This course examines how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century in European philosophy and literature, and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change. Are we still in modernity, or have we moved beyond the modern to the postmodern?
From Enlightenment to Revolution II
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En provenance du cours de Wesleyan University
The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 1)
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From Enlightenment to Revolution
Karl Marx is our focus here as we move from a consideration of ideas to a confrontation with alienation, class struggle and revolution.
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Michael S. Roth
So, the dialectic involves these three moments.
The thesis, its antithesis and then the synthesis that, that results from their
conflict. It's very important to realize that, for
Hegel, conflict makes the world go round. Conflict makes the world go round.
Remember for Rousseau, what was really real was the state of nature.
Was some point in the past where humans were authentically human and, and for
Russo, that's the standard that he can use to imagine our degradation over time,
that we build up inequality, we build up a taste for luxury.
We build a vanity and envy, all of these things are corruption because it doesn't
have to go that way, for Ruso. and, and Ruso's thinking actually gives
rise to lots of other artists and, and philosophers who and romanticism,
who, who, unlike Russo say we need to go back.
You know, they imagine going backwards to this, this innocent state.
A state prior to conflict. In Hagel, conflict goes all the way down.
And we'll see that in Marx too. Conflict makes the world go round.
The link between the ideal and the real, the link between the noumenal and the
phenomenal. The, the, the link between what's false
and what's ultimately true is history for Hegel.
History is that link. History is reasonable.
That is, that is the key for, that's the Hegelian tradition,
that, and it's not just in the end of days that
the Christian tradition would say the, in the end of days, right, it all will be
true, right? We'll all be, there's redemption and forgiveness in the end of
days in the Christian tradition. But that happens in the, is, is almost a,
it's miraculous salvation, right? or yeah, the salvation through love, or
through grace, and mercy. In this tradition, the Hegelian
tradition, building on the tradition, Christian tradition, to be sure, it is a
process. Salvation, occurs because history is
rational, it's, we're going to build a perfect society.
And, and, and that's, that's a hard idea for many people to swallow.
Because history is filled with so much suffering.
And that, that's what really, was, is quite amazing about Hegel.
I mean, he, he tries to give an account of all historical struggle.
So that it, it, it's justified. It makes sense.
It, it, it is reason itself. He's deeply in, influenced by
Christianity and Christian mysticism of the Reformation at the time and shortly
afterwards. because for, for, for Hegel, Christianity
prefigures his own insight into philosophy, that is.
in Christianity, God sends his only son to the world to redeem their sins.
The truth, Logos, the truth, God comes to the world and is incarnated in the world.
That's what Hegel takes as a lesson of Christianity, that truth is incarnated in
the world, in the, in the flesh. And for Hegel says, that means the truth
is in the flesh of history. So, he takes it from being the flesh of
Jesus, to being the stuff of history. That's the only realm where truth is
found. And that actually gives politics a
historical struggle, a much more important value then they
would have otherwise had. You can't say, I'll go off and isolate
yourself, and contemplate, and think you can find the truth, somewhere away from
the noise of the street. The truth is in the street.
The truth is on the battlefield. The truth is in politics.
The truth will emerge in history. That is Hegel's strong belief, and it
emerges dialectically, that is through this conflict: thesis, antithesis,
synthesis, which he thinks is not just a way of looking at the world.
It's not just a way of looking at the world, it's how the world works itself.
So, here's another quotation, from Hegel's philosophy of history.
The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of
freedom. You can hear the, the, the optimism of
the revolutionary period. The history of the world is none other
than progress in the consciousness of freedom,
a progress whose development according to the necessity of its nature it's our
business. Hegel writes to investigate.
So Hegel says, I am investigating progress, and progress is the, is advance
in the consciousness of freedom and that means, for Hegel, that the truth is that
all must be free, not just some people, not just the best people, not just the
elite. But freedom has to spread through all of
society, and that is the truth of history.
Now, I want to, go back to dialectic, and make sure that we understand this, this
notion of, of one thing calling forth as opposite,
and then they are constantly giving rise to some kind of synthesis.
I'll give you first a He-, Hegelian category.
medieval communalism med-, or feudalism, if you will, where you have everybody in,
in this, in this a very generalized version.
[LAUGH] Everybody is in an organic relationship. They depend on each other.
the, the, the, the, the whole gives meaning to its parts.
That's that thesis, it gives rise to its opposite, Hegel says.
Individualistic capitalism, where everybody's on their own.
Everybody's on their own, everybody is, is fighting for their individual
salvation, individual success, and there's no community.
Hegel says those two things are in conflict, and they give rise they give
rise to another kind of mitigated individualism where you have both freedom
of the individual, and some communal interconnection.
Give you another kind of Hegelian example One the one hand, you have Infinite God.
God has great, is omniscient, omnipotent, all the power.
It gives rise to its opposite, sense that human beings have sometimes that, I am
nothing. I am nothing,
I can't do anything. and then that conflict, infinite God, the
human being as, as impoverished, as nothing, that, that, that conflict gives
rise to a human who incarnates the divine.
Gives rise to Christianity, gives rise to Jesus, as a, as a, as a merely human. I
am a person, I am man, but who incarnates the divine.
You have monarchical absolutism. Gives rise to revolutionary anarchism.
And then somehow they combine in synthesis of ordered freedom.
And that would be another example. you can have fun with this, or have the
slide there where you can fill in the blanks.
You have Charlie Chaplin, is your thesis. It gives rise to his antithesis.
let's, let's say Groucho Marx, you know, extraordinary verbal, comedy.
and then what's the synthesis of Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx? Maybe it's
Woody Allen, or maybe you have some other idea.
you can do this, you can start thinking dialectically by, by saying, okay, here's
the one thing I wanted when I was 15, and when I was At 28 I thought I want just
the opposite, and how does that come out later on in your life.
How does it, how does that produce, it's not so much a compromise, but the residue
of the conflict between those 2 positions, and you'll see some examples
of that, on, this slide, which I call Rorty on thinking
dialectically because Richard Rorty, great American philosopher, was my
teacher when I was a graduate student at Princeton.
He used to hand us a sheet like this with different ways of thinking about how
opposites call for one another, and how one can imagine a synthesis of that
conflict. So now, we finally get to Marx, because
this idea of, of conflict is absolutely central to his thinking about history
about politics, and about change. Now Marx, if, if you know once sentence
of, from Marx, it's the history of all hitherto society, existing society, is
the history of class struggle. The history of all hitherto existing
societies is the history of class struggle.
So you see, it's all about conflict, thesis giving rise to antithesis.
in the, in the section of his work on alienation, that we, read today, he's
trying to use this notion of a dialectic to understand how, through our labor, we
actually become more estranged from ourselves.
We actually lose ourselves through the work we do, which for Marx is a
contradiction. and we that is something we need, we, we,
we will have to change. So, here's a quotation from Marx.
On the basis of political economy itself, he writes, we have shown that the worker
sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of
commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the
power and magnitude of his production. There's your, there's the tension.
The more you produce, the more impoverished you are as a worker.
That is Marx's conflict. That is the conflict he is looking at in
this text I've asked you to read for this week.
You, how do, if you're working and you're trying to get out of poverty, what do you
want to do? You work harder, but for Marx in this period of capitalism, the harder
you work, the more impoverished you become.
Because, you, you produce more and more, which will call for fewer, a smaller and
smaller price, you'll get paid less and less, and you will feel more and more
alienated. You will feel more and more that you have
become as a worker, a commodity,
somebody else's tool. And for Marx, that is a symptom of an
industrial system that produces wealth for very, very few, and produces a sense
of alienation, or what he calls self-estrangement, in this reading, for
many. Here's a quote from think it's paragraph
four on alienation, from Marx. The alienation of the worker in his
product, means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence,
but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him,
and that it becomes a power on its own, confronting him.
It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as
something hostile and alien. What does he mean by this? For Marx, it's
in some ways pretty simple. Before exploitation for Marx, when you
were working in your own field, or at your own workbench, when you make
something, you actually learn who you are.
Through your work, and this is Hegel, a Hegelian idea, through your work you see
more about yourself, you learn about yourself, from the work you do.
So, if I was making, lets say, this pair of glasses, I've been working on it, you
know, getting it right, making sure that the lenses are okay, and I, I put them on
and they work, [LAUGH], I think, my goodness, I've, that's, I'm the kind of
person who can make these glasses. I've learned about myself,
about my capacities, about my limitations,
about my ability to work a certain amount of time.
For something that, when I look at it, and say, this is mine.
I have created this. Marx says what happens in capitalism is
when I make something, it's not mine., Somebody else takes it away immediately.
I make something, and the more I make, the more it's somebody else's, and so by
working, I lose myself. We'll talk about that next time.
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