The Religion and Philosophy Room
How about some boring philosophy for the new year! For at least your reading pleasure...
A Dialectic View of Social Development: Hegel and Marx looks at the path of progress as viewed by Hegel and Marx.
...This path was determined by a process called the dialectic. In each era, the reigning state of the world would create a fundamental opposition. For Hegel, this dialectic was the mind of God coming to understand its own being. At first God is the subject, the thing that thinks. But then to think, you need an object, that is, something to think about.
So, God is both the subject and the object. One state always creates the opposite....
Ultimately, this conflict between them destroys them both, leaving only the core commonalities they share that would then become the basis for the next higher stage of reality. This, too, would create a fundamental opposition and on and on the process goes until ultimately, the universe ended up where it needed to be....
...instead of everything being an immaterial mode of God’s consciousness as Hegel thought, Marx claimed that the universe was made of material things rather than abstract states of being. Marx suggested that the dialectical process of cultural and economic development was the result of class-on-class struggles.
...For Marx, slavery, for example, was a necessary evil....
...Feudalism in which ... the lords couldn’t dictate their every action, but they did control the land that produced the food that was needed for survival.
Eventually, there was a peasant revolt and the result was a capitalist society in which it wasn’t land owners who controlled the society, but the factory owners who controlled the means of production....
...Marx did not think capitalism was an inherently evil or bad system. Indeed, he thought it was a necessary step in economic history. Capitalism has to occur, and it serves a very important role in human development.
...The result is the elimination of scarcity, whereby human beings have everything they need....
...But in making this happen, the laborers have become alienated, dehumanized, and removed from meaningful relations they have with each other, themselves, and with the things they create. Eventually, they will have had enough. We are now set for the next step, and the revolution of the workers.
...Moving through a time of collective ownership, we ultimately arrive at the communistic utopia....
Marx thought slavery a necessary evil. What do BLM Marxists think of that?
Most socialists get it wrong in thinking socialism is needed to create the communist utopia, no, that's capitalism.
Note that Marx never described the communist utopia.
The Errors of Progressivism
...Just as the Progressives of today have no real sense of where their progress might or should lead, they have even less sense of their origins. Progressivism, as understood in the last several centuries, originated in the thought of the Prussian philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and his contemporary, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814).
...It would be nearly impossible to exaggerate how quickly the cycle of thesis-antithesis-synthesis—given the shorthand of “progress” and its advocates “progressives” —pervaded Germanic thought in the nineteenth century. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels especially coopted the idea.
...Progressivism is really, at heart, pre- and trans-political. It is a theory of history and anthropology, not of politics. Deeply conservative men such as Harvard University’s Frederick Jackson Turner embraced the progressive vision of history. When teaching students the meaning of Hegelian and Fictean visions of history, I find they learn best by looking at the simplified version offered by Turner....
...In Turner’s progressive history, Europe serves as the thesis; Indians as anti-thesis; and Americans as the synthesis.
One need not limit his analysis to the nineteenth century. Modern neo-conservatives, such as Francis Fukyama, have embraced the progressive vision of history just as readily as had Marx and Turner. Progressives have come to dominate academics, churches, the media, and, especially, politics.
...the progressive vision demands conflict. That is, in its understanding, history is made up of winners and losers. This flies directly against the long tradition of republican and Judeo-Christian thought that calls for the “common good” of the res publica, not the greater good of those with might. In the greater part of the Western tradition, at least up through the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli, the most important intellectuals recognized the flaws or fallenness of man, noting that power must be divided and guarded against. The progressives, wittingly or not, embrace the idea that those with power should be taken down by those with equal power, thus creating a third and new power, itself soon to be the “establishment” to be challenged. As such, the guiding force of society is might, not justice....
...From its beginning, whether intentional or not, Progressivism has been racist and bigoted. Yet, such results are true to its theory. If all history comes from the conflicts over power, the losers will always be dehumanized. Crazily enough, the modern Progressives have done the same thing. Yet, whereas once our history was written by the victors, it is now written by the victims....
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Originally Posted by Chris
