Ortega y Gasset's Philosophy: Comparisons with Nietzsche, Descartes, and Kant

Comparison of Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset

If we compare Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset, the context is crucial, as they belong to the same period:

• Ortega would agree with Nietzsche that life is the central concept upon which all philosophical reflection is based. The fundamental reality is life; the reality of every individual is their life.
• However, Ortega believed that explaining life as a mere "will to power" is a reductionism that excludes much of what constitutes human life, such as history, projects, desires, and so on.

Comparison of Descartes and Ortega y Gasset

If we compare Descartes and Ortega y Gasset, we can highlight the following:

• Ortega criticizes Descartes for attempting to reduce reason to mathematics, which prevents it from providing a reason for living. Reason cannot be isolated and separate; it must be something more, including the vital. For Descartes, reality is what can be mathematicized, but that does not tell us what things mean to us. For Ortega, the world is the "stage" of life.
• For Ortega, reality is perspective, the ontological status for knowing reality. Perspective is both individual and collective, encompassing biography and culture (including the time and generation) within which the subject lives. (This could also apply to Nietzsche's radical vitalism.)
• The self is not only self-consciousness; it must also be life, perspective, and history. If we understand the subject solely as the Cartesian cogito, we leave aside all biography, personal history, the body, and so forth.
• (This criticism, as in Nietzsche's case, would apply to all of Western rationality, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, etc., but Ortega focuses primarily on Descartes.)

Comparison of Kant and Ortega y Gasset

When comparing Kant and Ortega y Gasset, we can observe:

• There is a clear influence of Kant's Theory of Knowledge on Ortega: The notion of the world as a circumstance, as "true for me," as the "stage of my life," closely corresponds to the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon in Kant's philosophy. Kant argued that knowledge is only possible of the phenomenal (the object as it appears to the subject), never of the object in its entirety (the object itself, the noumenon). Reality will always be "more" than what we know about it, but we can only truly speak about what we know, or phenomena.
• Thus, Ortega, by "tying" the real to the self, by relating objects in the world to the subject who knows them through the key concepts of "perspective" and "circumstances," develops, from his perspectival position, the Kantian noumenon. This makes sense if we remember his training at the University of Marburg with Hermann Cohen.
• Furthermore, Ortega's self-imposed task of attempting to unite two contradictory currents, such as vitalism and rationalism, by formulating a new philosophy that integrates and simultaneously overcomes both, is directly inspired by Kant. Kant managed to synthesize, in his critical thinking, both rationalism and empiricism, which struggled to dominate the philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries.