JULIÁN MARÍAS (1914-2005)

THEMES ON THIS PAGE:

1. PHILOSOPHIZING INCLUDES ITS HISTORY

2. THE EXPERIENCE OF LIFE

3. TRUTH

4. AUTHENTICITY

Julián Marías (1914-2005) was a Spanish philosopher, a student of Ortega y Gasset, and a major thinker of the so-called Madrid School. The Spanish Civil War interrupted his philosophy studies at Complutence University of Madrid, and after the war his PhD thesis was rejected because of his criticism of the dictator Franco. He was imprisoned for several months, and was released thanks to the intervention of several public figures. He was, however, banned from teaching for more than 30 years. As a result, he visited USA several times where he gave philosophy courses in important universities. He also founded, together with his teacher Ortega y Gasset, the Institute of Humanities.  

Marías’ philosophy focuses on real life-situations. The foundation of philosophy, for him, is the real life of human beings, and philosophy investigates and systematizes the root of human existence as it is lived in real situations.

 

TOPIC 1.  PHILOSOPHIZING INCLUDES ITS HISTORY

 

The following text is from Julián Marías’ introduction to his first book, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (1941). The book was a best-seller, and the income enabled him to live without teaching (from which he was banned by Franco). This introduction is not a mere introduction – it presents Marías’ views about the historical nature of philosophy. Philosophy, he explains, is not an abstract and objective theory like in science, because it is intertwined with human existence, which is historical.

In the two sections included below, Marías argues that when we do philosophy, the history of philosophy is part of our philosophizing. 

 

PHILOSOPHY AND ITS HISTORY

The relationship of philosophy to its history is different from, for example, the relationship of science to its own history. In the case of science, the two things are distinct: science on the one hand, and on the other hand what science WAS – in other words, its history. The two are independent of each other, and science can exist and be understood and cultivated in separation from the history of what it has been. Science is constructed from a certain objective topic, and from the available knowledge about that topic. In philosophy, the problem of philosophy is philosophy itself. Moreover, this problem is formulated according to the historical and personal situation in which the philosopher finds himself. And this historical and personal situation is determined, to a large extent, by the philosophical tradition to which the particular philosopher belongs. The entire philosophical past is included in every act of philosophizing.

Third, the philosopher must investigate the philosophical problem in its totality, and therefore investigate philosophy itself from its original root. He cannot start from an existing ready-made state of knowledge and accept it. Rather, he must start at the beginning, and AT THE SAME TIME from the historical situation in which he finds himself. In other words, philosophy must fully establish itself and fulfill itself in every philosopher, and it must do so in each philosopher in a unique way: the way in which he has been conditioned by all previous philosophy. Therefore, all philosophizing includes the entire history of philosophy. If this was not so, philosophy would not be intelligible and, furthermore, it could not exist. At the same time, philosophy possesses only the reality which it achieves historically in each philosopher.

There is, then, an inseparable connection between philosophy and the history of philosophy. Philosophy is historical, and its history is an essential part of it. Moreover, the history of philosophy is not just a scholarly account of the opinions of philosophers, but the true presentation of the real content of philosophy. Only this way is it truly philosophy. Philosophy does not exhaust itself in one philosophical system; rather, it consists of the true history of all philosophical systems. And, correspondingly, none of these systems can exist independently by itself, because each one requires all previous systems and is involved in all of them. There is still another point: Each system of philosophy achieves maximum reality, full TRUTH, only outside of itself – in other words, in the thought of those philosophers who will come after it. Every philosophizing originates from the totality of the past, and it projects itself toward the future, thus advancing the history of philosophy. This is, briefly, what one means when one says that PHILOSOPHY IS HISTORICAL.

 

TRUTH AND HISTORY

The above account does not mean that TRUTH does not interest philosophy, that philosophy should be viewed just as a historical phenomenon that is not connected with truth and falsity. Every philosophical system claims to be true. On the other hand, contradictions between systems are evident, and they are not just a coincidence. But these contradictions do not mean that the systems are completely incompatible. No system can claim ABSOLUTE and EXCLUSIVE validity, because none of them EXHAUSTS reality. If a system claims to be the only true system, it is false. Every philosophical system understands a portion of reality – precisely that portion which is accessible from its own perspective. Nor does the truth of one system imply the falsity of other systems, except on points of formal contradiction. A contradiction arises only when a philosopher affirms more than he actually sees. Thus, all philosophical visions are true (I mean, of course, partially true) and in principle they do not exclude one another.

Moreover, every philosopher’s point of view is conditioned by his HISTORIC situation. Therefore, every system, if it is faithful to its own perspective, must include all previous systems as part of its own composition. Thus, the different TRUE philosophies are not interchangeable. Rather, they are strictly determined according to their sequence in human history. 

 

TOPIC 2.  THE EXPERIENCE OF LIFE

 

Julián Marías’ article “The experience of life” was originally published in 1960 in the book La Experiencia de la Vida (republished in English in his book Philosophy as Dramatic Theory, 1971). In this article Marías asks: What do we mean when we say that a certain person has life-experience, or EXPERIENCE OF LIFE?

To clarify the question, Marías points out that an old farmer or a simple manual worker may have a rich experience of life (life-experience), even if she lived her entire life in her little village. Life-experience is not the same as experiencing many things in the world, and it is not the same as knowing a lot of information. Life-experience is something that develops through the years, and you are likely to have it when you grow older. You are no longer absorbed in specific things, but “withdraw” out of them and are with life as a whole. As a result, when you encounter a new situation, you feel: “I have already seen this kind of things.”

Marías explains the nature of life experience in terms of two main elements: First, life (as it appears from your perspective) is “systematic” – it is a single coherent system. Like a book or a novel, if you “taste” several chapters, you get the taste of the entire book, even if the details are new.

The second element is more important, and more difficult to understand. The experience of life (unlike the experience of specific things) is not a knowledge that I possess, but a way of participating in life. I become part of my world. But “my world” consists not just of my own personal experiences, because I find in “my world” other people too – friends, neighbors, strangers. And these people extend beyond my experiences – they have their own experiences. Thus, the world of “my” experience is a world that is much bigger than me. It opens to life in general.

This idea of a trans-personal world of experience is important in Marías’ philosophy, and it has a surprising conclusion here: The experience “of” life is not “my” experience. It does not belong to me, but to life. It is a drama that includes the chapter of my own personal drama, but has many more chapters; a field of experiences that includes my personal experiences but is much larger than it. It is as if life experiences itself through my own experiences!

   

THE EXPERIENCE OF LIFE

The peasant, the half-literate woman, show sometimes a surprising accumulation of experience of life, combined with tremendous poverty of “experiences.” They are people who have always done the same thing, people to whom nothing much has happened. […] The experience of life, in fact, requires WITHDRAWING, since, as we have seen, we withdraw ourselves from involvement with things, and we move towards life itself, where the meaning and significance of all things resides.

How do we come to know about the experience of life? We talk about it, perhaps, because we know that we possess it, or we miss it, or we observe it in others. We don’t know it completely, of course. But it is connected to a certain self-knowledge, to a certain transparency and reflection. Discovering it in ourselves is usually translated into what I would call the experience of “I HAVE ALREADY BEEN THROUGH THIS.”

[…]

I said before that the experience of life is acquired in solitude, but that we arrive at this solitude precisely by withdrawing from life in the company of others. When I say that I am WITHIN life, this is obviously true, but we must make a distinction. I am within my life, but […] WITHIN IT I find other realities [humans], and I am necessarily “outside” them. The experience of life is not experience of MY life, although we might be tempted to think so. Perhaps, strictly speaking, no experience of my life is possible. In any case, it is precisely the presence of other lives, which are not mine, that produces that experience of life.

[…]

Through the years, a person gradually comes to know life by savoring it in many different ways. The experience of life (as opposed to the experience of things) gradually discovers life’s abundance and its limitation, its poverty and its abundance beyond all legend, the impossibility of happiness and at the same time its unquestionable, fragile, and endangered existence. One of its sources is the acceptance of reality and its limits – what is usually called satisfaction in limitation. […]

Human life is SYSTEMATIC: wherever you touch it, you touch life itself. For that reason, every real contact with life discovers life’s self-identity, which does not mean that you grasp it as a whole. This is crucial for understanding how the experience of life is possible, and what it signifies. When a person “withdraws” into himself, when he retreats from things to the drama which contains himself, then he is creating the experience of life out of his own life. But note that he does not possess this experience “in his hand” and as “given.” This experience presents itself to him as open and completely spread-out, unfinished and in some ways unforeseeable. In other words, he is creating experience in its unlimited reality.

[…]

We now encounter one final perplexity. It is about the meaning of the expression we have been using: “the experience of life.” What does this mean? What is the meaning of that possessive word “of,” ambiguous in so many ways? A first meaning would be: experience CONCERNING life. Evidently, this meaning is involved, and we have to keep it. But a second meaning would be: experience CHARACTERISTIC of life, experience that life itself possesses or acquires.

It could be said that ordinary experiences – experiences of things, of events, or happenings – are experiences of a person, or perhaps only of his mind. These experiences are about a definite object and, like the person who experiences them, they influence his psychophysical reality. But something else happens when life becomes transparent to itself, and when it receives the organization of the reality which is MY LIFE. Because my genuine encounter with reality (not just a mental or theoretical encounter) happens when I EXPERIENCE it. Thus, my experience influences life as a whole, life as the drama that includes the world, not just my individual mind or my psychophysical reality. Life, then, organizes and reorganizes itself according to the development of my experience, and my experience becomes part of life not as a mere object of knowledge, not as contents of the mind, but as an element in its reality, and thus as a decisive factor in the conduct of life. The experience of life is not just mental, but much more, it shapes mentality and becomes an instrument of its intellection.

 

 

TOPIC 3. TRUTH COMES FROM UNCERTAINTY

 

In his many writings, Julián Marías’ explores various aspects of human existence, always attempting to trace them to the way they appear in our concrete everyday life. His book REASON AND LIFE (1954) explores in this way the broader dimensions of life, such as reason, truth, ideas and things. The following passages are slightly adapted from Chapter 3: “The vital functions of truth.” Here he explores what truth means, and as usual, he does not want to analyze this topic from an abstract perspective. Rather, he asks himself how and when the idea of truth appears in our lives. The answer is that we start thinking about truth only when we are confused and uncertain. We then start searching for the truth, and at this moment we discover that before our confusion began, we had been sure and trusting, that we had taken many things for granted – in other words, we had been living “in” our truths without thinking “about” them. The conclusion is that there are two senses of truth: the background truth in which we usually live without thinking about it, and the truths that are the objects of our inquiry.

 

From the section TRUTH COMES FROM UNCERTAINTY

When a person feels perplexed and unsure about any matter, a vital need rises in him of something which he does not possess, and this something is what is called TRUTH. […] The idea of truth appears, then, as a result of an uncertainty, and it has above all the character of a lack. This character refers to a previous state – the earlier state of security or certainty – which the idea of truth has to re-establish. And so, we realize that before we came to be “in” uncertainty we were “in” truth, even though we completely lacked any idea of it. In one sense, therefore, truth is a state in which we find ourselves when we know what to rely on. In a second sense, truth is what makes us find again the security and certainty which we had lost. Only the second kind of truth, which we may call KNOWN TRUTH, makes us notice the first kind of truth, that is, THE STATE OF TRUTH in which we found ourselves before, although without knowing it. […]

Known truth, or truth in the narrow sense, coincides, as we shall see, with the second type of certainty mentioned above, with the certainty at which we arrive as a result of not knowing what to rely on. Known truth presupposes perplexity or loss of orientation, which is the source of known truth in the sense that it creates the demand for it. If you were always clear about your situation, you would not need truth, nor have the faintest idea of it. At most it could be said that you were “in” it. When cracks in your world – the uncertainty of your beliefs – make you feel insecure and perplexed and not knowing what to do, you realize that you don’t know whether your beliefs are true or not, or which of several contradictory beliefs is true. Truth reveals itself, then, as a quality which is lacking (or at least MAY be lacking) in the beliefs “in” which I am, and the things around me which I have to trust in order to live. The demand for truth implies a kind of failure, or need of truth, which is the first step to the discovery of truth.

  

From the section TRUTH AS AUTHENTICITY

Man lives, then, surrounded by uncertainty. Unlike the animal, which reacts to the environmental stimuli that are present to it, man is an open world. He has to deal with what is neither present nor given to him, and with this situation he must make his life. For this reason, he must assess his situation at every moment, and in order to do so he must think. Because, in fact, how can man live? How is it possible that he does not surrender with terror and anxiety, with perplexity, when he sees himself surrounded by hidden realities on which he cannot rely? When he does not know what there is above or below him, and around him? When, especially, he doesn’t know what is going to happen in the next moment to him and to everything around him, and he must live, projected towards this mysterious future? It is worth pausing to think what man’s situation is. He has to make his life in the future, and this is by nature foreign to him and hidden from him. […] What can man do?

Since he doesn’t have in his hands what he needs in order to live, man has no choice but to live on credit. For that reason – although not only for that reason – man is always needy. The primary form of that credit on which man lives is, literally, what is CREDITUM or believed – his beliefs. Credit gives me now what I really don’t have, but which I need now in order to live. Credit makes up for the absence of what should to be present and is not. In a belief, what cannot be present “bodily” or “in person” is “present” in a peculiar way. […] Beliefs represent, therefore, the normal way in which the immense majority of realities are present to us. […].

 

 

TOPIC 4. AUTHENICITY

 

In the following passages, also taken from Chapter 3 of his book REASON AND LIFE (1954), Julián Marías’ continues to explore the idea of truth. Here he discusses four different ways in which we can live with truth, some are authentic and some inauthentic. Remember, however, that for him truth is never truth from an absolute perspective, but truth as it appears to us. Therefore, when Marías speaks of “true belief” he does not mean that it is true in an absolute way, but that it is true from the perspective of a person who came to believe that it is true.

From the section TRUTH AS AUTHENTICITY

[…] When I say that a certain belief is true (or false, it makes no difference), I am now in a new belief – the belief about the truth or falsehood of the earlier belief. And I affirm the truth or falsehood of the first belief because I am in the belief that it is really true or false. […] Now, truth in this sense is called AUTHENTICITY. A true belief is an authentic belief in which I am, of which I feel myself a part, on which I really rely in order to live. And life achieves more reality in proportion to the authenticity of its beliefs, and of its projects which rest on them. In this sense, the truth of life itself is authenticity.

From the section THE RELATIONS BETWEEN MAN AND TRUTH

One possible relationship between a person and truth is what might be called LIVING IN THE DOMAIN OF TRUTH. This happens when an individual (or a historical period) lives with the support of a repertoire of true beliefs, on to which his existence is authentically based. This repertoire may be narrow or very wide, rough or exact, but in any case, he rests on the assumptions with which he feels complete solidarity, and with which he lives in full authenticity. […]

But it may happen that a person does not find himself in such a satisfactory state of sure and sufficient belief. And this happens either because traditional beliefs have failed and have been lost, completely or partly, or else because the situation has changed and he does not find himself in any ready-made belief about the new situation. Then the “classical equilibrium” is disturbed, and the person is offered various possibilities as a substitute for the original one. The second possibility is to live WITHIN THE HORIZON OF TRUTH; I mean to live IN SEARCH OF TRUTH, to seek it as long as you do not possess it […]

But there is also a possible third situation, which is much more frequent, because in the majority of periods, the system of beliefs is damaged or mutilated, and very few individuals are capable of the violent effort that is required for the discovery of truth. Such a situation consists in living ON THE MARGIN OF TRUTH, that is, on a repertoire of more or less coherent beliefs, with which a person feels no ultimate solidarity, but which he receives from his environment and accepts without criticism. He manages to live with certain “ideas” about which he lacks certainty, and which he uses without demanding that they should be justified. We might also call this kind of life – which is the life of the great majority of people, including professional intellectuals – living in THE APPEARANCE OF TRUTH. And of course, its ultimate root is the triviality of pretending to “know what to follow” and not taking of life seriously, filling life with tasks or distractions, with pleasure, or work, or power, or success. But since the substance of life is seriousness, this evasion means the evasion of life itself, which means not living life properly and falling into inauthenticity.

Lastly, there is a fourth situation, extremely abnormal and paradoxical, which is living AGAINST TRUTH. And this is – let us not delude ourselves – the situation which dominates our own historical age. People affirm falsehood and seek it on purpose because it is falsehood. They accept it implicitly even though it comes from their enemies, and they are prepared to argue in support of it, never in support of truth. The truth is considered by the vast masses as the great enemy, which it is easy to agree to oppose. There are in today’s world many topics – which are on everyone’s mind and need not be mentioned here, and mentioning them would create a disturbing embarrassment – about which one says everything imaginable except the truth, which nobody (I mean nobody “social,” no “public opinion”) would tolerate. Some day the historians of the future (if historians will exist) will think seriously about this strange sickness of our time. They may ask: And why live against truth? Why this voluntary adherence to lying?

The reason is not too obscure: fundamentally, it is just a matter of fear of truth. The person who lives on the basis of ideas and beliefs which he privately believes (or at least suspects) to be false […] and who doesn’t have courage, flees from truth and persecutes it because he thinks that its mere presence would ruin the unreal foundation of his life. Or, rather, that it would ruin his counter-life, of his essential inauthenticity, which is the mode of “not-being” of human life.