I hope this will be a short post. I’ll try to keep it short. This is also an exercise in synthesis because I’m preparing a presentation for my party (about 1 hour long) on this very topic. I’m interested in what people here think.
Inspired mostly by Georges’ Politzer Elementary principles of philosophy, which you can find here.
We’ll see idealism, materialism, metaphysical materialism and dialectical materialism always starting with the opposite, so that we can better understand the marxist position which is also the correct one – this isn’t me being dismissive of other philosophies; it took thousands of years to get to that stage where we could recognize materialism, recognize dialectics, and thanks to Marx and Engels join them together into dialectical materialism.
Idealism
Idealism was born out of human ignorance – we’re talking about the first homo sapiens. Concepts that we did not quite understand (storms, volcanoes, germination…) were given idealist explanations because it was impossible to observe the mechanics. Storms were the gods quarrelling. Your field sprouting was the gods being pleased with your offering.
Idealism posits that ideas create matter. Not literally, of course. But that reality is a reflection of our thoughts and experiences. You say an apple is red, but a colour-blind person will see it gray. Therefore what you and they think of as an apple is a different thing. Essentially, say idealists, if there was no human left on Earth but apples still, would they still be apples? If there was no one to look at the fruit and say “hey, that’s an apple”.
Yet this is the pitfall of idealism. By stripping objects of their properties, by isolating these objects, we can claim that nothing exists. But an apple has several properties, not just the ones we want to remove. It exists outside of our thoughts and we can prove this objectively.
Today idealism exists side-by-side with materialism. Materialism is the correct outlook of the world, and as such it is very hard not to notice it (even in people who don’t care for philosophy), but the bourgeoisie benefits from making us believe idealism is the true outlook. It keeps the world ignorant and easily manipulated. Then when you hear the CIA suggest that they should bomb Syria to bring them democracy, you don’t question it. The world is so complicated, there are bad countries and good countries, just trust them.
Materialism
Materialism is the conception of the world that matter creates ideas. Things exist whether we want them to or not. For the longest time we thought the sun was a tiny, shiny yellow circle in the sky. By sending probes in space to observe the sun, we now know that it is a gigantic ball of white fire. It is not tiny, it is not yellow, and it doesn’t shine rays.
Therefore reality exists outside of our mind. The sun will continue being a gigantic ball of white fire in space whether we exist or not. Whether we want it to be the circle we see from the Earth or not, it does not objectively look like that.
This discovery was possible by science, which is at heart a method of observing, analysing, and studying what exists around us. That is why materialism is the scientific outlook of the world. Idealism is the non-scientific outlook of the world.
This is ultimately proven by looking at consciousness. Perhaps when the first humans dreamt, they couldn’t explain these images of their peers that came to them in their sleep and thought that their friends and families had “doppelgangers” in the world of dreams. That there was a whole other world out there, accessible only in our dreams, and that when you died, you met up with your double in the “other world”.
The soul, to idealists, must exist. After all, it leaves our body after death and goes to heaven. It’s why there are ghosts around. Yet it’s an intangible object that science has never been able to find. This is the ultimate form of idealism: willing this object into existence has made it real.
So where does our soul come from? No surprise, it comes from God (likely inherited from earlier religions as we’ve seen). And God must be conscious for him to give us consciousness. God is the ultimate argument to idealists because: he is not falsifiable, he has always existed and will always exist, requires no evidence, and invoking God will end any conversation about the matter (because a materialist cannot prove God does not exist).
This is the pitfall Hegel fell into when describing dialectics (a concept much older than him). He remained an idealist and while he understood dialectics, he figured God must be the “force” driving change. A creative engineer has an idea for a more efficient steam engine, he creates that engine, and factories adopt his engine and so there is material change. This was Hegel’s view of dialectics (and where did the engineer’s idea come from? From his consciousness, which came from God). Marx and Engels put dialectics back “right side up” by understanding that material reality came before ideas, not the other way around. It used to be that we travelled by horse carriages, and now we travel on planes. It wasn’t enough to have the idea to travel by plane, and while we can still have the idea of travelling in a stagecoach, nobody would ever actually choose this over plane travel.
You see this idealist, religious thinking in flat earthers as well. Turns out pretty much all of them are fundamentalist Christians.
Metaphysical materialism (metamat)
Materialists are separated into two categories. Metaphysical materialists are still very much alive today.
Metamats are materialists indeed, but they don’t see the relation that exists between, well, everything. They think a horse is a horse, and a zebra is a zebra, and so there is no point in trying to compare a horse to a zebra or study one like the other. They see that an apple is a red fruit that has such or such characteristics, and so they only study the apple. But an apple used to be a flower and before that a bud, born on a tree branch. It didn’t come from nothing and will not always stay the way it is, therefore it’s possible to study the apple as a process, as a whole, instead of as an isolated object. Why then are metamats isolating objects from one another and don’t want to find comparisons between the two?
You see this thinking sometimes. A zoologist will maybe spend their day at work studying behaviours in chimpanzees and compare them to human behaviour, and then they will go home at night and after a few drinks say something like “anyways politics has always been shit and that’s not gonna change”. Has it really always been shit? Is it really never going to change? This scientist is dialectical at work and metaphysician at home.
Don’t forget, capitalism will try to confuse you. This is why this scientist is contradictory in their own beliefs.
You’ve likely heard at least one person say “In the USSR, people are not paid for the full value of their labour, and it’s the same in the USA. Their surplus value is stolen, both are exploited, and so there is no difference between a Soviet worker and an Amerikan worker”. The metaphysical pitfall here is to not see that they are two different societies, and that the relations between human and machine are different in both. In the USA, surplus value goes to enrich the business owner. In the USSR, surplus value goes to the socialist state so as to enrich the workers. Things have certainly changed.
Dialectical materialism
Dialectics are the study of movement. Not literal movement (though Politzer correctly points out that metamat is the observation if stillness and dialectics is the observation of movement), but in simple terms that things change, because they go through processes.
If you remember the example of the apple, it was a flower on a tree before being a bud which was born on a tree branch. It is important to understand what things were to understand what they currently are and what they will be. Just as well, things are in constant motion and are always changing. The apple, after it falls off the tree, will not become still and stay fresh. It will keep ripening and eventually, it will die and break down.
Politzer explains four laws of dialectics:
- Change
- Mutual action
- Contradiction
- Progress by leaps
Conclusion
This is almost the end of the book. It still goes into the laws of dialectics (which I’ve only listed out in this post), historical materialism, and finally materialism and ideologies, but I am still reading that part. Still, I hope that so far this has given you a new understanding of dialectical materialism.
Abridging a book that already synthesises 2000 years of philosophy is a more difficult task than I anticipated, and there are many things I wasn’t able to talk about here (such as the union of theory and practice, agnosticism, the four laws of metaphysical materialism – I’ve only explained two – or the more precise history of why we came to be idealists, why there were metamats before diamats, etc). Also I hit the character limit in my first draft lol.
This is really interesting and well written! Thanks!
You see this thinking sometimes. A zoologist will maybe spend their day at work studying behaviours in chimpanzees and compare them to human behaviour, and then they will go home at night and after a few drinks say something like “anyways politics has always been shit and that’s not gonna change”. Has it really always been shit? Is it really never going to change? This scientist is dialectical at work and metaphysician at home.
I had never heard of metaphysical materialism before. But your explanation makes sense to me.
Metamats are the opposite of diamats. Metaphysical materialism studies stillness, such as isolating the object of their study, as if one can never be related to another. You also see this thinking sometimes when people say “well this person is a biologist, they shouldn’t be talking about the economy”. Perhaps. But the state of the economy is affecting their job as well, and so it is valid that a biologist speaks about the economy in some ways. As dialectical materialists we understand that everything is linked together in some way.
When studying life and death for example, which are very clear contradictions, metamats will study one without taking the other into consideration. As if something was either dead or alive, and these two states were completely independent from each other. Yet death follows life, there is a dialectical process at work. It is also possible to be dead and alive at the same time (necrosis) or come back from the dead (depriving the brain of oxygen long enough that it starts dying).
Politzer claims that this point of view came up naturally as we started doing science experiments, because it’s much easier to start with what is still (the ripe apple, without considering the flower that came before it or the biomass that will come after it). He likens it to mechanics and miniaturization; it’s an easy task to nail shut a crate (it doesn’t require much skill or precision). It’s much more difficult working on a wrisremovedch (which requires experience, a steady hand, and a lot of precision). Yet it was impossible to achieve the latter without going through the former; diamat is essentially the evolution of metamat.
I recommend reading the whole chapter though, he explains it much better than I could.
