Rousseau & Marxism: Enlightenment versus Romanticism

1. Lecture Rousseau & Marxism

2. Enlightenment versus Romanticism • Kant on Enlightenment: Man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s intelligence without guidance from others. • Romanticism: Rejection of reason. Focus on intuition, emotion, imagination, and creativity. Rejection of industrialized society. Focus on nature.

3. Society versus individual • Rousseau • Marx

4. Dialectical Materialism • Primacy of matter. • Everything is in continual process of becoming, ceasing, and changing. • Contradiction is the driving force of change.

5. Human nature • 6th thesis on Feuerbach: "But the human essence is not an abstract idea inherent in each specific individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of societal relations" • Alienation: Alienation from work. Alienation from oneself. Alienation from other human beings.

6. Historical materialism • It is not the consciousness which determines existence; it is social existence which determines consciousness. • Different stages of production with capitalism as the dominant form to be followed by socialism or communism.

7. Social and Political Theory • State: Instrument through which the propertied class dominated other classes.

8. Economic theory • Usage value • Exchange value • Surplus value

9. Revolutionary theory • Class struggle

10. Epistemology • In the social production that men carry on, they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and intellectual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence; it is on the contrary their social existence which determines their consciousness.”

11. “Psychology:” The socio-historical character of consciousness • Consciousness is societal product. • The consciousness of a single individual is not just the consciousness of a single person, as the consciousness is in connection with the whole of society and part of the whole of society.

12. Arguments • Scientists should study concrete individuals. • "The formation of the five senses is the work of the whole world history" • In the objectified products of human labor  we understand the nature of humans: "One sees how the history of industry … is the open book of human nature, of … human psychology" • "A psychology, for which this book, the sensously most tangible and accessible part of history, is closed, cannot become a real science with a genuine content” • Marx: Darwin’s book on natural selection is "the natural-historical foundation for our view"

13. Consciousness and power: Ideology • The mind changes and develops historically, with production (labor) being the carrier for this development. • Modes of production are power-laden as producing humans not only affect nature but also other human beings. They develop relations with other humans and production takes place under these societal relations. • "The ideas of the ruling class are in each epoch the ruling ideas" and "morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of the mind, thus no longer retain the appearance of independence”

14. Ideology • Metaphor of a camera obscura to describe ideology or false consciousness. • Conclusion: our mind has distorted views of the world (as in optical illusions), and our mind works upside down (as in the camera obscura). • "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” • Ideas of freedom, education, right "are results of bourgeois production and property relations"

15. Methodology • Non-experimental. Rather philosophical and historical. • Marx projected a monistic view of science: "The natural science will later subsume the human science as the human science will subsume the natural science: There will be one science." • Marx suggested a methodology in which one begins with active humans in order to understand their ideas and imaginations scientists must reflect upon and study the preconditions that make consciousness possible before they enter into experimentation. • Abstraction and analysis. • Designed a questionnaire for workers.

16. Critical Theory • Frankfurt School: Researchers associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. • Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse). • Max Horkheimer (1895-1973): Traditional theory: Theory is a sum-total of propositions, an enclosed system of propositions, logical, mathematical, deductive. • Critical theory: Fights the separation between individual and society, value and research, knowledge and action. Value: Reasonable organization of society that meets the needs of the whole community. Abolition of social injustice.

17. J. Habermas: Lifeworld and System • The symbolic structures of our lifeworld are deformed and reified through the steering media of the system: money and power. • Money and power regulate the private and public sphere. • Imperatives of subsystems of purposive-rational action (labor) invade domains in which consensus-oriented communication (interaction) is required. Colonization of our lifeworld. • Experience of power -> Loss of freedom and meaning.

18. L. S. Vygotsky • Zone of Proximal Development: Range of tasks too difficult for children to master alone, but which can be learned with the guidance and assistance of adults or more skilled children.