As we said before, Marx is the most important point of view in the West, and one of the ways by which Marx became the most important point of view is through a point he made in his doctoral dissertation about how the world within the world which is cultivated by individual consciousness or self-consciousness through philosophy is both an aspect of the totality of reality and the totality of reality all at the same time. Marx wrote:
“It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself, turns into practical energy, and, leaving the shadowy empire of Amenthes as will, turns itself against the reality of the world existing without it.”
A process then takes shape whereby the aspect of totality becomes the totality and vice versa. Marx added: “When philosophy turns itself as will against the world of appearance, then the system is lowered to an abstract totality, that is, it has become one aspect of the world which opposes another one.” Philosophy is very much realized in this world “to its intellectual carriers, to the individual self-consciousness in which its progress appears.”
But Marx also suggested that a contradiction then arises, in the sense that the liberation of the social world from a lack of philosophy is to lose philosophy altogether. How one resolves this contradiction is to simply let the process play out until a “great philosophy” or a “world philosophy” develops over the course of time. To borrow from Marx yet again:
“While philosophy has sealed itself off to form a consummate, total world, the determination of this totality is conditioned by the general development of philosophy, just as that development is the condition of the form in which philosophy turns into a practical relationship towards reality; thus the totality of the world in general is divided within itself, and this division is carried to the extreme, for spiritual existence has been freed, has been enriched to universality, the heart-beat has become in itself the differentiation in the concrete form which is the whole organism. The division of the world is total only when its aspects are totalities. The world confronting a philosophy total in itself is therefore a world torn apart. This philosophy’s activity therefore also appears torn apart and contradictory; its objective universality is turned back into the subjective forms of individual consciousness in which it has life. But one must not let oneself be misled by this storm which follows a great philosophy, a world philosophy. Ordinary harps play under any fingers, Aeolian harps only when struck by the storm.”
It follows that philosophy is at first “torn apart” and “contradictory” but then becomes “objective universality” as a result of a process that is facilitated by individual consciousness or individual self-consciousness. But as Cornel West argued, the ability of individual consciousness or individual self-consciousness to facilitate such a complex and epic process “is inextricably linked with the struggle of those who have been dehumanized on the margins of society.”
But of course, the trick employed by individual consciousness or individual self-consciousness in both facilitating the whole process of rendering philosophy into an “objective universality” all while espousing a sense of empathy and sympathy with those who have been dehumanized and marginalized is by turning “meaninglessness and hopelessness” into an “effective kind of struggle and resistance” against the “market mentality” and “market ethos” of those who are perpetrating this dehumanization and marginalization.
Adam A. Azim 