Vlog: Cameron's Hypocrisy

First vlog. A bit rough, but it's a prototype. Enjoy.

Modernism

The Three Great Skeptics came in the mid-to-late 19th century and were against the theories of the enlightenment. As such, they rejected many of the things their worlds were built on - democracy, nationalism, capitalism, and so on. The common link between these three men is that they don't believe, as Hegel does, in a central narrative to the world. Everything is subjective. It is in a way the philosophical solidification of the romantic ideas Rousseau began espousing a century earlier.

Marx has already been talked about, but his ideology was essentially that the lower classes were constantly being lied to and manipulated by the upper classes. Between these two classes, there was constant warfare. And, he heavily implied, it was the geist of the lower classes that would eventually trump the upper class.

Nietzche believed that mainstream culture was corrupt and doomed. Morals are subjective. For example, the statements that “it is wrong to steal” or that “charity is good” are not facts. These things have specific history as ideas and aren't universally true except for specific cultures, and within cultures these ideas can change, as in the example of homosexuality, which was accepted in the Greek and Roman world, considered an evil once Christianity spread, and has once again become an accepted facet of the world, at least in most western countries anyway.

Freud was against the enlightenment because he thinks that we don't know what we want, that we're perverse and that behaviour and morality are all determined by subconscious drives. Sexuality & hunger are the main two. He explains the oedipus complex, the five stages in growth (all sexual in nature) and the Id, Ego and Superego. His essential claim is that we act to fulfil some sort of drive no one is aware of. It is the science of irrationality and anethema to enlightenment ideas. It's for good reason that Freud is considered a dead end in the scientific community, as his 'research' is full of holes. But the cultural impact of his ideas were great. 

Modernism is the theory of relativism. There is no centre, things are only defined by their relationship to everything else in the world. No one is equal, there is no model of perfection to strive for, however we can respect this diversity of such a worldview.

European Idealism

Empiricism is for the most part Anglocentric in its thinkers and flourished in Britain most notably. But in Europe, and especially Germany, it was idealism that was most influential.

Hegel believehis philosophical system that can explain all of history. A Christian, he takes the idea of the Fall of Man as a central doctrine of history. This integrates with Rousseau (who harkens back to a Golden Age pre-civilisation). All history is the attempt by everyone to get to heaven, or recreating the Garden of Eden on Earth. Has he been to Bahrain? Gilgamesh liked it. The whole of history is battle between good and evil (perhaps taking from Zoroastrian thought, or perhaps a coincidence). 

Geist is spirit. Zeitgeist means the spirit of the time. It is an immaterial thing. Attempts of history are the attempts of God to bring us back to Eden and, according to Hegel, when geist realises itself, we will be brought back to Eden. This orderly view of the entirety of history is simplistic, but the idea of 'zeitgeist' is a compelling one. One might describe the Arab Awakening and renewed will of the Arab people as the zeitgeist of their time.

Next is Marx, who called himself a 'historical materialist'. He is seen as a follower of Hegel but differs in that his ideas stem from economics. He thought geist was the spirit of the people. Turning Hegel's idea on its head, he suggests that it's not geist (that is, sheer will, like Smith's 'hidden hand of the market') that's getting things happening, it's the people who are doing things, who then call it geist. His is a materialist conception of history. What people actual do is make things, as he outlines in his theories that the history of society is the history of class struggle. It's exemplified in the famous statement of the Communist Manifesto: workers of the world unite!

Kant changed the way philosophers approached the universe. Previous to him, philosophers believed that the world was there and our mind perceives it (as Locke did). Kant states that rather, one's mind is everything and the universe is inside one's head. Bertrand Russell puts it “We see space and time because we wear space and time goggles” To put it another way, as three-dimensional beings we cannot cannot imagine an object that is 2D, or that does not exist in time or space. Wittgenstein pointed out that we cannot even imagine space except as on object inside of space.

Schopenhauer is of the generation after Kant. He thinks there's only one "numena": the universe as a thing in itself, the will to be, beingness as a thing. This Will is everything and, when we perceive something, that is a representation of it. In other words, the human mind shapes Will into representation Schopenhauer's ideas were being influenced by Hinduism, reflecting the contact Europeans were beginning to make with cultures beyond their continent.

Romanticism

Necessary ideal: to suffer is good.

Rousseau - father of romanticism – has thoughts on human nature: "mankind is born free but everywhere is in chains". Each person is impelled by inner desire to be free but civilisation constrains us all.

Rousseau's main idea: Social Contract in order to benefit from civilisation, we surrender our freedom for protection (an integrative idea). This is an unhappy condition to be in and a revolutionary way to consider civilisation. Classical Greek thought was that civilisation was Great. "Barbarian" literally meant 'dog person'. But Rousseau sees civilisation as constraining – it's the individual against society. Humans should be free.

Emile – novel where rational child destroyed by education system. Just another way that Roussea subverts the idea that to be civilised is good.

It was the late 18th century and France was beginning to expand as an empire.. France encountered undeveloped people, namely those of Tahiti. These are people in tune with nature, born free and living natural lives.

Another of Rousseau's big ideas was that of the General Will. He believed in small communities, that no country should be bigger than what you can walk in a day. But after the French Revolution, General Will is transformed into the Will of Nations, from which we get nationalism, and so nationalism and romanticism are philosophically linked in this way (nationalism also has connections to Hegellian theories I think)

Prometheus is a  Greek Titan who fashioned mankind from clay and stole fire from gods for mankind. In punishment he was chained to the side of a mountain where an eagle would come and eat his liver every day. Prometheus defied the Gods. This is a quintessentially romantic deed because he defies fate. The Cult of Prometheus grows around the creative class of this era, Beethoven dedicating his work to the Titan for example.

Byron was a romantic poet and possibly the first 'celeb' in the modern way. He was famous for his art and his poems printed all over Europe. He loved Venice, a romantic city, where he apparently fathered 700 bastards there alone. Venice, named after Venus, is also the city of casanova.

In Literature and Poetry you have Shelly, Byron and Keats, who states that "Beauty is Truth, Truth is Beauty / This is all we can know in this world". This is completely contrary view to that of empiricists. Truth is something subjective, not objective, according to the romantics. The debate between romantics and empiricists seems to be equivalent to the the form/function debate.

Enlightenment and Empiricism

Descartes - "I think therefore I am"

New rational philosophies and mathematics - the Empiricist ideal of the 'clockwork universe' - Newton.

Start of the printing press – Gutenburg. His printing press allowed the spread of ideas in a very new way, similar to the revolution of the internet. Original printing press was a bible-printing machine. Protestant reformation: Martin Luthor wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible in their own language, and so the spread of Protestantism helped to spread literacy. From there, the printing press allowed all sorts of things to be published en masse: novels, scientific treatises, even porn, were invented in their printed form within 200 years of the original Gutenberg press. There was an explosion of literature, especially in Holland, then the most free country in Europe.

Courants printed in Holland during the English civil war were the first periodicals. These were mostly propaganda

Press – Addison and Steel – involved in the early bourgeoisie trade and adverts. "Win Free Sex" as a template was first invented by these early journalists, whose papers advertised easy money ventures and the likes to make money themselves. So the recogniseable tropes of a newspaper were set, and can still be seen today in the contents of modern papers.

Empiricism – knowledge can only come from the 'five senses'. All comes from without. Everything can be analysed. Empiricism is opposite Idealism, where all things comes from within.

Thomas Hobbs was the father of Empiricism . Odeas of the state – non-moralistic empiricist view of human behaviour – humans live to maximise pleasure and minimise pain.

John Locke – people are tabula rasa at birth – blank slate. Once again, all things come from without. This would later be contradicted by the great skeptics, namely Freud.

Adam Smith – empiricist view of economics – seeking of pleasure/avoiding of pain – utility economics – everyone tries to maximise utility – his classical economic theories were the foundation of all economic understanding until Keynes turned his ideas upside down.

David Hume – Essay Concerning Human Understanding – How do you derive complex/abstract ideas from sense-data? He asks how we can synthesise ideas from simpler ones – something Wittgenstein would pick up centuries later, as to how simple objects form complex atoms.