Especially when online leftists throw around "idealism" as a meaningless label to dismiss ideas, and claim to be "materialists" themselves. Same vibes as "facts don't care about your feeling." They actually don't even use the correct definition of the word, using it to mean either idealists as in naive and unrealistic, or as in driven by ideals(yeah Im driven by material only, no ideas).
Engels was the first one who proposed the two camps of idealism and materialism. Later the vulgar "dialectical materialism" of Stalin turned this into a rigid division and unfortunately it caught on. In the end, intelligent idealism is still better than dumb materialism.
EDIT: This post actually shows how hopeless some self proclaimed leftists are, completely ignorant about PHILOSOPHY of all things. Is it really too much to ask to read a single page of Marx, and not parrot some other reactionary philosopher? Absolutely pathetic.
You should really stop posting good takes with this username.
Or don’t, it’s funny either way.
A certain someone (in)famous for that "end of history" idea admitted that he didn't expect people to cling to ideals over the neoliberal optimization plan of every single individual being an atomized consumer unit that purchases identity markers a la carte and otherwise having no desire to belong to anything. :shocked-pikachu:
Who the fuck is driven by only ideals? Didn't you just propose the dumbest idealism of all? That human beings could possibly be driven exclusively by "ideals". Go read a book lmao, the idealism marx and engels discussed has doesn't even have anything to do with "driven by ideals", it is about philosophies that elevates human subjectivity above the material world
Locking this thread because of your needless aggression and toxicity throughout. Consider this a warning. Insulting everyone's intelligence is not how you have a discussion.
omg you can name a book marx and engels wrote, so proud of you! yet you have still failed to make your point about what idealism and materialism actually are and why they are important and essential distinctions
why they are important and essential distinctions
which you did not explain, because you literally do not know what they are.
Idealism is when you disagree with me, and materialism is when you won't so much as take out the garbage because “the material conditions aren't right, yet”.
Read books, develop ideas, act on those ideas, repeat. Your ideas don't need a perfect and unassailable scientific foundation to be useful, and nobody shits out a perfectly coherent theory of power on the first try.
I think the dichotomy is present in Marx, and arguably Hegel. And even Stalin acknowleges that HistMat is itself an idealist form.
The mistake many leftists make is forgetting the second step of Material Reality -> Ideas -> Material Reality.
I'd also doubt that intelligent idealism is less bad than, say, logical positivism. You can at least in principle argue your way into realising positivism is impossible.
You can't always do that with a sophisticated idealist philosophy.
phil 101 students have a better understanding of philosophy than you do jesus christ
Popper?? What's next, Hayek and Ayn Rand? You're actually so full of shit lmao
Bizarre associations? Popper was very close to Hayek and literally said that he learnt the most from Hayek than anyone else. Besides if you have any critical thinking skill you would be able to see the futility of analytic philosophers like Popper and Kuhn coming up with stupid shit like fallibility. Their "philosophy" directly leads to the maintenance of the status quo and technocratic capitalism as the end of history.
"Turns out experiments being replicable is actually chauvinism?!? Also graphs need to be abandoned (and geometry and arithmetic unwed) because I don’t like Descartes."
Just putting words into my mouth at this point lmfao, under Popper's outdated bullshit theory of falsifiability evolution isn't even a real science, let's abandon that!
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400831296-023/html
Im getting the impression that I have read more popper than you lmfao
Then I shall kindly explain it to you, since you are absolutely clueless about any philosophy, even the reactionary analytic "philosophy" that you are such a fan of. How would you falsify evolution? What can you observe that would disprove Darwinism?
More crudely, if we found out that traits within a species are not actually transmitted parent-to-child at all, and the fact that it seemed to be the case to Darwin
That is genetics not evolution lmfao
If we found, for example, that an arctic hare developed a dark, noisy fur pattern that completely undercut its ability to camouflage with no observable benefit and yet that trait somehow managed to dominate the local arctic hare population over successive generations, that would be a data point that would be a problem for a Darwinian scientist in this alternate reality.
No it would not, to scientists it would be noted as a species with low fitness. If they end up going extinct, that would prove darwinism, and if they end up being successful, that means they actually have good fitness and that the observations were incorrect.
Darwinism according to Popper is a metaphysical research program, it has no testable laws. He literally talks about why in the pages that I linked. It is actually pathetic that you told me to read Popper and you don't even understand Popper's own theories, which by the way are outdated by now. You are arguing something so completely ridiculous, akin to saying that Marx advocated for free market capitalism in the communist manifesto, why should I take anything you say seriously?
and to think that you had the audacity to tell me to read the german ideology, you are as much a marxist as jordan peterson is
Idealism: When libs think that the way to "make things better" is to magically change how everyone thinks because akshually "action follows thought" thus if you all have the correct beliefs then reality will magically follow suit. This completely disregards how socioeconomic systems/material realities incentivize (ie. "do this or you starve lol") certain behaviors over others, and even changing how people think is impossible.
Dialectical materialism: (according to former libertarian small business owner, now anarchist small business owner, Noncompete): Acknowledging that the above is kindergarten level nonsense compared to the assertion that external material reality influences human thoughts, and due to our "conscious will"(?), we are thus able to in turn influence external material conditions, which then influence us, and so on and so on...
Engels was the first to propose this? I thought this was a long standing debate in western philosophy since it began
