Archive for the ‘Modern Philosophy’ Category

« Older Entries
Jun
04
2010

Marx, Engels, and Capitalism

Marx, Engels, and Capitalism

As philosophers who inherited the goals of the Enlightenment, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed the main theme was freedom, freedom to become a full human being, creating oneself through free choices.  They attributed a high value to the human personality and believed that making a life was distinct from making a thing.  The concern for the alienated human under capitalism can be found in a number of remarks made by Marx and Engels:

“..devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things..”

“Labor does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity…”

”…the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object…”

“…the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of the worker…”

By the Nineteenth Century, the economic and social conditions that created what Walter Benjamin would call “high capitalism” were the result of numerous factors that converged over several centuries. World markets emerged and production and consumption became international and cosmopolitan. Local industries collapsed under the stress of factory goods and imports.  The result was that capitalism or capital was concentrated in a few hands due to centralized production.  These centers of production attracted workers and the uprooted poor poured into cities and cities, such as London, grew astronomically overnight.

The globalization of the Nineteenth Century was halted by the incessant wars of the Twentieth Century, and it is only in the past decade that we have returned to the levels of globalization that Marx witnessed.  During the Nineteenth Century, national states arose and accumulated great power over the people, but state power was undermined by capital’s international scope.  The fortunes of the nation state, as Adam Smith predicted, became entangled with capitalism, which was in the position of making or breaking the stability of the state through finances.

Power shifted from a small privileged class that presided over land, but did not produce products to the middle class, which based its power upon the kind of wealth that could grow exponentially. The bourgeoisie was first ruling class based, not upon ancestors, but on what they actually did which was to produce, but production had the tendency to outstrip demand or need.  In order to make sure that adequate demand for commodities continued, the bourgeoisie economy had to be based on competition for the new or novel product. The producers were forced to innovate, and, in order to compete, the means of production must constantly be revolutionized and the objects produced must constantly change.  As Marx commented,

“The bourgeoisie, in its reign of barely a hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive power than have all previous generations put together…”

“The bourgeois society has resolved all personal honor and dignity into exchange-value; and in place of all the freedoms that men have fought for, it has put one unprincipled freedom—free trade…”

Therefore the lives of ordinary people are controlled by the ruling class, which has vested interests invested in the capitalist system.  This class is in change and uses economic chaos and social crisis to its own advantage, seeing and seeking lucrative opportunities for further profits.  Capitalism is thus characterized as needing a permanent revolution, or a yearning for change. The “revolution” is not, of course, a political, social, or economic one, for real change threatens the status quo of the dominant class.  Instead, the impulse for “revolution” and “change” is transferred or displaced towards commodities.  Capitalism forces individual self-development but only in restrictive and distorted ways, because everything bourgeois society builds will only to be torn down.  In perhaps his most famous and often quoted remark, Marx perceptively described the conditions of capitalism:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.  All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face…the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men…”

According to Marx, the middle class is most violently destructive ruling class in history.  The   bourgeois class does not efface old structures but absorbs them and incorporates them into the market and new life becomes the new commodity to be consumed.  Capitalism manages to co-opt and absorb all challenges to its authority.  Marx pondered the impact of this new social condition upon human beings and commented,

“The production of ideas, concepts and consciousness is first of all directly interwoven with the material intercourse of man, the language of real life.. Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness…”

Human consciousness alters with every change in conditions of material existence in social relations or social life. Even society’s moral and ethical standards determined by monetary considerations.  Is it moral to appropriate the labor of others?  Is it ethical to exploit the desperation of human beings?  Why does labor allow such exploitation?  Under capitalism, dissimulation will silence these questions and will not allow the answers to be heard, thus, solidifying the “false consciousness” of ideology. The social mind is malleable to the forces of social persuasion, responding to the needs of the dominant class to further their position.

To reify the power relations already in place, the forces of legitimation work ceaselessly.  The elements of the superstructure are called into play to legitimate the status quo or the “natural,” whether the functions of the superstructure are education or the law or art.  Art and Law are commodities and the cultural workers produce in the name of the power relations with which they are complicit.  The artist, along with other intellectuals and poets, has lost his/her halo and has become a wage-laborer.  The artist is but a producer of ideas into material works of art, which are a form of perception or consciousness formed by capitalism.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

May
28
2010

Marx, Engels, and Property

Marx, Engels, and Property

For centuries, philosophers had been trying to determine the origin of property.  Almost without exception, from Rousseau to Hobbs, property was the equivalent to the apple in the Garden of Eden.  Property was the cause of the fall of the human raced from grace.  In 1884 Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Like the Utopian socialists before him, Engels imagined the end of the state and the coming of a communal equality, but the barrier is property.  So fundamental to human nature that it was hard to eliminate, property had to start at some point in society and the question was why and how?  Engels located the origin of property in the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.  Once tribes settled onto a specific piece of land in order to farm it, the urge to claim the land and the fruits of the land evolved.  Property ceased to be tribal and became individual over time and began to include the domesticated animals that assisted in the process of cultivation.  But people were also crucial in the planting and tending and harvesting and agriculture was labor intensive.  At some point, men emerged or put themselves forward as “owners” of “property” that was theirs along with “their” animals and “their” people, including “their” wives and “their” children.

Property became private; society became unequal; people became property. Just as Rousseau had trouble in explaining why free humans would voluntarily come together under the control of a social system, Engels had difficulty in explaining why women allowed men to become the owners of the very property they worked on.  The transformation of women into property was undoubtedly facilitated by marriage in which a woman was exchanged between two men, her father, who “gives” her to her husband.  Property, as land, objects, animals and people, was crucial to capitalism.  Property, under capitalism, was transformed from its traditional form of land into commodities that could be purchased and owned.  Marx said,

“…the product is an objectification of labor…”

“…new fangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want…”

The “want” that Marx spoke of was a function of capitalism, which needed the mechanism of projection of desire upon the object.  Thus desire became “reified” or solidified.  Marx was writing just on the edge of the establishment of the department store and its vast array of tempting goods, but his insights were prophetic.  He could not have known how the process of reification would work in the future, but he was aware of the connection between desire and the object, which was a “symptom” of the desire.  Reification is a mental process and is part of the exchange value of an object.  For example, people are convinced to act out their desired identities through the acquisition of an object.  The more desirable the fantasy identity, the more expensive the object, and the more money a person is willing to pay for a Porsche, for example. However, reification on the commodity level is trivial in comparison to how reification acts on the level of the total society.

Reification is used to further the interests of the ruling class.  The desire to acquire certain commodities was based upon an ideology of “success,” expressed through objects.  The property purchased reinforced the capitalist system, which is dependent upon constant buying which, in turn, supports the power position of those who control the mode of production.   The desire to own property is legitimated through ideology, encouraging consumption.  To counter arguments that capitalism exploits the working class,  the real consequence of  desire is falsified, hidden, or denied in a process called “dissimulation.”

Dissimulation, which is a form of misdirection or lying, is an important function of ideology. Reification, then, is the denial of the power relations by placing these relations outside of time.  The rich are not rich because of the capitalist system, the worker is not exploited because of the capitalist system, the unequal power relations are “natural.”  The rich are rich because they “naturally” deserve to be in power and the poor are poor because they are “naturally” inferior.   Property, while part of the ideology of capitalism, is an old and alien practice that has been absorbed into and transformed by the moneyed economy.

Echoing Hegel, Marx said, “…everything seems pregnant with its contrary…” Capitalism has a strange internal contradiction. The means of production, that is the entire labor-manufacture system, is socialized. Property, in contrast, refuses socialization in order to remain private, and yet the entire socialized capitalist system strives to accumulate private property.  In other words, private property or ownership or profits remains individual or private, while workers and the practices and customs that allow their labor to be appropriated so that private property can be accumulated are socialized through laws. The rules and laws of the superstructure produce circumstances favorable to private ownership and property and lead to and result in the exploitation of laborers—all of which is made to seem both logical and natural, through the workings of ideology.

In order for the spell of ideology to be broken, the consciousnesses of the workers had to be raised though a revelation of the true state of affairs, leading to a revolution and an overthrow of the social system.  To counteract this situation of appropriation and exploitation, Marx and Engels believed that property must be socialized and come under communal ownership.  Contrary to today’s beliefs about socialism, Nineteenth Century socialists did not believe in “big government,” but looked forward to the day when the “will of the people” would supersede the state, which would, in Marx’s words, “Wither away.”

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

May
21
2010

Marx, Engels and Alienation

Marx, Engels and Alienation

Aware of Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx was concerned with alienation and recognized the connection between the estrangement of human beings from themselves and from nature and the Industrial Revolution.  Marx re-wrote Schiller’s psychological alienation, as the estrangement of workers in industrial capitalist society from the products of their labor.  Capitalism is based upon money and money is abstract.  If money is abstract, then value is abstract.  Barter for goods and services ceases to exist and is replaced by exchange of money and thus the value of both labor and goods become arbitrary.  Once the worker is alienated from the product produced then the value of his or her labor is rendered arbitrary.  According to Marx,

“…devaluation of human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things…” and “…labor does not only create goods’ it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity…” therefore  “…his labor becomes an object…”

Marx’s concept of alienation was worked out in his 1844 essay, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” which set up a triad of alienation: the state is an alienated form of social life, social life is an alienation of labor, and the wage laborer is alienated from the product of his/her labor.  The cause of the alienation of the worker is the unfortunate discovery of surplus value.  As Marx’s writing partner, Friedrich Engels, stated,  “…the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of the worker…” Surplus values pocketed by the owner as profit.  What the owner refers to, as “profit” is also, according to Marxist theory, the fundamental incompatibility between mode of production and mode of appropriation.  When the worker was in control of his/her own product, all such “surplus value”, or “profit” accrued directly and only to him/her.

But, as Marx pointed out, surplus labor creates surplus value,  and surplus labor allows exploitation.  Surplus labor is the result of two major factors: an increase in population and the development and use of labor saving machinery increases profits for the owner of the mode of production.  Although the initial capital investment in the machinery was substantial, this investment was finite, compared to ongoing or infinite costs of hiring extra workers.

Under capitalism, the product belongs to the capitalist, not to the worker.  The worker is alienated from the product because his/her actions are performed in relation to the desires of the capitalist.  The laborer becomes a “tool” for the owner and is robbed of “humanity” or of the potential for human development.  Working in a state of “illiteracy”, the wage laborer is trained in one operation and cannot participate in the benefits and achievement of society that is progressing…but only for the middle class.  The products are objects of desire, which the laborer must labor to purchase in a viscous circle of desire and debt and powerlessness.  All workers are competitors with each other because their choice is between work and starvation.  Thus all workers are alienated from each other.

These are the facts of productive life, the fundamental factors that influence the ways in which all other aspects of all human affairs will develop. The question is why are the workers complicit with a system that enslaves them?  The answer is that their consciousness has been determined by the economic system.  Ideology or the belief system put forward by the ruling classes teaches the laborers to work on employer’s premises and on employer’s terms.

Ideology is a powerful mixture of truth and lies.  Capitalism requires capital or money to invest in a business.  A laboring family may take generations to accumulate the capital necessary to become bourgeoisie. A person from the working class encounters a system that is monopolistic and works to eliminate or bar competitors. The workers are made to believe that their alternative is no job and no wages, and they are made to hope that some day their condition will improve if they are cooperative.

The laborers believe the dreams of success and wealth that capitalism keeps alive and count on the positive effects of social mobility.  The owners of the mode of production, after all, were once lower class people who were rewarded for their hard work.  Surely, the worker thinks, me and my family will also receive the benefits of capitalism.  Laborers labor on, not realizing that fortunes are made within a network of privileges, invisible to the workers, and not upon merit.  Because the workers are in the thrall of an ideology of social and economic improvement, the owners of the mode of production are able to buy labor cheaply and sell goods dearly.

But Marx predicted that the consciousness of the workers will be “raised” and they will see past the veil of ideology, or “false consciousness,” and the proletariat will become aware of itself.  The workers will rise up against the owners and the two classes, the thesis, and the anti-thesis will clash.  The destiny of the proletariat is the truth of dialectical materialism and destruction of capitalism.  The class revolution is inevitable when “false consciousness” is dispelled and proletariat recognizes the exploitation and recaptures its own labor from the masters and institutes a classless society that Marx called the “Dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx’s dialectical model of change is the revolution and the destruction of one class by another.  According to this model, violence and conflict between classes are fundamental.

Although he understood that the economic system determined human consciousness, Marx could not predict is how deeply ideology was embedded in society.  The lower classes continued to reinforce the needs and the dominance of the upper classes who proved to be adept at misleading the workers through misinformation and gaining their cooperation to work against their own interests.  The consciousness of the lower classes was structured to obey the dominant class and no amount of information could release or “raise” the consciousness of the exploited class.  Those who attempted to advise the workers of the “truth” were rejected as elitist oppressors and the familiar and real owners of the mode of production were embraced and defended.  Labor unions could easily be co-opted by management be entangling the worker with the fate and profit of a company.  The poor would reject the very social policies designed to aid them, preferring the known and the familiar, no matter how badly they were treated.

For Marx, ideas and theories are epiphenomena or byproducts of economic forces, which are the real determinants of change.  Marx stated that “Consciousness does not determine life; life determines consciousness…” and that “…man makes religion, religion does no make man…” Although these statements sound idealist, they are actually materialist.  Yes, Marx understood and accepted that the mind constructs reality, and he asserted that social relations are bound up in material production, which become forms of perception or particular ways of seeing the world related to dominant way of seeing or social mentality.  Marx remarked,

“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.  The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises on a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.  The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general.  It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness…”

The ideology of the age is the product of concrete social relations, in other words, materialism.  Actual lived class relations are experienced, legitimized and become perpetuated.  The dialectical method accommodates itself to fundamental changes of reality due to constant change, resulting from oppositional forces. Marx was opposed to the formalism of Kant who sought the transcendental.  According to Marx, it is life that determines consciousness and the resulting consciousness is understood as “natural.” This unseen set of beliefs is unrealized or so accepted the ideology is invisible.  The lower classes are trained to believe in an ideology of inferiority, which is internalized and forces them to accept their lower status in society.   They are poor because they “deserve” to be poor.  The poor are poor, not because the system is designed to work against success for the many, but because they lost out in the Darwinian struggle for survival.  Ideology is the ultimate form of alienation because the workers will work against themselves.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

May
14
2010

Philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Today it is fashionable in some quarters to dismiss Karl Marx because of his apparently “failed” theory of an inevitable revolution in which the lower classes, realizing their exploitation, would rebel against those who owned the means of production.  Witnessing the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many said, “Marx was wrong.”   This rather anachronistic judgment fails to take into account that Marx was not an economist but a philosopher and that he could not see into a future in which capitalism would create a dazzling world of commodities that would tempt the working class to become consumers, buying into the very system that enslaved them.

In many ways, Hegel established a way of analyzing the past and set up a method by which Nineteenth Century historians could work.  Karl Marx adapted Hegel’s idea of the dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis into what he called “dialectical materialism.” Instead of appealing to ideas, Marx appealed to historical forces, a theory of history or a theory of things.  In contrast to Hegel’s “absolute” synthesis of categories, Marx was critical of “ideas,” which are empty and produce ideology.  Like Hegel, Marx claimed scientific precision for his philosophy with history as measurable record of clear progress. History, for Hegel, consisted of opposing forces: thesis and anti-thesis that over time would evolve into a synthesis that would, in its turn, become the new thesis.  Through these colliding forces, new stages would be reached and progress would occur. Marx was deeply concerned with social process/progress.  As a materialist, Marx’s ideas were phenomenological and not transcendental but he gave a great deal of attention to Hegel’s philosophy of history.  As Marx commented,

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.  And just when men seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language…”

Marx was also aware of the ideas of Kant and knew that Kant’s Copernican Revolution needed to be taken into account.  Kant, Hegel, and Marx were Determinists, that is, they all created philosophical systems that had a high explanatory value—each system could answer all the questions.  The difference in the thinking of these philosophers rested upon what forces determined their particular structure.  For Kant, the a priori workings of the human mind determined his system of knowledge, for Hegel it was the dialectic, and for Marx, it was the economic system.  Marx asserted that people are not free to choose social relations but are constrained by material reality, which is determined by economic production.

The key to Marx’s system is dialectical materialism, and his dialectic was the class system created by the capitalist system.  The creation of a privileged upper moneyed class and a dispossessed underclass resulted in a clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  The basis of society or the skeleton of society is economics.  Marx created a social model that distinguished between base and superstructure.  The base is the mode of production, which in Marx’s time is capitalism; and the superstructure can be defined as the social structures produced by human consciousness.  The superstructure is the laws and politics that define the form of social consciousness.  Consisting of education, cultural customs, political and legal practices, the superstructure both produces and reinforces an ideology, which functions to legitimate the power of the ruling class.

Human consciousness is determined by the mode of production or the economic system.  According to Marx, material relations between things are part of universal laws of history.  Marx wrote of the fatal evolution of capitalism, which is characterized by the domination of the bourgeoisie or middle class society who owns the mode of production and its necessary exploitation of the lower classes who produce the wealth.  The Bourgeoisie created a new social class, the urban poor, or the proletariat, that was collected into urban centers and concentrated in masses that could be exploited by the new system.  In contrast to the previous system, feudalism, value-in-exchange, capitalism is an abstract system, based upon an abstract concept called “money” and is not attached to the external qualities of things. Feudalism was a system based upon barter and upon a system of responsibilities.  Thing was exchanged for thing, obligation was exchanged for obligation.  A peasant could exchange a cow for a pig and give a portion of the harvest to the feudal lord who, in turn would protect the peasant who took care of the land he owned.

Within capitalism, a thing, an object is priced abstractly on the open market and will be sold according to what “the market will bear,” or according to what people will pay for it.  The end “value” of the object on the market has no relation to what those who own the means of producing the thing pay the workers for their labor.  Human  “labor” is embedded in goods and becomes abstracted.  In capitalism, the worker is alienated from the object and the difference between what s/he is paid and what the object sells for creates “surplus value,” which is appropriated by owner of capital who has exploited the laborer’s lack of alternatives. The excessive supply of labor drives wages down.  The minimum cost of making the product is covered by the laborer in a few hours, while the surplus or excess “value” goes to the employers.  According to Engels, “The appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of the worker….”

When the surplus value, created by the worker, is appropriated by the owner of capital, a dialectic is created between “labor and management,” and management’s exploitation of the helpless laborers leads to a class struggle.  The competition among the capitalists functions according to the law of capital accumulation or the concentration of wealth in a few hands.  The capitalist impulse is towards monopoly control of production, such as seen currently in the business model of Microsoft. The end result is that capital becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of the few, and unemployment grows as production becomes more technologically efficient. The result is overproduction and a crisis, such as seen in the American automotive industry.

The crisis of overproduction is resolved by opening new markets, which become new centers of production.  The old markets are limited in ability to absorb goods, which increases stress on the producers who must sell commodities.  Theoretically, the consumer needs only one television set but to resolve the stress a new and false need must be created, such as a television set for every member of the family.  The problem of overproduction is solved by manufactured desires that engender new demands for the new commodities, which are absorbed into the community. Marx and Engels stated,

“…the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with them all the relations of society…constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones…”

Marx and Engels wrote a theory of social causation or historical determinism and understood history to be a history of class struggles with every epoch having a prevailing mode of economic production and exchange.  The human being and human consciousness and social organization necessarily followed from this basis of political and intellectual history.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

May
07
2010

Late Nineteenth Century Social Philosophy

Late Nineteenth Century Social Philosophy

The post-Revolutionary philosophers of the early Nineteenth Century were prescient in foreseeing the social problems of the Industrial Age.  By mid-century, the philosophical emphasis had shifted from social reform to epistemological reform of philosophy itself, shifting philosophy away from idealism to materialism. New philosophers began to base their ideas upon empirical ideas and objective reasoning borrowed from science.  Even Hegel, one of the last of the idealist philosophers, stated that, “Philosophy must assume a regular structure as teachable as geometry,” and he wanted philosophy to be based upon a “definite methodical procedure.”

Auguste Comte was a disciple of Saint-Simon who shifted from Utopian thinking about society to a scientific study of society.   As the founder of “sociology,” Comte rationalized the study of human behavior by using scientific methodology.  People and their actions could be examined, facts could be gathered, hypothesis could be formed, and theories could be put forward and tested.  The goal was to study society as it was and not to imagine society, as it should be.  The importance of the Positivism of Comte is that the philosopher stressed actual observation and careful study of society.  In contrast to Comte’s more scientific approach, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was more political in his critique of society in his What is Property? (1840) and The Philosophy of Poverty (1846).   Rather than putting forward utopian ideals, Proudhon anticipated Marx by examining society and expressing outrage (“Property is theft.”) at the growing class stratification, as the industrialist class enjoyed runaway wealth and the lower classes enjoyed endless repetitive labor.  Like Saint-Simon, Proudhon imagined the disappearance of the state, but he wanted to substitute the authority of the state with the direct participation of the people who would decide their own affairs.

Although Proudhon sounded a bit less totalitarian than Hegel who believed that the nation and the state were one and the same and morally superseded the community, he, too, was an authoritarian.  Women, he believed, should be submissive to men and take care of them, and while, serving men, women should also should have children and nurture them as well.  He was typical of men of his age in his ideas about women and the use of authority.  Proudhon, as a non-too-successful professional publisher and writer, also had strong opinions about accumulated wealth.  He equated slavery with murder and property with robbery.  As Proudhon stated in What is Property? “..property and robbery are synonymous terms; that every social advantage accorded or rather usurped in the name of superior talent or service, in inequality and extortion…”

Most socialists (and anarchists) defined socialism as direct government achieved through suffrage.  Putting aside the fact that women and people of color could not vote, suffrage had its problems, because the mass of people were not well-educated or informed, they would not know how to vote for their own interests.  Proudhon preferred to create a form of government that would create an equilibrium between freedom of the people and the role of the government.  Arrested during the Revolution of 1848, sent into exile to Belgium during the Second Empire, Proudhon took the idea of equilibrium and applied it to war, advocating force to bring about equilibrium among nations, much to the dismay of his admirers.  “Reforms always,” he stated, “Utopias never,” announcing pragmatism and positivism.  A prolific letter writer and self-publisher of his many works, Proudhon was a native of Besançon, in Franche-Comté, the territory of Gustave Courbet.  Sometimes writing as an art critic, Proudhon published his ideas about Courbet’s paintings of a region that was very familiar to him.   Proudhon is perhaps better known for his association with Courbet than for his philosophical ideas today, because he was overshadowed by his one-time colleague, Karl Marx.

Karl Marx brushed Proudhon aside as a “bourgeois socialist” who would not advocate revolution.  It is difficult today to ascertain Proudhon’s knowledge of German philosophy.   Hegel had yet to be translated into French, however, Victor Cousin was teaching about Kant, for example, at the Sorbonne, and, from Proudhon’s own words, it would seem Cousin would have been his source of German thought.  However, the main difference between Kant, Hegel and Marx and the socialists was that the Germans created structured models for their philosophical thought and the socialists were less systematic.

The social philosophers were futurist; they looked forward, envisioning a better life.  They were less idealist than materialist in that they dealt with real social problems in a relatively practical fashion.  Hegel and Marx, in contrast, were determinists.  The future they posited was determined by the triadic forces of the dialectic.  It was Marx, who dominates the discussion of social theory and philosophy today with his application of the Hegelian dialectic to economics, to the “secret engine” of culture. As Marx stated,

“…New relations in production, superior to the former ones, never come into being before their material reason for existence has developed in the womb of old society.  Humanity puts to itself only the riddles that it can solve, for on looking closely at the matter, one will find that the riddle is put only when the material conditions of its solution already exists…”

Although Karl Marx 1818 – 1883) wrote often with Frederic Engels, (1820 –95) it is Marx who is the better-known philosopher.  Together Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology, 1846 and the Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1846.  On his own, Marx wrote Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844, Wage-Labor and Capital, (usually referred to as Das Capital) 1849, The Eighteenth Brumarie of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, Grundrisse, 1857-88, Wages, Price and Profit, 1865, The Civil War in France, 1871, and Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875.  Although Marx would live in bourgeois comfort in suburban London, his place of exile, and spent his days writing in seat G7 in the British Museum Library, he wrote movingly on the plight of the working classes during the Industrial Revolution.  By the time Marx was forced out of his native Prussia for his revolutionary ideas, industry and capitalism had been the basis of modern society for over one hundred years and its consequences were plain to see.

Vast new wealth had been accumulated by the new commercial class, and an abyss of poverty subjugated the lower classes.  Like many observers of his time, Marx foresaw a pending social and economic revolution—for human misery can be contained only so long.  As a German national living in England, Marx would have witnessed the activities of Reformists, politicians and writers, such as Charles Dickens, and philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham.  The British thinkers repeatedly warned of the consequences of the environmental and social horrors that had descended upon the so-called “advanced” industrial nations.

Kant and Hegel are considered idealists, reaching towards some kind of absolute or universal.  Marx, on the other hand, was a thoroughgoing materialist: for him, reality was grounded in existence, knowledge was the result of reality, and therefore the mind could never be independent of history.  If the mind constructed reality, then the constructions must always be changing, along with history.  If this was the case, then consciousness could never be absolute or universal and must be subjected to changing conditions.  For Marx, these conditions were capitalism, the greatest social change since the breakdown of the Roman Empire into feudalism, and the middle class, the first new class since the beginning of human history.  Capitalism had created a society based upon the abstraction of money, labor, goods, value, and, ultimately—human beings.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

Apr
30
2010

Early Nineteeth Century Utopian Philosophy

Early Nineteenth Century Utopian Philosophy

The largest issue of the second half of the Nineteenth Century was the containment of people.  The problem of how to control a growing population in  Europe and an alien population in colonized lands occupied the century’s philosophical minds.  In contrast to the Enlightenment philosophers who wrote in abstract absolutes, the mid-century philosophers were more concerned with the particular and the pragmatic. The materialist philosophers and socialist writers had been farsighted in their discussions of the impact of the Industrial Revolution. These early Nineteenth Century thinkers were more utopian than practical but they were moved by the plight of the workers who were being dehumanized and alienated in an industrial system based upon the demands of the machine.

Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon and his follower, Charles Fourier, in France and Jeremy Bentham and Robert Owen in England (and later in America) were products of the Eighteenth Century and disciples of the Enlightenment.  They envisioned a better way of life, based upon shared responsibility and rewarding and fulfilling labor.  These utopians were not revolutionaries but reformers.  From a practical point of view, they were ineffectual, but from a philosophical and social perspective, their ideas of equality and open-mindedness, especially towards the equality of women and tolerance of sex, are still advanced to this day.  However, there is a dark side to this early socialism.  In comparison to today’s socialists and socialism as practiced in Europe, the Nineteenth Century utopian socialists were closer to Twentieth Century totalitarian rulers than their benign-sounding classification would suggest.

According to Paul Taylor in The Birth of the Modern, Saint-Simon was a witness to the French Revolution but he felt that the Industrial Revolution was the most important.  It was he who coined the terms “industrialization” and “industrialist” as terms of admiration. Saint-Simon saw these “new” men as those who would improve society and thus elevate the standard of living by all people and raise the lower classes to a higher level.  It was Saint-Simon, not Marx, who coined the phrase, “To each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”   Like Marx, Saint-Simon saw society in a fundamentally new way: people were not  “citizens” or individuals but as part of a class.  His remarks about needs and abilities can be construed as benefiting the “industrial class,” which had the ability but then would have to assist the lower class which had needs that should be met.  Certainly Saint-Simon’s reputation as the “first socialist” is probably justified, due to his idea of social responsibility, for his favored industrialists were expected to repay the less fortunate and to spread the benefits of their wealth.

Obviously, Saint-Simon’s theories would have been an effective way to free the creative hands of the “new men” and to control the teeming masses of the poor, and his follower Charles Fourier was quite explicit in how people should behave in modern society.  He was gifted with a vivid imagination and saw a future when the Mediterranean Sea would turn to lemonade and women would have four men in her life at the same time.  While the world is still waiting for the lemonade stage, many of Fourier’s ideas have been attempted by people who wished to experiment with a communal way of life.  Fourier’s idea of a garden city became one of the long lasting dreams of city planners, such as Frank Lloyd Wright.

The English utopian socialist, Robert Owen, also attempted to build actual communal settlements, which were inspired by the idea of improving the living conditions industrial society.  However, like many of the socialists of the early part of the Nineteenth Century, Owen’s ideas were centered upon control of the very people who had a history of being unruly demanders for their basic rights.  His communal villages, from New Lanark in Scotland and New Harmony in Indiana, were marred by his authoritarian rule over his “human machines.”   Although it was in Owen’s new organization, All Classes of All Nations, that the term “socialism” was first used, like all the so-called radical socialists, Robert Owen created systems of dominance and subordination.

Perhaps the best-known practitioner of control over those who needed to be controlled, Jeremy Bentham imagined the most famous building never built, the Panopticon, a model prison that allowed for maximum surveillance with minimum staffing.  As a social architect, Bentham, who witnessed the worst of the British Industrial Revolution, recommended rounding up the poor and the criminal and incarcerating them.   His ideas sound positively Twenty-first Century in his demands that people be taken care of before they committed a crime and that these social undesirables should be part of a universal registry of names, a sort of national ID. Writing in Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault used Bentham’s unbuilt Utopian prison as the starting place for what turned into a society of surveillance or a “carceral” society.

Utopian socialists, then, were visionary but their visions were at odds with “liberty, equality, and fraternity” and more in line with totalitarian social engineering that included, not freeing individuals for self-actualization, but in cataloguing them for future reference.  The distance between Saint-Simon and Bentham can be measured by their projections for a future society.  Saint-Simon sounds almost conservative today in his dream of the shrinking state.  In the future, there would be no poverty and ignorance, and, therefore, no need for government.  On the other hand, the vision of Bentham necessitated greater government, the kind of government that would patrol the streets, actively seeking the poor and future criminals.

What makes the arguments of the early socialists interesting is that they were taking place against a backdrop of monarchies, constitutional and otherwise. Reading between the lines, it is possible to hear the voices of men of privilege, suspicious of the lower classes, called, by Marx, the Roman name, the “proletariat” and trusting of the power of the ruling class. True communal equality was hard to imagine.  Communism had been a concept ever since the French Revolution and by the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and ideas of communal equality and the redistribution of wealth throughout society were well established. Those in charge who were being enriched by the capitalist system liked it the way it was saw and no reason to be kinder or gentler to their workers.  The assembly line might result in alienation, the repetitive motions required by factory labor might be boring, and the safety and health conditions under industrialization might be dangerous, but the industrialists saw only profit, which trumped the needs of the workers.  At Mid-Century, Karl Marx would take the dialectical method of Hegel and turn it into Dialectical Materialism, taking Hegel’s idealism into the realm of materialism.  The ideas of utopian and positivist thinkers filtered down to the Realist artists who began to look carefully and critically at what the “modern” had wrought.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


Share

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

Apr
23
2010

Hegel and His Impact on Art and Aesthetics

Hegel and his Impact on Art and Aesthetics

Like any aesthetician, G. W. F. Hegel does not get involved in any particular movement or style or work of art, but, that said, he was very definite about the kind of art where Beauty could be found.  Like Emmanuel Kant, Hegel brings art and freedom together and anticipates the idea of art-for-art’s sake.  For Hegel, the Idea is always opposed to Nature.  The mind is contrasted to the mindlessness of matter or nature.  The mind creates art, which gives an idea to nature.  This idea is the unity of the externality or objectivity of nature and the subjectivity or personal vision of the artist.  As with Kant, the spectator of the work of art is as important as the art maker for Hegel.  Beauty in art is the emanation of the Absolute or Truth through an object.   Beauty can be shown only in a sensuous form called the Ideal, which transcends the Idea to become a special form.  Like all of Hegel’s triads, nothing is lost: nature and idea are the Other to one another but together they create an organism, the work of art.

The contemplative mind strives to see the Absolute. In order to see Beauty, this detached mind must transcend nature.  By freeing itself, the mind perceives the spiritual content of the work of art, which must also be free in order to be Beautiful.  Kant insisted that the higher form of beauty had to be free and independent and Hegel followed suit.  Hegel insisted that, to manifest Beauty, art must expel all that is external or contiguous or unnecessary.  Remember, in Hegel’s system, each part of the triad must be “pure” and can contain only its dialectical opposite.  For art to reveal Beauty is to reveal Truth, which can only be pure.  This is why art can never imitate nature, which is, mindless and irrational.  Nature must be reversed with its antithesis, the idea, which brings about the inner unity necessary for spiritual content: nature, idea, spirit = art.

If art must be free, then art should show, not just Beauty and Truth, but Freedom itself, which is the property of the free mind.  Hegel, true to his age, is a child of Neoclassicism and, like many Germans, was looking back to a Golden Age when human beings were free.  Part of being “modern” is being un-free.    Society has demands, which are placed upon people who have lost their sense of wholeness and self-actualization.  Thinking along the same lines as Friedrich Schiller’s “alienation,” Hegel felt that his own age was a diminished one.  Therefore, the artist should take subject matter from the past, a heroic age populated by characters that were free of the social restrictions so prevalent of the industrial age.

Ancient peoples, Hegel assumed could determine their own destinies and could make their own lives on their own terms.  While the current times were particular to the modern period, the primeval era could manifest life in its universal and essential form.  By stripping the process of living down to its basics, one is nearing the first cause of life, the logic of existence in which one is in the process of becoming.  One can “become” only if one is free, linking the rational with the free to the universal.  Hegel explained art’s predilection for the depiction of the high-born because those individuals are free, assuming that the lower classes are unsuited to being represented because, being subservient to their masters, they can never be free and therefore, never universal.   Stripping away the elitist assumptions that princes are preferential to peasants as subject matter in art, it is possible to note that Hegel was insisting that the artist attempt to reach the universal through art.

But Hegel was a also creature of history.  The idea of “princes” should not be taken so literally in the modern era, an era badly suited to the classical art of the past.  Hegel understood that the antique forms were indissolubly linked to their own time.  Greek and Roman sculpture expressed the ideal in universal poses of repose, rather than with active poses linked to a particular action. But in the modern age, the new society did not lend itself to  rest and repose, which could be found only in the spirit of the artist or in his personality.  The modern age has come to realize that any hope of freedom or infinity is impossible and the human mind has no escape, except into itself.  The new subjectivity of the spirit produces a new kind of art in which the artist imprints him or herself upon the art.  the result is Romantic art which is the art of modern Europe.  Unlike ancient art which needs the sensuous manifestation of the classical statue, Romantic art gives rise to an independent spirituality or mind which leaves behind its traces as sensuous remnants.   It then logically follows that sculpture is not the appropriate receptacle for the spirit of the Romantic artist.  Clearly, Hegel could not conceive of a form of sculpture that was allowed to transcend its traditional role of starting with and then transcending nature into idealism.  Sculpture was, despite its attempt at perfection of form, too bound to the “real.”

Painting, in its two-dimensional flatness, is the most suitable manifestation for the spirit, mind, and personality of the artist.  Painting is appearance, rather than actuality or matter and, as a mental process of the artist, is subjective.  The external world is allowed to enter into the subjective world of art because concrete reality is transformed through art.  Hegel allows for the ugly, the grotesque, suffering and evil in Romantic art as the other necessary element in his dialectic.   Beauty must contain ugliness, just as Truth conceals Lie, and for reconciliation to take place beauty and ugliness must be reconciled into a concrete unity that is a higher form of Beauty, which is also Truth.

Although Hegel’s ideas on art and aesthetics were inspiration for those who believed in “art-for-art’s-sake” or the avant-garde, his deterministic philosophy was politically very retrograde and repressive.  There is another way to view Hegel’s “princes.”  As with his colleague at the University of Berlin, Johann Gottleib Fichte, Hegel believed that Germany’s destiny was to become the dominant power in Europe, due to the forces of history, which had passed England and France and had progressed to Germany. A snob and a social climber, the consummate academic ego, Hegel was enamored of power and, during the French occupation of Germany, was thrilled by Napoléon.  Like Fichte, he believed that Germany was a chosen nation and that it had the moral right to pursue its hegemonic dominance ruthlessly with “absolute privileges over all others.  It should behave as the spirit willed it and will be dominant in the world…” With Hegel, war and dominance as historical tools of historical progress entered into European thought.  Because his philosophy was based in history, Hegelian aesthetics also impacted upon art history and art criticism.  The basic structure of art history has followed his model of successive and contrasting movements.

The history of art has been told as a succession of conflicting styles by Heinrich Wölfflin and as a tale of successive and contrasting movements by history based upon formalist models. The ancient produced the modern, the universal produced the particular, the timeless produced the contingent and modern art is the synthesis of these conflicting forces.  As a synthesis, Romantic art must be independent and begins to exist on its own.  Hegel’s aesthetics inspire the theory of the avant-garde: thesis, antithesis, synthesis—Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, and so on.   One avant-garde movement, assigned the positive position, opposed another avant-garde movement, the negative or counter position, resulted in a dialectic, which pushed art ever forward and towards an absolute of purity.  The result of the influence of Hegel, art criticism, especially under the American art writer, Clement Greenberg, was model of artistic progression from representation towards abstraction.  By using the avant-garde and its oppositional stance as the engine of change, art history in the Twentieth Century has been Hegelian in structure.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

Apr
09
2010

Hegel and the Dialectical Method

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Dialectical Method

Within the architectonic model, Kant’s categories were isolated from each other and appeared to impose themselves upon the structure.  However useful the categories were in explaining Kant’s theory of human reason, Hegel wanted to find a starting point, a first cause. For Hegel, “cause” was “reason”—-what is the reason that this event happened?  The “reason” has a “consequence”—-because of this, that happened. Therefore the first cause must be reason and the world is the consequent of reason. Reason, for Hegel is not an ideology, as it was for the Enlightenment philosophers.  Reason is an abstraction, which becomes part of a process, which produces a consequence. It follows that each category must be logically deduced from the other, so that they all relate, with each emerging from the other.  The categories, then, had to be a single unified whole. The key concept of Hegel is the “organic,” which has less to do with the natural and more to do with the logical deduction of one thing from another, due to a process that binds all elements together into an organic whole.  The whole that is produced is composed of necessary parts, none of which can be discarded.

The first principle of the world, Hegel reasoned, must be Being.  Being is both universal and necessary.  All things have being and Being must be the highest possible abstraction.  Having located the first cause, or first category, the philosopher then had to develop a mechanism from which other categories could be deduced from Being.  These categories, unlike Kant’s, could not be arbitrary; they had to be necessary and universal, not just because they sounded “logical,” but also because the categories were linked through deduction. The method of deduction was the Dialectical Method. The Method was the philosopher’s way of avoiding pictorial thinking or the tendency of humans to think in images or things.  For example, Kant’s philosophical structure was like a building or resembled an architectonic model.  One could easily imagine a house within which the categories become rooms.  Although one can certainly envision Hegel’s dialectic, the dialectic is process orientated and dynamic, compared to a more static model.  Hegel invented the dialectical method, based upon his realization that every concept necessarily contains its own opposite, hidden away, and that this opposite must be extricated or deduced and revealed from the first term.  For Hegel, his categories had to be objective and ontological, meaning that they had to be a proiri and independent.

Therefore, Hegel began with Being. If Being was to be the starting point, it must be the primal cause.  Being must necessarily be the first category because, without being, nothing else could exist.  Being, Hegel reasoned, as an abstract and pure category contains Nothingness and therefore can be ultimately reduced to Nothingness–its logical opposite.  But to have deduced nothingness from being is to also say that being and nothingness are the same.  Being passes into Nothingness; Nothingness passes into Being.  This passing (process) is called Becoming.  In other words, from Being and Nothingness, we can deduce Becoming.  These are the first three Categories of Hegelian Logic.  It is not we, however, who deduce these categories; the categories necessarily deduce themselves.  The first triad: Being, Nothingness, Becoming is based upon a founding affirmative, the thesis, the founding negative, the antithesis, and the process that resolves the contradiction or the dialectic between the two, the founding synthesis.  These are the three highest and most abstract categories, universal and existing by virtue of necessity and deduced by the method of deduction.  Equally obvious is the consequence of the system which unfolds in three parts: the powers of Reason will always force the system forward.  The Dialectic will push onward until a point is reached when no contradiction or antithesis is possible.   At that point one has reached the Absolute.  Here in the final category all distinctions are merged, because as the dialectic moves forward, nothing is lost, all is retained and assimilated.  The unity of the Absolute is necessary, grounded in the Logic of the thesis/antithesis conflict itself.  The antithesis will never discard the thesis and the synthesis will contain both the thesis and the antithesis, carrying the sequence of triads forward towards the Absolute.  The terminus of Hegel’s system is the category of the Absolute Idea, where nature and idea are transcended be the Spirit.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

Share

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

Apr
02
2010

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831)

It has been said that all philosophy is simply a series of footnotes on the ideas of Plato and Aristotle.  It can also be said that all modern philosophy is a series of footnotes no the work of Emmanuel Kant.  Writing in the early Nineteen Century, G. W. F. Hegel inherited the philosophy of Kant and accepted the (Copernican) notion that the mind constructed the world but then proceeded to modify much that was Kantian in his own philosophical system. In The Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), Hegel assumed the universe was rational and that through a progress of deduction, human beings would eventually find and agree upon the truth. The question was the starting point for the process of deducing the truth. Kant had introduced the notion of the Thing-in-Itself, a concept that Hegel found difficult to accept.  Like Plato, Kant assumed there were what Plato called “Forms” that were beyond the reach of human consciousness. The forms are unseeable and unknowable and exist only as ideas. Ideas are “beings” that produce the world.  All existence is Appearance and all appearance is dependent upon the world.  According to Plato, Things of the world are mere “copies” of Universals or Ideas.  Copies of the form/idea are made by and/or through Images of Ideas being stamped upon Matter by God(s).  Matter, for Plato was formless; matter was emptiness.  Matter is “not-being”, something that has not yet arisen from Idea.  Matter is primordial and independent.  The Thing comes into being only when matter is acted upon.

According to Aristotle, the Form, the Universal of a Thing, is also its End or Purpose.  The final cause (end) (thing) is identical with the formal cause (form).  A purpose must logically exist prior to the execution of the form.  This conclusion leads Aristotle to the distinction between potentiality and actuality.  Matter in itself is absolutely formless, the substrate of things.  In other words, matter is actually nothing but it is also potentially all things.  Matter gains actuality—becomes a “thing”—by acquiring Form.  Form is actuality, for Aristotle.  With the Greeks, the world process is crucial: there is the end, the form, and the universal. A “thing” is a combination of matter and form.  Without form, which must always be Universal, the thing cannot exist. Compared to the universality of form, the object/matter must be particular. All things strive towards their own ends.  Form molds matter and impels it to a higher state of existence.  The end must be present at the beginning; otherwise the end could not exert propelling force.  There is no new element, in other words, for the new must be present as a potentiality of the old.  The ancients considered development to be the process by which that which was latent or hidden came to light.  For the ancients, and for Plato and Aristotle, the world was driven by this dualism between idea and actuality, by these contradictions, which drive development.  These ancient ideas will be Hegel’s starting point and the source of his famous Dialectical Method, an invention that allowed him to ground truth and reality in the process of deductive Logic.

An idealist, who learned from Kant, Hegel accepted Kant’s Copernican Revolution or Kant’s concept of the self or Self as an enduring entity, that is independent of events and stands alone in a condition of self-awareness.  This “awareness” is the awareness of the object.  This recognition of the object results in the realization of the difference between the self and the “other”.  This moment is the origin of consciousness or being, an awareness of object as “other-than-me”.  Things are content, and Hegel distinguished between the object, as it is “in itself,” and the object as it is for an observer.  Although the concept of duality originated in ancient philosophy, modern philosophy credits René Descartes with the “Cartesian split.” Since Descartes, Western thought assumed a split between mind and matter. It was David Hume who questioned Greek idealism, exposing the inherent weakness of the dualism between mind and matter by returning to the question of how do we know reality?  Or what is knowledge?  Hume explored the most basic concept upon which all knowledge depends: cause and effect, both of which must be both universal and necessary. True, we experience what we name “cause” and then we experience what we call “effect.”  But we have done nothing more than placed a convenient label upon the events that transpired.  We have not established knowledge.   Experience in itself is never universal nor is experience in itself ever necessary.  The connection between cause and effect is an assumption and any “knowledge” is therefore illusionary.  Hume determined that knowledge could never arise out of experience and thus exposed the metaphysical base of philosophy.  Kant immediately understood the implications of Hume’s thought: once the metaphysics of philosophy had been revealed as a “faith based” system, any knowledge of the world was now impossible.  We knew nothing but our own beliefs and belief is not knowledge.

In order to correct David Hume and to put philosophy back on track, Kant proposed space and time as conditions that are both universal and necessary. The universal and necessary conditions of Space and Time give us objects.  Space and Time are a priori conditions, they preexist thought and make thought possible.  Space and Time are perceptions of our own minds and do not exist apart form us and are forms of our own perceptive faculty.  Space and time are Forms of sensations and these forms are filled with sense data.  The objects perceived by us through space and time are not real objects: they are Appearances.  Thought is conceptual and non-sense-based concepts—synthetic a priori judgments—are derived, not from experience, but from constructions made by the mind.  These concepts are the result of formal judgments of Logic.  We arrive at these concepts thorough the epistemological operations of the mind, Kant called “categories”, and there were twelve of them.  The twelve categories were subjective, and, because they were universal, were necessarily static, and unchanging.  However, as Hegel noticed, these categories were not deduced one from another and were therefore arbitrary models made up by Kant in order to show the way the mind worked. If the categories were not Logical, then the Reason-based philosophy of Kant was not on a firm base.  And this is the problem Hegel wanted to solve: to build a Logical base for the foundation of the Categories.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


Share

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

Feb
05
2010

Kant and Reason

Kant and Reason

The Eighteenth Century British philosopher, David Hume, suggested that we believed that there is a connection between cause and effect.  For example. fire causes flame and results in an effect of smoke.  Were it not for this belief system, we would be surprised every time we lit a match, saw fire, and witnessed the fire burn an object. Kant replaced Hume’s charge that cause and effect were mere metaphysical constructs with the idea of the a priori: mental structures possessed by human beings that allowed people to logically order empirical experiences in a rational fashion. We understand that “smoke” means “fire” not because one observes the effect of a lit match upon a dry leaf, but because one carries a preconceived concept of cause and effect in the mind.  Thus Kant replaced Descartes’s blind faith that God would not delude him with human reason and the powers of rational thinking.  Kant removed God from the philosophical equation. In his critique of Western philosophy, Kant realized that much of the writings of his predecessors had rested upon this ultimate appeal to God–metaphysics–placing philosophy in the precarious position of having its efficacy based solely upon belief in God.

The preconceived concept or preexisting idea is the a priori, or a structure in the mind that organizes perceptions.  The procedure of critique is nothing less than a Copernican Revolution, a call to reason rather than to faith, a demand for self-knowledge rather than for dogma.  Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was concerned with epistemology, establishing the grounds of knowledge, and with refuting untenable metaphysics. God does not give us the world that we see and experience.  We understand the world through reason. Knowledge is a cooperative affair—the mind organizes sense data actively and imposes reality upon the world.  We, as humans, can never hope to “see” “reality” or the “thing-in-itself.” We construct reality with our minds, which are organized at the most basic and abstract level to structure the most basic experiences, our perceptions of time and space.

There are two kinds of judgment: a priori and a posteriori.  The a priori judgment is pure and transcendent and self-evident.  It is absolutely valid and strictly necessary.  This judgment is independent of experience and is expressed in a statement in which the subject is defined by its predicate: ”The rose is a flower,” which is an analytic statement.  For Kant, the real problem for philosophy is a posteriori statements that were synthetic, that is, statements in which the predicate is not contained in the subject.  Cause and effect would come under the concept of a synthetic statement: there was no necessary connection between cause and effect.  Kant had to make an argument for cause and effect being a synthetic a priori judgment, that is a judgment that is absolute and necessary without being self-evident.   Kant argued that the mind imposes patterns and the patterns themselves are necessary.  Because the patterns are necessary, they are also transcendental.  This Aesthetic is immediate and non-discursive and sensuous, but it can be ordered and constructed by the mind.  For example, the mind has an intuition, that an immediate and sensuous, apprehension of space that is sensuous or aesthetic.

This intuition must be a priori to account for our knowledge of objects.  Thus Space is an a priori representation that underlies all outer intuitions and validates all claims of geometry, which is a science of space.  “Space” is the way the mind organizes experience.  “Space does not represent any property of things in themselves; it is, therefore, solely from the human standpoint…” and is inner and outer.  Time, like space, is another “pure form of intuition” and is the temporal ordering of experience into before and after and simultaneous.  But time is only “inner space” and is part of a spatiotemporal ordering of contents: a synthetic ordering due to the active mind’s cognition of physical objects.  This is what Kant called transcendental logic, the “putting together” (synthetic) of perceptions.  This synthetic operation makes experiences of objects possible.

In a typically Enlightenment fashion, Kant conceptually “built” an architectonic structure that would contain philosophy within a model.  Based upon reason, knowledge comes from thinking, which comes from judging.  All effective knowledge is the result of experiences of concrete sense data ordered by conceptual thinking.  According to Kant, “…thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind…” Kant was the first philosopher to distinguish between precepts and concepts, after the Cartesian duality of mind and body had proved to be untenable.  Kant then set out to establish categories of judgments, based upon Aristotelian logic.  Each form of judgment is an a priori conceptual category and the categories correspond to types of judgments.  Kant calls his arrangements the metaphysical deduction of the categories: each judgment presupposes one or another twelve synthetical (putting things together) categories or operations (such as cause and effect).

The categories are transcendental because they are rules.  These rules are not empirically observable but are necessary, because they make synthesis possible.  In other words, successive messages of data must be organized or held together into an experience or a unity of consciousness, which is the unity of self.  Experience is a combination of the self that experiences objects as a result of a priori acts of synthesis.  The human experience of objects consists of unified representations, producing objects of representation.  All knowledge demands a concept and the form of the concept must be universal and must serve as a rule.  Self and object are reciprocal.  Kant asked, “What conditions make experiences possible”?  and stated that experience is a combination of a priori concepts and empirical concepts.  The necessary conditions for “experience” is the object—sense experiences, put together into unity—and self—a collection of desires, memories, expectations, feelings, attitudes that unifies the data.  The self is also an object.  The putting together is a transcendental synthesis: objects-for-a-self.  The object is a synthesis of data of outer sense/space and the self is the synthesis of inner sense/space.

Thus, for Kant, empiricism is rehabilitated, cause and effect becomes a rule, and the function of concepts is to order the manifold of sense into meaningful and stable patterns.  The key to knowledge is order and rule that makes experience possible.  Order, in other words, must be presupposed (a priori) to make experience possible.  The world as experienced reflects patterns or categories.  Two important categories are substance and causality for human experience would not be human experience without an order that is indifferent.  We never experience these substances or the necessary connections; we experience only succession (synthesis).  Kant attributed our understanding of objects to a priori concepts through which our minds order experience with a notion of permanence and regular sequence.  His conclusions are an advance on the fallback position of Descartes that is that God “implanted” helpful innate ideas that give us reality.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


Share

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

« Older Entries