ABSTRACT
The thinkers featuring in this chapter are as keen as those in the hermeneutical tradition to define human beings as primarily historical creatures. Just like the hermeneuticists, they inherit unhelpful oppositions between science and expressivity, Enlightenment and Romanticism, and hope eventually to overcome them with new philosophical or theoretical alignments. Unlike the hermeneuticists they insist, in their different ways, on the primacy of the material circumstances of our lives over our ideas. The bodily conditions of our existence determine our consciousness of it, although we typically see things the other way round. Their materialism does not imply that they are less interested in interpretation. On the contrary, their elucidations of our ways of understanding the world grow more absorbing and demanding in proportion as they try to criticize interpretation. In doing so, they hope fundamentally to characterize our habitual disguising from ourselves of the true nature of things. Thus ideologies, values and repressions – properly understood – furnish revealing clues to, rather than successful distractions from, the truth. Nevertheless, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud all desire in some sense a future breaking-out of this inauthentic history,
however culturally rich it might be in symbolic or mythical content – a new start which directly accepts our destiny and, as a consequence, estimates the world more justly.
