
Cartesian, implying that one may shift suddenly from the natural to
the transcendental viewpoint (1936 [1970: 154-5]). According to
Ortega, Husserl presented phenomenology as a descriptive manner in
which one philosophizes without presuppositions and without empirical
statements. The phenomenological reduction, in the *Ideas*,
provided the principal theme of this "new science" as it
accounted for the reflexive process of "consciousness", a
consciousness that comprises consciousness of perceptions of the
natural world. Thus, for Ortega, Husserl's position reduces phenomena
as entities in the natural posture of our world:



> 
> 
> There is a "natural manner" of carrying out acts of
> consciousness, whatever they may be. That natural manner is
> characterized by the executive value which those acts have. Thus the
> "natural posture" in the act of perception consists in
> accepting as existing in truth before us a thing that belongs to a
> group of things which we consider in fact to be real and which we call
> "world"....
> 
> 
> 
> Thus, all the acts of consciousness and all the objects of those acts
> can be placed in parentheses. The whole "natural" world or
> science insofar as it is a system of judgments carried out in a
> "natural manner", is reduced to phenomenon. And here, a
> phenomenon does not mean what it does in Kant, for example, something
> that suggests another substantial something beyond it. Phenomenon here
> is simply the virtual character that every thing acquires when from
> its natural executive value one passes to contemplate it in a
> spectacular and descriptive posture, without giving it a definite
> character.
> 
> 
> 
> That pure description is phenomenology. (*Obras*, I:
> 252-53)
> 
> 
> 



This sympathetic discussion of Husserl's *Ideas* inspired
Ortega to pursue the new science of phenomenology as a method of
inquiry. This method of 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. After the 1912 paper and a paper
delivered at the Fourth Congress of the Spanish Association for the
Advancement of Science in 1913 on "Sensation, Construction and
Intuition", he presented a series of lectures for the course,
"Systematic Psychology", in 1915. 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*.
Inspired by Franz Brentano's reformist vision of philosophy as an
exact science, Husserl adopted the viewpoint of his mentor to posit
philosophy as a "rigorous science". Husserl's early work
on presupposition-less descriptive psychology was also concerned with
Brentano's concept of presentation and the intentional inexistence of
an object. Following Brentano and Carl Stumpf, he regarded the
essential nature of psychic acts as having content and, normally, an
object. In the First Edition of the Logical Investigations,
1900-1901, Husserl understood Phenomenology to mean
"descriptive psychology", which had its origins in
Brentano's earlier efforts. 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. Gradually, a
new conception of the individual emerged, 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 the 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 asked 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. For, he writes,



> 
> 
> anyone who seriously wants to establish a new science will have to
> practice the self-denial required in prolonging a long time this
> periods of schooling, of apprenticeship, of studying the classics.
> (*Obras*, XII: 340)
> 
> 
> 



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: to surpass the previous classical stance,
> to transform, to extend, and to renew science itself. (*Obras*,
> XII: 340-41)
> 
> 
> 



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 own time and place. In view of this characterization,
Ortega formulated his philosophical objective within the context of
the early twentieth century.



> 
> 
> My purpose is to study the fundamental problems of psychology with the
> purpose of making systematic psychology possible. These problems
> ... do not allow for vague treatment; in fact, they demand a most
> detailed and, if possible, exhaustive inquiry. (*Obras*, XII:
> 42)
> 
> 
> 



Ortega maintains that once the problem concerning the distinction
between mental and physical phenomena have been established, other
questions will also be resolved: those pertaining to the object and
method of psychology and logic; the nature of inner perception and of
introspection; the possibility or impossibility of a straightforward
descriptive psychology of thinking; the meaning of intuition; and
"consequently, whether or not nonnutritive thought is
possible" (*Obras*, XII: 342-43).



Subsequent to the 1912 essay and the 1915 lectures, the influence of
the language of phenomenology becomes discernible in the works of
Ortega through the usage of such terms as "apodictic
appearance", philosophy as "a science", and
philosophy "as a science without supposition"
(*Obras*, I: 318-19; VII: 335). Since 1914, Ortega
remarked in his work *The Idea of Principle in Leibnitz and the
Evolution of Deductive Theory* (1947), which was published
posthumously in 1958, a



> 
> 
> reflection on the phenomenon "human life" is the basis of
> all my thought. At that time I formulated it--in order to expound
> Husserl's phenomenology during various courses--correcting, in an
> essential manner, the description of the phenomenon
> "consciousness of...". which, as is known,
> constituted, at that time, the basis of his doctrine. (*Obras*,
> VIII: 273, n.2)
> 
> 
> 



In 1925, he wrote a short section in his essay, *The Dehumanization
of Art* entitled "A Few Drops of Phenomenology", in
which he discussed the "perspectivism" motif of variegated
experiences (*Obras*, III: 360-64). The discrepancy
between science and experience, though extreme for some of his
contemporaries, became one of his central concerns during this period.
He maintained that the different perspectival perceptions of an
identical event illuminated for us the fact that "one and the
same reality may split into many diverse realities when it is beheld
from different points of view". Modern physics, while leaving
mechanistic explanations of certain natural phenomena intact,
shattered the overall mechanistic conception of nature. It demolished
the notion of an objective reality with all that it implied: the unity
of nature, both human and physical, the universality of natural laws,
the determination of physical processes, and the ability of science to
solve all problems of the natural world. 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. Ortega perceived, in this
system, the "human point of view" as that reality in which
we live: situations, persons and things. 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 among persons, things and
situations and thereby come to observe reality more closely
(*Obras*, III: 361, 363, 362).


## 3. Ontological Factors Confronting Transcendental Phenomenology



In 1925, Ortega presented Husserl's phenomenological approach to his
students at the University of Madrid, wherein he projected his program
to study the "restatement of the problem of Being" for a
series of publications. Specifically, Ortega oriented himself towards
the possible adoption of a systematic method within which the problem
of "Being" might have resolved the issue of human reality
for him in the development of his thought. "In 1925", he
recounted:



> 
> I stated my theme--some of my students would be able to
> remember--saying literally: 1st, it is necessary to
> renew, from its roots, the traditional problem of Being;
> 2nd, this has to be done with the phenomenological method
> insofar and only insofar as this means *synthetic or intuitive
> thinking*, and not merely conceptual-abstract thinking as is the
> traditional logical way of thinking; 3rd, but it is
> necessary to integrate the phenomenological method, adapting to it a
> dimension of *systematic thinking* which, as is known, it does
> not posses;4th, and finally, in order that a systematic
> phenomenological thinking may be possible, it is necessary to start
> out from a phenomenon which may be a system *by* and *in
> itself*. This systematic phenomenon is human life and from its
> reflection and analysis one must set out. (*Obras*, VIII: 273).
> 



In this account of his quest for "synthetic thinking",
Ortega proceeded to explain how he



> 
> 
> abandoned Phenomenology at the very moment of accepting it. Instead of
> withdrawing from consciousness, as has been done since Descartes, we
> become firm in the radical reality which is for every one his [or her]
> life. (*Obras*, VIII: 273)
> 
> 
> 



In this manner, by 1925, Ortega's ambivalence towards adopting a
phenomenological method became apparent in his search for a coherent
method of analysis. He was willing to retain the
"synthetic" (or "intuitive") function of
phenomenological analysis provided that this function in turn becomes
integrated into the systematic phenomenon of "human life".
Through this connection, the phenomenological method of analysis, and
the analysis of human life experiences, performed interchangeable
functions for Ortega in the systematic apprehension of the traditional
problem of being. This explains the positive side of the ambivalence
which prompted him to approach and accept phenomenology. However, on
the other side of the ambivalence, he avoided phenomenology where the
emphasis appears to be on the abstract in the tradition of
idealism. His critical response to Husserl's *Formal and
Transcendental Logic* (1929) [1969] identified this tendency
in phenomenology.



Several European thinkers who were influenced in one way or another by
concepts of the phenomenological movement, but 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 explicitly express any dissatisfaction
with what he perceived as the solipsistic implications of the
transcendental idealism in the latter work until twelve years later.
As indicated earlier, Husserl expressed dissatisfaction as well in his
*Crisis*, saying that his transcendental *epoche*
may have been misread by others. Indeed, Husserl insisted that his
efforts attempted to point away from the solipsistic path of the
"Cartesian way". In two lectures delivered at the Sorbonne
in 1929, Husserl introduced ideas which transformed his earlier
position on transcendental phenomenology from a world of isolated
ideas into a world community of intersubjective individuals. The
observations and insights made in the lectures were amplified later in
his *Cartesian Meditations* (1933) and *Crisis*. In
these later writings, Descartes' ego lost its abstract, absolute
status as it became correlative to the world of experience (1933
[1964: 1-8, 157]; 1936 [1970: 154-55, 188, 257-63]).
In his *Notes on Thinking* (1941), Ortega found Husserl's
approach to the problem of genesis of reason to be "tantamount
to being absolute", particularly where Husserl expounded his
"genetic phenomenology" as "consciousness of"
reality, thereby designating "consciousness of itself" as
being "immediate to itself". He criticized further the
analysis and definitions of reason given by Husserl in *Formal and
Transcendental Logic* as not incorporating "the themes of
humanity, life and the functional character of reason".
Accordingly, "the phenomenological attitude as formulated in
*Formal and Transcendental Logic* is diametrically opposed to
the attitude that I call living reason". He opposed this
tendency toward transcendental idealism in *Formal and
Transcendental Logic* but refused to completely reject
phenomenology (*Obras*, V: 545).



Our discussion thus far makes manifest Ortega's ambivalence toward
phenomenology. After he learned of Husserl's *Crisis of European
Sciences*, Ortega did not argue that his later general position
and that of phenomenology were "diametrically opposed".
Indeed, in a long footnote at the conclusion of *Notes on
Thinking*, Ortega invited a comparison between himself and
Husserl. In 1935, Husserl presented a series of four lectures in
Prague on "Philosophy in the Crisis of European Mankind",
all of which were incorporated into the*Crisis*. 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. The study of
the lived world, the experience of it,
and "ego-and-life-relatedness", became the
primary consideration of phenomenology. *Lebenswelt* philosophy
is primarily engaged in the elaboration of the broader question posed
in *Logical Investigations*: what is meant by
"truth"? 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. Consequently, as individuals living in
the world, we respond correctly to the question of truth by describing
the experience of the true and insisting on the genetic development of
the "ego": truth consists not as an object but as a
movement, and exists only insofar as this movement is *actually
carried out by the ego*. Also, in regard to the life-world, the
innovative contribution of *Crisis* lies in Husserl's attempt
to provide a thematic account of history, the historicity of the
life-world and subjectivity within the overall framework of
transcendental phenomenology. History, however, as Husserl came to
understand it, consists from the outset, in "nothing other than
the living moment of being-with-one-another and in-one-another of
original meaning-constitution and meaning-sedimentation". This
has also been referred to as "intentional history".
Furthermore, the concepts of history, the historicity of the
life-world, are made possible by the inner historicity of every human
being living in it. History thereby exhibits an historical
"*a priori*" itself which, for him, assures
objectivity of history. The historical *a priori* itself
presupposes a certain idealization in that the "insights of
principle" are *historical*. 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. Rather, they are grounded in lived
experiences on which the truth of the theoretical consciousness is
based (Husserl 1936 [1970: 349-51, 369-78, 389-95]).
Husserl perceived the historical world to be pre-given as a
socio-historical world. As he expresses it,



> 
> to live is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world ... wakefully
> in the world ... we are conscious of fellow men on our
> horizon.... Like me, every human being ... has his fellow
> men and always, continuing himself, civilization in general, in which
> he knows himself to be living (Husserl 936 [1970: 142, 358, 372]).
> 



Ortega found this kind of reflection on the historical manner of
being, and the life-world, compatible with his own notion of
"historical reason" presented in *History as a
System*. 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*.
"Personally", Ortega commented concerning his reaction to
the 1935 publication,



> 
> 
> this leap of the phenomenological doctrine has been extremely
> satisfactory for me because it consists in nothing less than a resort
> to "historical reason". (*Obras*, V: 546-7,
> n.1)
> 
> 
> 



Therefore, Husserl's later works, particularly *Cartesian
Meditations* and the *Crisis*, which were attempts to
resolve the difficulties inherent in transcendental phenomenology and
representative 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
ontological functions of the experience of human life. The orientation
of these later writings has contributed to the theory that Husserl
perceived the *Crisis* as the "definitive"
introduction to phenomenology.



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. Discussions in *Cartesian Meditations* of the problem
of other people, or intersubjectivity, and of the world as a world
essentially inhabited by "others" was conceivably the part
of Heidegger's philosophy which had the profoundest effect on the
development of Existential Phenomenology and Ortega's thought. Ortega
took issue with a small point on the role of the notion
"analogical transposition" concerning the
"Other", which was made in the fifth meditation, yet he
did not consider this point to be diametrically opposed to his notion
of human life. "Husserl", he remarked at one point in his
*Man and People* (1939-40),



> 
> 
> was the first who clearly defined the radical and not merely
> psychological problem that I call "The Appearance of the
> Other". Husserl's development of the problem is, in my opinion,
> much less successful than his definition of it, although there are
> many admirable discoveries in his development. (*Obras*, VII:
> 160-61)
> 
> 
> 



*Man and People* feature essays which Ortega developed and
presented in several lectures and courses over a period of
approximately twenty years. In *The Origin of Philosophy*, in a
footnote, Ortega referred to the occasion in which he presented for
the first time his concept of a "new sociology" under the
title, "Man and People" in Valladolid in 1934
(*Obras*, IX: 355, n.1). The first chapter was published as
"Being in and Beside One's Self" by Espasa-Calpe
Argentina, Buenos Aires, 1939 (*Obras*, V: 291-315; 7:,
72-73, 79). In a Prologue to his *Ideas and Beliefs*,
Ortega announced in 1940 the forthcoming appearance of two major
works: a philosophical exposition, *Dawn of Historical Reason*,
and the corpus of his social doctrine, *Man and People*. In the
Fall, 1940, at the University of Argentina, and four years later, at
the University of Lisbon, Ortega presented lectures under the
title, "Historical Reason". These variegated
expositions were compiled and published posthumously in 1979. In 1929,
Ortega wrote an essay titled "The Perception of One's
Fellowman" (*Obras*, VI: 153-163) that may explain
his attempt to distinguish his concept of "the other" from
Husserl's notion of the "appearance of the other"in
*Man and People* in view of the inevitable comparisons made
between the two.



The foregoing discussion should not suggest an absence of shared
viewpoints between Ortega and Husserl, and Husserl's intellectual
influence on Ortega. Although Ortega disagreed with Husserl's notion
of "analogical transposition", he did view the latter's
phenomenological approach to knowledge as having been "the
greatest influence of this last half-century". Ortega also
considered the notion of the appearance of the other--that is,
the other's presence both as an object (i.e., the physical structure
of its body) and as a subject (i.e., as an alter ego that experiences
the same world that is experienced by the "I")--and
life experience as analyses which helped avert solipsism and the
enclosure of the "I" within itself. 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*, V: 545). Although Ortega's
own independence of thought remains controversial, his intellectual
development exhibits a consistent emphasis on discerning the boundary
drawn between extra-historical and historical coherence in
transcendental phenomenology. Ortega discussed, in his later writings,
such phenomenological notions as actions which are directed toward
objects when the "I" encounters its environment; ego/alter
ego interaction in the world of intersubjective communities as the
realm of lived experiences; and the position of entering the
transcendental attitude of phenomenological reduction in order to
apprehend the alter ego, all of which are notions similar to those
discussed by Husserl. In these authoritative writings, his criterion
of "openness to experience" led him to an acceptance of
historical variegation, and to the principle that a human being's
relation to the world consists in a total relation of one entity among
other entities.



From the viewpoint of this characterization of phenomenology, Ortega
reached back to "I am I and my circumstances" as his
starting point of analysis. For Ortega, the individual ego is
conscious of itself through the awareness of both its physiological
features and behavioral gestures, and those of "others" in
reciprocal human interaction, a consciousness of self that proceeds
through self-analysis of the inner essence of the being of the
"I" and the "I's" awareness of other selves as
similar beings in the "circumstances" of the world of
lived experience. In short, he attempted to characterize the nature of
an individual's experience of one's world and oneself. 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. "Living", he said,
"is to reach outside of oneself, devoted ontologically, to what
is *other*, be it called world or circumstances"
(*Obras*, V: 545).


## 4. "I am I and my Circumstances": Neither "Biologism" nor "Rationalism"



In an edition of his work (1932), Ortega proclaimed:



> 
> 'I am I and my circumstances'. This expression, which
> appears in my first book and which condenses in final volume my
> philosophic thought, does not only mean the doctrine that my work
> expounds and proposes, but means that my work is an executive case of
> the same doctrine. My work is, by its essence and its presence,
> circumstantial. This is precisely what the cited phrase declares.
> (*Obras*, VI: 347-48)
> 



The first book to which Ortega referred was his *Meditations on
Quixote* (1914), a work of essays he thought propelled
philosophical aspirations. According to some commentators, the nucleus
of Ortega's basic philosophical principle--the notion that human
life is the ultimate reality--is formulated in the
*Meditations on Quixote* through the instrumentality of his
well known expression, "I am I and my circumstances". A
close and critical reading of the *Meditations on Quixote* and
Ortega's later writings reveals that albeit "I am I and my
circumstances" appeared in this early work, we fail to perceive
a systematic elaboration of "I am I and my circumstances"
as an analytical and ontological statement in his general philosophic
point of view before his later works. The psychological interpretation
of external and internal excitation, as discussed by Freud in the
*Outline of Psychoanalysis* (1904) and *The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life* (1904), arrested Ortega's attention on this new
scientific method between 1911 and 1915. Husserl and the
phenomenological movement, and Freud and the psychoanalytical
movement, presented for Ortega the new "intellectual tendency of
our times--subjectivism, or subjectivistic relativism"
(*Obras*, XII: 417). This intellectual tendency became his
philosophic concern during the succeeding years. This concern became
apparent in his lectures of 1921-22, subsequently published as
*The Theme of Our Time* (1923). For Ortega, the
"principal theme of our time", the essence of which
"modernity" had to confront, comprised the concept that
"human life is in an eminent degree psychological life"
(*Obras*, III: 152-156).



The phenomenon of human life thus possesses a "double
character": the physiological and the psychological. In the
modern movement of culture, each dimension of human character has to
find its expression within the "spirit of the time"
(*Obras*, III: 165-66, 68, 297-98). 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 shift of emphasis in the
realm of aesthetics countervailed the earlier emphasis on
"naturalist", "materialist" or
"realist" factors in human life. The transition in
aesthetic sensibility from nineteenth-century "realism",
and its corresponding concern with human reality, to the
"new" perceptions of the early twentieth century
creativity, marked for him the "dehumanization of art".
The "modern" movement culminated in a new aesthetic
sensitivity--what Ortega labeled a "pure",
"artistic art"--which consciously separated its
audience into groups: the "specially gifted minority" who
comprehended modern art and the majority of those who found it
incomprehensible. The new aesthetic sensibility of modernity, which
called for the "progressive elimination of the human, all too
human elements" predominant in romantic and naturalistic
production, resulted in creating an art of figures instead of an art
of adventures, an art that refused solely to report the world, and
vowed to create it (*Obras*, III: 358, 355-56). This
modern group of artists and critics who produced art and possessed
"an organ of comprehension" denied to the majority
constituted "a specially gifted minority". A pronounced
emphasis on the "psychic structure of the individual" thus
became one of the primary consequences of modernity's shift from
realism and human representation.



If Ortega's notion that the "psychic" depictions of modern
art were only accessible to a gifted minority were extended to
incorporate the notion that every individual intellectual activity
apprehends reality from a point of view accessible only to itself, his
philosophy of "perspectivism" as the synthetic principle
which "regulated the world from the point of view of life"
becomes intelligible. The "theme of our time" reflected
the absolutist tendencies of rationalism and the skeptical
inclinations of relativism, proposing Ortega's doctrine of "the
point of view as a third view of the process of knowledge, which is a
perfect synthesis of the two" (*Obras*, III: 179,
198).


## 5. Perspectivism: Human Life, Vital Reason and Historicism



The doctrine of perspectivism 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
apprehend reality from the point of view of their respective
perceptions of reality. The varying perceptions of reality are all
legitimate and account for the postulate that different individuals
interpret the same "horizon" differently so that
"*every life is a point of view directed upon the
universe*" (*Obras*, III: 200). Ortega's
"perspectivist" postulate thus promised to perform the
function of unifying reality. From the assumption that
"perspective" comprises both "one of the component
parts of reality and its organizing element", Ortega arrived at
the position that "all knowledge is knowledge from a definite
point of view" (*Obras*, III: 199). Hence every truth
connects to a place in space and time. In locating truth in space and
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 essay on "The Historical
Significance of Einstein's Theory" pointed to parallel
tendencies in new modes of twentieth century thinking and in
Einstein's theory of relativity, which he characterized as "the
most important intellectual fact that the present can show"
(*Obras*, III: 231). In dissolving the entire edifice of
classical mechanics, Einstein's theory ushered in the twentieth
century (the "present time") very much in the manner that
Descartes' philosophy prepared thought for the modern era
(*Obras*, III: 231-34). Ortega's ideas on the historical
significance of relativity were derived primarily from Einstein's
discussion of the Special Theory. He was drawn to comparing the theory
of relativity to his philosophy of "perspectivism" because
relativity appeared to furnish scientific "proof" of his
own "perspectivist truths", which were formulated in El
Espectador in 1916 (*Obras*, III: 235; see also II:
15-21).



Ortega's perspectivist doctrine, as a synthetic principle, also
implied for him a doctrine by which one may "attempt to order
the world from the point of view of life" (*Obras*, III:
179). The principle of human life, which constituted the reality of
human experience, became the philosophical category through which
Ortega synthesized the universe. Correspondingly, the "sign of
the times" also pointed to the important role played by
Nietzsche, Croce, Dilthey and Heidegger, as well as Freud and Husserl,
in the formation of twentieth-century thought. 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 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 Ortega was influenced by
their ideas both directly and indirectly. The historical ideas of
Windelband and Rickert reflected the European intellectual currents
that paralleled Ortega's intellectual development, Dilthey had been
acknowledged by Ortega as having influenced his intellectual focus
directly, and Croce's early historical ideas appeared to have exerted
influence on the historical thought of Ortega.



In his essay, "Wilhelm Dilthey and the Idea of Life",
twenty-seven years after his studies in Berlin, Ortega wrote of
Dilthey's importance in his intellectual development and his
misfortune of not having been exposed to the ideas of Dilthey earlier
as a student:



> 
> 
> I became acquainted with Dilthey's work as late as 1929, and it took
> me four more years before I knew it sufficiently well. 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
> 1906...Dilthey *happened* to have given up lecturing in
> the university building a few years before and admitted to courses he
> held in home for only a few specially prepared students. Thus
> *chance* had it that I did not come in touch with him.
> (*Obras*, VI: 171-72)
> 
> 
> 



By the late 1920s and the early 1930s, however, Ortega did incorporate
the idea of human life into his philosophic viewpoint. During these
years, he labeled his own philosophy as "the metaphysics of
vital reason" to signify his continuous search for a structure
of life that would be transcendent in its relation to every existing
reality, and yet itself located within the framework of temporal and
spatial reality. Like Dilthey, whom he considered "the most
important thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century",
he denied truth to any constant principle that establishes itself as
superior to the flux of life, including that of the physical and
biological sciences. 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,
and in this sense, Ortega's notion of human life
resembles Dilthey's. For Ortega, "my life"--in
the "biographical" not in the "biological"
sense--is the question of what to do with it and that of what
happens to me as I find myself "shipwrecked" in the
precarious sea of "circumstances". The individual, from
this point of view, saves himself by sinking into the inner depths of
his being as he makes an effort to hold on to consciousness and to the
very essence of his life. "To live", he maintained,
"is to deal with the world, aim at it, act in it, be occupied
with it" (*Obras*, V: 26, 33-34, 35, 44-45,
VII: 103-04). 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 dimensions of human and social
phenomena, as realized within the lived experiences of life, reveal
the vitalization of philosophy and the historicization of life
perspective that are reflective of historicism and the attitude that
historical knowledge is unique to the realm of human affairs.



This historicism comprises the perspective perceived in Ortega's
notion of the "dynamic dialogue" in the
"drama" of the life-world of the individual. Historicism
is not used here in the polemical extreme characterized by Karl
Popper's charge that historicism is incompatible with any form of
"genuine science". In his *The Poverty of
Historicism* (1957), which describes and criticizes both
"anti-naturalist" and "pro-naturalist"
doctrines of historicism, Popper charges the former doctrine with
"theology" and "holism" and charges the latter
doctrine of advancing the notion that "*historical
prediction*" is their principal objective, something that
becomes attainable in discovering the "rhythms",
"patterns", "laws" or "trends"
that underlie the evolution of history. (1957 [1964: 2-4, 39,
128-30])



Popper's title alludes to Marx's *The Poverty of Philosophy*
(1847), which, in turn, responded to Proudhon's *The Philosophy of
Poverty* (1847). Popper thereby signaled his intention to
formulate a philosophico-methodological criticism of Marxist and, by
extension, Hegelian philosophy of history. The term
"historicism"signifies here both "historism"
(in the German sense of *Historismus* in connection with
Windelband, Rickert, Dilthey, Meinecke--by way of Herder and
Goethe--Mannheim and Troeltsch), and "historicism"
(in the Italian sense of *Storicismo* as formulated by
Benedetto Croce). In tracing the term to both Herder and Goethe,
Meinecke perceived their emphasis on the "concrete", the
"unique" and the "individual" as constituting
the core of historicism. 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 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 manifests itself not by
abstract, general laws or principles but by the living expressions of
the multiplicity of these unique historical forms. Individuality, the
"fact of change", and the historical process, the
*Weltanschauung* of historicism, combine to formulate a sort of
historical relativism. This signification of historical phenomena
entails the sense in which historical knowledge and reality are
explained by Dilthey:



> 
> 
> The historical consciousness of the finitude of every historical
> phenomenon, every human or social state, of the relativity of every
> sort of belief, is the last step toward the liberation of man. 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. (quoted in Hodges
> 1944: 33-34).
> 
> 
> 



The historicist orientation of Croce contributed to Ortega's shift
from the historicization of life to the historicization of philosophy.
Ortega's aspirations concerning the interpenetration of history and
philosophy were conveyed in his 1929 lectures:



> 
> 
> I hope, for very concrete reasons, that in our age the curiosity for
> the eternal and invariable which is philosophy and the curiosity for
> the inconstant and changeable which is history, for the first time
> join each other and embrace. (*Obras*, VII: 285)
> 
> 
> 



Ortega's view that "historical thinking proceeds with respect to
human phenomena", which combined with his notion of the vital
dimensions of "historical reason", reveals some of the
affinities in their historical thought. 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. Where history, for Croce, consists in the
"inseparable synthesis of individual and universal",
history, for Ortega, embodies the "inexorable chain" of
human experiences and is constituted by the synthetic function of
"historical reason". In this connection, both historicist
and rationalist elements of coherence, for Ortega, were
emphasized in his formulation of historicism. Traversing
from philosophy to history and then back again to philosophy, Croce
presented his systematic "Philosophy of the Spirit" as
absolute historicism. He formulated his systematic treatment of the
"Philosophy of the Spirit" in four volumes and devoted one
volume of this general position to historical thought (Croce 1917
[1920: 60-61]). History, in this connection, provides the
important function of synthesizing the theoretical and practical
levels of human activity, the universal and the particular, as well as
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. History encompasses not only
concrete individual developments and concepts of individuality, but
also encompasses the "universal". For Croce, individuality
constitutes the historical process within which an advance towards the
universal occurs and, in this context, the general is identified with
what the individual experiences directly. The historical process
becomes the expression of the "inseparable synthesis of
individual and universal" and, as such, establishes for Croce
the "identity of philosophy with history". Croce viewed
any philosophical problem identical to historical synthetic judgments
when restored to the historical context that gave rise to the question
we attempt to answer. As the synthesis of the individual and the
universal, history possesses the most complete form of knowledge.
Indeed, for Croce, as well as for Collingwood-- the philosopher
with whom Croce's name often has been
associated-- "history is thought" (Collingwood 1948
[1956: 215,245, 247-48]). From the theoretical perspective, thought
establishes connections between sensory-perception, intuition, and
concepts, whereas history synthesizes the aesthetic, logical and
practical levels of human activity. Theoretic activity consists of
knowledge while practical activity is characterized by volition, and
thereby within this perspective knowledge is the precondition of
action (Croce 1917 [1920: 60-61; 94-107]; 1909 [1913:
33]).


## 6. Existential Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Life



In the early 1930s Ortega formulated, in a systematic fashion, his
general philosophical standpoint--positing human life as the
ultimate reality--which contains philosophy within history. He
presents it in his book *En Torno a Galileo* (1933), by way of
his theory of generations, and in his essay *History as a
System* (1935). The "concept of being" or "human
life", for Ortega, "is the very root of philosophy",
and, therefore "any reform of the idea of being means a radical
reform in philosophy". At this point, he abandoned the
"biological organism" content of his earlier notion of
life in *The Theme of Our Time* to incorporate a concept of
life--"the life of each one of us"--as a
being-that-lives-in-the-world. "Biologists", he
averred,



> 
> 
> use the word "life" in order to designate the phenomena of
> organic beings...but...when we give this word a meaning
> which is more immediate, broader and more decisive. (*Obras*,
> III: 166).
> 
> 
> 



In this broader connection, Ortega's concept of human life comprised a
dimension which was similar to the *Fundamentalontologie* of
Heidegger's *Daseinanalyse.* Ortega's analysis of human
existence and human life characterized "I am I and my
circumstances" as the interchangeable interaction of the
"I" and "the world". That is, "I am
always with myself...the world is always linked with me and my
being is a being with the world" (*Obras*, VII: 394, 405,
402). Ortega wanted to liberate the "I" from the
"internal prison" of "subjectivism" and
proposed that we "save ourselves in the world", in
"that vital horizon". This sense of being as having been
"thrown into" the "world" further
characterizes the authentic reality of life as "finding oneself
face to face with the world" and "inside the world"
(*Obras*, VII: 411, 416-17, 430; compare Heidegger 1927
[1962: 236, 399]). To "escape from idealism", then,
"life includes both the subject [the conscious self] and the
world". Living is "*finding oneself in the
world*". Hence:



> 
> 
> Life always finds itself in certain circumstances, in an arrangement
> surrounding it--circum--filled with things and other people.
> One does not live in a world which is vague, except that the vital
> world is circumstance [the things and the people around one]; it is
> this world, here and now. (*Obras*, VII: 422, 431)
> 
> 
> 



Ortega considered Dilthey one of the "first discoverers"
of "the new great Idea of life", who has "taught us
more radically than any of his predecessors--Hegel,
Comte--to see historicity as a constitutive feature of the human
being" (*Obras*, VI: 166; IX: 396). After the posthumous
publication of Dilthey's *Gesammelte Schriften* in 1928 and
Ortega's subsequent "acquaintance" with Dilthey's
philosophical work, we begin to observe the eventual unfolding of a
general systematic statement of human life in Ortega's philosophy and
historical thought. The years surrounding Ortega's absorption of
Dilthey's writings suggest that he derived from Dilthey a sense of
historicity, which he previously had never possessed. He assigned, as
did Dilthey, history the task of supplying human life's only
"fixed, pre-established, and given line", of converting
itself into the "historical reason" which secures the one
kind of continuous, empirical progress of which the individual is
capable. We also observe that, in addition to the influences of
historicism and phenomenology, Ortega also integrated existential
philosophy into his general philosophical orientation. During the late
1920s and 1930s, of his intellectual development, Ortega incorporated
the idea of human life into his fundamental philosophical outlook, and
the discernible transition from "vital reason" to
"historical reason" occurred in his thought. That is, once
human life was established as the basis of his philosophical
standpoint, "vital reason" and "historical
reason" became interchangeable terms for Ortega (*Obras*,
V: 538, VI: 39-41). Though he spoke of a parallelism between the
ideas of Dilthey and his own, during the period 1914 and 1929, and
although his insistence on the fact that he discussed the notion of
"vial reason" prior to the early 1930s remains accurate,
there was no such discussion of "historical reason" in the
manner in which one has become familiar with its usage in his mature
writings of the 1930s. After the publication of his lectures, *What
Is Philosophy?* (1929) and his essay on Dilthey,
"life" and "reason" and "vital
reason"--or "living reason"--and
"historical reason" were central concepts in the fusion of
his systematic analysis of man, society and history. 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. The correlation of these
concepts, which placed a common emphasis upon the actions and the
creations of the individual, the facticity and the uniqueness of
individual human existence, makes explicit Ortega's connectedness to
Lebensphilosophie: " Life", Dilthey averred, " is
the inner relationship of mental processes within a person. Knowledge
of life is growing awareness of, and reflection on, life."
(Dilthey [1976: 125]). "The significance of life," he
contended further, "lies in its shaping and its
development." (Dilthey [1962: 88]. Existential philosophy, in a
variety of ways, had been an outgrowth of *Lebensphilosophie*
and phenomenology, and Ortega, with the complement of the historicist
viewpoint of the "unique individual" and of "human
life" as the ultimate reality, appears to have pursued the path
which had been directed by both Dilthey and Heidegger (Misch 1931:
5-197, 216-37).



In his works in the 1930s, Ortega posited "human life" as
ultimate reality and, from this standpoint, connected the historicist
philosophical point of view that of existential phenomenology. The
existentialist perspective of Ortega closely resembles the
*Fundamentalontologie* or *existentiale Analytik* in
Heidegger's *Sein und Zeit*. (Heidegger 1927 [1962: 21-83
; Spiegelberg 1960: 62-74; Spiegelberg 1965: vol. 1,
408-413). Through the epistemological standpoint of "I am
I and my circumstances", the individual, in realizing the
"vital possibilities" of the essence of his being, engages
actively in the human world. The process of the realization of man's
"vital possibilities"--through the
"circumstances" of his being--as a
being-in-the-making and as a being-that-goes-on-being-in-the-world,
Ortega characterized as a "drama" which
"happens". Ortega's notions of "life as a
happening", the insecurity of human life in the face of death,
the ontological distinction between human life and things and between
"being" and "authentic being", are strikingly
similar to ideas which had been formulated by Heidegger in 1927. In
*What Is Philosophy?* he aligned his philosophical position
with that of Heidegger and the "new philosophy" of being,
existence, and human life:



> 
> 
> These common words, finding oneself, world, occupying oneself, are now
> technical words in this new philosophy. One would be able to talk for
> a long time on each one of them, but I will limit myself to observe
> that this definition, "to live is to find oneself in a
> world", like all the principal ideas in these lectures, is
> already in my published work. It is important to me to observe this,
> especially, with regard to the idea of existence, for which I claim
> chronological priority. For that very reason I am pleased to
> acknowledge that the person who has gone deepest into the analysis of
> life is the new German philosopher, Martin Heidegger.
> 
> 
> 
> ...To live is to find oneself in the world. Heidegger, in a very
> recent work of genius, has made us take notice of all the enormous
> significance of these words. (*Obras*, VI: 40-41; VII:
> 415-16)
> 
> 
> 



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*. Apart from a general discussion in his *Idea
of Principle in Leibniz and the Evolution of Deductive Theory
(*Obras*, VIII: 270-300),* and the essay
"Martin Heidegger and Language of the
Philosophers"(Universitas, 7(9) [1952]: 897-903, *Obras*,
IX: 625-44), Ortega referred to Heidegger only in passing in a
long footnote in his essay, "Goethe from Within" (1932)
*Obras*, 4: 403-04, 541. Whatever the context in which
this controversy over Ortega's intellectual indebtedness to Heidegger
may have been initiated, it was during this decisive period of the
1930s that he turned to the systematic formulation of the philosophy
of *Lebensphilosophie*, and it was also in this period that
Ortega's explicit postulation of the notion "I am I and my
circumstances", as radical reality, reflected the influence of
existential and phenomenological points of view in his philosophy of
existence, man and society.



While Ortega's general ontological position does bear some
similarities to Heidegger's *existentiale Analytik*, and while
his idea of human life shows some affinities with Dilthey's
*Lebensphilosophie*, there are also 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. That is, for Ortega, analysis of being and the analysis
of human life constituted at once the systematic analysis of the
existence of man in his "lived-relations" and his
"being-in-the-world". Furthermore, Ortega makes explicit
the connection between the concept of historical time and the concept
of everyday reality in that temporality constitutes the basic relation
between human beings and their activities in the world.


## 7. Human Reality and Historical Reason



History narrates the actions of individuals in society. In the world
of physical objects, things change, but in the social world of
individuals, events happen. References to historical reality, or to
historical time, then, are defined in terms of human motives, actions,
and reactions and therefore as unique events. What, then, are
historical facts? To Ortega, "all knowledge of facts" as
"isolated" data, "is, to be precise,
incomprehensible and can be justified only when used in the service of
theory". Our capacity to comprehend the connectedness in the
external world is served best "in the synthesis of facts",
for "the unity of facts" is "found not in
themselves" but is found "in the mind of an
individual" (*Obras*, I: 316-17). For Ortega,
historical reasoning thus has a specific form of narration.



> 
> 
> In short, the reasoning, the *reason*, which sheds light here,
> consists in a narrative reason. In order to comprehend anything human,
> be it personal, or collective, it is necessary to tell its
> history.... Life only returns a small degree of transparency in
> the presence of *historical reason*. (*Obras*, VI:
> 40)
> 
> 
> 



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. The particular
importance Ortega ascribed to history, and his contention that the
mind's 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 adopting this position, one assumes
that human behavior becomes subject to invariant, universal
regularities, and that explanations necessarily consist in subsuming
what occurs beneath "a general law of nature". Against
such a view, Ortega argued that human nature involves a continual
process of reflective self-transformation which reveals individuals to
be continually modifying and reformulating their experiences. 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 subsumed. In order to understand the relationship
between human life and reality, therefore, the individual must escape
from what he labels, "the terrorism of the laboratory".
Through his various readings of Kant, Ortega learned that the
autonomous mind must liberate the self from the enslavement of our
empirical existence by nature. To avert compounding the ontological
distinctions he thought should be made between a philosophy of
physical nature and a philosophy of human nature, Ortega maintained
that "man has no nature". The individual must liberate
himself or herself from the shackles of the natural scientists for the
latter are too involved with general, abstract concepts of nature, and
"man has no nature". In this sense, according to Ortega,
the generalized interpretations of the natural scientists exclude the
most essential element of human reality: the life of the individual.
In denaturalizing "man", a question still remains for us:
if the individual has no nature, what does he or she have? "Man
has history" Ortega replies. "Man lives", he
continues, and, as a "living being", the individual
relates to other "living beings" so that vital, operative
factors are set in motion--the "living experience of
man". Ortega's departure from physics and mathematics' universal
perspective of reality shows us that his dictum, "man, in word,
has no nature; what he has is ...history", completes the
alienation of the individual from nature and nature from the
individual. This abrupt separation of 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. History, therefore, "*sensu
stricto*" constitutes "human history". For
history "is the reality of man. He has no other. Through history
he has made himself such as he is". Ortega's later emphasis on
the "original autochthonous" basis of "historical
reason", insisted both on the systematic quality of history
and on the "transcendent" character of physical reason
(*Obras*, IX: 83-86, 88-89). To Ortega, human life is
"not a thing" but "a drama"; human life
"is a gerund, not a participle: a *faciendum*, not a
*factum*". Finally, as expressed differently by
Collingwood: "what nature is to things, history, as *res
gestae*, is to man.... Man finds that he has no nature other
than what he has done himself". For Collingwood, history is the
study of "*res gestae*: actions of human beings done in
the past"; and, because it studies human activity, it is the
study of purposive activity (*Obras*, VI: 32-33, 41;
Collingwood 1948 [1956: 9]; 1921 [1966:19-20]).


## 8. Existential Phenomenology, the Social World and Historical Time



The individual thus lives in an active 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 which, according Ortega, does not belong to the common
life of man in general; rather, it belongs solely to each unique
individual (*Obras*, VI: 25). It is only within his or her own
factual existence that the individual can fathom "I am I and my
circumstances". The individuation of the individual's being is
that which identifies what he or she may become. If the
"circumstances" of the individual connote, for Ortega, any
situation toward which an act may be directed by the "I",
then circumstances, for the most part, constitute more a condition,
and not a denial, of the individual's freedom of action. That is to
say, once it is established that freedom entails choice, a choice must
be made with respect to the variety of possibilities which arise out
of the "circumstances" of the individual. To create his
destiny so that he may become "the novelist of himself",
the individual "must choose among these possibilities".
"Therefore", Ortega argued, "I am free. But
understand it well, I am free by coercion, whether I want to be or
not". The conditions of freedom evolve within given alternatives
and freedom of action, and thereby result in the ability to choose and
act under whatever confronting circumstances that may arise. Thus, for
Ortega, how an individual constitutes himself or herself becomes
determined very much by the way in which one allows for the possession
of his or her being. The individual has not chosen freely his or her
"circumstances;" nevertheless, each can freely take over
the responsibility of his or her being and allow it to disclose itself
as uniquely his or hers. "Man's destiny, then", he
posited, "is primarily action. We do not live to think, on the
contrary: we think in order that we may succeed in surviving"
(*Obras*, VI: 34; 5: 304). For once given his life, man's being
or essence becomes an ever-changing reality. As man's essence becomes
characterized in conjunction with the conditions of his
"circumstances", individual man is placed into and
delivered over to the being which is his and which he has to be. In
this manner, the burden of action and decision-making is placed upon
the individual as the very essence of one's being consists in an
ever-changing reality in the making. One's ability to be this or that
being is contingent upon his or her actions, and thus for Ortega, the
individual 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*, VII: 102-03).



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 1920s to the 1950s. 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.
This being the case, the essence of man's being takes on a dual
characteristic in Ortega's philosophy of human life, the
differentiation between the internal trait of the individual--the
"I"--and its external manifestation within the
environment of physical entities. He views the "I" both as
constituting and as being constituted by the tangible reality of the
world. Life as the confrontation of the "I" with its
environment--environments in which various possibilities
exist--places man outside himself. As we observed,
"possibility" connotes, for Ortega, that which possesses
potential actuality (from the viewpoint of the individual's
"circumstances"). From this point of view of the
circumstantialities of life, taking into account the "I"
as the prime human reality is not sufficient unto itself since the
realization of this factor of life spurs the individual into action
and thereby confronts him or her with external reality
(*Obras*, V: 72-73). Thus, continual confrontation with
his "circumstances" demonstrates the essential factor that
prevents the individual from being isolated, locked in his or her ego.
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. "Life is anguish", he remarked,
"and enthusiasm and delight and bitterness and innumerable
things". According to Ortega, at a certain point during his or
her experience, the individual may plunge into the mood of
anxiety--as if he or she were "between the sword and the
wall"--when death becomes imminent. "Death", he
continued, "is certain, there is no escaping it! Could there be
less choice?" (*Obras*, VIII: 297; VII: 104). 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. For, in the face of
"possible death", to experience life as being also implies
an awareness of the possibility of life as not being. 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*.
> 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.
> (*Obras*, VII: 186-87)
> 
> 
> 



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. "I am I and my circumstances", as the starting
point of the human condition, also expresses the fact that the living
experience of the individual consists of something that takes place
temporally as well as spatially. What does "I am I and my
circumstances" imply, then, in this sense? 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. Indeed, he tended to define individuals'
"circumstances" in terms of "certain elemental,
basic phenomena that involve human society" and that in actual
fact imposes themselves from the outside on the historical process
that he theoretically followed from within. As the temporality of man
is very much a part of the here-and-now, man's being-in-the-making,
for Ortega, constitutes a "happening" toward the future.
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. The life of the present
moment--when "some men are born and when some men
die"--in its very essence "is boxed in", Ortega
averred, "between other lives which came before or which are to
come after..." (*Obras*, V: 35-37). Once an
individual becomes aware of himself or herself as a being based on the
facts of his or her past (such facts as where one was born or who
one's parents were), 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. Ortega viewed the future as the more
important aspect of temporality because it is the "open
area" toward which man directs himself and in which man
manifests his own being. The individual directs himself or herself
toward the future and, accordingly, takes upon himself or herself the
inheritance of the past, thereby becoming oriented to his or her
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. Through living
experiences, "man goes on being and un-being". Hence, the
temporal experience of living is not structured in a one-dimensional
progression. 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 finitude dwell together in the
living experiences of individuals. Man's choice and
"destiny", then, are contemporaneous--embedded in the
here-and-now. Accordingly, the contemporaneity of man presupposes the
authentic temporality of man:



> 
> 
> The past is the moment of identity in man, the inexorable and fatal.
> But, for the same reason, if man's only *Eleatic* being is what
> he has been, this means that his authentic being, what, in effect, he
> is--and not merely "has been"--is distinct from
> the past, and consists precisely and formally in "being what one
> has not been", in non-*Eleatic* being. And since the term
> "being" is occupied irresistibly by its traditional static
> signification, one should agree to liberate oneself of it. Man is not,
> save the he "goes on being" this and that.
> (*Obras*, VI: 39)
> 
> 
> 



Authentic being, thus understood, has its essential weight not solely
in the past, nor in the future, but in the individual's
here-and-now--the present in its reflexive connection with the
past. Hence, as an authentic being, man is as contemporary as he is
historical, and thereby the historicity of man makes explicit the
temporal manifestations of his vital dimensions.



Through the "I" and its "circumstances",
Ortega balanced the principle of individual variety with his
philosophy of human life. However, in considering the individual to be
a historical being occasioned by his or her temporality, Ortega began
to pursue a line of thought that would eventually position him to
establish a principle of coherence for the realities of the
individual, society and history; this theme would be borne out of the
phenomenological thrust of Ortega's philosophy of human society and
his theory of generations. For life, as the process of happening and
the temporality of the individual, makes implicit the assumption that
"man goes on being" and thus has a discernible principle
of coherence.



Once human life has been established as the fundamental standpoint of
reality, for Ortega,



> 
> 
> we are *ipso facto* given two terms or factors that are equally
> primary and, moreover, inseparable: Man, who lives, and the
> circumstances or world in which man lives.
> 
> 
> 



As a being that lives, the individual relates to other living beings.
For Ortega, "all realities must in some way make themselves
present, or at least announce themselves within the shaken boundaries
of our human life" (*Obras*, VII: 101). Hence, the basic
reality of human life constitutes the life of an individual with the
lives of other individuals as well as situations that pertain to the
confrontation of the individual with the existent realities of
physical objects. In accordance with this viewpoint, man--as a
being-that-lives-in-the-world--does not perceive the world from
the isolation of his ego, for the very essence of his being consists
in living in an actively disclosing manner. For Ortega,
being-in-the-world has a dual characteristic: as it relates to
"I am I", being-in-the-world functions as
being-for-itself; but as it relates to "my circumstances",
being-in-the-world functions as being-for-and-with-others. "Our
world", he explained,



> 
> 
> the world of each one of us, is not *totum revolutum*, but is
> organized in "pragmatic fields". Each thing belongs to one
> or some of these fields, in which it articulates its
> *being-for* with that of others, and so on successively.
> (*Obras*, VII: 130)
> 
> 
> 



Through an approach reminiscent of Kant and Husserl, Ortega posited
the fact that "all men live in one and the same world". He
continued,



> 
> 
> This is the attitude that we may call the natural, normal and everyday
> attitude in which we live; and, because of it, because of *living
> with* others in a presumed world--hence *our*
> world--our living is *co-living, living together*.
> (*Obras*, VII: 152)
> 
> 
> 



Any meaningful interaction with the other "consists in my
relation with becoming active, in my acting on him and his on me. In
practice, the former usually follows upon the latter". In this
manner, then, the discovery of the body of the other, as an object in
reality, becomes a reverse revelation of the "I" and its
being. The being which is subsequently revealed to the "I"
is revealed as being-for-and-with-others. This component of
being-for-itself-and-others is an integral part of being-in-the-world
and being-for-itself and, thereby provided Ortega with the
phenomenological perspective through which he developed his idea of
individuals interacting in human society. He explains:



> 
> 
> This means that the appearance of the Other is a fact that always
> remains as it were at the back of our life, because on becoming aware
> for the first time that we are living, we already find ourselves, not
> only with others and among others, but accustomed to others. Which
> leads us to formulate this first social theorem: Man is a
> *nativitate* open to the other, to the alien being; or, in
> other words: *before each one of us became aware of himself*,
> he had already had the basic experience that there are others who are
> not "I", the Others; that is to say, again, Man, on being
> a *nativitate* open to the other, to the *alter* who is
> not himself is a *nativitate*, like it or not.... Being
> open to the other, to others, is a permanent and constitutive state of
> Man, not a definite action in respect to them. ... This state is
> not yet properly a "social relation", because it is not
> yet defined in any concrete act. It is simple co-existence, matrix for
> all possible "social relations". It is simple presence
> within the horizon of my life--a presence which is, above all,
> more compresence of the Other, singular or plural. (*Obras*,
> VII: 149-50)
> 
> 
> 



For Ortega, framing the social world as a horizon connotes, as it
did for Husserl, the context in which the experience of human
interaction (among "I", and "We" and
"Other") occurs. The various "I's" constitute
the fundamental units of the structure and content of the social
world. "Husserl says very well", Ortega recalled,
"the meaning of the term *man* implies a reciprocal
existence of one for the other, hence, *a community of men, a
society*" (*Obras*, VII: 148). As we saw previously,
in describing reality, Ortega postulated the distinction between
things (i.e., plants, stones and animals) and man through the fact
that things exist and man lives. By dint of the unique qualities
of human existence, the individual possesses an essence that is
peculiarly one's own, which means that humans are not
only split off from nature--plants, stones, minerals and the
like. All individual human acts, for Ortega, are directed toward some
object and, as such, the actions of the individual are manifested in
accord with the nature of the objects toward which they are directed
and in accord with their physical, spatial context. If the object is a
stone, the individual's actions would be unilateral; however, if the
object is an animal, an individual discovers that his or her
actions would be manifested toward an anticipated reaction by the
animal to which they are directed:



> 
> 
> We know that a stone is not aware of our action on it.... But as
> soon as we begin dealing with an animal, the relation changes....
> There is, then, no doubt that, in my relation with the animal, the act
> of my behavior toward it is not, as it was in the case of the stone,
> unilateral; rather, my act, before being performed, when I am planning
> it, already calculates with the probable act of reaction on the
> animal's part, in such a manner that my act, even in the state of pure
> project, moves toward the animal but returns to me in an inverted
> sense, anticipating the animal's reply. (*Obras*, VII:
> 133-34)
> 
> 
> 



We find this sort of transcendental reflection--by way of action,
responses and reciprocal responses--to be fundamental in the kind
of description made by Ortega of the social world. With an animal as
an object toward which individuals direct
their actions, one finds more of a reciprocal response than
occurs with stones and other inanimate objects.
An individual and an animal, according to Ortega,
exist-for-each-other but not to the same degree as between man and
man; the latter relate to one another as
being-with-and-for-the-other. Yet the question remains: what kind of
behavior can be constituted as being social and what are the
contingencies implicit in this behavior? The contingency, for Ortega,
relates to the fact that social behavior entails interaction between
individuals, in contrast to acts between individuals and
animals-- human life remains the ultimate
reality--and this human interaction has to be reciprocal. It is a
kind of reciprocity of action that can only arise and occur amongst
humans:



> 
> 
> Does not the word "social" immediately point to a reality
> consisting in the fact that man conducts himself in confrontation with
> other beings which, in their turn, conduct themselves with respect to
> him--therefore, to actions in which, in one way or another, the
> reciprocity intervenes...in short, to say the same thing in
> another way, that the two actors mutually respond to each other, that
> is, they correspond? (*Obras*, VII: 135-37)
> 
> 
> 



 Upon experiencing the others as other individuals, Ortega
maintains, the "I" understands and relates to them
as modalities that are analogous to the "I" and are
inextricably connected, as fundamental units of human reality, to
their "circumstances" as well. This interaction manifests
itself in such a manner that the "I", for Ortega,
apprehends the world-about-the-others and the
world-about-the-"I" as one and the same world--from
an objective, empirical standpoint--that differs in each
individual case only insofar as it affects consciousness differently.
For we all perceive reality through our sense-perception, albeit our
individual perceptions of this very reality are registered
differently. For Ortega, as we have seen, I am the only one who is an
"I". All the other "I's" are similar to
objects (in the sense that they are perceived solely as physical
organisms) and, once viewed as being "an *other
person*" (that is, a being perceived as possessing both a
body and an inwardness, an *other* "I"), are
referred to as the "others". My own place in this
world--in time and space--is related to my "I"
and my body. Therefore, when the "ego" (which is my
"I") encounters an "alien ego", it is
essential for it (the "ego") to transcend itself and
thereby make possible meaningful attempts to understand and perceive
the existence of other "egos", or "I's". The
Other, as "I", according to Ortega, embodies an
"ego" that possesses a similar quality of consciousness,
inwardness and solitude: an ego that will be regarded as also
possessing both primary and secondary modal qualities and whose
fundamental essence and structure will also be encountered as existent
within the "I". Thus, for Ortega, in order to attempt to
enter this sphere of the "other's inwardness", it becomes
essential to strive toward attaining the transcendental attitude.
"In this sense of radical reality", he explained,



> 
> 
> "human life" means strictly and exclusively the life of
> each individual, that is, always and only my life.... If, by
> chance--I added--appears in this my world something that
> must also be called "human life" in another sense, neither
> radical nor primary nor patent, but secondary, derivative and more or
> less latent and hypothetical... What is decisive in this step and
> in this appearance is that when my life and everything in it, on being
> patent to me, on being mine, have immanent character--hence the
> truism that my life is immanent to itself, that it is all within
> itself--the indirect presentation, or compresence, of the alien
> human life startles and confronts me with something transcendent to my
> own life.... (*Obras*, VII: 141)
> 
> 
> 



Through the mediacy of a human world, then, the "I" and
the Other, communicate as collective human lives. The radical reality
of the "I", as the inwardness of human life, is unique to
the individual "I", and, to the extent possible, relates
transcendentally to the "I" of the other. The
consciousness of the "I" becomes separated from the
consciousness of the other by the very distinction that separates, in
the first instance, the "I's" consciousness of its own
body, and secondly, the distinction that separates the body of the
"I" from the body of the other, and finally, the
distinction that separates the other's body from its consciousness.
Alternatively, the bodies of the "I" and the other, as
existent physical structures in the common world of "human
lives", are necessary "broadcasting centers", as
Ortega calls it, between the consciousness of the "I" and
the others. In this connection, the relations between the bodies of
the "I" and the Other consists of a relation of
transcendental exteriority. "What is certainly patent in my
life", he explained,



> 
> 
> is the notification, the signal, that there are other human lives; but
> since human life in its radicality is only *mine*, and these
> will be lives of others like myself, each the life of each, it follows
> that, because they are others, all their lives will be situated
> outside of or beyond or *trans*-mine. Hence they are
> transcendent. (*Obras*, VII: 142)
> 
> 
> 



Expressed in this manner, the individual, as a
being-who-lives-in-the-world and as a being-for-and-with-others, is an
empirically finite being who has to transcend the finitude of his
"radical reality". As we have seen, from the perspective
often associated with existential philosophy, Ortega averred that for
the individual to transcend the determinacy of one's being and to
attain individual consciousness, an individual has to make
free choices and decisions. From an ontological point of view, Ortega
makes a case, like Husserl, for the necessity of entering the
transcendental attitude so that an individual may bring oneself
closer to an understanding and consciousness of the experience of the
"other". The phenomenological and existential philosophies
are thus linked together, for the individual remains an empirical,
finite, concrete, and unique being in his particular
"circumstances" who has been placed decisively within the
spatiotemporal context in the here-and-now of one's world, and
through this perspective, one transcends
one's "radical reality" in its every detail
(*Obras*, V: 545-47). Although he called into question
the "abstract analogical transposition" of Husserl's
"transcendental reduction", Ortega's phenomenological
approach to the importance of transcending individual
experience--as the fundamentals basis for understanding the very
experience of reality--still remains very much within the
tradition of Husserl, his students, and followers
throughout disparate phases of the phenomenological method:
Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. When Ortega
presented the ontological ramifications of reality, clearly he
considered the human body to be connected to the totality of what he
called human life or radical reality and, as such, to be the
foundation of its vital structure. More specifically: the body is a
body of an individual insofar as it exists in the indissoluble unity
of its radical reality. But, he questioned, "what do we mean
when we say that an Other is before us, that is, an other like myself,
another Man?" His answer,



> 
> 
> ...I, ego, means for us no more than "human life",
> and human life...is properly, originally, and radically only the
> life of each of us, hence, *my life*. (*Obras*, VII:
> 158-59)
> 
> 
> 



To some, it would appear to be an obvious fact that individuals
are able to understand others, in their being and essence, both
as alike and other than themselves. From a phenomenological
standpoint, however, this fact is a problem which is neither obvious
nor easy to explain, and it is a problem whose solution was viewed
differently by both Ortega and Husserl. For Husserl, the solution to
this problem was found in his notion of *Einfuhlung*
("empathy", or literally, "feeling oneself into
another"). Husserl's concept of the *Einfuhlung* in
*Lebenswelt* resembles David Hume's idea of
"sympathy", and its philosophical function (as a
propensity "to sympathize with others", and as a
"transcendental theory of experiencing someone else") was
intended to establish, as thoroughly as possible, a way of presenting
the "other" to us. (see Hume 1739 [1985: 367-69]).
Ortega renounced the supposition inherent in this solution to the
problem because the notion of *Einfuhlung*
assumes the "other" is "analogous" to my
"I"; the concept assumes that it is a double of
my "I" and still fails to serve the function of
explaining the most difficult question--namely, how is it
possible that this "double" of myself continues to appear
to me as constituting the other? The main thrust of Ortega's argument
is directed against Husserl's formulation, in *Cartesian
Meditations*, of the *alter ego* as "an
analogue" of the ego. The solution of "an analogical
transposition or projection", therefore proved inadequate for
Ortega, and the notion of the "appearance of the Other"
became the problem to which he extended his
existential-phenomenological position of being-for-itself and
being-for-and-with-others. In order to clarify somewhat the
problem, Ortega replaced Husserl's notion of "in [my] every
intentionality" with his own idea of "my life as
radical reality" (see especially Husserl 1933 [1964:
89-100, 104-11]; ZPI: vol. 14, 3-11, 429-33;
vol. 15, 40-50; see also, Scheler 1923 [1954: 6-50];
*Obras*, VII: 161-63). As the individual is never a
wordless "I"--for, as radical reality his life is
being-in-the-world--also one is never an isolated
(Other-less) "I". For Ortega, this manifestation of
"radical realty" constitutes the fundamental feature of
being-for-and-with-others and consequently cannot be explained as an
isolated "I" that somehow discovers a way of confronting
another equally isolated "I". An individual does not
have to find his or her way to another individual for, with
the disclosure of one's own being as being-for-and-with-others,
the being of other "I's" becomes disclosed to one as
possessing this identical feature:



> 
> 
> Observe then: being the other does not represent an accident or
> adventure that may or may not befall Man, but is an original
> attribute. I, in my solitude, could not call myself by a generic name
> like "man". The reality represented by this name appears
> to me only when there is another being who responds or reciprocates to
> me. Husserl says very well: "The meaning of the term
> 'man' implies a reciprocal existence of one for the other,
> hence a *community of men, a society*". And conversely:
> "It is equally clear that men cannot be apprehended unless there
> are (really or potentially) other men around them".
> Hence--I add--to speak of man outside and apart from a
> society is to say something that is self-contradictory and
> meaningless.... Man does not *appear* in
> solitude--although his ultimate truth is solitude; man appears in
> sociality as the Other, frequenting the One, as the reciprocator
> (*Obras*, VII: 148).
> 
> 
> 



The "I" and the other, then, are constituted by their
appearance before each other, in the common world of society, and as
each engages in reciprocal interaction. In this regard, Ortega was in
basic agreement with Husserl as the former attempted to reconcile the
realms of "I" and other, solitude and society, by
establishing the fact that a referral to the other (on the part of the
"I") is an indispensable condition for the constitution of
being-in-the-world.



Thus, in the social world of being-for-and-with-others, an individual
directs oneself away from the possibilities that may be viewed as
being exclusively one's own and attempts to broaden
the understanding of oneself by relating to the common world
possibilities of others. The social world in which the individual
lives--as one who remains linked with other individuals through
manifold relations--becomes a realm that the individual apprehends
and interprets to be meaningful for one's own possibilities,
"circumstances" and here-and-now. Adopting this
standpoint, Ortega contended that, as individuals who are rooted in
our radical realities, we must "make an attempt at
interpenetration, at *de-solitudinizing*
ourselves..." (*Obras*, VII: 140). This being the
case, as the spatial-temporal dimension of an individual's radical
reality become part and parcel of one's here-and-now, the reality
of the social world (as the context and mediacy through which groups
of individuals interact) is also enmeshed in their here-and-now.
Through one's own finitude, the individual's temporality
reveals+ itself as the consciousness of the intrasubjective
structure of his life. The reality of the social world, conversely,
reveals itself to the individual as an intersubjectively structured
world which the "I" shared through interacting
with others. The spatial-temporal manifestations of this
intersubjectivity connect the "I" to the others and, at
the same time, sharply differentiate the world of the "I"
from the social world of the others. "The first thing", he
explains,



> 
> 
> I fall foul of in my proper and radical world is Other Men, the Other
> singular and plural, among whom I am born and begin to live. From the
> beginning, then, I find myself in a human world or society.
> (*Obras*, VII: 177)
> 
> 
> 



In the context of social reality, the individual therefore measures
one's "I" by what constitutes the Others and by what
they have achieved and failed to achieve in the social world. The
experience of the social world by an "I" thereby
justifies and corroborates itself (as a being-in-the-world) through
the experience of the others with whom the "I" interacts.
The possibilities of individuals and their subsequent
understanding of themselves can be broadened after
their encounter with the "others" in the social
world common to all "I's". However, Ortega also
perceives the shared social world, in several aspects as
constricting, instead of expanding, the individual's
possibilities. As an empirically finite being whose radical reality
continually confronts the possibility of death, the individual,
for Ortega, can make efforts to transcend the determinacy of
one's being by making, existentially, free choices and
decisions. Conversely, the individual, as a social, empirically
finite being who, interrelated with other individuals, finds
it difficult to transcend and recoil from the process of the
reciprocity of human interaction in the context of social reality and,
hence, becomes conditioned (by society) to act with a view toward what
others have done and currently are doing. Once given this social
world that may be interpreted to signify the possible realm of action
for all of us (as "all men find themselves among men"), in
Ortega's view, the individual must discriminate between what
constitutes the possibilities of Others--humans in
general in the social world--and what constitutes the
possibilities inherent in the uniqueness of his own finite being.
"What is yours", he states,



> 
> 
> does not exist for me--your ideas and convictions do not exist
> for me. I see them as alien and something as opposed to me....
> All Yous are such--because they are different from me--and
> when I say I, I am only a minute portion of the world, the tiny part
> of it that I now begin accurately to call "I".
> (*Obras*, VII: 178, 189-90)
> 
> 
> 



In this connection, the individual must live neither as an isolated
"I" nor as a conformist to the common social world of the
others. Rather, the individual must live the existence of a unique
"I". That is to say, the unique individual consists of
one who lives in an actively and disclosing manner and who has
the ability both to come out of and to withdraw into the possibilities
which are permitted within the realm of the
"*yous"* and "*wes*" that
one confronts in the reality of the social world. "It is in
the world of the yous, and by virtue of them", he
elaborates,



> 
> 
> that the thing I am, my I, gradually takes shape for me. I discover
> myself, then, as one of countless *yous*, but as different from
> them all, with gifts and defects of my own, with a unique character
> and conduct, that together draw my authentic and correct profile for
> me--hence as another and particular you, as *alter tu*.
> (*Obras*, VII: 196)
> 
> 
> 



At this point of our analysis, it becomes apparent that the term
"social world", or society, for Ortega, connotes merely
the category which he utilized to describe the
phenomenological interaction between individual "I's" both
as unique individuals and as social individuals. In other words, the
social world entails the realm in which the interactive process of the
"I" and its "circumstances" becomes extended
to the inclusion of other "I's". Departing from this
perspective, Ortega became concerned with the fundamental patterns of
human interaction that underlie the larger context of social reality.
The reduction of the whole of what constitutes social reality into its
component elements discloses the phenomenological grounding of
Ortega's analysis of human society. Hence, the social relation of
individuals identifies the distinctive unity which is defined by the
reciprocal interaction of its unique individual components. As he
explains:



> 
> 
> ...the basic structure that is social relation, in which man
> moves appearing and defining himself in front of the other man, and
> from being the pure other, the unknown man, the not-yet-identified
> individual, becomes the unique individual--the You and I. But now
> we have become aware of something that is a constituent factor in all
> that we have called "social relation"...namely, that
> all these actions of ours and all these reactions of others in which
> the so-called "social relation" consists, originate in an
> individual as such, I [myself] for example, and are directed to
> another individual as such. Therefore, the "social
> relation", as it has so far appeared to us, is always explicitly
> a reality between individuals, a reality formally inter-individual.
> (*Obras*, VII: 202-3)
> 
> 
> 


## 9. Social Reality, the "Mass Man" and "Mass Society"



The behavior and interaction of individuals in the social world, for
Ortega, comprise a reality which becomes tangible and open to
objective analysis. This analysis reflects the perspective of social
reality as the realm in which we may perceive and interpret the
concrete functions of human interactions. The substance of Ortega's
objective analysis of social relations was structured around his
theories of "creative, select minorities", "mass
man", and "mass society". For Ortega, "mass
man" and "mass society" are manifestations of social
and historical phenomena that are perceptible, in part, through the
objective factor of their vast numbers and magnitude in the social
world. But, he points out immediately, the argument of sheer quantity
hardly explains accurately or adequately the fact that "we see
the multitude, as such, in possession of the places and instruments
created by civilization". More importantly, he averred, a sharp
focus on the intrinsic features of mass man and mass society that
would bring us much closer to discerning the essence of this concept
than its external manifestations of agglomeration and plenitude
(*Obras*, VII: 144, 143). The philosophical dimensions of mass
man, mass society and select minorities, as a theory of social
relations and human interaction and also as an analysis of social
reality, must focus more attention on its qualitative characteristics
than its quantitative characteristics. That is, while making
references to the quantitative factor of the concepts of masses and
select minorities as descriptive indicators of the coherence of one
group of individuals vis-a-vis another group remains important
and useful, references to the qualitative features of identifying what
constitute masses and select minorities becomes even more essential
toward an understanding not solely of unique individuals in society
but also of how these unique persons remain together as a dynamic
unity.



> 
> 
> The concept of the multitude is quantitative and visual. If we
> translate the concept into sociological terminology without changing
> its character, then we find the idea of social mass. Society is always
> a dynamic unity of two component factors: minorities and masses. The
> minorities are individuals or groups of individuals who are specially
> qualified. The mass is an aggregate of persons not especially
> qualified. By masses, then, it is not to be understood, solely nor
> principally, "the working masses". The mass is "the
> average man". In this manner, what was mere quantity--the
> multitude--is converted into a qualitative determination: it
> becomes the common social quality, man as undifferentiated from other
> men, but as repeating in himself a generic type...To form a
> minority, whatever it may be, it is necessary beforehand that each
> member separate himself from the multitude for *special*,
> relatively individual reasons.... This coming together of the
> minority precisely in order to separate themselves from the majority
> is always introduced into the formation of every minority.
> (*Obras*, IV: 145-46)
> 
> 
> 



For Ortega, the "specially qualified", "select
man", must separate himself from the common values of everyone
by placing greater demands on himself and by drawing upon the
uniqueness of his radical reality. As we saw, to realize one's
possibilities as a unique individual, one must occasionally withdraw
from the social reality of others to the radical reality of his
"I". According to Ortega, in such circumstances, the
individual has to ignore momentarily the objective values of the
social world and create the increasingly subjective values derived
from the uniqueness of his being. This subjective withdrawal into the
"solitude" of one's radical reality provides the necessary
retreat of the select minorities whenever confronted with the
constraints of the masses, a process which resembles Nietzsche's
concept of the *ubermensch.* For Nietzsche, the
*ubermensch* (over man) must liberate himself from the
*ressentiment* of "slave morality" by setting his
own standards and by creating his own values (Nietzsche 1887 [1969:
36-43]). We previously observed that in order to attempt to
develop individual consciousness and realize the vital possibilities
of his being, Ortega thinks the individual has to become absorbed
within the circumstances of the social world and interact actively
with other individuals in the world. However, the development of
individual consciousness and the realization of one's vital
possibilities also entail an occasional withdrawal from social reality
into the solitude of one's self (without remaining "hermetically
enclosed" and locked in the ego), with the purpose of possessing
both the unique individuality of the "I" (against the
constraints of society) and the positive process of reciprocal human
interaction. Although Ortega opined that "there is no creation
without withdrawal into one's self", he also maintained that the
"I" has to confront others actively and collide in the
strife he designates as "social relations". The dynamics
of "de-solitudinizing" through actions and creations of
the individual in the social world, then, project the realm of
possibilities not only from the "I" to the other and from
the other to the I, but also from our social world (in the
here-and-now) to their social world (in the future)--in short,
from one generation to the next. The individual, for Ortega, must
withdraw from the social world not solely to realize the vital
possibilities of his own being, but also to attempt to create and
actualize the vital possibilities of the social world through which
the circumstances of his very being (and the being of the others) are
defined. In this context, the individual, by engaging actively in the
social reality surrounding his circumstances, contributes
substantively to the making of the essence of society and history as
well as the essence of his own being (*Obras*, V: 79-80).
The spatial-temporality of man and his circumstances--by way of
his life, society, consciousness of time and history--will take
us into Ortega's concept of the "generation" and its role
in his philosophy of history.


## 10. The Concept of Generation, Temporality, Historical Reason and Critical Philosophy of History



The social world and the conscious process of the individual, however,
disclose more than the experiences of other individuals that are
directly given in the common, vivid present of the here-and-now. For
Ortega, the social world also contains an implicit feature of social
reality that remains inexperienced directly (in the broader sense of
immediate confrontation) by the individual--in the
here-and-now--but becomes contemporaneous with the life of the
individual and subsequently may be made available to him as an
experience in the future. Hence, the here-and-now of the individual,
as an immediate direct experience, extends itself (both as a process
of consciousness and as a perceptible factual occurrence in space)
into the broader social context of living and interacting as
"contemporaries" (*Obras*, V: 36-42). In this
context, the explicit features of the social reality of
"contemporaries" reveal the conscious process of a
generation of individuals as a temporal process.



The temporality of the lives of individuals (as
"contemporaries" and also as what Ortega called
"coevals") is central to the concept of the generation. In
this sense, for Ortega, ultimate reality as the reality of human life
also signifies the explicit manifestation of time (for time is in man
as the events of his life are connected to their placements in time)
and thus provides him with the basic structure of his concept of
generation and the basis of historic changes. The life of man, as
being-in-the-making, is life as a happening, life as a changing
structure. With each fleeting moment of the here-and-now, man's inner
stream of consciousness of the flow of time relates to the fact that
his life changes as he grows older and ages with each reference to the
no-longer-here and the not-yet-here. "The most elemental fact of
human life", he said,



> 
> 
> is that some men die and others are born--that lives succeed each
> other. All human life, in its very essence, is enclosed in between
> other lives which came before or which are to come after--it
> proceeds out of one life and goes into one which is to follow. Well
> then, it is on this most fundamental fact that I establish the
> inevitable necessity of change in the structure of the world....
> This is not to say, heedlessly, that the youth of today--that is,
> his soul and his body--is different from the youth of yesterday;
> but it is inevitable that his life should have a different framework
> than that of yesterday.
> 
> 
> 
> Well then, this is nothing but to find the reason and the period for
> historical changes in the fact joined essentially to human life, that
> this human life always has an age [a period of time]. Life is
> time--as Dilthey already made us see and Heidegger repeats to us
> today; and not imaginary cosmic time because imaginary time is
> infinite, but limited time, time which grows toward an end, which is
> the true time, the irreparable time. For this reason man has age. Age
> is man's being always in a certain part of his limited
> time-span--whether it is to be the beginning of his vital life's
> time, to be the ascension toward the middle, to be its center, or to
> be approaching toward its end--or, as one is accustomed to say,
> whether he is a child, a youth, a mature man, or an old man.
> (*Obras*, V: 37)
> 
> 
> 



After having established this principle of change, Ortega's concept of
generation becomes the principle through which the no-longer-here, the
here-and-now, and the not-yet-here converge in the temporal reality of
the social world. Thus, when Ortega referred to one's "life
time" as consisting youth, maturity and old age, we are able to
discern that: in the first instance, his concept of generation entails
a horizontal reference to living individuals as being
"contemporaries"; and, secondly, it refers to the vertical
differentiation, in age, among youth, maturity and old age--in
short, as being "coevals". Ortega's view of three distinct
life times, as manifestations of the concept of generation, resides in
his notions of "coevals" (which refers to the interaction
of individuals of approximately the same age) and of
"contemporaries" (which refers to the interaction between
all individuals of whatever age) and their appositeness with regard to
time and to space (*Obras*, V: 37-38). As the active
engagement in the social world persists in importance for both the
development of the individual and society, the inner dynamics of vital
human interaction, for Ortega, are also important insofar as the
concept of generation has any significance in illuminating the human
condition. Yet we ask ourselves: how do we characterize those
individuals who do engage actively in the "circumstances"
of their reality but whose social worlds differ from those of other
groups of individuals? They may possess the same age as these other
groups of individuals and their activities are contemporaneous, but
the "vital contact" of one group of individuals who belong
to a particular social setting does not necessarily interact with that
of another social group, as their social worlds are different in space
though not in time. This question takes us into the broader historical
implications of Ortega's concept of generation.



The historical nature of human reality and social thought sheds light
on Ortega's notion that "there is no spontaneous
generation", for the "series of the generations"
function through the continuity of the historical process. Social
thought and ideas of individuals reflect "the minds of
men" together with the particular generations within which they
develop and, if constituted as "coming from" and
"going toward", they become part and parcel of the
"happening" of the historical process (*Obras*, VI:
202-4). As we have seen, man's being-in-the-making, for Ortega,
"is in man mere happening, happening to him" and,
accordingly, a happening toward the future: the present evolves out of
the past and, as the reality exigent to man, veers toward the future
(*Obras*, VI: 37, 40-41). This historical sense of continuity
between the minds of men and the succession of generations recalls for
us Ortega's assertion that the individual cannot live solely within
the isolation of his ego (whether he is a "mass" or a
"select" man). Social thought in general, and individuals'
ideas in particular, fail to develop and expand within the solipsistic
vacuum of the "I" by their very essence. As a being of the
social world, the individual and his ideas are influenced by the
historical context and the very social world within which they
emerged, and, similarly, formed by the past. From this perspective,
man, time, thought and society are disclosed in reality as being
essentially historical. For Ortega, the individual is not born in some
general place and moment; rather, he or she is born in a particular
moment in time and at a particular place in space. Human life has a
beginning and an end and, on entering the world, man enters a social
world that is given to him in conjunction with the historical process
of its temporal dimension. As we saw, for Ortega, "man has no
nature...what he has is history" for, he says, "man
is the entity that makes itself...the *causa sui*".
(*Obras*, VI: 33). History, then, provides the process through
which the essence of man becomes manifest both as an individual and a
social being. As an individual being, man undergoes the stream of
consciousness of an internal occurrence as a historical process; as a
being-that-lives-in-the-world, man experiences the succession of
generations as an external occurrence within the historical process.
Ortega posited the "theme of history" and
"historical thought" as proceeding "with respect to
the human phenomena" through the prisms of these internal and
external occurrences. History, through the succession of generations,
not only provides us with the basic features of the individual at a
particular time and place, but also provides us with "a
regulative principle" of coherence for human phenomena. The
unity of the past and the present in history, for Ortega, constitutes
a reality which becomes identified with the experiences of
individuals. Like Croce, Ortega perceived history qua history as being
"contemporary" and "living", whereas mere
facts are relegated to the realm of "dead chronicle".
Through the relationship of history to life, he defined history, as
contrasted with chronicle, by its vitality and present-mindedness
rather than by connectedness as such, though he did acknowledge that
those who defined it by the latter quality pursued the correct path.
The contemporaneity of history, then, proffers a dynamic process that
is ever changing and continuously absorbed by the past. The relations
that past events bear to other events and to the present are
significant in that they are continually changing and, according to
Ortega, the function of the philosopher becomes not only to describe
and analyze the past but also to attempt to understand these relations
in conjunction with human life. The underlying concept of the
individual ultimately determines the critical character of historical
interpretations, which results from both a reading of the past and
simultaneous self-analysis by the observer. In this critical revival
of the past, the contemporary generation achieves a higher historical
consciousness of its own being. Internal consciousness of temporal
change within the individual coupled with an awareness of the external
manifestations of change in the social world of human reality dispose
one to see how Ortega's concept of the generation constitutes a
concept of historical methodology:



> 
> The concept of the generations, converted into a method of historical
> investigation, consists in nothing more than projecting that structure
> across the past. Anything other than this is to renounce discovering
> the authentic reality of human life in every period of time--that
> is the mission of history. The method of the generations permits us to
> see that life from within itself, in its actuality. History is
> virtually to convert that which has already passed into that which is
> present. For this reason--and not only
> metaphorically--history is to relive the past. And as living is
> nothing else but actuality and the present, we have to transmigrate
> from the actuality and the present which are ours to those of the
> past, looking at them not from without, not as living experiences
> which have been, but as those which persist in being (*Obras*,
> V: 40).
> 



Historical study, thus, constitutes a humanistic enterprise.
Currently, history can be our approach to knowledge of the individual
and of humanity, and through history we acquire the wealth and wisdom
of past cultures. The critical awareness of the potentialities of the
individual enables us to act in our own historical time with deeper
insights and active commitment. History depends on what the
consciousness of the historian brings to it, and therefore, the
humanistic aspects of historical consciousness stems from the
realization that our lives constitute time. For the "past is
past", Ortega remarked,



> 
> 
> not because it happened to others but because it forms part of our
> present, of what we are in the form of having been: in short, because
> it is *our* past. Life as reality is absolute presence: one
> cannot say that *there* is anything if it is not present, of
> this moment. If, then, *there* is a past, it must be as
> something present, something active in us *now*.
> (*Obras*, V: 40, 55; 6: 33)
> 
> 
> 



In this connection, Ortega was in accord with Croce's notion that
"we know that history is in all of us and that its sources are
in our breasts". According to this notion, the recordings of
"chronicle's dead data" of the past fail to register the
reality of history and human life, which is the "vital",
living action of the present, and one with the past and the future.
History characterizes *what we are*, instead of something that
we possess. Through history we learn *who we are* by examining
*what we have done*. In view of this position that we are what
we have done, history shapes itself in and through ourselves
(*Obras*, VII: 178-79).



Hence historical time carves the essence of individual configurations.
For Ortega, "historical reason" perceives and registers
the tangible facts of historical reality through the demonstrative
process of how the present originated from the past in order to
engender the future. By the term "historical reason",
Ortega intended to make a clearer distinction between the
"cultural sciences" and the "natural sciences"
to namely posit the notion that history has its
"autochthonous" reason; history remains in a realm
entirely its own. Ortega's notion of history's
"autochthonous" reason establishes for history its
autonomy from both the abstract concepts of philosophy and the logic
of "physico-mathematical reason". His invocation of
history as humanity's appropriate science, and his overt emphasis on
the "original, autochthonous" basis of "historical
reason", point to his insistence on the systematic quality of
history and on the "transcendent" character of physical
and mathematical reason. History becomes autonomous in that history
alone consists of the essence of human reality, and historical
knowledge provides us with the essential understanding of this human
reality. Every concept "claiming to represent human
reality", he explains, "every concept referring to human
life, specifically, is a function of historical time"
(*Obras*, VI: 40-41). In conjunction with the
historicization of the individual, historical reason became the medium
that circumscribed and eventually supplanted physical and mathematical
reason as the unitary principle of ultimate reality: human life, and
thereby "historical reason" was now viewed as possessing,
at once, the principle of diversity and unity. Hence, history was
rationalized and reason was historicized, as with the individual:



> 
> 
> ...Man alienated from himself encounters himself as reality, as
> history. And, for the first time, he sees himself compelled to occupy
> himself with his past, not from curiosity nor in order to find
> normative examples, but because he *has no* other thing. Things
> are never done seriously but when, truly, they are absolutely
> necessary. For this reason, the present hour is the time for history
> to re-establish itself as historical reason.
> 
> 
> 
> Until now history has been contrary to reason. In Greece the two terms
> "reason" and "history" were opposed. And until
> now, in effect, hardly anyone has been concerned to search in history
> for its rational substance.... Hence the expression
> "historical reason" must be understood in all the rigor of
> the term. Not an extrahistorical reason which appears to fulfill
> itself in history but, literally, *a substantive reason constituted
> by what has happened to man*, the revelation of reality
> transcending man's theories and which is himself, the self underlying
> his theories (*Obras*, VI: 49-50).
> 
> 
> 



In one of his essays on Hegel, Ortega remarked on the change in
European intellectual sensitivity that



> 
> 
> the "modern" spirit has experienced in the last
> years.... The "modern" [spirit] does not believe as
> naively in the final age any more. (*Obras*, II:
> 565-66)
> 
> 
> 



This modern stance epitomized what Ortega had come to understand as
one of the distinctive characteristics of modernity: the consciousness
of human life's increasing depreciation, and the subsequent
reaffirmation of life through the expression of creative freedom.
Ortega perceived the early twentieth century as a world emptied of
meaning and sought to elude the despair provoked by its
meaninglessness. To transform this sense of despair, he affirmed
"our life, human life", as the "radical
reality". Human life thus constitutes constancy and change or,
as Ortega proclaimed, "historical reality"
(*Obras*, VII: 99-100; 2: 540-41). Through the
discussion of historical reality and historical reason, the ground
upon which historical knowledge has been based for Ortega becomes
apparent. Speculative philosophies of history, the "owl of
Minerva", began its flight at dusk; for Ortega, and for certain
twentieth century philosophers of history, "historical
reason" proclaims the dawn of human history.



Individual lives are historical. Where human life has a beginning and
an end, in view of Ortega's reading of Hegel, history has neither a
first beginning nor a final end. It can only be conceived of as the
realization of the potentialities of the individual in historical
time. In retracing the individual's struggle to control nature and in
reviving the thoughts and conscious life of the past, historical study
offers the contemporary generation the challenge of making its own
vital decisions on the basis of critical knowledge of the full scope
of former human experiences and achievements. History is understood
here in its dual meaning as a factual world of phenomena and as
discipline concerned with only its relevance of life in the
present.



Starting from the premise that consciousness, in the sense of
cognitive awareness, always should be consciousness of something,
Ortega and modern thinkers have perplexed themselves with questions of
what consciousness is in itself and how it is related to the thing, or
the facts, which are its objects. It does not appear to be identical
with its objects, yet, neither does perception. Historical
consciousness constitutes a concern with the past as being relevant to
our understanding and apprehending of the human condition. Its key
attribute consists of our awareness of ourselves as
"being-in-time". It implies that the temporal ordering of
events refers to the very nature of human existence. Historical
consciousness thus enables the individual, a civilization and the
philosopher of history to expand their experiences beyond their actual
historic time frame to absorb the results of events in which they had
no part. The study of history thereby opens the horizon to
participation in the completeness of human history.



This participation in human history has to be understood as being
direct and active. Where the physical scientist perceives phenomena
which have a reality independent of the observer, history has the
character of being real in the consciousness of the historian. The
word "history" means both history as actuality--the
*res gestae* of Ortega and Collingwood--and written
history; history as what has happened in the past. Clearly, any
attempt to distinguish between historical reality and historical
accounts of reality implies the interpreter knowing what constitutes
historical reality. The past is present only insofar as it is relived
by the historian through sympathy and understanding. The central
problems of historical epistemology and methodology revolve around the
understanding that an objective knowledge of the past can be attained
solely through the subjective experiences of the investigator. Thus to
understand an action, or past actions, implies comprehending it as an
expression or process of meaning conceptually connected to some
underlying pattern of thought or intention, rather than as a
completely contingent relation. Moreover, such an underlying pattern
presupposes a background structure of established rules or practices
of the sort that may prove to be integral to human life and experience
as we apprehend them. For to claim, as does Collingwood, that such an
account of historical understanding requires the re-enactment of past
thinking merely directs attention to the method, admittedly familiar
among historians, of imaginatively projecting oneself into another's
position for the purpose of arriving at an explanatory hypothesis.
Ortega also claims that,



> 
> 
> man invents for himself a program of life, a static form of being,
> that responds satisfactorily to the difficulties planned for him by
> circumstance. He essays this figure of life, attempts to realize this
> imaginary character he has resolved to be. He embarks on this essay
> illusioned and creates, completely, the experience of it.... But
> on experimenting with it, the limits of this vital program make
> apparent its insufficiencies. It does not resolve all the
> difficulties, and it creates new ones (*Obras*, VI: 41).
> 
> 
> 



The claim was to demonstrate that the explanations historians provide
are similar in their structural analysis to those put forward in other
areas of investigation in the social sciences; this demonstrates that
an explanation of past historical actions, by reference to
motivational factors, is possible when presupposing the validity of
pertinent cognitive generalizations. Ortega, together with Croce,
Dilthey, Collingwood and others who associated with the tradition of
historicism, expressed sympathy with those who claimed that the
interpretation of human actions raised difficulties for standard
empiricist accounts and explanations of the human and social world.
For the most part, they were wholly committed to universal human
objectives and placed a very high value on the uniqueness of the
individual. They were concerned with the philosophical implications of
historical knowledge and made attempts to develop systematically the
problem of relating presuppositions to the problem of historical
knowledge. They sought to identify their specialty, philosophy and the
philosophy of history, with historical knowledge.
"History", Ortega averred,



> 
> 
> is perfect continuity. Every idea of mine comes from another idea of
> mine or from the ideas of some other man... [Therefore]
> historical thinking proceeds with respect to human
> phenomena--philosophy, law, society, arts and letters, language,
> religion--the same thing began with the natural sciences, as
> established in the works of Kepler and Galileo, when they proceeded to
> bring together empirically the simple facts of material phenomena.
> (*Obras*, VI: 167, 184)
> 
> 
> 



Ortega's contribution to this area of study has been to emphasize what
he considered the epistemological implications of historical
knowledge. In the company of such phenomenologists as Husserl,
Heidegger and Scheler, Ortega was challenged to continually emphasize
the strict and accurate observation of the various elements of human
experience. Ortega was persuaded by the argument that isolated
empirical facts, apart from any understanding of their interior
meaning, their inner connection to human life and the meaning of the
social and historical process were limited, if not futile. In adopting
these orientations, philosophers, historians and philosophers of
history may learn from philosophical and cultural anthropology that
constructive comparisons can be made between understanding what
individuals do and understanding what they say. Through this
connection the philosopher of history may reconstruct historical time
as a form of human understanding and, if so inclined, as the process
through which self-analysis may be attempted. As we saw, for Ortega,
the interpretation of human actions raises difficulties for standard
empiricist accounts of explanation of the human and social world. The
results of Ortega's studies in existential phenomenology, historicism
and the philosophy of history allured him to the approach of choice
and knowledge of the individual and of humanity. This approach
advances the notion that, through history, the epistemological break
occurs not with the past but with empirical accounts of the past. The
philosophical historian's approach and attitudes toward the past, when
honed successfully, can result in his or her ability to comprehend and
communicate with the past on its own terms. The historical approach
thus serves as a communicative link between the past and the present,
and the philosopher, in making such communication possible, serves as
a mediator between the worlds of the past and present. The historical
lines connecting the past and the present also connect temporal
reality and the observer. To attain this end, Ortega eventually
grounded historical knowledge in a thorough knowledge of the
individual. "History", he explained,



> 
> 
> is the systematic science of that radical reality which is my
> life.... There is no *actio in distans*. The past is not
> there, at the date when it happened, but here, in me. The past is
> I--by which I understand, my life. (*Obras*, VI:
> 40-41)
> 
> 
> 



The historical act of reconstructing past human creations and
projecting oneself into the thoughts of others makes salient critical
philosophy of history's synthetic function of connecting temporal
reality and mind through the process and consciousness of time.
Through this form of communication with the past and present, the
phenomenological aspect of Ortega's thought thereby combines with his
existential and historicist perspectives. The synthetic function of
these perspectives becomes actualized in individual behavior, in
social relations and in history. It is the fusion of these approaches
that mark Ortega's contribution to philosophy. "Very deep is the
well in the past", Thomas Mann wrote at the beginning of his
novel, *Joseph and His Brothers*. In bringing human
connectedness and meaning to historical time and mind, Ortega's
critical philosophy of history has provided a synthesis that serves to
prevent the deep well of the past from becoming bottomless.