Ortega on the Idea of Life (Part 1)

José Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher and politician, is one of the most exciting theorists to read. Commenting on themes philosophical, political, aesthetic and cultural, Ortega was perhaps the first modern Spanish thinker whose ideas made up a true export. Uniquely original, masterfully didactic and unusually perspicuous, Ortega is a genuinely enjoyable read. However, he has been eclipsed in existentialism by the likes of Sartre, Heidegger and Marcel, so few, even among the philosophy crowds, are aware of his thought. This is unfortunate, for his ideas under-gird a large part of twentieth century philosophy. Perhaps no other idea of his is as compelling, insightful and inspiring as his idea of life, which is the foundation of every tenet of his philosophy.

“One of the things life has taught me is that nothing is a matter of indifference if one has a moderately clear view of reality.”[1] These words, taken from a verbose but certainly not prolix self-introduction, never reached their intended German audience in the lifetime of their author, yet they perhaps capture in exemplary fashion his entire philosophical purview better than any other phrase he ever penned. José Ortega y Gasset insisted that life must be lived intentionally, not in the cognitive sense born out of the phenomenological tradition to which he remained loosely tied, but in its mundane sense of common parlance. For Ortega, one either chooses one’s destiny with deliberation, intention and execution or one resolves to consent and to concede to living at the derivative plane. There is no tertium quid or, in this case, no tertia vita. Indifference is not an option for life. I choose to realize my destiny or I choose to supplant my destiny with the cheap construct.

In this series of posts, I will touch on one of the main themes of Ortega’s thought, namely the idea of life. In the first section, I describe Ortega’s diagnosis of his present age in which he detects a fundamental need to return to the question of life. In the second, I treat in summary fashion Ortega’s idea of life. Finally, in the third, concluding section, I touch upon Ortega’s charge that the person of the present age must face the full reality of human life and respond to its imperative of realization. While my intent is primarily expository, my hope is to portray Ortega’s idea of life as what, in my opinion, it is within the history of philosophy: the departure point of twentieth century existentialist thought.

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[1] José Ortega y Gasset, “Preface for the Germans,” in Phenomenology and Art, trans. Phillip W. Silver (New York: Norton, 1975), 19.