In previous journal entries, I've explored the lesser-known ideas of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Here I'd like to extend that series by looking at his insights into what we might call personal destiny, which can be found in his 1949 essay "In Search of Goethe from Within" (printed in the expanded 1968 edition of The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature).
Ortega proposes that every person represents a certain design for living: there is no such thing as human life in the abstract, but only the particular lives of particular human beings. This design for living - a vital program, a destiny, a vocation, a task, a calling, an ergon, an entelechy, a potential, a plan of being (etc.) - is not something you freely choose, he says, but instead is a pre-ordained potential that you can choose to realize or not. If you choose to realize it, then you live authentically; if not (e.g., because you substitute some other vital program for the one to which you are destined), then you live inauthentically. A human life is something that has to make itself - it is not a thing that fits a general pattern, but is inherently a task of self-discovery. There is no pre-existing solution to life, because at root your life consists in the problem of itself ("life is preoccupation with itself"). The essential question for each individual person is not "what am I?" but "who am I?" Thus "living is precisely the inexorable necessity to make oneself determinate, to enter into an exclusive destiny, to accept it - that is, to resolve to be it."
I admit that I'm not sure what to make of Ortega's proposal. On the one hand, I tend to recoil from any form of essentialism and I'm skeptical about the notion of the true self; on the other hand, we're all familiar with the reality of people living second-hand lives in which they succumb to external pressure instead of living by their own lights (e.g., by giving up their true love to marry someone their parents prefer, or by pursuing a conventional career instead of working at something they really love to do). Furthermore, what seems destined in one phase of life might not seem destined later on. And then there are all the practicalities of life: "do what you love and the money will follow" has always struck me as pure folly.
And yet, I do feel there are things I was born for. I even feel a kind of destiny about the people I care for most. To be sure, there's a great deal of contingency involved in who you meet in life, but with certain special people things feel so deeply right that the feelings I have for them seem to be a matter of destiny.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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