5. Tracing Truth: The Rise Of Necessity

Kant: The Mind That Shapes Reality

Intuitive certainty as a rational foundation for truth had collapsed spectacularly.

It is easy to gloss over this collapse from a distance. A few obscure thinkers pursued strange ideas about truth and failed to ground it securely. So what?

But these were not obscure thinkers. They were the most respected minds of their time. And their ideas about truth were not strange. On the contrary, they were natural starting points, reasonable attempts to anchor knowledge in clarity, experience, or reason.

What had happened was this: in the dialogue of the best minds over a little more than a century, it became clear that the very concept of truth used in everyday life could not be justified. It could not be reconstructed in a way that held together.

Worse still, the evidence pointed to something more radical. Our ordinary understanding of the world, with stable objects and necessary causal connections, appeared to rest not on reason or necessity, but on custom and habit.

What could possibly help now?

Only one candidate for certainty seemed to remain: the step-by-step necessity of mathematics, what David Hume had called the demonstrative sciences.

But this route was treacherous. As Hume himself admitted, even if the rules of logic are infallible, our minds are not. We often fail to apply them correctly. We fall into error.

Still, this was the only path left.

So Immanuel Kant turned away from intuitive certainty and toward demonstrative necessity.

This shift helps explain why Kant and the thinkers who followed him became famously difficult to read. The age of elegance and immediacy was over. With Kant, philosophy moved into abstraction, not out of arrogance, but because the problem demanded it.

When Kant read Hume, he later wrote that it shook him from his dogmatic slumber. Hume had exposed the fragility of knowledge. If all we have are patterns of experience, then causation, the self, space, time, identity, even external reality itself become uncertain. But Kant saw a deeper puzzle behind Hume's skepticism.

Consider causality. Kant agreed with Hume that causality involves necessity and universality. And he agreed that neither the relation of cause and effect nor the necessity of this connection can be found in what the senses give us.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes:

"Experience never gives its judgments true or strict, but merely assumed or comparative universality [...] so that, properly speaking, it must be stated: so far as we have observed thus far, no exception has been found to this or that rule."

["Erfahrung gibt niemals ihren Urteilen wahre oder strenge, sondern nur angenommene und komparative Allgemeinheit [...], so daß es eigentlich heißen muß: soviel wir bisher wahrgenommen haben, findet sich von dieser oder jener Regel keine Ausnahme."]

Yet we do not merely expect causality. We rely on it as if it were necessary: everything has a cause, nothing happens without one. Today, we can at least imagine genuinely random processes, such as the decay of radioactive elements, for which no hidden causes appear to exist. But in Kant’s time, such possibilities lay entirely outside the horizon of thought.

Kant therefore argues against Hume:

"[...] the very concept of cause so obviously contains the concept of a necessity of the connection with an effect and a strict universality of the rule, that the concept would be entirely lost if one were to derive it, as Hume did, from a frequent association [...]."

["[...] ja in dem letzteren enthält selbst der Begriff einer Ursache so offenbar den Begriff einer Notwendigkeit der Verknüpfung mit einer Wirkung und einer strengen Allgemeinheit der Regel, daß er gänzlich verlorengehen würde, wenn man ihn, wie Hume tat, von einer öftern Beigesellung dessen, was geschieht, mit dem, was vorhergeht, und einer daraus entspringenden Gewohnheit, [...] Vorstellungen zu verknüpfen, ableiten wollte."]

Kant concludes: "If, therefore, a judgment is thought in strict universality, i.e., so that no exception at all is allowed to be possible, then it is not derived from experience [...]."

["Wird also ein Urteil in strenger Allgemeinheit gedacht, d.i. so, daß gar keine Ausnahme als möglich verstattet wird, so ist es nicht von der Erfahrung abgeleitet [...]."]

Solving this puzzle, Kant suspected, required a new kind of judgment.

Kant's predecessors had assumed that all knowledge fell into two categories. First, statements that are true or false solely by virtue of the concepts involved, independent of experience, such as "a bachelor is unmarried." Second, statements whose truth cannot be determined by concepts alone and must therefore be learned from experience, such as "wood is hard."

Kant argued that this division was incomplete. There is a third category: statements whose truth is not revealed by conceptual analysis alone, yet which cannot be derived from experience either, such as 7 + 5 = 12.

If such judgments exist, then Hume may have dismissed too much. And perhaps something could still be saved.

Kant's investigation begins with a striking claim. Strip away all perception of objects and all thoughts about them, and something still remains: space and time. These, he argues, are not learned from experience. They are the necessary preconditions for having any experience at all.

Causality is another such necessary precondition. Personal identity, too, depends on structural features of cognition rather than experience alone.

From this Kant draws a new conclusion about truth. Truth does not arise solely from what the world gives us. It depends on how our minds are structured to receive it. The mind is not a passive observer. It actively shapes experience. In order for experience to be possible at all, the mind must already supply its basic form.

Our minds therefore organize sensory input according to built-in structures: space and time, and a set of fundamental categories such as cause, substance, and identity. These structures are not learned. They are innate structures, though not innate ideas in the Cartesian sense.

When we judge something to be true, we are not simply matching thoughts to a raw, independent world. We are recognizing that a judgment fits the world as it appears through this shared cognitive framework.

This was Kant's central move. He made the conditions for experience and knowledge internal to the mind, without collapsing into subjectivism. These conditions are not private. They are necessary for any possible experience at all. Truth still means correspondence with reality, but a reality already structured by the mind. We see the world through categories we cannot not use.

Naive truth is preserved, and so are causality, the self, space, time, and identity. But the price is clear. Truth now applies only to the world as it appears to us. The world as it is in itself remains inaccessible. The mind both enables knowledge and limits it.

Kant also drew boundaries for philosophy. Philosophy as pure speculation, he argued, overreaches, because it lacks a criterion for its truth. Philosophy can only proceed legitimately by identifying the necessary conditions of possible experience.

The impact of this insight was immense. It reshaped epistemology and altered how science, psychology, and the limits of reason itself were understood.

Kant had rebuilt certainty. Not as something felt, but as something structured: necessity. He had shown that we must experience the world in certain ways if we are to experience it at all. And that truth is shaped by those conditions.

But the cost remained. The world before us was appearance. The world in itself unfolded behind our backs, forever beyond direct reach.

René Descartes had imagined truth as a cathedral built from ideas, resting on certainty.

John Locke had objected that it must be built from experience, stone by stone, from a blank slate.

Kant returned to the cathedral. But now it was not made of ideas. It was made of the mind's own structure.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would resist this. He would argue that even the structure of thought unfolds over time. That the mind is not a cathedral, but the becoming of a cathedral.

Much later, science would raise its hand. Charles Darwin would challenge the assumption that cognitive structures are fixed. And relativity theory would bind space and time into a single fabric, spacetime, a structure that disappears if all matter disappears. If space and time were necessary forms of human experience, how could they vanish?

Conviction Shift: Kant

Kant gave up on intuitive certainty and asked instead: what are the necessary conditions for experience? From these conditions he concluded that we do not merely receive the world. We actively shape it. Space, time, causality, and identity are not learned, but are required for any experience to occur at all. Truth survives, but only within the world of appearance. The world as it is in itself remains out of reach.

Hegel: Truth As The Whole

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel thought Kant's account was lopsided.

To Hegel, mind and object cannot be cleanly separated. They are not two independent things that somehow have to be connected afterward. They belong to one evolving whole. Otherwise, how could the mind ever reach the object at all?

The mind also does not begin already equipped with a fixed set of categories. It begins as a largely undifferentiated, receptive presence to what appears. Not yet structured understanding, but the seed from which structure will grow. The categories Kant treated as conditions of experience are, for Hegel, results of a developmental process, not its starting point.

That initial presence soon encounters something that does not fit. Something that contradicts its first grasp of the world. To resolve this tension, the mind adjusts and expands. In doing so, it does not discard what came before. It preserves it while transforming it.

Contradiction by contradiction, the mind advances toward a more adequate understanding.

Truth, for Hegel, is not a fixed correspondence discovered at a single moment. It is the unfolding whole. It emerges only at the end of the mind's journey, after every contradiction has been confronted and integrated. One stage at a time: a position, its contradiction, a higher reconciliation. The seed becomes the flower.

This process is already visible at the very beginning of his Phenomenology of Spirit, where consciousness is still minimally articulated. Hegel introduces the example of the "Here":

"The Here is for example the tree. I turn around, so this truth has disappeared, and has turned into its opposite truth: the Here is not a tree, but rather a house. The Here does not disappear; rather, it persists in the disappearance of the house, tree and so forth, and indifferent to being house or tree. The [Here] shows itself as mediated simplicity, or as generality."

["Das Hier ist z.B. der Baum. Ich wende mich um, so ist diese Wahrheit verschwunden und hat sich in die entgegengesetzte verkehrt: Das Hier ist nicht ein Baum, sondern vielmehr ein Haus. Das Hier selbst verschwindet nicht; sondern es ist bleibend im Verschwinden des Hauses, Baumes usf. und gleichgültig, Haus, Baum zu sein. Das [Hier] zeigt sich also wieder als vermittelte Einfachheit oder als Allgemeinheit."]

What is happening here should not be read as a trick of language, but a movement of consciousness itself. At first, the mind takes "this" to be a determinate object: the tree. Turning around reveals a contradiction: "this" is now a house, not a tree. The mind cannot simply discard one truth in favor of the other. It must revise its understanding. It comes to see that "this" is not a particular object at all, but a form of immediacy that can host different determinations.

The contradiction is not an error to be eliminated. It is the engine of development.

This process continues, stage by stage, as consciousness refines and expands its concepts, integrating ever more of reality into understanding. Philosophy, for Hegel, does not consist in identifying timeless conditions of experience, but in following experience as it transforms itself through its own internal tensions.

Hegel begins with something like Kant's receptive mind, but without Kant's fixed categories. That mind is already embedded in the world and develops in interaction with it. There is no sharp divide between appearance and an unknowable thing in itself. The mind does not merely impose form on reality. It develops itself to grasp reality more adequately. This was the asymmetry in Kant that Hegel wanted to overcome.

When every contradiction has been integrated according to the inner necessity of the object, and no unresolved tensions remain, absolute knowledge is reached. At that point, mind and object coincide. Knowledge becomes fully true, not because it mirrors reality from outside, but because it has become adequate to it from within.

Hegel distinguishes between two kinds of necessity, and it matters which one is at work here.

Outer necessity is formal necessity. The kind found in mathematical proofs, where each step follows according to rules applied from the outside. Such necessity is indifferent to the content of what is being proved.

Inner necessity, by contrast, is the necessity of the thing itself. It is the logic of the object's own development. Hegel's logic aims to trace this inner movement. It cannot be reduced to formal rules, because its direction is determined by the content it unfolds.

Critics have long objected that this reduces necessity to whatever Hegel himself judges necessary.

Some regard his philosophy as a milestone in the history of thought. Others see it as an elaborate illusion, a system that mistakes its own momentum for truth. No consensus has ever been reached.

Hegel himself believed that his system represented the culmination of philosophical development, the point at which thought finally became fully transparent to itself. An extraordinary act of intellectual self-congratulation.

The cost of this ambition was substantial. Hegel's system is vast, abstract, and often impenetrable. His writing is dense, his sentences winding, his conceptual machinery heavy. His vision of history as a progression toward higher forms of understanding can appear either emancipatory or oppressive. Does disagreement signal genuine difference, or merely developmental delay? Can entire cultures be ranked as more or less advanced? These questions would later take on unmistakably political significance.

Still, Hegel's achievement remains singular. He offered the most ambitious attempt to understand not just truth, but the formation of truth itself. To show how convictions are not simply adopted or rejected, but formed through necessity.

Convictions, for him, are neither imposed from outside nor chosen freely from within. They emerge in the tension between both. Contradiction is not failure, but fuel. Truth is not found by eliminating error, but by integrating it into a higher understanding.

Convictions evolve through breakdown, revision, and reconciliation. And although Hegel believed this development to be universal and necessary, the lasting insight is more modest: what we believe depends on where we stand in an unfolding process.

Conviction is not static. It is lived history, one contradiction at a time. And what counts as a contradiction depends on deeper commitments: on what we take to be capable of conflict in the first place.

Arthur Schopenhauer, a contemporary of Hegel, belonged firmly to the camp that saw his system as illusion. He thought Kant did not need to be overcome, but clarified and completed. What Hegel presented as necessary development, Schopenhauer saw as projection: a grand narrative imposed on a world driven by blind will rather than rational unfolding.

Karl Marx, by contrast, found something powerful in Hegel’s dialectic. He stripped it of its idealism and recast it as material struggle. History, on this view, is not driven by ideas realizing themselves, but by economic forces that generate ideas as their expression. Dialectic survived, but its subject changed.

Much later, science added a further complication. Some processes converge; others stall in local optima. Some models overfit their own internal structure and mistake that structure for reality. What looks like necessity from within a system may be an artifact of the system itself.

Conviction Shift: Hegel

Hegel rejected the idea that truth is fixed or given in advance. He denied that the mind begins with a complete set of categories, and instead understood truth as the unfolding of mind and reality together in a whole. Convictions arise through struggle, contradiction, and integration, driven by inner necessity rather than choice. When development reaches its completion, thought and reality coincide. Truth, for Hegel, is what emerges at the end of this dialectical journey.

Schopenhauer: Truth As A Veil Over The Will

Arthur Schopenhauer saw himself as one of the last genuine philosophers, fighting against what he regarded as the intellectual fraudulence unleashed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. To him, Hegel was not a brilliant system-builder, but a charlatan: a master of convoluted obscurity who had seduced academia with empty verbiage.

For Schopenhauer, Hegel's belief in historical progress, in the unfolding of ever-higher truths, was a grand illusion. Where Hegel saw dialectical development, Schopenhauer saw an endless cycle of blind striving and suffering.

Where Hegel saw ideas evolving toward truth, Schopenhauer saw ideas as surface-level rationalizations of deeper, irrational forces. Hegel's philosophy appeared to him as a magnificent distraction, a way for people to convince themselves that they were advancing toward wisdom, when in fact they were merely justifying the restless movement of the Will.

Against Hegel, Schopenhauer believed that Immanuel Kant had been largely right. But Kant, in his view, had stopped one step too early.

We do, Schopenhauer claimed, have access to the thing in itself.

In the second book of The World as Will and Representation, he writes:

"If we in the first book [...] had explained our own body, like all other objects in this vivid world, as a mere representation of the cognizing subject;"

["Wenn wir im ersten Buche, [...] den eigenen Leib, wie alle übrigen Objekte dieser anschaulichen Welt, für bloße Vorstellung des erkennenden Subjekts erklärten;"]

Look at your hand. It appears as an object, structured by space, time, and causality. It is representation. Close one eye, then the other. The hand you see shifts position, but the hand itself does not.

Schopenhauer continues:

"[T]hen now it has become clear to us, what in everyone's consciousness distinguishes the representation of the body from everything else, [...] namely this, that the body occurs in consciousness in a completely different way, different in kind altogether, which we designate by the word will, and that exactly this double cognition, that we have of our own body, gives us insight into itself, its action and movement on motifs, as well as its suffering through external influence, in one word, about what it is, not as a representation, but furthermore, in itself, which we do not have immediately of the nature, action and suffering of all other real objects."

["[S]o ist es uns nunmehr deutlich geworden, was im Bewußtseyn eines Jeden, die Vorstellung des eigenen Leibes von allen andern, dieser übrigens ganz gleichen, unterscheidet, nämlich dies, daß der Leib noch in einer ganz andern, toto genere verschiedenen Art im Bewußtseyn vorkommt, die man durch das Wort Wille bezeichnet, und daß eben diese doppelte Erkenntniß, die wir vom eigenen Leibe haben, uns über ihn selbst, über sein Wirken und Bewegen auf Motive, wie auch über sein Leiden durch äußere Einwirkung, mit Einem Wort, über das, was er, nicht als Vorstellung, sondern außerdem, also an sich ist, denjenigen Aufschluß giebt, welchen wir über das Wesen, Wirken und Leiden aller andern realen Objekte unmittelbar nicht haben."]

Pinch your hand. The pain you feel is not merely an appearance. It is not representation of something else. It is something more immediate. Here, Schopenhauer argues, we encounter the thing in itself directly: Will.

The Will manifests itself in all appearances. In gravity and magnetism. In the formation of crystals. In the growth of trees and their reproduction through fruit. Everywhere, the same blind force expresses itself.

It becomes most visible in life. Schopenhauer offers example after example:

"[T]he young spider [has no idea] of the prey for which it spins a web; nor has the ant-lion any idea of the ant for which it digs a trench for the first time. The larva of the stag-beetle bites the hole in the wood, in which it is to await its metamorphosis, twice as large if it is to become a male beetle as if it is to become a female, in the first case so that there may be room for the horns, of which it has no idea yet. In such actions of these animals the will is clearly operative as in their other actions; but it is in blind activity, which is admittedly accompanied by knowledge but not guided by it."

["[D]ie junge Spinne [hat keine Vorstellung] von dem Raube, zu dem sie ein Netz wirkt; noch der Ameisenlöwe von der Ameise, der er zum ersten Male eine Grube gräbt; die Larve des Hirschschröters beißt das Loch im Holze, wo sie ihre Verwandelung bestehn will, noch ein Mal so groß, wenn sie ein männlicher, als wenn sie ein weiblicher Käfer werden will, im ersten Fall um Platz für Hörner zu haben, von denen sie noch keine Vorstellung hat. In solchem Thun dieser Thiere ist doch offenbar, wie in ihrem übrigen Thun, der Wille thätig; aber er ist in blinder Thätigkeit, die zwar von Erkenntniß begleitet, aber nicht von ihr geleitet ist."]

And finally, the Will becomes conscious of itself in the human being.

The Will is free, because it is the thing in itself. But this freedom offers no comfort. You can do what you want, but you cannot want what you want.

Where Kant had argued that truth is shaped by the structures of cognition, Schopenhauer went deeper. Even our most rational insights, he claimed, are surface effects of a deeper, irrational force.

We believe not because we reason well, but because we are compelled. The intellect is not the master. It is the servant of the Will, producing explanations and justifications after the fact for what has already been decided at a deeper level.

Human life, on this view, is inherently tragic. We are caught in an endless cycle of desire and dissatisfaction. We strive, we obtain, and satisfaction vanishes almost immediately, replaced by new longing. The Will drives us forward without ever allowing rest.

What we call happiness is merely a brief pause in suffering.

This stood in stark opposition to Enlightenment optimism. Reason and progress, Schopenhauer believed, could never free us from the tyranny of the Will. No amount of clarity dissolves blind striving. We are trapped in illusion and pain.

Yet Schopenhauer did not leave us entirely without escape. If truth and conviction are surface phenomena, then liberation cannot come from better beliefs. It must come from loosening the grip of the Will itself. Art, music, and contemplative absorption offer temporary relief, moments in which willing falls silent.

But lasting release, he argued, requires something more radical: renunciation. The denial of the Will's demands.

Schopenhauer's fascination with Indian philosophy was no ornament. It shaped his entire outlook. In Buddhism and Vedanta he found confirmation of his own insight: that desire is the root of suffering, and that wisdom lies in withdrawal rather than affirmation. Where Western philosophy had sought salvation through reason, Schopenhauer believed peace could come only through detachment.

Schopenhauer accepted Kant's verdict on naive truth theory: correspondence applies only within the world of appearance. But he took one further step. And one step deeper.

He claimed that we do have access to the thing in itself. It is blind Will, endlessly struggling with itself.

We do not merely suffer in the world. We suffer as the world.

Naive truth returns. But what it reveals is not order or reason. It is striving without purpose.

Schopenhauer's lasting contribution is not that he exposed illusion, but that he explained why even clarity can betray us. Something deeper uses the mind for its own ends.

His dark vision turned philosophy away from faith in rational necessity toward the irrational forces shaping belief, action, and suffering. His influence on Friedrich Nietzsche was profound. Nietzsche would first admire him, then rebel, taking Schopenhauer's insight and reversing its conclusion: not renunciation, but affirmation.

Sigmund Freud denied any influence from Schopenhauer. Few have found this denial convincing.

Conviction Shift: Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer rejected the idea that reason leads directly to truth. Convictions, for him, are not shaped by logic alone, but by a deeper force he called the Will: blind, irrational striving beneath all appearances. The intellect serves this force, providing explanations after the fact. Conviction is not a triumph of insight, but an expression of inner compulsion. Truth-seeking becomes a veil over desire. Liberation, if it is possible at all, does not come from believing the right thing, but from loosening the grip of the Will.

In this sense, naive truth returns once more. But what it reveals beneath appearance is not harmony or reason. It is blind striving, endlessly repeating itself.

Marx: Truth As Ideology

The Young Hegelians were a loose and quarrelsome circle of students and critics who believed that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had retreated into abstraction, leaving reality behind.

One of them, Ludwig Feuerbach, attacked Hegel's philosophy at its very starting point. In Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy, he writes:

"'The here is a tree'; but I walk further and say: 'The here is a house.' The first truth has now disappeared. [...] We cannot even speak of the individual, which we mean in the sensuous certainty." - "The here - why not that which is here?"

["'Das Hier ist ein Baum'; aber ich gehe weiter und sage: 'Das Hier ist ein Haus.' Die erste Wahrheit ist verschwunden. [...] Das Einzelne, welches wir in der sinnlichen Gewißheit meinen, können wir daher gar nicht einmal aussprechen.", "Das Hier - warum nicht das Hierseiende?"]

Feuerbach's point was blunt. Hegel, he argued, loses real things at the very first step of his philosophy. Abstraction dissolves the concrete world instead of explaining it.

He later makes the same point with an almost mocking example:

"My brother is called John; but innumerable people besides him are called John too. Does it follow now that my brother John is not real? Or that Johnness is the truth?"

["Mein Bruder heißt Johann Adolph; aber außer ihm sind und heißen noch unzählige andere auch Johann Adolph. Folgt nun daraus, daß mein Johann keine Realität ist? folgt daraus, daß die Johannheit eine Wahrheit ist?"]

For Feuerbach, Hegel's method was not philosophy but a game with words. Real knowledge, he insisted, must begin from the sensuous, physical world.

He concludes that beginning from sensuous reality is the only justified starting point, because otherwise "we would let ourselves be fobbed off with words instead of things".

["sonst würden wir uns im Leben statt mit Sachen mit Worten abspeisen lassen"]

This position came to be known as materialism.

But Karl Marx thought even this was not radical enough.

In his Theses on Feuerbach, he writes:

""Feuerbach is not content with abstract thinking and wants intuition; but he does not grasp sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity."

["Feuerbach, mit dem abstrakten Denken nicht zufrieden, will die Anschauung; aber er faßt die Sinnlichkeit nicht als praktische menschlich-sinnliche Tätigkeit."]

Feuerbach, Marx thought, had taken only a half step. He had moved from abstract speculation to contemplative observation. But materialism, Marx argued, must go further. It must turn to practice.

That meant turning to economy: to the concrete ways in which real human beings organize their lives, labor, feed themselves, reproduce, and struggle within societies.

Marx took Hegel's dialectical method and applied it not to concepts, but to historical forces of production.

Truth, in this view, is not merely an individual achievement. It is shaped by material conditions. Convictions arise within social structures, formed by labor relations, ownership, class position, and struggle. Morality, politics, religion, and philosophy are not neutral reflections of reality. They are conditioned by the mode of production of a society.

Philosophy, Marx argued, had spent too long treating ideas as if they floated above human life. But convictions are not born in a vacuum. They emerge from lived roles within economic systems.

History, therefore, does not move forward through the refinement of ideas, but through conflict. Each historical epoch has a dominant mode of production, like feudalism, capitalism, and so on, and with it, a dominant ideology. What appears "natural," "rational," or "true" in a given era reflects the interests embedded in that system. The feudal lord believed in divine hierarchy; the capitalist believes in free markets. Neither belief is timeless. Each is historically conditioned.

Where Hegel saw contradictions between ideas driving history forward, Marx saw contradictions between classes. The struggle is not conceptual but material. The synthesis is not a higher idea, but a new social order produced through conflict, upheaval, and transformation.

Like Hegel, Marx believed history moved toward a final resolution. In his case, this would be a classless society, where material contradictions had been overcome. Only then, Marx believed, could human beings perceive reality without ideological distortion. Only then would truth no longer serve class interests. In this sense, naive truth theory would be restored — but only after history had done its work.

The implications were explosive. If truth itself is shaped by material conditions, then philosophy cannot limit itself to interpretation. It must intervene.

Marx famously summarized this in the final thesis of the Theses on Feuerbach:

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Marx added a new demand to the history of truth: truth must prove itself in history.

Marx's influence did not end with his lifetime. The Soviet Union has collapsed, but Marxist ideas continue to shape political movements and academic discourse. China and North Korea still govern under explicitly communist frameworks, and critiques of capitalism drawing on Marx remain influential worldwide.

Conviction Shift: Marx

Marx relocated truth from thought to material life. Convictions are not timeless insights, but products of labor, class, and economic struggle. What counts as truth in a society functions as ideology, stabilizing existing power relations until material conflict forces change. Like Hegel, Marx believed in an ultimate resolution of contradiction. But for Marx, this resolution would not occur in thought, but in a transformed society where class conflict had been abolished. Only then, he believed, could truth cease to be distorted by material interest.

Recap: The Fall Of Necessity

Intuitive certainty as a rational foundation for truth had collapsed.

Demonstrative reasoning took its place as the last remaining candidate. Necessity replaced certainty, a shift visible even in language. Where certain and its variations dominate the vocabulary of Locke and Hume, not(h)wendig and its derivations come to the fore in Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Marx.

Each, in his own way, searched for what must be the case.

Kant and Schopenhauer sought the necessary conditions of experience, and struggled with what such necessity implies. Hegel proposed a dynamic alternative: to follow the inner necessity of the object as it unfolds through contradiction. Marx took over this dialectical structure and grounded it not in thought, but in material history.

Strikingly, this philosophical turn toward necessity coincides with the rise of Newtonian physics, an era in which laws came to appear not merely descriptive, but binding. Whether this parallel reflects influence or coincidence remains unclear. But the timing is difficult to dismiss.

Still, something is wrong.

Each of these thinkers claims necessity. Yet each arrives at a different account of what is necessary.

If necessity can justify anything, it justifies nothing.

And so necessity, too, collapses. The attempt to ground truth in what must be the case proves no more stable than grounding it in what cannot be doubted. What once looked like a solid foundation fractures into incompatible systems: different necessities, different structures, different truths.

From the perspective of naive truth theory, this is a breaking point. If multiple, incompatible descriptions each claim correspondence with reality, the notion of a single truth has been abandoned.

If certainty failed because it left too little standing, necessity fails because it leaves too much.

Yet philosophy does not end here.

If neither certainty nor necessity can secure truth, something else must be doing the work. We step into a world where the old foundations have crumbled, but nothing has replaced them. A world where truth no longer commands, but competes. A world that has not resolved contradiction, only multiplied it.

The age of modernity begins.