LATEST..... 

It appears writing on here lately has been cut down, despite the fact there's been plenty food for the thought due to a formal yet unusual form of study (online courses that is), as well as artistic input (exibitions, musical events)..I could say also life in general, as there's a lot of inspiration in it. Well, all my initial intentions started with heavenly ideas, but they turned hell frozen in what concerns this blog. So let me remedy that a bit.

When I look back a bit on the assignments I had to write for my course of Modernism and Postmodernism and of which I'm not too pleased - the writings, not the wonderful course!... I realised I can pick some of them to update this ''place''... after all, the blog was born also out of my need of having  a ''reader's /speaker's corner''.  The magic of the internet, let me use it once again! With sense?  :)

Luckily, the texts/excerpts I will share have the length of a blog post, so there won't be as gruelling to read as some of the previous updates on here. I'm very much aware of the possibilities of improvement and completing these assigenments I wrote up until now, but I take my chances and let them go publicly (they were seen already by my peers,  so they're not that obscure - or so I'd like to think). Let me dwell no more and shoot the first one out:

Q: How did Kant define Enlightenment? Use Kant’s definition to discuss whether either Rousseau or Marx is an Enlightenment figure.

A:
Kant saw the Enlightenment as the fall of people's inmaturity chains, as a way of eliberation from the guidance provided by well established and accepted institutions of ''control'' of the state (being that religious or of other kind). In respect to the latter aspect, he even underlines that if one accepts this guidance without putting any effort of thought (use of reason), all that it has to be done is to replace his own ability of thinking with a ''payment'' so that others think in this one's place who's unable thus to think for himself/herself and just picks up what is told to do/act/etc. Freedom is the solution to all this and it can be achieved non-radically through the use of reason; gaining it, one earns indepenence in thinking, maturity and authority, i.e. is enlighted: ''(...) if it is only allowed freedom, enlightenment is almost inevitable.'' (I. Kant, What is Enlightenment)  Some of Marx's own ideas inscribe into the same direction as Kant's in what regards the ways to reach Enlightenment, inscribing him thus in the line of the thinkers of the Enlightened Age.

At the end of his essay What is Enlightenment, Kant states that ''(...) the inclination to and vocation for free thinking (....) it finally even influences the principles of government, which finds that it can profit by treating men, who are now more than machines, in accord with their dignity.'' This statement is perhaps the most appropiate reference to the impact which Marx's ideas had upon our world and how his philosophical principles found application in reality, so to say (the whole history of the communism being more than evocative in this sense).
In the same manner as Kant, Marx indicated that a better state of affairs can be achieved only when men would break from  being part of the machine (the capitalistic one) which makes them dependent and lacking individuality: ''In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.''(Manifesto of The Communist Party)
Marx pointed at the capital and at wage-slavery as to the yokes which kept people under opression, a state of things which altered relations in society and among people, transforming these people into commodities which served the interests of the few who held the capital and the power (''Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power'', in the Manifesto of The Communist Party). This incompatible mode of living was not seen by Marx as something to be totally destroyed, but it was aiming to a better use of capital and products of the society without intereference to an individual's liberty, somehting which yet again takes us back to Kant's own idea of personal independence and autonomy.

Thus, Marx and Kant's principles of building an enlighted society meet in the manner in which the two philosophers indicate the pursuit of freedom and breaking from any societal chains which stops an individual from being one (and not part of a controlled mass), but also in the way in which they saw this breaking as not being a radical, yet built on the remains of the old.