Moral and Social
Philosophy 3
Section taught by Howard Taylor
Texts for reading:
Blind Alley Beliefs David Cook, chapters 3,4,5
Questions that Matter, Ed Miller.
Philosophy, Popkin and Stroll.
Topics for Third Term
 Humanism
 Post-Modernism.
 Existentialism
 Marxism
Ideology.

Ideas.

How to improve the world or how to behave
in the world.
 What is wrong with the world.
 How it should be put right.
 Systematic – written explanations
 Actions – justified by the ideology
 Own morality.





The tutor does his best to be fair to all views
- religious and non-religious.
However in the interests of honesty he will
explain what he thinks and believes and
why.
Although the tutor has his own convictions,
the assessment of essays and tutorials will
not be affected by a student's own different
convictions.
Knowledge of the subject and good argument
are all important for assessment.
Holding the same convictions as, or different
convictions from, the tutor will not be
relevant for module assessment.
Humanism
HUMANISM:
"Man is the measure of all things"
Said Protagoras the ancient Greek Philosopher.
(What he actually meant was that each person knows
for him/herself alone what it true and what is good.)
These days ‘humanist’ usually means ‘atheist’.
However that was not always so.
Even in its modern atheist form it is only a special
(optimistic) form of atheism.
In its modern form it believes that we know
nothing greater than ‘humans’ and therefore we
should place our faith in humanity above all else.
As we shall see later in the module, other forms of
atheism say that there are no grounds for putting
our faith in anything at all - not even ourselves.
We now turn briefly to the ancient
world.
 Ancient
Greek philosophers believed the
ability for reason
abstract
thought
universal thought
–
made human beings unique and superior
to all other earthly living or non-living
things.

Everywhere they looked in nature they saw
‘order’ and therefore ‘mindedness’.
–
Somehow, then, they believed that
 mind
pervades nature.
 human beings share in that universal mind.

They had no belief in a Creator or Creation (although Aristotle believed in a Prime
Mover), so nature has to be as it is by logical
necessity.
–
The mysteries of the universe can be understood
by reason, logic and mathematics alone - without
the need for experimentation.
Renaissance Humanism (15th & 16th
Centuries)
 Celebration of freedom of thought.
–
–
–

Dependence on the doctrines of the Church
became less necessary
Right and wrong could be discerned from ‘the
way the world is’.
Natural law.
Although knowledge became less
dependent upon the Church, underpinning
this humanism was faith in the goodness
of the natural world and its Creator.
Post Enlightenment and Modern Humanism.
After
Newton’s discoveries of the ‘laws of motion’
governing the movement of bodies (large and small),
many gradually came to believe that eventually all
things would be explicable by physical laws alone.
Growth of a humanism without belief in God.
The

God
Laws of Nature, eternal?
Why do the planets orbit the sun?
 Not God but the law of gravity.
of the gaps.
A mechanistic universe.
Reductionism
Nevertheless humanism maintains its optimistic belief in the
goodness of humanity.
EXCERPTS FROM THE BRITISH HUMANIST ASSOCIATION’S
DECLARATION OF ITS MAIN CONVICTIONS (whole slide):
 Humanists reject the idea of any supernatural agency intervening
to help or hinder us.
 Evidence shows that we have only one life, and humanists grasp
the opportunity to live it to the full.
 Humanists retain faith … that people can and will continue to
solve problems, and that quality of life can be improved and made
more equitable. Humanists are positive, gaining inspiration from
a rich natural world, our lives and culture.
 Humanists think that:
 this world and this life are all we have;
 we should try to live full and happy lives ourselves and, as
part of this, make it easier for other people to do the same;
 all situations and people deserve to be judged on their
merits by standards of reason and humanity;
 individuality and social co-operation are equally important.
Questions and Problems for
Modern Humanism 1
God does not exist Can there be any evidence for this
as an objective
conviction?
reality.
 It claims knowledge about all of reality.
Humanity (not
How do you measure goodness?
 Is that possible?
God) is the correct  By our feelings as to the difference between
object of faith. We
should do what is
natural - we are
basically good
right and wrong?
 Are not our feelings often contradictory?
 If Hitler had won the war and then
brainwashed everyone to believe that
genocide was good, would that make it
good?
Questions and Problems for Modern
Humanism 2
 We must promote human happiness.


Yes but, how do we know what is good for the
promotion of human happiness in the long term?
Does not human happiness come from a sense of
purpose, which is being fulfilled?




What is this purpose?
Is humanity's purpose in life to be happy?
If that is the case, all that is being said is that in
order for humanity to be happy it must be happy!
The first question above has not been answered.
Questions and Problems for Modern
Humanism 3
God is now unnecessary because education has
meant that humans have 'come of age'.
 Are not some educated people criminals?
 Is there evidence from our behaviour that we have
grown up and can now safely guide ourselves?
 Mankind is potentially capable of achieving
great progress in terms, of technology and social
justice.
 Can we be sure that the way we have used the
progress in technology has brought more good than
evil?

Questions and Problems for Modern
Humanism 4
 Mankind
is also free to act and
achieve his aims if he so chooses there are no supernatural bonds to tie
him down.
 If we are nothing but bundles of matter
and physical laws can there be real
freedom?
Lord Hailsham: If Common Law did take the view that a child in the
womb has the same rights as a separate human being, it would follow
that the termination of a pregnancy, even to save a woman's life, is
legally the same thing as the murder of a child. But at the other end of
the scale, I find it impossible to deny that the embryo in the mother's
womb is a form of human life and, as such, to be reverenced both by
the mother herself and by her doctor. I have to take into account the
holiness and worshipfulness of human life, whether in the mother or
the unborn child, and, in so far as humanism leads one to treat human
beings as if they were just animals or, for that matter, to treat animals
as if they were chattels and nothing more, it seems to me to fall down
precisely because it has degraded humanity and even animal life in
the proper scale of values. . . Humanism by itself has never redeemed
mankind from sin or despair, offers no explanation why, in acting
morally, men are also acting rationally. In so far as humanism exalts
the nature and destiny of man I am with it all the way. But in so far as
it debases man to a mere bundle of wants and satisfactions, I find it
unworthy of the name of humanism, because it fails to understand the
nature of humanity it professes to serve.
Post Modernism.
First what is meant by Modernism?
It had/has many differing forms mainly
expressing beliefs about science and/or
politics and the meaning of human
history.

It was/is the quest for certainty without
reference to religion. (Many ‘modern’ people
remained religious but used religion for their
private lives and kept it out of the public
domain.)
What is Modernism - continued.
 From
–
–
–
Truth is built on logic applied to self-evident truths
(rationalism) and/or experimental data.
Objective scientific method applied across the board
in the soft sciences (eg: sociology, psychology)
Naturalism - and scientism: The physical universe
is all there is.
 From
–
–
science:
history and politics:
Hegel’s Universal Spirit and the Dialectic.
Marxism was one political example of modernism.
The Meta-narratives of Modernism broke
down:

Problems with Modernism.
– Political Theories broke down.
– Science’s advance reveals more and more mystery.
 It
can’t answer the ultimate questions after all.
–
Doubts about science’s ability to be really objective.
–
Depersonalising influence of modernism
 wars, pollution,
 it cannot explain our personal self-awareness and
spiritual longings.
Its optimistic belief in progress has been
undermined by recent human history.
–
Post Modernism reacts against Modernism.




If the Meta narratives of Modernism fail should we
return to the big stories or Meta narratives of
religion?
Jean-Francois Lyotard (French Canadian), in 1979,
defined Post Modernism as `incredulity towards
(all) Meta-narratives’.
– Neither science nor politics nor religion give us
universal truth.
– There is no `big story’ - no universal truth.
Don’t worry - just pick and mix what makes you
feel good.
Don’t consider the big questions. Just enjoy your
own little world.
Mix together ancient and modern images,
sayings and teachings.
Don’t ask yourself what they mean meaning does not matter - there is no
universal meaning.
If possible enjoy both religious services
and speeches by atheists.
If they appear to contradict one another
- don’t worry - its how they make you
feel that matters.
Just don’t get bored.
.
Post Modernism is a ‘care-free’ attitude to
life coming from the conviction that there
are no universal truths.
But can that conviction remain care-free?
– The conviction also has its inevitable
darker despairing side - e.g.: Nietzsche
(19th C German philosopher) and his
alternatives to Nihilism.
– Nietzsche and his fear of Nihilism are
considered later under the heading of
Existentialism.
The Intellectual Problem for Post
Modernism
‘There is no absolute truth’ is itself a
statement that claims to be absolutely
true!
Post Modernism therefore refutes itself!
-----------------------------------------------See handout: Post Modernism
Structuralism, Post Structuralism and
Decontructionism.
In contrast to the old view that all my disparate
parts are held together by my unchanging 'self'
and 'consciousness',
Structuralism held that the real 'I' is the
construction of the 'language' of my culture.
The old view had been that my conscious self
apprehends the real world around me,
and then from my ideas about it, formulates
language to communicate to other ‘selves’ my
ideas of reality.
So language is a product of the 'self'
apprehending the real world out there.
Structuralism reverses this by making the whole 'language'
the source of the structure of the real 'me'.
Words are defined by other words not by the reality they
pretend to reflect.
So words do not refer to the real world.
They are understood by their difference in relation to
other words. (Words 'differ' and do not 'refer')
It is claimed evidence for this comes from attempts to
translate one language to another.
All translations are approximations.
This means that there is no direct reference from
reality to word.
Words only find meaning in relation to other words.
Structuralists tried to strip the human of his various cultures
that structure the 'person' to find the real 'person' behind all
the differing manifestations of humanity.
Post Structuralists thought that
•there were no definite underlying structures that
could explain the human condition
•it was impossible to step outside of discourse and
survey the situation objectively.
Jacques Derrida (1930- ) developed Deconstruction as a
technique for uncovering the cultural assumptions
hidden in the texts.
Influenced by Nietzsche and others, Derrida suggests
that all text has ambiguity,
therefore the possibility of a final and complete
interpretation is impossible.
There is no point in trying to get back to the
‘author’ (including Derrida himself?).
According to Post Structuralists and Deconstructionists:
Language contains hidden ‘hierarchies' and 'privilege' which
construct the culture.
Language gives Reason/Science special places of privilege.
(Yet science does not really know what reality is. It should
be more humble.)
To identify these hierarchies one is involved in
'deconstruction'.
Attempts to interpret texts have given the Author a privilege.
Deconstruction rejects this and therefore seeking 'what the
author really meant' is wrong. (Therefore to find what
Derrida really meant is also wrong!)
Anti-Elitism.
Post-modern art attacks traditional views of 'quality’. Exhibits:
• a bicycle wheel, vacuum cleaners, a dirty nappy, a urinal.
• those portraying contradiction and absurdity, such as:
a picture of a horse labelled as a ‘door’ and a glass of
water labelled as an ‘oak tree’.
Existentialism.
Some important existentialists:

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55)
–
–


Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)
– Atheist.
Jean Paul Satre (1905-1980)
–

Atheist
Albert Camus (1913 - 60)
–

father of existentialism
Christian
Atheist.
John McQuarrie
–
Christian.
Essence and Existence.

Essence
• Does God exist?
• Who are we?
• Is there life after
death?
• What is the good
life?
• What is right?
• How can we
improve the
world?
• What is the
purpose of life?

Existence
• Decisions
• Commitments
• Passions
Existentialism
It has many forms but there is a common thread:









Existence precedes essence.
You are not born with a fixed nature.
You cannot, by thinking, find the meaning of life.
So don’t ponder the essence of your life and then
act.
Rather choose and commit yourself to something.
From your choice you will make and find your own
essence.
You cannot avoid choices. (Choosing not to choose
is a choice)
This involves a frightening responsibility.
Death mocks everything in the end. (Atheistic
form of existentialism only)
To Be or Not to Be?
- that is the Question.

Albert Camus (Atheist existentialist who
eventually died in a car crash) said:
–
–

“death is philosophy's only problem.”
How does one make sense of life when haunted
by this spectre?
Existentialists say:
–
`We must answer `To Be’ and put everything
into our lives.’
Background to Existentialism.

German Philosopher - Hegel. (1770 - 1831)
–
–
Not an existentialist!
Dialectic
 Socrates:
 Ideas
in conflict with other ideas lead to advance
in knowledge.
–
Hegel’s Dialectic:
 Nation
in conflict with nation leads to advance in
the progress of history.
 This progress is guided by Great Spirit immanent in World
Kierkegaard’s themes
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Rejected Hegel’s philosophy as unrelated to
life.
Tumultuous life marked by indecision re
marriage and ordination.
We cannot find truth by reflection and reason.
I must do what God wants me to do and then I
will find truth.
Don’t go in for proofs.
The less the evidence the better.
Decision - leap in dark - pain.
Kierkegaard’s book titles give a
clue to his thinking:
Fear and Trembling
 Philosophical Fragments
 Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
 The Concept of Dread

Kierkegaard’s main themes (Cont)
•
•
•
•
•
Stake your life on something even if, at first,
there is no reason to do so.
Don’t live a second or third hand life, choose
for yourself.
Subjectivity not objectivity is key to truth.
Enlightenment must come from beyond
one’s reason.
One must desire enlightenment for its own
sake.
Kierkegaard’s parable.

King (representing God and/or enlightenment)
wants to marry peasant girl.
– She must love him not for his wealth or power
 He can’t dazzle her with wealth and entice her.
 He can’t force her to marry her.
 He conceals himself.
 So:
–
–
God concealed Himself from us in Christ.
We must desire enlightenment for its own sake and
not be enticed by its benefits.
 Then
God is able to miraculously reveal true
purpose of life to us.
 Kierkegaard
was converted during Holy Week
Subject - Object relationship

HGT’s comments:
 Objective
truth does exist.
 Thinking is necessary.
 Thinking alone is not enough.
 Revelation is necessary especially in knowledge
of persons.
 We cannot be detached observers
 Understand a little, commit a little, understand
more, commit more.
 Truth does change us.
 Personal commitment and passion is part of the
quest for objective truth.
Soren Kierkegaard - quotations (1)
*Faith
Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many
in every generation may not come that far, but none
comes further.
*Life and Living
Life has its own hidden forces which you can only
discover by living.
*Mystics and Mysticism
Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment
when they are able to breathe forth their love for
each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper,
so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer
he can, as it were, creep into God.
Soren Kierkegaard - quotations (2)
–
Personality
 Personality
is only ripe when a man has
made the truth his own.
–
Saints
 God
creates out of nothing. Wonderful
you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what
is still more wonderful: he makes saints
out of sinners.
–
Tyranny
 The
tyrant dies and his rule is over, the
martyr dies and his rule begins.
Meaning and meaninglessness from two philosopher
mathematicians. (I owe the thoughts to the Christian philosopher: Thomas V. Morris.)
Bertrand Russell (20th C) in ‘Why I am not a Christian.’:
“That man … his growth, his hopes and fears, his love and
beliefs, are but the outcomes of accidental collocations of
atoms; that no fire, nor heroism, no intensity of thought and
feeling can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all
the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all
the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to
extinction in the vast death of the solar system .. and be
buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these
things, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which
rejects them can hope to stand.”
Pascal (17th C), Pensees 139: How hollow and full of trash is
man’s heart.
Something has meaning if and only if it is endowed with meaning
of significance by a purposive personal agent or group of such
agents.
To have meaning of any kind, a thing must be brought under the
governance of some kind of purposive intention, whether an
intention to refer, to express, to convey, or to operate in the
production of some acknowledged value. This is true of all
meaning. Meaning is never intrinsic; it is always derivative.
Objective or Subjective Meaning?
Some philosophers advocate a ‘Do-It-Yourself’ approach to
questions of meaning. According to this view there is no ‘objective’
meaning of life waiting to be discovered. If we order our lives
around things we desire, value and enjoy, within the structure of
goals we take for ourselves, we render them meaningful and
thereby give meaning to the life they compose. A person’s life can
therefore have ‘subjective’ meaning - or so they say.
Problems for Subjective Meaning.
How do you distinguish between one kind of ‘meaningful’
goal and another?
Someone may focus his whole life on collecting matchbox
covers and another on finding cures for terrible diseases.
How does one distinguish the trivial from meaningful
goals? There is nothing to appeal to.
Someone may be very good at torturing people and enjoy
it very much so that he focuses his life on that pursuit.
How does one distinguish between worthy goals and
unworthy goals? There is nothing to appeal to.
How can a purely subjective approach to life’s meaning
account for these objective differences?
Nietzsche.

`God is Dead’
–
Thus Spake Zarathustra begins with
pronouncement by Zarathustra that God is dead
–
Nietzsche meant that belief in God is dying and
that is the significant fact for belief in life’s
alleged value. (Rather than the actual
existence/non-existence of God.)
According to Nietzsche Christian belief in God is essential
for meaning and morality.
To try to preserve it without God is an ‘English’ fantasy.
Values cannot survive without belief in God.
There is no value to be discovered in the world.
He attacks the view that the preservation and
advancement of humankind can be a motive for morality.
He is thus afraid of the ‘nihilism’ that will follow the death
of God.
However he is also afraid we may cling to Christian
morality (without reason - because ‘God is dead’) and
deteriorate into the ‘slave’ morality described in the
Sermon on the Mount.
No truth can serve as the basis of morality or immorality.
(Although there are cases where ‘moral’ action should be pursued
and ‘immoral’ be action avoided but not for any ultimate reason.)
Why should we be interested in truth? Maybe the pursuit of
falsehood might serve us better.
Dissatisfaction is the germ of ethics.
Survival of the fittest belongs to what we actually are. Therefore
our humanity must be affirmed by the pursuit of ‘Greatness’ rather
than ‘Goodness’.
Greatness absorbs and uses pain.
Goodness tries to relieve pain - and is therefore to be despised.
We must assert the ‘will to power’ or the ‘master morality’ rather
than the pathetic appeals to goodness by the ‘slaves’ who invoke
Christian morality or ‘human rights’ to protect them from the
masters.
Because God is Dead (said Nietzsche)

It follows that:
–
–
–
–
–
the physical world with its laws is all that
there is
there is no real `I' independent of my
body/brain. (See quote in next slide)
no such thing as free thought
no such thing as reasoning and knowledge
science as knowledge of the real universe is
an illusion
:
Quotation from `Beyond Good and Evil’:
As for the superstitions of the logicians, I shall never tire
of underlining a concise little fact which these
superstitious people are loath to admit - namely that a
thought comes when it wants, not when `I' want; so that
it is a falsification of the facts to say: the subject `I' is
the condition of the predicate `think'
Here Nietzsche is saying two related things:
1. There is no real ‘self’ (`I’) that can initiate anything.
All actions and ‘thoughts’ are the result of impersonal
physical laws.
2. `Thinking’, as we normally consider it, is impossible.
The Irony

In an age of dramatic scientific discoveries
we decide that we know nothing
–
–
To the obvious question: `How can it be true
that there is no truth?' he provides no answer.
He cannot.
Nietzche enjoys the irony that the rationality
that made science possible has been destroyed
by science.
Nietzsche’s existentialism in blue
 Science
alone provides the given
 This has made our normal understanding of
truth unintelligible
 There is no objective purpose to life - no good
and evil.
 We must now seize the moment, say yes to
life, and impose our will on the world around
us. We must be strong willed.
 Truth is not discovered it is created.
 Truth is the will to power.
An extreme example of Nietzsche’s
rejection of objective morality:
"Who can attain to anything great if he does not
feel in himself the force and will to inflict great
pain ? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in
that line, weak women and even slaves often
maintain masterliness.
But not to perish from internal distress and doubt
when one inflicts great suffering and hears the
cry to it - that is great, that belongs to greatness.”
Friedrich Nietzche, 'The Joyful Wisdom', trans. by
Thomas Common (New York: Russell and Russell, Inc.,
1964), p.25.
Nietzsche’s Contradictory & Tragic Life(1)
Son of a Protestant minister
 Father died young.
 He always loved and honoured his father’s
memory.
 On his father’s grave stone he put the words
from the New Testament:

–

Love abides forever.
He had little money, poor health and was
lonely.
Nietzsche’s Contradictory & Tragic Life(2)

Yet he hated teaching of Jesus (which taught
‘slave morality’ such as:
–
–
–
–
–
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of
righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those
who persecute you.
Nietzsche’s Contradictory & Tragic Life(3)
He believed such teaching went against
his conviction that we must assert
ourselves in the face of adversity.
 He believed Jesus encouraged weakness.
 A Question:

–
Could the contradictions in his intellectual
and spiritual life have contributed to his
eventual insanity? (He died at 56 after
spending years in a psychiatric hospital)
Richard
Richard Rorty*, Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality:
Rorty
iscontemporary admirers of Plato claim that all featherless bipeds When
Professor
of and childlike, even the women, even the sodomized - have
even the stupid
the same inalienable rights, admirers of Nietzsche reply that the very idea of
Comparativ
e'inalienable
Literaturehuman rights is, like the idea of a special added ingredient, a
laughably feeble attempt by the weaker members of the species to fend off
inthe
USA
and
stronger.
awell
As I see it, one important intellectual advance made in our century is the
known
steady decline of interest in the quarrel between Plato and Nietzsche. There
supporter
of willingness to neglect the question 'What is our nature?'
is a growing
and to substitute the question 'What can we make of ourselves?'… We
Postare coming to think of ourselves as the flexible, protean, self-shaping
Modernism.
animal rather than as the rational animal or the cruel animal.
One of the shapes we have recently assumed is that of a human rights
culture… We should stop trying to get behind or beneath this fact, stop
trying to detect and defend its so-called 'philosophical
presuppositions'… Philosophers like myself… see our task as a matter of
making our own culture - the human rights culture - more self-conscious
and more powerful, rather than of demonstrating its superiority to other
cultures by an appeal to something trans-cultural.
If we think of our essence as mere accidental descent
from bacteria, we can
•find it depressing, as did George Bernard Shaw. (Next
slide)
•See also handout: Bad and Bored.
•Or we can rejoice in the meaninglessness of life - and
allow the strong to eliminate the weak as in the quote of
H. G. Wells. (2 slides ahead.)
•(The following GBS and HGW quotes are taken from Richard
Dawkins’ ‘The Devil’s Chaplain’.)
•Or we can attempt to rise above the meaninglessness of
life in personal existentialism. (Satre, Camus (?)
George Bernard Shaw wrote of
Darwinian evolution:
When its whole significance dawns on
you, your heart sinks into a heap of
sand within you. There is a hideous
fatalism about it, a ghastly and
damnable reduction of beauty and
intelligence, of strength and purpose,
of honour and aspiration.
H.G.Wells, however, revelled in the ruthlessness of nature: And how
will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal
with the black? . . . the yellow man? . . . the Jew? . . . those
swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people,
who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the
world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it
they will have to go. . . . And the ethical system of these men of
the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the
world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of
what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity—beautiful
and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds. . . . And the
method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the
world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating
weakness . . . is death. . . . The men of the New Republic . . . will
have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.
Someone asked: ‘Why shouldn't morality be accepted as the truth and
Darwinism a mere political construct?’
EXISTENTIALISM AFTER KIERKEGAARD
– Some
books by Jean Paul
Sartre
 Nausea
Mockery of ‘humanism’.
 Distinction between a person and a thing
is blurred or denied.

 Being
and Nothingness
 The Wall
 No Exit
 The Room
Jean Paul Satre - Quotations 1:

"Atheistic existentialism...states that if God does
not exist, there is at least one being in whom
existence precedes essence, a being who exists
before he can be defined by any concept and that
this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human
reality. What is meant here by saying that
existence precedes essence? It means that, first of
all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene,
and, only afterwards, defines himself."
Jean Paul Satre - Quotations 2:
"The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain
kind of secular ethics which would like to abolish
God with the least possible expense.” (This is
Satre’s attack on Humanism.)
All human actions are equivalent... and all are on
principle doomed to failure.
The poor don't know that their function in life is to
exercise our generosity.
Every existing thing is born without reason,
prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by
chance.
Jean Paul Satre - Quotations 3:



Things are entirely what they appear to be
and behind them . . . there is nothing.
Hell is other people.,
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I
exist because I think. . . and I can't stop
myself from thinking.
Jean Paul Satre - Quotations 4:
"There are two kinds of existentialists; first,
those who are Christian...and on the other hand
the atheistic existentialists, among whom...I class
myself. What they have in common is that they
think that existence precedes essence, or, if you
prefer, that subjectivity must be the turning
point."
We must act out passion before we can feel them.
Man is condemned to be free; because once
thrown into the world, he is responsible for
everything he does.

Albert Camus - Most famous book - ‘The
Outsider’. Summary in next slide.

Quotations from Albert Camus 1:
–Ideology
 Whoever
today speaks of human existence in terms of
power, efficiency, and "historical tasks" is an actual or
potential assassin.
–Injustice
Children
will still die unjustly even in a perfect society.
Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to
diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.
–Life
and Living
If,
after all, men cannot always make history have
meaning, they can always act so that their own lives
have one.
Albert Camus’s The Outsider.
The Outsider is not a ‘bad’ man, but he is indifferent to the
difference between good and evil and to society’s norms.
This means:
No pretence of sadness at mother's funeral.
Helps his ‘bad’ friends, e.g:
pimp who was brutal to Arab girl who tried to escape,
neighbour who was cruel to his dog but wept when it died,
Pimp quarrels with girl's brothers and this leads to a fight in
which the Outsider kills, in self defence??, an Arab.
He is arrested and put on trial for murder.
Evidence against him includes:
attitude to his mother's death & helping the pimp escape.
No pretence. He is then sentenced to death.
Priest comes to him before execution and appeals to him to
accept the gospel of forgiveness and peace with God.
Angrily refuses saying he doesn't believe in God.
Just before his death he rejoices at meaningless of everything.
Quotations from Albert Camus 2:
–
Optimism
 If
Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to
human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human
destiny, I am optimistic as to man.
–
Self-knowledge
 To
know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is
action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our
personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we
should die. (This quote shows Camus as a true
existentialist)
–
Suffering
 In
default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering
would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have
that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one
day.
Marxism
Karl Marx (1818 - 1883)
The Two Main Writings:
Das Capital
The Communist Party Manifesto.
But first the background to Marxist
theory:
The Dialectic.

Process.
 Thesis
against Antithesis leads to Synthesis.
 This new thesis has its own antithesis.
 So a new synthesis emerges
 And so on …

Dialectic in Socrates and Plato.
 Method
of argumentation using `contrary case’
to elicit more truth.
 One opinion has a counter opinion.
 The clash of the two leads to advance in
understanding in a synthesis - and so on …
Hegel(1770-1831)& the Dialectic
Absolute Spirit (Mind) guides dialectic
process.

A) Process in history of universe
–
–

Material universe - Low level consciousness - higher
consciousness - self-awareness - human reason.
The Mind of the Universe now expresses itself in
human reasoning.
B) Process in history of nations.
–
–
–
Nation against nation leads to new nation
incorporating best of both in a new synthesis.
This new nation conflicts with another nation and
another nation appears.
So on until the perfect society is reached.
Feuerbach (1804 - 1872)
He denied the existence of the Absolute
Mind or Spirit.
 Reality can be understood by material
processes alone.

Marx’s Dialectical Materialism

The Dialectic is not the conflict of nations
but classes.
–

The Class Struggle.
The Dialectic is an inevitable process but
is not moved forward by Absolute Spirit or
Mind - there is no God or Eternal Mind.
–
–
It can be understood by material and economic
processes alone.
A Question for Marxists:
 How
do we know that blind material processes
alone will follow the path Marx believed in?
Some of the main phases of Marx’s
dialectic:
1. Feudalism, 2. Capitalism, 3. Socialism, 4. Communism.
– Each change is revolutionary not gradual or
evolutionary.
– The process needs each of these in order.
 A people
cannot jump from Feudalism to Socialism (say).
 For example Marx believed capitalism was needed to give
socialism a prosperous foundation.
–
However, after Marx’s time, one of the main
communist nation (Russia) did try to jump from rural
semi-feudal economies to socialism, missing out
industrial capitalism!
Feudalism

Landowner and Tenants.
–
–

Tenants have no right to buy land or significant
property.
Permanent serfdom.
Clash between serfs and landowners leads
to Capitalism.
Capitalism leads to Socialist revolution.
–
Every person can own land and/or capital.
 Some
are successful and start businesses.
 They employ workers.
 Competition between businesses lowers prices.
 Low prices means low wages paid to workers.
 Worker is paid less than the `value’ he puts into the
product.
 The difference is the `surplus value’
 Worker becomes alienated from the product.
–
Workers rise against owners of capital.
 Workers
take over government and seize all property for
the people.
– `Dictatorship of the proletariat’ (socialism) begins.
Socialism to Communist
Utopia.




The power of the state withers away
Nations and governments disappear.
A community of common ownership emerges.
This communist community would then fulfil
Marx’s famous words:
`From each according to his ability to each
–
–
according to his need’.
It was this statement that inspired many Western
Christian people to sympathise with Communist
ideology - at least until the realities of life under
Stalin (USSR) and Mao (China) became apparent.
This final `communist’ phase was never reached.
The reality was the opposite of Utopia.



Even excluding those killed in war or civil war,
in the 20th Century more than 100 million
people perished under so-called Marxist
governments - many more than all those who
perished under all other systems of government
put together.
Why did this happen?
Three things, at least, contributed:
–
–
–
Absence of the rule of law.
The concentration of all political and economic
power in the hands of a political elite.
The explicit materialist conviction that human
beings are not finally accountable to God.
Marxist Morality and a
Paradox
An act which encourages the forward
movement of the revolutionary process is
good.
 An act (say generosity to the poor) that
delays the revolution is bad.
 The revolutionary process is inevitable
and cannot be stopped by anyone.

–
Nevertheless we must struggle and fight to
promote the revolution.