so i've wondered for a long time about how leftists use the terms 'materialism' and 'idealism', and how it relates to those terms usage in broader philosophical discussions on epistemology.
i may be incorrect in my interpretations, but it seems to me that leftist uses of the term (even its usage in some of marx's writings, from what little i've read) are such that 'materialist' means 'understands that the material conditions of a society drive its development via dialectical processes' and that 'idealist' means 'focuses on artificial/socially constructed ethical or legal principles (such as 'freedom' and 'democracy' and 'rule of law' and 'free speech') rather than material conditions of society like quality of life, literacy, etc.'.
the broader philosophical definitions of these terms are slightly different, however.
epistemologically, a 'materialist' is someone who believes that we can (and do) directly apprehend the mind-independent external world. this is contrary to epistemological idealism, which argues that we can only ever know the contents of our own mind. we can use these contents to infer things about 'true reality' but can never truly verify them.
ontologically, materialism argues that all of reality can be described in terms of physics, or that all facts of the universe are causally dependent on or reducible to physical processes. this is again opposed to Idealism, which argues that existence is in some way irreducibly and fundamentally mental.
so my first question for you beautiful posters is, are my perceptions of these definitions and usages overall correct or incorrect? How exactly does Marx (or Engels or any other marxist philosopher) use these terms, and do they intend an epistemological, ontological, or other interpretation? am i missing something fundamental about the philosophical definitions or about the colloquial/leftist usage? What's the deal with that 'philosophy is pointless, the goal is to change the world' quote, is understanding reality not a benefit for efficiently manipulating it?
My next point, is that it seems to me like Marx and Engel's Dialectical Materialism, or at least the political program and methods of Socialism/Communism, are not necessarily at all incompatible with either philosophical Idealism or Materialism, in terms of epistemology or ontology. Neither is necessarily incompatible with basic empiricism, but is rather a difference in interpretation of what our empirical knowledge is. Whether reality is fundamentally mental or matter, it consists of opposing energies and dialectical processes that play out in our experience with the extrinsic appearance of physical matter. Whether the world is in the mind or 'really out there', our experiences of it are the same.
A bit ago i stumbled across this article that seemed to be making a similar point, a point i've never really seen made by anyone else before. I haven't read past the abstract yet, and It seems like someone random person's college dissertation or thesis or something so I'm probably not well read enough to interpret this without context, so i was wondering if anyone had seen any similar discourse? What would Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao say about this line of thought? is it a heresy against socialism, a useless detour into pointless philosophical questions that serve no practical purpose for the revolution, or is it something potentially useful in framing Marxism's relationship to epistemology and ontology?
What is “really real” can get a bit stonery.
I think materialists generally agree with idealists that we can only perceive things through our “minds”, though materialists would usually not say “minds” but “brains” and “senses”. I think materialists usually take the world to be “real” because we develop theories of the world from what we take in through our senses (and the tools we build for extending our senses), and that these theories generally have become more & more self-consistent and more & more successfully predictive. And we call this process science. We don’t think we’re just making things up in our minds because these scientific theories have become rather reliable.
In contrast, idealists are solipsists, or at least that’s what Marxist materialists usually insist about idealists.
These aren’t irrelevant questions to Marxists, who take philosophy seriously. I don’t know if this is the best short book on the topic, and it’s a bit dated, but it’s what I know of off the top of my head: Georges Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy.
i think this is an overly simplistic reading of Idealism. In Idealism, even my experience of my self occurs 'in mind'. notice i did not say 'my mind' because i make no claims about the structure of mentation or cognition or experience, i only acknowledge its irreducible existence. like, in Idealism, just because i am not currently seeing China, doesn't mean that China does not exist. It might exist in someone else's mind, or God's mind, or some kind of non-anthropomorphic, non-unified Universal Background Mentation that is fundamental to the structure of reality. Solipsism is independent of ontology.
I can’t speak for all Marxists, but this is where I see idealist arguments veer into stoner talk, what’s “really real.” They’re unfalsifiable musings. And even if one of these many unfalsifiable musings happens to be The Truth, that Truth is not only unknowable to us, but also it would change our lived experiences not one whit. There’s no practical value in them. This is how you end up with religions and the fascist ideologies of e/acc tech chuds.
Even if we could somehow prove that one of these idealist theories is true, what’s to say there isn’t yet another layer of Truth deeper than that? It’s turtles all the way down silliness. There can never and therefore will never be an answer to the question of what is “real”.
glad you pointed out EA, e/acc; i deal with it enough in my day-to-day i feel like im screaming into the void talking to some of these folks
empirical unfalsifiability and impracticality is not only true of idealism, though, it applies to materialism as well. whether reality and what we percieve is 'ideas' or 'matter', we can never really know, but it all works the same way empirically. empiricism or empirical methods are all that's required to account for the regularities of human experience, materialism and idealism both are superfluous. so why is this an argument against idealism specifically, and not all kinds of ontology including materialist ones? i understand and might even agree that ontology is of questionable practical value in terms of solving immediate human needs (assuming there is no human need for metaphysical inquiry or a sense of place in the universe, which i am skeptical of but will accept for the sake of this discussion), but then why are so many marxists seemingly so committed to a specific materialist ontology rather than simple empiricism - verifying through experience that the reality operates according to regularities (ignoring the problem of induction that plagues basically every ordered logic)?
I would argue that they’re of no practical value, full-stop. I can’t think of a single one.
Which Marxists are doing anything other than empiricism? If a Marxist is clinging to an unproven theory or one that has since been proven wrong empirically, then that should be pointed out to them, and they should drop it.
I’d argue that ontology itself is an idealist, metaphysical rabbit hole that Marxists aren’t interested in engaging with. We’re not interested in the idealists’ various unfalsifiable conceptualizations of what is “real.” Smart people eventually leave their skunky college dorm rooms and stop asking idle questions that are known to be unknowable.
questions like this can determine ethical and cultural questions such as the classic 'existentialist question', the 'meaning of life', the value of humans and other people and nonhuman animals, etc. for example if 'mind' does not exist or is illusory then why take the minds of the self or others into consideration when determining your actions and beliefs? where do you get your ethics from? should i be a pure nihilist egoist or something and just pick and choose the ones i happen to like or that will benefit me personally the most? these are all real questions with real societal impacts.
the fact that you insist on using specifically 'Idealist' as a pejorative for all allegedly useless philosophy belies an ontological bias for at least some marxists, does it not? if its no sillier than materialist phyiscalist realist ontology, and if empiricism is superior to both kinds of ontology anyway, whence the (at least linguistic) disdain specifically for idealist ontology and not materialist ontology? why is it any sillier to propose an 'external world' that conforms to certain empirically verified patterns, and is fundamentally mental in some unknown way, as opposed to proposing an 'external world' that conforms to certain empirically verified patterns, and is fundamentally mindless or reducible to mindless physical processes in some unknown way? either way you come to similar conclusions on the mechanics of the interactions regardless of what you think the 'object of study' is. why not maintain epistemological nihilism in this case instead of attacking only Idealism? or is this another case of using the term Idealist only colloquially in the marxist sense of 'foolish person who ignores empiricism'? i'm not trying to be confrontational i'm honestly confused, i can have a hard time interpreting the specific meanings of speech and text sometimes.
Questions that cannot have falsifiable answers cannot actually answer anything. Idealisms, being unfalsifiable, can allow any answer, and their veracity comes from the end of the spear: that of the Vatican or the king or the bourgeoisie. Idealist ideologies are weapons. That’s why we use idealism pejoratively.
This line of reasoning about the basis of morality is scarcely different from the Abrahamic one: that without God there can be no morality. Which firstly, as a life-long atheist, I can tell you is bullshit, but secondly I think any Marxist-Lenninists worth their salt is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. Liberal morality is the hegemonic bourgeois idealist morality that we need to get out of.
I don’t think the question is answerable nor that the answer would make any difference. The only reason Marxists give any sort of answer to these kinds of questions is because idealists still exist and keep asking them.
I agree with your bit on morality, when I use the term I use it descriptively; i.e. a normative framework which tends to vary in different cultures, subcultures, periods of time, etc. which is intrinsically linked with how members intragroup and intergroup conduct themselves
my point is that you say there is no answer to ontology or any difference between answers, yet you still exclusively use the term 'idealist' when describing any ontology at all, when you could say the same thing for non-idealist ontologies, including materialist/physicalist realist ones.
to reiterate: Materialist Ontologies are EXACTLY as unfalsifiable as Idealist Ontologies
so why exclusively use Idealist as a pejorative, instead of ontological or metaphysical? and besides, in the philosophical sense, Materialists/physical realists/scientific realists do indeed make metaphysical claims, they are indeed doing metaphysics. i recommend the Stanford article about scientific realism/antirealism elsewhere in the thread.
Okay, I think it’s fair to say that materialism is also unfalsifiable in the ontological sense.
Some Marxists may claim that the material world is “real.” If I want to be more precise, I would say that materialism is the only thing that is “useful,” and therefore the only thing worth treating as “real,” while idealism offers nothing “useful.” All idealism ever does is pile extra, superfluous unfalsifiable concepts on top of our lived material experience.
but so does materialism, right? what we have direct access to is our experiential world, and the existence of an external material world on top of that is itself a culturally constructed, likely fictitious, abstractive layer on top of that. we can call the empirically verified experiential world anything we want, but all those empirical verifications tell us is the patterns and regularities of culturally collected experiences, they can't tell us what underlies them or what 'reality is made of'. so it's weird to me to say 'materialism is the only thing that is useful' rather than 'empiricism is the only thing that is useful'.
Marxists basically don’t make a distinction between materialism and empiricism. I’m not sure if the two had yet been made distinct in the 19th century.
Perhaps more precisely still would be: empiricism is the only thing that is useful, and materialism is the unfalsifiable Occam’s razor of what we’ve discovered empirically.
this is the only part here that i'm skeptical of. is it not parsimonious enough to define empiricism on its own terms without reference to any metaphysics whatsoever? would occam's razor not suggest to make no claims whatsoever about that which we can have no knowledge? in this case, given the choice between equally unfalsifiable, hypothetically empirical formulations of materialism and idealism, can we really say that one is more plausible than the other?
(edit: in fact, would it not be more parsimonious to assume that only mind exists, since we can't really refute its existence (as it is all we have direct epistemological access to), rather than assuming on top of that, there is yet another layer of 'physical' or 'material' reality?)
i guess my concern with the way we use language around these topics, is that we may lose sight of the socially constructed aspects of empirical knowledge and the stories we tell to make sense of it, if we use overly literal language and overly simplified thought processes that take these stories literally, and at face value. we can't let the societal discourse on the sciences be dictated by ignorant if not potentially malicious actors by ignoring how knowledge is created and spread and what theories really are.
Occam's razor is a heuristic tool, so if it’s to be applied at all, it’s to give probabilistic weight to proposed theories. The whole point is that not everything is as equally probable.
Which is more likely, the world as it appears to us, or the world as it appears to us plus Russell's teapot? What about the world as it appears to us plus Russel’s Teapot plus it’s all in a computer simulation? Why??? Why seriously consider any superfluous unfalsifiables at all? There’s nothing to be gained.
What kinds of malicious actors are you thinking of? What is being ignored? The information that idealists create and spread?
If this in defense of postmodernism, we think it was/is an intentional bourgeois ideological project to undermine Marxism/socialism.
You got me there: fascist solipsism it is then 😭
how is anything i said fascist or solipsistic? i literally believe that other peoples minds exist, i literally use my idealism as a foundation for empathy, i literally believe in the power of people to come together and organize society for their own benefit, or the benefit of others. i believe a communist dem-cent dictatorship of the proletariat is the best hope to make as many people happy as possible. i just dont understand your absurd characterization of my arguments. its like you are intentionally ignoring my points. you know what, nevermind. i dont really care what you have to say at this point. if someone else wants to make your point without being as much of a jerk then i welcome it.
i mean the mfer is literally coming at me with 'fascism is when solipsism and solipsism is when idealism and idealism is when philosophy, whereas communism is when materialism and materialism is when coal mine', absolutely the silliest shit ive ever heard