Philosophical Concepts: Kant, Marx, and Nietzsche
Kant
Legal Freedom
A core characteristic of citizenship, legal freedom ensures individuals aren’t bound by laws without prior consent. It emphasizes acting autonomously while respecting others’ freedom. This freedom is shaped by laws, ensuring compatibility among individuals’ freedoms. Citizens should be co-legislators.
Social Contract
A hypothetical agreement where people transition from a natural, semi-wild state to a civil one. For Kant, it’s an obligation, enabling actions only possible within a structured society. Forcefully subjecting individuals without agreement negates the social contract principle.
Imperatives
Practical principles guiding our actions. Two types exist:
- Hypothetical Imperative: Prescribes actions as good for achieving a specific purpose. Binding only for those desiring the outcome (e.g., “If you want Y, do X.”).
- Categorical Imperative: Universally necessary and unconditional. Prescribes actions as intrinsically good, regardless of potential outcomes (e.g., “Do not steal,” not because of potential punishment, but because stealing is inherently wrong).
Transcendental Illusion
Reason’s error when attempting to know “things-in-themselves” (noumena) beyond experience. These noumena (soul, world, God) are metaphysics’ focus. Kant argues metaphysics is inevitable but can’t achieve scientific knowledge of these unknowable, yet thinkable, objects.
Copernican Revolution
Kant’s analogy for a philosophical shift. Instead of knowledge conforming to empirical objects, objects conform to our a priori knowledge. This transcendental idealism posits that we can only know phenomena, not things-in-themselves.
Marx
Infrastructure and Superstructure
Infrastructure comprises productive forces (labor and means of production) and production relations (social ties during production, defining social class). It conditions, but doesn’t determine, the superstructure (society’s non-economic institutions).
Capital
Goods used in production to generate profit (machinery, raw materials, labor). Central to the bourgeois mode of production (capitalism).
Labor
Exercising human capacity to transform natural resources into commodities.
Surplus Value
The difference between labor’s value and the value it produces, appropriated by the capitalist.
Alienation
In capitalism, work becomes alienating, separating individuals from themselves and their productive activity. Abolishing private property and the capitalist system is the solution.
Value
- Use Value: A commodity’s utility.
- Exchange Value: A commodity’s market value, measured by money.
Nietzsche
Apollonian and Dionysian
- Apollonian: Orderly and rational.
- Dionysian: Passionate and instinctual.
Innocence of Becoming
Accepting the world as it is, not as reason dictates it should be.
Slave Morality
The morality of the weak, rejecting passions and affirming a higher world requiring sacrifice. Contrasts with master morality, which values earthly life. Slave morality arises from resentment towards the strong.
Transmutation of Values
Nietzsche’s call to abandon Christian values and embrace the “Superman,” unafraid of pain.
Nihilism
- Passive Nihilism: Belief in no values due to God’s absence, leading to inaction.
- Active Nihilism: Exposing dominant values as inventions, paving the way for value transmutation.
Marxist Theory: Social Nature of Man
Humans are inherently social, defined by productive activity (interaction with nature through labor) and social activity (interaction with others). In capitalism, man is primarily an economic being.