logicp_writings/collectivist_theology/Marx_Ontology_of_Man_Telos_History.md

Introduction

You don't get a lot of this on the first try. Describing an alien way of thinking about the world, that' sbeen with us for at least a century and a half, but arguably since the snake lied in Genesis, and you didn't know that this way of thinking was grafting itself into people and society/government.

Dialectical Faith of Leftism

• Hegel
• Dialectical Trinity
• Connected to Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Social Contract
• Deeper and clarifying guide into the relevance of Rousseau's Leftism
• Where do these things come together with Karl Marx's dialectical materialism

Marx's Ontology of Man and the Telos of History

Marx had a theory of what it means to be human. His religion is based on this conception of what it means to be human, except for the Telos of History - History has a purpose.

For a long time, it may have been seemed evident to refer to the God of Marxism as History - History itself, as the God of the world - the unfolding of all of Man's activities, from the beginning, through the present to the endpoint of history when things are finally perfected.

The purpose of history - telos of History - gives us the purpose of being, which is to move history along as quickly as possible. The purpose of being is to arrive at Utopia where history ends because we no longer have contradictions between one another. Between the theoretical idea and the practical idea. Those contradictions are worked out and resolved Dialectically.

Soros

"Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, while alchemy seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs." in 1992

Remember that Hegel was an alchemist.

What did Hegel express this in 1807 when he was writing the Phenomenology of Spirit:

• Verstand: Understanding - seeks to understand things as they are
• Vernunft: Vernunft - reason - seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs
• Components of wissenshaft

Horkheimer

The difference between the Critical Theory and the Traditional Theory: Traditional theory seeks to understand things as they are, while Critical Theory seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs

• There's a lower-level of scientific understanding that's merely to understand what we see in the world, but a higher level of "system of science" that we use to transform the world dialectically. Take the world as it is and transform it into something that it is not yet. Make that Concrete and Actual.
• We maybe only can envision it in the abstract right, and we have to deal with the contradictions of our imagination by seeing what we see in the world
• the theoretical idea meets the practical idea: see contradiction so transform the reality into the world where we transcend the contradiction

"Traditional Theory seeks to understsanding things as they are while Critical Theory seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs."

• A continuity from Hegel - Marx - MarxFor whatever set of reasons, George

Rousseau

• Necessary for this because he orients everything in the left
• Rule by social contract
• Willingly give up some freedom for the greater good which leads us to attaining greater freedom
• Emancipates us of what is restricting us - liberate to be our more nature and to be conscious of that nature
• Occurs when social contract is made right.
• We are made free by becoming the Collective

No contrained life where we are concerned with the dominance of reason and sovereignty of logos, but will free the other aspects of our true humanity like imagination, emotion, and the senses (which we'll not use not just to perceive the world but to engage in sensuous experience)

Creating the Theology

What Marx is doing to create the theology of Marxism is:

• Import leftsm of Rousseau
• Package it in the Hegelian dialectical box
• Rousseau's leftism in the Hegelian Dialectical box
  • Was a strict materialist
  • No spiritual realm

Questions:

"What does it mean to be a man?" "What is the purpose of being a man" "How do we demystify reality" (the mystifications from Feurbach become central to how Marx reconceives Hegel's ideas and leads to him cramming the leftism of Rousseau into the theological box of Hegel's dialectic)

History

Becomes the central object of this. Your entire purpose is to advance history. How do we do this? Arbitrarily? Or an organic way?

No. To a directed endpoint. Even if we don't know what it looks like, we know that it would be free from the things that constrain us and imprison us.

At that point, history has advanced to the point where it becomes perfected/idealized/its absolute state. Man has been made, dialectically, to live in society.

No longer talking about ideas or an absolute idea on the spiritual level. Man has to be made to live in society - the Rousseauian vision, packaged up in the Hegelian Dialectic to advance history to its absolute state.

Figure out what the absolute state of man is, and the society he lives in. We don't have the absolute idea / actualization of God which would show us what it should look like, or how to manifest it. That's the mystification Marx blamed Hegel for (spiritualist nonsense).

Quote from Marx

Intellectual swindling is done by jabbering your jaw a whole lot to convince people of nonsense and make it plausible. Marx writes as though this is what he's doing. Hundreds of pages of this. Irritating to read.

Being

"A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet, and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. We are already throwing out God.

When Marx was 25 years old: "A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life, but if he has moreover created my life. If he is the source of my life. When it is not my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside of it. The creation is, therefore, an idea very difficult to dislodge from popular consciousness. The fact that nature and man exist on their own account is incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts everything tangible in practical life."

What Marx is saying is very clearly visible: Man is his own creator.

If you regard something outside of Man as his creator, then Man can't be independent. He cannot be an independent being that enters into his own true independent manhood, as Man - what it means to be human. He cannot owe his existence to something else because that would make him dependent on that something else. He must be wholly independent. Anything taht might be like creator has to be cast down as a mystification of reality taht blinds man from his true nature - that he is his own creator.

Man is God in the Marxist theology - his own creator.

Not quite the man that you think. The supreme court didn't nail Communism because they didn't think there was a deity - a theos. But it does.

Man is the God. All of Man is the God in Marxist Theology. Not man as he is now - at any given point in the stream of history as it unfolds.

Man, as he will be when he completes himself, at the end of history, when he actualizes his true nature, is God.

Marx noted that Man recognizes himself as an incomplete being who is in the process of becoming his completed self, just like for Hegel God is an incomplete deity in the process of becoming his completed self.

The Man that arrives at the end of history, when he actualizes his full true nature, is God. Man is actually already that, but he cannot realize that about himself until we get to the end of history and the contradictions are resolved. In the meantime, Man is dominating other men and there are social constructions created by that that limit his ability to perceive himself as he truly is - as his own creator, both individually and socially.

Man, as the absolute Man (Social Man/Socialist Man) arrives at the end of history - this is in parallel to Hegel's "Absolute Idea", from which the whole of reality is supposed to establish itself in its perfected form.

Man is his own creator, and when he realizes his creative potential, seizes the means of production of himself, and arrives over the long process of creation/re-creation (or reimagined and recreated). At the end of that process, we'll have finally reached God in Man. There is no distinction between individual man and Social Man. An Individual made to live in Society.

Realizing the God of Marxism

"I figured out, we talk about God in Christian Theology as a moral law-giver and the ultimate judge. 'You will stand before your maker on judgment day and you will be judged according to your life'.

What do you think being 'On the right side of history' means? It means you look backwards a couple generations and you think about how strange and backwards your grandparents were and the world was in the 1930s, and you judge those people. Then you look forward 50-80 years and think "Those people are going to judge me the way I judged my ancestors" and then you kick that off to the end of history.

The I at the end of history - the perfect society - saying "Did you stay with this process or did you not?" Is the ultimate judge.

You were either on the right side of the process of moving history, or you were on the wrong side.

When I realized that the moral law-giver and his role as "final judge" determines being on the right or wrong side of history as the "I" at the end of history, and that the end of history arrives when the dialectical process ends, by all contradictions ending and man reaching his perfected true nature / social nature self, I realized what the Deity of Marxism is:

Man, as he already is, without knowing it, as he will become when he fully realizes it, looking back and judging you for progressing the dialectic, ignoring the dialectic or resisting the dialectic that brought him to where he is always supposed to be.

For now, and then, whether we're talking about 1844 when Marx wrote these things, or today in 2022, Man is Incomplete.

But what makes him man, as opposed to animal, is that Man can know he is incomplete. He can be awakened to a true consciousness of his incompleteness, and thus his need to complete hismself, and the capacity, as a creator, to take the actions that will complete him. He can know he is in the process of becoming the Absolute Man (projecting Hegel into Marx to make it more clear as a teaching device).

Man can know that he is the creator that can not only create coffees, computers and chairs, but he's the creator also of other things that he takes as his object.

Man's Objects

• Society
• Man, himself
• The species being (what it means to be Man as a species) Marx, being a German, and entranced with the idea of a total systematic philosophy that explains the entire world, and also being a young Hegelian in that line of thinking, really liked Hegel's dialectic for thsi process of realizing one's incompleteness and capacity to recognize oneself as a creative subject that might complete himself and everything around him.

But he thought it was too Mystical. He hides his religious ball in the demystification of Theology.

Demystification

Preface to 2nd edition of Das Kapital "The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in ac omprehensive and conscious manner. With him, it is standing on its head. It must be turned rightside up again, if you are to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell".

At the top of the Trinity is the Idea, but that's upside down. We need to flip it over and bring it down to earth, if you will.

Get out of the mystical shell of ideas and idealism and the absolute idea being the structure of reality, but keep the comprehensive and conscious form of the dialectic as a means to transform reality. Bring in materialism to un-stand the dialectic from its head. There is no neo-platonist realm of forms of perfect hsapes to reality that can be understood by people who approximate them through creating in an idea space or philosophical space and that flows into a state that's around the philosophical ideas of the time to give structure to things. No, the idea actually exists in people's heads. People come BEFORE the Idea.

The idea, for Marx, is that people see the world and they form the idea. Not that the idea is out there and we're trying to recollect it.

Marx's take on Hegel is that he's not quite wrong, but he missed the fact of the materialist truth because he was caught up in religious mystification. Mystification, for Marx, takes two primary forms that are the same form.

Religion and ideology (religion fits within ideology). Ideology is the set of stories and mythologies that people in power tell themselves and everyone else about why society is structured the way it is and why it should stay that way.

The capitalist meritocratic system is an ideological myth where people say this is why I deserve to be a have, and you have to be a have not.

Society is legalistic and needs lawyers because we have to adjudicate these different disputes. We need these things - this is an ideological mystification.

But we don't REALLY need lawyers - they don't do productive work. We don't really need them, because this is all socially constructed nonsense. If man realized his social nature, there would be no disputes to adjudicate with law. Law itself is a problem.

You become able to think of yourself as an individual, rather than an individual made to live in society.

Rousseau's leftism tucked into Hegel's dialectic with all the demystification that Marx could possibly perform.

Marx described his own idea - his own theory - Marxism, as it came to be called, as the end of ideology. All the justifications. All the stories. Not necessarily capitalist and fascist ideology, but all ideology, Marx did not consider his own way of thinking to be ideological.

He exempted himself because his was the one that ends all the ideology. Intellectual swindling going on here, requiring thousands of pages of nonsense.

He was very much down on religion because of this. Even before he wrote the Economic and Philosophic manuscripts of 1844.

Temporal context:

• Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right 1843
• Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 1844
• Communist Manifest 1848
• Das Kapital 1867

Communist Confession of Faith was renamed on the advice of Engels.

Started off by criticising religion vigorously (the entire first few pages are relentlessly ripping Religion apart):

"Religion is the fantastic realization of the human essence, since the human essence has not acquired any true reality."

Humans don't know what humans are - we have not acquired the true reality of what it means to be human, so we create a fantastic one instead - a fantasy (religion) - a story people create to tell themselves about who we really are, so we don't have to encounter who we realy are - which would force us to take in the real nature of what we experience (suffering), which is caused by the division of labour. We live in a world full of suffering and we give ourselves religion to try and cover up the pain.

In the meantime, we try to explain who we are to ourselves with religion in order that we don't think we're giving ourselves some kind of opiate to dull the pain.

"Religious suffering is at one and hte same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering."

It's a refusal to experience the real suffering of your life.

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people"

You still feel the pain, but you don't care that it's there.

Instead of this, hiding through an opiate, man is supposed to seek his true reality

Man must seek his true reality if he's going to be truly free or independent. The independent man, parallel to Hegel's Absolute Idea, is Absolute Man.

Gnostic vs Alchemist

This focus on suffering is not accidental but because Marx is a gnostic.

Marx believes he lives in a world he didn't choose to live in that has imprisoned him by the conditions of the world he doesn't like, and if he had a hint of absolute knowledge he could escape from that condition of suffering.

We arrive at that by seeking our true reality. The abolition of religion is the illusory happiness of the people - it is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give upwddddkc,