Contemporary Philosophy: Metaphysics, Ethics, Anthropology, and Politics
CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY
Metaphysics
After the Death of Marx
After the death of Marx, Engels stretched nature dialectic, separating it from being human. In his “Dialectics of Nature” he makes the following laws:
- Law of Interaction: In nature, things are linked to others. Ex: you can not understand the life of a plant separate from nature.
- Law of Universal Change: Any object was something else before it is. Example: a tree before it was a seed.
- Law of Qualitative Change: Increase or decrease of a quantity. Example: if you put a pot of water on the fire, heat increases the water temperature gradually gets a bottom-up process. In the process up, we see that the temperature increases, and when it reaches a hundred degrees changes from liquid to gas. The same can be observed in some social facts, like the French Revolution.
- Struggle of Opposites: This is the engine of change. The internal contradiction is because the cause of the movement of things is inside and not outside them, and innovative for the struggle of opposites leads to overcoming the old with the new.
- Unity of Opposites: If the opponents do not have a relationship, they do not act upon one another and contradiction does not create its beneficial effects.
While Marx’s Dialectic applies to men and to history using the job as mediation, Engels understands the historical and social structures as natural.
Ethics
Nietzsche’s Two Moralities
Nietzsche distinguishes two ways of being that is reflected in two distinct types of morality: the morality of the nobles and the morality of the slaves.
Morality of the Nobles
The noble is arrogant and proud, and believes himself superior to the rest. His claimed moral values include hierarchy, pride, and good arrogance. The concept is related to everything that contributes to increasing life, while evil is what degrades. It is the moral of the heroes and warriors.
Morality of the Slaves
The slave morality belongs to the people and defends equality and solidarity. There is an instinct for vengeance waiting for his chance for revenge. Their values are those of poverty and renunciation. There is a common enemy: the elites, the ascending life. The importance that Plato’s supersensible world has to do with the defense of social elites. In slave morality, resentment has played an important role. While the warriors risked their lives fighting in battle, in the rear were the priests. The return of the victorious warriors were overshadowed and undermined its role. But it refuses to let go and started a work against the new heroes. Resentment becomes creative, makes vice into virtue and opposes beauty and happiness. The ascetic ideal is a priestly establishment, which created the concept of sin and also the remedy for it.
Anthropology
Marx’s View of the Human Being
For Marx, the human being is the supreme reality. It is a praxis. The human being is a steady main task. The main human relationship is work. Work from humans creates a dual relationship:
- The human’s relationship with nature makes him an asset to be modified to suit your needs and ensure their livelihood.
- By the work, the human humanizes nature, transforming it for their own benefit and naturalizes itself. Nature is like the inorganic body of man, by which man’s essence is no abstraction, but “a set of social relations.”
Human Alienation
Marx inherited from Hegel and Feuerbach, the concept of alienation (or insanity), it means no longer holding himself in some states that reality property.
Hegel passes through three stages. In nature, the idea of being lost consciousness Hegel calls this alienation, since the idea is not recognized, it becomes strange to itself. When, finally, nature gives rise to humans, it retrieves the alignment presents idea.
Feuerbach’s religious man, conscious of its limitations, fables an imaginary world where dreams are made. God is a projection of human desires, but the man is not aware of it, does not recognize his works, which will enslave him.
The alienation becomes a Marxist theory of the unhappiness that notes the desire for happiness and the failure of those who try. Man is a victim of four alienations at once:
- With respect to nature: Nature and do not belong to the worker because the capitalist has bought the raw material. Man lives from nature, it is part of it for their livelihoods and as an instrument of work.
- With respect to work: Only a few own the means of production, the rest have to work selling your time in exchange for a wage. Work is just a means to satisfy basic needs so that the worker is forced to work. The activity that executes the worker no longer belongs to him, belongs to the capitalist, since the employee receives a salary that counts is profit, not people.
- Relative to the product: It also takes away the worker, and moreover, the more work, more turns against him his product, because the capitalist is enriched more and more does the world’s worker.
- With respect to other human beings: Competition creates differences among workers, making each one an enemy to others.
Contemporary Political Thought
Criticism of the State, Socialism, and Democracy
Nietzsche’s philosophy remained, in general, with his back to the social and political issue, crucial in a century where social tensions have increased dramatically, and in which there was extensive discussion of ideology. However, Nietzsche was not overlooked the importance of democracy as a political system and socialism as an ideology.
The state, which emerges and is consolidated during the modern era, is seen by Nietzsche as a new imposition of the intellectual tradition West. It is an organization to organize the life of human beings and subject it to restrictions, regulations that stifle the freedom of individuals, mainly of individuals “stronger” and “superior” who see their power and limited by the “weak” and “inferior.” The latter want the state to subdue the free spirits and thus ensure security and protection to them. The state, which for Hegel was the greatest achievement of reason, will be seen by Nietzsche from its consolidation, the source of mandates and obligations to follow.
For Nietzsche, Socialism is the new ideology to replace Christianity, but is very similar to it. Both are gregarious for unusual beliefs, for people fearful of the possibilities of life. Socialism kills preaches equality and thus the difference of life itself. It attacks the freedom and equality prefixed to it, promising an egalitarian society that is the end of all progress. In addition, enthroned in state, which is a pipe dream, an abstract concept, which lays down rules that determine the lives of individuals and oppress their freedom. Socialism, like Christianity, arises from the envy of the weak who can not live the life of the fort you want to chain their freedom and avoid difference.
For Nietzsche, Democracy is the government of the flock, the weak, which join together to counteract and curb the “free spirits” claiming the equality of all.
A Stateless Society
All the political project of Nietzsche can be reduced to a single proposition: the destruction of the state. This is the “big politics” to do the superman. In this sense, his political thought would coincide more with anarchism, but anarchism with a peculiar, not a socialist for whom everything must be left to the free expansion of the vital forces.