Thanks for another fine post on Ortega's thought. I agree that consistency makes far more sense than essence, and the latter is a rather confusing term that troubles even philosphers.

The "Consistency" of "My Life."

This passage is from a lecture in the first of two lecture series which he gave in Buenos Aires in 1940 on the topic of "Historical Reason." The editor gave this passage the title "What is life as fundamental reality? Purely and exclusively 'event'," but I have supplied my own title, "My Life" Consists of Events, Happenings, or Pure Occurrence, based on using it in this thread. It includes an excerpt from another essay by Ortega entitled "Ideas and Beliefs," with some brief additions.

In this passage, as in previous passages discussed in the thread "My Life" is the "Radical Reality,"Ortega states again that "one's life" is "the fundamental reality," where he uses the word "fundamental" as a synonym for "radical." Ortega then repeats his proposal to use the term "consistency" instead of "essence," and that if we agree that "life is what exists," then we can proceed to "ascertain its consistency." He begins to do that by stating, in various ways, that life -each person's life- is "purely and exclusively 'occurrence,' . . . is made up of countless events . . . is what happens to me."(1)

Although the translation is for the most part adequate, I have made one slight change in the first part of the excerpt [noted in brackets]. The translator has rendered the Spanish word "astro" incorrectly as "star," but it is more correctly translated as "astral body," which does in fact make more sense and corresponds more directly with what Ortega meant.

Note also the use of the terms "radical," "radicalism" and "radical realities" in the last paragraph before the excerpt, and the further discussion of "reality" and also of "worlds," in the passage from his "Ideas and Beliefs" which he quotes from in this lecture. [italics Ortega's, emphases mine.]:

[CENTER]"My Life" Consists of Events, Happenings, or Pure Occurrence [/CENTER]


"We began with what is usually called-what each one calls-in sorrow and joy, in anguish and hopefulness, one's life. This is the fundamental reality. It is what we discover to be already there, not in a more or less theoretical, hypothetical way, not as mere supposition, but as what is always there, before any theory; that is, qua being, as what is real.

Now we must discover what "all this" really is-discover the consistency of what exists. According to traditional terminology, we call what something is, its "essence." However, since all that there is not only exists, but consists of this or that, I prefer the term "consistency." Whereby the old pair of Scholastic terms, "existence" and "essence" is replaced by the following one, which to my mind is more sprightly and exact: "existence" and "consistency."

We state that, based on all the evidence, life is what exists, and we propose it as the prototype of existence-just as for antiquity "the world" was the prototype of existence, and as "thought," consciousness, mind, was the primal reality for the modern era.

But now we must ascertain the consistency of this life. And since the new reality we discovered was something hidden behind the world that thinking thought, and even behind the thinking that thought that world, and since, in consequence, it is a reality prior to all this, an even purer reality, we must make every effort not to employ concepts, in describing or thinking about this reality, that were formulated to think the world and thought-because now we know that the latter notions are secondary, derivative concepts.

What we need, then, is an entirely new philosophy, a whole new repertoire of fundamental-indigenous-concepts. We stand in the presence of a new source of illumination. But it cannot be won too abruptly, because then you and I would not understand one another. We have to take off gradually-as pilots say-from traditional philosophy, from the repertoire of received, familiar, and commonplace concepts; in the meantime we must use those concepts that come closest, that approximate the new reality we have glimpsed.

And so I will begin by saying that life-each person's life is our focus-in contrast to all other known or supposed realities, is purely and exclusively "occurrence." Living happens to me. In its turn, life is made up of countless events. (And people say philosophy is so difficult. The definition of life I have just given could have been said in a bar, over drinks, in chatting with a friend.) Life is what happens to me. An expression like that might well be the first words of a tango. (By the way, some day we shall have to speak at length about the words of the tango; there is a subject about which, I dare say, much remains to be said.) Life occurs; it happens-to-me. And our lives are, simply, that first this happens and then that happens. Now we must attempt an adequate conceptualization of just what this something is that is mere happening-that is, occurrence. The problem-and here the tango fails us-is that this something must be understood in a radical way, which is what makes this philosophy. Philosophy is intellectual-radicalism. Because what confronts us is not my being something or, rather, two things: body and soul; or that this thing that I am should be here, among other things, within a large thing called the world-provisionally, the earth-or that here one thing or another happens to me. No! Not at all! There is nothing but this happening-to-me. There is nothing that is not pure occurrence. Which means that living is not my body and soul here on this earth; because body, soul, and earth are not radical realities but ideas we have had, while living, about the nature of the reality that I am and that I inhabit. These ideas may be radical formulations that are original with me, or I may have taken them form my social milieu. That is, perhaps they were first formulated by someone else in another era. The issue that arises at this juncture was treated-I believe with a certain exactness-in my essay "Ideas and Beliefs," to which I said we would have to refer more than once. Here is part of that essay:

"If we are asked what we really walk on, we answer at once that it is the Earth. By this we understand a star [an astral body] of a certain size and constitution, that is, a mass of cosmic matter revolving around the sun with sufficient regularity and precision so that we can count on it. This is our firm belief, and this is why for us it is reality; and because it is reality for us, we automatically count on it, we never question it in our daily lives. But the truth is that if the same question had been asked a man living in the seventh century B.C., his answer would have been quite different. How did he view the earth? It was a goddess, the mother goddess, Demeter. Not a mass of matter but a divine power with its own desires and caprices. This should suffice to warn us that the primary, authentic reality of earth is neither of these things, that the star [astral body] Earth and the goddess Earth are not reality, pure and simple, but two ideas-or perhaps one true idea and one false idea about that reality, two ideas formulated by specific individuals on a given day with great effort. This means that the reality the earth is for us did not simply originate when the Earth did, the latter is not "that" by itself; instead, we owe this name to some man, to many earlier men; and besides, its truth is the result of many difficult decisions. In short, this truth is problematic and open to question; therefore, the Earth as a star [astral body] and the earth as goddess are two theories, two interpretations.

The same point could be made regarding everything, which leads us to the discovery that the reality in which we believe we live, on which we count, and which serves as ultimate reference for all our hopes and fears, is the work and creation of other men and not primary, authentic reality. In order to encounter authentic reality in its sheer nakedness we would have to remove all the layers of today's and yesterday's beliefs, all those theories that are nothing but interpretations thought up by man about what he finds, in living, in himself, and in his milieu. Prior to all interpretation, the Earth was not even a thing, because thing is itself a configuration of being, an idea that defines the peculiar way something has of behaving (as distinct, say, from the behavior of a phantom), an idea the mind thought up to explain to itself that primary reality.

If we were properly grateful, we would have realized that what the Earth has been to us-that is, a star [an astral body] or, formerly, a goddess-and what, as theories, as ideas, helped us know how to behave in their regard and lit us be at ease and not live in perpetual fear, all this we owe to the efforts and intelligence of others. Without their intercession we would have the same relationship to the Earth and all around us as did the first men on Earth; that is, we would live in constant fear. We have inherited all their efforts in the form of beliefs, and this is the capital on which we live. The monumental and, at the same time, the essential, elementary discovery the West will make in the coming years, when it recovers from the drunken spell of folly that began in the eighteenth century-and which it is in the process now of regurgitating-is that man is above all an inheritor. And it is this rather that anything else that distinguishes him from e animals. But awareness of being an inheritor means being historically aware. Our lack of a historical awareness that man owes everything to his past is just like the ingratitude of the arrow of which I spoke the other day.

The authentic reality of the earth has no configuration at all, no mode of being; it is pure enigma. Taken thus, in its primary, naked consistency, the earth is only the ground that for the moment supports us without the least assurance it will not give way the next second; it is what has allowed us to escape some danger, but also what, as distance, separates us form a beloved or from our children; it is what sometimes faces us with the bothersome character of being uphill and sometimes with the delightful condition of being downhill. The Earth in itself, stripped of the ideas man has formed about it, is not, then, anything at all, but merely an uncertain repertoire of facilities and difficulties that affect our life.

The oldest interpretation of what the Earth is can be gleaned from the Latin etymology of the word. [longknowledge Note: The Spanish word for "Earth" is "Tierra".] Terra apparently derives from tersa, which means dry, that is, solid ground, offering a good footing. In this primitive interpretation of the Earth the latter is defined-as you see-according to what it does for us, as distinct from what happens in its watery alternative. It is in this sense that authentic, primary reality has no configuration in and of itself. This is why it cannot be called 'world.' It is an enigma posed to our existence. To live is to be irrevocably immersed in the enigmatic. Man reacts to this primordial, pre-intellectual enigma by activating his intellectual faculties, above all, his imagination. He creates a mathematical world, a physical world, a religious, a moral, a political, and a poetic world, which are all effectively worlds because they each have a configuration and offer a plan, an order. These imaginary worlds are set alongside the enigma of authentic reality, and when they seen a close enough approximation they are accepted. But, of course, they are never confused with reality itself.*

*In culling these paragraphs from Ideas and Beliefs, for presentation in the classroom, Ortega made a few brief additions to the original text. [Ed.]"
[From: "Historical Reason (Buenos Aires, 1940)." In: Historical Reason, Translated by Philip W. Silver. (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), pp. 69-74.]

(1) If you who wish to explore this idea further, see "My Life" Consists of "What I Do" and "What Happens to Me"

[CENTER]"My Life" Consists of "What I Do" and "What Happens to Me"[/CENTER]
　
The following passage, much shorter than the previous postings, comes from one of the lectures of the course on metaphysics which Ortega gave at the University of Madrid in 1932-33. I'll let the passage speak for itself. [again emphases mine, italics Ortega's]:

". . . [T]he fact is that I must take you as you are, and you are here where, for the moment, orientation is assumed. That orientation is what makes each of you now feel yourself completely 'found', not 'lost'. In fact, each of you now feel yourself here, listening to a lecture on metaphysics. Now this actual and indubitable fact belongs to a thing, or a reality, which is called your life. What is this-your life, our lives, the life of each one of us? It would appear to be something without importance, for science has never busied itself with this. Nevertheless, that reality, so neglected scientifically, proves to have the formidable condition that it contains for each one of us all the rest of the realities, including the reality called science and the one called religion, in that science and religion are only two of the innumerable things that man creates in his own lifetime.

Before metaphysics begins to tell us what the universe is, is it not worth while to stop to survey this earlier and most humble but inescapable fact that metaphysics itself is only what man-you and I-create in our own lives, and that, consequently, this life is something earlier, something antecedent to, whatever metaphysics-or any other science, or religion itself-is going to discover for us?

I do not know whether or not what I call 'my life' is important, but it does seem that, important or not, it was here before all the rest, including before God Himself, for all the rest-including God-must be taken as given to us and as being-for me-within my own life.

What, then, is life? Do not search far afield; do not try to recall learned expressions of wisdom. The fundamental truths must be always at hand, for only thus are they fundamental. Those that one must go forth to seek are the ones that are found only in a single place-the particular, localized, provincial truths, the truths in a corner, not the basic ones. Life is what we are and what we do; it is, then, of all things the closest to each one of us. Put a hand on it and it will let itself be grasped like a tame bird.

If, on coming here a moment ago, someone had asked you where you were going, you would have said, 'We are going to hear a lecture on metaphysics'. And here you are, listening to me. The fact has no importance. Nevertheless, it is what makes up your life. I am sorry for you, but truth obliges me to say that your life now consists of a thing of miniscule importance. But if we are sincere, we will recognize that the greater part of our existence is made up of similar insignificant affairs. We go, we come, we do this or that, we think, we love or we do not love, and so on. From time to time, our lives seem suddenly to take on tension, as if to rear up, to concentrate and become dense. It may be a great sorrow or a great desire that overcomes us; we say that things of great importance are happening to us. But note that in terms of our lives, this variety of emphasis, this experiencing or not experiencing something momentous, is a matter of indifference in that the frenetic and culminating hour is just as much a matter of life (and no more) as is the common business of our habitual moments.

The result, then, is that in this inquiry into life's pure essence, the first view we get of it appears to us as the sum of what we do, the sum of our activities which, so to speak, furnish it. Life is what we do and what happens to us.

Our method is going to consist in noting the attributes of our lives, one after another, in such order that from the most external we advance toward the most internal, from the periphery of living we narrow down toward its palpitating center. We will then find a successive series of definitions of life, each of which conserves and deepens the preceding ones.

And so the first definition we find is this: to live is what we do and what happens to us, from thinking or dreaming or worrying, to playing the market or winning battles. It is important to me that you recognize that this is not a joke, but a truth as platitudinous as it is basic and unquestionable. I intend to talk to you not of things that are abstruse and far away, but of your life itself, and I begin by saying that, at this moment, your life consists in listening to me. I am sure that you will resist this truth, but there is no alternative because this listening to me is what you are doing now, and it is what now makes up your life."

[From: Some Lessons in Metaphysics, Translated by Mildred Adams. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1969, Lesson II, pp. 34-36.]
　
　
　

See my next thread: "My Circumstance" Consists of "Concerns," "Importances," or "Pragmata"

I would like to ask you something in all due respect. When Ortega tells us that, "Life is what we do, and what happens to us", or, alternatively (to the extent it is different) "To live is what we do, and what happens to us", or, "Life is what we are and what we do", all in the space of a page, what is this but just three platitudes? My reaction is, why is this all supposed to be profound or deep? Of course that is what life and living are. What else would they be? Why should I be impressed by any of this? I am tempted to quote:

A mountain was in labour, sending forth dreadful groans, and there was in the region the highest expectation. After all, it brought forth a mouse.-: Fables, iv. 22, 1.

And I'm not only tempted but I will quote:

"The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes."
C.S. Lewis, Sagittarius [emphasis mine]