Abstract
Many people are under the impression that there are two attitudes one can have towards the future—a cheerful but naïve hubris, or a realistic but crippling dystopian fatalism. In this essay I argue that both perspectives disfigure reality, and arise from a failure to grasp the total, emergent character of historical causality. Based on a creative appropriation of Marx’s dialectic, I propose a third alternative which synthesizes these two opposing poles and transcends their contradiction. From this new perspective, it turns out that empiricism is teleologically emancipatory, and that the subject-object dichotomization of reality, thought to be indispensable to science, is normative and should be abandoned.
Benjamin E. Schiek