Genesis of the sense of radical reality: Ortega on imagination

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to elucidate, from an exegetical standpoint, the intrinsic sense that applies to the conception of radical reality in Ortega’s philosophy. This sense, as we shall observe in detail, finds its fundament in the fantasizing activity proper to human life, which we will call imagination. For this, we will first expose the relationship between the self and its circumstances, that which is given immediately to its individual experience, we will say, to its perspective. With this, we will enter a second level of analysis, where we will expose the process in which these circumstances come to be constituted from the concepts of beliefs and ideas. Finally, and once this review has been carried out, we will access an even more primary and fundamental stratum which, precisely, is the source of meaning in our life: the executive being and its latent projective activity, which is nothing but his imagination.