Freedom and Circumstance

🔗Connect

🔼Topic:: Existentialism (MOC)

✒️ Note-Making

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. Myself and my environment - In every experience we have both the "I" and the "thing" we interact with, both are always present. Therefore, we can't really separate ourselves from our environment, which means that it has a great effect on our identity.
2. Life project - the goal in life is to create a meaningful project, that involves affecting our environment, not to sit idly by and give up on who we are

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen?

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are...

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style...

📒 Notes

Who was ortega

CHAPTER 1   FIRST, WHO WAS ORTEGA?

• To really understand the particular and to reform it requires looking well beyond the particular. (Location 160)

surpassing modern philosophy

Modern philosophy has become more and more about Idealism, that things only exist for us inside our perception, we can never know the things as they truly are Objectivism, or even if they exist outside of ourselves, because we are always present in connection to other things.
This is the view the Ortega wishes to surpass.

CHAPTER 2   SURPASSING MODERN PHILOSOPHY

• Idealism has discovered that the thinking self is the only thing immune to doubt. Hence, all other things become anchored in the thoughts of the self. Reality derives from the ideas of a thinking self. (Location 292)
• Idealism, on the contrary, is the belief that the ego has no sure knowledge of anything other than itself (the cogito); that I know the things only while I am seeing them, touching them, thinking of them, desiring them, and so forth. (Location 305)
• I do not and cannot know what the things are like when they are apart from me—not even if they exist in me, since I know nothing of them without being present. (Location 308)
• “Philosophy is an enormous appetite for transparency and a resolute will for the clarity of midday.” (Location 345)
• What is at stake is that Idealism, if left unsurpassed, leaves us with an inaccurate depiction of reality and of our lives. For philosophy, that predicament of inaccuracy is unacceptable. (Location 355)

Starting again

The "problem" with idealism is that it takes two to tango. Yes, there is a mind that perceives everything, but the "everything" must exists for the perceiver to perceive anything, otherwise everything would just be blank. So the internal and external world co-exist together inseparably. But this means that the human endeavor of philosophy is to explore the connection between those two worlds, both the "i" and the "circumstances". Context

CHAPTER 4   STARTING AGAIN

• the ego and exterior reality exist in mutual interdependence. They are not two separate substances which require us to have either the ego swallow up exterior reality or to have exterior reality exist beyond our consciousness. (Location 563)
• radical reality “is not my existence .  .  . but rather my coexistence with the world.”[61] (Location 572)
• philosophy, at its best, serves as a guide to a greater, practical appreciation of the often hidden potentialities of our lives. (Location 614)

what is living

Life is about:

1. Connection to our circumstances
2. Unplanned (as if forced upon us)
3. Our responsibility to improve
4. Freedom to act within our circumstances
   From this stems that circumstances are crucial, but we do have power over time. We can relocate, we can associate ourselves with different people, we can learn new perspectives. Those are examples of "life projects" of freedom within circumstances

CHAPTER 5   WHAT IS LIVING?

• “Our life begins by being the perpetual surprise of existing, without our prior consent, as shipwrecked people, on an unforeseen globe.”[73] Thus, it is foolish to waste time complaining that things are not as we would have wished. (Location 655)
• We must recognize that the where and when of our lives are an inseparable part of who we are. (Location 686)
• circumstances are crucial to our self-identity. We need to choose them wisely, including the individuals with whom we associate, (Location 690)
• The goal is not a life without problems, something which would not be recognizable as life at all, but rather to face problems with a life project. (Location 695)
• The best response to past disappointments and tragedies is to decide differently in the future. (Location 703)