Episode #166 ... Jose Ortega - Circumstance
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Hey, thanks so much for listening to the podcast. Cool that you're enjoying it so far. Full transcripts of every episode at philosophizethis.org. And to support a show like this, go to patreon.com slash philosophizethis. Could never do this without your help. Thank you. So before we begin, there's a few things you got to know about the philosopher we're going to be covering today, who goes by the name of José Ortega y Gasset.

Who, from here on out, by the way, I'm just going to be referring to as Ortega. You know, as a card-carrying citizen of the United States, I am spiritually obligated over here to abbreviate practically everything in existence. Y'all know this. We save time over here with abbreviations so that we can argue with each other more. So Ortega by no means gets a free pass there. Few things you got to know about the guy. Some people refer to him as an existentialist philosopher. But that would only describe a portion of the work that the guy did throughout his career.

Some people call him a phenomenologist, but that would be equally misleading. I mean, in his words, he abandoned phenomenology as an exclusive approach to philosophy almost the instant that he understood it. Some people call him a historicist, a contextualist, a social critic. But when it comes to Jose Ortega himself and the way that he viewed his body of work, he was never really all that big on putting labels or titles on stuff. It seemed a bit too limiting to him.

So maybe the most accurate way to describe Ortega is to say that he's the type of philosopher that you really don't see too much of in today's day and age. What I mean is there's a lot of thinkers out there who spend almost every second of their time here on this planet critiquing the work of others. They read a bunch of other people's work, and then their contribution to the world is to deconstruct, to unravel, to point out the flaws in any narrative that you can possibly throw their way.

It's actually pretty impressive, like some kind of philosophical demolition crew. They're really good at tearing down anything anyone around them claims to be meaningful. But oftentimes when they're asked for an alternative, when they're asked to create something better to replace the thing that they just tore down, they got nothing most of the time. We've all come across this kind of person before. And this can be frustrating for some people. You know, they'll say, that's your contribution to humanity? That's what you're going to do is just complain all the time?

Well, Jose Ortega in many ways can be seen as the opposite of that sort of energy. He really is like a lot of older philosophers that we've covered on this show, where after having read them, you really do get the feeling that what this person's trying to do in their work is offer a truly different way of interpreting the universe and our place within it. There's this feeling like, here's a person that was not satisfied with the ways people were formerly trying to make sense of things, so they actually tried to do something about it. You know, at certain points throughout his work,

Ortega is going to have something to say to someone that calls themselves a pragmatist or an existentialist or anybody that subscribes to these ways of thinking and says they're doing so because, well, I'm just a more reasonable person than all those religious people or those philosophers of the past. You know, they're not just going to believe in a story that was given to them by their teachers or parents. They're not that lazy.

You know, they're the kind of person that does the work. They're willing to deal with the unanswerable problems of philosophy. Questions about truth. Questions about good and evil. And they're willing to deal with the existential dread of not knowing the answers to these questions. Pragmatism is a way of thinking rooted in a humble mindset, they would say. You know, people can learn a little something from me and this humility that's just constantly radiating out of me. But Ortega wouldn't let him get away with that. He'd say, just think of what you're really doing there.

Throughout your formative years, you were educated. You were made aware of certain philosophical problems that remain unanswered so far. You were given by your teachers the conventional methods and science and philosophy that people have used to solve problems in the past. And then at that point, you more or less arbitrarily decided that the conventional methods taught to you were the only thing you were ever going to be willing to consider and then deemed the unsolved philosophical problems as not really problems at all.

I mean, we can't solve them with what people have used so far. Why agonize over them? In other words, Duartege, all you've really done there is redefine what you consider a problem to be. You decided a real problem is just whatever's solvable by the conventional methods that already exist. Anything outside of that, not really a problem. And you call yourself a philosopher, he would ask. You really believe you're thinking about the world on some different level there? Part of the job description of a philosopher is to step outside the bounds of convention.

If there are philosophical problems that seem unsolvable, why not have a different strategy, he would ask? Why not try to look at reality in a completely new way that may make those formerly impossible problems seem like they were just limitations built into a method that's long since been outdated? This is one of the many things that Ortega was trying to do in his work. Born in Spain, lived from 1883 to 1955.

See, he was responding to an early 19th century challenge that had been issued to the thinkers of his time. The challenge was to question everything that Western philosophers had thought they knew about philosophy up until that point. Because something wasn't working, folks. And to get to the bottom of exactly what that was, Ortega wasn't just going to sit around critiquing the work of others. He was actually going to try to create something new. He was going to lead by example.

Which, in his case, was going to involve an entirely new way of thinking about reality. Now, that's human reality. For Ortega, the only thing we ever really have access to is human reality. And as we'll see throughout the rest of this series, when you make changes to the way you think about something as fundamental as our subjective relationship to reality, then everything else that springs out of that reality, everything we use to make sense of the world including science and philosophy,

Changing the foundation of the building has the potential to change the configuration of everything else that's built on top of it. So to get started, what piece of that foundation is Ortega gonna take issue with first? And the answer is the mind-body dualism of René Descartes. And I guess then as an added little bonus, the hundreds of years of dialogue between philosophers that came after Descartes that spent their time arguing about realism versus idealism as the foundation of knowledge.

On the one hand, we got these idealist philosophers that may try to operate entirely in the realm of abstract philosophical reasoning to arrive at absolute truth. On the other hand, we got the thinkers that adhere to what Ortega calls the sort of bourgeois realism of the past, conventional methods. We even got people that think it's possible to understand everything about the universe strictly by understanding the material properties of things.

We've gone into all this on the podcast before. We've also gone into Heidegger and how he throws out thousands of years of Western metaphysics when he says that we have no reason to assume any sort of dualism like this, where we are a subject distinct and separate from a realm of objects that we're navigating. That at the most root ontological level, being and the world are unified. Being can't exist without a world to be in, and the world wouldn't even exist without beings in it.

This way that we see ourselves as somehow separate from the universe has been a mistake from the beginning. And by the way, look at all the philosophy that we built on top of that foundation over the years. And I only bring up Heidegger to try to relate Ortega's work to something we're already pretty familiar with. Because the rejection of this realism versus idealism false dichotomy from the history of philosophy, and then all the claims Heidegger's making about being, this is going to be similar to something Ortega's saying about the nature of human life.

Because in a world where philosophers have systematically tried to dehumanize so many aspects of our reality by making them either purely material or purely abstract reasoning, here is Ortega trying to re-humanize the reality that we have access to. And conveniently enough, it turns out, the only thing we've ever had access to anyway is a reality as it is perceived through the lens of a human life. This is going to be the place Ortega wants to begin his analysis from.

Because he'd probably start out by saying, you know, obviously there are things about the material world that exist outside the realm of our mental constructions of a material world. You know, an asteroid hits the earth. That is not just a mental construction. Like you actually are just a hickory smoked piece of barbecue chicken at that point. And you are delicious, by the way. But when it comes to human life, the human reality that we experience is

Which is a medium, by the way, that everything we claim to know about the universe has to pass through. When it comes to this reality, the world that we live in cannot be understood without reference to our cognitive faculties, and our cognitive faculties can't be fully understood without reference to the world that we're understanding. The two are inseparable.

He says, quote,

End quote. To any doubters out there that may think human life is not in fact a unification between mind and the world that it inhabits, Ortega might say something like, "Give me an example of a mind that exists that is not also in the world." I mean, philosophers will try to. Again, with their fallacy of mind-body dualism. They'll talk about flying men in the vacuum of space.

They'll talk about brains living in jars. They'll talk about an evil demon creating an elaborate deception all up in your mind. But these are just thought experiments. Down here in the real world, all this stuff doesn't actually exist. So when Descartes makes the claim on the back of the evil demon and says, "I think, therefore I am," Ortega's not all that mad at the reasoning going on there. He just thinks Descartes didn't take it far enough.

To Ortega, we live, therefore we think. Meaning that to Ortega, when you don't begin from a dualistic metaphysics there, then what the claim by Descartes is actually saying is "I think, therefore I exist in the world." And this changes everything to José Ortega. Now there's a lot of good lines you could pull from Ortega's writing, but by far the most famous line if you're studying his work and trying to understand the way he's looking at human reality is this line right here:

He says, quote, I am I and my circumstance. And if I do not save it, I do not save myself, end quote. So out of context, this line can seem deceptively simple, but there's actually a lot going on here. And I guess the best way to get acquainted with what he means when he writes it is to just take it apart into sections and explain what he means piece by piece. We already partially know what he means when he's talking about the I in this quote. That to exist as a subject is always to exist within the world.

Think back to when this all began. You know, you're about to be born. You're canoeing down the birth canal. You open your eyes. And what's the first thing you realize right before they slap a little pink hat on your head? I'm in the world.

Meaning that you are not navigating the world. You are a part of the world. Think of your experience of your existence as one singly unified entity with brackets around it called human reality in the world. That is your reality that you have access to. And this becomes the new vantage point, the new workstation for rethinking everything we think we know about human life.

Okay, so back to the quote. This is part of the "I" in that quote. But the other part of us, he says, is that we are also our circumstances. What does he mean when he says that? The best way to explain it is to talk about how Ortega sees knowledge. More specifically, the limited parameters that he thinks human life always needs to operate within to be able to acquire knowledge of the world at all. He might start out by saying, "Our existence may always be linked to the world.

But make no mistake, there is never a point in time where we can see all of the world at once. It may seem like a remarkably obvious statement to lead with, but what he's referencing is all these philosophers that have tried to find some theory that gives them absolute knowledge of the universe, they're all kidding themselves at some level. When we're just being realistic, the only thing any of us ever really have access to is an individual human perspective. This makes him a proponent of something that falls under the general heading of perspectivism. Now,

Totally get it. Some people hear the word perspectivism and they slowly start to die from the inside out or at least want to.

You know, there can be this idea that if Ortega's gonna say that all we have is a perspective, then what that must mean is that to remain logically consistent, I gotta listen to people in my life as though all perspectives are equally valid. You know, Grandma Beatrice comes over and says, "Well, your perspective is the intersubjective consensus of modern science. But my perspective is that we're all fluffy seeds floating in the breeze next to a great sycamore tree." Uh, no. No, that's not what we are.

But that's my perspective. No, Grandma. Grandma, we're not doing this again. Float your seed over there to Spain in the early 1900s and just listen to Ortega, because he would say that this is not a perspectivism like Nietzsche's perspectivism, which Ortega thinks ultimately devolves down into a subjective relativism. No, under Ortega's perspectivism, he's very clear that

Not all perspectives are created equal. Some perspectives are better than others. There is a truth that exists out there. We just change our position and orientation to that truth. Let me give an example before we get any deeper into this. The example he gives at one point in his writing is of when he was walking through a forest on a trail. Now, the forest he's walking through is huge. Dense trees. You look around. You can't really see anywhere outside of about 50 feet in any direction around you.

Now, let's say you wanted to try to get knowledge of that entire forest in the same way we often want to get knowledge about the entire world around us. The only thing you ever really have access to is that human perspective of about 50 feet around you.

Now, it should be said, you can shift your orientation and position in relation to that forest. You can move to different parts of the trail, to different points in time and space. You can see the same collection of trees from a completely different angle. You may even come to a clearing where you get to see one angle of a larger portion of the forest.

But there is never a point, Ortega says, within our human perspective of the world where you can see all angles and perspectives at once. This is true of things in the physical world. This is true of cultural institutions. This even rings true all the way down to basic things we have to do in our everyday life. Like, you ever been looking at a house or an apartment online and they got the wide-angle lens on the camera? It's all well-lit. Looks like you're about to stay in the Taj Mahal.

But then you actually get there, it turns out you're sleeping in like a mop bucket in a spare closet at a bed, bath and beyond. Yeah, we've all been there before. Point is, we only stand to benefit from sending other photographers in to get different interpretations of reality. No single perspective under Ortega is ever going to encapsulate the entire truth.

But no perspective is entirely a mental construction either. Even a purely metaphorical account of reality potentially has something to teach us. And our perspective only suffers to Ortega if we don't expose ourselves to a diversity of conflicting opinions from other human lives. We got to see the world from as many different angles as we can and then link the pictures together into a higher resolution, wider angle view, kind of like a panoramic shot of the culture and world that surrounds us.

Now, on the surface this can seem like far from the most groundbreaking discovery in the history of philosophy. At first glance this can seem like Ortega's more or less just attached a non-dualistic metaphysics onto something that most of us believe in pretty much through common sense. I mean, of course all I have is my own perspective. Of course that is limited. And of course your perspective almost always becomes more developed the more you educate yourself on different takes arrived at by other people.

But it's this non-relativistic perspectivism, combined with his commitment to human life as the fundamental way that we perceive this reality. It's this combo that's going to lead to some very interesting conclusions about our responsibilities as human beings and how we connect to our circumstances. And it's with that, it's with this impending talk about our responsibilities as people that it may be helpful to start thinking of Ortega as a really interesting variation of an existentialist philosopher. Because this is where he's been going with all this.

See, Ortega was influenced by the biology of his time. The thinking was that if you wanted to study an organism of any type, you can't just isolate the thing and look at it under a microscope. To fully be able to understand a life form, you gotta see how it operates in the environment that it actually survives in. Well, so too, he's gonna say, with us as individuals. When he says in the quote from before, that "I am I and my circumstance,"

Well, we've already established that our subjectivity is unified with the material world. And we've already seen through his perspectivism that we can never see the entire world at once. What we can see though, to Ortega, is the localized set of circumstances that we exist in. Now, by our circumstances, he's not saying anything philosophically mysterious here. We're all actually very familiar with the kind of stuff he's talking about. Our circumstances provide us with the parameters within which we realize our possibilities in life.

Circumstances include, but are not limited to, on one level physical things like your height, age, eye color, skin color, biological sex. On another level, your circumstances include social factors like your nationality, social status, income level, your education. And within that education you could have certain cognitive biases that you hold onto. Prejudices for certain groups of people, charitability for certain sets of ideas over others, assumptions about the world that limit your field of view.

On an even deeper level, your circumstances are historical, meaning that you are living in the wake of a history that came before you, created by other people, that was completely out of your control, but nonetheless is responsible for some of your circumstances. In fact, if you think about it, many of these things, Ortega would say, are completely out of your control. They were given to you. You inherited them against your will.

And a common existentialist way of seeing your life is to think of yourself as an individual thrown into existence, navigating a set of external circumstances that are happening to you. But here's where Ortega takes an interesting turn. He would ask the question, really though, is it so crazy to think of your identity in a way where these circumstances that you find yourself immersed in are actually a part of you?

In the sense that they give you the contents of everything you've ever known, cared about, desired, seen, thought, or imagined. In the sense that you can only be understood in reference to the environment that you survive in. In the sense that your very consciousness is constituted by the world that you're perceiving. It's so crazy to say that in a way, you are the circumstances that you're immersed in.

So when Ortega says, "I am I in my circumstance," you're not navigating a set of circumstances. You are a part of your circumstances, and they're a part of you. It can start to feel bizarre even imagining a self that exists independent of them. Like, who are you without the circumstances to live in reference to? What kind of opinions and values does your personality gravitate towards when you're floating around in the vacuum of space?

Now, what immediately follows from this if you're Ortega is that in the same way you have a responsibility to know yourself, to study and understand yourself, well, your circumstances are a part of you. So you have a responsibility to know, study, and understand those as well. To not know your circumstances is to not fully know yourself.

Which is also to say that to be apathetic about the state of the world around you is to be apathetic about a big piece of who you are. The only way for you to truly come to terms with the set of circumstances that constitutes your reality is through active engagement with your circumstances. Put another way, human life to Jose Ortega, who you are, is not some abstract concept that can be theorized about and solved by philosophers sitting in the academic departments of universities.

Lord knows we've done way too much of that in the past. Who you are is a gritty affair. It is a daily campaign entrenched in the circumstances that surround you. In many ways, active engagement with your circumstances is where life truly begins. And just to be clear here, nobody's blaming you for the way the world currently is. Ortega would be sympathetic to the plight that you're going through. You didn't ask for any of this. You didn't design the circumstances that you were born into.

And your circumstances may be horrible, many of them completely outside the bounds of your control. But here's the thing he would say: Many of these circumstances are within your control. Many of them are within your capacity to have at least a positive impact on. This is the last section from our quote from before: "I am I in my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself." After all this, you're ultimately left with a question:

Do you want to improve yourself? Is that something you feel you have a responsibility to do at all? Well, a natural extension to that question is, do you want to improve the circumstances that make up a large part of who you are and who future generations will be? And if the answer to either of those is even kind of yes, understand, Ortega would say, that how effective you are at contending with and improving the circumstances around you in society is

will come down to the knowledge that you have about the world around you. How the world as it is came to pass. Why the world is specifically the way that it is instead of a million different other ways that it could be. Why did certain institutions within society emerge in the specific ways that they did? The more questions you ask, the more perspectives you expose yourself to. And the more you truly understand the history that is brought to bear through your circumstances, the

the more effective you're going to be at knowing how to steer the ship forward into the future. You know, just imagine being someone that doesn't put in any effort into understanding their circumstances or their history. They just don't care for whatever reason. Just imagine coming in on season six of a TV show, having never seen any of the previous seasons, and then just pretending like you know everything that's going on. How arrogant would that be? Like, if you don't understand your circumstances and your history, then you don't know that you're

Brian and Jessica used to date back in season two, and then Brian faked his death and became the mayor of the town, and now Jessica's actually his long-lost conjoined twin. Like, you wouldn't know any of that. How can you ever hope to save your circumstances if you don't even understand what they are? But of course, it's gonna get even more complicated than that. Because even if you know exactly what your circumstances are, and you're motivated to try to improve them,

That by no means is a guarantee that you even have the slightest idea about how to actually make things better. You could be left existing in a state of almost constant disorientation, constant insecurity about what to do next.

It can start to feel like part of the very thing that makes you human is that you're always confronted with a vast horizon of possibilities, a vast horizon of possible ways you can engage with the circumstances around you. And that once you're in that place, how are you supposed to ever know the correct way to move forward? You can start to feel disillusioned about the entire situation, frustrated, lamenting the fact that there always seems to be some critical life or death choice that needs to be made from your island of a limited perspective.

Ortega describes the situation here much more eloquently than I just did. He says, quote, 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, end quote. See, if you're an employee of the universe with a specific job that was assigned to you in life,

there'd be no disorientation. You'd always know more or less what it is that you have to do next. But to Jose Ortega, the nature of our existence is such where we have to always be on a collision course with the boundaries imposed by the circumstances that surround us.

Our lives can be thought of as a revolving door of us studying and understanding our circumstances, then choosing one of many possibilities we have to engage with those circumstances, testing the boundaries, finding the edges where our circumstances prevent us from going any further, and then starting that process all over again, recalibrating, applying what we've learned so far in life, and testing the boundaries of our new perspective of the world. To Jose Ortega, life is always a problem to be solved.

But he might want us to also consider the perspective that life doesn't always have to be viewed as miserable. Because if the problem we have to solve is that we temporarily live in a state of disorientation, with no clear directions, and nothing but our own initiative and inspiration to guide our way, then the problems of life start to sound remarkably similar to the problems you face at the beginning of any new art project.

To live fully is to live in a constant state of questioning the assumptions we're making about the world around us that may be self-limiting. Constantly rediscovering what is possible within our circumstances. A constant re-justification of the theoretical framework we use to make sense of the world and our place within it. And this may sound beautiful and inspiring and it may make you want to pull out your gratitude journal and just go nuts for a while.

But this could also make some people out there feel like what Ortega's suggesting here is ultimately a recipe for neuroticism. I mean, who wants to live in a constant state of re-justifying themselves? Just imagine that. It must be torturous to be constantly questioning your beliefs, always refining, always improving. Don't you want to be able to just live sometimes without having to always be worried about whether or not you're living correctly?

Ortega might respond to this by saying that you can definitely frame it in a negative light like that if that's what you want to do. Call it neuroticism if you want, but he would probably frame it more as activity. Or it may even be as simple as someone just engaging in plain old philosophy. In the middle of his life, Ortega did a series of lectures titled, Que es Filosofia? or What is Philosophy?

They were published after his death and in them he talks at length about the value of philosophy as something rooted in human life that is itself always absorbed within circumstances. Because remember, that's how we have to think of it through the eyes of Ortega. Again, if we're going to rethink something as fundamental as human subjectivity, then philosophy, as an institution that emerges out of human subjectivity,

philosophy has to be thought about in a different way as well. And when viewed from this new perspective, what Ortega is going to say is that one of the best ways he can think of to describe philosophy is that philosophy is a form of theoretical heroism.

To engage in philosophical thinking in an honest way requires someone to adopt a heroic, almost paradoxical combination of character traits. You have to be both incredibly brave and incredibly humble at the exact same time. You have to be this way, because if you're really going to try to take up the mantle of being a philosopher, at any

At any point, you have to be willing to throw out the entire theoretical framework that you use to make sense of reality, just so that you can be open to some new way of chopping up and making sense of reality, all on the off chance that this new way of thinking might possibly allow you to see the universe in a different way that you've never considered before. He'd probably contrast being a practitioner of philosophy with being a practitioner of the sciences.

See, science had done some pretty incredible stuff by the time Ortega was doing his work. And he thought some of the philosophers of his time were looking at the successes within the sciences, and they were trying to emulate the scientific method inside the realm of philosophy. They were trying to philosophize like a scientist. But this was a huge mistake to Ortega. Not the least of which was because science and philosophy are two different fields trying to accomplish two very different things.

One of the examples that he gives is that scientists always have the luxury of compartmentalizing their work. Physicists operate within the subculture of physics. Chemists operate in the world of chemistry, biologists in the world of biology. And when a physicist comes up with some sort of new groundbreaking theory, they don't cite the work of a biologist or a psychologist to call into question how two particles relate to one another.

This compartmentalization is part of what keeps the sciences so focused and successful at making incremental but consistent progress. However, someone engaged in philosophy to Ortega, they don't have the luxury of compartmentalizing which theories they're willing to consider and which ones are just going to ignore. If somebody comes up with a new way of perceiving our circumstances that makes sense,

Philosophers have to be open and willing to overthrow everything they've ever thought they've known before. See, Ortega thought that during his time, in an age of greater and greater levels of scientific specialization, there may be more scientists around us than we've ever had before. But he thought the cost of that is that there's far less truly cultured people that try to see the entire forest instead of just the individual trees. Philosophy provides an entirely different service to humanity.

To Ortega, there's a sense of adventure present in philosophy that you just don't find in other areas of thinking. And he'd want the general population to see philosophy in this new light, as something a person does if they're actively engaged in the world, rather than the alienated, disconnected way that philosophy has often been seen in the past. He'd want them to see that philosophy is not about a bunch of philosophy professors sitting around, giving each other back rubs, photoshopping themselves into pictures with Schleiermacher, pretending he's their dad.

No, to actually engage in philosophy is to be brave and humble enough to repeatedly head out into that unknown.

and then to navigate those uncharted waters not knowing what you're going to find next. He'd want to show how philosophy can be exciting when it's actually immersed in the world, not being done in spite of the world. How these theoretical quests into the unknown can serve as a wellspring of new ideas, new ways of seeing that could uncover beauty that you'd never even considered before. A new level of freedom in your thoughts that former prejudices just didn't allow you to have.

Like shining a flashlight into a pitch black room, bringing to light something that was always around us, but just never visible. We just needed someone that was willing to step outside the comfort of conventional thinking. Call that neuroticism if you want. Call that overthinking. But Ortega might just call it being the theoretical hero that we all desperately need. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.