Ortega on Life & Marx on Historical Materialism

Ortega y Gasset: What is Philosophy?

What is Philosophy? is a posthumous book based on the lessons of a course given by Ortega y Gasset in 1927-28. In it, he vindicated philosophy as unavoidable knowledge. Unlike the positive sciences, philosophy is knowledge that must justify its own object. It possesses a universal character in contrast to the fragmentation of science, and it is ultimate knowledge compared to the provisional nature of scientific learning.

Lesson X: The Radical Data of Philosophy

In Lesson X, Ortega asked what the radical data, the object of philosophy, should be. Ortega criticizes the naive realism of the Greeks, for whom the radical reality was things independent of the self. Equally, he critiques idealism where reality is solely the self. Ortega's radical view is that the fundamental data prior to any theory is life, understood as the dynamic coexistence of both: "I am myself and my circumstance."

Phenomenological Description of Life

Lesson X also focuses on the phenomenological description of life and its categories:

• Self-making
• Necessity
• Freedom
• Care
• Futurization

Since life is a changing reality, Ortega calls for abandoning the traditional categories of being and reality, replacing a static ontology with a dynamic view.

Marx: Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

In 1859, at full maturity, Karl Marx published the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. This work introduces his theory of value for the first time, which he would later develop in Capital. The focus of the work is a critique of capitalism as a mode of production that generates exploitation and alienation of human beings. It addresses some of the most important issues that reappear in Capital.

The Prologue: Historical Materialism

The Prologue to the Contribution contains one of the clearest and most specific formulations of historical materialism. It includes crucial ideas such as:

• The concept of historical and dialectical materialism.
• The relationship between the economic infrastructure and the legal, political, and ideological superstructure.
• The idea of revolution and radical change in the infrastructure, leading to the destruction of the superstructure.
• History understood as a succession of modes of production.
• Class struggle or antagonism as the engine of history, culminating in the destruction of capitalism through the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Marx argues that the productive forces of bourgeois society create the material conditions for resolving this antagonism and thus for the destruction of capitalism. All this makes the Contribution an excellent summary of Marxist ideas, especially of historical materialism.