Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

The end of the Middle Ages meant the revival of Greek humanism, but it returned to the idea of intuition, based only on the intellect of reason. For René Descartes (1596-1650), it was the only thing capable of distinguishing the true from the false, and it was the only thing that made it possible to obtain knowledge of the world.

This path consisting of doubt, experimentation (empiricism was born) and the formulation of laws were the influences that would come to dominate the rationalist precepts of the Enlightenment.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) re-elaborates empiricist and rationalist ideas, and it is this path that will elaborate the Enlightenment doctrines of the 16th and 17th centuries in the West. He states that “All our intuition is nothing more than the representation of a phenomenon; the things we intuit are not in themselves as we intuit them, nor are the relations between them in themselves as they appear to us.” This is a central point in his philosophy, particularly in his Transcendental Idealism.

For Kant, through this intuition, objects are given to us and the doctrine that studies this data is Transcendental Aesthetics, which orders and classifies things according to a series of categories that are not only intuited, but deduced by the intellect.

The world of the subject and its elaborations is reduced to its “subjectivity”, the way in which each individual experience and constructs the world, is no longer a divine transcendence, but the fruit of practical reason in a moral order.

The pinnacle of idealism, especially in Germany, was the idealism of Hegel and his disciples, and after his death they were divided between the old Hegelians, stuck in the world of transcendence and its dualistic contradictions, and a re-elaboration of the idealist religious spirit, including David Frederic Strauss (1808-1874), his brothers Bruno Bauer (1809-1882) and Edgar Bauer (1820-1886), and Max Stirner (1806-1956).

Among the young Hegelians, in Karl Marx’s view, were he and his companion Frederic Engels, who criticized Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), for them the only one to have moved on from Hegel’s idealism to an objectivist materialism, and thus Marxism was born.

This is what Engels wrote: he [Feuerbach] “…pulverized contradiction at a stroke, restoring materialism to its throne without further ado. Nature exists independently of all philosophy and is the basis on which men grow and develop, who are also themselves natural products; outside of nature and men nothing exists…” (Engels, 1941).

However, Feuerbach relied on nature and little on politics, and this is where the Marxist critique comes in.

The idea of being is reduced to a historical and materialist conception, related to production, economics and politics, while the contemplative, moral and ethical vision of Being is subject to the “thing”.

The idea that there was a moment when the universe was created is subject to mathematics and physics.

Engels, F. Ludwig Feuerbach.  Spanich Version, p. 14, Moscow, p. 13, Moscou 1941.