Aesthetic Materialism

I'm sympathetic to Hegel in the sense that I think that what is most important is consciousness itself, though I'm unsure whether the Christian framework that Hegel employs to understand it is the best way.  It seems possible to me that an entirely scientific, materialist framework is sufficient for explaining consciousness, though I don't know how, and I'm skeptical of all the available theories of which I'm aware.   I do not believe for a moment that consciousness is a mere linguistic confusion.  (Identity might be, perhaps.  But identity has nothing to do with consciousness.)  So the Wittgensteinian, Lacanian, and Derridean traditions are unappealing to me, and seem to me to be definitively ruled out.  Nor do I find Heidegger plausible, if he insists that "language is the house of being."  It strikes me that language has little or nothing to do with consciousness.  Animals that do not have language the same way we do are, it seems to ...

  It's difficult to express the chief defect in Karl Marx's theory concisely, but if I had to sum it up in a sentence, I would put it this way: Marx presents the problem of capitalism in such a way that it cannot be solved.  This is for several reasons, but one of them is that, in some of his writings, he fails to distinguish adequately between capitalism and the market.  That is not to say that he makes no distinction at all.  I don't want to be one-sided, here - I recognize his accomplishments, which were considerable, and I want to give credit where credit is due.  Marx does indeed admit a distinction, or at least seems to point towards an implied distinction - but then he blurs this distinction.  Of course, it's perfectly fine to be a bit nuanced - one could imagine a theorist who went too far in the opposite direction, overly concretizing, making everything a little too black and white.  But I think we're far from that danger, and that to analyze ...