Kultūra ir kasdienybė Ortegos y Gasseto filosofijoje

ENThis article analyzes the understanding of culture in Ortega у Gasset’s treatise "Meditations on Don Quixote". Ortega rejects the Neokantian notion of culture as based on concepts of pure reason and pure experience. According to him, an analysis of cultural reality is to be conducted not from a scientific standpoint based on pure reason, but from the perspective of day-to-day individual, spontaneous life. Universal meaning should be discovered and created in our immediate environment. Meaning does not exist in the transcendental world: it is to be found in ordinary things and simple events and circumstances of day-to-day life. Therefore, as Ortega says, it must not be neglected, but perceived attentively, for each of its things, events and circumstances bears a trace of the divine. Man can save circumstances, provided he understands them as the universe opened in an individual perspective. Abandoning the Neokantian concept of philosophy, Ortega does not identify philosophy with science, and regards his own essay as an expression of the personal experience and of the most intimate feelings. Such feelings cannot be presented as something which is universally true. Ortega therefore regards his own texts not as a presentation of truth, but as an indication of new possible ways of "seeing". He realizes practically the phenomenological attitude in philosophy. He does not speculate on phenomenology, but applies it to life studies. One of the most important arguments of Ortega’s philosophy is his own life.