Historia de la filosofía 111. Filosofía contemporánea: introducción

A warm greeting, friends. Today we begin

the contemporary age in philosophy, and

I will follow the following outline in this

first video, which is an introduction.

First, I will explain that we are in a

time of revolutions that began with the

French Revolution of 1769 and

continued into the early 20th century.

Second, I will present some

general characteristics of the contemporary age. And

finally, the general philosophical trends

that are present at this time. I

begin, then, with this time of revolutions. These

new times, which are ours,

had Hegel as their herald because,

according to him, the central motives of the

French Revolution and its expansion

throughout Europe by the armies and the

legal work of Napoleon announced the

realization of reason in history.

Later, Napoleon had already triumphed and

undone his work. Apparently, Hegel

fixed his gaze on Prussia, one of the

victorious powers. He was convinced

that his philosophy unified the world

through thought, while

political and military forces unified it through

action. This was not the first time

something similar had happened.

Aristotle, with whom Hegel so liked to

compare himself, had also

striven to integrate... A

coherent system of all previous knowledge, with the

aim of understanding the world, while his

disciple Alexander conquered it by

arms and laws and extended

Hellenic culture to all its confines, just as

Aristotle did. Hegel, too, closes one

historical cycle and opens another; he himself

believed it to be so. It is usually taken for granted

that this cycle,

called the contemporary age, begins

with the Congress of Vienna in November

1815, when the victorious powers,

after having annihilated

Napoleon's troops at the Battle of Waterloop

fought in July of the same year,

divided Europe and sought to

strengthen the legitimacy of the Old

Regime.

In Vienna, it was hoped that the

past, which the revolution of 1769

and its first offspring, the

Napoleonic Empire, had been about to

bury forever, would be given new life.

But the congress was a human endeavor to

contain a current that would soon

prove to be unstoppable.

The

case of Spain, where Napoleon entered in

1808 and enthroned his brother Joseph

to establish equality in the

legal system and education, is sufficient to understand this. general and

decree the end of the Inquisition,

state confessionalism, the abolition of

serfdom, universal suffrage,

etc. But it was rejected by the

people who rose up in arms.

Ferdinand VII, the treacherous king,

then represented that rejection and tried to

return to the previous state of affairs, but

the history of Spain has ended up

overthrowing the old order and recovering the

Napoleonic reforms, refined and

adapted more or less to our land.

Perhaps this was what Hegel foresaw

for universal history: the

political revolution, temporarily failed in

France and partially achieved in

England, had already triumphed in the United

States of America, while

the social revolution continued its

underground course, as the bourgeoisie was

combining political and social dominance with

economic power, displacing the old

aristocracy.

This was a barely visible but

real effect of that historical process that has been

called the Industrial Revolution. Let it be accepted

that the contemporary age

begins in 1815, but to note

immediately that it consists of a long period

of vacillation that lasts until 1914, the

beginning of the First World War, or

until 1917. From the

Bolshevik Revolution, the changes that appeared in between,

such as liberalism, the

political creed of the bourgeoisie; the advance of

science and technology; the applications of

both to industrial production, which have

caused the so-called second

industrial revolution; and socialism, the

political creed of the dispossessed of

fortune, are the parents that have

begotten the marks of our time.

Secondly, I speak of the features that

this contemporary age has,

a picture of the new age which is summarized in

the following five strokes. The first is

that network of technical and

scientific advances, whose flowering, which some

judge excessive, is now evident to

anyone.

To the Industrial Revolution of coal and

steel, which brought with it the machine,

work in factories, and the

transformation of rural life into

urban life, another revolution followed: that of

the introduction of

scientific and technical planning in the production of

goods, which brought with it the

growing production of needs.

The second feature is the displacement of

Europe as the center of history. From the

first period of expansion of

industrialism to the whole planet, from

absolute confidence in the superiority of

European values ​​to the proclamation,

even of the moral obligation, to

extend them to all Humanity, which

has earned the accusation of

imperialism and colonialism, has

experienced another period of the rise of

new powers that have signified the

decline of the European sun.

The result has been the current forging of

a new world, whose clearest sign is

the planetary weight acquired by the

United States of America, but also

the emergence of Russia, China, Japan, etc.

The European policy applied during the

19th century to the entire planet has been

replaced by a world politics

whose center is being contested in

our time.

The third characteristic is the awakening of the

masses, which has changed individual life

and political organization. The development

of new industry has concentrated enormous

numbers of people, which have

grown exponentially during the

last 200 years and have become

massive, impersonal,

statistical, and malleable agglomerations. These

agglomerations have posed

new problems such as health and

education and have forced the development

of new philosophies on

state intervention. This is why

mass democracy has been a power

wielded by political parties that

history had never known. The

fourth characteristic is the reaction of Asia,

America, and Africa against the West.

European superiority was

still undisputed at the beginning of the 20th century, but

a counter-movement soon emerged,

reaching its peak between

1945 and 1960. In those few years,

more than

40 states, encompassing over 800

million people, achieved their independence from the West. History

had never witnessed anything like it before.

The fifth characteristic is the emergence of

Marxism as a political ideology.

Its original ideas come from the

19th century, especially from the writings of Marx and

Engels, but they became identified with the

triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution of

1917 and those that followed in

many other countries.

Its easy propagation in the form of

rigid labels, thanks to the new

diffusion of culture and new

methods of instruction, has made it

a

specific product of the 20th century. In the same

way that liberalism emerged from

1789 as an ideology intended

to deny the privileges of the

aristocracy, so too did

Marxism emerge after 1917 as an ideology

intended to deny liberalism and lay the

foundation for the long-awaited revolution of

the dispossessed.

Finally, it's time to

mention the

philosophical trends that flourished during this period.

The ways of thinking, the conceptions of

reality, the subjective illusions, and

the feelings of the people could not

remain unscathed amidst such

great upheavals. Philosophy also

underwent changes: positivism, mechanism,

Marxism, historicism, vitalism, etc.,

during the 19th century, and pragmatism and

rationalism, phenomenology, existentialism,

relativism, etc.,

during the 20th and 21st centuries.

The deep cause and root of these

changes was the disintegration of the

humanism that had prevailed since the

Renaissance, a

disintegration that was taking place

in the currents of social development

before it was in the classroom. The contradiction

between the humanist creed, which attributed

dignity to all men, and the

indignity experienced daily by a

huge number of people became

too intense.

Academic rationalist humanism

closed its eyes to reality, and reality

unfolded. Meanwhile, Nietzsche, taking the opposite approach,

transformed "that his power is made"

into a philosophical category. Whoever

wants to have the solution to all the

enigmas, whoever wants to possess the truth of

this world, must know that the truth of

this world is the will to power, he said.

Humanity has had to pay dearly for the gram of reason that has been

sold to it from Plato to Hegel, he

continued, saying that traditional European values

that had pretended to

present man as master of his

destiny are a lie.

Nor was his attack directed against one flank

of the philosophical tradition, but he

was not alone.

Berxon gave primacy to intuition over

reason. Juan Carê asserted that with

mathematics it is not possible to know anything about

reality.

Bradley said that the idea that nature

consists of pieces of matter

submerged in space must be

abandoned, etc. Modern physics, on the

other hand, has turned

material reality into an inextricable network of

symbols whose relationship to it is more

than doubtful.

Freud's theory of the unconscious has

destroyed the old idea of ​​man

as an ordered, irrational being.

Sociology has turned the mind into a

social process. The thousand branches that have

sprouted from the trunk of philosophy

seem like so many trees separated

from each other, and from their roots

result It's highly doubtful that

any order can be established among them, and

this is what I wanted to put as an

introduction to this age of ours. In the

next video, I'll begin with

German idealism. Until then, friends.