Hegel points out that the followers of a particular philosopher tend to believe that they have received the one true philosophy from him, and as a result they brand every other philosophy as false and try to ruin its reputation. These zealous people exhibit the notion that philosophic truth is capable of reaching a fixed, rigid, static, finished, and final form; they believe that one particular philosophy can achieve this final truth; and that such a philosophy must be defended against any opposing views. These philosophers, Hegel says, do not comprehend that the disagreement between philosophies, when adequately understood, exhibits not conflict but the growth and development of truth. Differing philosophic systems should be seen not as at war with one another but as “elements of an organic unity.
What does this mean for philosophy? It means that Hegel has brought into the world a new way of viewing philosophy, the historicist way of viewing philosophy. Philosophy cannot be understood as Plato or Descartes or Hume understood it, as a zero-sum game, in which there is only one winner, only one true philosophy. Philosophy must be understood as the evolving, changing historical development which it is, with all its conflicts playing their necessary parts in the developmental process. The meaning of philosophy, then, can only be found in its own historical development: The history of philosophy is philosophy.
Your actions flowing from your own desires have unintended consequences in the industrial, financial, and educational functions of your society which you do not recognize. In this way, the Cunning of Reason uses the desires of human individuals to sustain the ongoing functions of the nation. Moreover, when you pursue your own desires you not only sustain or determine the continued existence of these various functions of your society, but your desires themselves are sustained or determined by the society. Your choice of clothes or a career is determined by the various options which your culture has developed and made available for you to desire and to choose.
The Spirit of the People is embodied not only in the culture but also in a people’s social, economic, and political institutions, and all of these are incorporated in the ongoing life of the Nation-State. This great organic totality, the Nation-State, is the source of culture, institutional life, and morality. The ethical life for the individual member of society is provided by the Nation-State itself, by the Spirit of the People as it is embodied in the culture and in the legal, political, economic, religious, and educational institutions of the society. Ethical life, the moral life, is life lived in a community, in an organized society.
You can live a moral life, says Hegel, only by acting in accordance with the moral principles expressed by your own society in its own institutions. In your moral life, as well as in your beliefs, your personal goals, your philosophy, you are a culture carrier, a receptacle for the moral values which are embodied in the culture, in the political and economic way of life, and in the religious and educational institutions of your society. The moral values that are embodied in your Nation-State provide the only morality you have, your only moral ideals, your only moral obligations. The moral life has its source only in the Nation-State and can be fulfilled only in the Nation-State.
Man as a species, says Marx, is a natural being which develops in the course of world history. Man is primarily a creative being, with desires and powers, faculties, creative abilities, which have their outcome in production. Mankin in its history has transformed the objects of the natural world and has created the entire world of culture. The vast historical and natural accumulation of the material and cultural objects mankind has produced are the manifestations or externalizations or embodiments of man’s creative powers. Man actualizes himself in the world.
Materialism had its greatest modern historical influence in the form of mechanistic materialism, which was formulated in the seventeenth century by René Descartes (1596-1650), as we have seen, and by his British contemporary Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Mechanistic materialism arose in response to the rapidly developing physical sciences and claimed that reality consists of physical (material) particles in motion according to mechanical laws; these laws were scientifically verified and systematized by Newtonian mechanics (Newton’s Principles, 1687), which explained by three laws of motion all earthly and astronomical motion.
Marx believes that his own materialism is different from all previous types of materialism in its awareness that the reality of material objects is not independent of human beings, but is actually a reality which has been transformed by human labor in the course of history. Marx presents his own conception of historical materialism, as a radically new materialism and as a new way of understanding history.
The concept of the economic structure, or economic foundation, of society is crucial to Marx’s view of society and history. Marx begins with a fundamental point about the history of human production. Whereas animals satisfy their needs with what nature provides, human beings must themselves produce the food and clothing and shelter which will meet basic human needs. Thus humans must produce the means to change what nature provides into things suitable for human needs. And as soon as man’s basic needs are satisfied he develops new needs, which he is also increasingly able to satisfy by his productive activity.
Marx’s point is that man is thus the producer of his own expanding material life. Man the producer is limitless in the needs he has the power to create and in the instruments he can produce to satisfy those needs. Human nature is expressed in this ongoing productive activity and its creative power, by which man continually transforms the material world and transforms himself.
In Marx’s analysis, this process of man’s material production consists of three components or factors. Human production is linked, first of all, to the existing conditions of production in the particular society. By the term conditions of production Marx means such basic conditions affecting human production as the existing climate, the geography of the society’s physical location, the supply of raw materials, the total population.
The second component of production Marx calls the forces of production, and by this term he means the types of skills, tools, instruments, and technology as well as the type and size of the labor supply which are available to the society. The third and crucial component Marx calls the relations of production and by this he means the property relations within a society- specifically, the existing social relations according to which the society organizes its conditions and forces of production and distributes the product among the members of the society.
Human life is not designed for pleasure, Kierkegaard tells us, yet in the time given to each of us for our own existence, we strive for happiness in order to escape anxiety and the deep, hopeless depression which is despair. But there is no escape-no matter how pleasurable and comfortable we make our lives in order to hide from the truth. For the truth is, Kierkegaard insists, that all of us live in anxiety and despair. This is the universal human condition. We suffer from anxiety even when we are not aware of it, and even when there is nothing to fear, nothing in the objective world to feel anxious about. This is because at bottom, says Kierkegaard, our anxiety is not objective at all, it is subjective anxiety, it is the universal fear of something that is nothing, it is the fear of the nothingness of human existence.
Source : From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest by T.Z. Lavine
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22626.From_Socrates_to_Sartre
Read Previous Article in the Series :
Thinking Beyond Science 
Leave a comment