Zain's Guide to Overthinking Everything

  Enlightenment Political Philosophy: Thomas Hobbes vs. John Locke vs. Rousseau Beginning with Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), he was in favor of governmental absolutism. He argued this through his social contract theory. Social contract theory tries to prove the legitimacy of government by explaining why people should give up their freedom. The burden of proof is on the state to show why people should obey rather than live naturally. According to Hobbes, human psychology is fundamentally driven by desire for pleasure and aversion from pain. Furthermore, morally what we call good is what gives pleasure and what we call bad is what causes pain. Yet, he also recognized that individuals each had their own pleasures and pains which can be distinct from others. The things that people sought, he called “passions” and thus life becomes the pursuit of passion. The means to achieve one’s passion is done through reason, which is calculated by looking at the pros and cons of the method of achiev...

Dialectical Materialism        Marx proposes dialectical materialism. He loved Hegel’s dialectic and his progression but Marx, a materialist, he does not believe in the existence of a soul or the non-material world. He sees a materialistic evolutionary progression from simple to complex and the same in human beings. Humans in a more primitive state would be more tooth and claw but as we grow as a species we are to be more communal and collectively minded or communist. History is the story of human struggle, specifically class struggle. The thesis, an emperor, and the antithesis, the slave, and the synthesis being a king, i.e. a feudal system. Then the king being the new thesis, the antithesis is the serf, the synthesis would be the bourgeoisie and the merchant system. The bourgeoisie would be the new thesis, the antithesis is the proletariat, and the synthesis is the communist system. However, it could be argued that the final synthesis would be capitalism inste...