The first stage of Ortega y Gasset's thinking, objectivism, is greatly influenced by his concern about Spain's backwardness towards the rest of Europe, and this could only be overcome if the dominant {subjectivism} and personalism were eliminated. Things are usually more important than men, or for the sake of objectivity, we have to treat men as things. Then he will retract this kind of antihumanism.
By 1910, his thinking was characterized by perspectivism. The two major themes of the period are circumstance and perspective. The idea of circumstance has its origin in the concept of umwelt created by von Uexküll and then used Husserl. The point is to point out that there is no self separate from the real world:
I am my circumstance, and if I do not save her, I will not save Ortega y Gasset, Mediations of Quixote
The concept of perspective, which already appear in Leibniz, while each monad is a perspective of the universe and in Nietzsche, although Ortega, in fact follows Teichmüller, is a shortcut to overcome skepticism and rationalism as illegitimate and conflicting attitudes. Ortega understands that logic oscillates historically between skepticism and dogmatism so that two opposing opinions emerged: there is no point of view but the individual: truth does not exist (skepticism) on the one hand, and truth exists: one must take a supraindividual point of view (rationalism) on the other. Ortega will say these perspectives originate in the conviction that the point of view is false. But for him, the individual point of view is the only possible point from which you can look at the world and its truth.
In this way, circumstance and perspective are articulated in a particular conception of truth. Reality can only be viewed from the circumstance (the point of view) that each fatally occupies in the universe. Reality can only be offered in individual perspective, which does not invalidate them but makes them valuable.
In maturity (raciovitalism) Ortega will criticize Socrates. He will affirm that Socrates "time was to develop spontaneous life to replace it with pure reason, but later, he would discover that the rational imitated the irrational: pure reason cannot replace life, the culture of abstract intellect is not, as opposed to spontaneous, another life that suffices itself and can evict it: it is just a brief island floating over the sea of primary vitality. He will then say that it is the subject of his time that of subjecting reason to vitality, locating it within the biological and making it subsidiary of the spontaneous. It is about biological culture, pure reason will be displaced by vital reason.
Ortega defended himself against those who described his thinking as vitalism because his intention was not a biological reductionism nor to devalue reason. But it does not postulate a dependence on reason that culminates in idealism. Raciovitailsm aims to be an intermediate position in which reason and intuition are put at the service of life. Thus, for Ortega, the road will be a radical reality and man will not be nature but history, because life is nothing but what we do and what happens to us. Ortega clearly approaches {existentialism}.