Ortega (philosophy)

natural part of humans

Given upon existence Realized by itself No problematic Not ones true being

one's self, one being consists in what is it not yet

How we are oriented or positioned into the world Always becoming and never quite being

among the possibilities you must choose

I am free by compulsion Freedom is not an activity pursued by an entity but it is already possessed of a fixed being To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity; to be able to be other than what one was Free being is this constitutive instability

extra natural (transcend nature)

Not given upopn existence Realized by oneself Problematic/interesting Ones true being/constitutes ones life

project of existence or devised program is ones self

Project that is always under way Never static Fulfill something you dream up for yourself

circumstance

Surrounding conditions (what life gives) One's past

reldialetktitk

dreamt of somewhere in his papers by dilthey; the writer to whom we owe more than anyone else concering the idea of life

man

has to be himself in spite of unfavorable circumstances, that means he has to make his own existence at every single moment. He is given the abstract possibility of existing, but not the reality Must earn his life economically and metaphysically Have to earn our existence

how do we live

in view of the past • If we are the novelists of ourselves then were also perpetually revising ourselves in light of the past and present circumstances

the stone

is given its existence, it need not fight for being that it is

from meaning to the sef

meaning of life identified with o=ones project of existence self is potentially, not an actualized reality

• The hardest thing is choosing who or what you want to be

o Can be liberating that you have that freedom o Can feel burdened because its all of you who is determined what you are/life o Can only blame or praise yourself based on the results

two tasks

o Determine what in the world were going to be o Then we have to strive to become that

the experiment already made with life narrow mans future

o If we do not know what he is going to be, we know what he is not going to be • Man lives in view of the psat • Man has no nature, what he has is history

stage of ones self as project

o Invent a program (determine what you'll be) o Attempt to realize it (believe its really you) o Discover the shortcomings/limitations o Invent second program (in light of the first and circumstance) o Rinse and repeat Goes on being and unbeing-living He goes on accumulating being the past; he goes on making for himself a being through dialectical series of experiments. This is dialect

• One aims at avoiding in a new project the drawbacks of the old

o The first is still active o Man shrinks from being what he was o Man goes on being and unbeing o Making for himself a being through his dialectical series of experiments

possibilities of being

o likewise are not presented to me; must find them for yourself through friends projects of being and doing in light of circumstances man is impossible without imagination man is impossible without the ability to create for himself

a kind of ontological centaur

part nature part not nature

man has a program

program of life that gives a satisfactory answer to the difficulites posed for him by circumstance o Embarks on an essay full of illusions and prosecutes the experiment with thoroughness o Comes to believe deeply that that this character is his real being

mans authentic being

stretching the whole length of his past o Man is substntia emigrant on a pilgrimage of being and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being

causa sui

the cause of itself and not in determing what self it was going to cause o beging with a self previously determined and invariable, consisten

freedom

• I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not • Our being consists in our constitutive instability

imagination and invention

• Man is impossible without imagination and is the novelist of himself • We invent for ourselves a program of life

man as an entity

• each mans self is nothing but a devised program o man begins by being something that has no reality, neither corporeal nor spiritual • we are bing that consists not in what it is already but in what it is not yet; a being that consists is not-yet being o things- entity whose mode of being consists in what it is already; being ready made • man is the entity that makes itself, an entity which traditional ontology only stumbled upon precisely as its course was drawing to close