Introduction
子貢問曰、有一言、而可以終身行之者乎。子曰、其恕乎、己所 不欲、勿施於人。
Adept Kung asked: "Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?"
The Master replied: "How about 'shu' [reciprocity]: never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself?"
Analects XV.24, tr. David Hinton
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On the day when President-Elect Obama officially resigned as Senator of Illonois, and is in the process of putting together his White House Staff, I will start to do the same in terms of my 'DGB Philosophy, Psychology, and Mythological Staff' representing some of the main 'Multi-Bi-Polar Functions of The Personality'.
I will actually probably put together three such models, the first one reflecting famous philosopher and psychologists throughout Western History; the second one, representing a 'mythological model'; and the third one a 'multi-bi-polar, functional model'. The model below represents my first attempt at a 'famous philosophers and psychologists model'.
I will probably not finish this work today but will get the process started.
Everything is subject to change as I move along...and gain more knowledge of Western(Europeon, American, Canadian) history.
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1. President of The DGB Philosophy Cabinet: John Locke
Mythological God: Zeus (a strong authoritarian mythological figure; not very democratic, but everyone knew who was the ultimate power)
Functional Name: 'The Central-Mediating and Executive Ego'
Honorary Presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy
Honorary Members: Aristotle, Sir Francis Bacon, G.W.F. Hegel, Denis Diderot, Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, David Hume
John Locke (29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher. Locke is considered the first of the British Empiricists, but is equally important to social contract theory. His ideas had enormous influence on the development of epistemology and political philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, classical republicans, and contributors to liberal theory. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. This influence is reflected in the American Declaration of Independence.[1]
Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin for modern conceptions of identity and "the self", figuring prominently in the later works of philosophers such as David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Locke was the first philosopher to define the self through a continuity of "consciousness". He also postulated that the mind was a "blank slate" or "tabula rasa"; that is, contrary to Cartesian or Christian philosophy, Locke maintained that people are born without innate ideas.[2]
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2. Head Of The Department of Humanistic-Existential Ethics: Erich Fromm
Mythological God: Apollo (ethical part -- variously interpreted as God of light and the sun, truth and prophecy, medicine and healing, music, poetry, and the arts, reason and justice...)
Honorary Members: Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Aristotle, Sir Francis Bacon, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa
Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was an internationally renowned German-American Jewish social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanistic philosopher. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
Contents
1 Life
2 Psychological theory
2.1 Five orientations
2.2 Fromm's influence on other notable psychologists
3 Critique of Freud
4 Political ideas and activities
5 Bibliography
6 External links
Life
Erich Fromm started his studies in 1918 at the University of Frankfurt am Main with two semesters of jurisprudence. During the summer semester of 1919, Fromm studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he switched from studying jurisprudence to sociology under Alfred Weber (brother of the famous sociologist Max Weber), the brilliant psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickert. Fromm received his Ph.D. in sociology from Heidelberg in 1922. And, then during the mid 1920s, he was trained to become a psychoanalyst through Frieda Reichmann's psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg. He began his own clinical practice in 1927. In 1930, he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and completed his psychoanalytical training. After the Nazi takeover of power in Germany, Fromm moved to Geneva and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York. Karen Horney's long-term infatuation with Fromm is the subject of her book Self Analysis and it is reasonable to believe that each had a lasting influence on the other's thought. After leaving Columbia, Fromm helped form the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1943, and in 1946 co-founded the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. He was on the faculty of Bennington College from 1941-1950.
When Fromm moved to Mexico City in 1950, he became a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and established a psychoanalytic section at the medical school there. He taught at UNAM until his retirement in 1965. Meanwhile, he taught as a professor of psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961 and as an adjunct professor of psychology at the graduate division of Arts and Sciences at New York University after 1962. In 1974 he moved to Muralto, Switzerland, and died at his home in 1980, five days before his eightieth birthday. All the while, Fromm maintained his own clinical practice and published a series of books.
Psychological theory
Beginning with his first seminal work of 1941, Escape from Freedom (known in Britain as Fear of Freedom), Fromm's writings were notable as much for their social and political commentary as for their philosophical and psychological underpinnings. Indeed, Escape from Freedom is viewed as one of the founding works of Political psychology. His second important work, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, first published in 1947, continued and enriched the ideas of Escape from Freedom. Taken together, these books outlined Fromm's theory of human character, which was a natural outgrowth of Fromm's theory of human nature. Fromm's most popular book was The Art of Loving, an international bestseller first published in 1956, which recapitulated and complemented the theoretical principles of human nature found in Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself—principles which were revisited in many of Fromm's other major works.
Central to Fromm's world view was his interpretation of the Talmud, which he began studying as a young man under Rabbi J. Horowitz and later studied under Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow while working towards his doctorate in sociology at the University of Heidelberg and under Nehemia Nobel and Ludwig Krause while studying in Frankfurt. Fromm's grandfather and two great grandfathers on his father's side were rabbis, and a great uncle on his mother's side was a noted Talmudic scholar. However, Fromm turned away from orthodox Judaism in 1926, towards secular interpretations of scriptural ideals.
The cornerstone of Fromm's humanistic philosophy is his interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden. Drawing on his knowledge of the Talmud, Fromm pointed out that being able to distinguish between good and evil is generally considered to be a virtue, and that biblical scholars generally consider Adam and Eve to have sinned by disobeying God and eating from the Tree of Knowledge. However, departing from traditional religious orthodoxy, Fromm extolled the virtues of humans taking independent action and using reason to establish moral values rather than adhering to authoritarian moral values.
Beyond a simple condemnation of authoritarian value systems, Fromm used the story of Adam and Eve as an allegorical explanation for human biological evolution and existential angst, asserting that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became aware of themselves as being separate from nature while still being part of it. This is why they felt "naked" and "ashamed": they had evolved into human beings, conscious of themselves, their own mortality, and their powerlessness before the forces of nature and society, and no longer united with the universe as they were in their instinctive, pre-human existence as animals. According to Fromm, the awareness of a disunited human existence is a source of guilt and shame, and the solution to this existential dichotomy is found in the development of one's uniquely human powers of love and reason. However, Fromm so distinguished his concept of love from popular notions of love that his reference to this concept was virtually paradoxical.
Fromm considered love to be an interpersonal creative capacity rather than an emotion, and he distinguished this creative capacity from what he considered to be various forms of narcissistic neuroses and sado-masochistic tendencies that are commonly held out as proof of "true love." Indeed, Fromm viewed the experience of "falling in love" as evidence of one's failure to understand the true nature of love, which he believed always had the common elements of care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Drawing from his knowledge of the Torah, Fromm pointed to the story of Jonah, who did not wish to save the residents of Nineveh from the consequences of their sin, as demonstrative of his belief that the qualities of care and responsibility are generally absent from most human relationships. Fromm also asserted that few people in modern society had respect for the autonomy of their fellow human beings, much less the objective knowledge of what other people truly wanted and needed.
Fromm believed that freedom was an aspect of human nature that we either embrace or escape. He observed that embracing our freedom of will was healthy, whereas escaping freedom through the use of escape mechanisms was the root of psychological conflicts. Three main escape mechanisms that Fromm outlined are automaton conformity, authoritarianism, and destructiveness. Automaton conformity is changing one's ideal self to what is perceived as the preferred type of personality of society, losing one's true self. The use of automaton conformity displaces the burden of choice from the self to society. Authoritarianism is allowing oneself to be controlled by another. This removes the freedom of choice almost entirely by submitting that freedom to someone else. Lastly, destructiveness is any process which attempts to eliminate others or the world as a whole to escape freedom. Fromm said that "the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it" (1941).
The word biophilia was frequently used by Fromm as a description of a productive psychological orientation and "state of being". For example, in an addendum to his book The Heart of Man: Its Genius For Good and Evil, Fromm wrote as part of his famous Humanist Credo:
"I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom." (c. 1965)
Erich Fromm postulated five basic needs:
Relatedness - relationships with others, care, respect, knowledge;
Transcendence - creativity, develop a loving and interesting life;
Rootedness - feeling of belonging;
Sense of Identity - see ourselves as a unique person and part of a social group.
A frame of orientation - the need to understand the world and our place in it.
Fromm's thesis of the "escape from freedom" is epitomized in the following passage. The "individualized man" referenced by Fromm is man bereft of "primary ties" of belonging (nature, family, etc.), also expressed as "freedom from":
"There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual . . . . However, if the economic, social and political conditions . . . do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom." (Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom [N.Y.: Rinehart, 1941], pp. 36-7. The point is repeated on pp. 31, 256-7.)
[edit] Five orientations
Fromm also spoke of "orientation of character" in his book "Man For Himself", which describes the ways an individual relates to the world and constitutes his general character, and develops from two specific kinds of relatedness to the world: acquiring and assimilating things ("assimilation"), and reacting to people ("socialization"). Fromm considers these character systems the human substitute for instincts in animals. These orientations describe how a man has developed in regard to how he responds to conflicts in his or her life; he also said that people were never pure in any such orientation.
These two factors form four types of malignant character, which he calls Receptive, Exploitative, Hoarding and Marketing. He also described a positive character, which he called Productive.
Fromm's influence on other notable psychologists
Fromm's four non-productive orientations were subject to validation through a psychometric test, The Person Relatedness Test by Elias H. Porter, Ph.D. in collaboration with Carl Rogers, Ph.D.at the University of Chicago's Counseling Center between 1953 and 1955. Fromm's four non-productive orientations also served as basis for the LIFO test, first published in 1967 by Stuart Atkins, Alan Katcher, Ph.D., and Elias Porter, Ph.D. and the Strength Deployment Inventory, first published in 1971 by Elias H. Porter, Ph.D. [1], [2]
Critique of Freud
Fromm examined the life and work of Sigmund Freud at length. He identified a discrepancy between early and later Freudian theory: namely that prior to World War I, Freud described human drives as a tension between desire and repression, but after the war's conclusion, he framed human drives as a struggle between biologically-universal Life and Death (Eros and Thanatos) instincts. Fromm charged Freud and his followers with never acknowledging the contradictions between the two theories.
He also criticized Freud's dualistic thinking. According to Fromm, Freudian descriptions of human consciousness as struggles between two poles was narrow and limiting. Fromm also condemned him as a misogynist unable to think outside the patriarchal milieu of early 20th century Vienna. However, Fromm expressed a great respect for Freud and his accomplishments, in spite of these criticisms.
Political ideas and activities
Fromm's most well-known work, Escape from Freedom, focuses on the human urge to seek a source of authority and control upon reaching a freedom that was thought to be an individual’s true desire. The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his book The Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor of humanistic and democratic socialism. Building primarily upon the early works of Karl Marx, Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal of personal freedom, missing from most Soviet Marxism, and more frequently found in the writings of libertarian socialists and liberal theoreticians. Fromm's brand of socialism rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing and bureaucratic social structures that resulted in a virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation. He became one of the founders of socialist humanism, promoting the early writings of Marx and his humanist messages to the US and Western European publics. In the early 1960s, Fromm published two books dealing with Marxist thoughts (Marx's Concept of Man and Beyond the Chains of Illusion: my Encounter with Marx and Freud). In 1965, working to stimulate the Western and Eastern cooperation between Marxist humanists, Fromm published a series of articles entitled Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium. In 1966, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year.
For a period, Fromm was also active in US politics. He joined the Socialist Party of America in the mid-1950s, and did his best to help them provide an alternative viewpoint to the prevailing McCarthyism of the time. This alternative viewpoint was best expressed in his 1961 paper May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy. However, as a co-founder of SANE, Fromm's strongest political activism was in the international peace movement, fighting against the nuclear arms race and US involvement in the Vietnam War. After supporting Senator Eugene McCarthy's losing bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Fromm more or less retreated from the American political scene, although he did write a paper in 1974 entitled Remarks on the Policy of Détente for a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
[edit] Bibliography
Escape from Freedom (US), The Fear of Freedom (UK) (1941)
Man for himself, an inquiry into the psychology of ethics (1947)
Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950)
Forgotten language; an introduction to the understanding of dreams, fairy tales, and myths (1951)
The Sane Society (1955)
The Art of Loving (1956)
Sigmund Freud's mission; an analysis of his personality and influence (1959)
Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism (1960)
May Man Prevail? An inquiry into the facts and fictions of foreign policy (1961)
Marx's Concept of Man (1961)
Beyond the Chains of Illusion: my encounter with Marx and Freud (1962)
The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture (1963)
The Heart of Man, its genius for good and evil (1964)
Socialist Humanism (1965)
You Shall Be as Gods: a radical interpretation of the Old Testament and its tradition (1966)
The Revolution of Hope, toward a humanized technology (1968)
The Nature of Man (1968)
The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970)
Social character in a Mexican village; a sociopsychoanalytic study (Fromm & Maccoby) (1970)
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973)
To Have or to Be? (1976)
Greatness and Limitation of Freud's Thought (1979)
On Disobedience and other essays (1984)
The Art of Being (1993)
The Art of Listening (1994)
On Being Human (1997)
Erich Fromm, His Life and Ideas, An Illustrated Biography (2000)
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3. Head of Epistemology (Knowledge), Language, Meaning, and General Semantics: Alfred Korzybski
Mythological God: Apollo (Epistemological Part)
Homonory Members: S.I. Hayakawa, Immanuel Kant, Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, David Hume, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Kelly, Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, Fritz Perls
Alfred Korzybski (pronounced /kɔ'ʐɨpski/) (July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American philosopher and scientist. He is most remembered for developing the theory of general semantics.
Contents
1 Early life and career
2 General semantics
3 Korzybski and to be
4 Anecdote about Korzybski
5 Criticisms
6 Impact
7 See also
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links
[edit] Early life and career
Alfred Korzybski's family coat-of-arms (Habdank).[citation needed]He was born in Warsaw, Congress Poland. He came from an aristocratic family whose members had worked as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers for generations. He learned Polish at home and Russian in the schools; and having a French governess and a German governess, he became fluent in four languages as a child. As an adult, he chose to train as an engineer.
Korzybski was educated at the Warsaw University of Technology. During the First World War Korzybski served as an intelligence officer in the Russian Army. After being wounded in his leg and suffering other injuries, he came to North America in 1916 (first to Canada, then the United States) to coordinate the shipment of artillery to the war front. He also lectured to Polish-American audiences about the conflict, promoting the sale of war bonds. Following the war, he decided to remain in the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1940. His first book, Manhood of Humanity, was published in 1921. In the book, he proposed and explained in detail a new theory of humankind: mankind as a time-binding class of life.
[edit] General semantics
Korzybski's work culminated in the founding of a discipline that he called general semantics (GS). As Korzybski explicitly said, GS should not be confused with semantics, a different subject. The basic principles of general semantics, which include time-binding, are outlined in Science and Sanity, published in 1933. In 1938 Korzybski founded the Institute of General Semantics and directed it until his death in Lakeville, Connecticut, USA.
Korzybski's work held a view that human beings are limited in what they know by (1) the structure of their nervous systems, and (2) the structure of their languages. Human beings cannot experience the world directly, but only through their "abstractions" (nonverbal impressions or "gleanings" derived from the nervous system, and verbal indicators expressed and derived from language). Sometimes our perceptions and our languages actually mislead us as to the "facts" with which we must deal. Our understanding of what is going on sometimes lacks similarity of structure with what is actually going on. He stressed training in awareness of abstracting, using techniques that he had derived from his study of mathematics and science. He called this awareness, this goal of his system, "consciousness of abstracting." His system included modifying the way we approach the world, e.g., with an attitude of "I don't know; let's see," to better discover or reflect its realities as shown by modern science. One of these techniques involved becoming inwardly and outwardly quiet, an experience that he called, "silence on the objective levels."
[edit] Korzybski and to be
Many supporters and critics of Korzybski reduced his rather complex system to a simple matter of what he said about the verb 'to be.' His system, however, is based primarily on such terminology as the different 'orders of abstraction,' and formulations such as 'consciousness of abstracting.' It is often said that Korzybski opposed the use of the verb "to be," an unfortunate exaggeration (see 'Criticisms' below). He thought that certain uses of the verb "to be," called the "is of identity" and the "is of predication," were faulty in structure, e.g., a statement such as, "Joe is a fool" (said of a person named 'Joe' who has done something that we regard as foolish). In Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Joe belongs to a higher order of abstraction than Joe himself. Korzybski's remedy was to deny identity; in this example, to be continually aware that 'Joe' is not what we call him. We find Joe not in the verbal domain, the world of words, but the nonverbal domain (the two, he said, amount to different orders of abstraction). This was expressed in Korzybski's most famous premise, "the map is not the territory." Note that this premise uses the phrase "is not", a form of "to be"; this and many other examples show that he did not intend to abandon "to be" as such. In fact, he expressly said that there were no structural problems with the verb "to be" when used as an auxiliary verb or when used to state existence or location. It was even 'OK' sometimes to use the faulty forms of the verb 'to be,' as long as one was aware of their structural limitations. This was developed into E-prime by one of his students 15 years after his death.
Anecdote about Korzybski
One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think", said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies". The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see, ladies and gentlemen", Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter." Apparently his prank aimed to illustrate how some human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself.[1]
Criticisms
See the criticism section of the main General Semantics article.
Impact
Korzybski's work influenced Gestalt Therapy[citation needed], Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy[2], and Neuro-linguistic programming[3] (especially the Meta model and ideas behind human modeling for performance). As reported in the Third Edition of Science and Sanity, The U.S. Army in World War II used his system to treat battle fatigue in Europe under the supervision of Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, who also became the psychiatrist in charge of the Nazi prisoners at Nuremberg. Other individuals influenced by Korzybski include Kenneth Burke, William S. Burroughs, Frank Herbert, Albert Ellis, Gregory Bateson, John Grinder, Buckminster Fuller, Douglas Engelbart, Stuart Chase, Alvin Toffler, Robert A. Heinlein (Korzybski is mentioned in the 1949 novella Gulf), L. Ron Hubbard, A. E. van Vogt, Robert Anton Wilson, entertainer Steve Allen, and Tommy Hall (lyricist for the 13th Floor Elevators); and scientists such as William Alanson White (psychiatry), physicist P. W. Bridgman, and researcher W. Horsley Gantt (a former student and colleague of Pavlov). He also influenced the Belgian surrealist writer of comics Jan Bucquoy in the seventh part of the comics series Jaunes: Labyrinthe, with explicit reference in the plot to Korzybski's "the map is not the territory."
In part the General Semantics tradition was upheld by Samuel I. Hayakawa, who did have a falling out with Korzybski. When asked over what, Hayakawa is said to have replied: "Words".
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Alfred Korzybski
See also
General Semantics
The map is not the territory
Structural differential
E-Prime
Institute of General Semantics
Robert Pula
Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture
Science and Sanity Complete work online.
References
^ R. Diekstra, Haarlemmer Dagblad, 1993, cited by L. Derks & J. Hollander, Essenties van NLP (Utrecht: Servire, 1996), p. 58.
^ http://time-binding.org/misc/akml/akmls/58-ellis.pdf
^ Bandler, Richard & John Grinder (1975). The Structure of Magic I: A Book About Language and Therapy. Palo Alto, CA: Science & Behavior Books.
Further reading
Manhood of Humanity, Alfred Korzybski, forward by Edward Kasner, notes by M. Kendig, Institute of General Semantics, 1950, hardcover, 2nd edition, 391 pages, ISBN 0-937298-00-X. (Copy of the first edition)
Science and Sanity An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, Preface by Robert P. Pula, Institute of General Semantics, 1994, hardcover, 5th edition, ISBN 0-937298-01-8, (full text online)
Alfred Korzybski: Collected Writings 1920-1950, Institute of General Semantics, 1990, hardcover, ISBN 0-685-40616-4
Montagu, M. F. A. (1953). Time-binding and the concept of culture. The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 77, No. 3 (Sep., 1953), pp. 148-155.
Murray, E. (1950). In memoriam: Alfred H. Korzybski. Sociometry, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb., 1950), pp. 76-77.
External links
Institute of General Semantics
Alfred Korzybski and Gestalt Therapy Website
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski"
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4. Head of The Department of Dialectic-Democracy: G.W.F. Hegel
Honorary Members: Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Daoism, Confucius, The Han Philosophers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Nietzshe (The Birth of Tragedy), Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Erich Berne, Fritz Perls...
From The Internet (Wikipedia)
4. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (IPA: [ˈgeɔʁk ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈheːgəl]) (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher, and with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, one of the creators of German idealism.
Hegel influenced writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (Bauer, Marx, Bradley, Sartre, Küng, Kojève), and his detractors (Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Peirce, Russell). Hegel developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or "system", to account in an integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the subject and object of knowledge, and psychology, the state, history, art, religion, and philosophy. In particular, he developed a concept of mind or spirit that manifested itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions that it ultimately integrated and united, such as those between nature and freedom, and immanence and transcendence, without eliminating either pole or reducing it to the other. His influential conceptions are of speculative logic or "dialectic", "absolute idealism", "Spirit", negativity, sublation (Aufhebung in German), the "Master/Slave" dialectic, "ethical life", and the importance of history.
Contents
1 Death
1.1 Early years: 1770-1807
1.1.1 Childhood in Stuttgart
2 Student in Tübingen (1788-93)
2.1 House tutor in Berne (1793-96) and Frankfurt (1797-1801)
2.2 Jena, Bamberg and Nuremberg: 1801-1816
2.2.1 Early university career in Jena (1801-1807)
2.2.2 Newspaper editor in Bamberg (1807-08) and headmaster in Nuremberg (1808-15)
2.3 Professor in Heidelberg and Berlin: 1816-1831
2.3.1 Heidelberg (1816-18)
2.3.2 Berlin (1818-31)
3 Works
4 His Thought
4.1 The concept of freedom through Hegel's method
4.2 Progress through contradictions and negations
4.3 Civil society
4.4 Influence
5 Hegel's legacy (interpretation)
5.1 Reading Hegel
5.2 Left and Right Hegelianism
5.3 Triads
6 Advocates
7 Detractors
7.1 Obscurantism
7.2 The Absolute
7.3 Totalitarianism
7.4 Natural Sciences
7.5 Psychology
8 Works
8.1 Published during Hegel's lifetime
8.2 Published posthumously
9 Secondary literature
9.1 General introductions
9.2 Essays
9.3 Biography
9.4 Historical
9.5 Hegel's development
9.6 Recent English-language literature
9.7 Phenomenology of Spirit
9.8 Logic
9.9 Politics
9.10 Religion
9.11 Hegel's reputation
10 Volume numbers and divisions of his completed works
11 Notes
12 See also
13 External links
13.1 Hegel's texts online
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
First published Thu Feb 13, 1997; substantive revision Mon Jun 26, 2006
Along with J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. von Schelling, Hegel (1770-1831) belongs to the period of “German idealism” in the decades following Kant. The most systematic of the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempted, throughout his published writings as well as in his lectures, to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic ontology from a “logical” starting point. He is perhaps most well-known for his teleological account of history, an account which was later taken over by Marx and “inverted” into a materialist theory of an historical development culminating in communism. For most of the twentieth century, the “logical” side of Hegel's thought had been largely forgotten, but his political and social philosophy continued to find interest and support. However, since the 1970s, a degree of more general philosophical interest in Hegel's systematic thought has also been revived.
1. Life, Work, and Influence
2. Hegel's Philosophy
2.1 The traditional “metaphysical” view of Hegel's philosophy
2.2 The non-traditional or “post-Kantian” view of Hegel
3. Hegel's Works
3.1 Phenomenology of Spirit
3.2 Science of Logic
3.3 Philosophy of Right
Bibliography
Collected Works
English Translations of Key Texts:
Secondary Literature
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
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5. Head of The Department of 'Power Dialectics, Politics -- and Dialectic-Democratic Deconstructionism': Anaxamander
Honorary Members: Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Erich Fromm, Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Bob Dylan
Anaximander (c. 610-c. 546 BC)
Greek astronomer and philosopher. He claimed that the Earth was a cylinder three times wider than it is deep, motionless at the centre of the universe, and that the celestial bodies were fire seen through holes in the hollow rims of wheels encircling the Earth. According to Anaximander, the first animals came into being from moisture and the first humans grew inside fish, emerging once fully developed.
He was born in Miletus, in what is now Turkey, and was a pupil of Thales. He is thought to have been the first to determine solstices and equinoxes, by means of a sundial, and he is credited with drawing the first geographical map of the whole known world. He believed that the universe originated as a formless mass containing within itself the contraries of hot and cold, and wet and dry, from which land, sea, and air were formed out of the union and separation of these opposites.
Anaximander (ənăk'sĭmăn`dər), c.611–c.547 B.C., Greek philosopher, b. Miletus; pupil of Thales Thales (thā`lēz), c.636–c.546 B.C.
..... Click the link for more information. . He made the first attempt to offer a detailed explanation of all aspects of nature. Anaximander argued that since there are so many different sorts of things, they must all have originated from something less differentiated than water, and this primary source, the boundless or the indefinite (apeiron), had always existed, filled all space, and, by its constant motion, separated opposites out from itself, e.g., hot and cold, moist and dry. These opposites interact by encroaching on one another and thus repay one another's "injustice." The result is a plurality of worlds that successively decay and return to the indefinite. The notion of the indefinite and its processes prefigured the later conception of the indestructibility of matter. Anaximander also had a theory of the relation of earth to the heavenly bodies, important in the history of astronomy. His view that man achieved his physical state by adaptation to environment, that life had evolved from moisture, and that man developed from fish, anticipates the theory of evolution.
From Anaximander, Wikipedia...
Anaximander maintains that all dying things are returning to the element from which they came (apeiron). The one surviving fragment of Anaximander's writing deals with this matter. Simplicius transmitted it as a quotation, which describes the balanced and mutual changes of the elements:[10]
Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.
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6. Head of The Department of Homeostatic (Dialectic-Democratic) Balance: Walter Cannon
Honorary Members: Heraclitus, Daoism, The Han Philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy), Freud, Jung, Berne, Perls...
From Wikipedia on the internet, the free encyclopedia...
Walter Bradford Cannon (October 19, 1871 – October 19, 1945) was an American physiologist, Professor and chairman of the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School, who developed the concept of homeostasis, and popularized it in his book The Wisdom of the Body, published in 1932 by W. W. Norton, New York.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Work
2.1 Scientific contributions
3 Publication
4 References
5 Further reading
6 External links
[edit] Biography
Walter Cannon was born in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin in 1871. In his autobiography The Way of an Investigator, Cannon counts himself among the descendents of Jacques de Noyon. His Calvinist family was intellectually active, including readings from James Martineau, John Fiske (philosopher), and James Freeman Clarke. Cannon's curiosity also lead him to Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndall, George Henry Lewes, and William Kingdon Clifford.[1] A high school teacher, Mary Jeannette Newson, became his mentor. "Miss May" Newson motivated and helped him take his academic skills to Harvard University.[2] Attracted to the biological sciences as an undergraduate, Cannon began working in Bowditch's laboratory as a first-year student at Harvard Medical School in 1896.[3] In 1900 he received his medical degree.
Cannon kept working in Harvard as an instructor in the Department of Physiology in 1900. From 1906 until 1942 he was Higginson Professor and chairman of the of the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School.
He was President of the American Physiological Society from 1914 to 1916.
He was married to Cornelia James Cannon, a best-selling author.[4] The couple had five children. One son was Dr. Bradford Cannon, a military plastic surgeon and radiation researcher. The daughters are Wilma Cannon Fairbank, Linda Cannon Burgess, Helen Cannon Bond and Marian Cannon Schlesinger, a painter and author living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Walter Cannon died in 1945 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
[edit] Work
Walter Cannon began his career in science in the year 1896 he began working in Bowditch's laboratory as an undergraduate at Harvard. Cannon began here his research in which he used the newly discovered X rays to study the mechanism of swallowing and the motility of the stomach. He demonstrated deglutition in a goose at the APS meeting in December 1896 and published his first paper on this research in the first issue of the American Journal of Physiology in January 1898.[3]
In 1945 Cannon summarizes his career in physiology by giving his focus at different ages:[5]
Age 26 - 40: digestion and the bismuth meal
Age 40 - 46: bodily effects of emotional excitement
Age 46 - 51: wound shock investigations
Age 51 - 59: stable states of the organism
Age 59 - 68: chemical mediation of nerve impulses
Age 68 + : chemical sensitivity of nerve-isolated organs
[edit] Scientific contributions
Use of salts of heavy metals in X-Rays
He was one of the first researchers to mix salts of heavy metals (including bismuth subnitrate, bismuth oxychloride, and barium sulfate) into foodstuffs in order to improve the contrast of X-ray images of the digestive tract. The barium meal is a modern derivative of this research.
Fight or flight
In 1915, he coined the term fight or flight to describe an animal's response to threats (Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage: An Account of Recent Researches into the Function of Emotional Excitement, Appleton, New York, 1915).
Homeostasis
He developed the concept of homeostasis, and popularized it in his book The Wisdom of the Body,1932. Cannon presented four tentative propositions to describe the general features of homeostasis:
Constancy in an open system, such as our bodies represent, requires mechanisms that act to maintain this constancy. Cannon based this proposition on insights into the ways by which steady states such as glucose concentrations, body temperature and acid-base balance were regulated.
Steady-state conditions require that any tendency toward change automatically meets with factors that resist change. An increase in blood sugar results in thirst as the body attempts to dilute the concentration of sugar in the extracellular fluid.
The regulating system that determines the homeostatic state consists of a number of cooperating mechanisms acting simultaneously or successively. Blood sugar is regulated by insulin, glucagons, and other hormones that control its release from the liver or its uptake by the tissues.
Homeostasis does not occur by chance, but is the result of organized self-government.
Cannon-Bard theory
Canon developed the Cannon-Bard theory with physiologist Philip Bard to try to explain why people feel emotions first and then act upon them.
Dry mouth
He put forward the Dry Mouth Hypothesis, stating that people get thirsty because their mouth gets dry. He did an experiment on two dogs. He cut their throats and inserted a small tube. Any water swallowed would go through their mouths and out by the tube, never reaching the stomach. He found out that these dogs would lap up the same amount of water as control dogs
[edit] Publication
Cannon wrote several books and articles.
1910, A Laboratory Course in Physiology
1911, The Mechanical Factors of Digestion
1915, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage
1923, Traumatic Shock
1932, The Wisdom of the Body
1936, Digestion and Health
1937, Autonomic Neuro-effector Systems, with Arturo Rosenblueth
1945, The Way of an Investigator
[edit] References
^ Way of an Investigator, pp. 16-7
^ Saul Benison, A. Clifford Barger, Elin L. Wolfe (1987) Walter B. Cannon: the Life and Times of a Young Scientist. pp.16-32
^ a b 6th APS President at the American Physiological Society
^ Although not mountaineers, during their honeymoon the couple were the first, on July 19, 1901, to reach the summit of the unclimbed southwest peak (2657 m or 8716 ft) of Goat Mountain, between Lake McDonald and Logan Pass in what is now Glacier National Park. The peak was subsequently named Mount Cannon by the United States Geological Survey [1].
^ On page 218 of his book The Way of an Investigator,
[edit] Further reading
Saul Benison, A. Clifford Barger, Elin L. Wolfe (1987) Walter B. Cannon: the Life and Times of a Young Scientist, [ISBN 0674945808].
Elin L. Wolfe, A. Clifford Barger, Saul Benison (2000) Walter B. Cannon, Science and Society, [ISBN 0674002512].
Walter Bradford Cannon: Reflections on the Man and His Contributions, International Journal of Stress Management, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1994
Marian Cannon Schlesinger, Snatched from Oblivion: A Cambridge Memoir, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979
[edit] External links
6th APS President at the American Physiological Society
Walter Bradford Cannon: Experimental Physiologist, a biographical article by Edric Lescouflair, dated 2003
Chapter 9 of Explorers of the body, by Steven Lehrer (contains information about X ray experiments)
[hide]v • d • eSubfields of and scientists involved in cybernetics
Subfields Polycontexturality · Second-order cybernetics · Catastrophe theory · Connectionism · Control theory · Decision theory · Information theory · Semiotics · Synergetics · Biological cybernetics · Biosemiotics · Biomedical cybernetics · Biorobotics · Computational neuroscience · Homeostasis · Management cybernetics · Medical cybernetics · New Cybernetics · Neuro cybernetics · Sociocybernetics · Emergence · Artificial intelligence
Cyberneticists Igor Aleksander · William Ross Ashby · Anthony Stafford Beer · Claude Bernard · Ludwig von Bertalanffy · Valentin Braitenberg · Gordon S. Brown · Walter Bradford Cannon · Heinz von Foerster · Charles François · Jay Wright Forrester · Buckminster Fuller · Ernst von Glasersfeld · Francis Heylighen · Erich von Holst · Stuart Kauffman · Sergei P. Kurdyumov · Niklas Luhmann · Warren McCulloch · Humberto Maturana · Talcott Parsons · Gordon Pask · Walter Pitts · Alfred Radcliffe-Brown · Robert Trappl · Valentin Turchin · Jakob von Uexküll · Francisco Varela · Frederic Vester · Charles Geoffrey Vickers · Stuart Umpleby · John N. Warfield · Kevin Warwick · Norbert Wiener
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7. Head of The Department of Narcissism (Hedonism, Sensuality, Sexuality, Egotism, Greed, Power, Revenge, Violence...): Sigmund Freud
Mythological Gods: Dionysus, Narcissus
Honorary Members: Thomas Hobbes, Arthur Schopenhauer, Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey...
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Henry Havelock Ellis (February 2, 1859 - July 8, 1939) was a British sexologist, physician, and social reformer.
Alfred Charles Kinsey (June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956), was an American biologist and professor of entomology and zoology, who in 1947 founded the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, now called the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Kinsey's research on human sexuality profoundly influenced social and cultural values in the United States and many other countries.
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7. Sigmund Freud (IPA: [ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt]), born Sigismund Shlomo Freud (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939), was an Austrian psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology.[1] Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of repression and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for curing psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud is also renowned for his redefinition of sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life, as well as his therapeutic techniques, including the use of free association, his theory of transference in the therapeutic relationship, and the interpretation of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Early life
1.2 Medical school
1.3 Freud and psychoanalysis
1.4 Last years
2 Freud's ideas
2.1 Early work
2.2 Cocaine
2.3 The Unconscious
2.4 Psychosexual development
2.5 Id, ego, and super-ego
2.6 The life and death drives
3 Freud's legacy
3.1 Psychotherapy
3.2 Philosophy
4 Patients
5 References
6 Bibliography
6.1 Major works by Freud
6.2 Correspondence
6.3 Biographies
7 Media Representation
8 See also
9 External links
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8. Head of Department of Philosophical Idealism: Plato
Honorary Members: Confucius, Socrates, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel...
Plato (Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, "broad")[1] (428/427 BC[a] – 348/347 BC), was a Classical Greek philosopher, who, together with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy.[2] Plato was also a mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world. Plato was originally a student of Socrates, and was as much influenced by his thinking as by what he saw as his teacher's unjust death.
Plato's sophistication as a writer can be witnessed by reading his Socratic dialogues. Some of the dialogues, letters, and other works that are ascribed to him are considered spurious.[3] Although there is little question that Plato lectured at the Academy that he founded, the pedagogical function of his dialogues, if any, is not known with certainty. The dialogues since Plato's time have been used to teach a range of subjects, mostly including philosophy, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, and other subjects about which he wrote.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Early life
1.1.1 Birth and family
1.1.2 Name
1.1.3 Education
1.2 Later life
1.3 Plato and Socrates
2 Philosophy
2.1 Recurrent Themes
2.2 Metaphysics
2.3 Theory of Forms
2.4 Epistemology
2.5 The State
2.6 Unwritten Doctrine
3 Works
3.1 Plato's Dialogues
3.1.1 Early dialogues
3.1.2 Middle dialogues
3.1.3 Late dialogues
3.2 Narration of the dialogues
3.3 Trial of Socrates
3.4 Unity and Diversity of the Dialogues
3.5 Platonic Scholarship
4 See also
5 Notes
6 Citations
7 References
7.1 Primary sources (Greek and Roman)
7.2 Secondary sources
8 Further reading
9 External links
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9. Head of The Department of Science and Observational Empiricism: Aristotle
Honorary Members: Thales, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Wittgenstein, Korzybski, Cannon, S.I. Hawakawa...
Aristotle (Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology.
Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. He was the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality and aesthetics, logic and science, politics and metaphysics. Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by modern physics. In the biological sciences, some of his observations were only confirmed to be accurate in the nineteenth century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which were incorporated in the late nineteenth century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially Eastern Orthodox theology, and the scholastic tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today.
Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"), it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one third of the original works have survived.[1]
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10. Head of The Department of Enlightenment Philosophy: Denis Diderot
Honorary Members: Sir Franklin Bacon, John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, Voltaire, Tom Paine, Montasquieu, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin...
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (Eng. /ˈmɒntəˌskyu/; January 18, 1689 in Bordeaux – February 10, 1755), was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Era of the Enlightenment. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He was largely responsible for the popularization of the terms feudalism and Byzantine Empire.
10. Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher and writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment, his major contribution to the Enlightenment being the Encyclopédie.
Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and His Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding novels, their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas about free will. Diderot is also known as the author of the dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew) upon which many articles and sermons about consumer desire have been based. His articles included many topics of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment
Although the intellectual movement called "The Enlightenment" is usually associated with the 18th century, its roots in fact go back much further. But before we explore those roots, we need to define the term. This is one of those rare historical movements which in fact named itself. Certain thinkers and writers, primarily in London and Paris, believed that they were more enlightened than their compatriots and set out to enlighten them.
They believed that human reason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny and to build a better world. Their principal targets were religion (embodied in France in the Catholic Church) and the domination of society by a hereditary aristocracy.
Background in Antiquity
To understand why this movement became so influential in the 18th century, it is important to go back in time. We could choose almost any starting point, but let us begin with the recovery of Aristotelian logic by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. In his hands the logical procedures so carefully laid out by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle were used to defend the dogmas of Christianity; and for the next couple of centuries, other thinkers pursued these goals to shore up every aspect of faith with logic. These thinkers were sometimes called "schoolmen" (more formally, "scholastics,") and Voltaire frequently refers to them as "doctors," by which he means "doctors of theology."
Unfortunately for the Catholic Church, the tools of logic could not be confined to the uses it preferred. After all, they had been developed in Athens, in a pagan culture which had turned them on its own traditional beliefs. It was only a matter of time before later Europeans would do the same.
The Renaissance Humanists
In the 14th and 15th century there emerged in Italy and France a group of thinkers known as the "humanists." The term did not then have the anti-religious associations it has in contemporary political debate. Almost all of them were practicing Catholics. They argued that the proper worship of God involved admiration of his creation, and in particular of that crown of creation: humanity. By celebrating the human race and its capacities they argued they were worshipping God more appropriately than gloomy priests and monks who harped on original sin and continuously called upon people to confess and humble themselves before the Almighty. Indeed, some of them claimed that humans were like God, created not only in his image, but with a share of his creative power. The painter, the architect, the musician, and the scholar, by exercising their intellectual powers, were fulfilling divine purposes.
This celebration of human capacity, though it was mixed in the Renaissance with elements of gloom and superstition (witchcraft trials flourished in this period as they never had during the Middle Ages), was to bestow a powerful legacy on Europeans. The goal of Renaissance humanists was to recapture some of the pride, breadth of spirit, and creativity of the ancient Greeks and Romans, to replicate their successes and go beyond them. Europeans developed the belief that tradition could and should be used to promote change. By cleaning and sharpening the tools of antiquity, they could reshape their own time.
Galileo Galilei, for instance, was to use the same sort of logic the schoolmen had used--reinforced with observation--to argue in 1632 for the Copernican notion that the earth rotates on its axis beneath the unmoving sun. The Church, and most particularly the Holy Inquisition, objected that the Bible clearly stated that the sun moved through the sky and denounced Galileo's teachings, forcing him to recant (take back) what he had written and preventing him from teaching further. The Church's triumph was a pyrrhic victory, for though it could silence Galileo, it could not prevent the advance of science (though most of those advances would take place in Protestant northern Europe, out of the reach of the pope and his Inquisition).
But before Galileo's time, in the 16th century, various humanists had begun to ask dangerous questions. François Rabelais, a French monk and physician influenced by Protestantism, but spurred on by his own rebelliousness, challenged the Church's authority in his Gargantua and Pantagruel, ridiculing many religious doctrines as absurd.
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne, in a much more quiet and modest but ultimately more subversive way, asked a single question over and over again in his Essays: "What do I know?" By this he meant that we have no right to impose on others dogmas which rest on cultural habit rather than absolute truth. Powerfully influenced by the discovery of thriving non-Christian cultures in places as far off as Brazil, he argued that morals may be to some degree relative. Who are Europeans to insist that Brazilian cannibals who merely consume dead human flesh instead of wasting it are morally inferior to Europeans who persecute and oppress those of whom they disapprove?
This shift toward cultural relativism, though it was based on scant understanding of the newly discovered peoples, was to continue to have a profound effect on European thought to the present day. Indeed, it is one of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment. Just as their predecessors had used the tools of antiquity to gain unprecedented freedom of inquiry, the Enlightenment thinkers used the examples of other cultures to gain the freedom to reshape not only their philosophies, but their societies. It was becoming clear that there was nothing inevitable about the European patterns of thought and living: there were many possible ways of being human, and doubtless new ones could be invented.
The other contribution of Montaigne to the Enlightenment stemmed from another aspect of his famous question: "What do I know?" If we cannot be certain that our values are God-given, then we have no right to impose them by force on others. Inquisitors, popes, and kings alike had no business enforcing adherence to particular religious or philosophical beliefs.
It is one of the great paradoxes of history that radical doubt was necessary for the new sort of certainty called "scientific." The good scientist is the one is willing to test all assumptions, to challenge all traditional opinion, to get closer to the truth. If ultimate truth, such as was claimed by religious thinkers, was unattainable by scientists, so much the better. In a sense, the strength of science at its best is that it is always aware of its limits, aware that knowledge is always growing, always subject to change, never absolute. Because knowledge depends on evidence and reason, arbitrary authority can only be its enemy.
The 17th Century
René Descartes, in the 17th century, attempted to use reason as the schoolmen had, to shore up his faith; but much more rigorously than had been attempted before. He tried to begin with a blank slate, with the bare minimum of knowledge: the knowledge of his own existence ("I think, therefore I am"). From there he attempted to reason his way to a complete defense of Christianity, but to do so he committed so many logical faults that his successors over the centuries were to slowly disintegrate his gains, even finally challenging the notion of selfhood with which he had begun. The history of philosophy from his time to the early 20th century is partly the story of more and more ingenious logic proving less and less, until Ludwig Wittgenstein succeeded in undermining the very bases of philosophy itself.
But that is a story for a different course. Here we are concerned with early stages in the process in which it seemed that logic could be a powerful avenue to truth. To be sure, logic alone could be used to defend all sorts of absurd notions; and Enlightenment thinkers insisted on combining it with something they called "reason" which consisted of common sense, observation, and their own unacknowledged prejudices in favor of skepticism and freedom.
We have been focusing closely on a thin trickle of thought which traveled through an era otherwise dominated by dogma and fanaticism. The 17th century was torn by witch-hunts and wars of religion and imperial conquest. Protestants and Catholics denounced each other as followers of Satan, and people could be imprisoned for attending the wrong church, or for not attending any. All publications, whether pamphlets or scholarly volumes, were subject to prior censorship by both church and state, often working hand in hand. Slavery was widely practiced, especially in the colonial plantations of the Western Hemisphere, and its cruelties frequently defended by leading religious figures. The despotism of monarchs exercising far greater powers than any medieval king was supported by the doctrine of the "divine right of kings," and scripture quoted to show that revolution was detested by God. Speakers of sedition or blasphemy quickly found themselves imprisoned, or even executed. Organizations which tried to challenge the twin authorities of church and state were banned. There had been plenty of intolerance and dogma to go around in the Middle Ages, but the emergence of the modern state made its tyranny much more efficient and powerful.
It was inevitable that sooner or later many Europeans would begin to weary of the repression and warfare carried out in the name of absolute truth. In addition, though Protestants had begun by making powerful critiques of Catholicism, they quickly turned their guns on each other, producing a bewildering array of churches each claiming the exclusive path to salvation. It was natural for people tossed from one demanding faith to another to wonder whether any of the churches deserved the authority they claimed, and to begin to prize the skepticism of Montaigne over the certainty of Luther or Calvin.
Meanwhile, there were other powerful forces at work in Europe: economic ones which were to interact profoundly with these intellectual trends.
The Political and Economic Background
During the late Middle Ages, peasants had begun to move from rural estates to the towns in search of increased freedom and prosperity. As trade and communication improved during the Renaissance, the ordinary town-dweller began to realize that things need not always go on as they had for centuries. New charters could be written, new governments formed, new laws passed, new businesses begun. Although each changed institution quickly tried to stabilize its power by claiming the support of tradition, the pressure for change continued to mount. It was not only contact with alien cultural patterns which influenced Europeans, it was the wealth brought back from Asia and the Americas which catapulted a new class of merchants into prominence, partially displacing the old aristocracy whose power had been rooted in the ownership of land. These merchants had their own ideas about the sort of world they wanted to inhabit, and they became major agents of change, in the arts, in government, and in the economy.
They were naturally convinced that their earnings were the result of their individual merit and hard work, unlike the inherited wealth of traditional aristocrats. Whereas individualism had been chiefly emphasized in the Renaissance by artists, especially visual artists, it now became a core value. The ability of individual effort to transform the world became a European dogma, lasting to this day.
But the chief obstacles to the reshaping of Europe by the merchant class were the same as those faced by the rationalist philosophers: absolutist kings and dogmatic churches. The struggle was complex and many-sided, with each participant absorbing many of the others' values; but the general trend is clear: individualism, freedom and change replaced community, authority, and tradition as core European values. Religion survived, but weakened and often transformed almost beyond recognition; the monarchy was to dwindle over the course of the hundred years beginning in the mid-18th century to a pale shadow of its former self.
This is the background of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Europeans were changing, but Europe's institutions were not keeping pace with that change. The Church insisted that it was the only source of truth, that all who lived outside its bounds were damned, while it was apparent to any reasonably sophisticated person that most human beings on earth were not and had never been Christians--yet they had built great and inspiring civilizations. Writers and speakers grew restive at the omnipresent censorship and sought whatever means they could to evade or even denounce it.
Most important, the middle classes--the bourgeoisie--were painfully aware that they were paying taxes to support a fabulously expensive aristocracy which contributed nothing of value to society (beyond, perhaps, its patronage of the arts, which the burghers of Holland had shown could be equally well exercised by themselves), and that those useless aristocrats were unwilling to share power with those who actually managed and--to their way of thinking,--created the national wealth. They were to find ready allies in France among the impoverished masses who may have lived and thought much like their ancestors, but who were all too aware that with each passing year they were paying higher and higher taxes to support a few thousand at Versailles in idle dissipation.
The Role of the Aristocrats
Interestingly, it was among those very idle aristocrats that the French Enlightenment philosophers were to find some of their earliest and most enthusiastic followers. Despite the fact that the Church and State were more often than not allied with each other, they were keenly aware of their differences. Even kings could on occasion be attracted by arguments which seemed to undermine the authority of the Church. The fact that the aristocrats were utterly unaware of the precariousness of their position also made them overconfident, interested in dabbling in the new ideas partly simply because they were new and exciting.
Voltaire moved easily in these aristocratic circles, dining at their tables, taking a titled mistress, corresponding with monarchs. He opposed tyranny and dogma, but he had no notion of reinventing that discredited Athenian folly, democracy. He had far too little faith in the ordinary person for that. What he did think was that educated and sophisticated persons could be brought to see through the exercise of their reason that the world could and should be greatly improved.
Rousseau vs. Voltaire
Not all Enlightenment thinkers were like Voltaire in this. His chief adversary was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who distrusted the aristocrats not out of a thirst for change but because he believed they were betraying decent traditional values. He opposed the theater which was Voltaire's lifeblood, shunned the aristocracy which Voltaire courted, and argued for something dangerously like democratic revolution. Whereas Voltaire argued that equality was impossible, Rousseau argued that inequality was not only unnatural, but that--when taken too far--it made decent government impossible. Whereas Voltaire charmed with his wit, Rousseau ponderously insisted on his correctness, even while contradicting himself. Whereas Voltaire insisted on the supremacy of the intellect, Rousseau emphasized the emotions, becoming a contributor to both the Enlightenment and its successor, romanticism. And whereas Voltaire endlessly repeated the same handful of core Enlightenment notions, Rousseau sparked off original thoughts in all directions: ideas about education, the family, government, the arts, and whatever else attracted his attention.
For all their personal differences, the two shared more values than they liked to acknowledge. They viewed absolute monarchy as dangerous and evil and rejected orthodox Christianity. Though Rousseau often struggled to seem more devout, he was almost as much a skeptic as Voltaire: the minimalist faith both shared was called "deism," and it was eventually to transform European religion and have powerful influences on other aspects of society as well.
Across the border in Holland, the merchants, who exercised most political power, there made a successful industry out of publishing books that could not be printed in countries like France. Dissenting religious groups mounted radical attacks on Christian orthodoxy.
The Enlightenment in England
Meanwhile Great Britain had developed its own Enlightenment, fostered by thinkers like the English thinker John Locke, the Scot David Hume, and many others. England had anticipated the rest of Europe by deposing and decapitating its king back in the 17th century. Although the monarchy had eventually been restored, this experience created a certain openness toward change in many places that could not be entirely extinguished. English Protestantism struggled to express itself in ways that widened the limits of freedom of speech and press. Radical Quakers and Unitarians broke open old dogmas in ways that Voltaire was to find highly congenial when he found himself there in exile. The English and French Enlightenments exchanged influences through many channels, Voltaire not least among them.
Because England had gotten its revolution out of the way early, it was able to proceed more smoothly and gradually down the road to democracy; but English liberty was dynamite when transported to France, where resistance by church and state was fierce to the last possible moment. The result was ironically that while Britain remained saturated with class privilege and relatively pious, France was to become after its own revolution the most egalitarian and anticlerical state in Europe--at least in its ideals. The power of religion and the aristocracy diminished gradually in England; in France they were violently uprooted.
The Enlightenment in America
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, many of the intellectual leaders of the American colonies were drawn to the Enlightenment. The colonies may have been founded by leaders of various dogmatic religious persuasions, but when it became necessary to unite against England, it was apparent that no one of them could prevail over the others, and that the most desirable course was to agree to disagree. Nothing more powerfully impelled the movement toward the separation of church and state than the realization that no one church could dominate this new state.
Many of the most distinguished leaders of the American revolution--Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Paine--were powerfully influenced by English and--to a lesser extent--French Enlightenment thought. The God who underwrites the concept of equality in the Declaration of Independence is the same deist God Rousseau worshipped, not that venerated in the traditional churches which still supported and defended monarchies all over Europe. Jefferson and Franklin both spent time in France--a natural ally because it was a traditional enemy of England--absorbing the influence of the French Enlightenment. The language of natural law, of inherent freedoms, of self-determination which seeped so deeply into the American grain was the language of the Enlightenment, though often coated with a light glaze of traditional religion, what has been called our "civil religion."
This is one reason that Americans should study the Enlightenment. It is in their bones. It has defined part of what they have dreamed of, what they aim to become. Separated geographically from most of the aristocrats against whom they were rebelling, their revolution was to be far less corrosive--and at first less influential--than that in France.
The Struggle in Europe
But we need to return to the beginning of the story, to Voltaire and his allies in France, struggling to assert the values of freedom and tolerance in a culture where the twin fortresses of monarchy and Church opposed almost everything they stood for. To oppose the monarchy openly would be fatal; the Church was an easier target. Protestantism had made religious controversy familiar. Voltaire could skillfully cite one Christian against another to make his arguments. One way to undermine the power of the Church was to undermine its credibility, and thus Voltaire devoted a great deal of his time to attacking the fundamentals of Christian belief: the inspiration of the Bible, the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, the damnation of unbelievers. No doubt he relished this battle partly for its own sake, but he never lost sight of his central goal: the toppling of Church power to increase the freedom available to Europeans.
Voltaire was joined by a band of rebellious thinkers known as the philosophes: Charles de Montesquieu, Pierre Bayle, Jean d'Alembert, and many lesser lights. Although "philosophe" literally means "philosopher" we use the French word in English to designate this particular group of French 18th-century thinkers. Because Denis Diderot commissioned many of them to write for his influential Encyclopedia, they are also known as "the Encyclopedists."
The Heritage of the Enlightenment
Today the Enlightenment is often viewed as a historical anomaly, a brief moment when a number of thinkers infatuated with reason vainly supposed that the perfect society could be built on common sense and tolerance, a fantasy which collapsed amid the Terror of the French Revolution and the triumphal sweep of Romanticism. Religious thinkers repeatedly proclaim the Enlightenment dead, Marxists denounce it for promoting the ideals and power of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the working classes, postcolonial critics reject its idealization of specifically European notions as universal truths, and postructuralists reject its entire concept of rational thought.
Yet in many ways, the Enlightenment has never been more alive. The notions of human rights it developed are powerfully attractive to oppressed peoples everywhere, who appeal to the same notion of natural law that so inspired Voltaire and Jefferson. Wherever religious conflicts erupt, mutual religious tolerance is counseled as a solution. Rousseau's notions of self-rule are ideals so universal that the worst tyrant has to disguise his tyrannies by claiming to be acting on their behalf. European these ideas may be, but they have also become global. Whatever their limits, they have formed the consensus of international ideals by which modern states are judged.
If our world seems little closer to perfection than that of 18th-century France, that is partly due to our failure to appreciate gains we take for granted. But it is also the case that many of the enemies of the Enlightenment are demolishing a straw man: it was never as simple-mindedly optimistic as it has often been portrayed. Certainly Voltaire was no facile optimist. He distrusted utopianism, instead trying to cajole Europeans out of their more harmful stupidities. Whether we acknowledge his influence or not, we still think today more like him than like his enemies.
As we go through his most influential work, The Philosophical Dictionary, look for passages which helped lay the groundwork for modern patterns of thought. Look also for passages which still seem challenging, pieces of arguments that continue today.
Next: Voltaire & the Philosophical Dictionary
Further useful link:
Richard Hooker's detailed history of the European Enlightenment
Back to on-campus syllabus
Back to off-campus syllabus
Other study guides
This page has been accessed times since December 17, 1998.
Paul Brians' home page
Created by Paul Brians March 11, 1998. Last revised May 18, 2000.
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11. Head of The Department of Romantic Philosophy -- and The Arts: Jean Jacques Rousseau
From Wikipedia on the internet...
Jean Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, 28 June 1712 – Ermenonville, 2 July 1778) was a major Swiss philosopher, writer, and composer of the Enlightenment, whose political philosophy influenced the French Revolution and the development of liberal, conservative, and socialist theory. With his Confessions, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, and other writings, he invented modern autobiography and encouraged a new focus on the building of subjectivity that bore fruit in the work of thinkers as diverse as Hegel and Freud. His novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse was one of the best-selling fictional works of the eighteenth century and of great importance to the development of romanticism.[1] He also made important contributions to music as a theorist and a composer, and was reburied alongside other French national heroes in the Panthéon in Paris, sixteen years after his death, in 1794.
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12. Head of The Department of Humanistic-Existentialism: Frederick ('Fritz') Perls
Honorary Members: Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre...
Fritz Perls...From Wikipedia on the internet...
Friedrich (Frederick) Salomon Perls (July 8 1893, Berlin – March 14, 1970, Chicago), better known as Fritz Perls, was a noted German-born psychiatrist and psychotherapist of Jewish descent.
He coined the term 'Gestalt Therapy' for the approach to therapy he developed with his wife Laura Perls from the 1940s, and he became associated with the Esalen Institute in California in 1964. His approach is related but not identical to Gestalt psychology and the Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy of Hans-Jürgen Walter.
At Gestalt Therapy's core is the promotion of awareness, the awareness of the unity of all present feelings and behaviors, and the contact between the self and its environment.
Perls has been widely evoked outside the realm of psychotherapy for a quotation often described as the "Gestalt prayer". This was especially true in the 1960s, when the version of individualism it expresses received great attention.
I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped. (DGB preferred alternative version: 'If not, then not.')
(Fritz Perls, 1969)
Life
Fritz Perls was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1893. He was expected to go into law like his distinguished uncle Herman Staub, but instead studied medicine. After a time spent in the German Army in the World War I trenches, he graduated as a doctor. Perls gravitated to psychiatry and the work of Freud and the early Wilhelm Reich.
In 1930 he married Laura Perls (born Lore Posner), they had two children together, Renate and Stephen.
In 1933, soon after the Hitler regime came into power, Fritz Perls, Laura and their eldest child Renate fled to the Netherlands, and one year later they emigrated to South Africa, where Fritz Perls wrote Ego, Hunger, and Aggression in 1941 (published 1942). His wife Laura contributed to the book, but she is usually not mentioned. In 1942 Fritz went into the South African army where he served as an army psychiatrist with rank of captain until 1946.
The Perls moved to New York in 1946, where Fritz Perls first worked briefly with Karen Horney, and then with Wilhelm Reich. Around 1947, Perls asked author Paul Goodman to write up some hand-written notes, which together with contributions from Ralph Hefferline and Goodman, were published as Gestalt Therapy.
Fritz Perls moved to California in 1960, where he continued to offer his workshops as a member of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, until he left the United States to start a Gestalt community at Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island, Canada, in 1969. Fritz Perls died almost a year later on 14th March 1970 in Chicago of heart failure, after surgery at the Louis A. Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
[edit] Bibliography
Ego, Hunger and Aggression (1942) ISBN 0-939266-18-0
Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951/1977) ISBN 0-939266-24-5
Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (1968) ISBN 0911226028
The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy (1973) ISBN 0-8314-0034-X
In and Out the Garbage Pail (1981) ISBN 0-553-20253-7
[edit] About Fritz Perls
Petruska Clarkson, Jennifer Mackewn: "Fritz Perls", 1993, SAGE Publications.
[edit] See also
Existentialism
Gestalt therapy
Paul Goodman (writer)
Phenomenology
Wilhelm Reich
Brian J. Mistler
Kurt Lewin
[edit] Influenced by Laura and Fritz Perls (students)
Jack Lee Rosenberg
IBP Integrative Body Psychotherapy
Claudio Naranjo
Pat Korb
Gordon Wheeler
Richard Bandler - co-founder of Neuro-Linguistic Programming
John Grinder - co-founder of Neuro-Linguistic Programming
Stella Resnick
[edit] External links
Biographical:
A Life Chronology, by Frederick Perls
Frederick Perls: A Son's Reflections, by Stephen Perls
Growing Up Rugged: Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy by National Book Award winner Ernest Becker. Delivered as a talk shortly after Perls's death in 1970.
Obituary at the New York Times
Writings and lectures by Fritz Perls:
Psychiatry in a New Key from the Unpublished Manuscripts of Fritz Perls
Finding Self Through Gestalt Therapy, a transcript of a talk given at the Cooper Union by Frederick Perls in 1957
Planned Psychotherapy by Frederick Perls. A talk given in the late 1940s at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, "Planned Psychotherapy" predates the articulation of Gestalt therapy by a few years. Perls discusses in detail his developing use of focusing on the "here and now."
Interview with Fritz Perls:
Fritz Perls: Gestalt Therapy A nearly forgotten interview with Fritz Perls (the co-founder of Gestalt Therapy) by Adelaide Bry
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Perls"
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13. Head of Department of Idealistic (Humanistic-Existential) Capitalism : Adam Smith
Honorary Members: Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden
Adam Smith
From Wikipedia on the internet...
Biography
[edit] Early life
Adam Smith was born to Margaret Douglas at Kirkcaldy, Scotland. His father, also named Adam Smith, was a lawyer, civil servant, and widower who married Margaret Douglas in 1720. His father died six months before Smith's birth.[3] The exact date of Smith's birth is unknown; however, his baptism was recorded on 16 June 1723 at Kirkcaldy.[4] Though few events in Smith's early childhood are known, Scottish journalist and biographer of Smith John Rae recorded that Smith was abducted by gypsies at the age of four and eventually released when others went to rescue him.[a]
Smith was particularly close to his mother, who likely encouraged him to pursue his scholarly ambitions.[5] Smith attended the Burgh School of Kirkcaldy from 1729 to 1737, and there studied Latin, mathematics, history, and writing.[5] Rae characterized the Burgh School as "one of the best secondary schools of Scotland at that period".[6]
[edit] Formal education
A commemorative plaque for Adam Smith is located at Smith's home town of Kirkcaldy.Smith entered the University of Glasgow when he was fourteen and studied moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson.[7] Here he developed his passion for liberty, reason, and free speech. In 1740, Smith was awarded the Snell exhibition and left the University of Glasgow to attend Balliol College, Oxford.[8]
Smith considered the teaching at Glasgow to be far superior to that at Oxford, and found his experience there to be intellectually stifling.[9] In Book V, Chapter II of The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote: "In the University of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching." Smith is also reported to have complained to friends that Oxford officials once detected him reading a copy of David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, and they subsequently confiscated his book and punished him severely for reading it.[6][10][11] According to William Robert Scott, "The Oxford of [Smith's] time gave little if any help towards what was to be his lifework."[12] Nevertheless, Smith took the opportunity while at Oxford to teach himself several subjects by reading many books from the shelves of the large Oxford library.[13] When Smith was not studying on his own, his time at Oxford was not a happy one, according to his letters.[14] Near the end of his time at Oxford, Smith began suffering from shaking fits, probably the symptoms of a nervous breakdown.[15] He left Oxford University in 1746, before his scholarship ended.[15][16]
In Book V of The Wealth of Nations, Smith comments on the low quality of instruction and the meager intellectual activity at English universities, when compared to their Scottish counterparts. He attributes this both to the rich endowments of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, which made the income of professors independent of their ability to attract students, and to the fact that distinguished men of letters could make an even more comfortable living as ministers of the Church of England. Smith had originally intended to study theology and enter the clergy, but his subsequent learning, especially from the skeptical writings of David Hume, persuaded him to take a different route.[11]
[edit] Teaching and early writings
Smith began delivering public lectures in 1748 at Edinburgh under the patronage of Lord Kames.[17] His lecture , economics, and religion indicate that they shared a closer intellectual alliance and friendship than with the others who were to play important roles during the emergence of what has come to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment.[18]
In 1751, Smith earned a professorship at Glasgow University teaching logic courses. When the Chair of Moral Philosophy died the next year, Smith took over the position.[19] Smith would continue academic work for the next thirteen years, which Smith characterized as "by far the most useful and therefore by far the happiest and most honourable period [of his life]".[20] His lectures covered the fields of ethics, rhetoric, jurisprudence, political economy, and "police and revenue".
He published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, embodying some of his Glasgow lectures. This work was concerned with how human communication depends on sympathy between agent and spectator, or the individual and other members of society. His analysis of language evolution was somewhat superficial, as shown only fourteen years later by a more rigorous examination of primitive language evolution by Lord Monboddo in his Of the Origin and Progress of Language.[21] Smith showed strong capacity for fluent and persuasive—if rather rhetorical—argument. He bases his explanation not on a special "moral sense", as the third Lord Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had done, nor on utility as Hume did, but on sympathy. Smith's popularity greatly increased due to the The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and as a result, many wealthy students left their schools in other countries to enroll at Glasgow to learn under Smith.[22]
After the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith began to give more attention to jurisprudence and economics in his lectures and less to his theories of morals. The development of his ideas on political economy can be observed from the lecture notes taken down by a student in 1763, and from what William Robert Scott described as an early version of part of The Wealth of Nations.[23] For example, Smith lectured that labor—rather than the nation's quantity of gold or silver—is the cause of increase in national wealth.[22]
François Quesnay, one of the leaders of the Physiocratic school of thoughtIn 1762, the academic senate of the University of Glasgow conferred on Smith the title of Doctor of Laws (LL.D.). At the end of 1763, he obtained a lucrative offer from Charles Townshend (who had been introduced to Smith by David Hume) to tutor his stepson, Henry Scott, the young Duke of Buccleuch. Smith subsequently resigned from his professorship to take the tutoring position. Because he resigned in the middle of the term, Smith attempted to return the fees he had collected from his students, but they refused.[24]
[edit] Tutoring and travels
Smith's tutoring job entailed touring Europe with Henry Scott while teaching him subjects including proper Polish.[24] Smith was paid £300 per year plus expenses along with £300 per year pension, which was roughly twice his former income as a teacher.[24] Smith first traveled as a tutor to Toulouse, France, where he stayed for a year and a half.[24] According to accounts, Smith found Toulouse to be very boring, and he wrote to Hume that he "had begun to write a book in order to pass away the time".[24] After touring the south of France, the group moved to Geneva. While in Geneva, Smith met with the philosopher Voltaire.[25] After staying in Geneva, the party went to Paris.
While in Paris, Smith came to know intellectual leaders such as Benjamin Franklin,[26] Turgot, Jean D'Alembert, André Morellet, Helvétius and, in particular, Francois Quesnay, the head of the Physiocratic school, whose work he respected greatly.[27] The physiocrats believed that wealth came from production and not from the attainment of precious metals, which was adverse to mercantilist thought. They also believed that agriculture tended to produce wealth and that merchants and manufacturers did not.[26] While Smith did not embrace all of the physiocrats ideas, he did say that physiocracy was "with all its imperfections [perhaps] the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy".[28]
Adam Smith's burial place in Canongate Kirkyard
[edit] Later years and writings
In 1766, Henry Scott's younger brother died in Paris, and Smith's tour as a tutor ended shortly thereafter.[28] Smith returned home that year to Kirkcaldy, and he devoted much of the next ten years to his magnum opus which was published in 1776.[29] The publication of the book was an instant success, selling out the first edition in only six months.[30]
In May 1773 he was elected fellow of the Royal Society of London,[31] and was elected a member of the Literary Club in 1775.[32] In 1778 Smith was appointed to a post as commissioner of customs in Scotland and went to live with his mother in Edinburgh.[33] Five years later, he became one of the founding members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,[34] and from 1787 to 1789 he occupied the honorary position of Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow.[35] He died in Edinburgh on 17 July 1790 after a painful illness and was buried in the Canongate Kirkyard.[36] On his death bed, Smith expressed disappointment that he had not achieved more.[37]
Smith's literary executors were two friends from the Scottish academic world: the physicist and chemist Joseph Black, and the pioneering geologist James Hutton.[38] Smith left behind many notes and some unpublished material, but gave instructions to destroy anything that was not fit for publication.[39] He mentioned an early unpublished History of Astronomy as probably suitable, and it duly appeared in 1795, along with other material such as Essays on Philosophical Subjects.[38]
[edit] Personality and beliefs
[edit] Character
James Tassie's enamel paste medallion of Smith provided the model for many engravings and portraits which remain today.[40]Not much is known about Smith's personal views beyond what can be deduced from his published works. His personal papers were destroyed after his death.[39] He never married[41] and seems to have maintained a close relationship with his mother, with whom he lived after his return from France and who died six years before his own death.[42]
Contemporary accounts describe Smith as an eccentric but benevolent intellectual, comically absent minded, with peculiar habits of speech and gait and a smile of "inexpressible benignity".[43] He was known to talk to himself, and had occasional spells of imaginary illness.[37]
Smith is often described as a prototypical absent-minded professor.[44] He is reported to have had books and papers stacked up in his study, with a habit he developed during childhood of speaking to himself and smiling in rapt conversation with invisible companions.[44]
Various anecdotes have discussed his absentminded nature. In one story, Smith reportedly took Charles Townshend on a tour of a tanning factory and while discussing free trade, Smith walked into a huge tanning pit from which he had to be removed.[45] Another episode records that he put bread and butter into a teapot, drank the concoction, and declared it to be the worst cup of tea he ever had. In another example, Smith went out walking and daydreaming in his nightgown and ended up 15 miles (24 km) outside town before nearby church bells brought him back to reality.[44][45]
Portrait of Adam Smith by John Kay, 1790Smith is reported to have been an odd-looking fellow. One author stated that Smith "had a large nose, bulging eyes, a protruding lower lip, a nervous twitch, and a speech impediment".[46] Smith is reported to have acknowledged his looks at one point saying, "I am a beau in nothing but my books."[46] Smith "never" sat for portraits,[47] so depictions of him created during his lifetime were drawn from memory, with rare exceptions. The most famous examples were a profile by James Tassie and two etchings by John Kay.[48] The line engravings produced for the covers of 19th century reprints of The Wealth of Nations were based largely off of Tassie's medallion.[49]
[edit] Religious views
There has been considerable scholarly debate about the nature of Adam Smith's religious views. Smith's father had a strong interest in Christianity and belonged to the moderate wing of the Church of Scotland.[50] Smith may have gone to England with the intention of a career in the Church of England: this is controversial and depends on the status of the Snell Exhibition. At Oxford, Smith rejected Christianity and it is generally believed that he returned to Scotland as a Deist.[51]
Economist Ronald Coase has challenged the view that Smith was a Deist,[52] stating that while Smith may have referred to the "Great Architect of the Universe", other scholars have "very much exaggerated the extent to which Adam Smith was committed to a belief in a personal God".[53] He based this on analysis of a remark in The Wealth of Nations where Smith writes that the curiosity of mankind about the "great phenomena of nature" such as "the generation, the life, growth and dissolution of plants and animals" has led men to "enquire into their causes". Coase notes Smith's observation that "[s]uperstition first attempted to satisfy this curiosity, by referring all those wonderful appearances to the immediate agency of the gods". Smith's close friend and colleague David Hume, with whom he agreed on most matters, was described by contemporaries as an atheist, although there is some debate about the exact nature of his views among modern philosophers.[54]
In a letter to William Strahan, Smith's account of Hume's courage and tranquility in the face of death aroused violent public controversy,[55] since it contradicted the assumption, widespread among orthodox believers, that an untroubled death was impossible without the consolation of religious belief.[56]
[edit] Published works
Adam Smith published a large body of works throughout his life, some of which have shaped the field of economics. Smith's first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments was written in 1759.[57] It provided the ethical, philosophical, psychological and methodological underpinnings to Smith's later works, including An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), A Treatise on Public Opulence (1764) (first published in 1937), Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795), Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms (1763) (first published in 1896), and Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
Main article: The Theory of Moral Sentiments
In 1759, Smith published his first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He continued to revise the work throughout his life, making extensive revisions to the final (6th) edition shortly before his death in 1790.[b] Although The Wealth of Nations is widely regarded as Smith's most influential work, it has been reported that Smith himself "always considered his Theory of Moral Sentiments a much superior work to his Wealth of Nations".[58] P. J. O'Rourke, author of the commentary On The Wealth of Nations (2007), has agreed, calling Theory of Moral Sentiments "the better book".[59] It was in this work that Smith first referred to the "invisible hand" to describe the apparent benefits to society of people behaving in their own interests.[60]
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith critically examined the moral thinking of the time and suggested that conscience arises from social relationships.[61] His aim in the work is to explain the source of mankind's ability to form moral judgements, in spite of man's natural inclinations toward self-interest. Smith proposes a theory of sympathy in which the act of observing others makes people aware of themselves and the morality of their own behavior. Haakonssen writes that in Smith's theory, "Society is ... the mirror in which one catches sight of oneself, morally speaking."[62]
In part because Theory of Moral Sentiments emphasizes sympathy for others while Wealth of Nations famously emphasizes the role of self interest, some scholars have perceived a conflict between these works. As one economic historian observed: "Many writers, including the present author at an early stage of his study of Smith, have found these two works in some measure basically inconsistent."[63] But in recent years most scholars of Adam Smith's work have argued that no contradiction exists. In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith develops a theory of psychology in which individuals find it in their self-interest to develop sympathy as they seek approval of the "impartial spectator". The self-interest he speaks of is not a narrow selfishness but something that involves sympathy.
Haakonssen adds that Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations "only contradict each other if Smithian sympathy is misinterpreted as benevolence and self-interest wrongly is narrowed to selfishness and then taken to be the reductive basis for all human motivation".[64] Rather than viewing the Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments as presenting incompatible views of human nature, most Smith scholars regard the works as emphasizing different aspects of human nature that vary depending on the situation. The Wealth of Nations draws on situations where man's morality is likely to play a smaller role—such as the laborer involved in pin-making—whereas the Theory of Moral Sentiments focuses on situations where man's morality is likely to play a dominant role among more personal exchanges.
[edit] The Wealth of Nations (1776)
The first page of the Wealth of Nations, 1776 London editionMain article: The Wealth of Nations
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is Smith's magnum opus and most influential work, published on 9 March 1776 during the Scottish Enlightenment. It is a clearly written account of political economy at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and is widely considered to be the first modern work in the field of economics. It is often considered one of the most influential books on the subject ever published. The Wealth of Nations was written for the average educated individual of the 18th century rather than for specialists and mathematicians. There are three main concepts that Smith expands upon in this work that forms the foundation of free market economics: division of labour, pursuit of self interest, and freedom of trade.
The Wealth of Nations expounds that the free market, while appearing chaotic and unrestrained, is actually guided to produce the right amount and variety of goods by a so-called "invisible hand".[65] The image of the invisible hand was previously employed by Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments, but it has its original use in his essay, "The History of Astronomy". Smith believed that while human motives were often driven by selfishness and greed, the competition in the free market would tend to benefit society as a whole by keeping prices low, while still building in an incentive for a wide variety of goods and services. Nevertheless, he was wary of businessmen and argued against the formation of monopolies.
An often-quoted passage from The Wealth of Nations is:[66]
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
Value theory was important in classical theory. Smith wrote that the "real price of every thing ... is the toil and trouble of acquiring it" as influenced by its scarcity. Smith maintained that, with rent and profit, other costs besides wages also enter the price of a commodity.[67] Other classical economists presented variations on Smith, termed the 'labour theory of value'. Classical economics focused on the tendency of markets to move to long-run equilibrium.
Smith also believed that a division of labour would effect a great increase in production. One example he used was the making of pins. One worker could probably make only twenty pins per day. However, if ten people divided up the eighteen steps required to make a pin, they could make a combined amount of 48,000 pins in one day.
[edit] Other works
Shortly before his death, Smith had nearly all his manuscripts destroyed. In his last years, he seemed to have been planning two major treatises, one on the theory and history of law and one on the sciences and arts. The posthumously published Essays on Philosophical Subjects, a history of astronomy down to Smith's own era, plus some thoughts on ancient physics and metaphysics, probably contain parts of what would have been the latter treatise. Lectures on Jurisprudence were notes taken from Smith's early lectures, plus an early draft of The Wealth of Nations, published as part of the 1976 Glasgow Edition of the works and correspondence of Adam Smith.
Other works, including some published posthumously, include Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms (1763) (first published in 1896); A Treatise on Public Opulence (1764) (first published in 1937); and Essays on Philosophical Subject (1795).
[edit] Legacy
A statue of Adam Smith on Edinburgh's Royal MileThe Wealth of Nations, one of the earliest attempts to study the rise of industry and commercial development in Europe, was a precursor to the modern academic discipline of economics. In this and other works, Smith expounded how rational self-interest and competition can lead to economic prosperity and well-being. It also provided one of the best-known intellectual rationales for free trade and capitalism, greatly influencing the writings of later economists. Smith was ranked #30 in Michael H. Hart's list of the most influential figures in history,[68] and he is often cited as the father of modern economics.[69]
George Stigler attributes to Smith the central proposition of mainstream economic theory, namely that an individual should invest a resource, for example, land or labour, so as to earn the highest possible return on it. Consequently, all uses of the resource should yield a risk-adjusted equal rate of return; otherwise resource reallocation would result.
On the other hand, Joseph Schumpeter dismissed Smith's contributions as unoriginal, saying "His very limitation made for success. Had he been more brilliant, he would not have been taken so seriously. Had he dug more deeply, had he unearthed more recondite truth, had he used more difficult and ingenious methods, he would not have been understood. But he had no such ambitions; in fact he disliked whatever went beyond plain common sense. He never moved above the heads of even the dullest readers. He led them on gently, encouraging them by trivialities and homely observations, making them feel comfortable all along.” (Schumpeter History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, p 185)
Classical economists presented variations on Smith, termed the 'labour theory of value', later Marxian economics descends from classical economics also using Smith's labor theories in part. The first volume of Karl Marx's major work, Capital, was published in German in 1867. In it, Marx focused on the labour theory of value and what he considered to be the exploitation of labour by capital.[70][71] The labour theory of value held that the value of a thing was determined by the labor that went into its production. This contrasts with the modern understanding of mainstream economics, that the value of a thing is determined by what one is willing to give up to obtain the thing. It is a paradox that Smith is often cited not only as the conceptual builder of free markets in capitalism but also as a main contributor to communist theory, via his influence on Marx.
The Adam Smith Theatre in KirkcaldyA body of theory later termed 'neoclassical economics' or 'marginalism' formed from about 1870 to 1910. The term 'economics' was popularized by such neoclassical economists as Alfred Marshall as a concise synonym for 'econonic science' and a substitute for the earlier, broader term 'political economy' used by Smith.[72][73] This corresponded to the influence on the subject of mathematical methods used in the natural sciences.[74] Neoclassical economics systematized supply and demand as joint determinants of price and quantity in market equilibrium, affecting both the allocation of output and the distribution of income. It dispensed with the labour theory of value of which Smith was most famously identified with in classical economics, in favor of a marginal utility theory of value on the demand side and a more general theory of costs on the supply side.[75]
The bicentennial anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations was celebrated in 1976, resulting in increased interest for The Theory of Moral Sentiments and his other works throughout academia. After 1976 Adam Smith was more likely to be represented as the author of both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and thereby as the founder of a moral philosophy and the science of economics. His homo economicus or "economic man" was also more often represented as a moral person. Additionally, his opposition to slavery, colonialism, and empire was emphasised, as were his statements about high wages for the poor, and his views that a common street porter was not intellectually inferior to a philosopher.[76]
[edit] Portraits, monuments and banknotes
This £20 note was issued by the Bank of England and features Adam Smith.Adam Smith has been commemorated in the UK on banknotes printed by two different banks; his portrait has appeared since 1981 on the £50 notes issued by the Clydesdale Bank in Scotland[77][78], and in in March 2007 Smith's image also appeared on the new series of £20 notes issued by the Bank of England, making him the first Scotsman to feature on an English banknote.[79]
A large-scale memorial of Smith was unveiled on 4 July 2008 in Edinburgh. It is a 10 feet (3.0 m)-tall bronze sculpture and it stands above the Royal Mile outside St Giles' Cathedral in Parliament Square, near the Mercat cross.[80] 20th century sculptor James Sanborn (best known for creating the Kryptos sculpture at the United States Central Intelligence Agency) has created multiple pieces which feature Adam Smith's work. At Central Connecticut State University is Circulating Capital, a tall cylinder which features an extract from The Wealth of Nations on the lower half, and on the upper half, some of the same text but represented in binary code.[81] At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, outside the Belk College of Business Administration, is Adam Smith's Spinning Top.[82][83] Another Adam Smith sculpture is at Cleveland State University.[84]
[edit] As a symbol of free market economics
Adam Smith's Spinning Top, sculpture by American artist James Sanborn at Cleveland State UniversitySmith has been celebrated by advocates of free market policies as the founder of free market economics, a view reflected in the naming of bodies such as the Adam Smith Institute, Adam Smith Society[85] and the Australian Adam Smith Club,[86] and in terms such as the Adam Smith necktie.[87]
Alan Greenspan argues that, while Smith did not coin the term laissez-faire, "it was left to Adam Smith to identify the more-general set of principles that brought conceptual clarity to the seeming chaos of market transactions". Greenspan continues that The Wealth of Nations was "one of the great achievements in human intellectual history".[88] P. J. O'Rourke describes Adam Smith as the "founder of free market economics".[89]
However, other writers have argued that Smith's support for laissez-faire has been overstated. Herbert Stein wrote that the people who "wear an Adam Smith necktie" do it to "make a statement of their devotion to the idea of free markets and limited government", and that this misrepresents Smith's ideas. Stein writes that Smith "was not pure or doctrinaire about this idea. He viewed government intervention in the market with great skepticism ... yet he was prepared to accept or propose qualifications to that policy in the specific cases where he judged that their net effect would be beneficial and would not undermine the basically free character of the system. He did not wear the Adam Smith necktie." In Stein's reading, The Wealth of Nations could justify the Food and Drug Administration, The Consumer Product Safety Commission, mandatory employer health benefits, environmentalism, and "discriminatory taxation to deter improper or luxurious behavior".[90]
Similarly, Vivienne Brown stated in The Economic Journal that in the 20th century United States, Reaganomics supporters, The Wall Street Journal, and other similar sources have spread among the general public a partial and misleading vision of Adam Smith, portraying him as an "extreme dogmatic defender of laissez-faire capitalism and supply-side economics".[91] Noam Chomsky has argued[c] that several aspects of Smith's thought have been misrepresented and falsified by contemporary ideology, including Smith’s reasons for supporting markets and Smith’s views on corporations. Chomsky argues that Smith supported markets in the belief that they would lead to equality.[92] Economic historians such as Jacob Viner regard Smith as a strong advocate of free markets and limited government (what Smith called "natural liberty") but not as a dogmatic supporter of laissez-faire.[93]
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14. Head of The Department of Idealistic (Humanistic-Existential) Socialism: Karl Marx (His Early Works)
Honorary Member: Erich Fromm
Karl Marx
From Wikipedia on the internet..
Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was a German[1] philosopher, political economist, historian, sociologist, humanist, political theorist and revolutionary credited as the founder of communism.
Marx's approach to history and politics is indicated by the opening line of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto (1848): “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, will produce internal tensions which will lead to its destruction.[2] Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, capitalism itself will be displaced by communism, a classless society which emerges after a transitional period—socialism—in which the state would be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.[3][4][5]
On the one hand, Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socioeconomic change. He argued that it is the structural contradictions within capitalism which necessitate its end, giving way to communism:
“ The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. ”
— (The Communist Manifesto)[6]
On the other hand, Marx argued that socioeconomic change occurred through organized revolutionary action. He argued that capitalism will end through the organized actions of an international working class, led by a Communist Party: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." (from The German Ideology)
While Marx was a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence was given added impetus by the victory of the Marxist Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution, and there are few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Career
2.1 Education
2.2 Marx and the Young Hegelians
2.3 Marx in Paris and Brussels
2.4 London
3 Marx's thought
3.1 Influences on Marx's thought
3.2 Philosophy
3.3 Political economy
4 Marx's influence
5 Criticisms
5.1 Economic
5.2 Systematic
5.3 From the Left
5.4 Marx and antisemitism
6 Works (selection)
7 References
8 Notes
9 See also
10 External links
10.1 Bibliography and online texts
10.2 Biographies
10.3 Articles and entries
Biography
Karl Marx as a teenagerKarl Heinrich Marx was born in Trier, in the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhineand the third of seven children. His father, Heinrich Marx (1777–1838), born Herschel Mordechai, the son of Levy Mordechai (1743-1804) and Eva Lwow (1753-1823), was descended from a long line of rabbis but converted to Lutheran Christianity, despite his many deistic tendencies and his admiration of such Enlightenment figures as Voltaire and Rousseau, in order to be allowed to practice Law. Marx's mother was Henriette née Pressburg (1788–1863). His siblings were Sophie (d. 1883) (m. Wilhelm Robert Schmalhausen), Hermann (1819-1842), Henriette (1820-1856), Louise (1821-1893) (m. Johann Carel Juta), Emilie, Caroline (1824-1847) and Eduard (1834-1837). His mother was the grand-aunt of industrialists Gerard Philips and Anton Philips and a maternal descendant of the Barent-Cohen family through her parents Isaac Heijmans Presburg (Presburg, c. 1747 – Nijmegen, May 3, 1832) and wife Nanette Salomon Barent-Cohen (Amsterdam, c. 1764 – Nijmegen, April 7, 1833), the daughter of Salomon David Barent-Cohen (d. 1807) and wife Sara Brandes, in turn the uncle and aunt by marriage of Nathan Mayer Rothschild's wife.
Marx in 1882Soon after losing his job as editor of Rheinische Zeitung, a Cologne newspaper,[7] Karl Marx was married to Jenny von Westphalen, the educated daughter of a Prussian baron, on June 19, 1843 in Kreuznacher Pauluskirche, Bad Kreuznach. Their engagement was kept secret at first, and for several years was opposed by both the Marxes and Westphalens. From 1844 to 1848, Marx enjoyed a very comfortable lifestyle, with income derived from the sale of his works, his salary, gifts from friends and allies; a large inheritance from his father's death, long delayed, also became available in March 1848.[8] During the first half of the 1850s the Marx family lived in poverty and constant fear of creditors in a three room flat on Dean Street in Soho, London. Marx and Jenny already had four children and three more were to follow. Of these only three survived to adulthood. Marx's major source of income at this time was Engels, who was drawing a steadily increasing income from the family business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. Inheritances from one of Jenny's uncles and her mother who died in 1856 allowed the family to move to somewhat more salubrious lodgings at 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town a new suburb on the then-outskirts of London. Marx generally lived a hand-to-mouth existence, forever at the limits of his resources, although this did to some extent depend upon his spending on relatively bourgeois luxuries, which he felt were necessities for his wife and children given their social status and the mores of the time.
Marx's children by his wife were: Jenny Caroline (m. Longuet; 1844–1883); Jenny Laura (m. Lafargue; 1845–1911); Edgar (1847–1855); Henry Edward Guy ("Guido"; 1849–1850); Jenny Eveline Frances ("Franziska"; 1851–1852); Jenny Julia Eleanor (1855–1898); and one more who died before being named (July 1857).
Karl Marx's Tomb at Highgate Cemetery LondonFollowing the death of his wife Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health for the last fifteen months of his life. It eventually brought on the bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him in London on March 14, 1883. He died a stateless person[9] and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, on March 17, 1883. The messages carved on Marx's tombstone are: “WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE”, the final line of The Communist Manifesto, and Engels' version of the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach:[10]
“ THE PHILOSOPHERS HAVE ONLY
INTERPRETED THE WORLD IN
VARIOUS WAYS - THE POINT
HOWEVER IS TO CHANGE IT
”
The tombstone was a monument built in 1954 by the Communist Party of Great Britain with a portrait bust by Laurence Bradshaw; Marx's original tomb had been humbly adorned.[11] In 1970, there was an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the monument, with a homemade bomb.[12][13]
Several of Marx's closest friends spoke at his funeral, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and Friedrich Engels. Engels' speech included the words:
“ On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep — but forever.[1] ”
In addition to Engels and Liebknecht, Marx's daughter Eleanor and Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue, Marx's two French socialist sons-in-law, also attended his funeral. Liebknecht, a founder and leader of the German Social-Democratic Party, gave a speech in German, and Longuet, a prominent figure in the French working-class movement, gave a short statement in French. Two telegrams from workers' parties in France and Spain were also read out. Together with Engels' speech, this was the entire programme of the funeral. Also attending the funeral was Friedrich Lessner, who had been sentenced to three years in prison at the Cologne communist trial of 1852; G. Lochner, who was described by Engels as "an old member of the Communist League" and Carl Schorlemmer, a professor of chemistry in Manchester, a member of the Royal Society, but also an old communist associate of Marx and Engels. Three others attended the funeral — Ray Lankester, Sir John Noe and Leonard Church — making eleven in all.
Marx's daughter Eleanor became a socialist like her father and helped edit his works. Karl Marx was known to become the first major social theorist to form a series of concepts within the break between modern and premodern societies. [14]
Career
Education
Marx was educated at home until the age of thirteen. After graduating from the Trier Gymnasium, Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of seventeen; he wished to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted that it was more practical to study law. At Bonn he joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society and at one point served as its president. Because of Marx's poor grades, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. During this period, Marx wrote many poems and essays concerning life, using the theological language acquired from his liberal, deistic father, such as "the Deity," but also absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the Young Hegelians who were prominent in Berlin at the time. Marx earned a doctorate in 1841 with a thesis titled The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, but he had to submit his dissertation to the University of Jena as he was warned that his reputation among the faculty as a Young Hegelian radical would lead to a poor reception in Berlin.
The younger Karl Marx
Marx and the Young Hegelians
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The Left, or Young Hegelians, consisted of a group of philosophers and journalists circling around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer opposing their teacher Hegel. Despite their criticism of Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, they made use of Hegel's dialectical method as a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. One of them, Max Stirner, turned critically against both Feuerbach and Bauer in his book "Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum" (1845, The Ego and Its Own), calling these atheists "pious people" for their reification of abstract concepts. Marx, at that time a follower of Feuerbach, was deeply impressed by the work and abandoned Feuerbachian materialism and accomplished what recent authors have denoted as an "epistemological break." He developed the basic concept of historical materialism against Stirner in his book, "Die Deutsche Ideologie" (1846, The German Ideology), which he did not publish.[15] Another link to the Young Hegelians was Moses Hess, with whom Marx eventually disagreed, yet to whom he owed many of his insights into the relationship between state, society and religion.
Marx in Paris and Brussels
Towards the end of October 1843, Marx arrived in Paris, France. Paris at this time was the home and headquarters to armies of German, British, Polish, and Italian revolutionaries. Marx, for his part, had come to Paris to work with Arnold Ruge, another revolutionary from Germany, on the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.[16] There, on August 28, 1844, at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais he met Friedrich Engels, who was to become his most important friend and life-long collaborator. Engels had met Marx only once before and briefly at the office of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842;[17] he went to Paris to show Marx his recently published book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.[18] It was this book that convinced Marx that the working class would be the agent and instrument of the final revolution in history.
After the failure of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx, living on the Rue Vaneau, wrote for the most radical of all German newspapers in Paris, indeed in Europe, the Vorwärts, established and run by the secret society called League of the Just. When not writing, Marx studied the history of the French Revolution and read Proudhon.[19] He also spent considerable time studying a side of life he had never been acquainted with before—a large urban proletariat.
“ [Hitherto exposed mainly to university towns...] Marx's sudden espousal of the proletarian cause can be directly attributed (as can that of other early German communists such as Weitling[20]) to his first hand contacts with socialist intellectuals [and books] in France.[21] ”
He re-evaluated his relationship with the Young Hegelians, and as a reply to Bauer's atheism wrote On the Jewish Question. This essay was mostly a critique of current notions of civil and human rights and political emancipation, which also included several critical references to Judaism as well as Christianity from a standpoint of social emancipation. Engels, a committed communist, kindled Marx's interest in the situation of the working class and guided Marx's interest in economics. Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which remained unpublished until the 1930s. In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist conception of communism, influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production.
In January 1845, after Vorwärts expressed its hearty approval of the assassination attempt on Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, Marx, among many others, were ordered to leave Paris. He and Engels moved on to Brussels, Belgium.
Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and in collaboration with Engels elaborated on his idea of historical materialism, particularly in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), the basic thesis of which was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production." Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one—industrial capitalism—and its replacement by communism. This was the first major work of what scholars consider to be his later phase, abandoning the Feuerbach-influenced humanism of his earlier work.
Next, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a response to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty and a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848, as the manifesto of the Communist League, a small group of European communists who had come to be influenced by Marx and Engels. Later that year, Europe experienced tremendous revolutionary upheaval. Marx was arrested and expelled from Belgium.
In the meantime a radical movement had seized power from King Louis-Philippe in France, and invited Marx to return to Paris, where he witnessed the revolutionary June Days Uprising first hand. When this collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and started the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ("New Rhenish Newspaper"). During its existence he was put on trial twice, on February 7, 1849 because of a press misdemeanor, and on the 8th charged with incitement to armed rebellion. Both times he was acquitted. The paper was soon suppressed and Marx returned to Paris, but was forced out again. This time he sought refuge in London.
London
Marx moved to London in May 1849, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. For the first few years there, he and his family lived in extreme poverty, which is believed to have acutely damaged Marx's health and shortened his life. He briefly worked as correspondent for the New York Tribune in 1851.[22] In London Marx devoted himself to two activities: revolutionary organizing, and an attempt to understand political economy and capitalism. Having read Engels' study of the working class, Marx turned away from philosophy and devoted himself to the First International, to whose General Council he was elected at its inception in 1864. He was particularly active in preparing for the annual Congresses of the International and leading the struggle against the anarchist wing led by Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). Although Marx won this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London to New York in 1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of the International. The most important political event during the existence of the International was the Paris Commune of 1871 when the citizens of Paris rebelled against their government and held the city for two months. On the bloody suppression of this rebellion, Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, The Civil War in France, an enthusiastic defense of the Commune.
Given the repeated failures and frustrations of worker's revolutions and movements, Marx also sought to understand capitalism, and spent a great deal of time in The British Library studying and reflecting on the works of political economists and economic data. By 1857 he had accumulated over 800 pages of notes and short essays on capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the world market; this work however was not published until 1941, under the title Grundrisse. In 1859, Marx was able to publish Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, his first serious economic work. In the early 1860s he worked on composing three large volumes, the Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo. This work, that was published posthumously under the editorship of Karl Kautsky is often seen as the Fourth book of Capital, and constitutes one of the first comprehensive treatises on the history of economic thought. In 1867, well behind schedule, the first volume of Capital was published, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production. Here, Marx elaborated his labor theory of value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism. Volumes II and III remained mere manuscripts upon which Marx continued to work for the rest of his life and were published posthumously by Engels.
During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he was incapable of the sustained effort that had characterized his previous work. He did manage to comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia. His Critique of the Gotha Programme, opposed the tendency of his followers Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) and August Bebel (1840–1913) to compromise with the state socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle in the interests of a united socialist party. In his correspondence with Vera Zasulich, Marx contemplated the possibility of Russia's bypassing the capitalist stage of development and building communism on the basis of the common ownership of land characteristic of the village Mir.
Marx's thought
Main article: Marxism
A Karl Marx monument in the German city Chemnitz, formerly the East German city Karl-Marx-Stadt (Karl Marx City).The American Marx scholar Hal Draper once remarked, "there are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike." The legacy of Marx's thought is bitterly contested between numerous tendencies who claim to be Marx's most accurate interpreters, including but not exclusively Marxist-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and libertarian Marxism.
Influences on Marx's thought
Main article: Influences on Karl Marx
Marx's thought was strongly influenced by:
Hegel's dialectical method and historical orientation;
The classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo;
French socialist and sociological thought, in particular the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier;
Earlier German philosophical materialism, particularly Ludwig Feuerbach
The solidarity with the working class of Friedrich Engels
G.W.F. HegelMarx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism (controversially adapted as the philosophy of dialectical materialism by Engels and Lenin) is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically. Hegel believed that human history is characterized by the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed slavery in the United States during his lifetime, and he envisioned a time when Christian nations would eliminate it from their civilization.
Marx's critiques of German philosophical idealism, British political-economy, and French socialism depended heavily on the influence of Feuerbach and Engels. Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set it upon its feet. Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's idealism was greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man and that the qualities people attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideology prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly.
The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism was Engels' book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to conceive of the historical dialectic in terms of class conflict and to see the modern working class as the most progressive force for revolution. Engels' article "Outlines of Political Economy" in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher also had a great influence in directing him towards the study of the workings of the capitalist economy.
Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically and discern tendencies of history and the resulting outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of Marx concluded, therefore, that a communist revolution is inevitable. However, Marx famously asserted in the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it", and he clearly dedicated himself to trying to alter the world. Consequently, most followers of Marx are not fatalists, but activists who believe that revolutionaries must organize social change.
Philosophy
Main articles: On the Jewish Question and The Poverty of Philosophy
Marx's philosophy hinges on his view of human nature. Fundamentally, Marx assumed that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "labour" and the capacity to transform nature "labour power." For Marx, this is simultaneously a physical and a mental act:
“ A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. ”
— (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1)
Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual. Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially determined and change over time. Beyond these basic points, Marx made no claims about human nature.
Marx's analysis of history focuses on the organization of labor and is based on his distinction between the means / forces of production, literally those things such as land, natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the relations of production, in other words, the social relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together these compose the mode of production, and Marx distinguished historical eras in terms of distinct modes of production. For example, Marx observed that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. Marx believed that under capitalism, the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to regulate that technology). For Marx this mismatch between (economic) base and (social) superstructure is a major source of social disruption and conflict.
Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or classes. As a scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources. For Marx, different classes have divergent interests, which is another source of social disruption and conflict. Conflict between social classes being something which is inherent in all human history:
“ The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. ”
— (The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1)
Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labor power. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labor — one's capacity to transform the world — is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Marx called this reversal "commodity fetishism" (at the time Marx wrote, historians of religion used the word fetish to describe something made by people, which people believed had power over them).
Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations. For example, although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than the people who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect (according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labor-power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface[23] to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:
“ Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. ”
— (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)
Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function in terms of political and economic inequality. Moreover, he provides an analysis of the ideological functions of religion: to reveal “an inverted consciousness of the world.” He continues: “It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms, once [religion,] the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked”. For Marx, this unholy self-estrangement, the “loss of man,” is complete for the sphere of the proletariat. His final conclusion is that for Germany, general human emancipation is only possible as a suspension of private property by the proletariat.
Political economy
Main article: Das Kapital
Memorial to Karl Marx in Moscow. The inscription reads "Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!" (Proletarians of all countries unite!)Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity—when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land. People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power are "proletarians". The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois". The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists.
Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one market and sell them in another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate within given markets, there is often a difference between the price of a commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practice arbitrage, and hope to capture the difference between these two markets. According to Marx, capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market and the market for whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist. Marx observed that in practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the difference "surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour, the difference between what it costs to keep workers alive and what they can produce.
The capitalism is capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies and capital equipment. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly improved the means of production. But Marx argued that capitalism was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor. Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit falls below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors of the economy would collapse. Marx thought that during such a crisis the price of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors of the economy.
Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive well-organized violent revolution would be required, because the ruling class would not give up power without struggle. He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat - a period where the needs of the working-class, not of capital, will be the common deciding factor - must be created on a temporary basis. As he wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program", "between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."[24] While he allowed for the possibility of peaceful transition in some countries with strong democratic institutional structures (e.g. Britain, the US and the Netherlands), he suggested that in other countries with strong centralized state-oriented traditions, like France and Germany, the "lever of our revolution must be force."[25]
Marx's influence
See also: Marxism
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels monument in Marx-Engels-Forum, Berlin-MitteThe work of Marx and Engels covers a wide range of topics and presents a complex analysis of history and society in terms of class relations. Followers of Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to propose a grand, cohesive theoretical outlook dubbed Marxism. Nevertheless, there have been numerous debates among Marxists over how to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and conditions. Moreover, it is important to distinguish between "Marxism" and "what Marx believed"; for example, shortly before he died in 1883, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers' leader Jules Guesde, and to his own son-in-law Paul Lafargue, accusing them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of lack of faith in the working class. After the French party split into a reformist and revolutionary party, some accused Guesde (leader of the latter) of taking orders from Marx; Marx remarked to Lafargue, "if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist" (in a letter to Engels, Marx later accused Guesde of being a "Bakuninist").[26]
Essentially, people use the word "Marxist" to describe those who rely on Marx's conceptual language (e.g. "mode of production", "class", "commodity fetishism") to understand capitalist and other societies, or to describe those who believe that a workers' revolution is the only means to a communist society. Some, particularly in academic circles, who accept much of Marx's theory, but not all its implications, call themselves "Marxian" instead.
Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the "Second International" as a base for continued political activism. This organization was far more successful than the First International had been, containing mass workers' parties, particularly the large and successful Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was predominantly Marxist in outlook. This international collapsed in 1914, however, in part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein's "evolutionary socialism", and in part because of divisions precipitated by World War I.
World War I also led to the Russian Revolution of 1917 in which a left splinter of the Second International, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took power. The revolution dynamized workers around the world into setting up their own section of the Bolsheviks' "Third International". Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and political heir to Marx, and developed a political program, called "Leninism" or "Bolshevism", which called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized "Communist Party".
Marx believed that the communist revolution would take place in advanced industrial societies such as France, Germany and England, but Lenin argued that in the age of imperialism, and due to the "law of uneven development", where Russia had on the one hand, an antiquated agricultural society, but on the other hand, some of the most up-to-date industrial concerns, the "chain" might break at its weakest points, that is, in the so-called "backward" countries, and ignite revolution in the advanced industrial societies of Europe, where society is ready for socialism, and which could then come to the aid of the workers state in Russia.[27]
Marx and Engels make a very significant comment in the preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto:
“ Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.
”
— (Marx and Engels, Preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto)
Marx's words served as a starting point for Lenin,[28] who, together with Trotsky, always believed that the Russian revolution must become a "signal for a proletarian revolution in the West". Supporters of Trotsky argue that the failure of revolution in the West along the lines envisaged by Marx, to come to the aid of the Russian revolution after 1917, led to the rise of Stalinism,[29] and set the cast of human history for seventy years. This is termed the theory of the Permanent Revolution, which became official policy in Russia until Lenin's death in 1924 and the subsequent development of the concept of "Socialism in one country" by Stalin.
100 Mark der DDR note used in the German Democratic Republic. 100 Mark banknotes with Marx's portrait were current from 1964 until monetary union with West Germany in July 1990.In China Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that peasants and not just workers could play leading roles in a Communist revolution, even in third world countries marked by peasant feudalism in the absence of industrial workers. Mao termed this the New Democratic Revolution. It was a departure from Marx, who had stated that the revolutionary transformation of society could take place only in countries that have achieved a capitalist stage of development with a proletarian majority. Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be internationally known as Maoism.
Under Lenin, and particularly under Joseph Stalin, Soviet suppression of the rights of individuals in the name of the struggle against capitalism, as well as Stalinist purges themselves, came in the minds of many to be characteristic of Marxism. This impression was encouraged by capitalism-oriented western states, as well as the politics of the Cold War. There were, nonetheless, always dissenting Marxist voices — Marxists of the old school of the Second International, the left communists who split off from the Third International shortly after its formation, and later Leon Trotsky and his followers, who set up a "Fourth International" in 1938 to compete with that of Stalin, claiming to represent true Bolshevism.
Statue of Marx and Engels in the Statue Park, Budapest.Coming from the Second International milieu, in the 1920s and '30s, a group of dissident Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research in Germany, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. As a group, these authors are often called the Frankfurt School. Their work is known as Critical Theory, a type of Marxist philosophy and cultural criticism heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and Max Weber.
The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists, including Lenin and Bolshevism in several key ways. First, writing at the time of the ascendancy of Stalinism, they had grave doubts as to the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected economic determinism. While highly influential, their work has been criticized by both orthodox Marxists and some Marxists involved in political practice for divorcing Marxist theory from practical struggle and turning Marxism into a purely academic enterprise.
Influential Marxists of the same period include the Third International's Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci, who along with the Frankfurt School are often known by the term Western Marxism. Marx was an important influence as well on the German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, an occasional associate Adorno and the Frankfurt School.
In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review, a journal and press, to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United States independent of the Communist Party.
In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend Marx's thought as a coherent and scientific theory of history by restating its central tenets in the language of analytic philosophy. This gave birth to Analytical Marxism, an academic movement which also included Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski and John Roemer. Bertell Ollman is another Anglophone champion of Marx within the academy, as is the Israeli Shlomo Avineri.
In Marx's 'Das Kapital' (2006), biographer Francis Wheen reiterates David McLellan's observation that since Marxism had not triumphed in the West, "it had not been turned into an official ideology and is thus the object of serious study unimpeded by government controls."
The following countries had governments at some point in the twentieth century who at least nominally adhered to Marxism (those in bold still did as of 2008): Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam. In addition, the Indian states of Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal have had Marxist governments.
Marxist political parties and movements have significantly declined since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some exceptions, perhaps most notably Nepal
Marx was ranked #27 on Michael H. Hart's list of the most influential figures in history.
In July 2005 Marx was the surprise winner of the 'Greatest Philosopher of All Time' poll by listeners of the BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time.[30]
Criticisms
It has been suggested that some of the information in this article's Criticism or Controversy section(s) be merged into other sections to achieve a more neutral presentation. (Discuss)
Main article: Criticism of Marxism
Economic
Many proponents of capitalism have argued that capitalism is a more effective means of generating and redistributing wealth than socialism or communism, or that the gulf between rich and poor that concerned Marx and Engels was a temporary phenomenon. Some suggest that self-interest and the need to acquire capital is an inherent component of human behavior, and is not caused by the adoption of capitalism or any other specific economic system and that different economic systems reflect different social responses to this fact. The Austrian School of economics has criticized Marx's use of the labour theory of value.[31] In addition, the political repression and economic problems of several historical Communist states have done much to destroy Marx's reputation in the Western world, particularly following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Some argue that while socioeconomic gaps between the bourgeoisie and proletariat remained, industrialization in countries such as the United States and Great Britain also saw the rise of a middle class not inclined to revolution, and of a welfare state that helped mitigate any revolutionary tendencies among the working class. While the economic devastation of the Great Depression broadened the appeal of Marxism in the developed world, future government safeguards and economic recovery led to a decline in its influence. In contrast, Marxism remained extremely influential in feudal and industrially underdeveloped societies such as Tsarist Russia, where the Bolshevik Revolution was successful.[32]
Systematic
An intriguing critic of Marx, although he also paid tribute to many of Marx's basic ideas, was Louis Feuer, the late professor of philosophy at University of California, Berkeley. In his introduction to Selected Works on Economics and Politics by Karl Marx, published in 1960, Feuer argued strongly for the viewpoint, also expressed by others, that Marxism has many of the characteristics of a religion—in other words, that Marxism largely depends upon a fervent kind of faith, not provable scientifically, which is typical of religious believers. Just the same, Feuer in his introduction, and in other works, argued that Marx has had a very enduring and positive influence on the social and economic thinking of almost every modern country, particularly in Western Europe, but also in the United States. He made the interesting comment that Marxism largely depends upon the injection of ethical thinking into economic and political analysis—in contrast to modern trends which prefer to discuss these important areas in a totally "objective" manner without ethical values.[citation needed]
Still others criticize Marx from the perspective of philosophy of science. Karl Popper has criticized Marx's theories for not being falsifiable, which he believed rendered some aspects of Marx’s historical and socio-political argument unscientific; Popper's falsifiability standard, though very influential, has itself been controversial. Popper also criticized Marx for historicism, that is, a relativization of truth to a particular historical period.[33]
While Marx and Engels focused almost exclusively on developments in the West following the prospective development of capitalism, this left the problems of the less developed nations, such as Russia, largely unaddressed. This perceived problem with Marxist theory—that revolutions nevertheless took place in less developed areas of the world, even rather more than within the most advanced capitalist ones—was known from the beginning of the 20th century, and much of the work of Vladimir Lenin and other Marxist and Marxian authors and theorists became dedicated to addressing it. Lenin's collected works contain dozens of examples of his insistence that the victory of socialism in Russia was dependent upon its spread to the heavily industrialized nations. Trotsky famously developed the theory of Permanent Revolution to show how revolutions in backward countries like Russia could succeed so long as they spread to the West. After Lenin's death, this was opposed by Stalin, who argued that it was possible to establish "socialism in one country." In essence, Lenin argued, taking the theory from several other contemporary Marxist writers, that through imperialism the bourgeoisie of wealthy countries is using "superprofits" from the imperial colonies to effectively bribe the working class back home in order to appease it. Nevertheless, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, Western capitalist nations did experience (unsuccessful) revolutions more or less along the "proletarian" lines that Marx envisaged, notably in Germany (1918, 1919, 1923), Hungary (1919), Finland (1918), and Spain (leading to the Spanish Civil War) with upheavals in eastern China, France, Italy, and the UK (the general strike of 1926) and elsewhere.
Others, like Shlomo Avineri, have argued that it was the pre-capitalist structure of 1917 Russia, as well as the strong authoritarian traditions of the Russian state and its weak civil society, which pushed the Soviet revolution towards its repressive development.
Critics have also claimed to have shown problems with the concept of historical materialism. At the base of historical materialism, they claim, is the view that the mode of production creates all historical events and changes.[34] But critics have asked the question `Where does the mode of production come from?'. Murray Rothbard argues that "...Marx never attempts to provide an answer. Indeed he cannot, since if he attributes the state of technology or technological change to the actions of man, of individual men, his whole system falls apart. For human consciousness, and individual consciousness at that, would then be determining [the mode of production] rather than the other way round."[35] However, Marx's famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy states "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production." [2] Marx clearly attributes the productive forces and their development to the actions of human beings, but emphasises the social nature of this development, based on necessity, the need to maintain their existence, which thus develops "independent of their will", as individuals, and thus impacts back on the individual in ways which reflect the given social conditions
From the Left
Marx has also been criticized from the Left. Marx and Henry George were contemporaries, and George claimed that if Marx's ideas were ever tried, political repression would be the inevitable results. More recently, some have argued that class is not the most fundamental inequality in history and call attention to patriarchy or race, as not being, as Marxists argue, dependent on class. It could however be argued that Marx does not suggest that class divisions are more fundamental than patriarchy, since the division between men and women, as Engels pointed out, predates class divisions, but only that the movement of history can be best understood in terms of class, and that class struggle is the mechanism of change. Anarchists, on the other hand, have usually opposed Marxism, even its most libertarian forms, as being too authoritarian, and missing the basic necessity of rebellion against authority by concentrating on economic matters. (See also Anarchism and Marxism).
Some today question the theoretical and historical validity of "class" as an analytic construct or as a political actor. In this line, some question Marx's reliance on 19th century notions that linked science with the idea of "progress" (see social evolution). Many observe that capitalism has changed much since Marx's time, and that class differences and relationships are much more complex — citing as one example the fact that much corporate stock in the United States is owned by workers through pension funds. Critics of this analysis retort that the top 1% of stock owners still own nearly 50% of the nation's publicly traded company stocks.[36] The Left Wing philosopher Peter Singer argues in the book A Darwinian Left that the Marxist view of human nature as highly flexible is incorrect. The Scientist Lionel Tiger has also argued against the Marxist view of Human nature. Lionel Tiger argues that Marxist states have failed to wither away and give power to the Proletariat because Marxist Socialism fails to realize that because humans have inherited competitive and despotic tendencies from their primate ancestors a system of “checks and balances“ and restrictions on individuals gaining power and wealth are necessary to maintain an egalitarian Socialist society.[37]
Marx and antisemitism
Some commentators, like Bernard Lewis, Edward H. Flannery and Hyam Maccoby, have maintained that Marx's On The Jewish Question was an antisemitic work, and that he made use of antisemitic epithets in his published and private writings.[38][39] According to them, Marx regarded Jews as the embodiment of capitalism and the creators of its evils.[40] In their view, Marx's equation of Judaism with capitalism, together with his pronouncements on Jews, strongly influenced socialist movements and shaped their attitudes and policies toward the Jews. In these scholars' opinions, Marx's 'On the Jewish Question' influenced National Socialist, as well as Soviet and Arab anti-Semites.[41][42][43] Hyam Maccoby has suggested that Marx was embarrassed by his Jewish background.[44]
The above authors often quote the following excerpt from On The Jewish Question to support their arguments:
“ What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, selfishness. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god? Money. Well then, an emancipation from haggling and money, from practical, real Judaism would be the self emancipation of our age.[45] ”
On the other hand, David McLellan and Francis Wheen argue that On the Jewish Question must be understood in the context of Marx's debates with Bruno Bauer about the nature of political emancipation in Germany. Wheen says: Those critics, who see this as a foretaste of ‘Mein Kampf’, overlook one, essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defence of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians.[46]
According to McLellan, Marx used the word Judentum colloquially, as commerce, arguing that Germans suffer, and must be emancipated from, capitalism, concluding that the essay's second half should be read as an extended pun at Bauer’s expense. [47]
According to Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, at the time Marx wrote On the Jewish Question, virtually all major philosophers were antisemitic, but the word "antisemitism" had not yet been coined or developed a racial component, and there was little awareness of the depths of European prejudice against Jews. Marx was thus simply expressing, in Sacks's view, the commonplace thinking of his era.[48]
Works (selection)
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843
On the Jewish Question, 1843
Notes on James Mill, 1844
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 1844
The Holy Family, 1845
Theses on Feuerbach, 1845
The German Ideology, 1845
The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847
Wage-Labor and Capital, 1847
Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852
Grundrisse, 1857
Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859
Writings on the U.S. Civil War, 1861
Theories of Surplus Value, 3 volumes, 1862
Value, Price and Profit, 1865
Capital, Volume I (Das Kapital), 1867
The Civil War in France, 1871
Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875
Notes on Wagner, 1883
Capital, Volume II [posthumously, published by Engels], 1885
Capital, Volume III [posthumously, published by Engels], 1894
References
Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1968) ISBN 0-521-09619-7
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (Oxford University Press, 1963) ISBN 0-195-20052-7
G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton University Press, 1978) ISBN 0-691-07068-7
Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (4 volumes) Monthly Review Press
Ronald Duncan & Colin Wilson, (editors) Marx Refuted, (Bath, UK, 1987) ISBN 0-906798-71-X
Stephen Jay Gould, A Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral - E. Ray Lankester, Page 1, Find Articles.com (1999)
Daniel Little, The Scientific Marx, (University of Minnesota Press, 1986) ISBN 0-8166-1505-5
David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (Harpercollins, 1978) ISBN 0-060-90585-9
Boris Nicolaevsky & Otto Maenchen-Helfen (translator), Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (Penguin Books, 1976) ISBN 0-140-21594-8
Murray Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought Volume II: Classical Economics (Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 1995) ISBN 0-945466-48-X
Maximilien Rubel, Marx Without Myth: A Chronological Study of his Life and Work (Blackwell, 1975) ISBN 0-631-15780-8
Thomas T. Sekine, The Dialectic of Capital. A Study of the Inner Logic of Capitalism, 2 volumes (preliminary edition), Tokyo 1986; ISBN 4-924750-44-9 (vol. 1), ISBN 4-924750-34-4 (vol. 2).
Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life, (Fourth Estate, 1999), ISBN 1-85702-637-3
Francis Wheen, Marx's Das Kapital, (Atlantic Books, 2006) ISBN 1-843-54400-8
Notes
^ MSN Encarta: "Karl Marx"
^ Baird, Forrest E.; Walter Kaufmann (2008). From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-158591-6.
^ Karl Marx: Critique of the Gotha Program (Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume Three, p. 13-30;)
^ In Letter from Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer (MECW Volume 39, p. 58;)
^ See, for example, Marx's comments in section one of The Communist Manifesto on feudalism, capitalism, and the role internal social contradictions play in the historical process: "We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged...the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes ... The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property." Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1848),The Communist Manifesto
^ Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1848), The Communist Manifesto
^ MSN Encarta: "Karl Marx"
^ Maltsev, Yuri N.(editor) (1993) Requiem for Marx, Ludwig von Mises Institute, p.91-96 ISBN 0-945466-13-7.
^ Ibid, p. 451.
^ See the photograph of the tombstone.
^ Wheen, Francis (2002). Karl Marx: A Life. New York: Norton, Introduction.
^ "Tomb raiders' failed attack on Marx grave", Camden New Journal
^ The monument is featured in the movie Morgan (1966). Morgan Delt, (David Warner) often sits meditating at the monument. In the 1970s the monument was a popular pilgrimage site for Chinese student groups, in unisex blue Mao suits, from the People's Republic of China (中國大陸).
^ Best, S and Kellner, Douglas (1997). "From the Spectacle to Simulation", The Postmodern Turn, pg.(79)
^ Several authors elucidated this for long neglected crucial turn in Marx's theoretical development, lastly Ernie Thomson: The Discovery of the Materialist Conception of History in the Writings of the Young Karl Marx, New York, The Edwin Mellen Press 2004; for a short account see Max Stirner, a durable dissident
^ Mansel 2001, p. 389
^ Wheen, Francis Karl Marx: A Life, p. 75
^ Mansel, Philip: Paris Between Empires, p.390 (St. Martin Press, NY) 2001
^ Mansel 2001, p. 390.
^ Weitling was author of the first book on communism in German, Humanity as it is and as it should be, published in Paris in 1838.
^ Sewell, William H. Jr., Work and Revolution in France. The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 p. 145 (Cambridge Press, 1980)
^ Karl, Marx (2007). in James Ledbetter: Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx. Penguin Books. ISBN 9780141441924.
^ Karl Marx: Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in: Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February, 1844
^ Karl Marx:Critique of the Gotha Programme
^ “You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries -- such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland -- where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means. This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labor.” La Liberté Speech delivered by Karl Marx on September 8, 1872, in Amsterdam
^ David McLellan, 1973, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought p. 443, New York, Harper and Row.
^ "We have always proclaimed and repeated this elementary truth of marxism, that the victory of socialism requires the joint efforts of workers in a number of advanced countries" (Lenin, Sochineniya (Works), 5th ed Vol XLIV p418, February 1922. Stalin made the same point until Lenin's death).
^ On the day after the Russian revolution of October 1917, at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, Lenin's resolution was passed which concludes: "The soviet is convinced that the proletariat of the West-European countries will help us to achieve a complete and lasting victory for the cause of socialism." Lenin repeated this on the November 5, 1917 declaration To the population which concludes that the victory of socialism "will be sealed by the advanced workers of the most civilised countries" and continued to repeat it throughout his life.
^ Trotsky termed this the "degeneration" of the Russian revolution in his Revolution Betrayed, due to the lack of basic material conditions for the survival of socialism in an isolated backward country.
^ Why Marx is man of the moment
^ Ludwig Von Mises. "Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis" 2nd Ed. Trans. J. Kahane. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. pg. 111–222
^ http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.10009,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
^ Popper, Karl (2003). The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume Two: Hegel and Marx. Routlidge Classics, pp. 91-2. ISBN 0-415-27842-2.
^ The Poverty of Philosophy
^ Rothbard, Murray (1995). An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought - Volume Two: Classical Economics. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., pp. 373. ISBN 0-945466-48-X.
^ Signs Point to Greater Rich-Poor Wage Gap
^ Leonard D. Katz Rigby (2000). Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives. United kingdom: Imprint Academic, 352. Page 158
^ Jacobs, Jack (2005). "Marx, Karl (1818-1883)", in Levy, Richard S.: Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, pp. 446–447. ISBN 1851094393.
^ Lewis, Bernard (1999). Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p. 112. ISBN 0393318397.
^ Flannery, Edward H. (2004). The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism. Mahwah, NY: Paulist Press, p. 168. ISBN 0809127024.
^ Perry, Marvin; Schweitzer, Frederick M. (2005). Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present. New York: Palgrave, p. 154–157. ISBN 0312165617.
^ Stav, Arieh (2003). "Israeli Anti-Semitism", in Sharan, Shlomo: Israel and the Post-Zionists: A Nation at Risk. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, p. 171. ISBN 1903900522. "Hitler simply copied Marx's own anti-Semitism."
^ According to Joshua Muravchik, political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, Marx's aspiration for "the emancipation of society from Judaism" because "the practical Jewish spirit" of "huckstering" had taken over the Christian nations is not that far from the Nazi program's twenty-four point: "combat[ing] the Jewish-materialist spirit within us and without us" in order "that our nation can […] achieve permanent health." See Muravchik, Joshua (2003). Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism. San Francisco: Encounter Books, p. 164. ISBN 1893554457.
^ Maccoby, Hyam (2006). Antisemitism and Modernity: Innovation and Continuity. London: Routledge, p. 64–66. ISBN 041531173X.
^ On The Jewish Question by Karl Marx
^ Wheen, F., Karl Marx, p. 56
^ David McLellan: Marx before Marxism (1970), pp.141-142
^ Jonathan Sacks, The Politics of Hope, pages 98-108
See also
Class struggle
Das Kapital
Friedrich Engels
historical materialism
History of socialism
Jenny von Westphalen
Karl Marx House
Marxian Class Theory
Marxism
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15. Head of The Department of Integrative Wholism, Spiritualism, Pantheism and/or Deism, The Integration of Science, Romanticism, and Religion: Baruch Spinoza
Honorary Members: Heraclitus, many Enlightenment philosophers, Einstein
Baruch Spinoza
From Wikipedia on the internet...
Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza (Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה, Portuguese: Bento de Espinosa, Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza) (November 24, 1632 – February 21, 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death. Today, he is considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy, laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism. By virtue of his magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes' mind–body dualism, Spinoza is considered to be one of Western philosophy's most important philosophers.
Spinoza lived quietly as a lens grinder, turning down rewards and honors throughout his life, including prestigious teaching positions, and gave his family inheritance to his sister. Spinoza's moral character and philosophical accomplishments prompted 20th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze to name him "the absolute philosopher."[1] Spinoza died in February 1677 of a lung illness, perhaps tuberculosis or silicosis caused by fine glass dust inhaled while tending to his trade.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Family origins
1.2 Early life and career
1.3 Controversial ideas and Jewish reaction
1.4 Later life and career
1.5 Dutch Port cities as sites of free thought
2 Philosophy
2.1 Ethical philosophy
3 Pantheism controversy
4 Modern relevance
5 See also
6 Bibliography
6.1 By Spinoza
6.2 About Spinoza
7 Notes
8 External links
[edit] Biography
[edit] Family origins
Spinoza's ancestors were of Sephardic Jewish descent, and were a part of the community of Portuguese Jews that grew in the city of Amsterdam after the Alhambra Decree in Spain (1492) and the Portuguese Inquisition (1536) had led to forced conversions and expulsions from the Iberian peninsula.[2] Some historians argue the Spinoza family ("de Espinosa" in Portuguese) had its origins in Espinosa de los Monteros, near Burgos, Spain.[3] Spinoza's father was born roughly a century after this forced conversion in the small Portuguese city of Vidigueira, near Beja in Alentejo. When Spinoza's father was still a child, Spinoza's grandfather, Isaac de Spinoza (who was from Lisbon), took his family to Nantes in France. They were expelled in 1615 and moved to Rotterdam, where Isaac died in 1627. Spinoza's father, Miguel, and his uncle, Manuel, then moved to Amsterdam where they assumed their Judaism. Manuel changed his name to Abraão de Spinoza, though his "commercial" name was still the same.[citation needed]
[edit] Early life and career
Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. His mother Ana Débora, Miguel's second wife, died when Baruch was only six years old. Miguel was a successful importer/merchant and Baruch had a traditional Jewish upbringing; however, his critical, curious nature would soon come into conflict with the Jewish community. Wars with England and France took the life of his father and decimated his family's fortune but he was eventually able to relinquish responsibility for the business and its debts to his brother, Gabriel, and devote himself to philosophy and optics.
[edit] Controversial ideas and Jewish reaction
Spinoza became known in the Jewish community for positions contrary to normative Jewish belief, with critical positions towards the Talmud and other religious texts. In the summer of 1656, he was issued the writ of cherem (Hebrew: חרם, a kind of excommunication) from the Jewish community, perhaps for the apostasy of how he conceived God, although the reason is not stated in the cherem. Righteous indignation on the part of the synagogue elders at Spinoza's heresies was probably not the sole cause for the excommunication; there was also the practical concern that his ideas, which disagree equally well with the orthodoxies of other religions as with Judaism, would not sit well with the Christian leaders of Amsterdam and would reflect badly on the whole Jewish community, endangering the limited freedoms that the Jews had achieved in that city. The terms of his cherem were severe.[4] He was, in Bertrand Russell's words, "cursed with all the curses in Deuteronomy and with the curse that Elisha pronounced on the children who, in consequence, were torn to pieces by the she-bears."[5] It was never revoked. Following his excommunication, he adopted the first name Benedictus, the Latin equivalent of his given name, Baruch; they both mean "blessed". In his native Amsterdam he was also known as Bento (Portuguese for Benedict or blessed) de Spinoza, which was the informal form of his name.
After his cherem, it is reported that Spinoza lived and worked in the school of Franciscus van den Enden, who taught him Latin in his youth and may have introduced him to modern philosophy, although Spinoza never mentions Van den Enden anywhere in his books or letters. Van den Enden was a Cartesian and atheist who was forbidden by the city government to propagate his doctrines publicly. Spinoza, having dedicated himself completely to philosophy after 1656, fervently desired to change the world through establishing a clandestine philosophical sect. Because of public censure this was only eventually realized after his death through the dedicated intercession of his friends.
During this period Spinoza also became acquainted with several Collegiants, members of an eclectic sect with tendencies towards rationalism. Spinoza also corresponded with Peter Serrarius, a radical Protestant and millennarian merchant. Serrarius is believed to have been a patron of Spinoza at some point.[citation needed] By the beginning of the 1660s, Spinoza's name became more widely known, and eventually Gottfried Leibniz and Henry Oldenburg paid him visits, as stated in Matthew Stewart's "The Courtier and the Heretic".[6] Spinoza corresponded with Oldenburg for the rest of Spinoza's short life. Spinoza's first publication was his geometric[clarify] exposition of Descartes, Parts I and II of Descartes' Principles of Philosophy (1663). From December 1664 to June 1665, Spinoza engaged in correspondence with Blyenbergh, an amateur Calvinist theologian, who questioned Spinoza on the definition of evil. Later in 1665, Spinoza notified Oldenburg that he had started to work on a new book, the Theologico-Political Treatise, published in 1670. Leibniz disagreed harshly with Spinoza in Leibniz's own published Refutation of Spinoza, but he is also known to have met with Spinoza on at least one occasion[6], and his own work bears certain striking resemblances to certain key parts of Spinoza's philosophy (see: Monadology).
When the public reactions to the anonymously published Theologico-Political Treatise were extremely unfavourable to his brand of Cartesianism, Spinoza was compelled to abstain from publishing more of his works. Wary and independent, he wore a signet ring engraved with his initials, a rose[citation needed], and the word "caute" (Latin for "cautiously"). The Ethics and all other works, apart from the Descartes' Principles of Philosophy and the Theologico-Political Treatise, were published after his death, in the Opera Posthuma edited by his friends in secrecy to avoid confiscation and destruction of manuscripts.
[edit] Later life and career
Spinoza's house in Rijnsburg from 1661-3, now a museumSpinoza relocated from Amsterdam to Rijnsburg (near Leiden) around 1661 and later lived in Voorburg and The Hague respectively. He earned a comfortable living from lens-grinding. While the lens-grinding aspect of Spinoza's work is uncontested, the type of lenses he made is in question. Many have said he produced excellent magnifying glasses, and some historians credit him with being an optician (in the sense of making lenses for eyeglasses). He was also supported by small, but regular, donations from close friends. He died in 1677 while still working on a political thesis. His premature death was due to lung illness, possibly the result of breathing in glass dust from the lenses he ground. Only a year earlier, Spinoza had met with Leibniz at The Hague for a discussion of his principal philosophical work, Ethics, which had been completed in 1676. This meeting was described in Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic.[6] Spinoza never married, nor did he father any children. When he died, he was considered a heathen anti-religionist by the general population, and when Boerhaave wrote his dissertation in 1688 he attacked the doctrines of Spinoza. He claimed later that defense of Spinoza's lifestyle cost him his reputation in Leiden and a post as minister.
[edit] Dutch Port cities as sites of free thought
Amsterdam and Rotterdam were important cosmopolitan centers where merchant ships from many parts of the world brought people of various customs and beliefs. It is this hustle and bustle which ensured, as in the Mediterranean region during the Renaissance, some possibility of free thought and shelter from the crushing hand of ecclesiastical authority. Thus Spinoza no doubt had access to a circle of friends who were basically heretics in the eyes of tradition. One of the people he must have known was Niels Stensen, a brilliant Danish student in Leiden; others were Coenraad van Beuningen and his cousin Albert Burgh, with whom Spinoza is known to have corresponded.
[edit] Philosophy
The opening page of Spinoza's magnum opus, EthicsSubstance, Attribute and Mode
"These are the fundamental concepts with which Spinoza sets forth a vision of Being, illuminated by his awareness of God. They may seem strange at first sight. To the question "What is?" he replies: "Substance, its attributes and modes". Spinoza, Karl Jaspers p.9
Spinoza's system imparted order and unity to the tradition of radical thought, offering powerful weapons for prevailing against "received authority." As a youth he first subscribed to Descartes's dualistic belief that body and mind are two separate substances, but later changed his view and asserted that they were not separate, being a single identity. He contended that everything that exists in Nature/Universe is one Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality, namely the single substance (meaning "that which stands beneath" rather than "matter") that is the basis of the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is only understood in part. That humans presume themselves to have free will, he argues, is a result of their awareness of appetites while being unable to understand the reasons why they want and act as they do. The argument for the single substance runs as follows:
Substance exists and cannot be dependent on anything else for its existence.
No two substances can share the same nature or attribute.
Proof: Two distinct substances can be differentiated either by some difference in their natures or by some difference in one of their alterable states of being. If they have different natures, then the original proposition is granted and the proof is complete. If, however, they are distinguished only by their states of being, then, considering the substances in themselves, there is no difference between the substances and they are identical. "That is, there cannot be several such substances but only one."[7]
A substance can only be caused by something similar to itself (something that shares its attribute).
Substance cannot be caused.
Proof: Something can only be caused by something which is similar to itself, in other words something that shares its attribute. But according to premise 2, no two substances can share an attribute. Therefore substance cannot be caused.
Substance is infinite.
Proof: If substance were not infinite, it would be finite and limited by something. But to be limited by something is to be dependent on it. However, substance cannot be dependent on anything else (premise 1), therefore substance is infinite.
Conclusion: There can only be one substance.
Proof: If there were two infinite substances, they would limit each other. But this would act as a restraint, and they would be dependent on each other. But they cannot be dependent on each other (premise 1), therefore there cannot be two substances.
Spinoza contends that "Deus sive Natura" ("God or Nature") is a being of infinitely many attributes, of which thought and extension are two. His account of the nature of reality, then, seems to treat the physical and mental worlds as one and the same. The universal substance consists of both body and mind, there being no difference between these aspects. This formulation is a historically significant solution to the mind-body problem known as neutral monism. The consequences of Spinoza's system also envisage a God that does not rule over the universe by providence, but a God which itself is the deterministic system of which everything in nature is a part. Thus, God is the natural world and has no personality.
In addition to substance, the other two fundamental concepts Spinoza presents, and develops in the Ethics are
Attribute:
By attribute, I mean that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance.
and Mode:
By mode, I mean the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself.
Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs through the operation of necessity. For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, with freedom being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. So freedom is not the possibility to say "no" to what happens to us but the possibility to say "yes" and fully understand why things should necessarily happen that way. By forming more "adequate" ideas about what we do and our emotions or affections, we become the adequate cause of our effects (internal or external), which entails an increase in activity (versus passivity). This means that we become both more free and more like God, as Spinoza argues in the Scholium to Prop. 49, Part II. However, Spinoza also held that everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, humans have no free will. They believe, however, that their will is free. In his letter to G. H. Schaller (Letter 62), he wrote: "men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined."[8]
Spinoza's philosophy has much in common with Stoicism in as much as both philosophies sought to fulfill a therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain happiness (or eudaimonia, for the Stoics). However, Spinoza differed sharply from the Stoics in one important respect: he utterly rejected their contention that reason could defeat emotion. On the contrary, he contended, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion. For him, the crucial distinction was between active and passive emotions, the former being those that are rationally understood and the latter those that are not. He also held that knowledge of true causes of passive emotion can transform it to an active emotion, thus anticipating one of the key ideas of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.
Some of Spinoza's philosophical positions are:
The natural world is infinite.
Good and evil are related to human pleasure and pain.
Everything done by humans and other animals is excellent and divine.
All rights are derived from the State.
Animals can be used in any way by people for the benefit of the human race, according to a rational consideration of the benefit as well as the animal's status in nature.[9][10]
[edit] Ethical philosophy
Encapsulated at the start in his Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding (Tractatus de intellectus emendatione) is the core of Spinoza's ethical philosophy, what he held to be the true and final good. Spinoza held a relativist's position, that nothing is intrinsically good or bad, except to the extent that it is subjectively perceived to be by the individual. Things are only good or evil in respect that humanity sees it desirable to apply these conceptions to matters. Instead, Spinoza believes in his deterministic universe that, "All things in nature proceed from certain necessity and with the utmost perfection." Therefore, nothing happens by chance in Spinoza's world, and reason does not work in terms of contingency.
In the universe anything that happens comes from the essential nature of objects, or of God/Nature. According to Spinoza, reality is perfection. If circumstances are seen as unfortunate it is only because of our inadequate conception of reality. While elements of the chain of cause and effect are not beyond the understanding of human reason, our grasp of the infinitely complex whole is limited because of the limits of science to empirically take account of the whole sequence. Spinoza also asserted that sense perception, though practical and useful for rhetoric, is inadequate for discovering universal truth; Spinoza's mathematical and logical approach to metaphysics, and therefore ethics, concluded that emotion is formed from inadequate understanding. His concept of "conatus" states that human beings' natural inclination is to strive toward preserving an essential being and an assertion that virtue/human power is defined by success in this preservation of being by the guidance of reason as one's central ethical doctrine. According to Spinoza, the highest virtue is the intellectual love or knowledge of God/Nature/Universe.
In the final part of the "Ethics" his concern with the meaning of "true blessedness" and his unique approach to and explanation of how emotions must be detached from external cause in order to master them presages 20th-century psychological techniques. His concept of three types of knowledge - opinion, reason, intuition - and assertion that intuitive knowledge provides the greatest satisfaction of mind, leads to his proposition that the more we are conscious of ourselves and Nature/Universe, the more perfect and blessed we are (in reality) and that only intuitive knowledge is eternal. His unique contribution to understanding the workings of mind is extraordinary, even during this time of radical philosophical developments, in that his views provide a bridge between religions' mystical past and psychology of the present day.
Given Spinoza's insistence on a completely ordered world where "necessity" reigns, Good and Evil have no absolute meaning. Human catastrophes, social injustices, etc. are merely apparent. The world as it exists looks imperfect only because of our limited perception.
Pantheism controversy
Main article: Pantheism controversy
In 1785, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi published a condemnation of Spinoza's pantheism, after Lessing was thought to have confessed on his deathbed to being a "Spinozist", which was the equivalent in his time of being called an atheist. Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Moses Mendelssohn disagreed with Jacobi, saying that there is no actual difference between theism and pantheism. The entire issue became a major intellectual and religious concern for European civilization at the time, which Immanuel Kant rejected, as he thought that attempts to conceive of transcendent reality would lead to antinomies (statements that could be proven both right and wrong) in thought.
The attraction of Spinoza's philosophy to late eighteenth-century Europeans was that it provided an alternative to materialism, atheism, and deism. Three of Spinoza's ideas strongly appealed to them:
the unity of all that exists;
the regularity of all that happens; and
the identity of spirit and nature.
Spinoza's "God or Nature" provided a living, natural God, in contrast to the Newtonian mechanical "First Cause" or the dead mechanism of the French "Man Machine."
[edit] Modern relevance
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, a name Wittgenstein later paid homage to in his Tractatus Logico-PhilosophicusLate 20th century Europe demonstrated a greater philosophical interest in Spinoza, often from a left-wing or Marxist perspective. Notable philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Étienne Balibar and the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chauí have each written books on Spinoza. Deleuze's doctoral thesis, published in 1968, refers to him as "the prince of philosophers."[11] Other philosophers heavily influenced by Spinoza include Constantin Brunner and John David Garcia. Stuart Hampshire wrote a major English language study of Spinoza, though H. H. Joachim's work is equally valuable. Unlike most philosophers, Spinoza and his work were highly regarded by Nietzsche.
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein evoked Spinoza with the title (suggested to him by G. E. Moore) of the English translation of his first definitive philosophical work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an allusion to Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Elsewhere, Wittgenstein deliberately borrowed the expression sub specie aeternitatis from Spinoza (Notebooks, 1914-16, p. 83). The structure of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus does have certain structural affinities with Spinoza's Ethics (though, admittedly, not with the latter's own Tractatus) in erecting complex philosophical arguments upon basic logical assertions and principles. Furthermore, in propositions 6.4311 and 6.45 he alludes to a Spinozian understanding of eternity and interpretation of the religious concept of eternal life, stating that "If by eternity is understood not eternal temporal duration, but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present." (6.4311) "The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole." (6.45) Furthermore, Wittgenstein's interpretation of religious language, in both his early and later career, may be said to bear a family resemblance to Spinoza's pantheism.
Spinoza has had influence beyond the confines of philosophy. The nineteenth century novelist, George Eliot, produced her own translation of the Ethics, the first known English translation thereof. The twentieth century novelist, W. Somerset Maugham, alluded to one of Spinoza's central concepts with the title of his novel, Of Human Bondage. Albert Einstein named Spinoza as the philosopher who exerted the most influence on his world view (Weltanschauung). Spinoza equated God (infinite substance) with Nature, consistent with Einstein's belief in an impersonal deity. In 1929, Einstein was asked in a telegram by Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein whether he believed in God. Einstein responded by telegram: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."[12] Spinoza's pantheism has also influenced environmental theory. Arne Næss, the father of the deep ecology movement, acknowledged Spinoza as an important inspiration. Moreover, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges was greatly influenced by Spinoza's world view. In many of his poems and short stories, Borges makes allusions to the philosopher's work.
Spinoza is an important historical figure in the Netherlands, where his portrait was featured prominently on the Dutch 1000-guilder banknote, legal tender until the euro was introduced in 2002. The highest and most prestigious scientific award of the Netherlands is named the Spinoza prijs (Spinoza prize). Spinoza's work is also mentioned as the favourite reading material for Bertie Wooster's valet Jeeves in the P. G. Wodehouse novels.
[edit] See also
Plane of immanence
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] By Spinoza
ca. 1660. Korte Verhandeling van God, de mensch en deszelvs welstand (Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being).[13].
1662. Tractatus de intellectus emendatione (On the Improvement of the Understanding). Project Gutenberg; Pdf Version
1663. Principia philosophiae cartesianae (Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, translated by Samuel Shirley, with an Introduction and Notes by Steven Barbone and Lee Rice, Indianapolis, 1998). Gallica.
1670. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (A Theologico-Political Treatise).[14]
Project Gutenberg: Part 1;Part 2;Part 3;Part 4; Pdf Version
1675/76 Tractatus Politicus (Unfinished) Pdf Version
1677. Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (The Ethics) Project Gutenberg. Another translation, by Jonathan Bennett.
1677. Hebrew Grammar.
[edit] About Spinoza
Albiac, Gabriel, 1987. La sinagoga vacía: un estudio de las fuentes marranas del espinosismo. Madrid: Hiperión D.L. ISBN 84-7517-214-8
Balibar, Étienne, 1985. Spinoza et la politique ("Spinoza and politics") Paris: PUF.
Boucher, Wayne I., 1999. Spinoza in English: A Bibliography from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. 2nd edn. Thoemmes Press.
Boucher, Wayne I., ed., 1999. Spinoza: Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Discussions. 6 vols. Thoemmes Press.
Damásio, António, 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Harvest Books,ISBN-13: 978-0156028714
Deleuze, Gilles, 1968. Spinoza et le problème de l'expression. Trans. "Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza" Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books).
———, 1970. Spinoza - Philosophie pratique. Transl. "Spinoza: Practical Philosophy".
———, 1990. Negotiations trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press).
Della Rocca, Michael. 1996. Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509562-6
Garrett, Don, ed., 1995. The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Cambridge Uni. Press.
Gatens, Moira, and Lloyd, Genevieve, 1999. Collective imaginings : Spinoza, past and present. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-16570-9, ISBN 0-415-16571-7
Gullan-Whur, Margaret, 1998. Within Reason: A Life of Spinoza. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-05046-X
Hampshire, Stuart, 1951. Spinoza and Spinozism , OUP, 2005 ISBN-13: 978-0199279548
Hardt, Michael, trans., University of Minnesota Press. Preface, in French, by Gilles Deleuze, available here.
Israel, Jonathan, 2001. The Radical Enlightenment, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———, 2006. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752, (ISBN 0-19-927922-5 hardback)
Kasher, Asa, and Shlomo Biderman. "Why Was Baruch de Spinoza Excommunicated?"
Kayser, Rudolf, 1946, with an introduction by Albert Einstein. Spinoza: Portrait of a Spiritual Hero. New York: The Philosophical Library.
Lloyd, Genevieve, 1996. Spinoza and the Ethics. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-10781-4, ISBN 0-415-10782-2
Lucas, P. G., 1960. "Some Speculative and Critical Philosophers", in I. Levine (ed.), Philosophy (London: Odhams)
Lovejoy, Arthur O., 1936. "Plenitude and Sufficient Reason in Leibniz and Spinoza" in his The Great Chain of Being. Harvard University Press: 144-82 (ISBN 0-674-36153-9). Reprinted in Frankfurt, H. G., ed., 1972. Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays. Anchor Books.
Macherey, Pierre, 1977. Hegel ou Spinoza, Maspéro (2nd ed. La Découverte, 2004).
———, 1994-98. Introduction à l'Ethique de Spinoza. Paris: PUF.
Matheron, Alexandre, 1969. Individu et communauté chez Spinoza, Paris: Minuit.
Morgan, Michael L. (ed.), 2002. "Spinoza: Complete Works", (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company). ISBN 0-87220-620-3
Moreau, Pierre-François, 2003, Spinoza et le spinozisme, PUF (Presses Universitaires de France)
Nadler, Steven, 1999. Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge Uni. Press. ISBN 0-521-55210-9
Negri, Antonio, 1991. The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics.
———, 2004. Subversive Spinoza: (Un)Contemporary Variations).
Popkin, R. H., 2004. Spinoza (Oxford: One World Publications)
Ratner, Joseph, 1927. The Philosophy of Spinoza (The Modern Library: Random House)
Stoltze, Ted and Warren Montag (eds.), The New Spinoza (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Smilevski, Goce. Conversation with SPINOZA. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2006.
Yovel, Yirmiyahu, "Spinoza and Other Heretics", Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989.
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Summary
These are the 15 Major Department Heads of DGB Philosophy-Psychology-Politics...
It remains for Hegel's Hotel: DGB Philosophy to successfully integrate the work of all 15 department heads...and their honorary members....into one philosophical system with Hegel's 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' providing the main spiritual and mediating, driving force for this huge integrative, philosophical project.
The New York World Trade Centre Twin Towers were each 110 stories high.
Hegel's Hotel is partly my memorial to all the philosophers mentioned in this essay, and many others who aren't.
However, Hegel's Hotel is also partly being built by me as my own personal memorial to the legacy of The New York World Trade Centre, and all the good things that it represented -- and/or could represent in the future. Mainly, for me, this entails a 'free and united integrtion of world commerce and business, ideally conducted with the prinicples of integrity, reciprocity, ethics, fairness, and humanistic-existentialism in mind -- not the principles of unbridled, one-sided human narcissism, greed, and power that is capable of destroying and self-destroying many a business from the top down, and from the bottom up.
By myself, I think I can build Hegel's Hotel to 55 floors -- at least half the height of The New York World Trade Centre -- by myself over the next 3 to 5 years, assuming I stay healthy and motivated. With help, before or after I am dead, maybe one day Hegel's Hotel will reach the magical height of 110 floors -- but this would probably involve the participation of numerous others, not unlike the extraordinary concerted help that Diderot was able to co-ordinate in his constructing of the mammoth 'Enlightenment' philosophical project in his lifetime -- 'Encyclopdie' -- which is another philosophical accomplishment that Hegel's Hotel wishes to memorialize -- and bring back alive, revitalized, in the present.
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This article is about the 18th-century French encyclopaedia. For a definition of the word "encyclopédie", see the Wiktionary entry encyclopédie.
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers
The title page of the Encyclopédie
Author Numerous contributors, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert
Country France
Language French
Subject(s) General
Genre(s) Reference encyclopedia
Publisher André Le Breton, Michel-Antoine David, Laurent Durand, and Antoine-Claude Briasson
Publication date 1751-72
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (English: Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts) was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements and revisions in 1772, 1777 and 1780 and numerous foreign editions and later derivatives.
Its introduction, the Preliminary Discourse, is considered an important exposition of Enlightenment ideals.
The Encyclopédie's self-professed aim was "to change the way people think." It was hoped that the work would eventually encompass all of human knowledge; Denis Diderot explained the goal of the project as "All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings."[1]
Origins
The Encyclopédie was originally meant to be simply a French translation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728).[2] The translation was commissioned by Paris book publisher André Le Breton in 1743 to John Mills, an English resident in France. In May 1745 Le Breton announced the work as available for sale - however to Le Breton's dismay, Mills had not done the work he was commissioned to do; in fact, he could barely read and write French and did not even own a copy of Cyclopaedia. Le Breton had been swindled, and so he physically beat Mills with a cane—Mills sued on assault charges, but Le Breton was acquitted in court as being justified.[3] Setting out to find a new editor, Le Breton engaged Jean Paul de Gua de Malves. Among those hired by Malves were the young Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot. Within thirteen months in August 1747 Malves was fired due to his rigid methods, and Le Breton hired Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert as the new editors. Diderot would remain editor for the next 25 years seeing the Encyclopédie through to completion.
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With great tragedy and traumacy to individuals and to all of mankind, buildings and people can be blown up. It is a reflection of the worst of mankind that this happens every day, often where we least expect it.
Ideas can't blown up and destroyed -- as long as there are people left on the earth to continue to pick up for those who have been left behind.
It is a sad, sad state of affairs that the 'war on terror' is at rock bottom a 'war of ideas, ideology, and ideals' -- healthy or pathological as they may be.
No-one can claim complete innocence of this tragic, human matter -- except perhaps the innocent civilians who are just trying to raise their family, and don't want to have anything to do with international power-games, revenge, and politics, and even more so perhaps, the poor children who are being blown up before they have ever had the chance to learn or do anything 'bad'.
We are all at least partly guilty in this matter, if only in not taking enough of a political interest in what kinds of things our government is doing abroad in the name of 'freedom', 'democracy' and 'God'. (See my essay, 'Blowback', and the collection of essays, 'Faceoff: DGB Philosophy vs. The American Republican Party, Parts 1-6, for more of my thoughts on this subject matter.)
'Foreign Interventionism' is a dangerous business -- not unlike the business of 'favoring and pampering one child while ignoring, neglecting, and/or abusing another'. The 'wholistic consequences' within the family are usually not good. And neither is the same type of approach on the world stage. Multilateralism and conflict-mediation is the way to go in American Foreign Policy; not American Unilateralism and Imperialism, and invading first this country, then that -- still in the name of 9/11 -- Iraq, Pakistan, Syria -- how many more warfronts does America want to start up.
I have reproached the American Republican Party in past essays for conducting a form of 'Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry' form of Wild West Justice -- shoot first, justify later...
But at least this can be said for all those Clint Eastwood wild west and/or police cop movies. Clint Eastwood always got his man. And there was no 'massive co-lateral damage'. Clint Eastwood never shot the 'wrong man -- woman, and/or child'. You can say what you will -- for or against -- his 'hard-line, Conservative-Republican brand of an eye-for-an-eye street justice'.
However, Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry never got the'epistemology' wrong.
In Clint Eastwood's world of 'hardline, eye-for-an-eye street justice', there were no 'sophist' and 'narcissistic' cover-ups and/or manipulations designed to deceive and manipulate the public -- the American people.
What was true, was true.
And what was false, was false.
There were no 'smoke and mirrors' games of deceiving and manipulating the American Public.
Clint Eastwood's 'epistemology' -- his knowledge of 'truth' and 'deception', 'good' and 'evil', 'right' and 'wrong' -- as ideally as it may have been depicted because
he was an American 'justice' hero, not an American 'narcissistic banker, mortgage lender, CEO for a military-industrial complex, or worst of all, a 'myth-spinning' government leader, was always 'bang-on'. 100 percent accurate.
Good epistemology.
And good ethics.
These should be the next 'twin towers of The New York World Trade Centre'.
And Hegel's Hotel: DGB Philosophy -- as much as it does not profess to be perfect any more than any other one man, one woman, and/or any one philosophical system can deem itself to be 'perfect',
Still aims to show leadership and a quality of good work in this direction.
And I have 15 very special 'Deparmtment Heads' as well as many other brilliant and amazing 'honorary members',
Who are more than capable of providing Hegel's Hotel: DGB Philosophy with all
the 'checks and balances' it needs/I need,
To build Hegel's Hotel -- with the best philosophical architecture and engineering in the world -- to a sparkling 55 floors high; maybe even with help, and/or if I live long enough, to the ideal 110 floors that I would like it to be built to.
My two main role models are G.W.F. Hegel and Denis Diderot.
As one of Obama's main role model's is Abraham Lincoln.
I think we are both heading in the right direction.
From now on, this will be my standard sign-off signature:
-- DGBN, November 16th to Nov. 23rd, 2008.
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
Are now, and God/Nature willing, for some time now, in Hegel's Hotel, be -- in process...
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