 From the viewpoint of this characterization of phenomenology, Ortega reached back to “I am I and my circumstances” as his starting point of analysis. For Ortega, the individual ego is conscious of itself through the awareness of both its physiological features and behavioral gestures, and those of “others” in reciprocal human interaction, a consciousness of self that proceeds through self-analysis of the inner essence of the being of the “I” and the “I’s” awareness of other selves as similar beings in the “circumstances” of the world of lived experience. In short, he attempted to characterize the nature of an individual’s experience of one’s world and oneself. There is an attempt to distinguish between the facts that one’s relationship to an organism is different from one’s relation to a person qua being, and that one’s actions toward an organism are different from the way that one acts toward a person. “Living”, he said, “is to reach outside of oneself, devoted ontologically, to what is other, be it called world or circumstances” (Obras, V: 545).