Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx are prominently well-known 19^th Century European Philosophers who pieced together the Communist Manifesto. Through “The German Ideology,” Marx and Engels continue their collective view on the wrongful integration of capitalism that bears a revolution due to its lack of correspondence to the history of society. Unfortunately, human consciousness is formed based on encountered reality and an unjust societal structure has ensured the burial of the worker.  To reverse this wrongdoing, both articulate indirectly that communism proliferates the bottom-mentioned benefits as follows; creating a classless society, promotion of equality, efficient distribution of resources, each citizen can keep employment and zero competition.

As demonstrated by (Marx & Engels, 659), “The production of ideas, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. The above-mentioned conveying of speech left my aura in pensive thought. From birth, a child unconsciously absorbs great stimuli that will influence language, disposition, social and cultural practices, and overall ideology. The information encountered, is organized into our society, potentially creating a harmful class system amongst the citizenry. In particular, if a similar stimulus and linguistics approach are orchestrated, similar behavior will follow suit and trickle down based on a conceptualized reality.

As the passage gains traction, they go on to add greater context to the essence of their argument. Contained (Marx & Engels, 660),” Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence.” In essence, history is curtailed and conformed to the history of the stimulus of present-day individuals. (Marx & Engels, 660), “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” Awareness and thought process has catalyzed our way of life and means of production. In addition, entailing mechanisms of religious and faith ideals that proliferate much weight, but don’t seize to represent the oppressed or less fortunate. From the viewpoint of Marx and Engels, society should take on a secular way of life and eliminate the capitalistic approach that involves the church. Thoughts born by religious ideologies bring true misery to the working class and have enunciated awareness of difficulties to meet the challenges for a societal aggregate.

Finally, in the latter half of their work, they add their Communist viewpoints from their Manifesto that offer connectivity and possible reform to the failings of current methods. (Marx & Engels, 661), “It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies.” Each communist should spread awareness of their ideologies and beliefs, and come to a consensus that appeals to the working class, so all the necessities, hopes, and dreams are guarded and protected. This revolution can curtail the consciousness on an upbeat track for present and future generations.

In the text called ‘The German Ideology” Marx and Engel go to discuss how the human consciousness is shaped by reality they live in. They both go on to connect how the labor class is connected to idea that is discuss in the text. With what I could understand from the text the main theme of it is that everything that is born from the mind is not a origin thought. The things we create or come to develop as ideas and knowledge are purely shape by the life we in. The very structure of society is the one that does all of the heavy lifting we as humans just take what is already giving to us. And create another story to which already exist. “Conceiving, thinking the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior.”(659)  This quote from the essay shows me that the mind of mankind are in connection with their natural behavior. Our actions reflects our mind how it is shape defends on where we are at in the social class in society.

Take a person who is deep in their faith they will make their entire thoughts and consciousness surrounding around God and the bible. Why because its the reality of that person the life they have around God will forever impact the thoughts, ideas, and action they do. Another example is that is the opposite to a person of God is an atheist all of their ideas/ideology will focus and only be formed based on. Them trying to disprove the existence of God or breaking down the structure of religion in society. I would say based on the ideas Marx and Engel explore that the very thing we call the consciousness would still be formed by itself without the reality of a person life to a certain extent. People do have a certain power to their own thoughts and how they are formed Marx and Engel admit to this idea as being true reasons for the connection of the mind to life. “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”(660) This simple sentences sums up the entire argument of Marx and Engel aside from the production that comes from labor. That our entire way of thoughts and ideas are fueled by the very existence of life our consciousness are before life not after. Every single ideal is formed by the perception of the mind has on it not by the power alone of the person thoughts on it.

In Rowland Barthe’s Eiffel Tower essay, Barthes speaks about the Eiffel tower as both an object to view and something to view from. Barthes begins the essay with a background on the Eiffel tower and its establishment for the 1989 world fair, as well as past intentions to destroy the tower when it was critiqued by artists, writers, and thinkers, immediately after its construction and served little to no purpose. However, The Eiffel Tower eventually became a landmark and a symbol for the entire world. In present-day Paris, the Eiffel Tower functions as a radio transmitter, an aircraft beacon, and a heavy tourist attraction that brings in tons of money for France due to the heavy tourist influx. The Eiffel Tower is viewable and simultaneously climbable and a place where people go to view Paris. All over the world the Eiffel Tower has the same significance and is a symbol of Paris. The Eiffel Tower metaphorically represents France and at the time of its establishment, represented France’s technological advancements and commemorated France’s victory in the French Revolution. This metaphor was created from something that had little significance to the establishment of the city or the country and was ultimately a minute event that changed the trajectory of the city forever. 

The issue with the Eiffel Tower being both a signifier and the signified is that it is impossible to eliminate the Eiffel Tower without completely altering the perception of Paris. Although many other aspects of Paris are known worldwide, The Eiffel Tower is universally known. Barthes writes “glance, object, Symbol such is the infinite Circuit of functions Which permits it always be something other and something more than the Eiffel Tower” (238). Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the concept of the signifier as the sound-imagine in language, and the signified as the concept we associate with the object. Without one, you cannot have the other. The Eiffel tower functions as both the signifier and the signified. The Eiffel Tower is a signifier because it is an image that represents Paris, and without thinking about it, we immediately associate the Eiffel Tower with the country and the city. The Eiffel Tower is signified and is an important concept encompassing the object representing love and the city’s progress after the French Revolution. This relationship could potentially be problematic because the tower was not an important structure when it was constructed, yet, removing the tower in the present day would completely transform the significance of Paris. Removing the signified object would eliminate the signifier and in language, this could be catastrophic for the perception of something known so well to mankind.

In “On truth and lying in a nonmoral sense” Nietzsche criticizes human perception, highlighting the limitations in cognition humans place upon themselves when interpreting stimulus through delusion. Humans have created their own understanding of what is true and what is a lie through the use of metaphors they attach to each concept without expanding their understanding beyond this attachment. Nietzche is critical of human perception because he feels that we are limiting our brains to place everything into categories and solely identify it as how it exists in each category. Nietzsche gives an example by mentioning leaves because something so simple, and so common is a good representation of limited perception. We drop these concepts arbitrarily and forget the features which differentiate one thing from another (755). Eventhough leaves exist in different species, colors, shapes, and sizes, we identify a leaf as a leaf and that is the extent of our perception.

Nietzsche’s writing style is bold and critical. From the beginning of the essay, Nietzsche intentions were to say why he believes humans are limiting themselves and he spends the remainder of the essay explaining the issues with cognition and criticizing the limitations humans have placed upon themselves. Beginning with his analogy of a minute in the universe, Nietzsche initially gives credit to human beings for developing cognition but soon after says that this brilliant moment was short-lived as humans have not done much with their ability to perceive. Nietzche did not write to please his audience but rather give an honest opinion and analysis of each topic. He gave his perspective and hoped that what he was saying resonated with his audience and left an impact on future generations. This essay on truth and lies may have certain psychological and philosophical underlying components. Nietzche criticizes thinking and perceptions saying that humans have used delusion to accept what they want to believe as truth and reject anything that doesn’t fall into the convention. This standard has been set in place over generations of using the same metaphors, analogies, and definitions for everything in this world. 

Truth, according to Nietzsche, is in short, a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration (756) Nietzche says that truth is an illusion created by human beings that have been forgotten to be an illusion and become universally accepted because they have been used frequently enough. Nietzsche proceeds to speak about perception because he believes, by creating a single truth we are wearing down that metaphor and knowing this as the only answer. We then reject any answer that does not fall into this category. If we are able to broaden our outlook, we will no longer be limited.

Ferdinand de Saussure defies language as a social construct, that becomes debatable in terms of how humans maneuver and use it. He brings forth the ability of single handedly isolating the use of language from our inner monologues. Language is “the principle of the arbitrary nature of sign”, indicating the numerous thresholds that hold onto the many different languages throughout the world. Saussure goes on to form his perspective on the usage of La Langue, a concept derived from the external world in which it is theoretically pulled from a particular language. 

With language, we are deemed to assimilate ourselves to a world where we watch, interpret and adopt. With Sassures demonstration of signifier and signified, he speaks on how humans interchangeably associate themselves with this development. With our thoughts, he associated that with the term ‘signifier’, ultimately meaning ‘words that sound like what they mean’. In this context, it exists, it’s available but not to the extent of originality. It’s visible, it’s open, it’s the symbol towards a universal system that has been interpreted and structured bound by rules. Yet when we look at signified, it’s the concepts in which it’s been suppressed to our individualities. It’s associated with this ‘freeness’ that we lack externally. Internally, it’s the infliction of what we originally perceive,  a graphic version of how we perceive language. The huge value of language within our minds, are altered to fit what we generally yearn to compose. With the concept of forming a relationship of thought and language, he highlights the correlation in terms of how compelling one is externally to internally. With language it’s a sound-image being translated into a fixed visual image. With that being said, the words we utter, it’s the components of that sound-image that portrays features within our ‘thought’, giving glimpses to what could be tricky to explain. 

Composing Saussure’s intake on language and the relationships he forms with thought and language, our minds subject itself to what it wants and needs to see. With language, we pitch together an image that can be altered in any way and regard it as a notion of expression or ideas. Language is very elevating in terms of how it’s used and with Saussure, it’s the abstraction of language that we take in and add our interpretations of it, whether in mind or not. It’s the collaboration of anything that relates to language into a visual form permitting grammar to speak for the language we adopt.

In “The Death of the Author” Roland Barthes tackles the relationship between writing and the author and writing and the reader. Barthes starts the essay by making the argument that when “the author enters into his own death, writing begins.” (pg 142). In recent years there has been discussion on whether as a consumer, one can separate the art from the artist. Here, Barthes is making the argument that in the creation of the art itself, the artist is no longer themselves. To be able to create a work of literature, the author has to essentially perform a role that is different from who they are as a person to be able to write the voices of these different characters from different perspectives. Later on in the essay, Barthes explores the opposite of this idea. The idea that the artist and their art are intertwined and therefore cannot be separated from one another. “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.” (pg 147). He makes this argument that the relationship between art and artist is similar to that of parent and child. That the art that an artist produces is inherently infused with bits of the artist because the art is the creation of the artist. In the case of a novel, it existed in the mind of the author before a word of it was ever written down and even after the written story has ended, the author continues living and so does the possibility of the continuation of their creation. Whereas the work of an author can never predate the author itself, for that reason, the author is the life force of the novel , making it difficult to separate it from the author. Towards the end of the essay, Barthes points out the relationship between text and reader “The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost” (pg 148). Barthes makes the argument that the text comes alive once it is perceived by the reader. Multiple readers with different personal biases interpret the text in different ways, which can be in direct conflict with the author and the original intentions of their work. The reader is removing the influence of the author and projecting their own, therefore once a text is exposed to a reader, it is the “death” of the author.