METÁFORA E IRONÍA, CLAVES DE LA RAZÓN VITAL

Abstract

Metaphor and irony are in a central position in Ortega's philosophy. On the one hand, they are the fundamental aesthetic categories of vital reason. The conversion of metaphor into the essence of art allows us to give an aesthetic value to irony: Art, as it is metaphor, cration of unreal worlds, make fun of iteself, ironizes its pretensions to reality, and recognizcs itsefl as play. On the other hand, in the base of this metaphoric power works one of the roots of ratioviatal anthropology, that finishes in the definition of man as a fantastic animal: the human instintc of evasion from real world and taking a rest from serious life, the human will of farce. But the decisive point is that metaphor and irony represent the effective intellectual form of vital reason, the method or way of thinking of a philosophy that refuses the identity established by idealism bwtween reason and reality and lodges the original "logos" in the life-world.