What Is Philosophy? by José Ortega y Gasset

First published:¿Qué es filosofia?, 1958 (English translation, 1960)

Type of Philosophy: Existentialism, metaphysics

Context

What Is Philosophy? contains a series of lectures that José Ortega y Gasset gave in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1928 and then in Madrid, Spain, in 1929. The lectures were not a traditional academic course in philosophy introducing the perennial problems in the field but a course that analyzed the very activity of philosophizing. Ortega explains that in the last half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the prestige of philosophy suffered under the “imperialism of physics.” Physics owed its success to its uniting within itself the rigor of mathematical deduction, the confirmability of its findings through observation, and the opportunity of making the world more comfortable through technology. Philosophy could boast of nothing comparable. However, by the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century, philosophy rebounded. One reason for this was the demotion of physics as the paradigm of knowledge. A second reason was a dissatisfaction with the individual sciences, which provide only those parts of reality that come within the province of their methods, unlike philosophy, which offers a total view, being rooted in a vital need to know, or to attain a synoptic vision of, the whole.

The Whole as a System

Philosophy has as its object each thing that exists as an integral part of the whole; it seeks to locate everything in the total scheme of things. Therefore, the object of philosophical knowledge is the whole as a system. The method of philosophical inquiry consists of the principles of autonomy, which stipulates that every truth in the philosophical system must be demonstrable entirely within the system itself, and of pantonomy, which stipulates that the philosopher should seek to grasp the whole by showing what every particular thing is and how it fits into the total scheme of things. What is known to be true must be directly intuited or immediately present in a manner appropriate to itself; therefore, knowledge of sensory objects requires that they be present to the senses and knowledge of concepts requires that they be present to the mind. Philosophy must determine what things have an absolutely certain existence because they are directly intuited. They constitute the basic “data of the universe.”

The physical world with its contents does not qualify as such a datum because, as René Descartes showed, it may be doubted; hence, realism must be rejected. What does qualify as a datum is thought; as Descartes proved, even when doubting one is thinking. Thought, then, “is the only thing in the Universe whose existence cannot be denied, because to deny is to think.” Moreover, thought is unique inasmuch as that at the moment it occurs, it fully manifests itself as it really is; nothing of itself is hidden. All that one knows exists for certain is one’s mind and its ideas; one cannot know that anything outside one’s mind exists for certain. This is the philosophical doctrine of Idealism.

Idealism

Idealism understands that the external world and its contents are nothing other than ideas in one’s mind; their existence somehow depends on one’s perception of them. Therefore, if one simply closes one’s eyes, the whole visible world instantly vanishes. However, where is the world? One cannot say it is outside one’s mind because one cannot escape one’s mind to see whether the world is really out there independently of one’s thought. Hence, the world must in some sense be contained within one’s mind. However, in saying this, one supposes that the part of one’s mind containing external objects such as chairs and tables takes on their physical properties—so one is reduced to the absurdity of supposing that one’s thought is round or square, has a certain color, and occupies space. If the idealist rejoins by saying that it is not the world itself that is inside the mind, but just an image of it, then one is left again with the untenable position that the world is completely outside the mind and therefore unknowable to it.

Ortega escaped the idealist’s dilemma by suggesting that the world is neither literally inside nor wholly outside one’s mind but is inseparably linked with one’s thinking of it—just as right is linked with left or concave with convex. Thus, to think at all is to think of the world, and to think of the world is simply to think: “The external world does not exist except in my thinking of it, but the external world is not my thought.” The world and oneself are necessarily coordinate, which implies that just as there is no world without a mind to perceive it, so there could be no mind without a world to think about. Thought and its object are mutually dependent.

In light of this, Ortega amends the fundamental insight of idealism. The basic datum of philosophy is “the joint existence of a self, a subjectivity, and of its world.” The world and oneself, which are indissolubly linked, indubitably exist. Moreover, this world that is coordinate with oneself is the one that a person not only thinks about but also responds to emotionally, succeeds in changing, and moves about and has one’s being in—none of which one could do if one did not coexist with the world. However, the term “coexistence” does not adequately describe this relationship because it connotes separate beings contiguous with each other. The relationship between the world and oneself is much more intimate and dynamic. It is a mutual interaction. The world depends on the person who perceives it, acts on it, endures it, and loves or hates it; yet the world confronts and resists one. The relationship between the world and oneself, their coexistence, is more a mutual functioning, one toward another. This complex interaction of oneself and the world is nothing other than one’s life. This means that the fundamental datum of philosophy—”the primordial reality”—is nothing other than one’s life. Thus, the fundamental task of philosophy is to define human life, not merely biologically because biology, like philosophy, presupposes this very life to be defined. Philosophy itself is a form of life, a vital activity that seeks to understand that life.

Life as Fundamental Being

As the basic datum of philosophy, or that which can be intuited with absolute certainty, life is the fundamental being for Ortega. His conception of being is quite unlike the traditional conceptions—the ancient conception of being as a “thing” or the modern conception of it as “innermost subjectivity.” For Ortega, being as living is an intimacy that one has with both the self and things. Unlike the old idea of being as something independent and self-sufficient, Ortega understands it is as mutual need: A person, to be, needs the world, and the world, to be, needs the person. “One’s living” replaces “being” or “existence” as the fundamental term of philosophy; all else is encompassed by one’s life. Ortega’s position supersedes, by absorbing and going beyond, idealism and realism. In affirming life as the basic reality, Ortega equally affirms the reality of both the conscious self (subject) and the world (object) in which the self finds itself. Life is more primordial than either thought or the world. Thinking is but an activity of one’s living self that would cease if one were dead. Moreover, the world is the world one finds oneself in as a living being. There is nothing that can possibly contradict the reality of one’s life because everything else can be doubted and presupposes that life.

Self-Knowledge, Freedom, and Time

More than what is described by biology, life is what one is, what one does, and what happens to one. Its first attribute (category) is self-knowledge, or self-discovery. What is known or discovered is not just the self but also the world that is inseparably linked with it; one is aware of living in the world, of acting within it, and of responding to things in it. Thus, one knows that one is an active agent who is productively occupied with things in the world—”life is preoccupation”; the world is the sphere of one’s activity. One preoccupies oneself with things—making and acting—for the purpose of improving one’s existence. In thinking, for example, one is preoccupied with things insofar as one thinks them and produces truths (philosophy). Those things that preoccupy one exist (in their primary sense) insofar as they exist for one’s purposes; they do not subsist or exist otherwise. However, when they cease to preoccupy, they obtrude themselves in one’s mind as self-subsistent things or as existing apart from one (in their secondary sense). However, even their self-subsistence is one’s concept or abstraction, and abstracting is uniquely a human activity or occupation. Hence, things subsist in themselves by virtue of one’s abstract preoccupation with them and so still exist for one. Through abstraction, one no longer occupies oneself directly with things or immediately experiences them as part of one’s life; one pushes them, and the life they represent, away from one, so to speak, and thereby transcend one’s own life. In this process can be found the theoretical (philosophical) attitude wherein one supposes things as existing not for oneself but for themselves.

One does not choose this world or one’s life and time within it; in this respect one’s life is predetermined. However—and this is the second attribute of life—one does not see oneself as being predetermined but as having some freedom to choose; daily one is confronted with choices one must make with respect to what one might do or become. Life, then, is a mixture of free will and determinism, of “fate in freedom, and freedom in fate.” Before one acts, though, one needs to decide for what purpose one should act: “Life consists in deciding what we are going to be.” Because one must decide and act purposively, one always has one’s eye on and anticipates the future where preferences will be met: “Our life is in its very essence futurism.” Life, then, is essentially paradoxical because who one is depends on what one will become, on what is not yet—living is wholly a living into the future. Hence, time is the third attribute of life; in considering what one ought to be, one must think of the future: “Life is what comes next, what has not yet come to pass.”

What Is Philosophy? represents Ortega’s mature thought. It adapts the ideas of several German philosophers, particularly Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and Nicolai Hartmann. The book is significant in numerous ways. It formulated a novel ontology of human life in which being or existence is defined as the “radical reality” of “my life”; it fused traditionally distinct or opposed movements, such as vitalism with rationalism, idealism with realism, and existentialism with phenomenology; it again placed the ancient field of metaphysics at the center of philosophy; it offered the concept of “vital” or “historical” reason; and it cast philosophical ideas in highly poetic and dramatic terms. What Is Philosophy? is of interest as a work of literature no less than as a text of philosophy; furthermore, it is an important document in the cultural history of Spain in the twentieth century.

Principal Ideas Advanced

•Philosophy aims to understand the universe (all that is) as a totality and as a system, by discovering how each thing fits into the whole.

•Philosophy must begin with self-evident or indubitable truth, which becomes its basic datum.

•That basic datum is one’s life (and the lives of all others) and is composed of oneself and the world, which mutually interact in an indissoluble bond.

•Living, rather than being, is the fundamental category of philosophy.

•The three attributes of life are self-knowledge, freedom, and time.

Bibliography

Graham, John T. Theory of History in Ortega y Gasset: “The Dawn of Historical Reason.” Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. This is a clear look at Ortega’s theory of history.

Gray, Rockwell. The Imperative of Modernity: An Intellectual Biography of José Ortega y Gasset. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. An extensive intellectual biography of José Ortega y Gasset that shows the development of his thought in all his major works. It places him in the history of international modernism at the turn of the century and considers his reaction to Spain’s cultural isolation.

Mora, José Ferrater. Ortega y Gasset: An Outline of His Philosophy. London: Bowes and Bowes, 1956. A concise and compact introduction to Ortega’s main philosophical doctrines that is especially suited to general readers. Its special virtue is that it is written by a philosopher and therefore contains the trenchant insights of a fellow practitioner.

Oimette, Victor. José Ortega y Gasset. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. A study of the development of Ortega’s thought against the social and political background of Spain in the first half of the twentieth century. It makes a good introduction to Ortega’s philosophy.

Raley, Harold C. José Ortega y Gasset: Philosopher of European Unity. University: The University of Alabama Press, 1971. An insightful study of Ortega’s political, historical, and cultural thought as it relates to Europe itself and Spain’s place in European history and culture.

Silver, Philip W. Ortega as Phenomenologist: The Genesis of ‘Meditations on Quixote.’ New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Focuses on a specific facet of Ortega’s thought that had been neglected—namely, his existential phenomenology—and describes his relationship to German philosophers, particularly Edmund Husserl.

Tuttle, Howard N. The Crowd Is Untruth: The Existential Critique of Mass Society in the Thought of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Ortega y Gasset. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. An examination of the thought of Ortega and others.