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Karl Marx – Good Historian, Terrible Prophet

Page history last edited by Malati Manjari 16 years, 3 months ago

Here Acaryadeva refers to the lecture “The Abstraction of Real Things into Numbers for Greed” he gave on the same morning. He reflects on how we are all trapped in different systems which dramatically affect our consciousness. He also talks about the relation of consciousness, body and soul and the pitfalls of humanistic, metaphysical relativism.

 

Part 1

 

Part 2

 

Hegel, who came around 100 years after Newton, wanted to establish a science of human history. His idea was that one could see broad patterns of human behavior & history from a distance. He was half way between theism and materialism. He thought that there was world spirit that realized itself through the evolution and dialectic process of human history. 

 

Then Marx, a student of Hegel wanted to come with a grand theory of history, but he was a materialist.  He was hostile towards religion. He saw the dialectics not as metaphysical but only as material. That was in the middle of the industrial revolution. He was aware of how people get influenced by the economic systems they live in.

The European Futile System collapsed because the economic center shifted from the land to the cities which produced new social hierarchies. Capitalism is not to be confused with free market economy. There was always a free market, even in ancient societies. With the capitalization of real estate a house was no longer a place for a family, but it became a number of capitals, a commodity. Everything became abstracted and converted into capital. In Capitalism greed became the purpose of life. 

 

People in general don’t like the idea of values being imposed on them.  If you live in society you have to live under the rule of law. Every law is the imposition of a value judgment (such a freedom versus security).  Hume pointed out that as soon as you say someone should do something it is a value judgment, a metaphysical claim. So the question is which values we are going to accept. 

 

In his forward to Srimad Bhagavatam Prabhupada is advocating a life style back to nature and is criticizing an industrialized life style. The vast majority of people will not live in complete isolation as hermits. They live in society and cannot produce their own economy. So they must participate in general economy which will limit their personal life style. Also life is so accelerated now that it is physiologically very difficult to think deeply.

Consciousness is not a material product. Even in the earliest Western philosophical traditions (Plato) and certainly in the Yoga tradition of India there has always been the understanding that consciousness is coming from the soul and not the body. The whole Yoga tradition taught for thousands of years that you are a conscious being within the body. 

 

If we understand the consciousness comes from the soul there is no such thing as a thinking machine or a machine that becomes conscious. The Hollywood-idea of having machines that take over and turn against human is a materialistic concept because of the underlying presumption that consciousness is a sophisticated product of matter. 

 

In English also we say “My body and not I body”. The most immediate and powerful fact in our life is being conscious. Consciousness has very different qualities from matter. We are like actors who have forgotten that they are in costumes. We understand that we see each other, but all we really see is the costume because we are spiritual beings inside the body. Today there is very little concern about finding the body. 

 

The philosopher Descartes made an interesting experience. He assumed he didn’t know anything with certainly (which was quite revolutionary at a time where Christianity was very dominant). The only thing he absolutely couldn’t doubt was that he was thinking. Therefore he concluded that he existed (“I think therefore I am”). He didn’t conclude that he was a physical body. 

 

There is something natural about land-based economy. If we live in an environment which is mostly made by humans people start to think that life is anthropocentric. In cities - not in the country - people come up with a dogmatic, metaphysical relativism because they live in this humanistic environment. The next step to think is that values and produced by human beings and God is a consumer product. The only purpose of spirituality is to make you feel good about yourself. God is not a public fact, but an instrument to private satisfaction. This leads to the self-centred humanistic idea that if there is an absolute truth, it is only my private, individual satisfaction – like looking through a restaurant list, searching out a god that works for you. There is no objective reality outside of our human preferences. Everything is just made by people. This really dominates our modern thinking.

Religions like Buddhism have started very simply, became intellectually sophisticated but because of basic religious needs Buddhism was almost indistinguishable from Hinduism. For religion to survive it had to fulfil the needs for guardian angels and a heaven. The fact that these are basic human needs doesn’t mean that they are false. The needs we feel (hunger, thirst, friendship) are nature’s way of telling us about real things out in this world that we can obtain.

 

There is a form of neurological determinism which claims that people are altruistic not because they have freely chosen virtue but because they are like are genetically programmed to behave a certain way, like a machine. This is an absurd assumption. These things are stated by scientists who never studied philosophy or history.

 

Reference to class The Abstraction of Real Things into Numbers for Greed

 

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