The Historical Roots of Human Life: An Ortega Perspective

As vital as the historical reason why life exists today: for example, a person's life can be a particular instant in a role, as in "your life." But that instant is not given in isolation. The moment and his work came moments after another long gone, but remaining the same as a souvenir. They last the life of each, the task of history. Everything comes from a soil (the past) and in view of a project (which is not yet one's own life, but what it wants to become in the future). This means, logically, that human life is rooted in history. Ortega says that man has no nature, but history, which means that all content appearing in human life is historical.

For Ortega, there are not two historical reasons, one vital and the other not, but vital reason is constitutively historical reason. And again, the reason why history is fiction. If all human life is a story, understand that life requires a story, to tell their story. The narrative presents to the listener what they have not witnessed. The narrative is the compression function of human life, the body capable of grasping the truth of something (human life) that is not to be, but happens.

Reason and Life: The Historical Reason

Ortega's reason is vital, putting us in contact with the lessness. But reason is not outside of this reality, but within it, for reason is not a function of human life, such as feeling or love; therefore, human life is rational. Living requires our intellectual capacity to operate in certain arrangements, consistent in seeking the truth: "Living has no choice but to reason with the inexorable circumstance." One of the things we do in the circumstance is thinking, or, rather, is one of the things we cannot stop doing.

But not knowing about any thing, but knowing the truth. Therefore, in Ortega's philosophy, the notion of knowing no longer means a mere mental exercise of thinking of concepts, but comes to signify something much more concrete: to know how to "know what to expect in the execution of one's life." Ortega establishes a rigorous distinction between thought and knowledge. Thinking is any thing we do in our lives to guide us in it. However, when that man is made for guidance about the nature of things, then what does is knowledge. Knowledge is one way of thinking, how to give things a being and stability and consistency they are not by themselves. The human being is made ideas of things: an idea is a mental construction that man is made for guidance.