Welcome back to the Modern and the Post-Modern. Last time, we talked about Jean Jacques Rousseau and his views of inequality. You may remember that we ended up last time, discussing some other reactions to Rousseau, ranging from the hilarious response to Voltaire, which was to say, Mr. Rousseau, you give me the urge to get down on all fours and crawl around like a baby. But, come on, give me a break. he gave that up a long time ago. Rousseau, of course is outraged by that. then later on after Rousseau's death, he's taken up by Robespierre in the Reignt of Terror. The, who's the, the radicals of, of the Jacobin during the French Revolution, take Rousseau to be their guide. They, they read Rousseau as saying we must squash out impurity. We must, we must support virtue and the most important thing we have to do to create a new society is radicals from, in 1793 said, the most important thing we have to do is to get rid of inequality. Get rid of difference. ale, everything the same. So, freedom and equality fighting against each other. Because when there are free people, of course, differences emerge. We also talked a little bit about Tocqueville, much later into the 19th century, who saw this battle between freedom and equality. as being a driving force in French history, in French society, throughout the modern period. He says it looks, when you read French history, Tocqueville says, it looks like people are struggling against authority, but really it's a struggle between freedom and equality, the desire to let people do what they want and the desire to keep everybody the same. The, this, this conflict one can see down until our own time. Today we move further along in time and we move towards Central Europe when we look at the work of Karl Marx. Now, many of you will have opinions about Karl Marx, because Karl Marx and and his colleague Engels are seen as the fathers of Communism. And Communism is a word that stirs great passions in the 20th century because it resulted in enormous journey and great suffering across the world but Marx is not the leader of a communist state in the 20th century. He is not the person who runs a government in one part of the world or another Marx for us in this class is a thinker who identified some of the, key problems, of maternity. and tried to access maternity through a, foundation of sorts. We'll talk about that later. a concept that would allow him to clarify maternity, so that he could promote, its change. And Rousseau, that concept for clarifying maternity was the state of nature. the state of nature that Rousseau talk about inequality as a form of corruption. For Marx, the concept will turn out to be much later in his work, the economic base or economic injustice. So that will allow him to, mount a critique of capitalism as we'll see in subsequent lectures. Today however, I want to give you some background to Marx, because the reading I've asked you to do today is from his early work. Sometimes called, philosophical manuscripts. It's work on alienation, on what the translators in english sometimes call self-estrangement. How is it, Marx wants to know, how is it that in modern society the things we do make us feel less like ourselves. How is it, Marx wants to know that the work we engage in feels like somebody else's work. Even the things we make feel as if they've been made by and for someone else. That, that's Marx's problem. So we start today trying to trace the path from Marx's teacher to these early texts. Marx's teacher being Friedrich Hegel, Georg Friedrich Hegel. and I want to give you some background, on Hegel and Marx, and this concept of alienation, and how it applies to property. So we have a lot of things to get through. Let's get started with a few words about Hegel. Hegel was in a generation following Kant, and remember when we talked about Immanuel Kant last week, and then the first week of the course, we focussed on Kant's Two World Theory. You'll remember I said that Kant wanted to steer a middle course, between skepticism and science. between those who looked to subjective ideas for truth and those who looked out in the world for, for truth. Kant did this by saying, well there are some things we can know. We call them the, the things about the phenomenal world. And there are some things we have faith in, we just believe in, we don't have knowledge about. Let's call that the noumenal world. Remember, we talked about that with Kant. His students, rejected this dichotomy. Kant said, what I can tell you, really, is don't mix up the phenomenal and the noumenal. You can have knowledge of the phenomenal. You can really make predictions about whether the bridge will stand up. You can make predictions and rational decisions about how to make a clock in the, because those were phenomenal issues, but don't try to have knowledge about the immortality of the soul. Don't try to have knowledge about freedom. That was Kant's way to eat his cake and have it too, right. To have faith in the noumenal knowledge in the phenomenal. His students say, [COUGH] we've got to bring this together. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel among others try to figure out how they can bridge the phenomenal and the nouminal. Hegel writing during the french revolution and into the first decades of the 19th century. is the, is the, the thinking we want to focus on today. so, Hegel's notion of getting from the bridging the phenomenal numino, is the notion of history and we want, I want to start off with that today. Hagle is the, the most important philosopher in up until his time to have looked at history with great seriousness. You have a quote there in front of you which is, a quote from one of Hagle's key texts about philosophy of history where he, in which he writes, the only thought which philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of history is the simple conception of reason, the simple conception of reason, that reason is the sovereign of the world. That the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process. The history of the world presents us with a rational process. For Hegel this is really key, that the only place where you'll find truth, is in the world, in history. If we go back to Plato and the history of philosophy, they're often distinguishing between what happens in the world, which is real messy stuff, and the ideal. The ideal realm, Kant called that ideal realm the noumenal. For Hegel said, it's only one world. It's the historical world. That's where truth is made. That's where truth happens. His quote goes on, reason is the substance of the universe. Reason is the infinite energy of the universe, everything we do in the world has to make sense, because making sense is grounded in history. Making sense is not something that happens out there in the noumenal realm or in the ideal realm. What makes sense is the historical record itself, if you know how to look at it, that is key for Hegel. If you have the philosophical or conceptual apparatus, for to know how to read history so history makes sense. Modernity for Hegel is period in which we understand That the only place we should look for truth is right around us, not in some divine or ideal realm. The concept that many of you probably have heard of in regard to Hegel is the dialectic. Hegel's notion of the dialectic is his notion of, is, is his lens really for reading history. So what is the dialectic in here? I'm going to, I'm going to go back to a quote from Hegel. In traversing the past, he wrote, we have only to do with what is present. The life of the ever-present spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments, he writes. Well, if you look at them in one way, they still exist beside each other. And if you look at them in another way, they've, some of them appear as past. For Hegel, the key about history, is that the historical present contains the past within it, because the dialectical processes or how the past is retained in the present. Dialectical processes, is, are how the past is retained in the present. [LAUGH] Now I, I know that sounds very abstract, but Hegel has something much more, concrete, in mind. It's that when you have one thing in history, it calls forth its opposite in a conflict. Fathers will conflict with sons and somehow the next generation will produces synthesis. We have the first point which we call, sometimes call that thesis, which calls forth its opposite. The pendulum swings, and they clash. And what you get is some, some result, some residue, but that has within it the first 2 terms, the father and the son, and then the next generation, the next generation. So these 3 moments for Hegel are what we find when we know how to read history. The thesis, it's opposite, the antithesis, and then what comes from them, a synthesis. That kind of opposition that gives rise to some, some result that opposition he calls negation or, in German, aufhebung. We'll talk about it the next time.
