 I'm going to be talking about roughly a period of 250 years so I'll try to fit that into 45 minutes or so. Encompassing from the middle of the 15th century really to the end of the 18th century. A period which encompasses what is often called the Renaissance, the Reformation and towards the end of the period what we call the Enlightenment. A period of the great bourgeois revolutions essentially, which represents two and a half centuries of basically the most immense class battles, a struggle of living forces that went on for two and a half centuries. Battles that weren't just fought out on the battlefields and on the barricades although there were plenty of those in this period, but which was also fought out on the plane of religion, on the plane of philosophy and on the plane of science, as well as art and every other sphere of human culture. And it was a period which in many respects was much like our own is. That is to say it was a period in which an old social system was dying on its feet but was refusing to leave the stage of history. And in which a new social system was basically struggling to be born. And in the course of these struggles you had thrown up throughout this period a galaxy of some of the most brilliant thinkers, some of the boldest thinkers who defined persecution by the religious establishment and the church and who sought to carry out a wholesale revolution really in human thinking to liberate human thought from mysticism from the fog of superstition. And they fought for rationalism, they fought for science, they fought for human reason and they fought, the boldest of those thinkers amongst them fought for a militant form of materialism. Now Engels described it as a time which called for giants and produced giants and I think that's very much the case. Now the roots of this crisis in this period that we're talking about obviously have their origins in the dying feudal order which had dominated Europe basically for centuries. In fact Europe had been through a period basically a millennium of darkness effectively since the collapse of the Roman Empire. Populations had collapsed, centres of culture had declined. It was almost literally a period of darkness in so far as not just were the ancient Greek texts of science and philosophy lost but the ancient Greek language was completely lost basically for the majority of Europe in this period. And it was in proportion as the centres of culture declined and Europe entered an epoch of backwardness. The strength of the Catholic Church increased its grip basically a vice-like grip over the minds of men and women throughout this period. And the church of course provided the ideological, was an ideological bulwark and really a part fused in with the new feudal ruling class basically. The church was part of that and this was reflected in the role that philosophy basically played throughout this period. The only purpose that philosophy and natural philosophy in science formed part of philosophy actually until the scientific revolution starting in the 15th century. The only purpose that it played basically was to glorify God's creation and our natural place effectively within it. And that was also reflected in the elements of ancient Greek thought that were preserved throughout this period which were limited amounts of Plato's ideas and a homeopathic dose of Aristotle's thinking. And Plato in particular, his views formed the philosophical basis of the thought which was predominant in the period of the Middle Ages, in the monasteries amongst the monks and all the different schools of philosophy. Fundamentally his world outlook was an idealist outlook. That is to say he inverted the relationship, for Plato the relationship between mind and matter was inverted. It is mind which is primary and matter which was secondary basically. Basically Plato divided the world effectively in two. We have this world around us which is mortal, which is imperfect and which is in a constant process of change. And then we have a second world which is the world of our conceptions which are perfect, which are immortal and which for Plato have an objective existence independent of this material world. And in fact this material world is merely an imperfect reflection of this world of ideal forms. This was the essence of Plato's idealism basically. And the Christian church took this on board and gave it its own spin of course that they rejected. They encouraged people to reject this sinful mortal realm and if you wanted to seek real knowledge it had to be knowledge of that spiritual ideal realm effectively. And that knowledge was to be grasped of course by the means of divine revelation through faith. It was through faith that you were going to gain knowledge and insight into that other realm basically. And the mode of thinking which dominated throughout the medieval period was known as scholasticism basically. It took these texts which were based upon faith and dogma and the fact that the church had sanctified them. A small infusion of philosophy and of course the Bible and other religious texts and the commentaries upon those texts. And knowledge was sought by basically applying syllogistic logic, formal logic to these texts to draw out further truths. So you have commentaries upon these given texts and then commentaries upon commentaries. And a huge amount of intellectual energy was basically exhausted. Commenting upon and debating utterly nonsensical ideas. The idea of scholastic philosophers debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is basically the kind of caricature but it wasn't far from that basically. Francis Bacon, who we'll meet later on, a 16th century English materialist, described the endeavours of the medieval schoolmen as like the spider who worketh his web and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning admirable for the finest of thread and work but of no substance or profit. In other words they were very intelligent people but they weren't looking out into the external world to seek knowledge basically. They were working it up from within themselves effectively, producing these cobwebs of knowledge. And what I think is interesting listening to Bacon's words is how applicable they are to modern academia basically. This idea of cobwebs of knowledge produced from within themselves, the commentaries upon commentaries of the medieval scholastic philosophers. Just like the textual analysis, the discourse, it's all based upon basically the same fundamental idealist notions and methods basically of the medieval schoolmen. Modern academia really are the inheritors of the scholastic tradition, not the Enlightenment tradition in some respects and to the extent that that means anything. I think it's no coincidence basically that for the many schools of academics such as like the Frankfurt School and the Postmodernists independently have come to the conclusion that they reject the Enlightenment and what they basically mean by the rejection of the Enlightenment is the rejection of rationality, of reason, of the possibility of gaining a rational insight into the material world through scientific empirical investigation and the rejection of materialism. And I think this rejection of the Enlightenment of the Postmodernists and these others is really a sign of how far the bourgeois have declined, of how spiritually pulparised they have basically become. Because in their revolutionary youth they represented the progress of human civilisation, the capitalist class they stood, or their best representative should I say, they stood for reason, rationality, the scientific method and they produced these brilliant thinkers because at that time they did represent progress because unlike the feudal lords whose wealth was based fundamentally upon land, this nascent bourgeois class, of course their industry, their wealth was based upon industry, sorry, and therefore their wealth increased at that time in tandem with every advance in science and production and technology which created the basis for new productive techniques, for new methods of navigation and the expansion of trade routes and their intellectual needs of this nascent class were fundamentally and utterly incompatible basically with the stifling atmosphere of the domination, this dictatorship of the Catholic Church over the minds of men and women throughout Europe. And you should begin to see the first elements of an intellectual ferment preparing the way for a revolution basically in the material world and also a revolution in culture. You begin to see that as early as the 12th and 13th century in the form of a crisis of scholasticism and this crisis was actually provoked by the rediscovery, either translated from the Arabic or the rediscovery of the ancient Greeks, of the ancient Greek originals, of the writings of Aristotle. He was a disciple of Plato, but unlike Plato he was fundamentally a materialist basically. He emphasised investigation of nature, of experiment and so forth and his students even had a phrase, there is nothing in the mind which was not first in the senses, that is the starting point of a materialist outlook and it created a crisis, but it was in many ways really only the harbinger of a greater revolution in philosophy and science to come which really begins in the mid 15th century and its centre is in northern Italy and it was kicked off of course by a man known as Nicholas Copernicus who wrote a book on the revolutions of the heavenly spheres from his deathbed I think in 1543 actually. From his deathbed for a reason he had a certain trepidation of what the consequences for himself might be because he understood rightly that this was laying down the gauntlet to the church basically, this was a revolutionary challenge to the old outlook of the geocentric earth-centred universe was basically part of the cosmology of the church which justified it was part of the justification of our place within God's creation which we must accept with resignation and therefore to place the sun at the centre of the universe was a serious challenge at that time and this scientific revolution was not limited to Copernicus' discoveries you also had discoveries in this period on magnetism the circulation of the blood in engineering and actually industry and technology played a massive advance in sparing all of these discoveries and advances in science and in the early 1600s it was a discovery from industry in particular the Dutch invented telescope which played a revolutionary role in the hands of one of the great revolutionaries of this period and in my opinion the true father of the enlightenment along with figures like Francis Bacon and Descartes and that is Galileo who took the telescope and he directed it up towards the heavens and he made observations that he didn't just limit himself to these observations he also studied terrestrial mechanics and the whole of existing physics as it had been inherited by him and he carried out, basically pushed forward a revolution in the whole of the existing understanding of the natural universe not just in astronomy, in terrestrial mechanics in a whole series of areas affecting physics basically and now the full weight of the inquisition was brought down upon Galileo he was silenced by the church even before Galileo had published his landmark writings Bruno Bruno was burnt at the stake for advocating the most modern of ideas to be honest Bruno was an incredible thinker and basically the intellectual life of Northern Italy was to a large degree snuffed out by the church in proportion as this challenge came up from below and their grip was being loosened upon the minds of men and women they resorted to terroristic methods of the inquisition to crush the intellectual life of this that was bubbling away basically but it was too late Galileo's revolution had left its mark on the whole of the subsequent century really the whole subsequent 17th and 18th century and on philosophy in particular and his revolution began flowing into the stream of another revolution that was happening simultaneously and parallel and that was in philosophy and its centre really was in England where you had the restatement and the systematic development of materialist philosophy for the first time in the modern period and its originator was Francis Bacon who I previously mentioned three years Galileo's senior he was a man quite unlike Galileo in a sense he was not a revolutionary in fact I think he was Lord Chancellor under James I and he didn't even intend to carry out I mean we think of materialism quite rightly in antagonism to religion and mysticism he was not a religious reformer or a revolutionary religion basically like a lot of the materialists in England actually you'll see that they didn't really want to challenge the established order or even the church and in fact he dodged a conflict with the church by basically saying well God is unknowable to either our sense perception or to human reason you can only know God through faith so let's leave God to one side and let's look at the material world we're familiar with it was a bit of a backhanded compliment to God that just batted him away basically but nonetheless on the primary questions that concerned him Bacon was a materialist he regarded matter as being primary and the ideas in our mind are a reflection of the material world around us and knowledge he explains could only be had could only be accessed through empirical investigation of nature through our senses our senses form a window onto the external world this is the basis of empiricism but it's also the starting point of materialism and it's the starting point of the scientific method actually it is a correct observation to say that is the starting point of our knowledge science begins by making observations and collecting facts about the outside world but how does that scientific method progress according to Bacon who is rightly regarded as the advisor of the scientific method in the 17th century contemporary with these great advances in science well of course we take particular facts and particular observations and then of course what we do is we discard what is non-essential about those things and we seek what they have in common basically and then we draw out universal conclusions so in other words through the method of what we call today induction we go from the particular to the universal that's how science takes place you know you have particular data points on a piece of graph paper and after you've got enough data points you can draw a trend basically that is how of course science develops according to Bacon and indeed yes it is the start it is the correct starting point of a materialist outlook but the question is is it only by our sense perception alone that we come to knowledge is it only by sensing the world that we know the world now of course the answer is no it's not of course simply by sensing things that we know the world as soon as we begin to sense the world of course we begin to process the world in our brain we begin to seek some rational insight some make generalisations basically and then having made those generalisations having gained some insight basically our reason in turn affects what we then further observe right sorry we obviously what we decide to go out and observe the significance we place upon observations is informed by our reason itself if I've lost my phone I'm not going to look everywhere in this building for my phone I'm going to retrace my steps I'm going to bring reason into the equation if I'm a biologist and I'm carrying out a comparative anatomy of say zebras and horses and I decide to dissect them and look at their tissues and organs I come with a certain amount of knowledge of those investigations right the idea of species, the idea of tissues the idea of organs it determines what I look for the scientist comes with a hypothesis so there is a dialectical interaction between reason and observation the two parts of the same process which furthermore is not also the gaining of knowledge is also not an individual process it is a social process actually most of the science that you know isn't because you individually have done those experiments they've done some of them but you know I've never proved that the atom exists but I know that someone has done it and I've read those experiments and the results of those experiments it is a social process actually and knowledge is a social phenomenon it's not an individual phenomenon so there are many different sides to knowledge but of course this and the sense impressions are only one of those basically the question is the issue was with English materialism this new materialist school that was developing it had the potential for a many sided development but in the hands of the successors to Bacon it was really developed in a very one sided way this question of sense impressions was developed and empirical investigation, empiricism this school became known as became really a very one sided emphasis on this side of knowledge to the exclusion of reason basically and human activity and the reaction to that was actually the development of a parallel school of thinking which was based primarily in France which was centred in France which emphasised the other side of human knowledge of reason and these were the rationalists the great rationalist philosophers and of course as you might expect the rationalists starting with Descartes they placed a great deal of emphasis on reason rather than empirical observation and this tendency did have a strong leaning in the direction therefore of idealism, the idea that we can simply deduce things from mind from simple facts that are obvious to our innate human reason we can deduce certain things in the manner of logical or mathematical proofs about the world of course that is a legitimate method but emphasising that of course to the exclusion of empirical observation can lead in the direction of idealism obviously but precisely because of the one sided character of materialism as I'll go on to there was a great contributions that were developed by the idealist philosophers and in particular of course it was through idealism that we came to the rediscovery of dialectics in the modern period although as I'll come on to not all of the rationalist philosophers were by any means clear cut idealists but back to the English materialist for now who were basically who came after Bacon they very much developed materialism in this one sided way they very much developed it in a purely mechanical sense and they regarded matter effectively as all of matter is describable in terms of mechanical motion now what do I mean by mechanical motion I mean bulk motion as it's described by the laws of physics but Newton of course was the one to definitively describe the mathematical laws of physics later on but basically this motion takes place through like Newton's law things basically continue moving in a straight line undeflected basically unless there is some sort of impulse from the outside matter itself is fundamentally inert for the mechanical materialist it's not self-moving basically and it is only through physical impact through collision that motion is produced and therefore I mean Locke himself says it we observe matter only to transfer but not to produce any motion it's a very inert sort of character of or notion of motion so I didn't do that intentionally thank you and so we have this impression of the world basically as lots of interlocking parts that are bumping into each other and causing a cascade causing a cascade of simple causes and effects which can be easily delineated from each other much like a piece of mechanics and that was how the world was seen as like a piece of clockwork basically and precisely because everything can be described in terms of mechanical motion therefore all of the qualities of nature which we see around us were fundamentally reducible to the properties of mechanical motion all of the qualities of nature could be described in terms of trajectory, speed, shape you know different geometrical qualities hardness and penetrability these sort of things were the fundamentally everything could be reduced to this it was a very reductionist outlook effectively and you know ironically it was a distortion that was caused by the rapid advance of astronomy and mechanics of terrestrial mechanics in the hands of great geniuses like Galileo and others that precisely because these sciences went further ahead than the others you know it wasn't until the end of the 18th century really that chemistry became a real science with the discovery of oxygen it wasn't until the 19th century with Darwin in biology that therefore everything it was informed by the science of its time the form that materialism took was very much informed by the science of the time Descartes for example even described the human body as effectively being like like a machine basically albeit one inhabited by a soul and Hobbes who was a contemporary of Descartes and Hobbes lived a time of incredible storm and stress he lived in the course of the English Civil War he lived through these great events ironically although he is probably one of the best representatives of bourgeois materialism he was a royalist actually he was a reactionary and he was therefore forced to flee to France where he wrote some of his great texts and he actually analysed the state as a little bit like the mechanical clumping together of atoms forms us as human beings the mechanical clumping together of men basically forms this great monster the Leviathan, the state basically it's the necessary evil with the autocrat at its head who is a necessarily sort of bringing order amidst the brutish and selfish competition of human beings that he very cynically imagines that we were of this sort of character it was a very mechanical sort of interpretation but you can see actually it came with certain personal dangers to advocate these views in France for Hobbes because of course it also strips the state of its divine justification and so he was forced in the 1650s to appeal to Cromwell to return back to England which he was able to do so you can see there's a seed of a revolutionary idea there but Hobbes was far from a revolutionary he was a pragmatic bourgeois materialist who could make peace with an absolute monarch or a lord protector at the same time he was a practical materialist of a bourgeois sort of outlook but ultimately because actually of this empiricist development of materialism, this very mechanical development empiricism itself as developed by Hobbes and Locke and particularly those that came after them would actually find itself in a dead end philosophically it would find itself ensnared when taken to its extreme and therefore absurd conclusion it would find itself in the realm of subjective idealism now for the mechanical materialist like Hobbes and Locke we interact with the world just as the world interacts with itself by very mechanical sort of motions where our sense organs are basically like buttons being pressed externally by the world around us and that is how we receive knowledge it's a very passive notion of knowledge basically and in fact John Locke described the mind as effectively like a tabular rasa a blank slate which is empty until the senses are impacted by the outside world our senses basically write upon our minds they fill our minds with content which is empty until such thing as our senses fill it with knowledge but immediately actually this very mechanical conception of things sets up a sort of duality effectively which became a serious problem for empiricism it places an opposition between cause and effect between the sense organ and that which impacts upon the sense organ between an outer objective world and a sort of passive inner subjective world in other words it sets up an opposition between mind and matter basically which is an inheritance from the middle ages really it falls into the same fundamental problem and in fact it raises a question if all we have are our sense impressions basically they are the interface between that outer objective world and this inner subjective world which are completely distinct from one another if all we have are our sense impressions which tell us about that outer world how can we know that they actually give any real impression of that outer world basically how do we know that the world is the way it is as our senses tell us it is how do we even know that there is anything beyond our sense impressions actually that's the sort of question that is raised by this sort of duality of falsely stating the problem in this kind of way and even Locke who he's largely regarded as a materialist but even he basically raised the question mark over even the existence of a material world he describes matter as merely the something we know not what the supposed but unknown support of those qualities we find existing so I mean he's not exactly sure himself whether there is a material world now the solution to this problem was actually provided or indicated really by one of the great rationalist philosophers and that was by Baruch Spinoza who lived in the Netherlands although he was of I think Jewish Sephardic ancestry and he explains the solution to this problem basically which is that there is only one world there is no fundamental separation between the objective and the subjective he regarded extension i.e. extension in geometrical space and the properties of mechanical motion and thought and experience and these sort of things as basically two qualities, two aspects of the same fundamental thing which he calls substance effectively and that is very much the case we're not simply passively receiving sense impressions from the world outside of us we're not separate and apart from that we have a material brain of course inside our material body which is as much part of the material world as anything else and for Spinoza everything was made of this one substance i.e. he was a monist he didn't set up this dualistic separation between mind and matter but for Spinoza as Alan explained last night this substance was God effectively in a pantheistic manner everything is God I am God, you are God the chairs and tables are God but of course if everything is God then nothing is God basically it reduces the mystical element of God entirely God is effectively a byword for matter in that kind of idealism so it's a kind of idealism that is for all intents and purposes materialistic basically it comes very close to a materialist worldview but once more returning to Locke and the downfall really of English materialism now Locke well he lived at the end really of a revolutionary period in British history the period of the 17th century in which you had the great English civil war, the restoration and then towards the end of the century you had the glorious revolution which was very much the time Locke was writing he had gone into exile I believe to the Netherlands in the time of the restoration and returned from exile when a Dutch adventurer, William of Orange was invited to take the throne of England from James II and it was a time basically in which the revolutionary potential of the British bourgeois was becoming exhausted now they were basically compromising with the elements of the old order that was still existing with the church the monarchy you had this constitutional monarchy the house of lords these remnants of feudalism and they came to a compromise basically with the old aristocracy in which the bourgeois would effectively have power and be able to make money in the means in which they which was their fundamental priority basically and Locke's philosophy was fundamentally in keeping with the spirit of his time basically his philosophy was a practical but inconsistent philosophy it had materialist elements but it doubted the existence of matter it left just like Newton it left room open for God despite the fact that you had this mechanical universe which would continue on its motions for all eternity it allowed room for a prime mover who would have the great role of just setting the whole thing in motion it was not exactly like the God of the Old Testament that could turn people to pillars of salt it was rather less than that so it was very much in the spirit of the time of compromising inconsistency basically of the British bourgeois but as I say having arrived in power the British bourgeoisie were determined to put an end to this period of storm and stress they became basically increasingly sceptical of anything that smacked of revolution or even of materialism and therefore a period of philosophical reaction effectively set in and in the 18th century the immediate successors of Locke in England actually I think Hume was Scottish was he not and actually Bishop Barclay was Irish but they still were the less formed part of this tradition of British empiricism they very much indeed did take empiricism to its logical and absurd conclusion and Hume precisely denied the possibility of knowing whether there even is a material world out there beyond our senses and the logical conclusion of that is actually that all I can be sure of is that I exist solipsism, the idea that I exist but I'm not sure any of you exist or the material world around me exists but that's the logical and completely sterile conclusion basically of this empiricism and Barclay he went further he denied that there was a material world at all all we have are our sense impressions there's no evidence for a material world in fact it's a leap of faith what we actually believe gives order to these sense impressions and therefore he believed it was God simply implanting these ideas in our heads basically so you see how this one sided materialism ran into a dead end and was taken to the extreme of subjective idealism by people like Hume and Bishop Barclay and it reflected the reaction of the British bourgeoisie in that period of time but if materialism died a death in England in the 18th century it had a brilliant revolutionary rebirth in France in the same period now by the 18th century the conditions were increasingly coming into conflict with the existing the existing state of affairs basically was coming into conflict with the state the old ruling class the old Ancien regime was in conflict with the progressive society basically the whole thing was teetering on the edge of collapse you had a series of wars with England and with European powers in which the French were dealt heavy blows and of course the national debt was increasing and who was forced to pay that debt it was the third estate basically i.e. not the first two estates of the clergy and the noblemen they didn't have to they had a say in everything but they didn't have to pay any taxes it was the third estate i.e. the increasingly wealthy bourgeoisie who represented the majority of the wealth of the nation who had to pay for these what they regarded as senseless wars in other words the French bourgeoisie were coming into a acute conflict with the whole of the existing order with the clergy, with the aristocracy with the monarchy and a revolution was brewing a revolution that would eventually end of course with the fall of the Bastille with the fall of the monarchy and with the beheading of a monarch and the beheading of much of the old aristocracy basically but in order to prepare the grounds for what would be an extremely thorough going revolution in France it was necessary to prepare the minds of men and women for this tremendous overthrow of the old order in other words society was crying out basically for a philosophy for an outlook an outlook of this revolutionary class in the ascent of the revolutionary element within the French bourgeoisie and it was in these conditions that actually it was ironically a conservative compromising gentleman that was John Locke his ideas were brought to France by a guy called Condillac and given a completely new content basically this English materialism when it was imported into France in the hands of a series of brilliant thinkers including Holbach, Helvetius and Diderot who were in turn closely aligned with the great social theorists although not really philosophers Rousseau and Voltaire whose names are synonymous with the great revolutions of the 18th century and they took this materialism this English materialism and they filled it with a new revolutionary content basically and it reflected the fact that the French revolution was basically being fought on a higher level than the English revolution the English revolution was fought on the basis of a purified religion of a puritanical sort of religious war the French revolution was fought under the banner of reason and of creating a rational society of liberty, equality and justice basically and in the same way that the French revolution itself was fought to its logical conclusion French materialism was also taken to its logical conclusion the great French materialist they didn't shirk the logical conclusion of materialism it's anti-religious, it's atheistic side it's revolutionary edge which people like Hobbes and Locke were very much not of that character these people they intended to turn materialism into a weapon against the gods and the church and the monarchy and the whole of the existing order which was deemed irrational by these thinkers they denied the divinity of monarchs and they declared that the highest good was that which led to the greatest happiness of human beings basically and as I say it was very far from the cynical self-serving materialism of someone like Hobbes who believed that we as human beings are naturally brutish and selfish and therefore we need some sort of authoritarian strong hands that's going to bring law and order no, these materialists were they believed that if you elevated human conditions you could also elevate human beings basically, we needed to liberate men and women from the awful conditions these barbaric conditions which create a barbaric culture and society and therefore they believed it was possible to reorganise society on the basis of human reason rather than on the basis of superstition and unlike those superstitious thinkers who thought that who preached a better life after death they said, well no, on the contrary suffering is not something that was created by original sin, it doesn't go back to Adam and Eve and all of these sort of things suffering is an ill produced by society and we can get rid of it basically by revolutionising society we can have heaven here on earth basically or not at all was the philosophy of the French materialists in other words you can see already the direction is being pointed forward towards how materialism connects to communism you can see that in French materialism it's already pointing in that direction to change men you have to change their material conditions and make them more humane fundamentally, Marxism owes a direct debt of gratitude really to the French materialists who in turn these brilliant writers and really they were, I mean Marx I think regarded Diderot as his favourite essayist their works were pulsating with life, they were really vivacious bold thinkers who also they harness all of the latest developments in science, they were really keenly interested in science, in fact Diderot himself led the editorial basically of an encyclopedia which aims to bring together all of human knowledge of the time in science, in philosophy in social theory all of these ideas into a great encyclopedia for which he wrote about 7000 articles himself he's a very prolific man and yeah, he thought that basically science was the way to liberate humanity it was through reason, getting rid of the fog of superstition and he came under this encyclopedia was basically banned by the church and by the French state at the time these people were prepared to face serious personal persecution these were self-sacrificing individuals who believed that they were doing what they were doing for the good of humanity and they their ideas are full of this really genuinely bold and revolutionary spirit and in fact there is a direct link really between French materialism and Marxism precisely actually through the utopian socialist Fourier himself was directly inspired by French materialism Robert Owen was more indirectly inspired by the ideas of Helvetius and Robert Owen precisely wanted to elevate men and women by creating decent conditions for them in the factories he was very much a materialist himself basically and even Lenin in the 20th century after the Bolsheviks had come to power in a short article he wrote he showed there is still life and a sharp edge effectively to these great French materialist writers he wrote an article on the significance of militant materialism and in the war against the influence of the church and of mysticism in the countryside in Russia to awaken the intellectual life of the Russian peasantry he actually advised Russian communists to translate the writings of the great French materialist precisely to awaken that mood of critical thinking and rationalism amongst the peasants and precisely because it contrasted it had so much colour in contrast with some of what he described as the sort of like the grey copied text of the so-called Marxist literature which he thought was of a deplorably low quality at that time so we I think we owe obviously a great deal I think there is a direct heritage really that Marxism owes to this brilliant school of French materialism but nonetheless it is worth pointing out of course that the French materialist suffered from all of the defects of English materialism basically it was very much an undialectical materialism and it was very much in that sort of vein of a mechanical mechanical outlook but just as with the English materialist or even to a greater degree considering the emphasis upon scientific investigation that these great materialists placed you can't really blame it upon the French materialist themselves I mean the level of science was such that the whole world outlook was affected the whole outlook of science was effectively undialectical species were regarded as completely static in the same form that they had been given to us since the origins of the earth it was regarded that basically the earth goes around the sun as do all the other planets and have done for all eternity in exactly the same sort of rotations and it was only Kant who really came up with the idea of the nebular hypothesis of the origins of the solar system a brilliant idealist philosopher actually but his ideas were not widely accepted actually until the start of the 20th century the acceptance of the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system became widespread and then of course geology didn't even exist as a science really that either we had had these geological features that we see around us for all eternity or they had been created by great biblical catastrophes this was kind of like the fundamental outlook of the time and these were the this was the level of science basically and it's no wonder of course that the French materialist reflected that level of science although it should be said there are brilliant dialectical insights in the great writings of the French materialist so for example I recommend reading Dallunbeir's conversations with Diderot or Diderot's conversations with Dallunbeir where Diderot actually hypothesises that species have evolved they've evolved from other species it's quite remarkable really it's far ahead of his time considering he's writing in the middle of the 18th century about you know a bit less than a century before the origins of the species came out so of course it's no wonder that they suffered from these limitations and of course the writing limitation of French materialism was precisely the fact that they were the ideological trailblazers of the great French revolution of a bourgeois revolution in other words and you know they were in order to raise the nation basically to raise the population for a struggle against the Ancien regime it was necessary to raise the possibility of fighting for the liberation of humanity not the liberation of a particular class these great thinkers were of course fighting for the liberation of humanity as a whole that was precisely what inspired them but of course it wasn't the French revolution would not end with the liberation of humanity it would achieve the liberation at least not in the immediate term it would achieve the liberation of the bourgeois class and itself was shown to be in given enough time it too was shown to be irrational it had its irrational elements also you know the kingdom of reason became basically the bourgeois republic the rights of man were really the rights of bourgeois man the rights to enjoy private property and the utopian socialists used the same method as the French materialists and the rationalists of the enlightenment to basically argue precisely that capitalism is just as irrational as the ancient regimes the feudal regime which fundamentally came before it these ideas were in a manner of speaking only semi-materialist and precisely for this reason because they were the ideas of the bourgeois revolution because they sought to liberate humanity in the abstract they talked about the rights of man in the abstract reason and rationality were abstract ideas that were basically you know reason could we could draw out reasonable conclusions at any period in time it was only because these thinkers happened to be born in the 18th century that the ideas of the rights of man the social contract and all of these sort of things of a harmonious social order were really discovered in the 18th century rather than say the 15th century or something like this and the utopian socialist fundamentally applies the same method you know they looked around at capitalism and they decided it was equally irrational you know the great satanic mills the poverty the slums all of these things and they were right of course capitalism did have that element of irrationality in it it had a class contradiction within it but of course in the period of the 18th century and the early 19th century there was a great deal of truth to what the French materialists were saying because of course that the to quote Hegel all that is rational is real and all that therefore the completely the obverse of that is that all that is irrational is unreal it was precisely because the old feudal system and the trappings of the old feudal system were coming into conflict with the needs of society that it was irrational it needed to be overthrown and they were correct of course in that analysis but that was not a timeless statement about feudalism and capitalism as social orders this was a historical truth of course and it had its historical limitations and the point is that today of course it is capitalism which has become irrational which is in conflict basically with the interests of society as a whole and it is the proletaria it is the working class which is which carries on its shoulders basically the destiny of humanity which is the ascending revolutionary class and which has nothing to be afraid of from the truth from rational insight and from reason basically but these are not of course now understood as a historical timeless truths basically but historical truths about where class society has come to in its culmination in capitalism basically and it's precisely as Lenin said that the reason that Marxism appears all powerful is precisely because it is true and the capitalist class today the truth is not on their side the truth actually speaks against them which is why in academia in the Frankfurt School post modernist they all turn their back on the enlightenment because these men and women they fought for truth they fought for rationality they fought for an insight into the workings of the world and the insight that genuine science gives us into the working of society is that capitalism is a doomed system that must be overthrown and therefore they turn their back upon rationality they turn their back upon reason and these sort of things but I think we should gladly allow them to turn their backs on that tradition of the enlightenment because these men and women these were giants who I think we can claim as part of our they fought in their own manner they fought honestly for the liberation of humanity not just materially but spiritually intellectually as we are fighting for the liberation of humanity spiritually and intellectually ourselves and some of them paid a terrible price for it the ultimate price for it people like Galileo people like Giordano Bruno like Spinoza and others they were great revolutionaries within the limitations that they had of course which were the limitations of their time and we if the bourgeois want to cast them aside and say that they don't want them as part of their tradition well we will say that Marxism stands on the shoulders of these great giants as well not just Marx Engels Lenin and Trotsky but also Giordano Bruno yes also Galileo and if you want Bacon and Descartes and all of these great thinkers of course also form part of our revolutionary tradition from which you know Marxism is the distilled essence of all of these fantastic ideas that also preceded it so on that I think I'll finish