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.

Ethics: Lies & Propaganda

Individuals and groups manipulate the truth to serve their own ends, in a conscious/unconscious way that often resembles denial. Speech means that we can tell the truth or tell lies. This has been an issue for humans before they were even human, like theft and violence.

Apes and Lying:
In one of the most fascinating stories of ape behavior I have heard, researchers documented that a young male baboon made the mistake of trying to force himself sexually on a high ranking female baboon of his tribe. When the female screeched, the rest of the tribe began chasing the young male along the ground floor. Suddenly, the young male turned and gave the call for leopard. The chasers dashed up into the trees and out of sight, while the young male stood, watching them leave, on the ground in no danger from any leopard. The researchers concluded that they had witnessed and documented an ape lying to save his own skin. Thus, we can assume, humans have been lying since before they were human.

Children and Lying:
Interestingly, we believe in lying to children as a matter of raising them. Children before the age of seven are quite incapable of telling the difference between fiction and reality or understanding sarcasm. This is why young children believe in Santa and wonder where Thomas the Train Engine lives.

There are two amusing stories I have on this. One of my students in a response paper wrote that as a young girl she had a pet goldfish and accidentally killed the fish by cleaning its bowl with hand soap. When she saw her fish was dead her mother, who did not want to torture the young girl with the truth, told her that the cat had walked by and the fish had a heart attack. Notice the utilitarianism here, and that Kant would be mortified. Secondly, there was a news story last year about a boy in Thailand who was stuck on the roof of a tall building, and he would not climb into the arms of the police who ascended a ladder to rescue him. One of the police dressed up in a Spiderman costume, and the boy threw open his arms and leapt into the waiting embrace of Spiderman, who carried him down to a cheering crowd.

Children believe in superheroes and villains. One would like to think that the use of heroes and myths ends with childhood, but the literature on propaganda tells us that all civilizations make myths that glorify themselves and demonize their enemies, both internal and external. Because children are raised with these myths, they often do not think to question them even when they are quite past the age of seven.

Consider the use of superheroes in comics, fighting criminals at home and enemies of America.
Watchmen is a good look at some of these dynamics. Consider that Iron Man was originally from Korea, then the recent movie puts him in the middle east. We still use superheroes to stand for “truth, justice and the American way”, but we have subtler ways. I think you can look at Iron Man and the new Batman movie and see distortions that we not only pass on to kids and teenagers but the adults in the audience as well.

City States and Rock Edicts:
The Assyrians were masters of propaganda, and they were one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. Most of their conquest was through trade, though they invented all of the siege weapons used through the European middle ages. Rock edicts, tall carvings in cliffs and on monuments, declared glorious meanings for the common people to consume. Interestingly, the common people could not read, and someone who could read and pass the messages to others was called “one who makes the stones speak”. Just like a modern textbook, the human authors are lost and the media simply speaks for itself.

Here we come to the old and the new style of propaganda. The old propaganda model is simple, and it is still in use particularly by traditional and communist countries: We are the King/State, we tell you what you need to know, namely that we look after you and our enemies are evil. WE are the great multicultural empire that looks after everyone (Assyrian did not denote a race, but a citizen of the empire), but our enemies will oppress you and kill you for no good reason. Very little has changed over several thousand years.

The new propaganda is even more effective, and strangely it does not call itself propaganda at all. In China today, the communist government says openly that they use propaganda to educate the people, and the same was admitted in the United States and Britain until just this last century. The government tells you “brush your teeth, it is good for you” and this is acknowledged as a message coming from authorities telling you what you should know and do. Chomsky, who we will study today, is quite clear on this point, as is Bernays. Propaganda only recently became something evil, something that the enemy does.

I am going to focus on American propaganda from WWI through the Cold War, and then talk about Chomsky’s theories on propaganda models and the American media’s role in American empire and economics.

Hegel tells us when we haven’t looked into an issue, perspectives are polarized. Here in America, similarly in Britain, it is thought that we are free and love democracy, but other cultures (especially the Germans in WWI and II, the Russians in the Cold War, and Islamic extremists) are not civilized but rather lie as much as they can because ‘they hate our freedom’.

We have failed to have a real discussion about censorship and bias in America. This means ‘THEY’ are simply biased and put forth propaganda, and WE would never do something like that. This is not only the basic human frame as before, but Americans and British got set in this in a particular way through WWI and II. In WWI, propaganda became something the Germans do, not the Belgians, British or Americans. In WWII, the Germans and Japanese do propaganda, and in the cold war the Russians. The British and Americans, however, would never do ‘propaganda’ by name, as they are the champions of liberty, democracy and freedom from tyranny (even as Britain and then America plundered and sought empire in the same way that the Germans, Russians did). Today, this is ‘Islam and the West’ where we have unbiased journalism while they simply put forward obvious propaganda (watch ‘Control Room’ for the best of this).

What we need? We need to see how people censor and authority is abusive in comparison, and this is what is never done. Rather than hear one line of Chinese media through ours and say “Propaganda!” we need to compare censorship operation by the government in both places and see the complex similarities and differences. I am going to show human overall consistencies while describing the particular way that Americans are involved in the inscription of messages and ideology in our society. That way, we get beyond the strange complex of saying that in America there is no propaganda while living in an America that knows how to sell and spin professionally better than anyone ever has.

WWI (the British/Americans vs. the Germans)
The Germans invade Belgium, and the British make up all sorts of things. The Germans become the evil Hun, and the Belgians the poor victim, even though they had just gotten bad world press by systematically killing 10 million Africans in the Congo.

The British run propaganda in America to get us into the war, and teach us the techniques of British style empire and propaganda. You set up ‘free’ reporters to say your messages, rather than do the old way like Germany and Russia with a Ministry of Propaganda.
Thus, after the horrors of WWI, ‘propaganda’ became a bad word in Britain and America.
Since then, we do not do propaganda at all. We do ‘education’, ‘information’, ‘public relations’, ‘human relations’, and in time of war we may engage in psychological warfare, but we never do ‘propaganda’.

Propaganda is not an evil conspiracy. Consider great example of guy who did ‘Birth of a Nation’, KKK film, being jailed for 10 years for his next movie showing British and Natives committing war crimes against Americans.

Basically, the British and Americans lied as much as possible about German atrocities, the French and British took most of what Germany had after WWI, the Germans fell even lower in the 20s with the market crash, and they came back as the Nazis, NOW as bad as the British and Americans had led others to believe.

Consider that Irish newspapers in NY were shut down for telling people that the British have been evil in Ireland, Scotland, India, Africa, all while calling themselves the defenders of democracy and freedom. At this time, government censorship during time of war was unquestioned (story about Pentagon lifting ban on coffins today).

Bernays book Propaganda:
Chomsky says that Bernays was one of the first propaganda specialists in America and he is quite open about praising the use of propaganda. Bernays says, during WWI, that it is remarkable that the moment America propaganda explodes (advertising, PR), becomes a necessary tool of corporations, it becomes ‘evil’ in name. PR went from being Barnum and Bailey to every corporation running spin and ad campaigns. Bernays invented the committee of Doctors who tell you to eat eggs and bacon for a ‘hearty’ breakfast, saying old way is ‘Eat Bacon!’, new way: ‘Drs say, ‘Eat bacon’’. This is ‘free expert’ style of propaganda.

In 1938, writing his book, Bernays says that half the front page of NYT is identifiably propaganda, stories planted by interested parties. He says the NAACP is a great PR group, and show a strong hand holding their annual conference in Atlanta. He got out of cigarette ads in the 40s, tabloids having picked up on the health risks. It wasn’t till the 1970s that major media carried the story at all. 1953 Bernays helped United Fruit convince everyone that Guatemala was a communist threat, so the US overthrew the elected leader with a CIA coup and we supported dictatorship there for cheap labor to supply Americans with cheaper fruit.

Nazis and WWII:
Hitler says: We did not have as good propaganda as the British and Americans, but next time will be different. Nazi TV, engineering goes to American, America rises above Britain in wake of WWII. During WWII, the Americans and British praised Stalin and his Red Army as they all fought the Nazis. Then, as soon as the war was over, the British led the Americans in the Cold War anti-communism campaign. This is where stuff gets REALLY INTERESTING: US vs. Soviet Union. Both say, ‘THEY do all of this, so WE HAVE TO’, in the official channels, but the story for the masses is: only THEY would do that.

COLD WAR
The following material is drawn largely from the book The Cultural Cold War by Saunders.
Post WWII, the French and Russians had largely convinced everyone that America has no culture, only cheap commercialism, and America talks a lot about Freedom, but look at how they treat black people. US and Soviets started ‘Congresses’, (Soviets for World Peace, US for Cultural Freedom). It is now know that these were the two big umbrella groups for a lot of fronts for propaganda campaigns. These groups used historians, scientists, poets, artists, philosophers, professors, you name it, to give the impression that individuals were lining up against ‘the evil’ of the other. The US wanted to fight the ‘French Flu’ and push European intellectuals away from Marxism as liberation towards free market capitalism as liberation. Ex: US intellectual goes to Paris, gives a talk about the ‘Negro’s progress in America’. Then when he is heckled (“possibly by communists”), brings out black band to do jazz all night.

US used CIA and many fronts to tour black performers through Europe, increase publication of certain books (Camus, not Sartre example, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, introductions written to spin Animal Farm and 1984 by Orwell, who hated both). The idea was to promote the NONCOMMUNIST LEFT. (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty not studied in America, as they boycotted Congress of Cultural Freedom invitations due to US treatment of Black people).

The US had spent $34 million on this by 1950 (also, wealthiest country at this point, passing Britain in financing the rebuilding of Britain, Germany and France). The money quadrupled in rate of expense after 1950, as China became the world’s largest communist country. The CIA set up French literature reviews, toured the Boston symphony orchestra, approached wealthy individuals about setting up art collections that praise US art and European art that honors the US.

Pollock and others (though communists) praised and toured through Europe to show that American has genius painters after all. Agent as director stockpiled abstract minimalist art at the NY Moma (Contemporary Chinese art exhibit in Berkeley today). The Ford and Rockefeller foundations remain serious fronts for money dispensed in America to artists, writers and performers who do work that promotes America even as it is avant-garde art.

At home, Billy Graham got money knowingly from intelligence, toured America telling Christians that ‘Communism is masterminded by Satan’, never mind that the first communes were French Christian communes. John Wayne and Ronald Reagan were promoted as Soldier/Cowboys, both spied for the FBI against communism at home for the house of un-American activities committee of McCarthy. Disney and Warner brothers made cartoons for the US in WWII, then denounced their writers and animators as communists when they went on strike. Disney spied for the FBI, testified for HUAC, while he was doing illegal things to his workers like sending strike breakers to beat people up and the FBI looked the other way.

In films, token black people began appearing well before the civil rights movement. Documents of agents who worked with studios on scripts say, ‘took out a drunk, added a black person’. One of the best examples is a black golfer and caddy added into the background of a scene on a golf course, at a time when white Catholics and Jews had a rough time getting into golf clubs. Consider that the civil rights movement was partly started by seeing token black people in the cinema, like the golfer and caddy, and wondering aloud why this could not become a real lived reality. Both US and Soviets fought over who liberates and who oppresses. In 1956, the ‘Melting Pot’ became a slogan for the US. We can see that many Russian films and Korean propaganda posters deplore the evils that America has done to black people as a simple tactic.

Today, if your movie has anything to do with police or military, they will give you heavy support as long as they go over the script and ok it. Six media owner companies means each needs a cushy relationship with both cops and military. That means: America is well aware of the streamlined view of America put out all over the world in TV and Movies. They are the BEST form of propaganda. There are consulting firms who specialize in getting your script ready for police and military approval, so that you do not get charged extra by the official government representatives who review the scripts for a fee.

Meanwhile, stories pepper the news about how “Iran censors movies” and “China might be censoring the internet”. No further detail is drawn. This is the British/American style: THEY simply censor, without any comparison of us and them. THEY censor (so, we don’t?). Recently the media corporations agreed with the government not to show footage of coffins coming home from the war. Is there ever a need for a conspiracy when power works the way it always has?

Chomsky and Herman’s MANUFACTURING CONSENT:
There is no better book on American propaganda and the stories both promoted and ignored by the American media. The book argues that the mass-media protects the interest of the wealthy and powerful individuals and institutions in America by promoting particular views and filtering out others. This process involves the ownership of media groups, the reliance of media on the government for information and support, the reliance of media on advertising revenue, flak heaped upon dissident views (particularly socialist views and those critical of business interests).

Social & Political Philosophy: Hegel's Logic and its Impact

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.

Remember the dialectical process of the opposite yet complimentary forces/faculties of understanding and reason. Why is thought opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Hegel writes that we need to start with the “legend” of the fall of man, of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important. This is entirely in the vein of Enlightenment Deists reading the Bible as a work of philosophy and psychology rather than literal history or religious authority. When Adam/consciousness, falls into the divided world and out of the unity of paradise, he/it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can see a similar in physics as the Big Bang and in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget & Vygotsky). Just as Adam and Eve have to toil for food and survival once out of Eden, knowledge and wisdom must be gained by effort and the process of history. Hegel argued that work and labor are a contradiction of subject and object, of ideal and actuality, of the mental and the physical. Marx entirely follows Hegel on this point, and both see the work (modes of production) of each age as a revealing of another level of truth through history.

Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding. 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/All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content. A cow is a cow, and not a horse, but without contradicting the separation of the categories and comparing a cow to a horse such that we can gather the similarities and divide the differences we can’t develop a greater understanding. In the Logic Hegel writes:

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… 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.

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 recognizing this with the categories of our understanding (one-sided logic and grammar) 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.

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 particularly interrelated. ‘All is one and in flux’ is an excellent truth (one of my favorites), but it tells us nothing of particular beings or stages of history. For this, reason must push towards more contradictions.

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.

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 either puts these essences outside the world (as Plato put them up in the stars), or inside of things as “nature”. It seeks the meaning of the thing in its group because it could not find it completely in ‘All as One’ or in singular things. The problem with this stage is that things are still isolated in groups by type and this prevents the understanding from grasping their interdependence and codependent evolution (much like the Buddhist concept of codependent arising). 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 are not like the world in which everything fits together as one. 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.

Through further dialectic, 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 Actuality, the final stage. Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory and modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle, the final contradiction that reason must push the understanding beyond itself to grasp. 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. Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and speculation, 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, which is in extension with the world.

Marx was deeply influenced by Hegel’s Logic, which gave him a social process of opposites resolving in unity. Marx wrote that Hegel’s Logic is by nature revolutionary and thus a scandal to the well positioned (the middle and upper classes). Marx argued that the bourgeoisie were trapped in their middle-class roles just as understandings are trapped in isolation, and that Hegel’s Logic separated his own thinking from that of other academics who were complicit with the status quo. Just as Hegel said the average person cannot comprehend contradiction and thus remain stuck in their undeveloped understandings, Marx saw the middle and lower classes as stuck because they cannot see the problems and contradictions of their position and labor. However, through a process identical with the master/slave dialectic, Marx believed this would eventually result in a greater understanding by way of reason and the political arrangement of the communist international state. Not only would the contradictions between classes be transcended, but also the contradictions between warring nation-states.

Both Hegel and Marx saw the business class as embodying a new synthesis of laborer and capitalist that creates new contradictions. Hegel was aware of the misery of the working class in Germany and England under rising industrialism and manufacturing, and spoke of these contradictions in his lectures even though he was not arguing for a communist revolution but rather a resolution in the form of the German state.

In 1914, just as WWI was being declared, Lenin (who was in neutral Switzerland along with other influential figures such as the Dada artists who kicked off much of modern art) studied Hegel’s Logic intensely to comprehend Marx. Lenin, like Marx, saw Hegel’s Logic as bringing the abstract and ideal down into unity with the material. For Marx and Lenin, this was a call to materialism and a recognition that ideas exist by way of the historical and material.

Most importantly for this class, Marx and Lenin followed Hegel in his criticism of Rousseau: it is not simply the arbitrary individual will that binds everyone together in the general will and the social contract, but rather the understanding/reasoning of individuals that determines the community and draws individuals together in groups and classes. Thus, Marx and Lenin saw communism as political science, as a result of ages of understandings/classes developed through reason/revolution. Note that this is complimenting Rousseau’s romantic will with rationalistic reason. Nietzsche, who like Hegel was influenced by Rousseau and a fan while critical, pushed back against reason to center on freedom and the will like Rousseau did originally. In the mid 1800s, the German people rose up in revolution to gain rights like the British, French and Americans and were crushed by the princes banding together. Marx wrote his major works in this period for a German revolutionary audience. The failure of the German revolution was the major cause of German pessimism, a turn from reason as the force of history to will as the force of history. We will consider this more we cover Nietzsche, the Nazis and Fascism.

We will cover the Young Hegelians as the first topic of Socialism next week.

Intro Philosophy: Islam & Early Europe

First, we look at the rise of Islamic civilization and its relationship to medieval European civilization with regard to philosophy, technology, science and scholarship. This is important to know, especially today. Second, we will look at central Islamic and medieval European philosopher/logicians (especially Avicenna and Aquinas).

America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are no good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (I have found this is true of Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic religion, literature, philosophy, or science.

Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of technology and study. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has always been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic.

Here are some awesome ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:

Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.

Law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. 1492 is a good example: it is the year that the Christian Kings of Spain and Portugal retook those lands from Muslims, and the start of the Spanish Inquisition that brutally attacked Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic Christians.

Algebra is possibly the most used device (if it can be called a device) in human history. It is important to consider algebra because in the second half of the course logic becomes an algebraic language (remember, logic used to be about debate in the ancient world, but it gradually became a highly specialized form of math that was intended to ground the foundations of mathematics). Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system and began doing math in the form of equations we are all familiar with today (taught by law to everyone up through college).

Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through town with the latest things and systems of thought (books come this way too from China). Castles are Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful.

Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, philosophy, logic and science that equations became the language for structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in paragraph form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas but is quite anachronistic and misleading to do this.

One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosopher/scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language.


ISLAMIC JESUS

Jesus is mentioned in the Koran more than anyone, the greatest prophet after Mohammed.
He is the patron saint of scholars and wisdom, and he sounds much like Confucius.

The worst man is the scholar who is in error, since many people will err due to him.
The one who has learned and taught is great in the kingdom of heaven.
Stones, mud and gold are equal in my sight.
‘Teacher, who are the people of my race?’ ‘All the children of Adam.’
No one taught me. I saw the ugliness of ignorance and avoided it.
How many fruits, but not all are good! How many sciences, but not all of them useful!


THE MAIN DIVISIONS OF ISLAM

Many are familiar with the Sunni-Shiite split of Islamic cultures without realizing that the central issues between groups are philosophical positions on human reason. The Sunni believe that revelation such as the Koran is the supreme authority, and all else is secondary. The Mutazilites, a smaller sect of Islam and one of the great forces for philosophy and science, believe that God/Being is fully reasonable and human reason and logic are supreme to following tradition or scripture. Mutazilites argued that God can not contradict reason and thus cannot possibly commit error, which became a major theological and philosophical issue in the golden age of Islamic thought and civilization. The Shiites, the second major sect of Islam like the Sunnis, take a middle position between reason and scripture/tradition. Sunnis argued that one must investigate matters when scripture and reason contradict each other. This is important to recognize today, as Muslims are often believed to be unquestioningly traditional and literal in their understanding of the Koran.


THE GREAT ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHERS:

Al Kindi (801-873)
Pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method,
introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. Wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, argued that time and space were relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later.

Argued that Islam and Philosophy/Logic are completely compatible. Our scholarship says that he mostly merged Neoplatonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian/Buddhist Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.


Al Farabi (872-950)
Little is known about Farabi’s origins or ethnic background. It is argued by scholars that he was Turkish or Persian. Farabi took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides famously said he could not understand Aristotle at all until he read Al-Farabi’s commentary, and then got it. Paid much attention to Imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and get right, you have visions of the cosmos and its workings. This is close to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments in his later thought.


Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037)
Foremost doctor of his time. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, neuropsychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), and the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing microscopic organisms as the cause of disease. The first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He learned Indian Arithmetic from and Indian grocer. This is ignored in most. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’.

The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you, was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars. Today, in the wake of Islamic and European civilization, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? This was the big issue. Avicenna asks: Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that a real horse is one thing? Does the horseness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horseness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horseness’ are both mental. Avicenna uses the phoenix and unicorn as imaginary beasts to illustrate.

His floating man thought experiment, showing self-consciousness, shows imagination.
This is considered by some to be a source of Descartes’ ‘I think’ with demon.

After this, there was a split in his followers: which is primary, the essence or existence?
Essentialism (What it is 1st, the thing second) vs. Existentialism (thing first, what 2nd).


Al Ghazali (1058-1111), Persian
One of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism. Sufism is Islamic mysticism, who like mystics of other religions and cultures believe that all is a supreme One and judgment and desire obscure this from human vision. Many are familiar with the Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant, a story that Sufis argue is about their practice being the religion of all religions. Ghazali was a pioneer of skepticism and doubt. His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certain human knowledge. When he says ‘The philosophers say’ I have read authors say, ‘this means Plato and Aristotle’, but I trust the scholars who say he means ‘Avicenna says’ as the position he always attacks. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that Atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of Negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.


Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) Cordoba, Spain
Wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, thus central for Europe Aristotle.
Wrote ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, arguing against Ghazali and for Farabi etc.

He was another central author in Europe for science and philosophy. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe followed him. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our science is now more like Avicenna, but for the longest time it was Aristotleian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as necessary to be flawed that Europe swung back into a ‘all is contingent’ Avicenna direction.


NEOPLATONISM AND THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS

First, they would have called themselves ‘Platonists’. Neo was added by first translator into English, and the title has been adopted by scholars in Europe and America. The start of the tradition comes from Alexandrian (Egyptian) Greek Platonists who were reading the Timaeus and participating in religious/philosophical debates amongst the many cultures of the trade port, including Egyptians, Nubians, Gnostic Christians, Coptic Christians, Jews, Indians, Persians, Mesopotamia etc.

Two texts that were central to Platonism were the Chaldean Oracles, which were supposed to be the secret teachings of Zarathustra from Persia, and the Hermetic Corpus, the secret teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (Thoth-Tat as a sage) from Egypt. These two sources became very important in the Renaissance, showing us that it was much more than a love of Greece and Rome that artists and scholars celebrated. These two texts actually had just been invented by Greek authors who were clearly using Plato to try to back-form the wisdom of Persia and Egypt that the ancient Greeks themselves praised, but at the time they were believed to be authentic and then well past by European scholars. Thus, they were sources that were believed to be earlier than Plato, which conveyed the wisdom that Plato himself developed and passed on as the true philosophy of all cultures.

Most famous Hermetic text is the Emerald Tablet, a short set of aphorisms. The line most quoted: the world is a sphere in which the center is everywhere and nowhere. Chaldean oracles aphorisms:
Explore the river of the soul, to rise to the order from which you descended.
When you see a formless fire, flashing through the depth of the world, hear the voice of fire.
The intelligible draws open the flower of the mind.

Central teachings of this tradition of Platonism:

The Soul must return to the One, the All (All-Lord or God), which it must do by way of lesser gods or angels and demons. The system is very much psychology of the soul, which is also angelology and demonology in classifying forces of the cosmos.
The macrocosm is the microcosm- small and big, so soul/mind is the universe.
Opening up the mind is returning to the cosmos that produced you.
Theme of the Fall and the Return (later in Christians id with Adam and fall from Eden).

There are two motions of mind to develop:
Kataphania and Apophania, positing and negating, affirming and doubting.
To get to the One, you must move Dialectically, back and forth, to open up and become the whole.

Humans occupy a unique place in the cosmos. They have the ability to subsume all the motions of things low and high, thus are most like the all-motion of the One.
Humans are the One fallen away from itself, journeying back to itself.
Time and space are the eternal moment and unity fallen and fragmented.
This is truly the most beautiful thought of Europe, which most don’t know about because it happened long before the gap of tech and science separated Europe from other cultures.

All the main thinkers of European Christianity were (Neo) Platonists for quite a while, and it thus still held much sway even after things branched out considerably.
Augustine, Pseudo Dionysius, Boethius, Eriugena, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino and Pico of the Ren (we will speak of them in particular), Bruno, Ren artists like Michelangelo, Botticelli, scientists like Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler.

Augustine (300) brought it into Christianity (from ‘Pagan’ authors). One of the most important author and church father, he was North African. He made the gods angels officially (each with an office) and talked about how light into the mind creates visions/theophanies/ideas of the cosmos and its order.

Pseudo-Dionysius (500) was a Syrian Christian who read Augustine and other authors and was big into negative theology, kataphania. He argued that the journey to the One was essentially one of unknowing or kataphania, and the One was the great Unknown, above all qualities or being (just like 99 names of Allah).

Eriugena (800) merged these two, working them together with many other authors, to create an amazing system. The first European Christian Platonist, Hegel wrote about him in his History- ‘With him, true philosophy first begins’, since Hegel is tracing an evolution of all thought up to himself, and Hegel is quite a European Platonist.
Notably, Hegel ignores the Islamic Zoroastrian Platonists who are writing at about the same time we learned about last week. Eriugena was one of the only people who could read a bit of Greek at the time, and so he was protected in the court of Charles the Bald who protected him from the Pope in exchange for translating and commentary on PD.
Basically, Augustine was cannon, and Eriugena was heretically saying that Augustine and PD are two sides of the same coin.

Eriugena saw the One as HyperOusia- the sum of being and non-being, the source of both but neither of the two at the same time. He took the radical unknown One of PD and made it the unknown source of both known and unknown in all levels of the cosmos.
God splits apart into oppositions to then form all the differentiations of the cosmos.
For Eriugena, psychology is physics, as we co-create our world as a product of our vision and the One’s vision. The One is unknown to itself/fully known to itself above human divisions of judgement, and it shares both of these with human beings, the special mediators of the cosmos. Like in Sufism, Humans are unique in potentially being God, encompassing the lowest and highest of all orders (the worm and the angel). Humans have free will thus- it was defending this radically which led to condemn. Authority comes from Reason, not the other way around.

Nicholas of Cusa’s mustard seed thought experiment- the boundless and infinite are present both active/potential, in the mundane of the world, just like the One/Christ.

St. Francis of Assisi (later San Francisco in Spanish) Visited Sultan’s Court, came back with a very Sufi vision. All religion is one brotherhood in God, give all to the poor, contemplate all through radical love. At the end of time, we will be standing side by side, hand in hand with sister death and brother fire.

The Renaissance (1400-1500)
‘Italy’ was not something that Ren people would have known. “Florence”, the city state was their nation. ‘Italy’ had yet to be unified and titled such, so ‘Italian Ren’ is a bit of a mis-title. Central power of the Pope had withered, and now trader city states can create competing cultures (another fall apart, good for thought time).

Vatican Library shows how books and Greeks had yet to be popular in 1400 Europe:
1443- 2 Greek books, 340 books total (that’s it)
1455- 400 Greek, 1200 total
1484- 1000 Greek, 3650 total

Frequently assumed by scholars that Renaissance was celebration of Greeks and Romans, both Philosophy and Art. Taking a close look at Ficino and Pico, the two major Platonists of the Renaissance and thus fathers of all European scholarship to follow, shows that the Egyptian and Persian wisdom was given a higher place than Plato.

Cosimo Medici founded the Platonic Academy of Florence in 1462 (meeting, not building as thought) and Ficino rose quickly to soon lead it, with Pico della Mirandola as student. Cosimo de Medici, when he knew he was dying, ordered Ficino to put aside translating Plato’s complete works and finish translating the Corpus Hermetica, the supposed secret wisdom of Egypt passed to the Hebrews and Greeks. Shows who was important. Plato is a follower of Hermes, and Zarathustra. Ficino translated ‘Maat’ as Logos, which is a bit of a confusion. Ficino finished translating the 17 texts in 1471.

Ficino argued there was one unbroken tradition of wisdom which included the Eyptians, Persians, the Brahmans of India (who he doesn’t go into detail on) and the Greeks.

This is like the Sufis, as well as arguing that Phil and Bible were compatible.
Ficino gave Europe the first Latin trans of Plato’s works, many derived from Arabic sources. Ficino thought that Zarathustra was the first prophet of the one true phil/rel, followed by Hermes from Egypt, then Moses, then Plato, then Jesus.
Pico, his student, thought it was first Hermes of Egypt, then Zarathustra, then Abraham, then Plato, etc. These remained the debated opinions for centuries.
Thus, Bruno and Masons follow Pico in Egypt being lost center of all wisdom.
Ficino repeatedly uses the Zoroastrian oracles to back up his points, and continuously mentions the 3 persian Magi visiting Jesus as infant in the Bible. Ficino writes that Plato had a third eye, which contemplated the union of being and nonbeing (The One), which came from a strange source. Pico was very big on Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, saying it was Egyptian.

Social & Political Philosophy: Hegel, Dialectic & Revolution

Hegel (1770-1831) is one of my favorite philosophers. In order to understand Hegel we study Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, the book that got me and others such as Angela Davis into Hegel. In the first part of Marcuse’s book he examines Hegel’s philosophy as it developed through his life (a very Hegelian method), and in the second part he examines Marx’s philosophy and later Marxist theorists building on while transforming Hegel’s philosophy. There will be more on Marcuse and his impact on the 60s next week with Socialism, as he is again one of the central authors we will read on the subject.

In college, I took a class on Hegel from a visiting German professor. I did not understand Hegel reading Hegel, but later in graduate school I read Marcuse’s book and got into a skeptical yet Hegelian view of the mind and reality. American and British schools neglected the study of Hegel until after the fall of the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union promoted the study of both Hegel and Marx as the science of history. Marcuse’s book is in fact a post-Marxist socialist rescuing of Hegel from theorists who argued that Hegel was a fascist and his ideas lead to Stalinist dictatorial communism (such as Popper).

Today we introduce Hegel, his life and important ideas, and finish with Hegel’s Phenomenology (his theory of History) and its master/slave Dialectic. Next time, we will look at Hegel’s Logic (his theory of psychology, his Philosophy of Right (his political theory) and the following of the Young Hegelians (the most famous being Marx). This will set us for studying socialism and communism in the coming weeks.


THE LIFE OF HEGEL

As I mentioned already, Hegel was a teenager during the French Revolution, and like his fellow German and European youth he watched with great anticipation hoping for radical change of tradition in the name of reason and rationality. Recall the Cult of Reason that Robespierre tried to install. Hegel watched the French Revolution and became more cynical and conservative in time. Many scholars have argued that this dialectic in Hegel’s own opinions was formative for his understanding of history and philosophy. By the time Hegel wrote his major work the Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind, he believed that Napoleon was a hero who embodied a new stage of history on horseback, and that Napoleon was a transition to the final form of politics embodied in the German and Prussian state governments that balanced authority with rights and liberties. As we will see when studying communism, Hegel went from believing in continuous revolution like Trotsky to conserving the established state like Lenin, which is also a great continuous change/Reason to supporter of the state/Understanding.

Hegel began his academic career much as Nietzsche, Heidegger and other German philosophers did: studying to be a theologian and Lutheran minister. Nietzsche wrote that one only has to mention the College of Tubingen (where Hegel began study) to know what German philosophy is at bottom: a cunning theology. I myself enjoy pointing out the similarities between Christian Neo-Platonism (the central philosophy of the European middle ages, the material one would study as a German doing theology) and German philosophy and it was the topic of my master’s thesis. Hegel does believe that the process and evolution of history is that of humanity building stage by stage the full understanding and reason of the human mind, which is the mind of God and the universe (similar to the understanding of Newton who was the rage in Hegel’s time). Marx took up this idea but famously “stood Hegel on his head” by taking Hegel’s system of dialectics and arguing that this is not the mind of God but the material science of politics being established according to the necessary process of reason, taking Hegel’s idealistic theism and making it materialistic atheism.

As a youth, Hegel thought that reason and freedom were the true forces of good in the universe, sounding much like a Jacobin. After watching the collapse of the French Revolution, he continued to view reason and freedom as the forerunners of human achievement but came to see understanding and necessity as counterweights that cause history to sway in a back and forth manner that Hegel identified with the Socratic and Platonic method of dialectic, of arguing both sides of an issue back and forth to achieve greater truth.

In 1801, just two years after Napoleon’s coup in France, Hegel began his academic career as a professor of philosophy in Jena. At the time, Kant was the rage in German philosophy, and Hegel’s philosophy developed in dialogue with Kant and others in vogue at the time. Hegel particularly took up Kant’s idea that understanding and reason are oppositional forces of the human mind and conceived of all history, including philosophy and politics, to be a dialectical evolution between these two forces.


HEGEL’S CORE IDEAS AND SYSTEM

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 by which they become what they are. After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Freud 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 understanding 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. Socrates and Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and Plato’s dialogues present 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 similar to Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal but opposite force.

Hegel’s dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and synthesis. Consider the French monarchy and feudalism, the French Revolution, and Napoleon. Consider the hometown conservative, the college liberal, and someone trying to find the overall truth after taking both sides. Hegel presents ideas as starting out positive (dogmatism), flipping and becoming negative (skepticism), and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole which then goes on to become the next positive or dogma for another stage of evolution. 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 world.

In the course of the history and evolution of politics and philosophy, thought has to gather everything into a universal whole while at the same time dividing everything up into their particular parts. It does this with the two opposite forces or faculties of understanding and reason. Understanding, the anchor and stability of the mind, has two jobs: keeping thought the same and keeping conceptions separate. Reason, the motion and freedom of the mind, also has two jobs, which are naturally opposite those of understanding: continuously changing thought and uniting conceptions together as a whole. This is the reason that dogmatic and conservative thought wants to keep traditions and ideas as they are and prevent them from getting mixed up, while skeptical and liberal thought want to change traditions and ideas and criticize the separate categorical differences of the understanding with inter-relativity. While everyone uses both understanding and reason continuously everyday and at every stage, dogmatists and conservatives prefer set understandings to fluid reasoning while skeptics and liberals prefer fluid reasoning to set understandings.

For Hegel, at each stage in any area of thought (religion, politics, philosophy, science etc) understanding provides the stable ground for the back and forth positions of reason. Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Theologians fight theologians in the name of religion, lawyers fight lawyers in the name of law, philosophers fight philosophers in the name of philosophy, and scientists fight scientists in the name of science. For Hegel there really is only one tree-like being which is mind/spirit, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought. Many have written a good deal about Hegel and Marx each coming to set understandings and then being contradicted and developed by later thinkers in the names of Hegel and Marx themselves.
Remember that Radin argued there are philosophers in all cultures, but they are rare. Hegel argues in his Logic that philosophers are rare because most get stuck in a one-sided understanding either on the side of dogma/understanding or skepticism/reason, and it is only the rare individual who can see the latest stage’s contradiction on both sides and become the understanding of the next stage (just like Napoleon). My own take on Hegel is much like that of Marcuse: dialectic is not giving us the unopposable truth, but powerful new truths (interpretations for Nietzsche, descriptions for Wittgenstein) that will be opposed but also supported by others in the continuous evolution/revolutions of truth and history. Recall Thoreau wondering about American democracy.


THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT/MIND

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. Like the Logic, 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. 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. 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. 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, subjective 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, 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. 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, balancing authority with rights, liberty and property as Locke argued it should. Rights and property are the unity of objective and subjective, the unity of the state and the individual understandings and perspectives.


THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC

One of the main ideas that structures Hegel’s Phenomenology is the Master/Slave dialectic, the continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next in history. It works equally 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 understanding with reason while the master deteriorates and grows lazy in a stagnant understanding/political arrangement. The slave comes to realize that one can do things for someone else (doing things for self and other at the same time), overcoming his own desires, and thus develops and 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.

The Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Marx. Marx argued that just as the French Revolution threw off the old masters, the clergy and nobility, the coming communist revolutions would throw off the new masters, the industrial capitalists. Feminist Hegelians use the master/slave dialectic for women, like Simone de Beauvoir did in ‘The Second Sex’. Post-Colonialists use the master/slave dialectic for oppressed minorities, such as Franz Fanon did in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as did 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). Considering that class, race and gender are the ‘big 3’ issues in academia since the 60s, Hegel is quite influential.