The Ethics of Creative Joy

Abstract

This paper intends to establish the core ethical guideline of Ortega’s thought on the idea of “health” which is interpreted like the meaning of Spinozist amor mundi and the creative joy, in contributing to the momentum of love, the ideal of integration and Hero’s attitude of being true to himself. These three roots are preparing the imperative of life, in possession of it and vital efficiency, through the balance of the experiment and creative thought into consideration. Health is the power to create and project the goal, where gravity full meaning of life, and to integrate one’s own death in a gesture of wanting pure and unconditional. In this sense, the health system is the opposite of morbid despair and disenchantment that leads respectively ethical and haunted idealism and mere naturalism. From this idea of health, Ortega carried out, drawing primarily on Nietzsche and Scheler, its critical to both the utilitarian moral and Kant’s formal ethics of duty. And through the concept of power, Ortega open to the idea of value, and from it to the Aristotelian good, and personal good in the form of Pindar “become that you are”. A second outline show the idea that health is a sporting attitude, as demand requires discipline and agonal effort, unlike the hero merely playful as Don Juan, and Don Quixote as hero haunted. And finally, the third outline of health is the power to address the fate and turn it into a vocation, theme where, paradoxically, Ortega is trying to balance two contradictory inheritance: Fichte and Nietzsche. The essay runs, ultimately, in consideration of “cervantina” irony and melancholy as two ingredients that involve maturation of health to address the destiny, always in-complete, which is man’s life.