Freud

Freud’s theory of the human condition is an all-encompassing theory. Freud’s work addresses the problem that is the misery of the human condition. We are unhappy because we are alienated from ourselves, we don’t know what we want. Freud believed he had found the solution in psychoanalysis as the way to gain access to the understanding of why we act the way we do. Freudian slips, dreams and neurosis, are all evidence that an unconscious mind exists and are gateways to your true thoughts.

Freud sexualised everything and believed that sex is the cause of our motives. He challenged the idea of the enlightenment that we are calculated beings, and he damaged our idea of ourselves as noble creatures. Freud was very pessimistic and had a dark view of humanity; he likened his ideas to the artwork of Rembrandt, a little light but a lot of darkness.

Marx also thought that we are alienated, but he had a teleological view that it was going towards a brighter thing – communism. Marx believed that we can evolve and become better. Freud rejects this and thinks it is nonsense. Our deepest needs are aggression, the wilful desire to hurt others and hurt ourselves. We seek our own destruction.

Freud followed Plato’s idea of the tripartite self (reason, spirit, desire – allegory of the two horses and a chariot). However where Plato believed that reason was the strongest, Freud actually believed it was the weakest.  Freud split the self into the Id, the Ego, and the Super Ego. The Id is the dominating part of our lives and is at our core from the moment we are born. It is made up of aggression and sexuality, it is the spoiled brat in us. “A cauldron seething in excitations” demanding fulfilment, always demanding we hurt others. The Ego is the least powerful part of the personality and is the voice of reason. We think it is the most dominant part of us but we are wrong. The Super Ego comes from the outside, initially from our parents and then the wider society. It is irrational. It is the policeman in your head, and punishes you with guilt when you don’t achieve perfection.

Society is full of suffering because it is full of pain:
1) Our own decaying body- nature
2) The external world – fate
3) Interaction with other people – the greatest pain. People are out to get us, but we are also inclined to hurt others.

Freud believes the answer to this is psychoanalysis, but this isn’t available to everyone. The masses will continue on their own destructive path. Freud outlines ways to contain these urges but he doesn’t recommend them:
1) Intoxication- but it is temporary and expensive
2) Isolation – stay away from other people
3) Religion – mass delusion

Civilisation is a collective super ego imposing moral limits on the Id.  The best example of this is religion “love our neighbour as ourselves” but how is that possible if the Id wants you to hurt them and for them to hurt you? Religion puts impossible demands on us.

Attacks on Freud’s theories:
1) Falsifiability –Popper – Freud was so vague that his theories could not be tested. There is no proof that psychoanalysis works.
2) Freud was not the discoverer of unconsciousness  - Schopenhauer said something similar.
3) Reich believed the complete opposite. The unconscious forces inside the mind are good and it was their suppression by society that distorted them and made people dangerous. Reich believed that the underlying energy was sexuality and if it was released then people would flourish.

Economics

The first economist was Adam Smith who wrote the publication “The Wealth of Nations” which raised the question; why is one country richer than another? Smith argued that wealthy countries are categorised by free people and free trade. Countries that have too much government intervention are poorer. He believed that money has no actual value in itself, it just keeps score on how much value has been created. Before “The Wealth of Nations” Smith published a book focusing on philosophy which contained theories similar to that of Kant. Smith had the view that everyone is out for themselves, people are not altruistic. There is no point trying to live out your life helping others, it is damaging, all you achieve is an ego boost. Smith believed there was a “hidden hand of the market”.

David Ricardo – Took the opposite view to Smith, amore metaphysical view. He believed there is a spirit of value in things. Value only arises when humans apply labour towards it, the more labour involved the higher its value. For example diamonds are more valuable than matchsticks as there is more human effort and labour put towards getting a diamond than there is making a matchstick. Water has more value in some places than others as it is harder to gain access to.

Thomas Malthus – Stated there was an “iron law of population”; humans will always starve to death. The natural condition of men  is to constantly be on the brink of extinction. If the food system broke down in the UK people would be suffering starvation within days. Marriage and chastity is the way to prevent starvation. Malthus’s theories are coming back into fashion with peoples growing concerns about climate change.

Karl Marx – An epistemologist and economist and his theories on economy are similar to that of Ricardo and Malthus. Labour is the only source of value, the pay for labour will decrease as the population increases. The people who grow the food, at the end of the day, will not be able to afford to buy it. For example, “widget” costs £10, the person who owns the factory takes £5 as profit and the employees take £5 as wage. The employees then go to the shop to buy a widget, but they cost £10 and they only have £5 to spend. This is the iron law of wages. In a system of profit they will always look to reduce the wage, this is known as the crisis of capitalism. It can result in overproduction and under-consumption.
1844 - The Bank of England created currency. The amount of money the country had depended on the amount of gold.
1848 - The year of revolutions.
1849 - Gold rush- they discovered gold in California and Australia.

JM Keynes – The 2^nd Wold War brought an end to the depression and the superstition about gold. They went off the gold standard and onto paper money. Every economist at the time were Keynesians. Keynes solved Marx’s “widget” problem, his solution was to simply print more money. If you print more money then companies have more money to invest in their business and can employ more people at a higher wage.
Problems of the Keynesian system:
- Inflation and “stagflation” so unemployment would return.
- Increased role of the state so there is a decline of freedom.
- Destruction of profitability.
- Orientation towards arms spending and militarism.
- Collapse of rational expectations, creates and entitlement culture.
- Failure to innovate

Seminar Paper - Logical Positivism, Wittgenstein and Karl Popper

In the early 20^th century Wittgenstein and Schlick met weekly, and were soon joined by other philosophers such as Carnap and Waismann, they were referred to as the “Vienna Circle”. After Wittgenstein left to work on another philosophical manuscript, the others developed into a self-conscious philosophical movement (logical positivists) and issued a manifesto against metaphysics, regarding it as an outdated system that must give way to science.

 They created the “verification principle” to show the difference between statements that mean something and those which don not. To verify something there must be facts, and statements which cannot be verified are just metaphysical nonsense. For example Descartes “cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am) is rejected because it can’t be verified, so it’s just empty words. However the verification principle came under scrutiny as it itself could not be verified.

Logical Positivists thought that the true task of philosophy was to clarify non philosophical statements. Their method of clarification was to show how empirical statements are brought up from “protocol” statements (direct records of experience). The meaning of the words used in protocol statements are derived directly from a feature of the experience that the word stands for.  This came under the criticism that protocol statements appear to be private to the individual, so if meaning depends on verification and everyone is carrying out their own method of verification, how can you understand what anyone else means? Schlick responded to this problem by showing the distinction between form and content. Content of experience is what I feel or live through when I see something, and is completely private and incommunicable. Form of experience may be common to many. For example when I see a tree I cannot be certain if anyone else has the same feelings as I do when they see the tree, but as long as we can all agree that the tree is green then we are able to communicate with each other.

Wittgenstein was dissatisfied with this response and he then strove to find a solution that didn’t pose the threat of solipsism. In the 1930’s Wittgenstein showed that private experience presupposes a public world. Even the words we use to describe our most private thoughts derive their meaning from the way we use them in public and open conversations. Wittgenstein later abandoned his previous thesis he had put forward in his “Tractatus” about the relationship between language and the world saying he over simplified it. He previously held that the connection between the two only had two features; the linking of names to objects, and the matching of propositions to facts. He now saw this as a big mistake, words might look like each other but their function differs. Language is interwoven with the world in many different ways which he referred to as “language games”. Wittgenstein referred to it as a “game” not because language is trivial, but because games have a similar variety to language. Like the logical positivists Wittgenstein was hostile to metaphysics, but instead of taking a blunt attack against it like they did with the verification principle, Wittgenstein carefully made distinctions between the mix of truth and nonsense within metaphysical theories.

Karl Popper didn’t see himself as a logical positivist and was referred to as the “official opposition”. Popper thought all scientific theories couldn’t be proved because of Humes problem of induction. He thought that we needed to progress by falsifying statements instead. For example the inductive statement “all men are mortal” cannot be falsified because it is at least possible that at some point at least one person will be born and be immortal. The problem of induction is that it is unreliable. For example a turkey a Christmas – every day of the turkeys life it wakes up, eats, then goes to sleep. Therefore the turkey presumes this will go on forever. Then at Christmas the Turkey wakes up and is killed. There is no previous empirical evidence to suggest that this would happen to the turkey. This example illustrates the point that no matter how much evidence we may have, we cannot predict the future.

Popper responded to the problem of induction by saying that everything has the potential to be untrue. For example Newton’s “Principa” gave an overarching theory of how the universe worked and was believed to be an undeniable truth. But then Einstein came along and proved that Newton’s theory was wrong. We constantly strive to get as close to the exact truth as possible, but Popper argued that we have to appreciate the fact that whatever we know now has the potential to be proved wrong at some point in the future.

Popper is also well known for his political philosophy with his publication “The Open Society and its Enemies”. Popper maintained that if a political organisation is going to flourish then it must leave room for self-correction. His political philosophy can be related to his philosophy on knowledge in that, just like science is constantly progressing through the correction of flawed hypothesis, society will only progress if policies are able to be evaluated and changed.  Therefore are two things required for an open society to work;
1. The ruled have freedom to discuss and criticise the policies proposed by their rulers.
2. It should be possible to change the ruler without violence or bloodshed if the ruler fails to promote their citizens welfare.
These are the two central features of an open society and are more important to democracy than just the election of government by a majority.

Popper didn’t rule out all forms of government intervention, for example incitement of intolerance should be classed as a criminal act and they state must protect the poor from the wealthy. Therefore we cannot have a completely non-intervention state and instead Popper argued that we should have planned economic intervention of the state. Unrestrained capitalism must be replaced by economic interventionism. Popper agreed to some extent with utilitarianism that the state must minimize avoidable suffering. Instead of building a utopia the government should act as problem solvers.

In the two volumes of his publication Popper attacked two philosophers; Plato and Marx. Poppers attack on Plato was against his “Republic” where Plato stated that the experts should be in charge and knowledge meant power. Whereas in the open society those who were being ruled would also have knowledge, not just the elite and those with power.  Poppers main attack focused on Marx and his claims that he had discovered scientific laws that determined the future of the human race, working towards an inevitable result. Popper showed how the course of history had in fact falsified Marx’s predictions. Popper was very anti-teleological, he didn’t believe that we could predict the future.

Popper thought that the human race is very vulnerable when it comes to conspiracy theories. This is because we like the idea of being to explain away everything, which most conspiracy theories appear to do. An example of this is David Ickes theory that a secret group of elites rule the world. This is not an unusual claim for conspiracy theorists to make, however Icke took this one step further by claiming that those within the elite group were in fact blood drinking lizards that morphed into people. However, despite how unusual Ickes claims seemed, he still managed to create a mass following preaching to large groups across the globe.

The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto was published in English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.  The first section illustrates the history of class struggles between the oppressor and the oppressed. This is a constant fight which either results in the revolution of society or the ruin of the contending classes. It then focused upon the modern bourgeois society (capitalism) and the relationship between the Bourgeoisie (business and factory owners) and the Proletariat (working class). The current state of society is the product of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange, and through political advance.

There is then an extensive list given of the problems which a capitalist society causes. Capitalism has destroyed our relationships with other people, conflicts caused by our own self-interest and the family has been reduced into a merely monetary relation.  Capitalism draws all the nations into civilization and causes them to adopt their capitalist society through its cheap prices of commodities. It has made the country dependent upon the towns and cities. The Proletarians become just an appendage of the machine doing the most monotonous of jobs and as the repulsiveness of the work increases, their wage decreases. The workman is nothing more than a means to an end. Communists see the capitalist system as flawed, as it produces its own “grave diggers”, its fall is inevitable.

The second section goes on to explain the communist society and what that has to offer. Communists have no interests separate from those of the Proletariat as a whole and do not set up any principles of their own in an attempt to mould or shape the Proletarian movement.  The only factors which distinguish the communists from other working class parties is that in the instance of national struggles of the different countries, communists will point out the common interests of the whole Proletariat independent of their nationality. They will also always represent the interest of the movement as a whole.

The immediate aim of communists is to overthrow the capitalist society and gain political power. The Communist Manifesto outlines ten rules which would be generally applicable in a communist society:
1)Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2) A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3) Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4) Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5) Centralization of credit in the banks of the state by means of a national bank with a state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6) Centralization of the means of communication and of transport in the hands of the state.
7) Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state.
8) Equal obligation of all to work.
9) Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, abolition of the distinction between town and country with a more equal distribution of people across the country.
10) Free education to all children in public schools and the abolition of children’s factory labour.

In the third section of the manifesto there is the definition of socialism, which is where the state owns the means of production. This is described as the stepping stone to communism.

Karl Marx 1818-1883

Marx was born in Germany to Jewish parents but later converted to Lutherism . His career took many different turns as he moved from studying law, to philosophy then to revolution.  Marx met Fredrich Engles in 1844 in Paris. Engles was a factory owner so he was living right in the heart of the industrial revolution. Engles had a profound influence in Marx’s most renowned publication “The Communist Manifesto”.

Marx believed that you could explain everything about a society by analysing the way economic forces shape social, religious, legal and political processes. He described man as the productive animal; mankind creates the environment it inhabits, “not a figure in the landscape, but the shaper of the landscape”.  Like Hegel, Marx had a teleological approach to history, he believed it was heading towards something.

According to Engles Marx’s theory provided a fusion of:
1) Hegelian Philosophy
2) British Empiricism
3)French Revolutionary Politics – Especially socialist politics

Although Marx did not agree with Hegel’s mysticism, he did however like Hegel’s dialectic, the system of change through conflict. Marx saw the significance in the class struggle throughout history and sought the explanation of the historical process through the relationship between man and the material conditions of his existence (dialectic materialism).

Marx was opposed to capitalism because it produced “alienation”.  The property-less working class (proletariat) had nothing to lose but everything to gain, yet they still did nothing to change their situation. Marx stated this was due to the fact that capitalism alienates men from themselves and from each other; we begin to see one another as commodities to exploit. Work is the loss of self, it belongs to another, it does not help to develop our body or mind.  (This is characterised in instances where people state they are not themselves when they are at work.)  Capitalism alienates us from our need for satisfying work, replacing it with the desire for money.  Capitalism seeds its own destruction, the things we want to buy will always be more expensive than what we could earn, the system in itself doesn’t work. Although capitalism will try to survive, Marx states that the fixes are only temporary and the collapse of capitalism is inevitable.

In a communist society there would be no difference between mental and physical labour. Whether you’re a scientist, a musician or a bin man, has no relevance as all of these jobs would have equal worth. “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.  People will do the job which they enjoy and which they are skilled at. There would be no need for a state as everyone would have an equal share of money. Marx saw communism as being a utopian society, a Garden of Eden on Earth.