1990s Karl Marx

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After the end of the Cold War and the apparent triumph of God over Satan, countless wiseacres declared that we had reached what Francis Fukuyama smugly called the End of History. Communism was as dead as Marx himself, and the blood-curdling threat with which he concluded the Communist Manifesto, the most influential political pamphlet of all time, now seemed no more than a quaint historical relic: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!” The only fetters binding the working class today are mock-Rolex watches, but these latter-day proletarians have much else they’d hate to lose - microwave ovens, holiday timeshares and satellite dishes. They have bought their council houses and their shares in privatised utilities; they made a nice little windfall when their building society turned into a bank. In short, we are all bourgeois now. Even the British Labour Party has gone Thatcherite.

--Francis Wheen, “Karl Marx: A Life”

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Of course, the 1990s are long gone, and revolution is starting to sound better again to a lot of people today. Instead of proletarians and the bourgeois, we speak in terms of the 99% and the 1%. A lot of the music is the same.

Saturday Morning

I got a little spooked last night. A little after midnight, as I was trying to sleep, the cats were getting restless and noisy, and since it looked like the temperature was not going to sink below the mid-forties, I let them go. After a couple of hours of solid sleep, I recall what I did, and not feeling to secure about the weather, I check the patio. Sammy is crouched there eager to come inside, and he does not want to go back outside. He was the only cat there, and I am feeling a little anxious about getting the cats in the house, though the temperature did not take a drastic drop. I cannot fall back asleep. About an hour later, Coco makes it in. That leaves only Ash to worry about. In about another hour, as I go to the sliding-door to check the patio, I notice that Ash seems to be in the kitchen by Coco. I look closely at her face and see the little white stripe above her eye. It is Ash. Was I mistaken about letting Sammy in; was it really her? I rush to the living room to look for Sammy. It is dark, but I am able to see Sammy dozing on the recliner. How did Ash get inside?? I suppose she must have snuck past me when I let one of the other ones in, which has happened before; they can be devilishly fast. Or maybe she was in the whole time, and I was mistaken that all three cats went outside. Well, no biggie, and I finally got my sleep. The morning becomes rainy, so that it turns out that it was a good thing that they got the few hours to do their thing in the moonlight.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

This is from Rebecca Goldstein's promotional work for her book "Plato at the Googleplex".

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INTERVIEWER

It’s interesting that you describe philosophy as a “mediator” between science and our common-sense intuitions about the nature of reality. So, on the one hand, philosophy is not, as Locke, for example, maintained, the “handmaiden” of the sciences. But, on the other hand, you’re not saying, are you, that philosophy’s job is just to tidy up what Wilfrid Sellars called the “manifest image” of the world?

GOLDSTEIN

Exactly. I do think there are other intuitions, commitments, even attitudes, that, in a Kantian sense, structure our experience and which are very hard to do away with. Some of them, if we’re committed to them, have implications. So philosophy is about maximising coherence. That would be my slogan for what philosophy does—the bumper sticker.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein at Prospect Magazine

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I am not entirely clear on the point here, but I think it is that philosophy still has its own intellectual domain, even though it must be informed by science. Science gives us a foothold on clear, objective reality, and philosophy works out our human reality - what it means for us.