 Hi and welcome to week two of this course on Marxist philosophy. Last week was kind of an introduction to Marxist philosophy and materialism and this week we're going to continue on the theme of materialism and we're going to go into more detail on the arguments of both materialism and idealism which is the opposite of materialism. Now last week we ended on the strange persistence of idealism as a philosophy in this age of scientific discovery when so much has been revealed about the natural world by science. We still nevertheless find that idealist philosophies that is philosophies that asserts that either the material world does not exist or we cannot know anything about it. These forms of philosophy not only persist but if anything have actually gained in strength. In fact the 20th century saw you could describe a kind of counter attack by idealism. Really 20th century philosophy was dominated by idealism in different forms more so than I would say the 19th century and we had for example at the beginning of the century the school of thought known as logical positivism which declared that any statement is meaningless if it is not if it does not directly refer to personal experience so it is meaningless for me to talk about the second world war because I obviously didn't experience it for example and it just ruled out vast vast ways of science as completely meaningless as a result. For them we cannot know anything beyond our immediate experience as an individual and therefore to be honest real knowledge is ruled out most of the knowledge of humanity is essentially ruled out. We also had a very similar train of thought with the imperial criticism school which Lenin criticised in his famous book materialism and imperial criticism and this was very similar set of ideas essentially which basically denied that we can even refer to a world of objective truth and natural things the material world independent of our own thoughts and then we also had phenomenology index existentialism which again started out from the analysis of the individual subject the thinking individual and everything was described in relation to how they perceive the world rather than the world itself and how that is or how society is and for all of these schools really they have no interest in talking about an independent reality for them an independent reality is essentially meaningless it's impossible to know anything about and then we had after the second world war post-modernism and post-modernism essentially quite different in its sort of style I suppose to the earlier philosophies but it's actually very similar in context and what it argues essentially is that all human knowledge is subjective all human knowledge and society as a whole really is created by language essentially by the way that we talk about things there is no objective truth or possibility of objective truth science for example is defined as simply a set of you know practices of ways of talking about things dependent on this or that culture and does not refer to any independent facts of the real world that can be verified in fact for them truth is really what they would say socially constructed in other words there is no objective truth it's just the relative truths of different cultures and different societies and there's no ability to determine which one is correct and which one isn't and so these are really the main schools of thought really of 20th century philosophy and all of them in one way or another are idealist now I haven't yet we haven't yet discussed formal logic which is you know something else that marxism criticizes but it is worth pointing out that most of these mistakes in philosophy and idealist philosophies do stem at least or can be partly explained by the way in which they start from a formal logical point of view that is to say a point of view which denies in a sense relations between things which isolates and atomizes and categorizes things we'll come on to discuss formal logic in a later week um in fact I believe it's what we're discussing next week but anyway the the and the reason for this um is that uh for them they start out from the the isolated human individual the thinking individual as well not the living practical individual in society in in work or anything like that just the sort of abstract individual who thinks somehow and then they start out by saying well how can this person have real knowledge of the real world and for them really that it proves to be impossible and there's no way of resolving that question and as marx explained in the theses on foyerbark of course it's impossible because you set up the question in a fundamentally scholastic way as he puts it in an impractical way in a way in which assumes from the outset that the fundamental difference and unrelatedness of human thoughts and the material world he says in the theses on foyerbark he says the question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question man must prove the truth i.e the reality in power that this sidedness of his thinking in practice the dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question i think that that really puts it brilliantly and and uh he doesn't attempt to disprove it in a kind of circuitous torturous kind of logical analysis or anything like that he merely points out that this this outlook is fundamentally redundant it has nothing to do with real human life which is not composed of atomized individuals who don't do anything but is composed of real practical individuals who need to survive and that ultimately is the way in which we prove whether or not an idea is correct or not it's by the practical application of it and of course there are a number of things that flow from this which we'll discuss in later weeks like the fact that humanity is a natural um or is part of nature is not separated from nature we'll discuss that later on um so the outlook of the of these idealists is kind of it's like almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy you start out from an atomized individual and you attempt to examine their thought as an atomized individual as if all of these ideas have just popped into their head out of nowhere and then you conclude it's impossible to see how their ideas can relate to the material world and the things that they do in it or of course if you start out in that completely abstract way then you will never be able to solve the problem i'll just give a quotation uh a couple of quotations actually that i think really reveal this the sort of formal logical starting point the very atomistic atomized rather uh starting point of these philosophers and why it makes it impossible for them to explain how we can have objective knowledge Berkeley or Bishop Berkeley who was a a very important idealist um in the uh in the 18th century uh wrote um the following he said but say you though the ideas themselves do not exist without the mind yet there may be things like them whereof they are copies or resemblances which things exist without the mind in an unthinking substance i answer an idea can be like nothing but an idea a color or figure can be like nothing but a color figure you can see very clearly there the way he he defines an advanced thought and the material world is fundamentally different and then it's like well how can they how can thought possibly relate to or how you know how can it have objective knowledge of of of things other than itself david hume uh also an enormous figure in in philosophy debates some people will say he's not an idealist i would say he is essentially an idealist um anyway david hume said the following he says the mind has never anything present to it but the perceptions and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connection with objects this supposition of such a connection is therefore without any foundation in reasoning in other words again uh the mind just just is defined in advances as not being a as just being fundamentally different in substance from the material world and therefore of course it cannot possibly know the material world as it is in itself um as lenin explained in response to this in in his book that i've already mentioned materialism and imperial criticism for this outlook uh our sensations which is how they say we have knowledge or rather they say we don't have knowledge um our sensations are um a barrier between two unrelated worlds you know the world of the objective the objective world and the world of our own subjective experience and the sensations are a barrier basically this the fact that we have sensations does not give us knowledge of the objective external world because sensations are part of the mind they're part of consciousness whereas for lenin and for for marxists and materialists uh sensations are are a bridge between not between two fundamentally different worlds but between two parts of the same world because we are ourselves objective material or natural beings and the sensations are a bridge between these different parts of the same world therefore um and i would say that the the main schools of 20th century philosophy which we've already mentioned are really rehashings of all of these ideas they don't really add anything in the philosophical sense to these arguments um now let's examine in a little bit more detail some of the arguments of these idealists some of the most important arguments uh for human camps who are again towering figures in idealist philosophy and they had some differences but a lot of similarities um they both kind of came to the conclusion that our ideas are um are abstract things you know um and we don't experience abstract things you know the concrete experience that we have you know of tables and chairs or whatever it is in the material world are not abstract these are concrete specific objects that are different to different objects um and yet they concluded that knowledge really consists of these abstract concepts like time and space and cause and effect and things like that without those abstract concepts we don't have any ideas about anything really so for them the fact that we don't experience time and space as such uh but we use time and space to make sense of the world shows that we never know the world as it really is uh shorn of these abstract concepts like time and space um and we're sort of like wearing kind of goggles if you like through which we see the world um uh but uh the best answer to this not comes not necessarily directly from Marx and Engels but actually from Hegel who himself was an idealist but of a very different kind and he thought it is possible to have objective knowledge of things outside of oneself and uh he explained it uh brilliantly um he said uh that's well so just to go back a sec Kant's main Kant is very famous for saying that because of these these the fact that our knowledge is is consists of abstract categories like time uh cause and effect space etc um he said that we can never know the thing in itself we can never know how the real object actually is outside of these concepts which of course it doesn't have right the concept the the object itself is not time um and so we cannot know what it is like without the concept of time applied to it as it really is in itself as he put it um but what Hegel pointed out quite brilliantly uh is that the thing in itself that Kant talks about is is absolutely nothing actually it's devoid of any content uh and I quote he says the thing in itself expresses the object in as much as abstraction is made of all that it is for consciousness of all determinations of feeling as well as all the all determinations all determinate thoughts about it it is easy to see what is left namely what is completely abstract or totally empty and determined only as what is beyond it is itself only the product of thinking and precisely of the thinking that has gone to the extreme of pure abstraction the product of the empty I as in me that makes its own empty self-identity into its objects now apologies for the kind of the the language of Hegel which sometimes is very hard to understand what he's saying essentially is that if you define something as a thing in itself removed from all of these determinate qualities like time and space cause and effect yellow black whatever color you ascribe to it if you'd say well these are abstract concepts that belong to my mind and they don't exist in the objective world um then if you do that and then you should say well then the thing in itself is somehow exist out there and I cannot know what it's like because I always apply these ideas to it you're defining the thing in itself as devoid of any content as nothing because if something is without any determination be it hard or soft yellow or brown or in time and space then it is really nothing it's you're defining it in advance which is an act of thought as Hegel points out you're defining it as nothing and therefore it is just nothing and he basically points out that okay yes these concepts that we use to make sense of the world they are concepts that you know time and space that is a product of thought but he also points out it doesn't follow from that but the objects themselves do not also have these qualities and of course that is the case so while it's true that we don't experience I suppose time in general we don't experience table-ness we only experience specific tables um these specific objects do and must have general qualities that relate them to other things such as hardness or softness um and by experiencing not one table but many many tables in our lives then we begin to experience begin to form generalizations which kind of link all of those related objects together and express their real relations more or less accurately obviously it's possible for ideas to be wrong but essentially that is what is going on so what human can't couldn't grasp was that these generalizations not yes they're not found in any one experience of any one table they are summation of the experience of many many things over a long period of time and therefore again I think we can see the limitation of idealism basing itself on on this very atomistic outlook that are breaking down experience into just the experience of one individual at one moment in time rather than seeing the process which is of course a dialectical outlook and will come on to dialectical thinking in later weeks anyway so that really answers that point of view just to go on to some other problems of idealism and the criticisms that we would make as materialists of it um Hume also pointed out that um again perception is different than the objects themselves he gave the example again of a table and he said that um if I come if I move further away from a table my perception of it is that it is smaller but obviously the table has not actually become any smaller so perception is fundamentally different from the object itself now this is really a bit of a silly objection it's very easy for a materialist to answer the perception we have of an object is not the same as the objects the perception expresses the relationship between the object and myself and of course the other objects that are around it um so yes it looks smaller to me because it is smaller it is is in relation to many more things because I've moved away from it so it has to be perceived as smaller so that is not a false perception so to speak it just it accurately expresses a different relationship between myself and the table so I think that was very easily answered um and a problem and in fact the fundamental problem that idealism has from a philosophical point of view uh is that it is kind of empty really ultimately uh for example uh Berkeley when he is discussing his ideas he he has to reckon with the fact that obviously um his idealism uh his subjective idealism or immaterialism as he called it in which the individual's perception is all that really exists and the independent object does not exist he has to explain why our ideas agree with one another why we all agree that this table looks like this and he says well the reason for that is that there's another mind outside of ours yours or mine which is God and God is also a mind like mine but is far more powerful and uh God perceives these things so God kind of gives an objective kind of quality to the perception which everybody has to agree with so it's not just subjective um and I think you can see from that the redundancy of of his idealism in fact there's one point where he says don't worry about this idealism like it doesn't mean you have to abandon your your sort of conception of things it doesn't make any practical difference to you in your real life and that that really is its condemnation it doesn't actually add anything to our understanding of anything it's devoid of content and it has to reintroduce objectivity such as God an objective mind outside of your own mind to make sense of the fact that we all agree about certain things um another example is Victor who was a German idealist again a subject of idealist all that really exists for him is the individual ego which as he puts it posits itself in other words you make yourself you create yourself um and uh he has to reckon with the fact that we have unexpected experiences that we face that we're aware of our own limitations right we don't feel limitless and like we can do anything um and so he he he basically says that the mind limits itself defines itself as limited in order to kind of make it i don't know make sense or something so it's again it's like he he starts out from the assumption of the isolated individual and then realizes that of course this would be absurd because if you were an isolated individual you would not leave your life in the way that you do so therefore he says well actually your own mind kind of creates an objective limitation for itself so he has to reintroduce objectivity after the fact um so we see that idealism kind of becomes like devoid of explanatory power um devoid of content really as to use a famous phrase a ghost in a machine it doesn't add anything to the explanation you know if if the soul or consciousness is totally immaterial and has nothing to do with the material why does it inhabit my body why does it make my body move in the ways that it does it's something that they cannot explain in any way they can just say well it does and it's a mystery or something or they can deny that the material body exists that's not really adding anything to our understand it's certainly not very helpful and in fact i would say that at the end of the day the idealists are condemned by the contradiction between their own ideas and their practice and as marx pointed out it is real human practice that is actually what defines us in the end um it hasn't added anything and any idealist even the most extreme subjective idealist philosopher leads their life just like anyone else they eat food they don't run out into the street etc obviously they don't really believe what they say they believe it in a sort of very abstract theoretical sense in their practical life it has no application whatsoever and therefore they disprove it instead of every moment of their existence therefore it's an outlook which quite obviously reflects the social position of philosophers and bourgeois intellectuals basically who are removed from the day-to-day struggles of the real world and who can afford to put forward ideas that are fundamentally useless although there is a use for these ideas of course which is to serve reactionary causes by obscuring the real struggles that people go through the real most profound truths of society that is the class struggle the poverty you know the real human experience that the vast majority of people go to by defining human experience as removed from all of those things and and defining it as just some sort of abstract in individual they have made philosophy um kind of a barrier against socialism a barrier against human liberation um and i think that as as we explained at the end of the last episode you know idealism still exists not only does it exist it's arguably still the dominant school of thought in at least in in philosophy um and that's a very peculiar thing in this era of science until you realize that we still live in a class society in a society in which a small minority is incredibly rich and powerful uh that wants to obscure the realities of our society you know a society that wants to maintain or sorry a ruling class that wants to maintain a society of alienation of poverty of lack of control over our own lives of insecurity essentially and so long as we live in a society in which humans exploit other humans and people lead lives of deep insecurity and uncertainty then i think idealism will still always exist as a philosophy that of the privilege essentially which which deliberate which justifies in one way way or another capitalism and all of its inequality so the fight against idealism once again is ultimately of course we have to be able to answer its ideas but it is ultimately a real a social and a political struggle against capitalism