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Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Marx and Nietzsche on Free Will, Part 2

Jonathan Murray
Section 4
Final 2
Marx and Nietzsche on Free Will, Part 2
            The concept of free-will has something that has perplexed me for a while now. I generally believe that humans do have free-will, that people are free to forge their own fate, and that there is no larger destiny that people hold. That being said, there is something that nags at the back of my head that says maybe there is no free-will, and that everything I want to do has already been determined. This nagging idea doesn’t really worry me, because if everything truly already has been determined, then I was already going to have these thoughts and I have nothing to worry about. It is both a comforting and a very restricting conundrum. These thoughts of predetermination don’t particularly spring from a Christian frame of mind, but more so a deistic one, one where a god isn’t actively participating in the universe and its happenings, as it has already charted the course for all future events and is letting them unfold. This sort of deism isn’t a belief I personally hold, but is one I find very interesting and one that I could see as a possibility.
            I find the beliefs of Nietzsche and Marx to both be very interesting. They both represent a fascinating point of philosophical history, one where the lens through which many philosophers viewed their ideas shifted away from a Christian one, and more towards a secular one. While Marx and Nietzsche did have some similar views on religion, their philosophies also differ quite a bit. Nietzsche’s ideas are far more harsh than I tend to lean towards, believing that if a person can’t keep up with the pack, they deserve to be left behind. While I don’t believe in all of Marx’s philosophies, I do agree with him that people do have rights to certain things, such as basic food, water, and shelter, that they should no longer have to fight for, given how far humans have advanced from their survival-of-the-fittest animal ancestors.
            That being said I would have to say that Marx is my favorite philosopher at the moment. Well, maybe not favorite, but definitely most interesting. I love history, and I find his view that history is composed of class struggles to be a very interesting and, for the most part, convincing one. As mentioned before, I do share some of his views on the basic things people are entitled to, but I’m not as thrilled on his idea of giving over ALL private property. All in all, I do find him to be a fascinating philosopher and a truly revolutionary thinker.

Link to Part 1: http://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2016/05/marx-and-nietzche-on-free-will.html

1 comment:

  1. Hey, since you're interested in Marx, I wanted to point out a few things that you might not know:

    For one thing, private property in the Marxist sense is separate from personal property. Personal property refers to what you make use of, meaning your instrument, toothbrush, car, etc., whereas private property refers to something that one owns but does not make direct use of. For example, imagine a farmer who owns more land than he can work himself. He decides to divide his land into five parts, work one himself, and pay four other farmers a certain amount to work the rest of the land, while keeping the profits for himself. In the Marxist sense, the injustice in private property is that even though the four other farmers work the land and produce the value in the crops, the farmer gets to keep the profit and pay the farmers less than what they would make if they owned that land themselves.

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