THE ESSENCE OF PHILOSOPHY: A RESPONSE TO KARL MARX

It is even hair-splitting that the field of human consciousness can even die, but a field can be in dominion of another field just as it is evident in the contemporary world of science that is failing us now.  What we have, in partial fulfilment of Marx’s vision, is the hibernation of philosophy, not its demise. Acting from the sound clandestine cum empirical foresight of a prophetic philosopher, Marx had with prescient eye presaged the dissipation of philosophy in the brimming world of science and technology whose dynasty is in fast rate encroaching and encompassing the dream of the universe, but the world is sick now by the malaise of technology and science in need of a pathologist which is philosophy.

First, the platform of Marxist ‘philosophy’ is scientific and material and the quintessence of Marx’s ideology is sending philosophy to the Coventry, but the weapon with which philosophy received its demise are fashioned for science approaching its own demise.

Premise 1: ‘philosophers have interpreted the world in several ways the point, however, is to change it’.( Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach)

The job was well done by Marx at the eleventh thesis of the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach where he argues for the irrelevance of philosophy in the world of scientific vagaries.  Hegel and Feuerbach had received the sledge of such premise and the succeeding Marxists were or are held spellbound by such enthralling wit of their raconteur but the premise is not far from being false.

The two substantial words in the premise are ‘interpret’ and ‘change’ which Marx has significantly used for philosophy and science.  While Marx attributes ‘interpret’ to philosophy or philosophers who are busy raging in the unending interpretation of the world’s mysteries, he carefully chooses ‘change’ in the position of science and the scientists who, according to him, have altered the surface of the world by edifices, automobiles, and machines. But Marx did not realise that both philosophers and the technologists have been interpreting the world and none has changed it.  The contrast surfaces where the philosophers are interpreting the world in the abstract sense and the scientists and the technologists are interpreting the world in the concrete sense.

The world had been equipped with what it entails, all we do is the interpretation of the components of its mysteries.  From the interpretation of the mule, a car is made and from the interpretation of the bird, a plane is imagined to fly.  From the interpretation of the waves came phone, and from the interpretation of the rock came the realisation of gold and diamond.  Water generates electricity and coals, petroleum, butane, and bitumen are mined from the ground.  No contradiction, however that these are the interpretations of the natural phenomena.   Philosophers likewise stem their interpretations from the rigorous abstractions and speculations of the world’s mysteries.  While nature feeds the duo, there is no innovation or invention in the world that had already manufactured itself.

To change the world is to tilt the world or make hyenas of human or seize the sun from shinning.  If a scientist can turn the night to morning or dawn to dusk or stop humans from loving or hating or smiling or killing, a scientist has changed the world but this can never be. While Marx glibly embarked on the communist ideology of wiping away what is capitalistic in man, he did not realise that humans are capitalists by nature and none can change the world.   Every age is modern in itself, the question of the primitive is a mirage.

Otherwise, the philosophers and the scientists are interpreting what the world is laid with ab initio.  The philosophers and the scientists have interpreted the world in several ways but none has changed it.

Premise 2: ‘ when reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence.’( the German Ideology).

Even after Marx’s death, some philosophers refuted this premise, loading its claim on the isolated fields such as psychology and sociology, not philosophy, but this is like escaping an arrow of an argument through an excuse.  In fact, Hegel and other idealists might have suffered from this ‘lethal’ blow.

Using the former linguistic approach, the two significant words in the premise are ‘reality’ and ‘philosophy’, where ‘reality’ is science and ‘philosophy’ is simply philosophy.  It could be deduced from Marx’s perspective that while science operates in the ‘reality’ that could be felt, touched, seen, ridden, talked on, toyed with, as evident in the hitherto world of technology, ‘philosophy’ operates as a mere circumlocution of words and gratuitous questioning of loafers whiling away their worries in the spasm of contemplation. 

If I may take Marx by his word ‘change’ in the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach , then ‘reality’ in The German Ideology is a misnomer because reality does not change.  The world of reality is the world of absolute stasis and immutability.  It is spurious to argue that the world that is capable of metamorphosis is a real world.  It is a mirage.  What is so real in the chameleon-like world where books are made from wood and jewellery are made from diamond and age succeeds age and seasons succeed seasons and all are manoeuvred by the bogus tricks of a magic wand?  The world so real is the world so fabricated and so distinct where there is no conversion made of another.  There is no ‘modern’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘old structure’ or ‘new structure’ or ‘obsolete’ or ‘fashionable’ in the world that is capable of reality.  The real world is the world of no invention or interpretation or discovery or advanced learning.  The world of reality is timelessly perfect and ideal.

   Ergo, if science’s vision is to this world, science is not real as the world unreal is.  While philosophy busies itself interpreting the labyrinth of the world, science and technology metamorphose with the world to die with it.  For if technology and science are set at perdition as evident in this world of apocalypse, annihilated by the incineration or washed away by the torrent of Armageddon, philosophy lives to tell the story of the flood and the conflagration that melted the world and its science into an extinction: the philosophy of judgement and the philosophy of Paradise which are ethereal.  Yet, philosophy occupies two posts, first, the corporeal, second, the spiritual, but science cannot operate beyond the corporeal. 

Premise 3: that philosophy is the symptom of the malaise of the society that is yet to realise itself until science places it on a firmer foundation.

The above premise is a paraphrase of some statements made by some Marxists.  It advocates the necessity of science and technology as the Messiah in the rescue of the sickening world besieged by the malaise of philosophy.  A significant word here is ‘malaise’ which is now the bone of contention.  However, philosophy ergo is the chiaroscuro of the hitherto beleaguered world of ‘demonology’.  How I wish Marx had been given a permit from where he is to witness his dream marred in the present world deluded by the malaise of science and technology.  It is however ironical that the erstwhile sick world sustained by science in the thought of Marx is being entrapped by more severe sickness incurred by its former Messiah.  And the Messiah of the hitherto sick world is philosophy, its former sickness.  Even the world was never sick as Marx claimed in his time but was beleaguered by the lost of philosophy thus wading in deserts of uncertainty.

The 20^TH and the 21^st centuries humans have been incarcerated by sports, entertainments, fashion: the symptoms of sickness incurred by the material science.  What seems the dryness of thought, philosophy and loftiness in the reasoning of the perilous humans of perilous time is the malaise of science and technology, the co-workers of material consciousness. Even the dwindling political might of the somnolent world is a symptom of the soporific and restive injections of sports, entertainment and fashion which can only be mitigated by philosophy.  Also, the seeming collapse of the world hangs on the gallows of the above routines on which the inert generation receives its serpentine deathblows.

That philosophy changes with the strides of time or that philosophy changes with the changes in the material consciousness of the people which could be argued that entertainment and fashion are the philosophy of the 20^th and 21^st centuries is false.  Such ‘philosophy’ changing with the course of time, casting ‘mythical’ the ideals of the past is not a philosophy but a mere belief capable of being eroded by the torrents of time.  Philosophy is eternal, so metaphysics, philosophy is philosophical, not profane.

The world that flouts philosophy tends towards barbarism, cannibalism and demonology; not barbarism in the primordial or cannibalism in the primitive or demonology in the coven, but barbarism in sophistication, cannibalism in massacre and deployment of incendiaries and demonology in politics.  Ergo, it is within the corpus of philosophy that the world spitting its source could be realised.

Olayiwola.O.Metamofosis