Idealism vs. Materialism

729 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Political philosophy of karl marx

The philosopher Hegel is an idealist, while Marx is a materialist. Hegel came from the German Idealism period and revolutionized Europe with his idealistic ideas, which were highly criticized by his counterpart Marx. Hegel however, did have a lot of people who admired his work and followed in his theory of idealism. Marx was also very influential in his theory of historical materialism. Marx materialist ideas were developed out of the struggle of the working class to attain a higher status in society. These concepts have redefined history and its development.
Hegel’s philosophy of history is idealist, which means that reality is depended on the mind or spirit. His philosophy is based on the concepts of idealism, spirit and unity. Hegel philosophy is based on absolute idealism; God is a spiritual entity that realizes itself and is the origin of all material things (Hegel 22). Thus, philosophy is the self-knowledge of the spirit. In particular, he developed the concept that history occurs through a dialectic or clash of opposing forces. Some of these opposing forces are nature vs. spirit and transcendence vs. immanence. He believed that ideas can be the motive force for world development. Hegel places ultimate reality in ideas rather than in material things.
Hegel’s philosophy of idealism deals a lot of the conscious state. In the Reason of History it is written that two things must be distinguished in consciousness, That I know and What I know (Hegel 23). Hegel argues that the nature of reality, to know reality is through consciousness (Hegel 35). One has to be conscious of reality to know reality and that is when one reaches perfection. Hegel philosophy is based on the study of logic, which investigates the fundamental structur...

... middle of paper ...

...at rules society while the group who provides for society, the working class (Proletariat) is the one being ruled. The ruling class essentially lives off the surplus of the working class.
Hegel and Marx were two philosophers with competing philosophical ideas. Hegel is an idealist philosopher, basing everything on ideas of competing forces. Marx’s philosophy on the other hand is based on the idea of class relationships determine people’s will or how they think. For Marx the conception of history is depended on the ability of human nature to produce (Tucker 164). Marx completely rejected Hegel’s religious and idealist theories because of their unrealistic nature. However, these two philosophers have impacted the development of world history through their opposing ideas. These two concepts have provided a theoretical basis for how present history is viewed.

Show More
Related

  • The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx

    872 Words  | 2 Pages

    ... his ideals and theories were influenced by the popular philosophical circles present throughout Europe. Saint Simon was a noble Frenchman whose spin on socialism featured a government ran by scientists. Proudon was another radical thinker that influenced Marx. Proudon’s book, “What is Property” centers around privatization of property and comes to the conclusion that the factors of production is theft. When Marx moved to France, he was introduced to many different socialist viewpoints which inspired his argument known as historical materialism. This argument stated that the world is changed not by ideas but by actual, physical, material activity and practice and can be connected to his theme of injustice of exploitation. This is why in the Manifesto he speaks out against child labor and the violations of the proletariat family by the bourgeoisie.

    Read More

  • What Heidegger Wishes To Transcend: Metaphysics Or Nietzsche

    2197 Words  | 5 Pages

    Heidegger tries to find a way to help man to transcend this homelessness, which he considers to be dangerous for the present and the future of the human being. This is the reason why Heidegger, already in 1929, asks the question of "what is metaphysics?". He thinks that this question itself can open the way he is looking for, because it plays a very important role in putting the question of Being correctly and in settling the problem of homelessness of the human being.

    Read More

  • Inequality In The Communist Manifesto By Karl Marx

    430 Words  | 1 Pages

    Marx sees history as a struggle between classes: “Oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (Marx and Engles 14).

    Read More

  • The Social and Economic Features of Jabal Nablus and Karl Marx's Methodology

    1143 Words  | 3 Pages

    The German Ideology starts off by illustrating the critique of the German idealists, while presenting Marx and Engels' alternative: materialistic view of history. According to Marx, the main reason for political and economical retrogression of Germany is its obsession with Hegel's view on history as a chain of phases or manifestations of World Spirit or Absolute Mind. It's possible to trace Marx's critique in three different perspectives. Initially, he directed his critique towards the very nature of Hegelian system, by stating its "contemplative" aspect. Secondly, he presented detailed analysis of discrepancies, regarding logical categories and religious conceptions, which rose between the Young and Old Hegelians. According to old Hegelians, the history was simply chronology of ideas, and the reason Germany was flourishing ,only because it was constructed on the best ideas. In the meantime, Young Hegelians adopted dialectics...

    Read More

  • Fundamental Faults in Hegelian Historicism

    907 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Philosophy is the history of philosophy”-Georg Hegel. Historicism is one of the important pillars of Hegelian philosophy, which attempts to provide insight on human social activities and thought process. According to Hegel, our thoughts and activities are directly influenced, defined and can understood by their history. Despite its perceived appeal in explaining this ultimate declaration, it has been the source of philosophical debate over the years and have been criticized by some philosophers as the hindrance to progress, that has justified relatively contemporary societal disputes. Fundamental faults are pointed out in Hegelian historicism. Philosophical schools such as structuralism and determinism as well as human psychology contradict historicism.

    Read More

  • Hegel and the Russian Constitutional Tradition

    3334 Words  | 7 Pages

    (7) Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy in three volumes, vol. 2 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995) 97. I made some corrections in the translation of this piece from Hegel.

    Read More

  • nietzche and hegel

    838 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...is an account of the birth of self-consciousness through intersubjectivity or the integration within culture. It is a dialectical interpretation that acts, for Hegel, as a form for perceiving the way in which the self comes to know itself through the other and through historical processes. The master/slave dialectic is an early account of intersubjectivity and also a lack of intersubjectivity because it is not based on equal recognition. Self-consciousness, for Hegel, is attained only through the recognition by another independent self. The human world is a world based on recognition, and the human being has within themselves the desire for recognition from other human beings. Hegel proposes that one cannot become a self-conscious individual without seeing oneself in another, and that each individual bases their existence on a world that is founded upon recognition.

    Read More

  • The Individual Being in Hegel's Philosophy

    1745 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...im, nor explain or rationalize God's will while in the faith. Whereas Marx finds Hegel's frustratingly apathetic towards the worker's struggle. Hegel's disregard for the physical being and objective nature is the cause of Marx's disenchantment with Hegel. Marx also recognizes the need for the individual as a utility to begin the Bloody Revolution. Without the individual, the secular Giest has no ground to stand upon.

    Read More

  • The Three Stage Failure of Sense Certainty

    1099 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the first stage of his examination of what the sensual might offer in the way of knowledge, Hegel examines the object apprehended by a sensing c...

    Read More

  • Comparing Marx and Freud

    901 Words  | 2 Pages

    Marx views history as being determined by economics, which for him is the source of class differences. History is describe in The Communist Manifesto as a series of conflicts between oppressing classes and oppressed classes. According to this view of history, massive changes occur in a society when new technological capabilities allow a portion of the oppressed class to destroy the power of the oppressing class. Marx briefly traces the development of this through different periods, mentioning some of the various oppressed and oppressing classes, but points out that in earlier societies there were many differentiations of social classes. Marx sees the modern age as being distinguished from earlier periods by the simplifications of the class conflict, splitting up society into two great hostile groups: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

    Read More

  • Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic

    4407 Words  | 9 Pages

    As presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the aim of Life is to free itself from confinement "in-itself" and thus to become "for-itself." Not only does Hegel place this unfolding of Life at the very beginning of the dialectical development of self-consciousness; Hegel characterizes self-consciousness itself as a form of Life and even refers us to the development of self-consciousness in the Master/Slave dialectic as an essential moment in the fulfillment of this aim of Life to become 'for-itself.' The following paper delineates this overlooked thread of the dialectic. The central thesis is that each step along the path of self-consciousness' attempt at making the truth of its unity with itself explicit, is simultaneously a step in the realization of the aim of Life: to become 'for-itself.' In the review of the Master/Slave dialectic, it reveals itself that the necessary condition for the fulfillment of Life's aim lies in work. Yet...

    Read More

  • Consciousness In Karl Marx's The German Ideology

    870 Words  | 2 Pages

    Karl Marx 's famous; The German Ideology opens with a detailed summary on the Hegelian tradition 19th century idealist German philosophers. The Hegelian philosophers focused on consciousness. Marx distinguishes from himself with earlier historians, particularly Hegel, who insisted on the predominance of the idea in their understandings of history. Consciousness is considered to be from the beginning a social product and remains so as long as men exist. Karl Marx distinguished several theories on the creation of consciousness enabling mankind to better understand the society that they are a part of. He defined consciousness as the knowledge of knowing something; which was created by humans in order to understand their environment in which

    Read More

  • Analysis of the Main Strengths and Weaknesses of Marx’s Sociological Thought

    1663 Words  | 4 Pages

    British political economy was brought about by the social analysis of early capitalism by writers such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. (Bilton, Bonnett, Jones, 2002, p.476) Using these concepts as a base to his theories, Marx further argued against the capitalist regime and was a firm believer of the revolution of the workers which would one day bring about the destruction of capitalism. Marx was also influenced by the philosophical ideas of Georg W.F. Hegel. However, unlike Hegel who was an idealist Marx was a materialist as he believed that the processes of reality as real, concrete existences in the social world. Hegel believed that although these processes were dynamic, they were an expression of development rather than being solid.

    Read More

  • Karl Marx: History as Explicable Human Activity

    537 Words  | 2 Pages

    Using phrases such as" innocent and childlike fantasies," Karl Marx unambiguously attacks the Hegelian philosophy preponderant during his time, citing in its concept of history an irrevocable divorce with reality. For Marx, history is exactly what it seems to be: a succession of human events in which ideas such as the division of labor, production, and revolution replace their immaterial Hegelian counterparts, if even such counterparts exist. In fact, Marx accuses the token historian of ignoring the fundamental aspects of actual human activity while instead concentrating upon non-actualized ideas at best and imaginary metaphysical concepts at worst.

    Read More

  • Philosopher Thomas Nagel's Essay On The Meaning Of Life

    1852 Words  | 4 Pages

    He removes himself from a subjective viewpoint and helps us translate all that we cherish to true meaning. Nagel breaks down the subjective and objective to help us realize what is not actually important and vice versa. Life is meaningful if it is objectively meaningful. He argues that since there is no objective metric of meaningfulness, life is not objectively meaningful. If there are no objective standards in the universe, Nagel, therefore, concludes that life is ultimately meaningless (Nagel 755-62). Nagel also strongly believed that there were certain experiences and characteristics that were beyond human understanding. In his publication “What is it Like to Be a Bat” he tries to express that all though we can imagine what it would be like for us to be a bat we could never think like or be precise about what its really like because we aren’t bats. For example we can try to imagine flying around blind searching for bugs to eat but will never have the same senses or perception as a bat. Another example is that of mans best friend. You can crawl on all fours, eat dog food, and imitate barking to the best of our ability. Unfortunately we have human senses and comprehend as human beings due to years of conditioning. He observed that we can describe any number of phenomenon associated with thinking beings but in any of them consciousness seems to be something that may be there or not. In the same way

    Read More

More about Idealism vs. Materialism

Open Document