Hello everyone, during my reading i try to take notes to make it easier to revisit the works in a more expedient manner, the latest one i read was Engels’s “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” and i wanted to share with the community and get some, i realize that the verbiage i use is simple but the point is to make the revisiting of said topics easy. I will break it down by chapter : Chapter 1: Hegel posing that everything that is real is rational,implies that all that dies is irrational which then leads us to the conclusion that all that is rational becomes irrational by the passage of time, which was a major contradiction in Hegel’s system. Hegel’s use of Dialectics was revolutionary, as beforehand philosophy kept chasing an absolute truth as it’s sole reason of being (raison d’être if you’re a francophone or like highfalutin verbiage lol), but dialectics moves past this as it considers that everything is in constant motion and nothing is static. The method was sound but the system was not as it still contained idealist tendencies. The young Hegelians afterwards found themselves becoming more and more materialist during their fight against religion.

Chapter 2: The debate of which came first the idea or reality still raged on in which the idealist of course posit that it is the idea which came first. This coupled with the understanding reality debate, and if we are truly capable of grasping reality completely, Kant argued that everything has it’s true essence of sort that is imperceptible to the human eye but Engels and materialist in general argue for the opposite as evident by the capabilities of reproducing chemical compounds and many phenomena in a scientific context proves that our understanding of reality is complete and there is no thing in of itself that we do no perceive. Progressing forward we had landed on mechanical materialism which saw the world as a bunch of cyclical processes that repeat themselves and as we will see later on the progress of scientific research disproved this framework.

Chapter 3: Feurbach even though he was to a certain extent a materialist, still clung onto idealist tendencies evident by his new religion, which all things being equal would only serve as a tool for obscuring the inherit class antagonisms inherit in the system. Feurbach’s also talks about the natural urge to happiness and how this is regulated by natural consequence in case of excess(digestive issues for gluttony for example) and social ones, this analysis completely ignores the fact that this pursuit of happiness is not universally enjoyed by everyone due to their lack of access to the means of pursuing said happiness, and is completely ahistorical as it disregards slavery and serfdom and how they are fundamentally built on unequal access to said means.

Chapter 4: Hegel argued that the absolute concept existed eternally, this then alienates itself to become reality which then understood by humans to become a concept once again.Meaning in Hegelian Thought the dialectics of the real world is merely a dialectics of the concept. Materialists (chiefly Marx) took the method of dialectics and paired it with materialism to rid it of the idealist weight. Materialist believe that the concept and it’s dialectics are an image of the real object and it’s dialectics. Dialectics in thought are easily observable however in the real world they are perceived as mere accidents and so on but the discoveries in sciences showed the interconnection of the many scientific disciplines. Engels does not disregard metaphysics and instead posits that it was historically necessary for primary understanding and development of science, especially to understand a single component or one phenomena, but once we started taking interest in the movement of objects and phenomena and their evolution metaphysics was rendered more nad more obsolete. In science these discoveries were that of the cell,evolution, and the conservation of energy as they showed the connectivity of the sciences and by extension the world and our understanding of it. Historical study underwent a same transformation, as history is driven by the will of people, but not just that surely? in the past even when we acknowledged the existence of other factors, instead of seeking them out scientifically, we opted to explain it away idealistically until the advent of historical materialism. Political struggle is economic struggle tied to economic emancipation, which of course implies class struggle. The will of the dominant class is carried out by the state apparatus which is wholly subordinate to said dominant class, and gives itself legitimacy through the legal framework which is only the codification of said interest.

FIN

I wanna thank everybody that read and i would love any pointers on the notes Thank you so much