This week's HCJ lecture started with the focus point for this week's seminar in Kenny's chapter on Frege. Frege's "Sense and Reference" (1890's) referred to the "reference point" of the work (definition) vs "sense" of the world, which means the sense within a sentence.
This is what Frege called "Sentential Logic" and shows how individual proposition do not have meaning, they have meaning only in relation to other propositions. They have only meaning in relation to other propositions, which is essentially relativity brought into logic. This can be expressed by saying that Manchester United is a football club in Manchester, but Manchester City is as well. Frege is the final rejection of syllogistic logic as a path to truth, when a paradigm shifts occurs, it is often in the field of logic first.
Without any form of logic from reasons as opposed to pure data, then all reason is brought into question with proof and sentential logic supplies the answers to these questions. Frege's Begriffsschrift was the new logical notation designed, which allowed computer programmes to be made possible, therefore Frege has helped one genius in Steve Jobs and one power hungry madman in Bill Gates. I guess you have to take the good with the bad.
Now we moved onto the main part of the lecture of the three men described as "The Three Great Skeptics": Marx, Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. This moves me onto the topic of subjectivist Epistomology, which is the belief that there is no universal truth only subjective impressions of relative value. It is the rejection of The Judeo-Christian-Islamic, the Rational Secularist scientific Approach, The Kantian Categorical Epistemology and Morality. This is exemplified in one of the most important lines in the American: "We hold these truths to be self evident" and was the rejection of the objective epistemology of both Adam Smith and John Locke.
Karl Marx claimed that he has discovered the universal law of human social development where he used the language of the enlightenment and was used as his enlightenment project (discovery of the laws of history and prescription of "natural" political and social order). Marx also believed in the truth of the Capitalist and Marxist truth, but this depended on it's own perspective to matter the opinion or outcome.
Nietzsche and Freud are both from same generation and same thought process, which believed that God is dead, but also is Marx. Nietzsche wrote in a series of outbursts and attacked Marx's thoughts behind his alienation ideology where Nietzsche believed that "The ruling ideas in way epoch and the ideas of the ruling class" (The German/Marx ideology).
Nietzsche felt that Marx lived in a concept of alienation and ideology, but this is still important and evident today in social science, politics and journalism. At it's extreme the Marxian concept of ideology leads to doctrines of separate or independent social consciousness E.G. working class, which demonstrate the move to subjectivity and the collapse of the enlightenment project of universal laws.
Nietzsche also attack Mark's apprentice Frederick Engles and his origins of family, state and property are subject of anthropology, which asserts that truth and systems of morality are subjective E.G. marriage. But, in anthropology the subjectivity is social, share and not individual.
This leads to the Marxist and Nietzsche critique of Freud as he lacks the anthropological, theocratical approach to his work or a political framework when he describes mental unhappiness coming from power and social issues, but he underestimates the social basis to subjective feelings. Freud then fails to treat Marx's alienation as a personal medical problem as Freud felt the way that people would comes top terns with this way of living e.g. Nietzsche is Neo-christian, but this was before Freud.
There was many ways that you can describe the causes of human unhappiness. Freud describes it using his "ego", with Nietzsche it was the "will" of others and with Hindu-Buddism they believe in "Karma", but what they all relate to is that our own social interaction and mental stability will determine this form of unhappiness as we will sometime cause our own downfall. It is how we perceive and act towards society on how our unhappiness for reflect on others or how others will try and reflect this happiness back upon ourselves, leaving us unhappy.
But, how is this mental unhappiness achieved?
Freud felt that the triumph of the ID was through "self control", through conforming and self realisation. Also, it was through his own process of psychoanalysis and self-questionaing of ones self. This will lead to the Freudian system not to happiness, but to "ordinary misery". There is no sociological dimension to this and if people are to complain and get angry as David Cameron would say to all British women it is time to "calm down dear."
The Superego is a anthropological element. The Ego and Superego is the sense of one's clinical problems for Freud, as in Schopenhauer the aim is Fama-Nirvana-Abolition of the sense of the self, which is death and this is what the ego fears most of all.
In Nietzsche something like Freud's "Superego": has a form of what he calls "herd mentality", which is a anthropological and genealogical basis of what passed in his lifetime. One famous quote of Nietzsche is he believed that "evil is merely of that thing of which we disapprove." What is that evil though because our Superego would disapprove of anything that did not form of any basis of perfection or satisfaction and it would treat evil as the basis for all of our failures.
Nietzsche also believed in Human limitation and that perception always came from a given perspective. If you change the perspective, then you change the truth and this is Nietzsche's view of the revaluation of all values. Nietzsche saw resentment as the one unforgivable sin and in 1895 wrote his famous work "The Anti-Christ", which contained the famous quote "That does which not kill me, makes me stronger."
On that note I will end this blog post for now, but for our seminar reading we were asked to find the answer to these three questions:
1. The evening star is the same thing as the morning star.
2. The present king of france is bald.
3. There was nobody in the road.
This will come in my next HCJ blog post, but until then I thought I would end this post with a music video inspired by Nietzsche. Enjoy!
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