Hegel’s Dialectical Idealism equates morality and ethics with rationality. Morality or the sense of what is right or wrong is quite different from the meaning of rationality which is almost synonymous with reasoning. Yet with their incongruence of meanings, Hegel argues that reason will lead one to believe that in order to attain freedom one must desire free will. By virtue of this insatiable desire for freedom, an individual will conceive the notion of society. Only inside the state can an individual realize one’s rationality. There is no freedom outside the boundaries of the state. Moral, true, and rational beings are said to reside in the said society. Hegel reasons that the created state would intermittently serve as an intermediate step for human beings to find their rationality. The state would ultimately serve its purpose by rationalizing one’s wants, needs, satisfactions. The next question tackled during class was that of that of a leader’s role in man’s new found state. It is said that a good leader is capable of understanding the events that occur within society, exemplifies moral ascendancy and, more importantly, can demand the same from his subordinates.
Feuerbach had another opinion on the primacy of thought first proposed by Hegel. In his work, On the Essence of Christianity, he proposes the opposite idea of Hegel’s Idealism and consequently postulates that man is the first thesis and not the logos. Karl Marx also shares the same view that the first thesis in man’s inception of a god and its anti-thesis is man’s search for one’s true essence as reflected in one’s own ideal self. Marx argues that it is the materialistic that guides the thesis. Marx emphasizes the primacy of material where man is very much material being full of material needs. Through one’s materialistic needs, man is able to generate the Idea.
Though I underwent a very conventional Catholic upbringing during my early days, I would agree completely with Marx’s statement that Religion is the opium of the masses. It is necessarily easier to give meaning to unexplainable events by rationalizing the existence of a higher entity. Having a Supreme Being lord over all of man’s whims and fortunes (and a lot more often, misfortunes) is simpler to believe than a world without one. The same escalation of commitment to this personal belief to a deity can also be attributed to the fact that it would be a lot easier for man to exist if one can trust an infallible Being who has constant access to their every desire and need. And as Professor Fernandez would nicely put it, Tamad mag-isip ang mga Filipino.
Indeed the same crooked logic can be found in the recent trenches of our history. EDSA Revolution. The late Cardinal Sin would readily attest that the Holy Mother is the prime mover of Philippine history and has mightily cast her grace into the unknowing consciousness of the Filipinos, but I beg to disagree. Applying Marx’s view on history, it does make sense that the Filipino consciousness was ‘awakened’ the moment their materialistic needs were unmet with the Estrada administration. The Catholic religion was conveniently exploited to fit the needs of these anti-government parties for an effective medium in which they can rationalize their subversive plot. To cap it all off, these concerned parties rationalized that it was God’s divine will for the former President Estrada to step down. In the realm of a materialistic world, nothing is held sacred, not even religion. Religion, in this case, was politicized to no end and, worse, was very effective in deceiving all unwitting and unwilling-to-think-critically Filipinos to a useless uprising in an otherwise stable society. (11/25/2010)
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