The Age of Enlightenment, Hegel, Kant & Marx

The Age of Enlightenment veered away from the lack of knowledge, irrationality, and superstition inherent in the Middle Ages. In the Age of Enlightenment, man's capacity for reason became the cornerstone of many philosophies aimed at discovering truth and the answers to mankind's greatest questions. Philosophers like Hegel and Kant were considered Bourgeois philosophers by Marx, because Marx was a materialistic philosopher who sought cause and effect reasons to find truth and meaning outside the mind while Hume and Kant strove to find such answers within the mind.

Both Hegel and Kant attempted to arrive at an explanation of truth within the human mind, though they maintained distinct views on the capacity of reason and the senses to arrive at such explanations. Marx, in contrast, felt that only cause and effect relationships could help human beings obtain greater understanding. In his theory for explaining class divisions in society, Marx turned to the social processes of production and labor to reveal social development. However, his theory does not explain the nature of the human mind as it is involved in this process. By focusing on the mind's involvement in such processes, Marx viewed Hegel and Kant as Bourgeois philosophers in that he did not believe man's limited capacity to know or understand could turn inward and gain greater understanding without considering external processes.

Hegel and Kant's views were bourgeois to Marx, because they fo

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forms his own notions of morality, religion, and beliefs, which is why Marx viewed this philosophy and Kant's as being bourgeois, since it enslaved the morality of the masses to the values dictated by the ruling elites. Across Europe during the Enlightenment, philosophers were focused on a reappraisal of life from an essentially nonsectarian perspective and without any specific or universal purpose. Many were reformists, intending to enlighten men so as to spur them to break free of slavish dependence on the past and its traditions. Kant, however, as a devout Christian, had an unshakeable faith and affirmed the existence and importance of God, whereas Marx considered religion the opiate of the people that kept them in check from rebelling against the upper classes. Kantianism holds that an action's rightness or wrongness is to be determined by the action's form or character and the motives or intentions of the actor. Kant believed, unlike Marx, that there was a moral law within individuals that consisted of, in his view, the idea of the autonomous human being who can comprehend the order of nature from with, and, paradoxically, determine his own course of action by effective reasoning alone. Kant proposed the "categorical

Category: Philosophy - T