Saturday, February 14, 2009

Marx reading Hegel

I think that the questions about "where is history going?" Thursday were very much in the vein of Marx insofar as I think that Marx was making predictions about how Spirit was going to become fully self-conscious and then Lenin thought it might make sense to help Spirit along. It isn't clear to me that Hegel would have taken this view particularly since Hegel views the passions of individual people as distinct motives from whatever is moving the Spirit to self-consciousness.

I keep thinking of general social science and that we can predict with amazing accuracy how traffic will move without knowing anything about the particular drivers. The general movement of "traffic" (analogous here to Spirit) is governed by different rules that the movement of the individual cars each of which is governed by the motive of the driver of that car.

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