Believing and Knowing: On Julián Marías’s Interpretation of Ortega’s Notion of Belief

Jorge García-Gómez

The difference between believing and knowing, noetically corresponding to the distinction between belief and idea elaborated by Ortega,1 is important enough in his work to deserve at least a brief examination. Julián Marías, for example, spoke in this connection of “true belief” (an expression in which “true” signifies “genuine,” as in “true gold” by contrast with “fool’s gold”), and he did so in opposition to a “belief that is true” or a (true) idea.

Marías did not confine himself, however, to referring to ideas but proceeded as well to place them in the life nexus to which they properly belong. He thus said that “the sense of ‘truth’ is taken more fundamentally when I speak of a true belief than when I judge a belief to be true, since I can only do this from the standpoint of the prior situation [i.e., that in which I found myself placed in the belief in question]. Now then, truth in this sense is called authenticity.”² In my opinion, this passage is all the more interesting since it lends itself to being seriously misunderstood. It seems to me, then, that it calls for certain clarifications. First of all, the point of departure of Marías’s remarks cannot be sufficiently underscored, for it is that of truth itself, particularly when it is taken to mean “authenticity” in the sense assigned to the term by Ortega in his En torno a Galileo,³ namely, that of “man’s self-coincidence.” Second, I must point out that Marías formulated the question concerning the relationship between truth and belief in a manner that is not purely logical and abstract but functional and concrete, for he looked at it in the context of each person’s life. This is precisely what he did when he asked a particular question, to wit: “who is the primordial subject of the truth and, therefore, its radical sense, that is, the root of all others?”⁴ Finally, it is not enough to touch on the point of origin of his considerations but is necessary as well to indicate, even if it is only in principle, the nexus they generate and the basic features exhibited by Marías’s treatment of the question.

To this end, let me avail myself of his own distinction between a “true belief” (in the sense already specified) and a “belief that is true.” A difference in meaning exists between them because, according to Marías, the former is “something really believed in” (even if false), whereas of the latter one may legitimately assert only that “its content, i.e., what is believed in it, is true.”5 One could take this as if it signified a division internal to the domain of belief, but if one understood Marías’s thesis in this fashion, one would be led not only to a misunderstanding of Ortega’s own position on the matter, but also to the committing of a gross error concerning the very “nature of things.” Now, although one is not entitled to such a conclusion, it would nonetheless follow from certain terminological choices. Let us see how.

It is my contention that the passage under consideration involves or implies a difficulty. First of all, according to Ortega, anything worldly originarily presents itself as being located in, and as forming part of, some pragmatic field or region, such as the world of war, the world of hunting, the world of festivals, and so on.⁶ Second, it would do so on the basis of a “true belief” in terms of which it would be taken, in one complex, as existent and as being something or other. Now then, Marías argued—following Ortega—that a “true belief” is that upon which we simply find ourselves placed. In other words, the effectiveness of a “true belief” as the foundation of our thought and action does not require that we first arrive at it by way of ideation, which is precisely what Marías has in mind when he speaks of a “belief that is true.” The latter is what Ortega called a (true) “idea,” that is to say, a (correct) interpretation we advance, or achieve, concerning what appears to us as conflictive, problematic, or opaque (in some sense, to some degree, and in some particular nexus of worldly experience) on the grounds of the belief regimen in force at a given time and place.

In my opinion, Marías would not have disagreed with the interpretation I have just assigned to his words, and yet, almost immediately after the passage cited, he proceeded inconsistently to assert that “when I say that a belief is true—or, for that matter, false—[that is, when, as the result of ideation, I come to judge it as being so], I find myself placed in a new belief [emphasis added], to wit, one the object of which is the truth or falsity of the first belief [emphasis added], because [now] I find myself placed in the belief that really is true or false; in other words, because, in turn, I would be in possession of a true belief about the prior one.”7

“Inconsistently” I have said, and advisedly, for even though it is correct to affirm with Marías that “a true belief is something which one really believes in,” as has already been pointed out,⁸ it is correct as well to remark that the “something in question may also be a falsehood”⁹ since what is important at this level of functional concretion in which Marías’s discourse is unfolding is the fact that the belief should be taken as true in the life of the person involved (and not the possible verification or falsification of the content in question). But this acknowledgment makes it obvious that the term “belief” has been employed by Marías in two senses that are not only logically and chronologically different, but opposite to each other as well.¹⁰ Hence, without incurring formal contradiction, one may not assert that, upon judging that my “true belief” is really true (or false), one adopts a “belief that is true,” which would consist in living—now—in a new and true belief about the prior one. On the contrary, such an outcome would be possible only with respect to a “belief that is true” or a (true) idea, and one which is advanced as such (as Marías himself recognized by referring to the ideas as “beliefs that are true,” as opposed to “beliefs taken in the strictest sense”)¹¹ or with respect to a true belief, the proper status of which had dissolved, either because of a sociohistorical (or even personal) crisis or by virtue of having been subjected to a suitable scientific analysis. It would never be possible, however, concerning a content that has been consolidated as—or transformed into—a “true belief” (or a belief sensu stricto,¹² that is to say, an intellectual “usage,” in Ortega’s sense of the term).¹³ Therefore, what Marías explicitly says may not be considered correct, either as an interpretation of Ortega’s thought or as a conception adequate to the “nature of things.” It follows, then, that the experience describable as “finding oneself placed in a belief” cannot be taken to mean the same thing in both cases. One may infer this on the grounds that the “first” belief is different from the “second,” not only chronologically but, also and above all, because the “first” one does not signify a manner of abiding that would immediately result from imagining or thinking lato sensu, much less from reflection (or from the activity of judgment based thereon), whereas the “second” one certainly does. Accordingly, believing as such consists in taking “things” to be real in one manner or another, and to do so at the level of preconstituted spontaneity (that is to say, without requiring for that purpose an actual or present mediation of any kind). As Ortega repeatedly stated, believing is already to find oneself at a reality,14 which is always of one sort or another.

Nonetheless, if one insists—as Marías did—in employing the same terms (namely, “believing” and “belief”) in both cases, one’s path would be fraught with ambiguity and, accordingly, open to the possibility of error, unless one were of course appropriately to qualify one’s terms at every turn, a procedure that not only would prove onerous but unnecessary as well. To “find oneself placed in a belief,” in the case of a “true belief,” amounts to being identified with it, and it is in this sense that one may assert that beliefs constitute the foundation of our lives. To “find oneself placed in a belief” means, then, to live on the grounds of such a foundation, and not just to proceed derivatively from it. By contrast, when we affirm that we find ourselves placed in an idea or a posteriori “belief,” we are contending not only that we have gained access thereto (which would after all be the case as well, had a sociohistorical or personal crisis occurred with regard to beliefs already constituted but no longer in force), but also that we would have done so in a special way, namely, deliberately and by means of ideative resources and motives of a personal nature. This would be the case since the procedure in question aims at confirming or modifying (or even abandoning, rejecting, and possibly replacing) one’s “true belief” by showing the inadequacy (or even falsity) of that in which and off of which we had been living ab origine. In other words, we would have come to live thus because we would have discovered the insufficiency, partial or total, of the “first” belief, and would have consequently “fall[en] into a state of doubt”¹⁵ about it, whether spontaneously or scientifically, that is, as a result of a sociohistorical or personal crisis or by the application of the methods of a relevant science, respectively.

If the latter alternative had become actual, we would have succeeded in identifying the reasons for our neediness in such a situation and, on that basis, in formulating a (true) idea or “belief that is true,” one by means of which we could overcome the situation in question so far as it is dubious (and ideally to the extent that it is dubitable). Furthermore, and still assuming that the said situation had become actual, we would have to say that I (as the projective or secondary ego given expression in Ortega’s fundamental philosopheme, “I am myself [and] . . . my circumstance”)¹⁶ would take charge of my life as a whole, albeit not spontaneously but in relation to myself by way of reflection or in the exercise of my own responsibility. My life would have then found its foundation in myself, although no doubt only in a certain sense, that is, in a way of living that is opposite in character to that in which I find myself exercising the originary belief in question—that is to say, when there is no experiential distinction between believing and living straightforwardly, to the extent that my life is foundationally identical with the belief in which I find myself placed. This is so because, in this nexus, I—sensu strictissimo and explicitly—would not exist, or, if I do, I would exist exclusively as that of which my life is implicitly or virtually responsible, that is to say, as that which would emerge of it, as that which is demanded and required by it and, in turn, would be supported by it (even in the paradoxical case in which I would do so under the sign of contradiction and rejection). To put it succinctly, a (true) idea or “belief that is true” is the fruit of straightforward but motivated imagining and eventually of the judgment founded thereon. By the same token, one would be entitled to speak, as Marías himself acknowledged, of truth as authenticity in the first case insofar as, in what I do and decide to do, I coincide with what I believe (even when the said coincidence occurs when there is a spontaneous fracture within my life), but not when it is a question of that which is founded on the truth taken in that sense (that is to say, when I coincide, in what I do and decide to do, with what I ideate with justification, even when the content involved happens to be the same in both cases). This is so because the sense of “coincidence” radically changes from one case to the other, undergoing verification as it does, either by virtue of the unity obtaining between the totality of my life with itself on the basis of originary believing in one case, or by reason of the establishment of a division between myself (in the sense of the secondary or projective ego as a constituted but integral part of my life) and the totality of the latter, a division that arises as a (true) idea or “belief that is true” is advanced.

In opposition to Marías’s stated position, one would have accordingly to insist that the proposition reading “a true belief may be a belief that is true” is false;17 in other words, it is to be considered false if the respective senses of “belief” are taken as they function in each person’s life, and not merely so far as their correlative contents are concerned. To avoid this finding, one would have at least to introduce, as Marías did,¹⁸ a distinction expressible by saying that a true belief need not be true in order to be true. But this is tantamount to affirming that both truth and falsity are compatible with the status of a belief as such, a status that must be suspended prior to the determination of its truth or falsity. Such a suspension can be accomplished either spontaneously (i.e., by virtue of a personal or a socio-historical crisis) or by the application of some scientific procedure, but in any case, the resulting new status would not be that of a true belief but instead that of a (true) idea or “belief that is true,” which would be brought about as a doxic modification on the basis of an originary belief.19

Hence, the conclusion Marías has drawn—on inaccurate grounds, as we have seen—is nonetheless quite correct, namely, that the “truth of life itself amounts, as well, to authenticity, to being actually manifest and certain.”²⁰ But this is a characteristic properly belonging to an idea, and saying so at this point—as he does by adding the qualification “as well”—is redundant, or, rather, it involves him in a contradiction since, to employ his own terms, we would have to assert precisely the opposite, namely, that an idea is not and cannot be, in the final analysis, an authentic belief, even if it is shown that it is true and that its content is identical to that of the corresponding true or genuine belief. As Marías would have agreed, this is indeed so because my way of finding myself placed in an idea consists in holding a view for which I am and feel responsible because of my own reasons (or, at least, because of grounds made my own by personal effort or assent). In other words, an idea is such that I am ready to justify my having adopted it, if need be, but that is a state of affairs opposite to what is the case when we move on the plane of belief, in Ortega’s sense of the term.

This notwithstanding, it may very well be that the lack of grounds for some of Marías’s assertions is due to the ambiguous character of the phrase with which he began the passage cited above, namely, that the “truth in this sense is called authenticity.”²¹ The ambiguity affecting its use here is due to the fact that it is properly applicable only to the situation Ortega described as “man’s coincidence with himself” (or of the totality of life with itself), and not to the coincidence experienced by the projective or secondary ego—which is only a constituted part of my life—with a true interpretation I would advance concerning a problem or difficulty faced by me in my life (and for which the resources available to me in my life, on the grounds of the belief regimen in force therein, are not sufficient). At a truly primordial level, then, it is always a question of living usually or customarily, that is to say, of thinking, feeling, suffering, and acting in terms of beliefs sensu stricto, in the “light” of which there is no experienced need for a hiatus to arise between the totality of my life and myself by way of reflection on things and events belonging to some “pragmatic field.”²²

By analogy, perhaps, it would be valid to characterize a (true) idea or “belief that is true” as “authentic” only in extremis, that is, when it has been established to be “manifest and certain” or shown to be rationally justified (or may present itself, in a given nexus of experience, as capable of being so justified) on the basis of the belief regimen in force. This is so much so that Marías will later speak—in my opinion, quite correctly—of a “counter-life,” that is to say, of a form of living consisting in “formal inauthenticity, which is the way of not-being proper to human life,”23 when the latter is led, at least, on the basis of the “suspicion” that the “presupposed ideas and beliefs” on the grounds of which one is living may be false. We could then open up to a new conformation of spontaneity in which we would “abide” in the unsustainable state of radical doubt, a condition that is fundamentally incompatible with the “believing” tone of everyday, customary living, and that motivates ideation and is the origin of its fruits. Now then, if this is so, one would have to affirm that the notion of “authenticity” may be predicated of an idea only by analogy and, to be sure, exclusively a posteriori. It is precisely this realization that would allow us to retrieve and endorse an opinion advanced by Marías, which otherwise would have to be seen as arbitrary, or as totally out of place, in the context established by his analyses. As he said,

Let us remark, then, the existence of two modalities of the truth: one, the truth stricto sensu, or truth as known [emphasis added], which is responsible for our regaining some lost certainty; another, the one referred to as the “state [or condition] of truth,”²⁴ that is to say, the certainty in which we had found ourselves placed [emphasis added]. The latter, as I said before, is not known [emphasis added]; it has no “idea” of itself; and thus it is the opposite of the idea of truth, which only arises when I [emphasis added] come to live in uncertainty and find myself in need of it.²⁵

It is a question, therefore, as Marías himself hastened to add, of the “difference between the truth in which one finds oneself placed [gratuitously or by taking it for granted] and the truth one arrives at”²⁶ in terms of personal motivations and resources. In other words, it is not—as he pointed out immediately thereafter—a difference that “corresponds to the distinction between two modalities of belief,”²⁷ for there is no continuity or mere gradation between an originary belief (or belief “in the strictest sense,” as Marías improperly characterizes it) and the idea (presumably a “belief” in a less strict sense). Rather, we are confronted, as Marías saw with clarity, with a functional, and not with a material or content-related, difference, which is why one must assert, as was done previously, that a true or genuine belief is not a belief that is true, and vice versa.

Let me now reformulate this thesis in usual terms: believing is not knowing but is instead that which renders knowing possible, even when we are pre-reflectively brought to a state of crisis concerning what we believe in. But if so, one must assert as well that beliefs (as the correlates of the act of believing that living fundamentally consists in) are the real (and, in this sense, the transcendental) conditions of everything founded thereon, whether immediately or not, as is the case with thinking (and the ideas that it generates), feeling (and the sentiments or effects thereof), and acting (and action, as its product).28 Or equivalently stated: ideas do not necessarily lead to the formation of beliefs, and this is a position perfectly compatible with Ortega’s oft-repeated contention that ideas, as such, are always open to doubt and subject to the requisite of proof (and are thus revocable in principle by one’s own personal effort), the opposite of what is the case with regard to beliefs. But this leads us again to reject the view—as Marías did too with good reason—that Ortega’s theory of ideas and beliefs is, or implies, a new classification of ideas as “contents of consciousness.”

NOTES

1. José Ortega y Gasset, “Ideas y creencias,” in Obras completas, vol. 5, 1932–1940 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial/Revista de Occidente, 1983), 381ff. Published in English as “Ideas and Beliefs,” in What Is Knowledge?, trans. and ed. Jorge García-Gómez (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 175ff.

2. Julián Marías, Introducción a la Filosofía, 9th ed., in Obras, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1962) 2:95. All emphases are Marías’s own, except for the intermediary ones.

3. Ortega y Gasset, En torno a Galileo, in Obras completas, vol. 5. Published in English as Man and Crisis, trans. M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962).

4. Marías, Introducción, 93.

5. Ibid., 95. Emphasis added.

6. Cf. J. Ortega y Gasset, El hombre y la gente, in Obras completas, vol. 7, 1902–1925, Obra póstuma (Madrid: Alianza Editorial/Revista de Occidente, 1983), iv, 130. Published in English as Man and People, trans. W. R. Trask (New York: W. W. Norton, 1957): “things as positive or negative services are articulated together to form architectures of serviceability—as war, hunting, festivals. Within the world, [they form] . . . little separate worlds. . . . I call them ‘pragmatic fields.’ . . . Our world, the world of each one of us . . . is organized in ‘pragmatic fields.’ . . . Each thing belongs to one or more of these fields, in which it interlinks its being for with that of others” (80). See also Ortega y Gasset, “Anejo en torno al ‘Coloquio de Darmstadt,’ 1951,” iv, in Obras completas, vol. 9, 1933–1948, Obra póstuma (Madrid: Alianza Editorial/Revista de Occidente, 1983), 639ff.

7. Cf. Ortega y Gasset, Man and People, 80: “things as positive or negative services are articulated together to form architectures of serviceability—such as war, hunting, festivals. Within the world, [they form] . . . little separate worlds. . . . I call them ‘pragmatic fields.’ . . . Our world, the world of each one of us . . . is organized in ‘pragmatic fields.’ . . . Each thing belongs to one or more of these fields, in which it interlinks its being for with that of others.” See also “Anejo en torno al ‘Coloquio de Darmstadt,’ 1951,” iv, in OC, IX, 639 ff.

8. Marías, Introducción, 95 (emphasis added). Cf. Ortega y Gasset, “Introducción a los problemas actuales de la filosofía,” in Meditación de nuestro tiempo. Las Conferencias de Buenos Aires: 1916 y 1928, ed. J. C. Molinuevo (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), 72–73, 84.

9. Cf. Marías, Introducción, 95.

10. Concerning the origin of this confusion about belief, one could refer to the verbal sentences creo (signifying “I believe”) and pienso (signifying “I think”), which often enough are taken as synonymous in colloquial Spanish.

11. Marías, Introducción 95.

12. Cf. Ortega y Gasset, “Un capítulo sobre la cuestión de cómo muere una creencia,” in Obras completas, 9:707ff.

13. Cf. Ortega y Gasset, El hombre y la gente, chapter 9.

14. Cf. Ortega y Gasset, “Ideas y creencias,” 393 (trans., 186).

15. Ibid., 392 and 394 (trans., 186 and 187–88). Cf. my critical review, “History or Consequences,” History and Theory 37, no. 2 (1998): 275–76.

16. Ortega y Gasset, Meditaciones del Quijote, in Obras completas, vol. 1, 1902–1915 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial/Revista de Occidente, 1983), 322. Published in English as Meditations on Quixote, trans. E. Rugg et al.; introduction and notes by J. Marías (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1961), 45.

17. Cf. Jaime de Salas, Razón y legitimidad en Leibniz (Madrid: Técnos, 1994), 93–95 for a discussion of the related thesis that “a belief is not a conscious content.”

18. Cf. Marías, Introducción, 95 and Ortega y Gasset, En torno a Galileo.

19. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, ed. K. Schumann, vol. 3, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), §104.

20. Marías, Introducción, 95.

21. Cf. supra, [1] y n. 2.

22. Cf. supra, n. 6.

23. Marías, Introducción, 98.

24. Cf. ibid., 79 and 81.

25. Ibid., 95.

26. Ibid., emphasis added.

27. Ibid.

28. Cf. Ortega y Gasset, “Guillermo Dilthey y la Idea de la Vida,” in Obras completas, vol. 6, 1941–1955 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial/Revista de Occidente, 1983), 192–93. Published in English as “A Chapter from the History of Ideas—Wilhelm Dilthey and the Idea of Life,” in Concord and Liberty, trans. H. Weyl (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1946), 161–62. See also, for example, Wilhelm Dilthey, “Vorrede,” Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 6th ed., ed. Bernhard Groethuysen (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner and Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1966), 1:xviii.