
The End of History? (1989) - Tomte
https://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm
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barberousse
As a former continental philosophy person who pivoted into front-end, this is
kinda surprising to see come up on HN. I'm guessing this is hear owing to
current issues with our President's possible abuses, election interference by
Russian nationals, etc, but reading this again, Fukuyama's trouble starts with
his extremely troubling history of idealism/materialism in Continental
European philosophy, which is already fairly ambiguous.

Another way to posit the history of idealism and materialism, and one which I,
as a Nietzschean, find much more useful, is to recognize that Hegel had
finished his major works before 1820. It is in 1824 that a book titled
"Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire" is published. This book is regarded
by some as the inaugural text of Thermodynamics as a scientific discipline.
This is important because this field, only in its nascent stages at the time
of Hegel's death in 1831, is _extremely well-understood_ by the time Marx,
Nietzsche, and Freud were students. All three men were also were extremely
fascinated by the stuff they were reading in Darwin's books. Thermodynamics
and Darwinian evolution both strongly refute the idea that something can come
from nothing, and when that maxim gets transliterated to the field of
philosophy of the time, it allows us to pose the question: so where did
consciousness come from? (and, more pointedly, and potently, how can God
exist?) In both Hegel and Kant, his predecessor, "consciousness" gets
explained in seemingly circular and sophisticated fashions, but with
materialism, we get to pose consciousness as an "emergent property" for lack
of a better term (in Freud, consciousness is a side effect of the forces of
speech and visual memetics [for the sake of brevity]; in Marx, the side of
effect of forces in the sphere of production; in Nietzsche, partially as a
side effect of early man's 'political' machinations and forces exerted by
Abrahamic faiths with their notions of original sin) But for a certainty, all
three agree that "consciousness" is the _cause_ of absolutely nothing; all
three represent different takes on "materialism" as well, where Fukuyama is
primarily arguing with students/criticis of political economy on the left and
right.

Fukuyama's weird reading of Weber also leads to line like this describing the
failure of Soviet governance: "The answer must be found in the consciousness
of the elites and leaders ruling them, who decided to opt for the 'Protestant'
life of wealth and risk over the "Catholic" path of poverty and security."

