Karl Marx had a bushy beard, there I said it, it's out the way and I don't have to think about it again. In related news, he was also a philosopher but not in the way we normally think of philosophers. He once said that "philosophers have only interpreted the world - the point however is to change it" and it is this that lies at the heart of his works.
Marx was born to a Jewish family which, depending on your opinion, has either no significance or great significance but let's go with great significance because it's a much more fun idea. Some people have commented saying that Marx saw himself as some sort of Old Testament prophet and even the wild beard and hair were significant; it seems he saw himself as someone coming to tell the 'good news' of the communist message as if it was something Biblical, which in some ways it was. Biblical in the sense of its size and impact but more on that later. The young Marx studied Law initially and was an exceptionally gifted student with a lucrative career ahead of him. Suddenly he decided he was more interested in philosophy which angered his parents but what angered them more was his next decision to become a Journalist. Lawyer to philosopher to journalist and it was his skills as a journalist that made his most well known work The Communist Manifesto so readable and persuasive.
He was one of the Young Hegellians, influenced greatly by Hegel's ideas on dialectics and this was to form a large part of his manifesto. He made a move into radical journalism and revolution meeting Friedrich Engels in Paris in 1844, the start of a friendship which encompassed co-authored works and the publishing of Marx's other writings posthumously. Marx's journalism at this time was rather inflammatory and it got him kicked out of countries for the radical beliefs he promoted. He was giving philosophical backing to the revolutions bubbling under the surface in Europe at the time. In 1848 he was pushed out to London where he lived until his death in 1883. His tombstone has one of his most famous quotes, the one at the heart of his communist manifesto, "workers of all lands unite." In the lecture we were reminded of a campaign slogan by Bill Clinton which said "It's the economy stupid" and Marx approached his theories in a similar way. He believed that you can explain everything about society by analysing the economic forces that shape it. For Aristotle, man is the political animal; for Plato, man is the political animal; for Kant, the moral animal; for Hegel, the historical animal; for Marx, man is the productive animal. Mankind creates the environment it inhabits - 'not a figure in the landscape, but the shaper of the landscape'. We dominate because we can make tools and co-operate.
In his works, Marx achieved (according to Engels) a combination of Hegellian philosophy in his history and dialectics, British empiricism with economists like Smith and French revolutionary politics especially socialist. He worked using a Darwinian scientific method, researching every aspect of society in order to understand it; he worked his through the reading in the British Museum. Hegel had a large influence on Marx and his historical process in terms of the spirit through history and its seeking of self understanding. History will end when the spirit achieves full self knowledge and becomes the absolute spirit. This process works through the dialectic:
• Thesis (Proposition)
• Antithesis (Counter proposition - contradiction)
• Synthesis (Combination or refuting of one proposition)
Hegel called the spirit Geist and believed history is being guided by the Geist towards an eventual end. Marx took the idea of the dialectic as he liked that two ideas could form one new idea but as far as Geist went, he thought that was all mystic rubbish.
Marx saw the class struggle throughout history, the master and slave, the lord and serf and now the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. His dialectic is based on Hegel's but reflects a more economised view, basing it on money in the real world, a so called "dialectic materialism". In this he argues that the proletariat have nothing to lose, "they have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." Other groups like the bourgeoisie have property to lose so cannot possibly be as selfless.
One of Marx’s most important theories in The Communist Manifesto is that of alienation. It comes from his theory of human nature in which - like Plato - Marx proposes that we have a tripartite self. We as human beings have three aspects or needs; the natural self which needs subsistence; the alienated self where natural needs are perverted, sex perverted by male dominated society, productivity and activity not met; finally the species self which understands we are all part of one another and will emerge in the Communist State. Capitalism, Marx states, alienates us from ourselves and each other, as we value things over each other, the cash nexus becomes the criterium of all value. As a generalised statement this works in theory but I think many people would value friends and family more than money and things, the laptop I'm writing this blog on isn't as important to me as my parents for example. Marx was writing in a time of child labour and possibly this cruelty in the name of financial gain tarnished his world view; as he once said, "Bourgeoisie has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment." Marx claims that the communist society will be characterized by equality and true justice and the evolution of a truly free individual. In a truly Hegellian manner, he looks at communism in this way:
• Thesis: The Bourgeoisie
• Antithesis: The Proletariat
• Synthesis: Socialism
Capitalism is sowing the seeds of its own destruction... apparently. Marx even provided a nice little sound bite for this idea, "capitalism produces all things in profusion but most of all it produces its own grave diggers." Capitalism encourages intense competition and so its eventual fall is inevitable as is the rise of the proletariat.
Communism will be some sort of Garden of Eden where no countries exist, no possessions and no religion. There will be no difference between mental and physical labour, no division. All activities will have equal worth. But how? What incentive would a Doctor have to do 7 years of training if in the end his salary will be the same as that of a bin man, whose job is hugely important and extremely necessary, but cannot possibly be seen as equal; good luck with that Marx. To explain this in an easy to digest way, Marx said "To each - according to ability. To each - according to need."
Procrastinators of the world unite!!! Tomorrow...
Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.
P.S. Sorry for the late and slightly disjointed blog, was attempting to write it whilst also doing a bunch of other assessments.
Showing posts with label Hegel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hegel. Show all posts
Saturday, 26 March 2011
Wednesday, 2 March 2011
Seminar Paper - Kant and Hegel
I promised you a seminar paper and today I deliver on that promise. Here's the magic.
Kant and Hegel were German Idealist philosophers, both writing around a similar time in the late 1700s to early 1800s. Their philosophies however were often at odds and Hegel in particular often wrote in reaction to the approach employed by Kant. Hegel also disagreed with the British Empiricists and their approach to natural law as, and this is a quote from the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, “Empiricism reaches conclusions that are limited by the particularities of its contexts and materials and thus cannot provide universally valid propositions regarding the concepts of various social and political institutions or of the relation of reflective consciousness to social and political experience.” I think what is meant by this is that Empiricism does not address certain social and political issues in its study of epistemology which Hegel believes you need to study.
Back to the differences between Kant and Hegel. Kant’s initial ideas, laid down in his 1781 book, The Critique of Pure Reason were a synthesis of the rationalism of Leibniz, which holds that all knowledge is derived from deductions based on existing ideas and Hume’s empiricism which holds that all knowledge is derived from observation alone. Kant therefore comes to the conclusion that we rely on the structure of our mind to form knowledge of the world, pure reason being something that is a priori. So the mind is not a blank canvas but instead it plays an active part in acquiring knowledge by processing the information it perceives. What we perceive then is more a result of our make-up as an observer than anything we do with the objects themselves. To this end he identifies objects such as time and space, which don’t exist externally and can’t be learned from experience so they help make up the basic concepts of the framework which enables us to make some sort of sense of the world.
The Critique of Judgment is the one I feel has the most relevance to our current work on Romanticism so I’m going to talk about that next. This particular work of Kant’s is most often remembered for its thoughts on aesthetics and with the previous lecture going into detail about first political and the aesthetic Prometheanism I felt it was appropriate to talk about it. Using the wonderful world of the Internet, I found an overview of the critique saying; Kant calls aesthetic judgments “judgments of taste” and remarks that, though they are based in an individual’s subjective feelings, they also claim universal validity. It goes on to say that our feelings about beauty differ from our feelings about pleasure and moral goodness in that they are disinterested. We seek to possess pleasurable objects, and we seek to promote moral goodness, but we simply appreciate beauty without feeling driven to find some use for it. Judgments of taste are universal because they are disinterested: our individual wants and needs do not come into play when appreciating beauty, so our aesthetic response applies universally. Aesthetic pleasure comes from the free play between the imagination and understanding when perceiving an object.
In Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, I was shocked to find scant mention of The Critique of Judgment but Russell has never particularly struck me as Romantic in any of the reading we have done so perhaps his bias should not surprise me. He does however go into some detail about Kant’s epistemology, stating in a round about way that whilst Kant believed ideas like arithmetic and geometry are synthetic in the Hume sense, they are also a priori. But how is this possible? Kant’s solution was that the outer world causes only sensation but our own mental apparatus orders this matter in space and time and supplies the concepts by which we understand experience. Essentially, we have some inbuilt thought processes which help us to make sense of the outer world and order our experiences. As a link to Hegel; Russell talks about Kant’s problem with ‘antinomies’ caused by applying space and time to things that are not experienced. Russell writes, “’The World has a beginning in time, and is also limited as regards space.’ The antithesis says: ‘The world has no beginning in time, and no limits in space; it is infinite as regards both time and space.’ The second antinomy proves every composite substance both is, and is not, made up of simple parts. The third antinomy maintains that there are two kinds of causality, one according to the laws of nature, the other that of freedom; the antithesis maintains that there is only causality according to the laws of nature. Finally, the fourth antinomy proves there is, and also, is not an absolutely necessary Being. This part of The Critique of Pure Reason greatly influenced Hegel who based his dialectic on antinomies.
We now move onto Hegel, viewed as more important than Kant by some, Russell included, because of the political implications of his writings. In Lesley Levene’s book, I Think, Therefore I Am: All the Philosophy You Need to Know she writes briefly on Hegellian Triads joking, “nothing to do with Chinese gangsters”; aside from the puns, she goes on to say there are the three parts of Hegel’s dialectical process. Using her example, first you have your thesis, being; then you come up with its antithesis, nothing; the resulting synthesis is becoming. Simply put, thesis and antithesis are reconciled into the concept ‘becoming’. Working off Kant’s ideas, Hegel reasoned that the world is not a collection of separate, contradictory units; despite appearances, these contradictory units are in fact part of the unified whole; the ‘Absolute’. Since these ideas can be refined and developed once combined, reality must be a rational idea with its fundamental structure mirrored in the structure of our thoughts as we try to unify contradictory ideas. I honestly really like this idea and so far agree with Hegel more than most philosophers, as the idea that we are a blank slate as in Locke’s Tabula Rasa never particularly appealed to me. The suggestion instead that we are using what are essentially a priori thought processes to come to terms with our experiences makes a lot more sense to me.
I made a passing reference to Hegel’s political importance and it was his posthumously published lecture notes on the philosophy of history which had such an impact. He saw history as a progression towards freedom; from the empires of the East, via the Greeks with their city-state, to the Protestant Reformation, when individuals realised they could achieve their own salvation. Imbued with this revolutionary spirit, Hegel had confidence in concepts such as progress and purpose. This had an enormous influence on German Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century and, with all this talk of historical progress, was central to the political theory of Karl Marx whilst Hegel’s dialectical reasoning, (minus all the spirit) became Marx’s dialectical materialism.
Thank you for listening.
Kant and Hegel were German Idealist philosophers, both writing around a similar time in the late 1700s to early 1800s. Their philosophies however were often at odds and Hegel in particular often wrote in reaction to the approach employed by Kant. Hegel also disagreed with the British Empiricists and their approach to natural law as, and this is a quote from the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, “Empiricism reaches conclusions that are limited by the particularities of its contexts and materials and thus cannot provide universally valid propositions regarding the concepts of various social and political institutions or of the relation of reflective consciousness to social and political experience.” I think what is meant by this is that Empiricism does not address certain social and political issues in its study of epistemology which Hegel believes you need to study.
Back to the differences between Kant and Hegel. Kant’s initial ideas, laid down in his 1781 book, The Critique of Pure Reason were a synthesis of the rationalism of Leibniz, which holds that all knowledge is derived from deductions based on existing ideas and Hume’s empiricism which holds that all knowledge is derived from observation alone. Kant therefore comes to the conclusion that we rely on the structure of our mind to form knowledge of the world, pure reason being something that is a priori. So the mind is not a blank canvas but instead it plays an active part in acquiring knowledge by processing the information it perceives. What we perceive then is more a result of our make-up as an observer than anything we do with the objects themselves. To this end he identifies objects such as time and space, which don’t exist externally and can’t be learned from experience so they help make up the basic concepts of the framework which enables us to make some sort of sense of the world.
The Critique of Judgment is the one I feel has the most relevance to our current work on Romanticism so I’m going to talk about that next. This particular work of Kant’s is most often remembered for its thoughts on aesthetics and with the previous lecture going into detail about first political and the aesthetic Prometheanism I felt it was appropriate to talk about it. Using the wonderful world of the Internet, I found an overview of the critique saying; Kant calls aesthetic judgments “judgments of taste” and remarks that, though they are based in an individual’s subjective feelings, they also claim universal validity. It goes on to say that our feelings about beauty differ from our feelings about pleasure and moral goodness in that they are disinterested. We seek to possess pleasurable objects, and we seek to promote moral goodness, but we simply appreciate beauty without feeling driven to find some use for it. Judgments of taste are universal because they are disinterested: our individual wants and needs do not come into play when appreciating beauty, so our aesthetic response applies universally. Aesthetic pleasure comes from the free play between the imagination and understanding when perceiving an object.
In Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, I was shocked to find scant mention of The Critique of Judgment but Russell has never particularly struck me as Romantic in any of the reading we have done so perhaps his bias should not surprise me. He does however go into some detail about Kant’s epistemology, stating in a round about way that whilst Kant believed ideas like arithmetic and geometry are synthetic in the Hume sense, they are also a priori. But how is this possible? Kant’s solution was that the outer world causes only sensation but our own mental apparatus orders this matter in space and time and supplies the concepts by which we understand experience. Essentially, we have some inbuilt thought processes which help us to make sense of the outer world and order our experiences. As a link to Hegel; Russell talks about Kant’s problem with ‘antinomies’ caused by applying space and time to things that are not experienced. Russell writes, “’The World has a beginning in time, and is also limited as regards space.’ The antithesis says: ‘The world has no beginning in time, and no limits in space; it is infinite as regards both time and space.’ The second antinomy proves every composite substance both is, and is not, made up of simple parts. The third antinomy maintains that there are two kinds of causality, one according to the laws of nature, the other that of freedom; the antithesis maintains that there is only causality according to the laws of nature. Finally, the fourth antinomy proves there is, and also, is not an absolutely necessary Being. This part of The Critique of Pure Reason greatly influenced Hegel who based his dialectic on antinomies.
We now move onto Hegel, viewed as more important than Kant by some, Russell included, because of the political implications of his writings. In Lesley Levene’s book, I Think, Therefore I Am: All the Philosophy You Need to Know she writes briefly on Hegellian Triads joking, “nothing to do with Chinese gangsters”; aside from the puns, she goes on to say there are the three parts of Hegel’s dialectical process. Using her example, first you have your thesis, being; then you come up with its antithesis, nothing; the resulting synthesis is becoming. Simply put, thesis and antithesis are reconciled into the concept ‘becoming’. Working off Kant’s ideas, Hegel reasoned that the world is not a collection of separate, contradictory units; despite appearances, these contradictory units are in fact part of the unified whole; the ‘Absolute’. Since these ideas can be refined and developed once combined, reality must be a rational idea with its fundamental structure mirrored in the structure of our thoughts as we try to unify contradictory ideas. I honestly really like this idea and so far agree with Hegel more than most philosophers, as the idea that we are a blank slate as in Locke’s Tabula Rasa never particularly appealed to me. The suggestion instead that we are using what are essentially a priori thought processes to come to terms with our experiences makes a lot more sense to me.
I made a passing reference to Hegel’s political importance and it was his posthumously published lecture notes on the philosophy of history which had such an impact. He saw history as a progression towards freedom; from the empires of the East, via the Greeks with their city-state, to the Protestant Reformation, when individuals realised they could achieve their own salvation. Imbued with this revolutionary spirit, Hegel had confidence in concepts such as progress and purpose. This had an enormous influence on German Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century and, with all this talk of historical progress, was central to the political theory of Karl Marx whilst Hegel’s dialectical reasoning, (minus all the spirit) became Marx’s dialectical materialism.
Thank you for listening.
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