Intro Philosophy: Kant & Hegel

Last time we ended with Hume and his very skeptical philosophy. Hume argues that we have impressions and ideas, and because all of our ideas come from our impressions, our ideas are assumptions. The famous example Hume uses is the billiard table, arguing that we have an idea or assumption of a cause when ball A hits ball B.

This total skepticism is quite welcome to some, but positivistic thinkers are not happy with cause being an assumption in the head and not a fact in the world. Another problem is that Hume does not tell us where our idea of cause comes from or how it is related to our other ideas.

This got to Kant, who said thing in itself with categories we can know (big influence on Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein’s early thought)

Kant (1724-1804) read Hume and famously wrote that Hume awakened him from his “dogmatic slumbers”. Kant is one of the biggest philosophers in the modern European cannon, loved by positivists and hated by skeptics. He was a big influence on Schopenhauer (who was a big influence on Nietzsche, the focus of next week), and a big influence on the early thought of Wittgenstein (who we focus on the week after next).

Kant believes very much in the aim of Descartes, the world does contain certainties and facts such as 2 + 3 = 5, but Descartes as we saw did not spend much time proving this. Kant’s major work, A Critique of Pure Reason, tries to bridge this gap with an air tight argument for true positive knowledge in the face of Hume’s skeptical challenge that all we know is merely assumption.

Kant argues that Hume is correct that we learn the world through the senses and this is how we acquire our ideas. However, even though we do not experience the world directly but rather through our experience and ideas, we can construct true positive knowledge of the world and our ideas through reason which can reveal new certain truths by reasoning from our initial ideas like mathematics can derive additional propositions from beginning propositions. Remember that in the 1700s algebraic science had come to question many traditional truths and give new positive answers. Kant studied and wrote in the time when Newton’s laws of physics had risen to fame.

Kant argues that the world, the “thing-in-itself” as he calls it, we cannot know, but our ideas about it have a structure and order to them. Kant believed that there are twelve categories of ideas and cause is one of these categories. If we start from these basic categories, we can learn additional certain truths about science and the world in the same way that if we start with 2 + 3 = 5 we can come to additional certain propositions of mathematics. Kant calls this the synthetic apriori, a fancy term for what we can discover we know prior to our experience of the world. The metaphor often used is our ideas are the eyeglasses through which we see the world.

Hegel (1770-1831) was as upset with Kant as Kant was upset with Hume. Like Kant thought of Hume, Hegel did not think that Kant gave much of an explanation or exploration of our ideas. It is one thing to say we have an idea of cause as a category for our experiences, but it is another to explain how cause functions, both in itself and together with the other ideas that we have. Hegel thought that Kant declares that we have a category of causation, but he does not show why we have this category or how it fits together with the other eleven categories.

Also, just as Kant was critical of Hume for putting the facts of the world out of reach by declaring everything to be an assumption, Hegel was critical of Kant for putting the world behind our ideas as “the thing-in-itself”. Do we experience our ideas as separate from the world in this way, like a pair of eyeglasses, or are our ideas experienced in and as the world itself? If cause is a lens through which we view the world, then the world itself remains something unknown and my certain knowledge of causation is still quite useless for practical knowledge of the world. Why should we know nothing of our experience of the world, but be certain of our experience of the mind?

Hegel has two major ideas that became very influential for later thinkers. The first is historical explanation or explanation by process. Hegel argues that things are not simply what they are at once, but evolve through stages to become what they are, and the process by which they evolve show us how the things essentially work. Also, things are not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things in which they become what they are (very like the Buddhist concept of co-dependent arising). After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud and Feuerbach were major thinkers who overturned old theories of static order with new theories of process to explain the workings of the mind and society. Consider that Newton thought God made the earth at the very beginning in an instant, while most believe today that there was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy formed. Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin, and how this questions our human-centered view of reality.

Hegel’s second major idea, the mechanism or motion of evolution over time, is dialectic. Dialectic is a Greek term for arguing back and forth, for and against a position, to come to greater understanding. Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and his dialogue plays show Socrates arguing against others and himself in this way. Hegel argues that all things are made of oppositions or contradictions (contra-diction means “arguing against”, like arguing both sides, the pros and cons, of a particular thing). This is not only similar to Lao Zi’s wheel (made of both solid and empty together), but Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal but opposite force.

While this has become controversial, many believe that Hegel’s dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and synthesis. Hegel often presents our ideas (which live in the world as politics and our shared expectations) as starting out positive, flipping and becoming negative, and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole. Remember Lao Zi’s wheel leads us through this three stage process (solid at first, then empty, then both), as does the famous Zen quote that first a rock is a rock, then a rock isn’t a rock (it is in the mind, as a concept) and then a rock is a rock (real rock and concept together as the rock).

Hegel argues that by looking at things as evolving over time in a situation, not immediate and isolated, and looking at things as two sided and in opposition to themselves and others, rather than categorical and without tension, we can come to understand how things actually are, which is a union (while an opposition) of how they are in the mind and how they are in the world.

In his first major work, The Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit (1806), Hegel gives us his social history of society and philosophy evolving by stages to the present day. In his second major work, The Science of Logic (1816), Hegel gives us his psychology. We will look at the overall structure and some key ideas of each, spending more time on the Logic which has become one of my favorites. Americans have only begun studying Hegel, because Hegel had a student named Marx who took Hegel’s concept of dialectic and used it to father communism. Communists like Hegel’s Logic very much, and so American and British universities did not teach much Hegel and when they do they often teach the Phenomenology but not the Logic. This is unfortunate, because while Hegel’s ideas about history in the Phenomenology are quite antiquated today I have great hope that there is more to be discovered by looking at the Logic in the light of the discoveries of modern psychology, especially the work of Piaget the child psychologist.


THE PHENOMENOLOGY

I disagree with Hegel’s history because it is quite simplistic and eurocentric, but it is an excellent introduction to Hegel’s thought not only because it was his first major work, after which he wrote the Logic to clarify the inner process of the mind at work in this history, but it shows dialectic working in three stages to complete itself as a union of contradictory sides.

For Hegel, the first stage of history is the Orientals. Hegel uses this term as it was used until recently, before the 1960s, to refer to everyone who is not European. In the 60s, 70s and 80s this term was still used by many to refer to East Asian people such as the Chinese. As archeology in Hegel’s time had revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel puts this as the first and basic starting stage in human development. It is good that this is the non-European start, but unfortunate that all further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the development is a course of Europe becoming different from others (again, this is overly simplistic and quite racist and eurocentric, but funny enough this is still largely the view preached on campuses today).

The Orientals understand objectivity and the state, two powerful positives. The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not question their society or science. They see the real as real, but do not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned. In some cases, such as Buddhism in India, Hegel believes that they realized skepticism but did not develop it further, turning the world into a simple void or nothing. Thus the Orientals get simple one-sided Being or Non-Being, but do not put these two together to see the unity of the opposition. It is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel argues make this next leap and become the second stage of history.

The Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of objectivity as subjectivity. While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who did this, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the earlier empires as more complex and also that the Greeks were only one civilization of many that made leaps forward like this (Jaspers calls the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese, the three places we studied in the ancient world in depth, the axial age).

Just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understand the negative, the temporary and perspective. Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing Being and Non-Being together as Becoming, and sees Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further development. However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks still put Being off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire or Plato’s static ideal forms. It is the Germans, and specifically Hegel himself, who see the true unity of objectivity and subjectivity, of state and individual, of necessity and freedom, of science and discovery, to complete the history of thought in three stages. Notice that Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in a page, with no credit at all.

The Europeans, but specifically the Germans who are in Hegel’s time becoming the foremost champions of philosophy, history, science, and politics are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world. Hegel sees Hume and Kant as the last negative and positive before his own system of unification. Also, as a teenager Hegel heard about the French Revolution and was, like many youth, an enthusiastic supporter of the left-wing progressive removal of the aristocrats and traditional ways. We get our terms left-wing and right-wing from the French Revolution, as liberals and conservatives sat on opposite sides of the congress hall. Unfortunately for the French, and for young Hegel, the revolution collapsed and Napoleon, a dictator, took over. Hegel developed his ideas about ideas working in the real world as oppositions watching the French Revolution.

Hegel believes that history is almost at its completion in his time with his own philosophy and the politics of the German parliamentary state which balances collective objectivity with individual subjectivity. He also believes that religion evolves exactly as philosophy and politics does, and that German Lutheran Christianity is the final form of religion that unites the individual directly with God (living objectivity) because each man is the priest of his household.


THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC

The Master/Slave dialectic is the continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next. It works on the level of idea, individual and social movement.

At first, the individual goes out into the world and discovers that there are other beings out there with other opinions and views. The individual thus wants to at first kill, later conquer these others, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be objectivity. The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master, and develops while the master deteriorates and grows lazy. The slave comes to realize that he can do things he never thought of for someone else, so he can do things no one has thought up yet for himself, and thus triumphs over the master and becomes the next master.

This is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap seeing subjectivity and objectivity as two sides of the same thing. Notice that this tells us the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and the Germans were slaves of the Greeks! This is not often pointed out, but it is implied by Hegel and confirmed by historians today. While Hegel is quite eurocentric, he is right to this extent.

The Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Marx. Feminist Hegelians, like Simone de Beauvoir, uses it for women in ‘The Second Sex’, Franz Fanon uses it for black people in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as does the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis (who went to Germany to study Hegel before going to jail for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the 60s).


THE LOGIC

After writing the Phenomenology, Hegel came to realize that he had not described the inner workings of the dialectical process of history to his liking. Hegel believed the world consisted of ideas, so he leaves history behind and turns to the workings of ideas in the mind. To show the inner psychology at work in every stage of historical development, he wrote his Logic which like the Phenomenology unfolds in three stages as positive, negative and synthesis, but instead of Orientals, Greeks and Germans, the three stages of the Logic are Being, Essence, and Concept.

Like Neo-Platonism, thought has to gather everything up such that all categories become modes or branches of the same thing. It does this with Understanding which holds things fast in sameness and Reason which divides things against each other and against themselves, opposing the Understanding. Understanding wants to keep ideas as they are and separate from each other, while Reason wants to change ideas and unite them all together as a whole. The mind craves unity, objectivity as the all-view, which pulls it in two directions. First, it wants to hold on to the unities of the understanding and keep them away from reason tearing them apart. However, reason wants to dissolve everything and return it all to the Absolute, or the undivided One. Thus, the motions rock back and forth in stages. It would thus be correct to say that, the way Hegel describes it, conservatives would rather understand than reason and liberals would rather reason than understand.

At each stage, the Understanding comes to change its shape and provide the ground for the back and forth positions of reason which share the same understanding(s). Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Thus, Hegel says there really is only one philosophy which is ‘thought’ itself, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought.

Why is it opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Interestingly, Hegel writes that we need to start with ‘legend’ of the fall of man, of Adam falling out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important (a similar reading to Deists of his time in Europe, who see the bible as true psychologically but not literal). When Adam, or consciousness, falls into the world out of unity with all, it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can describe the fall from unity either in physics as the Big Bang or in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget).

Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding. (God)(IS), (You)(Are), (this)(is), the anchor points of Descartes. However, these are inadequate. First, they are one sided, and so dogmatic, stuck. They are divided from each other and the All, so reason is not satisfied and tries to figure out how all of these separate categories are one in reality, or the big One or All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content, making them almost no different from empty. This is exactly how Hegel is critical of Kant’s categories and the gap he leaves between mind and world.

(68) “Kant, it is well known, did not put himself to much trouble in discovering the categories.”

“Kant, as we must add, never got beyond the negative result that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, and never penetrated to the discovery of what the antinomies really and positively mean. That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites.”

(118) “However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.”

Hegel writes that the feeling of being alive is to feel contradiction within oneself, at rest in itself but at the same time moving itself beyond itself. It both wants to stay and go at once, and does. Similarly, the Soviet literary critic and thinker Bakhtin said that when we think we are in dialogue with ourselves, are opposed to ourselves on opposite sides.

BEING, NOTHING AND BECOMING

In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that Heraclitus realized the unity of Being and Non-Being as ceaseless Becoming, as the flux of the cosmic fire. Hegel says that some say no one is capable of understanding contradiction, but Hegel points to Heraclitus and argues that to come to the next level in your understanding your reason has to see both sides and unite them in the cement of the understanding, which is what Heraclitus did for the Greeks such that they could rise beyond the Orientals to the next level. Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and nonbeing as one like Heraclitus. It is merely recognizing it that is the hard part. Hegel says that this is the hurdle that prevents the common person from being a philosopher, and the reason that the great thinkers and revolutions in thought are rare. In fact, often it takes decades after the thinker’s death for their ideas to become accepted, further proof that the great thinker must unite the old with the opposite direction of the new and this is the barrier between the new idea and the common understanding of the people.

Once thought realizes becoming as the unity of the being of things and their non-being (their temporary being in time and their not being other things), thought still does not have enough to understand each and every thing or how they fit into the All as one. Thought tries to understand the individual beings of the world and the world itself as constant becoming, like Heraclitus, but this does not show us how things are interrelated. This is exactly how Kant was frustrated with Hume, because everything being an assumption does not tell us what things are specifically.

Thought must explore two opposite directions to try to find the meaning of individual things. First, it tries to understand things by their qualities (such as green, square, closed), but this moves away from the things themselves towards abstract ideas. Second, thought tries to understand things by their quantities, with each thing being a one itself and being a quantity of many parts and being in a group of many members. Unfortunately, this leaves each being as merely a thing, and tells us nothing about the specific differences between types of things. Notice that quality and quantity are the two opposite sides to our abstractions of things, the two ways we isolate and abstract, through thought, the parts and ways of things. Consider that your hand is not explainable simply by its shape, or color, or texture, any more than its being one hand with five fingers, though all of this together tells me much about my hand. To understand your hand, you have to see it in context, in the world used with other things, as well as understand the qualities and quantities of the hand.

Thought now tries to understand things in terms of essences, and these essences in terms of their qualities and quantities. Remember that Hegel in his Phenomenology saw Plato as the union of Heraclitus and Parmenides, that Plato thought things have ideal essences in the stars that cause them to be what they are, and that Platonism was the major school of thought in middle-age Europe to which Hegel acknowledges he owes many insights.

Because thought could not understand things in their qualities and quantities, it tries to understand things by putting them in groups and then understanding the qualities and quantities of these groups. It puts these as essences outside the world as Plato put them up in the stars, in another more modern way “in” things and their groups as their “nature”. The problem with this stage is that this still puts things as isolated and does not understand them in a situation as mutually interdependent. It seeks the meaning of the thing in the group where it could not find it in the individual, but this still isolates things even as it puts them in groups. Hegel is very aware that modern science is often in this mode, isolating things and finding new truths about their exclusive natures. For Hegel, Plato’s forms, Kant’s categories and scientific theories are good but they are not complete because they do not understand how things cannot be separate from each other if we want our knowledge to be like the world, in which everything fits together.

Just as qualities are non-beings within beings, essences are also non-beings within beings, but a core is sought beyond and opposed to outer qualities or bunches of quantities. Thought has turned on itself yet preserved itself, trying to understand the real as merely the idea. It would be like saying that the hand is really the ideal hand, rather than a hand in the real world which we idealize. Thought is struggling to grasp the unity of the mind and the world, of our ideas of things and the real things themselves. Remember Kant left a complete gap between the fully certain categories of the mind and the unknown world-in-itself. Just as beings were opposed to themselves and others, Hegel says that essences, if they remain many and are not gathered into a trunk of the All still have contradictions in themselves and against each-other and so they are opposed to unity.

What, then, moves us beyond Kant’s categories and isolated essences? The process of dialectic, which grasps the unity of sameness and difference, of one and many, and of necessity and freedom, as it did with Being and Non-Being before at the first stage. The idea and the thing are realized as one in the Concept, which includes the thought and thing. When we see that the world is in our minds and in itself together as one, that things are our ideas about them and themselves for us as one that is also many, this is for Hegel Actuality, the final stage. It is grasped by the mind, but in extension is the view of the real world and all that it is or could be.

Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory and more modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle. To see that no part of reality is absolutely necessary, but no part is absolutely free, and the two hang together as opposites always like light and darkness, this is the final stage that lets us see things as they are. This would be the final and total grasp of the wheel as solid and empty, or the rock as thing and perception/assumption.

Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and simply Nature itself, with a ground to continue to investigate and understand things with all the branching of the Idea by which we could ever understand them to be. All becomes a single Idea, that is one with the world.

Unlike Hegel and Right wing Hegelians, who believe that the system has been achieved, Left Hegelians (most famously Marx) believe that evolution is constant and unending for the system, not just the knowledge it acquires and that we are constantly taking positions that are one-sided that need to be complimented by the opposite perspective. Many of the latest European thinkers have been powerfully affected by this leftist Hegelian view.

Social & Political Philosophy: Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci & Mao

Vladimir Lenin (1870 – 1924)
While Marx believed that the workers would rise up and create the communist revolution, Lenin argued that a small vanguard party of professional revolutionaries must take power to make the transition from capitalism to dictatorial communism to democratic communism possible. This became known as Leninism, along with specific economic theories Lenin believed would be the best way of implementing Marxism. Lenin, like Trotsky, was exiled from Russia for these views and organizing as a communist. In the midst of WWI, with starvation throughout the land, the Tsar abdicated the thrown as the people of Russia rose up demanding revolution in February 1917. The social democrats (like the US democratic party, who push for social reforms without nationalization) continued to invest in fighting the war, which upset the starving Russian people and led to the return of Lenin and Trotsky and the October revolution, the second and final stage of the Russian Revolution. Lenin, who famously announced, “I bring you peace, land and bread”, found himself politically on top of a volatile and unstable situation with many parties demanding many things. Unfortunately, after the Tsar and social democrats running the country were overthrown, Lenin called together a democratic assembly but disbanded it when it did not support a majority for Lenin’s Bolshevik party.

Leon Trotsky (1879 - 1940)
After Lenin’s death in 1924, not very long after the October Revolution, Trotsky and Stalin vied for power. Stalin argued that the Soviet Union should create “socialism in one country”, concentrating on Russia but supporting communist parties worldwide. This became known as Stalinism, though Stalin’s supporters called it Marxism and Leninism. Trotsky opposed this, arguing as Marx and Engels had done in the Communist Manifesto that Russia must work for revolution in developed countries like France, Germany, Britain and America. When Stalin seized power, Trotsky was exiled from Russia yet again, but this time by the communist government that he had played a large part in creating. Not only was Trotsky for internationalism, he was for democratic continuous revolution that would keep the top-down party structure in check, the Theory of Permanent Revolution. This became known as Trotskyism, and Stalin worked hard to eliminate all Trotskyites from power. Stalin became a brutal dictator, like Lenin suppressing all democratic dissent and criticism of his regime as counter-revolutionary enemies. Trotskyites argue to this day that their version is the true Marxism, just like the Stalinists, calling each other counter-revolutionaries who want to destroy true Marxism and the communist state. Today, in the wake of the tragedies of Stalin and Mao, most hard lining communists today ascribe to Trotskyism.

Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937)
Gramsci’s thought, contained in his Prison Notebooks, has become hip for many left leaning people including socialists and communists who do not like what happened in Russia or China. One of the founders of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), he was jailed by Mussolini after he took fascist control of the country in 1922 while Gramsci was visiting Russia as a representative. The prosecutor at Gramsci’s trial famously said, “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning”. Gramsci died in prison, but not before writing extensively in his prison notebooks which were smuggled out by visitors. Gramsci’s centrally celebrated concept amongst socialists, Marxists and post-Marxists is cultural hegemony. In the wake of Stalinism, communists began wondering why the revolution was not succeeding worldwide as planned. Gramsci argued that while Marx and Engels reduced all conflict to the struggle between workers and owners, society is more complex and certain groups dominate others (ex: Christians are predominant in America and this can lead to demonization of Muslims, just as Europeans are predominant such that minority groups are suppressed). The process by which these dominant and marginal forces work out their struggles is known as hegemonic discourse. With such a complex situation, communists should switch from an outright war of frontal attack to one of social positioning. Only such a long and patient effort would succeed given the divisions that exist in the world population. Like Trotsky, and following his lead, Gramsci believed that Lenin and Stalin had come to betray the revolution not because they wished to but because they did not grasp the need for a slow process of continuous revolution in setting up the dictatorship of a vanguard party. All dissent was labeled “reactionary” and “counter-revolutionary”, which masked the real divisions and issues.

Mao Zedong (1893 - 1976)
Mao had his own take on Marxism and Leninism. While the communist symbol is a hammer (for factory workers) and sickle (for farm workers), Mao argued that Lenin and Stalin had paid too much attention to the factories in the city and not enough to the farmers of the countryside. Mao shifted his attention and reforms to agriculture and farm life, which made sense considering China. Mao argued that communism in a developing country would only succeed if it did not try to jump to advanced industrialization in imitation of Britain and America but rather developed the life of the farming peasants. Mao famously said that the leader must be down on his knees with the peasants in the soil, or else there would be alienation between the rulers and the workers of the sort Marx had hoped to overcome. Unfortunately, Mao surrounded himself with supporters who wanted to please him while brutally suppressing dissent, and this created a situation where everyone was telling Mao the farms were producing overabundance when they were in fact creating massive starvation. In the wake of Mao’s death, factions accused each other of undermining Mao’s policies and thwarting the revolution. Since 1978 and the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, capitalist free-market reforms were introduced and China remains an officially communist country that has a mixed economy that leans far towards socialism. Bob Avakian, who participated in the 60s Free Speech Movement and worked with the Black Panther Party, is the most well known American Maoist.

I gave you Slavoj Zizek’s (1949 – present) introduction to the writings of Mao to read. Zizek, a post-Marxist socialist philosopher himself, argues that people make the mistake of trying to find the single moment when communism became dictatorship, but there may not be a single famous figure who “got it wrong” as Judas to Marx’s Jesus. As a Slovenian socialist, Zizek has particular interest in this because Slovenia was one of the lands brutalized under Stalin. He argues that the primary struggle today is between the first and third world, and that communism, like capitalism, can become the oppressive force that it attempts to oppose. Zizek often takes controversial figures like Jesus, Descartes and Mao and finds important contributions that are often overlooked in the wake of tragedy, opposing the externalization of the enemy. I appreciate this reversal of perspective. Thus, Zizek applauds Mao’s turn towards the farmers who Lenin sidelined for the sake of city development, as well as his return to a Hegelian understanding of the pervasiveness of contradiction and continuous struggle.

Social & Political Philosophy: 3rd Response Essay Topic

Given that capitalism, socialism and communism are all based on the idea of greater democracy from the bottom up through a system from the top down, which system do you think has the greatest chance of success and why? Include at least one of the thinkers we have covered since the last response and their ideas (Adam Smith, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Marcuse, Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mao).

Social & Political Philosophy: Communism & Marxism

COMMUNISM
As mentioned last week, communism is radical socialism. While socialism argues that some industrial production should be publicly owned and controlled for social interests rather than private interests in a mixed economy, communism argues for an entirely planned economy in which the “anarchy” of private ownership of industrial capitalism is transformed into a centralized system of social interests and production. Marx and Engels argued that just as the French Revolution threw off the first and second estates, the clergy and nobility, giving all power to the third estate, the common people, so must the communist revolution throw off the industrial capitalists and give all power to the laborers, the industrialized farmers and factory workers. Though the French Revolution fell apart and Napoleon took over, they viewed history much like Hegel and argued that industrialization signaled the final stage of economic development when an egalitarian revolution could finally succeed.

As we discussed with Saint-Simon and socialism, Marx and Engels argued that socialism would lead to communism such that there would be no more “thieves” who contribute nothing to society and “to each according to contribution” could become “to each according to need”. Saint-Simon argued for meritocracy, but Marx and Engels argued for a more radical egalitarian democracy that have no need to take benefits or voting rights from anyone. This assumes two things: first, that society would maximize the productivity and contribution of all members of society, and second, that society would produce a superabundance of wealth such that all could take as needed.

In theory, communism was supposed to be a radical form of direct democracy in which free-associating individuals participate in labor and labor councils (soviets, in Russia), which then form larger groups that form society as a whole. This would be very similar if not identical to bottom-up socialism and anarchism. The problem arises, most famously in Russia and China, in the transition to this final stage by process. Just as the French Revolution fell first to the dictatorship of Robespierre and then Napoleon, the Russian and Chinese communist revolutions did not come to erase divisions of power and create classless direct democracy but rather resulted in the dictatorships of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. In every case, a top-down radical communist government was installed to transition the people into a bottom-up communist direct democracy. Unfortunately, in both Russia and China (North Korea, Cuba) the people were never deemed “ready” by the oligarchs and the dictatorships persisted, unwilling to relinquish control. The most famous case is the duel between Lenin and Trotsky. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Lenin was not willing to compromise with opinions different than his own so he quickly abolished the democratic assembly and took power. Trotsky, who argued that there should be continuous revolution and democratic criticism of power, was tossed out, Stalin took power after Lenin and eventually had Trotsky killed. This was parodied by Orwell in his famous book Animal Farm.

To play devil’s advocate, all of these societies were under barrage by European wealthy capitalist nations and had reason to fear that communism would be overthrown without a strong leader shepherding the people and protecting them from communism. Consider the US blockade of Cuba and the jokes Reagan makes about the poverty of Cuba and Russia. In addition, there were large portions of the population who did not believe in either socialism or communism, and the leaders could easily convince themselves that they were acting out of the people’s interests in a top-down capacity even if the people were not yet capable of seeing their own advantage in communism from a bottom-up perspective. Would you trust America to be a direct democracy at this moment? Both the left and the right would worry that a democratic vote might sweep away their own programs and reforms. Those on the left would be afraid of popular racism, distrust of intellectuals and nationalism, while those on the right would be afraid of socialism, multiculturalism and internationalism.

Today many Marxists, or post-Marxists as the most critical call themselves after Stalin, acknowledge the serious problems with the Russian and Chinese revolutions and propose many different forms other than vanguard party dictatorship for the transition from capitalist to communist society. Unlike socialists, who would compromise with a mixed economy, they would still argue that an entirely planned economy is possible and most beneficial for all members of society. The question is that between top-down and bottom-up forms of power, the struggle we find in all societies that has certainly been raised wherever there has been leadership and division of labor. How much can leaders or the common people be trusted to work from their own particular individual interests and view toward the overall common social interest and view. From the top one can more easily take a longer view and social view (in line with Mill’s Utilitarianism) but one is detached from the labor and struggles of the common people. From the bottom one is involved with the labor and struggles of the common people, but one has more trouble taking the detached view while attached to one’s own position and in-group.

Another important idea of communism is internationalism. Nationalism, of course, is the allegiance to one’s homeland. Just as communism proposed common property and interest, internationalism proposes a common society beyond the boundaries of nation-states and a system that benefits all people of the world equally.


MARX & ENGELS
Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) was a German political philosopher and economist who co-wrote the Communist Manifesto with Engels in 1848. He wrote many works, his most famous other than the manifesto being Capital, a massive three volume work on capitalism and the possibility of communism. Born upper-middle class in Prussia, he became involved with the Young Hegelians at the University of Berlin. He spend most of his life in London writing, supported by Engels in poor conditions. His tombstone in London reads, “Workers of all lands unite”, the final line from the manifesto, and “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways – the point however is to change it”.

Friedrich Engels (1820 – 1895) was the son of a wealthy German cotton cloth manufacturer who read Hegel and began denouncing the conditions of the laborers in factories such as those owned by his father. With Marx, he attended the University of Berlin, joined the young Hegelians and co-wrote the Communist Manifesto. While he wrote many works on his own, including The Conditions of the Working Class in England, he considered Marx to be a better writer and philosopher than himself, at one time calling Marx the greatest philosopher who has existed so far, and he used his family’s wealth to support Marx and his writings.


THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
I gave you the Preface to the Russian Edition of 1882 as a preface to the manifesto because not only do you find Marx & Engels mentioning that the first Russian edition was translated by Bakunin, obviously before he broke from the communists to become a major leader of anarchism though the break is not mentioned, you also find them telling Russia that America will clearly overtake Europe as the greatest industrial power and that the revolution can only succeed if Russia, Europe and America all develop together. Considering the resistance of England and America in particular to the Soviet Union and its fall, this is quite remarkable to hear coming from Marx and Engels who would both be dead for decades before the Russian Revolution.

Marx and Engels start by noting that communism is feared by the powers that be in Europe, and so communism is clearly strong enough to publish its views openly in spite of persecution. The opening line famously reads, “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism”. The French philosopher Derrida wrote a book Spectres of Marx in which he, like the postmodernist he is, shows that every Marxist believes they follow what Marx really believed but this is taken in many different directions such that one may wonder if there is a single meaning behind or correct interpretation of Marxism.

Marx and Engels write that all history is the history of class struggle. As already mentioned, Gramsci and others will be critical of this reduction of all struggles between oppressor and oppressed into the single struggle of owners and workers. Marx and Engels believe that the final polarized struggle is crystallizing in their lifetime such that the final battle has been set by industrialization. The world has been united through international trade such that industrialization covers the globe. Factories and industrialized farms (hence the hammer, industry, and the sickle, agriculture, crossed as the symbol of communism) have created great alienating divisions between great masses of laborers who view each other as common in interest and the small number of wealthy capitalist owners who control the laborers. Notice how similar this is to Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.

As mentioned, a new time calls for a new stage of development. Between the owners and laborers is the bourgeoisie, what we often call the middle class (doctors, lawyers, professors, business managers, scientists, priests, artists, etc), who are the privileged servants of the capitalist owners but are in a prime position to lead the workers to liberation and a new way of life. The middle class is needed by the owners because the modes of production, the theories of management, academics, art and science, are in constant need of revolution and new ideas. Because of this, the middle class must be kept under control or they will revolutionize the structure of society in a way that does not benefit the small number of owners. However, because the world has become a smaller place and the machines allow for greater and greater achievements, capitalism is like a sorcerer whose magical spells have gotten too powerful for the sorcerer to control. All the peoples of the world are now in communication and exploited in the same ways by a small minority while the human individual becomes ever more capable of achievements through technology and science.

The manifesto argues that communists have no interests other than the interests of everyone, and that their theories and conclusions are not based on ideas or principles but rather the actual historical relations of the class struggle. Here we see the scientific positivism of Saint-Simon, a positivism that I myself do not admire for the same reasons Marcuse is critical of it. Marxists often argue that Hegel was an idealist, but Marxism avoids idealism and is scientific and materialistic. Marcuse argues, in the wake of Stalin, that this positivism is an unwarranted defense against criticism that does not liberate people but helps to enslave them. Next time, we will see that Trotsky would say the same and became the hated enemy of Lenin and later Stalin for it. This is a particularly interesting problem given that Marx was a great admirer of Hegel’s Logic, calling it fundamentally revolutionary, and thought the bourgeoisie who did not share his views were not critical enough of society.

The manifesto argues that communism is called the abolition of individuality and liberty by the middle and upper classes, and this is correct insofar as this sort of freedom is only provided by brutality and exploitation. Here again we see socialism and communism leaning toward equality where capitalism leans toward freedom. Marxists argue that they want freedom, but the sort of freedom that capitalists are afraid of losing is unsustainable in an economically just and egalitarian society. We read, “you reproach us with intending to do away with your property…Precisely so, for is just what we intend”. Middle and upper class individuality should be made impossible. Only then can common people be given their just due. The middle and upper class say that society will fall apart because everyone will be lazy, but the manifesto argues that if this is so, society should have collapsed already because those who work do not gain and those who gain do not work.

The manifesto calls for the abolition of the family, that children and women are objectified and exploited by the household head who seeks for his own gain rather than society or equal benefit throughout the family. Nationality and religious divisions need also be swept away, as these also divide the people who should view and share in common. Inheritance will be abolished, public education established, rebel property seized, central services nationalized, and heavy taxes on the wealthy imposed. In the beginning, these radical changes must be established through dictatorship or the property and power of the ruling class will thwart the revolution. Once the changes have taken, the dictatorship can be gradually dismantled and society will be ready for direct bottom-up democracy. Unfortunately, as we will see next time with Trotsky, Gramsci and Mao, this did not go according to the manifesto’s idealistic plan.

Ethics: Violence & Grossman

Apes & Violence
Monkeys and apes are some of the only creatures that can rotate their shoulders as we can.
This means that they, like us, are the only creatures that can throw things and club things.

There are three major groups of apes, Gorillas, Orangutans and Chimpanzees. Gorillas kill kids, but they don’t rape. Orangutans never kill kids, but they rape all the time. Our direct ancestor is the Chimpanzee, which comes in two major sub-species. Bonobo Chimps, the smaller group, are quite non-violent and solve all social issues with sex. The main group of Chimps, our direct relatives, do all the kinds of violence known to human kind. Once again, like every ethical issue we examine, the issue is older than humanity.

Early Civilization & Violence
Violence, like sex, was a part of life since childhood in the beginning. As Grossman says, in Victorian England sex became something shameful and best kept out of sight, and similarly with the butcher and refrigeration violence became something out of sight. Consider David Foster Wallace’s FX Porn article about T2 and Jurassic park. Sex and killing are specialized spectacles, quite unrealistic and pieced together with bad dialogue. Interestingly, serial killers and aggressive personality types often start and practice by killing animals, which used to be something everyone had to do. These are disassociating fantasies.

In the ancient world cosmology picture of the world, sacrifice and dismemberment play a major part in the creation of the world. To eat, one must kill livestock. Similarly, sacrifice was seen as giving food/thanks back in balance and exchange. The cosmos was thought of as a great sacrifice in which the All is carved up for everyone’s use and consumption. Thus, one should carve up animals and humans and give them back to be fair.

Consider the scepter of the king. Often in early cultural art we see the king holding a stick that symbolizes his authority. It has been suggested that this is the king as judge, jury and executioner. If you do something stupid, you get hit with the stick. How hard you get hit depends on what you did. The Egyptian Pharaohs have crossing stick and hook, ‘rod and staff’ from the psalm, in crossed arms, signifying that the king has power over life and death, which cross over into one another (like any pair of opposites).

Society became complexified and highly specialized. We now have specialized individuals who kill animals, who cook meat, who order acts of aggression, and who carry out the orders. As Grossman says, this specialization has made violence unnatural and fantastic, like sex.

Consider now that the US spends more on War than anyone has ever in all of world history. Objective ‘science’ is a myth in so far as the US Military has been one of the biggest supporters and funders of science (physics, mathematics, psychology) so far. Addicted To War says: over 50% of budget and taxes go to US Military.


LT. COL. GROSSMAN’S ON KILLING

The book is written in 1995, and Grossman says that there has never been a book on killing or dealing with killing from the individual perspective until this time. As an officer and psychologist of the US Marine Corps, Grossman tells us many things that are surprising but trustworthy about the capability of individuals and groups to be violent.

The overall message of the book I find to be quite positive. We all have violent thoughts, but very few humans will be violent, no matter what culture or ethnicity or gender. Normally, there is a safety catch in the human mind that prevents us from being violent (notice the gun metaphor, useful for teaching troops). However, in certain situations with particular factors, most everyone becomes capable of violence. 2% of the population have an aggressive personality, potentially psychosis (these individuals are often, Grossman says, drafted into the hardcore units, the marine spearhead squads dropped behind enemy lines or the frontal advance groups). Regardless of whether one is of the 98% or the aggressive 2%, violence is a kick at first but then psychological problems set in that are difficult for the individual.

The overall message is: though human beings are constantly getting themselves into violent situations, there are no human beings who find violence easy or simply justifiable. They pose this way to seem tough, but as Grossman says violence is about impressing the enemy and making them submit much more than it is about the killing. The killing is always in the service of something else, such as staying alive. Grossman, as a psychologist, is convinced that post traumatic stress disorder is natural and most will carry it silently their whole lives, afraid of what others will say or say about them if they question the things they did for the highest ideals.

In my terms: there is a balance that is quite brutal in the head. We can pretend like others don’t matter to us, but only for awhile. Grossman says: the one who takes life cheapens his own, in his own head, and argues this point well.

Non-firing Rates:
Grossman starts off from a very military pragmatic point of view. He argues that we have every reason to believe that most humans who have been involved with war have not tried to kill anyone the whole time. He notes studies that say that WWI and II troops would routinely fire over the heads of the enemy. He says that he and others examined these studies and the military celebrated a 95% firing rate in Vietnam, although he later tells us the factors that make this seem much better for the military than it really was. There were 50,000 rounds per US kill in Vietnam.

Grossman argues that, in all cultures and times, the majority of soldiers were posturing in war, doing everything to make the enemy back down, cease fighting and submit. Before guerilla war became the norm, this is the beating of the drums and the war chants, the clashing of shields. Grossman says we see nonlethal fighting with one’s own species in piranhas, rattlers, and the whole animal kingdom. Alexander the great only lost 700 men the whole 20 years of war.
This is quite similar to Hegel’s idea of the master/slave, reversed: submittal is primary.

American media is quite gifted with the myth of the easy kill, for both the hero and villain. Ex: Schwarzenegger’s Commando (“I let him go”) and O Dog from Menace to Society watching tape. This myth, like the propaganda last week, is a cultural conspiracy, a conspiracy of silence according to Grossman. It’s not what it says that’s the lie, but what remains unsaid.

What this myth conceals: there are far greater chance of being a psychological casualty of conflict then there are of being killed or wounded. 60 days of continuous combat without rest means 98% rate of psychological casualties (why we keep ‘green zones’ and distance to target).

But: is this killing or being subjected to combat? Grossman argues that Britain and Germany bombed each other’s cities in WWII, the first massive bombardments of history (now our specialty, setting the bar in Vietnam, then Gulf War, now War in Iraq). The theory was that the civilian population would go into traumatic shell shock, that everyone would be quickly converted to psychological casualties, but this turned out surprisingly to not be the case.

It turns out that, unless one feels that one has done something to warrant being killed, one bunkers down and does not suffer post traumatic stress disorder. Depression sets in, but not PTSD. Prison guards in the cities DO suffer from PTSD during bombings, but NOT the POWS! This shows us the balance of self and other in the head. One compulsively sets the world up as THIS perspective vs. OTHERS, and one sets the others up as one sets up the self in the head. This means that when one knows that the other will feel JUSTIFIED in killing, one becomes conflicted with oneself. Consider that recon patrols behind enemy lines don’t suffer PTSD like hard core (2%) marine spearhead units that are dropped behind lines to sew death and confusion. If one is in the enemies home turf, but not killing, one does not feel like the justifiably killable target that one does if one is killing the enemy. Consider that killing someone in their home is much more traumatic and justifiable than killing someone in their home.

So: What factors increase or decrease the justification and the enabling of violence?
This is what Grossman and the US Military have been studying intensely. Grossman tells us many surprising things openly that are done to help US troops kill easier with less consequence.

Absolution by Distance:
Killing with a knife is much harder than killing with a 20 foot pike, and killing with an automatic weapon is far easier because one does not feel the other’s body at all (propaganda value of showing the enemy with fixed bayonets). Medium to long range is the easiest kill. The farther away, the less PTSD. The more equipment mediating the kill, the easier it is. Bomber pilots feel little to no PTSD. Grossman says ‘Nintendo Warfare’ in first Gulf War is intentional use of night vision goggles and TV screens in tanks, which lessens the PTSD (one would think the purpose was to take the enemy in the dark, but not so).

The less one sees eyes and faces, the easier it is to kill. This is why the executioner is hooded along with the executed. Both lessen the feeling of PTSD for the executioner. Apes and humans have an impulse to attack when the other turns and runs. This is why if one is caught or kidnapped, one always looks the captor in the eyes as much as possible, take off the helmet or hat (or hood), why military are taught to kill with a kidney strike from behind.

Intolerance and Racism are used actively as distancing mechanisms, making it easier to kill. The less one’s enemy is like oneself, the easier it is to justify killing. This is why it is fundamental to say the other ‘does not share one’s values’. This is THE WEST, earlier the EUROPEAN RACE.

Absolution by Authority:
Officers are separated from killing. The officer orders the aggression, the troops carry it out. The officer can feel distanced from the act because they themselves did not kill or see the kill, and the troops can feel distance because they did not decide to kill or order the kill.
Interestingly, the farther the authority is away from the troops, the less the authority is effective, BUT the farther away the authority the easier it is to do the ordering.

Group Absolution:
The more one is firing into the brush with many others, the more one is unsure that one is killing a particular target oneself. In firing squads, often only one person has a bullet, and the others have blanks and are told this to ease the actions. In defending the home (being amongst one’s group and the group turf) one feels justified in killing in a way that is reversed when one is on enemy soil, as mentioned.

Stages of Killing
1)Combat High, exhilaration, esp. medium to long range (automatic weapons are best).
2)Remorse (move from positive to swing negative)
3)Rationalization (wrestling with the contradiction of positive/negative, self/other)

Both soldiers and gang members find themselves having nightmares where those who have been killed come back to haunt them and ask why. It is as if killing a being does not kill the presence, that the negated presence comes back. This is likely why people believed in evil ghosts for so long across all cultures. One feels one is still indebted to beings long gone if one was involved in their disappearance. (ex: ghost of Jacob Marley, the telltale heart of Poe)

Grossman notes that for HR Bush, Gulf War surge in popularity and then fall in end show social process of these stages as well as individual (and now this fits W Bush in Iraq war as well).

Intro Philosophy: Descartes and Hume

DESCARTES (1596-1650) is called the ‘first modern philosopher’ in the tradition of European and ‘Western’ scholarship. He went to law school following his merchant father, but decided to become a mercenary instead and fight in the 30 years war, ‘to seek truth’. It seems he did not find truth in law school. In 1633, Galileo was condemned by the Church for his solar centric theory (which India and Islam had for more than 700 years). Descartes thus decided not to publish his views on physics, but his ‘Discourse on Method’ instead. This is considered the first work of modern European philosophy. However, it was condemned by the pope in 1663, thirty years later, put on the prohibited index of books alongside other authors who are foundational for European scholarship.

Descartes’ death is famous (and unfortunately funny). For the majority of his life, he worked in bed until noon each day (an aristocrat has the time to do this). After he became famous and his works were prohibited by the Catholic Church, the Protestant Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to Stockholm to be her private tutor. Unfortunately for Descartes, she wanted morning lessons, every morning, at 5 am. Between the snow and the early mornings, Descartes was soon sick with pneumonia, and then dead. Maybe we should all work on our problems every day until noon, safe in bed. This is similar to Francis Bacon’s famous death, catching pneumonia and dying after repeatedly stuffing snow into chickens to try to preserve the meat.

We saw last time that Islamic algebra and mechanics show us the development toward modern society and thought. Descartes, in a world of increasing algebra and mechanics, turns from an understanding of causes being up in the heavens to cause being the mechanics of this world. Just like many Islamic and medieval European thinkers, Descartes identifies the mind and heavens with freedom and consciousness while putting the mathematical order of things down in the world. The heavens remain the good and pure, but the order and mathematics becomes a thing of this world and not the other world. This change, which is very much modernity, comes with a world increasingly full of algebra and mechanics. The world we see begins to be the known, and the spiritual begins to be the unknown. This goes in hand with the soul/mind ceasing to be round and made of fire and the heavens and afterlife ceasing to be physically above our heads even for the committed religious.

Best illustration of this is the City of Brass story from the 1001 Nights, also called the Arabian nights. In the story, an exploration party of the Sultan sets off to discover King Solomon’s lost City of Brass, a place where he kept demons in brass bottles and forced them to forge many wonderful pieces of metalwork in furnaces. Solomon uses mysterious forces from below to produce technological wonders in this world, a thing that he can do only because he is very holy and doing it as magic. In the story, there are many evil robots that still kill long after Solomon is dead and gone. This comes from the Islamic tales of Solomon, that when he died he stayed upright for a century and the demons continued to work on their tasks not knowing that he had died. Then a worm ate through Solomon’s staff and he fell over, and the demons realized that they had been working for no purpose and fled. In the City of Brass, a beautiful extension of the story, there are beautiful marionettes that move and beckon in the wind, luring some of the exploration party to their deaths in gorges below. There are other sorts of dangerous automata that are empty bodies still moving from natural forces. Finally, Solomon’s Queen (not Sheba who went to Ethiopia, but another) is stuffed and preserved, sitting on her thrown, with her eyes mechanically blinking every so often. One guy falls in love, approaches, and only realizes when touching her hand that she is dead, and he reels back in horror. Think of this as a medieval Islamic science fiction story.

Remembering the automata in Islamic palaces, Descartes now proceeds to make the natural world, including animals, nothing but mechanics and causation, completely devoid of intention or feelings. Dualism is a position that sees two separate levels in a thing. Descartes argues for a radical dualism between the mechanics of the world below (body) and the consciousness and intention of the world above (mind). Consciousness or mind or spirit is in the upper world, while all in the given world is mindless mechanics. This is what developed into our ‘scientific’, ‘modern’ mentality. The worst of this is that Descartes practiced vivisection, cutting animals apart while alive to learn about anatomy, and helped popularize the practice in Europe, arguing that animals do not have minds and thus do not feel a thing, their behavior being mere automatic reflexes of causal forces.

This is what led in Protestantism to loosing Saints and Angels with functional roles and simply praying directly to Jesus for everything, different from all previous systems (including Catholicism). Now that there is increasingly sophisticated practices of medicine and then veterinarian practice, you no longer take your sick cow to a particular temple and pray to a particular saint. The causal solution is now one of this world, but the ‘evil’ of sickness remains distantly rumbling in the world beyond, not gone but no longer the primary force of the institutional practice. Temples become increasingly research facilities.

Positivists celebrate Descartes as discovering the simple positives of mechanical causes and the existence of self-consciousness or the soul, arguing that there are certain mechanical facts and that each person has a certain personal identity. Skeptics see Descartes as being fooled by his own judgments, and argue that we can never be absolutely certain of mechanical facts nor of the personal or shared identities.

Thus, Descartes is very much part of the frame of European Philosophy to follow.
Not only is he the first to flourish in Europe in an algebraically structured wealthy culture, but his position is the starting positivism which is foundational for positivists and the departure point for skeptics.

Now, first let us remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment. In what some call the first ‘thought experiment’ (the central device of the American tradition of philosophy), he suggests that the reader imagine floating in a void and having all sensation, including of the body or senses, slowly taken away. What are you left with as the essential factor once the accidental sensual factors are removed? Self consciousness, with the awareness of consciousness and mind itself. For Avicenna, as for Descartes, this awareness and self-circling is the small piece of God, the big all awareness, that is one’s soul, humanity and life.

Descartes proposes a very similar thought experiment: he asks the reader to imagine that there is a deceiving demon that is creating an illusion of the world, casting doubt on everything except the essence of the human being and soul, the self-awareness which Descartes believes proves that you must exist. Thus, his famous line: “I think, therefore I am”, a conclusion that has been violently debated back and forth ever since. One’s position is defined, in a sense, by what you think of Descartes simple experiment.

Where does the deceiving demon in Descartes come from? Why the radical psychological skepticism, and then the simple positive (skeptics would say ‘naïve’) affirmation of existence? To see this, we must speak of the Cathars, a Gnostic Christian and Manichean hybrid Heresy that was being persecuted in France in the 1400s. Descartes is writing in France in the late 1600s, two hundred years later. Gnosticism, as we briefly mentioned, spoke of a deceiving demon false God that controls the appearance of this false world below, similar to the Indian doctrine of the world below as not only evil but illusion and false.

Manichaeism was a religion started by a Syrian named Mani (200-276 CE), who claimed to be the final coming of Jesus, the Buddha Amitaba, Buddha of Infinite light who will ferry people to the pure land. This is because Buddhism and Christianity flourished in Syria and Afghanistan as a middle ground of cultures. Then quickly the religion was fused with much Zoroastrian terminology to become what Christians in Europe considered a Christian Heresy. The religion spread up through Europe in 300-500, and the Cathars were an offshoot that survived in France up until the persecutions of 1400s.

Thus, Descartes (the first modern philosopher) is arguing for Christianity and its simple positive faith in the world vs. the Cathar-Manichean-Gnostic deceiving demon. Descartes thought experiment is very much Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment, but notice that it also attacks the idea of the Cathar Satan or King Demon. Notice that Descartes’ thought experiment suggests that a Demon could not keep us in the dark the way the Cathars believe. Instead, because of our self-consciousness/mind/soul that we get from God, and then using this as an anchor of certainty, Descartes argues that God thus does not completely deceive us in this world but shows us many other certainties that we can know with the power and sight of our mind.

I gave you selections of Descartes’ two great works, Discourse on Method and his six Philosophical Meditations. Let us work through the texts.

In his Discourse on Method, he lays out the famous “I think therefore I am” thought experiment, remarkably similar to Avicenna’s Floating Man thought experiment. He says he won’t tell us about his first meditations in hardcore skeptical ‘all is a dream’ mode, “for they are so abstract and unusual that they will probably not be to the taste of everyone”. Wow, keep that to yourself, Descartes.

He starts with the meditations he will tell us about with a thought experiment: assume that all the senses are being tricked, as if by a dream. (This is similar to Zhuang Zi’s Butterfly, and now he doesn’t know what it is- but Descartes ends like Avicenna’s floating man instead).

Everything can be doubted but the self-awareness. He writes that ‘I think therefore I am’ is the first principle of his new philosophy, brought up from the ground of this principle out of total skepticism of certainties. A skeptic here would wonder if this is so skeptical. First, Descartes assumes from self-awareness that he is a mind, a ‘substance of thought’, which is completely distinct from the body, which can be doubted. Already there are grey areas here. Can’t thought be doubted as much as a body part? Aren’t both ‘sensed’?

Now, we move to the Meditations, to the argument laid out step by step. Descartes argues that we all accept things that we believe to be certain, but then turn out to be wrong. Therefore, we cannot use certainty as the sole criterion for truth. We have to separate out the categorically certain from the seemingly certain. The skeptic here questions whether there are categorical certainties that are distinct from our illusions. This remains a central question. Positivists believe in the categorically true, also called ‘fact’, while skeptics tend to disbelieve in this sort of categorical certainty and opt for relative or perspective/subjective certainty.

Descartes says that it seems certain that he is sitting by the fire writing, but we can doubt this and believe that Descartes is simply dreaming that he is Descartes, by the fire. He uses the example of madmen who think that they are kings or that their bodies are made out of glass. Obviously, Descartes had some familiarity with at least literature about types of madness and delusions (also very Avicenna-like, who understood imagination and mental conditions).

There seem to be certain truths that cannot be untrue, like 2 + 3 is equal to 5, a central example he uses, or a square always has 4 sides. However, we can even imagine that this itself is all delusion. Hence, we assume for skepticism’s sake that there could be a deceiving demon (much like the movie The Matrix). He also says it could be someone extremely powerful who could use ‘industry’ to deceive me: this is the ‘brain in a vat’ mad scientist thought experiment. The demon cannot convince me that I do not exist, and so I am an existent thing that thinks. The one point of certainty is self-awareness or consciousness, the one thing that we cannot be fooled about because it is self-evident.

Descartes argues that the mind has no quality and no quantity, no space or time to it at all.
Hence, it is the human immortal soul/mind/awareness. Because we are sure of this, and because we get our truth from something that we are within we are not in the power of something that completely lies to us. Descartes then quickly declares that we can trust that God is good, the world is not an illusion and 2 + 3 is equal to 5. When we aspire to God and truth, using reason correctly, we discover certain truths, such as the truths of mathematics, the existence of the soul, and of God, the certainty that the body is not our true self, and that animals do not have souls or awareness. Note that everyone after Descartes found this reasoning a bit too quick, both those who agreed with him and those who did not.

HUME (1711-1776) did not agree with Descartes on much. Hume’s position is that all of our thinking and truth is induction. This is like the Indian theory of skandas, ‘piles’ of sand, speaking of the mind and how all perceptions in it are just bundles of stuff that accumulate and then dissipate. I gave you Hume’s ‘An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature’ because it is the condensed form of Hume’s first and foremost work which he wrote after critics claimed his original was convoluted and difficult to understand.

Hume starts saying that philosophy has flowered all over Europe in “these last four score years” (80 years, no connection to Lincoln), and that it has occurred in England just as greatly as any other. Notice the recent development for Europe, and England. Hume says that philosophers of ancient times have handled their truths delicately, showing more restraint than full depth of reflection. Remember with Descartes, whose skepticism quickly turns to orthodoxy. Hume is ultimately going to say that all truth is assumption, habit, and prejudice, which opens the gates on any accepted truth as needing to be proved, which opens up potential attacks on all established forms of truth.

Hume says that all mental activity are perceptions. Perceptions are divided into two kinds: impressions of objects that are present, and ideas of objects that are not present.

For example, one has the perception of a red billiard ball on the table. If one turns around and doesn’t look at the ball, one has an idea of the ball and its appearance in one’s head. Likewise, if one looks at the still red ball and imagines it is moving, one has an impression of the ball and has an idea of the ball rolling down the table. Impressions are strong, while ideas are weaker. Hume argues that we derive all of our ideas from our impressions. Hume acknowledges that this is in line with Locke’s Tabula Rasa/Blank Slate idea. It goes directly against Descartes and Kant, who believe we can with the operation of reason, independent of experience, determine several truths that must be certain regardless of experience.

Now, Hume gets to his famous and central billiard ball analogy. Imagine two billiard balls, one red and one blue. There are two events. First, the red ball moves up to the blue ball. Second, the blue ball moves away from the red ball. Naturally, and this is the key word here as we are talking about the habit, we all understand that the red ball struck the blue ball. Notice that we did not see or perceive the conjunction of the two events. We did not perceive the causation. The causation is itself invisible. Then how did we all understand it? The answer is: we have all shared common experience, and so we share ideas and prejudices. We all had an idea or prejudice when we watched the red ball moving toward the blue ball.

Our impressions of things knocking into each other, and in particular our impressions of billiard balls and their motions, naturally caused us all to get into the habit of having a preconception, a preconceived idea, that the red ball was going to hit the blue ball and then the blue ball was going to move afterward. Then, when things happened as they usually seem to, we all come to the conclusion, individually and as a group together, that we were right in our preconceptions.

Hume believes that this is all one can strictly say about the two events, and that saying anything else, like suspecting that a particular ‘causation’ was there as an invisible presence, may be common perception but it is not in fact perceived or known. Most often, our conclusions are correct, but whenever they are wrong, it shows us that we can have certainty and preconceived ideas, but these do not guarantee that we will be correct. For example, if I made a flash movie of the two billiard balls, it is an illusion that one image is striking the other. Obviously, I want the audience of the film to have this idea, but this does not make it any less of an illusion. In a sense, when we watch animation we know and don’t know that what is going on is ‘real’. We can ‘suspend’ our disbelief, and allow our minds to watch and believe in the animated events, even though any animated even must by its nature be fake caricatures of events.

Hume argues that all of our beliefs and truths are inferences that we draw, not certainties that we can know without qualification. This is true of life, history, and all of philosophy. If this seems hopeless in its skepticism, it is not entirely bad. Remember that most of our preconceptions are quite in accord with how things go, otherwise we would have no reason for forming them in the first place. While nothing can be known for certain, it is giving a different view of meaning. Things accumulate and build up in our ideas, and thus they are real to us. They are not so real that they ensure that nothing could ever contradict them, but they are real to us and we use them in the world. Hume uses the example of Adam in the garden of Eden as a human who learns the motions of things by experience, starting with a blank slate. Hume says that even Adam, “with all his science, would never have been able to demonstrate that the course of nature must continue uniformly the same, and that the future must be conformable to the past.”

“We are determined by custom alone to suppose the future conformable to the past. When I see a billiard ball moving towards another, my mind is immediately carried by habit to the usual effect, and anticipates my sight by conceiving the second ball in motion…It is not, therefore, reason which is the guide of life, but custom That alone determines the mind, in all instances, to suppose the future conformable to the past. However easy this step may seem, reason would never, to all eternity, be able to make it.”
“With regard to any matter of fact, however strong the proof may be from experience, I can always conceive the contrary, though I cannot always believe it…Philosophy would render us entirely skeptical (Pyrrhoian) were not nature too strong for it”.

Hume argues that effect is often variable and uncertain in life. As an example, he argues that thirty grains of opium will kill anyone that is not accustomed to it.

Hume goes on to question the Cartesians’ (followers of Descartes) idea of a supreme being which is wholly without deception, the eternal self, and geometric/mathematical truths (remember 2+3=5). He argues: how can they know this from experience? Our idea of God is a composition of our experience (guy with a beard, in the clouds) that we have not experienced in God so much as in other things. Mathematical and Geometric proofs look nice, but sometimes geometry seems like it is proving something that later is disproved.

Social & Political Philosophy: Marcuse

Marcuse (1898-1979), who some call the father of the New Left (progressive thought since the 60s), was born in Berlin, the center of Hegelian thought and the home of the Young Hegelians. He worked in publishing until returning to graduate school to study philosophy, particularly Hegel, under Husserl and Heidegger. Unfortunately, as we will discuss for fascism week, Marcuse and Husserl were Jewish and Heidegger was not, and in 1933 Heidegger joined the Nazi party and took the position that Husserl, his old professor, was kicked out of by the incoming regime. With other fellow Jewish intellectuals such as Adorno and Horkheimer, he formed the Frankfurt School which moved to Geneva, Switzerland in 1933 as the Nazis rose to power and then to New York where it became affiliated with Columbia University. The Frankfurt School became famous for Critical Theory, a rationalism that attacked the positivism, by name, of the Vienna Circle and others that had recently grown popular at German, British, and American universities.

At this time Marcuse began writing on Marxism and the new situation of corporate capitalism very influenced by his criticism of German fascism. Marcuse became a US citizen in 1940, the year he published Reason and Revolution, and he never lived in his native Germany again. In fact, he worked with the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, on anti-Nazi propaganda campaigns. After the war in 1945, he worked with the US State Department as head of the central Europe branch. In 1952 he left, just as China became communist and the cold war began to intensify, to teach at Columbia, then Harvard, then Brandeis, and finally UC San Diego. Throughout this time, he identified himself as a Hegelian and a Marxist. He was critical of both capitalism and communism for failing to live up to their ideals, comparing both with Nazi fascism. His first two books, Eros & Civilization and One Dimensional Man, as well as his Essay on Liberation, were revered by the 60s New Left and the hippie movement. He was an influence on countless left wing thinkers and artists, notably Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman.

One Dimensional Man (1964)
Marx argued that capitalism alienates labor through industrialization, objectifying labor and turning people into objects and tools much like feminists speak of the objectification of women. Marcuse took this idea and applied it to post 50s America. In One Dimensional Man, published in 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was passed, he argues that people are being turned into automata, into machines, finding their meaning of life in their car, television and commercial products. Critical of both US capitalism and Russian communism, he argued that people were being alienated and objectified by capitalism and technology such that they increasingly identified with the consumer products more than they did with each other making them increasingly incapable of resisting fascist tendencies of society. Consumerism is a form of social control that creates false needs through mass media and advertising that bind individuals to maintaining the modes of production and make them fear social revolution and critical thought. This is very opposite Saint-Simon. Like Thoreau, Marcuse argues for radical refusal to participate in society. Like his Frankfurt School, he argues for skeptical rationalism that challenges positivism, capitalism and authoritarianism. Like Gramsci, who we will read next week, he criticized orthodox Marxism’s reduction of class struggle to a single labor-capitalist struggle and argued that minorities and other outsiders are valuable for the generation of critical thought and social progress.

An Essay on Liberation (1969)
In this work, published in 1969 at the height of the 60s counter-cultural movement, Marcuse argues that corporate capitalism is a neocolonial empire that has socialism on the defensive. In Asia and Latin America and in the student movements (Marcuse was known to speak at student protests of the time) there are movements for social liberation under the red flag of socialism and the black flag of anarchism, but the fortress of corporate capitalism is only slightly strained. Marcuse dedicates the work to the student protests in France of 1968/69, and suggests they are a step towards a new liberation that is needed before a free society can be established. How can individuals satisfy their needs without harming, alienating and enslaving themselves and others? The needs and structures of society, the “Establishment”, must be transformed such that domination and brutality are no longer tolerated. Marcuse argues with Saint-Simon (though opposed to his positivism) that technology has acquired a stage that makes such a transformation possible such that it bridges the gap between middle class student protests and the struggle for survival of “the wretched of the earth” (a phrase borrowed from Fanon, who we will study under Post-Colonialism, to describe the people of the third world impoverished countries). The understanding of obscene must be revealed as repressive and reversed such that war and not nudity or hippies is understood to be the obscene. Even so, it is possible for society to use sexual liberation for its own solidification and the furthering of domination rather than counter-cultural criticism of war and economic slavery. The understanding of the “natural” and biological must be criticized, as consumerism becomes an extension of humanity and a natural need. This is very similar to Rousseau arguing that humanity is liberty by nature and thus can be easily turned into subservience to society and its brutality. Individuals must be rounded out such that they can participate in many various activities, not specialized the way Plato and Aristotle thought proper. We must turn our conception of causation from necessary causation to free causation, symbolized in art as the turn from realism to surrealism. In the final words of the essay, quoting a “young black girl” who very well may be Angela Davis who met Marcuse at a protest at Brandeis and became his student, one of the only black girls on campus at the time, Marcuse says that when we have obtained a free society, “we shall be free to think about what we are going to do”.

Social & Political Philosophy: Socialism

As we learned, capitalism rose with industrialization. Merchants became industrialists and capitalists, far more free than in earlier ages to seek profit for self-interest. As Adam Smith argued, this created much productivity and competition that fueled advancement and ever-increasing numbers of products and services. While this had great benefits and continues to fuel innovation today, it also caused problems such as great inequalities and periods of economic depression and collapse. Industrialization not only allowed capitalists to mobilize for themselves and their new class, it also mobilized labor, allowed it to be more coordinated, and develop several movements in counter-reaction to the domination of capitalists and the cultural groups to which they belong. For the rest of this class, we will be studying these, including socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, post-colonialism, and feminism.

Equality vs. Freedom
In many ways, while all people appreciate the values of freedom and equality, capitalism leans toward freedom while socialism leans toward equality. Industrialization created great freedom for those who are positioned to take advantage of it, particularly the middle and upper classes, but it also created great inequalities. Consider that neo-conservatives and free-market capitalist thinkers such as Milton Friedman took Adam Smith’s position farther in arguing that businesses should be for the purpose of profits, not jobs. This would mean that we should be striving in economic theory for the freedom of individual interest, not equality as social purpose. In America, a country that has leaned more towards capitalism than any so far, the demonstrators of the Civil Rights Movement were called communists for seeking federal laws that ensured equality across ethnic groups.

Social Use vs. Individual Interest
Saint-Simon, Marx and Engels all argued that cycles of overproduction lead to depressions and poverty, and so industry should be planned in accord with maximizing social advancement. This is entirely in line with Mill’s idea of Utilitarianism and taking both the long term and social view of society. Socialists also advocate the redistribution of wealth to benefit society as a whole rather than individuals who hold the wealth. This is put in balance with meritocracy such that those who work gain through redistribution while those who merely hold (either poor or rich) lose. Jobs should be provided not in accord with individual profit but social welfare and maximizing the potential of all members of society. A good example of this can be found in the beginning of War on Democracy: Hugo Chavez provided grocery stores for the poor of Venezuela that offered cheap government subsidized food funded by a nationalized oil industry, with constitutional rights in large print on back of each product.

Planned vs. Free Economies
While communists have an entirely planned economy (such as Soviet sneakers and jeans out of fashion by the time they are state made) socialism, like capitalism, is mixed economics with some industries and products made cheap by the state for the support of equality of people. In this sense, socialism is to communism as capitalism is to radical free-market capitalism and libertarianism. Industries that are often nationalized in such mixed economies include natural resources (water, electricity, oil), basic goods (bread, milk, corn, steel) and basic services (mail, transportation, housing, police, fire-departments, healthcare, quality control). Today, China and Vietnam are overall successful with socialist leaning mixed economics, mixing private corporations with state-controlled industries. Social Democrats, such as the Democratic party in America and many political parties all over the world often following European and American models, believe in some degree of government and public control over market driven forces, capitalism with some socialist steering, but no entirely nationalized/socialized industries (ex: corporation for public broadcasting, PG&E having monopoly on power in California as a corporation, BART).

Reform vs. Revolution
Some socialists believe in gradual reform from within, such as the social democrats who took over Russia after the Tsar abdicated but were tossed out as not radical enough by the Russian Revolution. Other socialists believe in radical reform and revolution, such as Lenin and Trotsky who formed the vanguard party to overthrow the social democrats. Revolution need not be violent, but involves rapid change in a short amount of time.

Authoritarian & Democratic Economics
Mill’s idea of Economic Democracy, unions, co-ops, everyone having a say in the business, is particularly important to socialism. Some want to live more socialist in a capitalist society: many communes are socialist this way, communist if the whole society becomes a single commune. The co-op housing arrangements in Berkeley are communes in that they are living arrangements rather than business like Cheeseboard co-op. Saint Simon, Engels & Marx believed technology would make the anarchy of capitalism gradually unnecessary. There remains, however, a split in socialism between those who seek socialism from above through centralized planning (Saint-Simon’s champions in the meritocracy, Lenin and Trotsky’s vanguard Bolshevik party) and those who seek socialism from below through de-centralized planning (co-ops, soviets, direct democracy). Both have advantages and disadvantages. From the top down, the government can take the overall view of the situation and the long term view, but there is a danger in centralized control hoarding power and advantage. From the bottom up, the democratic decisions of labor unions, co-ops and communes ensure the autonomy and interests of the group, but there is a danger that each group can lose sight of the social view and long term view and produce for their group interests rather than the interests of society. Anarchism, which we will study in two weeks, is similar if not identical to bottom-up socialism, especially when leaning to the left.

Mazdak, Persian Socialist
While socialism is often confused with hard-line communism, especially when religion and atheism are discussed, the earliest socialists were religious thinkers who believed that common purpose and property were the fulfillment of the teachings of their religion. Monasteries, for Buddhists, Christians and others, are communes in which much of the resources are commonly owned and distributed. Mazdak (450 – 525 CE) was a Zoroastrian priest living in Persia before Mohammed and Islam when Zoroastrianism was still the Persian religion. He believed that socialism was the true Zoroastrian way of life, and argued that the Zoroastrian clergy had oppressed the people rather than raised them up. He taught that God wanted everyone to share everything equally, but as the strong had come to dominate the weak, wealth must be redistributed such that it is shared in common. He advocated reforming and simplifying religion and replacing many religious rituals with community life and altruism. Like Plato, and Marx/Engels, he argued that families should be held in common such that individual families were not hoarding for themselves. Needless to say, many of his fellow Zoroastrian clergy found his teaching radically heretical, but he received royal patronage and his ideas flourished in Persia for a brief period. While his ideas were counteracted by later rulers, small Mazdaki communities survived in Persia for centuries long after Persia was converted to Islam.

Saint-Simon’s ‘Socialisme’
Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was a French thinker who many believe coined the term ‘socialism’ (socialisme in the French). He was a big influence on Marx and Engels, arguing that the anarchism of individual interest driven capitalist control should be transformed by science, technology and social planning such that poverty is eliminated and the powerful are the worthy (meritocracy, like Plato) rather than the wealthy (oligarchy, like often). Born an aristocrat in Paris, he fought for Washington in the American Revolution and worked hard in the early and more peaceful years of the French Revolution to build an industrial society for the French people. Renouncing his aristocratic title, he believed in meritocracy (those who achieve become great). Like Robespierre’s Cult of Reason, like Marx & Engels and the Soviet Union in Russia, Saint-Simon believed that scientific advancement would allow society to achieve meritocracy and egalitarianism. Because he was an aristocrat and attempted to finance his plans for France with land deals, he was imprisoned under Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and released at its end. Unfortunately, as we will see with Communism next week, similar suspicion and punishment faced many of the strongest supporters of the Russian Revolution.

Against Adam Smith, who argued that individual interest is better than social planning, Saint-Simon argued that power struggles, both those between workers and capitalists and those between capitalists, limit and harm production and prosperity. Individuals should think of themselves as laborers who work for themselves and others rather than owners who work for themselves. Note that this is similar to the swing of Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic, as the slave progresses because he does work for both self-interest and the master’s interest while the master stagnates because he acts only for self-interest. While Adam Smith used the term ‘invisible hand’, Saint-Simon used the term ‘hand of greed’. Much like the debate between Mencius and Xun Zi and like Hobbes, Saint-Simon believed that people were naturally greedy and self-advancing and this must be countered with education and society. Saint-Simon argued that only working people should have voting rights, and he divided society into workers and thieves (including both the wealthy and beggars into this latter category).

Unlike the Jacobins or Marxists, Saint-Simon was a Christian who believed in simplifying Christianity, boiling it down to its essential teachings and clearing it of the doctrines of both Catholics and Protestants. This way, without factions, Christianity can be used for its true purpose: the elimination of poverty and the equality of humanity. Thus, unlike Robespierre or Marx, Saint-Simon did not propose eliminating religion but rather using it as an essential part of the socially-purposed state. Some revered Saint-Simon after his death as a prophet, both religious and political.


The Young Hegelians
Marx was a student of Hegel, and believed that society evolves in stages based on the previous stage building its way towards completion through the tensions of class conflict. Marx and Engels argued that socialism is a lower and imperfect form of communism based on the principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to productivity”. This would, once socialism is firmly entrenched and established, gradually be transformed into communism, based on the principle, “from each according to ability, to each according to need”. Clearly, Marx and later Marxists believe that once society is based on utilitarianism, everyone would be raised in productivity such that Saint-Simon’s “thieves” would be eliminated on both top and bottom.

At the university of Berlin, the center of Hegel’s following, the Young Hegelians including Marx and Engels began circulating their views about politics and religion around 1840, only a few years after the death of Hegel. They were fond of reason, science and the French Revolution and deeply critical of class conflict and religion. Just like Hegel’s idea of a war between North and South America, they believed that a great and final conflict would come before the final political unity, that one political party would inevitably be left standing alone uniting all people. They gradually evolved from philosophical criticism of conservative noble-supported Christianity to atheism as the final and reasonable position.

Engels: Socialism Utopian & Scientific
In this work, Engels contrasts utopian socialism such as that of Saint-Simon, an ideal socialism in ideal conditions, with that of scientific socialism of Marx, his comrade and friend. This is very similar to the difference that Machiavelli sees between Plato and Aristotle creating ideal city models and his own examinations of how power works in real-world conditions. Engels argues that he and Marx use socialism as a science to examine society and improve it rather than creating an idealized model. He also saw socialism as acceptable in Europe of his day, but communism, the true final form of socialism for Marx and Engels, was not yet acceptable to the intellectual culture.

Engels praises the French for a revolution that strove to make reason rather than domination the way of society, but he argues the revolution and Rousseau had to be realized in an imperfect false society that protects the property of the upper and middle classes rather than true egalitarianism. He criticizes Saint-Simon’s antagonism between workers and the idle/thieves as a precursor of his and Marx’s antagonism between the capitalists and the laborers, but Saint-Simon had not realized that each side works in its own way for its own ends. He then proceeds to summarize Hegel’s Logic and method of dialectic suggesting that Saint-Simon’s thought as well as that of other socialist precursors would be set right through Hegel’s methods. However, he criticizes Hegel’s idealism and just like his praise/criticism of Saint Simon, says that Hegel’s ideas were to be realized later when the time was right and conditions had developed. He then goes on to praise Marx as the culminating stage, and argues that a proletarian workers revolution will resolve the contradictions of society that have developed over time.

I will examine Marcuse’s ideas in One Dimensional Man and An Essay on Liberation next time.