The Human Condition within the Unity-of-Everything-There-is-Alive — A Challenge to Philosophical Anthropologies

Abstract

The philosophy of life waited for two thousand years, as Julian Marias pointed out, to get off the ground. Already hinted at by Dilthey, it surged with the philosophies of Miguel de Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset. Both of these Spanish thinkers brought forth profound intuitions and insights in their own original fashions. Unamuno believed that lyrical meditation and a poetic, literary, and not an intellectual discursive, form of colloquy is the best way to frame and communicate the profound experience of life. Ortega also took the free literary, evocative stance although in places he attempted to articulate certain areas of his thought in a scholarly fashion. Nevertheless, in order to preserve the original freshness of his intuitions he shunned exfoliating in a traditional philosophical discourse. Both thinkers are certainly justified in this refusal to identify philosophy with a pseudo-scientific and strictly rational approach and mode of expression.