 Okay, so last week we dealt with the question of idealism and the problem of knowledge and we looked at the ways in which it proves impossible to solve the problem of knowledge. If you examine thoughts on an individualistic basis basically if you tear it from its social and historical conditions and you know if you start out from the position of an abstract individual it will be impossible to really explain thoughts and now we have to move on to this if you like scholastic question as Marx called it to the question of what thought really is what the real process of the development of thought is in real history rather than just endlessly wondering whether or not it's possible to have knowledge and this outlook the Marxist outlook on what thought is and the the necessity of looking at it in its real history is summed up brilliantly in Marx's famous thesis on Feuerbach written at the beginning of his career in which he shows that even materialism that the materialism that existed prior to Marx especially in the example of Feuerbach had not really fully broken with idealism and as a result it's it's struggled with the same problems of explaining thought. Marx explains in in this that and I quote Feuerbach wants sensuous objects really distinct from thought objects in other words he wants to accept the independence of material reality he goes on but does not conceive human activity itself as objects of activity in other words contained within his philosophy was a hidden assumption that somehow although the material world exists independently of man mankind in so far as it thinks is somehow not part of that world. Now Marx revolutionized in these thesis on Feuerbach philosophy in which you know it's only about two pages long the thesis on Feuerbach so it's an incredibly potent bit of philosophy and not only does he pose the question historically in terms of you know humanity being a part of the natural world having emerged from the natural world but he also this this outlook also opens the door to treating thought socially right rather than in terms of the isolated individual and in just two sentences he really destroys the rigid bourgeois idea of human nature or human essence as he calls it. Marx says and again I quote but the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each individual in its reality it is the ensemble of social relations so Marx explains that Feuerbach and indeed in fact anybody who doesn't grasp human nature in this way but instead treats it or rather must because they don't treat it in this way must treat it as an abstract way and must treat human nature as because not a product of history and of society as something that is somehow present from the beginning in each human individual sort of in its entirety you know so each person taken separately has the same dose if you like of human nature given to them for some mysterious reason and if you think about it it's the same basic standpoint of bourgeois people or people who think in a bourgeois kind of way when they say in response to for example you saying that you are a socialist they might say oh what about human nature this is kind of a notorious argument that any socialist has to contend with almost on a daily basis and the again the hidden assumption of that is that we have sort of in built within us a rigid human nature that somehow maybe in our genes or in our soul and it's sort of the same in each individual right it's not a product of history it's doesn't it's not found in society and in the particular relations of a given society but it's instead just sort of imprinted on each person 100% and taken separately and therefore the real origins of it remain a mystery for these people isn't really anything they can say they can just assert that human nature is this way then these theses on Feuerbach end with the famous probably the most famous single sentence in philosophy which ironically is the sentence in which Marx essentially shows the limitations of philosophy when he says famously that philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways the point is to change it and that you know really I think sums up Marxist philosophy in a sense now this this outlook rescues the the problem of mind as it or the mind body problem as it's often called from its abstract one-sided treatment in most of philosophy and it poses the question in its proper context and it doesn't necessarily provide in itself all of the answers for how we think but it it puts in its proper context and allows us to start looking at it in the right way and and to find the right tools for explaining it and so materialism now emerges as far more than the mere assertion that the material world exists independently and prior to the thinking individual now materialism or dialectical materialism shows that thought is part of the material world it's not just that it depends on it is actually part of the material world thought is a natural thing essentially and therefore it follows that we would be able to change the material world with our thought since it is part of the material world right so thought is treated now unlike in Feuerbach and other earlier materialists thought is treated as active and not passive and in fact thought can only be thought precisely because it is active that's what distinguishes it from mere sensation right which simply sort of registers what is happening to the body but thought is able to then react back upon the natural world precisely because it is part of the natural world is made of the same stuff effectively or comes from the same stuff and Marx also explains in the 1844 manuscripts which were written around the same time and the man must have an object to be must be an object rather to have an object and in other words again we are part of nature and this again is a very revolutionary way of thinking about problem at the time there is fundamentally no barrier between our thoughts and the material world since our thought is a product of one part of the material world and in order to think we must every day breathe in fact every every second we must breathe every day we must eat we must drink and we must find shelter and all of our powers including thoughts are natural powers which we direct towards survival in the in the natural physical world right and if we stopped doing that then of course we would stop thinking and so as Marx says and I quote again a being which does not have its nature outside of itself in other words what he means is does not depend on the natural world to exist in other words have to ease in things a being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being plays no part in the system of nature a being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being a being which is not itself an object for some third being has has no being for its object i.e. it is not objectively related its being is not objective a non-objective being is a non-being now translating that into plain English what he's arguing against essentially is any kind of non-materialist worldview that would have things like God the soul or ghosts or anything like that as these find as fundamentally non-material as spiritual beings or something and standing outside of the natural world and what he's saying is that essentially well as soon as you define it in that way you're effectively admitting it doesn't exist since to exist means to interact with the rest of the world or physical objects and to be able to do so you have to be part of that or you have to yourself be physical essentially and that applies of course to any not just those who believe in God or talk about ghosts but also those idealists who would argue that the thought is fundamentally non-material or cannot know the material world because it's a different thing to it and therefore because we are natural to our core we are fundamentally natural means nothing about us is non-natural immaterial and therefore we need the rest of nature to survive we must eat we must drink etc then as a result of this we also suffer because you know we can be deprived of those things that we need which Marx explains again in the 1844 manuscripts and this then lays the basis for understanding in their proper context all of our emotions our interests and therefore ultimately our thoughts which of course depend upon those things we couldn't have thoughts if it weren't for the fact that we need certain things that's what drives thoughts essentially so thought seen in this way it's not a magical property it's not some some sort of special spiritual substance which is somehow occupying a body but is instead a product of or a reflection of that particular beings natural beings needs physical needs fundamentally not only this but Marx also explains that we don't simply interact with nature on an individual basis but actually through and via society right so you know the foods that I eat and the clothes that I wear are almost in every case not actually produced by myself right they're produced by someone else in society or in reality many people in society there's a vast chain of of labor and exchange which enables the production of these things so that I can buy them in shops and use them that is really how I survive it's through society it's not as an independent individual very little of what I consume is made by myself and this applies to everybody so any attempt to explain how we think and what ideas are that doesn't take into account this fundamental fact of our existence will necessarily be false and abstract and we'll treat again once again we'll treat thought as a kind of magical and a mystical and therefore a mysterious substance that comes from you know who knows where so these these writings of Marx are really revolutionary and retain all of their validity I think now last week we discussed how philosophers like human Kant concluded that since the ideas that we use to gain knowledge such as time cause and effect since these ideas are very abstract and are not already found in our experience of concrete objects in other words I don't experience time itself and they concluded that these must be properties of the mind right and fundamentally not of the material world and now I think we can begin to make sense of that a bit more because you can see the similarity from that point of view with the point that Marx is making about Feuerbach treating human essence or human nature as present in each individual rather than as a historical product and a changing product of history and of society and similarly this this idea that our ideas and our abstractions are sort of result can you know it's seeing them as products of of the inherent structure of the mind present in each individual and not coming from experience or from the natural world that is a product of the removal of society and history from the study of thought essentially in philosophy in reality of course our ideas all of our ideas do come from experience but not the experience of each individual taken separately but the collective experience of humanity and that means fundamentally the labour of humanity the social labour of humanity the means by which we live as Engels says and I quote mastery over nature began with the development of the hand with labour and widened man's horizon at every new advance man was continually discovering new hitherto unknown properties in natural objects on the other hand the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual in short men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other in other words thought and language developed as a result of the production of tools the trouble is however this history the real basis of our thought is hidden it's been forgotten in the passage of time for various reasons but one reason that it's been forgotten is of course the the onset of class society in which a layer of society does very little or in fact no laboring at all and lives off the labour of others and instead deals only in ideas and abstractions in other words members of the ruling class and Engels explains this as well he says in the face of all these images that is culture and religion which appeared in the first place to be products of the mind and seemed to dominate human societies the more modest productions of the working hand retreated into the background the more so since the mind that planned the labour was able at a very early stage in the development of society to have the labour that had been planned carried out by the hands by hands other than its own in other words he's talking about a ruling class that uses its its education and the development of labour to live off the labour of others and therefore relegated the role of labour in the production of ideas into the background or completely disappeared it entirely so again understood in this way we we not only begin to understand the real origins of thoughts but we also begin to explain some of the problems of thoughts for example alienation which is hinted at in the quotation I just gave if human nature lies in the ensemble of of social relations and in real history and it's a product of that history and changes in with time and if the individual must live in and through society in order to survive then of course social problems social contradictions such as class society are bound to produce psychological problems if you like and so in a capitalist society the one in which we live the individual of course depends on society for everything as I've described but cannot exercise any real control over that society or even understanding in fact even bourgeois individuals business owners don't really usually understand how capitalism works in fact they have an interest in not understanding how it works and they can't control the market rather the market controls them so this impersonal market really decides what society produces who is fired and who isn't who is paid what etc and ultimately decides what is produced and in what quantities so no real human understanding of the overall process under capitalism is possible and Marx explains that thanks to social labour humans are the very first animals that can sort of well obviously that think and that can subject their own activity if you like to investigation other animals of course also have to produce things in order to survive but they don't really make tools or in very rare cases they do make some very primitive tools but generally they don't make any tools and they just depend upon their own natural characteristics their own physical properties in order to survive and that's what they do one generation to the next it never changes they don't develop any culture that learns and transmits certain things it's true there are some small exceptions to this but generally that is overwhelming in the case with all animals whereas because we labour and we create tools that are independent of our bodies we can obviously change these tools right we can invent new tools and we can discover new properties and things and as a result our tools can be perfected over time and with that the way that we work and the things that we produce obviously changes and develops and therefore the social structure is changed in this in this process right and therefore in turn our ideas of course and our culture changes as well and that's the real kind of basis for our ideas and the real kind of logic to to the development of thoughts over time which of course animals cannot do however once again in capitalist society because it is the market that dictates this process not contrast human beings that produces how we produce and what we produce we lose control over this process so although in capitalist society we have never before we have attained a level of mastery of toolmaking if you like that has never been achieved before I mean vastly superior to anything that has been achieved before our understanding of the properties of the natural world etc is incredible but at the same time our understanding of our own social structure and our own process of labour is has actually fallen in a sense we have lost control over that we don't understand the real logic of the market or Marxists do but society as a whole does not and cannot do that under capitalism and so this has a certain effect on our consciousness of sense of alienation a lack of control over our own fate you know a sort of obviously a boredom at work a lack of any connection with what you're producing what you produce has really nothing to do with what you consume and you don't get any say in what you produce at work you're told what to do and you might be fired one day and your whole community might be destroyed because of certain changes in the productive forces maybe you know you're in the industry that your community was built around suddenly ceases to be productive and is destroyed and that's it basically your town is ruined essentially that's the fate of humanity under capitalism we're all familiar with this idea right that that's that we that the technology that we have sort of is out of our control essentially and that this therefore explains not opens the door not just generally understanding how we think but also to understanding the problems of thought such as that of alienation and finally I just want to also draw attention to a something that may at first appear almost non-materialist in this outlook this revolutionary understanding of of how we think that Marx developed Marx and Engels developed over 150 years ago still escapes many I mean it's not really taught in schools and it's generally slandered in the education system and in the media so scientists and philosophers who are concerned with the problem of mind how we think basically generally ignorant of this this this philosophical outlook and you know make mistakes for example one of the most common ones in terms of how we think would be for scientists involved in the study of the brain and the nervous system to seek an explanation for everything about how we think and why we think purely within the structures of the brain which first of all at first glance appears thoroughly materialist and that's something that we would agree with now obviously we do accept that the brain is is is the site of thought is you know is indispensable to thoughts but there's more to it than that Trotsky said the following the brain is the material substrate of consciousness does this mean that consciousness is simply a form of manifestation of the physiological processes of the brain if this were the state of affairs then one would have to ask what is the need for consciousness if consciousness has no independent function which rises above the physiological processes of the brain and nerves then it is unnecessary useless it is a it is harmful because it is a super superfluous complication and water complication now this might seem as if he's developing an idealist outlook saying that the brain has almost got no control over thoughts um but actually it's nothing of the sorts there is more to materialism than simply explaining the structures of the brain and there's more to the material foundation of thoughts than the brain there's also the question of society as we have discussed which is of course also a material thing the brain does not simply equal consciousness and if it did then consciousness would merely be a passive byproduct that would never change like you know the bile that is secreted into the body it would just be a kind of in fact some scientists actually propose this that maybe consciousness is a sort of um like a kind of spell just a sort of accident they even call it like a fluky byproduct of the processes of the nervous system like it's basically plays no role it's just a sort of like the cherry on the cake it doesn't add anything it's just like a like a fluid that is secreted by the brain it's it somehow has this property of feeling um and sensation um which of course as Trotsky explains well that would be very expensive and sort of ridiculous thing actually consciousness rises above emerges from its material substrate as Trotsky calls it and in turn conditions it and this goes back to our earlier point about consciousness being an active and not a passive thing it actually changes it has the power to change one's behavior right um and how does it do that is that magic well no the the real determining factor in thoughts is society right and this is obvious when you think about it i mean if if if somebody was born with the exact same physical structures let's say they're an identical twin but they were brought up outside of society weren't introduced to language weren't introduced to the discoveries of of human thoughts would such a person have the same ideas and think in the same way as their identical twin who who was brought up in society clearly they would not so it's the the the logic of society and the history of society that produces ideas to go back to what we were talking about earlier it's labor the labor process the discovery of tools the ability to create new things and discover properties and and with that the structure of society changing over time that's really what produces and determines the ideas that we have and then we using our brains are able to internalize those things and to communicate them with language and therefore our brains kind of become more than the sum of their parts if you like they are able to absorb things that by purely by their own physical properties they would not be able to do because of this external social structure basically and and i think this this this outlook really often escapes a lot of scientists even working today but it's something that Marxist philosophy is is more than capable of explaining now to conclude then on the same note that we've concluded really the previous weeks since society produces thoughts since it is society that produces thought and not simply the brain or the soul or anything else it follows that the problems of society the contradictions of a society that we have briefly discussed today would if you like inhibit thoughts right and sort of mutilate it in a certain sense and hold it back so we cannot really call ourselves today a fully self-conscious species if you like because we don't as i've discussed we don't control our fate we don't understand why society does the things that it does why we have economic crises for example we don't why there is so much greed in society we don't really understand the or control these things and so as Engels says to win real self-consciousness for humanity and and freedom then humanity ultimately requires and i quote requires something more than mere knowledge it requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order in other words we need to socialize the means of production we need to put into working people's hands real control and conscious control over what they produce and how society needs to plan the whole of its production in a harmonious way to meet the needs of humanity and only when that is done in other words when we achieve socialism can we say that humanity has fully attained to self-consciousness