U start with the most advanced science, and work backwards form a historical perspective, looking at how the most advanced level of knowledge developed. wtf, seriously, its like marxism-leninism isnt recognised as a science or somethign.
fape posted:His proof of why materialism is superior to idealism, also, is the early-20th-century equivalent of "I can't see, hear, taste, smell, or touch god, therefore god doesn't exist" tthat atheists on GameFAQs and facepunch use to stump their 13 year old christian rivals.
mlyp
fape posted:The first men, completely ignorant, having no knowledge of the world or
of themselves, and possessing only poor technical means of acting on the
world, attributed the responsibility for everything which surprised them to
supernatural beings. In their imagination, they arrived at the conclusion
that each one of us has a double existence. Troubled by the idea of this
“double,” they came to imagine that their ideas and their sensations were
produced not by activities of their “bodies, but of a distinct soul which
inhabits the body and leaves it at death."
Afterwards was born the idea of the immortality of the soul and of a
possible life of the spirit independent of matter.
Similarly, the weakness and anxiety of these men, when confronted with
the forces of nature and all those phenomena which they did not under
stand and which the level of technology did not permit them to dominate
(germination, storms, floods, etc.), led them to suppose that, behind these
forces, there were all-powerful beings, “spirits” or "gods,” benevolent or
malevolent, but, in any case, capricious.
(...)
Those who, adopting the unscientific explanation, acknowledged the
creation of the world by God, i.e., affirmed that spirit had created matter,
formed the faction of idealism.
Why don't you take a second then and give us a more accurate definition of idealism / its development, because maybe they were just writing so long ago they dont have your good information.
fape posted:do you take russell seriously?
im talking about what you find in literally any philosophy books not my personal preferences.
Constantignoble posted:Speaking of tidying up versions of texts on Marxist philosophy: while digging through archived copies of NST, I found that vol 18 no 1 is just a full reprinting of John Somerville's The Philosophy of Marxism: An Exposition. It's a very good book; clear and accessible, with a Q&A section at the end of each chapter that actually adds to content instead of restating it. Chapter 2 alone, on dialectical logic, cleared up a lot for me.
Anyway I attempted to make it look nice and OCR and so on and the result is here.
(Incidentally, removing 99.9% of the image data in favor of text, culling metadata and cropping a load of whitespace at the margins somehow made the file a couple megs larger, because there appears to be no rhyme or reason to how acrobat encodes pdfs)
Protip: best way to deal with scanned books already in PDF format is to extract the images - easiest way to do this ensuring no conversion/quality loss is to use pdfimages which is part of the free xpdf package. Then use scantailor (also free) to do a semi-automated clean up of the images. Sounds like you have acrobat so then just use that to compile the resulting TIFF files into a pdf, do OCR, and save as optimized pdf. Should give you a good tradeoff between file size and quality. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.
Up to now we have studied what materialism in general is and what ideas are common to all materialists. Now we are going to see how materialism has evolved since antiquity to become modern materialism. In short, we are going to trace the history of materialism.
In so few pages, we shall not attempt to explain the 2,000 years of history of materialism; we simply want to give some general information which may guide future readings.
In order to study this history well, even summarily, it is indispensable to see why, at each instant, things happened as they did. It would be better not to cite certain historical names than not to apply this method. But, while we do not wish to overload the brains of our readers, we think, nevertheless, that it is necessary to name, in chronological order, the main materialist philosophers who are more or less already known to them.
This is why, in order to simplify the work, we are going to devote the first pages to the purely historical side of the question; then, in the second part of this chapter, we shall see why the evolution of materialism had to undergo the form of development which it did.
1. The need for studying this history
The bourgeoisie does not like the history of materialism, and that is why this history, taught in bourgeois books, is altogether incomplete and always false. Several methods of falsification are used:
1. As the great materialist thinkers cannot be ignored, they are spoken of in relation to everything they have written except their materialist studies, and people forget to mention that they are materialist philosophers.
There are many cases of forgetfulness in the history of philosophy such as it is taught in the high schools and the university, but we shall cite as an example Diderot, who was the greatest materialist thinker before Marx and Engels.
2. In the course of history, there have been numerous thinkers who were either materialists without knowing it or inconsistent materialists. That is, those who, in some of their writings, were materialists, while in others they were idealists: Descartes, for example.
Yet history written by the bourgeoisie covers up everything which, in the case of these thinkers, not only influenced materialism, but also gave birth to an entire current of this philosophy.
3. Then, if these two methods of falsification do not succeed in camouflaging certain authors, they are simply made to vanish.
This is how the history of literature and philosophy in the 18th century is taught while d’Holbach and Helvetius, who were great thinkers of this period, are "ignored."
Why are things like this? Because the history of materialism is particularly instructive for knowing and understanding the problems of the world; and also because the development of materialism is fatal for those ideologies which uphold the privileges of the ruling classes.
These are the reasons why the bourgeoisie presents materialism as a doctrine which has not changed, which has been fixed for twenty centuries, while on the contrary, materialism has been something alive and constantly moving. "But just as idealism underwent a series of stages of development, so also did materialism. With each epoch-making discovery even in the sphere of natural science it has to change its form; . . ." (Engels, Feuerbach, pp. 25-26.)
Now we understand better the need for studying, even summarily, this history of materialism. In order to do so, we must differentiate two periods: 1) from the origin (Greek antiquity) up to Marx and Engels; 2) from the materialism of Marx and Engels up to the present day. (We shall study this second part along with dialectical materialism.)
We call the first period “pre-Marxist materialism” and the second period “Marxist materialism” or “Dialectical materialism.”
2. Pre-Marxist materialism
(1) Greek antiquity
Let us recall that materialism is a doctrine which has always been linked to science and which has evolved and progresses with it. When, in Greek antiquity, in the 6th and 5th centuries before Christ, science begins to appear with the "Physicists,” a materialist current is formed which attracts the best thinkers and philosophers of this period (Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus). These first philosophers will be, as Engels says, “naturally dialecticians." They are struck by the fact that motion and changes are encountered everywhere and that things are not isolated, but intimately linked together.
Heraclitus, who is called the “father of dialectics,” said, “Nothing is immobile; everything flows; we do not bathe twice in the same river, for it is never, for two successive moments, the same: from one instant to another, it has changed; it has become different.”
Heraclitus was the first to try to explain motion and change and to see the reason for the evolution of things in contradiction.
The concepts of these first philosophers were correct; however, they were abandoned because they had been formulated a priori, i.e., the state of science in that period could not prove what they maintained. Moreover, those social conditions necessary for the flowering of dialectics (we shall see further on what these are) had not yet been realized.
It is only much later, in the 19th century, that the conditions (social and intellectual) allowing science to prove the correctness of dialectics will be realized.
Other Greek thinkers had materialist concepts: Leucippus (5th century B.c.), who was the instructor of Democritus, had already discussed the problem of atoms, the theory of which was established by the latter.
Epicurus (341-270 B.c.), disciple of Democritus, was a very great thinker whose philosophy was completely distorted by the Church in the Middle Ages. Out of hate for philosophical materialism, the latter presented the Epicurian doctrine as a deeply immoral doctrine, as a vindication of the lowest passions. In reality, Epicurus was an ascetic whose philosophy aimed at giving a scientific (and thus antireligious) foundation for human life.
All these philosophers were aware that philosophy was tied to the fate of humanity, and we already find there, on their part, an opposition to the official theory, an opposition to idealism.
But one great thinker dominates the Greece of antiquity: Aristotle, who was rather an idealist. His influence was considerable. This is why we must cite him especially. He drew up the inventory of human knowledge of this period and filled the gaps created by the new sciences. A universal mind, he wrote numerous books on every subject. Through the universality of his knowledge, from which only the idealist tendencies were retained while the materialist and scientific aspects were neglected, he had a considerable influence on philosophical concepts until the end of the Middle Ages, i.e., for twenty centuries.
During all this period, then, the tradition of antiquity was followed and all thinking was done through Aristotle. A savage repression raged against all those who thought otherwise. Nevertheless, towards the end of the Middle Ages, a struggle broke out between idealists who denied the existence of matter and those who thought that there was a material reality.
In the 11th and 12th centuries, this dispute was pursued in France and especially in England.
In the beginning, it is principally in the latter country that materialism develops. Marx said, "Materialism is the true son of Great Britain.”
A bit later, it is in France that materialism will flower. In any case, in the 15th and 16th centuries we see two currents appear: one, English materialism; the other, French materialism, whose union will contribute to the prodigious blossoming of materialism in the 18th century.
(2) English materialism
The authentic father of English materialism and all modern experimental science is Bacon. The science of nature is, in his eyes, the true science and physics, based on the experience of the senses, is its most noble and fundamental part. (See Engels, "Introduction," Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 10.)
Bacon is famous as the founder of the experimental method in scientific study. The important thing for him was to study science in the "great book of Nature." This was particularly interesting at a period when science was studied in the books which Aristotle had left several centuries before.
For example, here is how they went about studying physics: on a certain subject the passages written by Aristotle were taken up; next the books by Thomas Aquinas, who was a great theologian, were taken up, and what the latter had written about the passage by Aristotle was read. The teacher would make no personal commentary, let alone discuss what he thought about it, but rather referred to a third work which repeated Aristotle and Saint Thomas. That was the science of the Middle Ages, which was called scholasticism: it was a bookish science, because only books were studied.
It was against this scholasticism, this set and rigid instruction, that Bacon reacted by appealing for study in the “great book of Nature.”
At this period, one question was raised:
Where do our ideas come from? Where does knowledge come from? Each one of us has ideas, the idea of house, for example. This idea comes to us because there are houses, say the materialists. Idealists think that it is God who gives us the idea of houses. As for Bacon, he said that the idea exists only because we see or touch things, but he could not as yet prove it.
It was Locke (1632-1704) who undertook to show how ideas come from experience. He showed that all ideas come from experience and that only experience gives us ideas. The idea of the first table came to man before it existed because, through experience, he was already using a tree trunk or a stone as a table.
With Locke’s ideas, English materialism passes into France in the first half of the 18th century, for, while this philosophy was developing in a particular way in England, a materialist current had formed in France.
(3) Materialism in France
The birth of a clearly materialist current in France can be dated from Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes had a great influence on this philosophy, but, in general, it is not mentioned;
At this time, when feudal ideology was very much alive, even in the sciences, and when people studied in the scholastic way we have seen, Descartes engaged in a struggle against this situation.
Feudal ideology is imbued with a religious mentality. It therefore considers that the Church, representing God on earth, has a monopoly on truth. It follows from this that no man can claim to know the truth without subordinating his thought to the teachings of the Church. Descartes tears this concept apart. Of course, he does not attack the Church as such, but he strongly maintains that any man, believer or not, can attain the truth through the exercise of his reason (“natural light”).
Descartes declares from the beginning of his Discourse on Method that “Intelligence is the best shared thing in the world.” Consequently, everyone has the same rights with respect to science. And if, for example, he criticizes the medicine of his time (The Imaginary Invalid by Moltere echoes Descartes’ criticisms), it is because he wants to establish a science which is a true science, based on the study of nature and rejecting the science which was taught before him, in which Aristotle and Saint Thomas were the only “arguments.”
Descartes lived in the beginning of the 17th century; in the following century, the French Revolution was to explode; that is why it can be said that he comes out of a world, which is about to be born. This position makes Descartes a conciliator: he wants to create a materialist science while, at the same time, he is an idealist, for he wants to save religion.
When, during his time, it was asked, "Why are there live animals?”, the response came from the ready-made answers of theology: because there is a principle which makes them live. Descartes, on the contrary, maintained that the laws of animal life are the same as those of matter. Moreover, he believed and affirmed that animals are nothing other than machines of flesh and muscle, as other machines are made of iron and wood. He even thought that both had no sensations and when, at the Abbey of Port-Royal, during the weeks of study, men who claimed they shared his philosophy pricked some dogs, they would say, “How well made Nature is, one would almost say they suffer!”
For Descartes, the materialist, animals were therefore machines. On the other hand. Descartes, the idealist, says that man is different and defended by Descartes give birth, on the one hand, to a clearly materialist current and, on the other hand, to an idealist current.
Among those who continue the materialist Cartesian branch, we may recall La Mettrie (1709-1751). Adopting the thesis of the “animal-machine,” he extends it even to man. Why shouldn’t the latter be a machine? He sees even the human soul as a mechanism in which ideas are mechanical movements.
It is at this period that English materialism, with Locke’s ideas, penetrates into France. From the juncture of these two currents a more evolved materialism will be born. This will be:
(4) The materialism of the 18th century
This materialism was defended by philosophers who were also fighters and admirable writers. Continually criticizing social institutions and religion, applying theory to practice and always in battle with the established authorities, they were sometimes imprisoned at the Bastille or Vincennes.
It is they who united their works in the great Encyclopédie, in which they established the new orientation of materialism. They had,-moreover, a large influence since this philosophy was, as Engels says, "the conviction of all cultivated youths.”
In all the history of philosophy in France, this was the only period in which a philosophy with a French character became truly popular.
Diderot, who was born in Langres in 1713 and died in Paris in 1784, dominates the entire movement. What should be said firstly, and which bourgeois history does not say, is that he was the greatest materialist thinker before Marx and Engels. Diderot, Lenin said, almost arrived at the conclusions of contemporary (dialectics) materialism.
He was a real militant: always struggling against the Church and the social order, he saw jail cells from the inside. History written by the contemporary bourgeoisie has hushed this up. But one must read the Conversations between d’Alembert and Diderot, Rameau's Nephew and Jacques the Fatalist in order to understand the enormous influence of Diderot on materialism.
In the first half of the 19th century, due to historical events, we witness a retreat of materialism. The bourgeoisie of every country makes propaganda in favor of idealism and religion, for not only does it not wish to see progressive (materialist) ideas propagated, but also it must put both thinkers and the masses asleep in order to stay in power.
It is then that we see Feuerbach in Germany proclaiming his materialist convictions, in the midst of all the idealist philosophers, and “... placed materialism on the throne again.” (Engels, Feuerbach, p. 18.)
Developing essentially a critique of religion, he reverts, in a healthy and relevant way, to the bases of materialism which had been forgotten and thus influenced the philosophers of his time.
We come to that period of the 19th century where one notes an enormous progress in science, due in particular to the following three great discoveries: the living cell, the transformation of energy, and the theory of evolution (See Engels, Feuerbach, p. 46.) which will enable Marx and Engels, who were influenced by Feuerbach, to evolve materialism so as to give us modern materialism, or dialectical materialism.
We have just traced, quite briefly, the history of materialism before Marx and Engels. We know that the latter, though they may have agreed with the materialists who preceded them on a number of common points, also found that the work of their predecessors included numerous faults and gaps.
In order to understand how they transformed pre-Marxist materialism, it is therefore absolutely necessary to find out what these faults and gaps were and why this was so.
In other words, our study of the history of materialism would be incomplete if, after having listed the different thinkers who contributed to the progress of materialism, we did not try to find out how and in what direction this progress was made and why it underwent this or that type of evolution.
We are particularly interested in the materialism of the 18th century, since it was the culmination of different currents of this philosophy.
Hence, we are going to study what the errors of this materialism were and what gaps it left. However, since we should never look at only one side of things, but rather see them in their entirety, we shall also point out its merits.
Materialism, at first dialectical, was not able to continue on this basis. Dialectical reasoning, because of a deficiency in scientific knowledge, had to be abandoned. It was first necessary to create and develop the sciences. “It was necessary first to examine things before it was possible to examine processes.” (Engels, Feuerbach, p. 45.)
Hence, it is the very intimate union of materialism and science which will enable this philosophy to become again, on more solid and scientific bases, the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels.
We shall find, then, the birth certificate of materialism next to that of science. But, while we can always find where materialism comes from, we should always establish as well where idealism comes from.
3. Where does idealism come from?
If, in the course of history, idealism has been able to exist alongside religion, tolerated and approved by it, this is in reality because it was born and derives from religion.
Lenin wrote a formula about this which we should study. “Idealism is nothing other than a polished and refined form of religion.” What does this mean? Just this: idealism is able to present its concepts much more supplely than religion. To claim that the universe was created by a spirit floating above the darkness, that God is immaterial, then, abruptly to declare, as does religion, that he speaks (by the Word) and that he has a son (Jesus), these are a series of brutally presented ideas. By affirming that the world exists only in our thoughts, in our minds, idealism presents itself in a more covert fashion. In fact, we know that it is all the same in meaning, but the form is less brutal and more elegant. This is why idealism is a refined form of religion.
It is also refined because idealist philosophers know how to predict questions and lay traps in discussions, as Philonous did to poor Hylas in Berkeley’s dialogues.
But saying that idealism stems from religion is only putting off the problem. We should ask ourselves immediately:
4. Where does religion come from?
Engels has given us a very clear answer on this subject: “Religion arose from primitive conceptions of men.”
For the first men this ignorance is double: ignorance of nature and ignorance of themselves. We must keep this double ignorance in mind when we study the history of primitive man.
In Greek antiquity, which we regard, however, as an already advanced civilization, this ignorance seems infantile to us; for example, when we see that Aristotle thought that the earth was immobile and that it was the center of the universe around which the planets revolved. (The latter, which he thought numbered forty-six, were attached, like nails on a ceiling, and the whole thing turned around the earth.)
The Greeks also thought that there were four elements: water, earth, air and fire, and that it was not possible to decompose them. We know that all that is false, because now we decompose water, earth and air and we do not consider fire as a body of the same order.
The Greeks were also very ignorant about man, since they did not know the functions of the organs and considered the heart, for example, to be the source of courage!
If the ignorance of the Greek scholars, whom we regard as already very advanced, was so great, what must have been that of the men who lived thousands of years before us? The concepts which primitive men had of nature and of themselves were limited by ignorance. Nevertheless, these men tried to explain things. All the documents which we possess on primitive men tell us that these men were worried by dreams. We have seen, in the first chapter (See chapter 1, part IV.), how they had resolved this question of dreams by the belief in the existence of a “double” of man. In the beginning, they attribute a sort of transparent and light body, still having a material consistence, to this double. It is not much later that their minds give birth to the concept that man has an immaterial principle in himself, which survives after death, a spiritual principle (the word comes from "spiritus,” which in Latin means "breath,” the breath which departs with the last sigh, as the moment when the "ghost is given up” and only the “double” subsists). Hence, it is the soul which explains thought and dreams.
In the Middle Ages, there were strange ideas regarding the soul. It was thought that in a fat body there was a thin soul and in a thin body, a big soul; this is why, during this period, ascetics underwent long and numerous fasts in order to have a big soul, in order to make a lot of room for the soul.
Having acknowledged the survival of man after death, first in the form of a transparent double, then in the form of the soul, the spiritual principle, primitive men created gods.
At first believing in beings who were stronger than men but still existing in a material form, they gradually came to believe in gods who existed in the form of a soul superior to ours. And this is how, after having created a multitude of gods, each with his defined function, as in Greek antiquity, they arrived at the conception of a single God. Contemporary monotheistic religion was then created. So we can see that ignorance was at the origin of religion, even in its contemporary form.
Hence, idealism arose from primitive concepts of man, from his ignorance; whereas materialism, on the contrary, arose from the retreat of these limitations.
In the course of the history of philosophy, we shall witness the continual struggle between idealism and materialism. The latter seeks to draw back the limits of ignorance, and this will be one of its glories and one of its merits. Idealism, on the contrary, and the religion which nourishes it, make every effort to sustain ignorance and to take advantage of this ignorance of the masses in order to make them tolerate their oppression, their social and economic exploitation.
5. The merits of pre-Marxist materialism
We have seen materialism being born with the Greeks as soon as an embryo of science existed. Following the principle that when science develops, so does materialism, we find in the course of history:
1. In the Middle Ages, a weak development of the sciences and a halt of materialism.
2. In the 17th and 18th centuries, a very big development of the sciences parallel with a big development of materialism. The French materialism of the 18th century is the direct consequence of the development of the sciences.
3. In the 19th century, we witness many discoveries, and materialism undergoes a very great transformation with Marx and Engels.
4. Today the sciences are making enormous progress and so is materialism. We see the best scientists applying dialectical materialism in their research and studies.
Idealism and materialism, then, have completely opposed origins. Throughout the centuries, we find a battle raging between these two philosophies, one which is still going on in our time, and which has not only been academic.
This struggle, which spans the history of humanity, is a conflict between science and ignorance, between two currents. One draws humanity towards ignorance and maintains it in this ignorance. The other, on the contrary, tends towards the emancipation of man by replacing ignorance with science.
This conflict has sometimes taken serious forms, as at the time of the Inquisition, when we can cite the example of Galileo, among others. The latter declared that the earth revolves. This was a new piece of knowledge which was in contradiction with the Bible and Aristotle: if the earth revolves, this means that it is not the center of the universe, but simply a point in the universe so then the frontiers of our thoughts must be widened. What then is done in view of Galileo’s discovery?
In order to keep humanity in ignorance, a religious court is set up and Galileo is ordered to apologize. Here is an example of the struggle between ignorance and science.
We ought then to judge the philosophers and scientists of this period by placing them within the context of this struggle of ignorance against science, and we shall find that by defending science they were defending materialism without knowing so themselves. Thus Descartes, through his arguments, furnished ideas which have enabled materialism to progress.
We should also see that this conflict throughout history is not simply a theoretical conflict, but also a social and political one. The ruling classes are always on the side of ignorance in this battle. Science is revolutionary and contributes to the emancipation of humanity.
The case of the bourgeoisie is typical. In the 18th century, the bourgeoisie is dominated by the feudal class; at that moment, the former is for science; it leads a struggle against ignorance and gives us l'Encyclopédie. In the 20th century, the bourgeoisie is the ruling class and, in the struggle between ignorance and science, it is for ignorance in a much more savage way than ever before (e.g., Hitlerism).
We see then that pre-Marxist materialism played a considerable role and had a very great historical importance. Throughout the conflict between ignorance and science it was able to develop a general concept of the world which was able to stand in opposition to religion and thus to ignorance. Also, thanks to the evolution of materialism, to the progress of its research, the conditions necessary for the birth of dialectical materialism were realized.
6. The faults of pre-Marxist materialism
In order to understand the evolution of materialism, to see clearly its faults and its gaps, we must never forget that science and materialism are linked together.
In the beginning, materialism was ahead of science, and this is why this philosophy was not able to assert its authority right away. It was necessary to create and develop science in order to prove that dialectical materialism was right, but that took more than twenty centuries. During this long period, materialism came under the influence of science, particularly that of the spirit of the sciences, as well as that of the most developed specific sciences.
This is why:
The materialism of the last century was predominantly mechanical, because at that time, of all natural sciences, mechanics and indeed only the mechanics of solid bodies—celestial and terrestrial—in short, the mechanics of gravity, had come to any definite close. Chemistry at that time existed only in its infantile, phlogistic form. Biology still lay in swaddling clothes; vegetable and animal organism had been only roughly examined and were explained as the result of purely mechanical causes. As the animal was to Descartes so was man a machine to the materialists of the eighteenth century. (Engels, Feuerbach, p. 26.)
So, here we see what materialism was, coming out of a long and slow evolution of the sciences after the “hibernation period of the Christian Middle Ages.”
The big mistake of this period was to see the world as a big mechanism, to judge everything according to the laws of the science called mechanics. Regarding motion as being merely mechanical, it was thought that the same events would continually reproduce themselves. The machinelike aspect of things was seen, but not the living aspect. For this reason this materialism is called mechanical materialism.
Let us look at an example: how did these materialists explain thought? In this way: “The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile”! This is a bit simplistic! Marx’s materialism, on the contrary, gives a series of precisions. Our thoughts do not come only from the brain. We must see why we have certain thoughts and ideas, rather than others, and then we realize that society, surroundings, etc., make our ideas. Mechanical materialism considers thought to be a simple mechanical phenomenon. But it is much more! “This exclusive application of the standards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and organic nature—in which processes, it is true, the laws of mechanics are also valid, but are pushed into the background by other and higher laws—constitutes a specific but at that time inevitable limitation of classical French materialism.” (Engels, Feuerbach, pp. 26-27.)
This is the first big fault of 18th century materialism.
The consequences of this error were that history in general, i.e., the point of view of historical development, of evolution, was ignored. This materialism believed that the world does not evolve and that it returns at regular intervals to similar states; neither did it conceive of an evolution of man and animals.
The second specific limitation of this materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the universe as a process—as matter developing in an historical process. This was in accordance with the level of the natural science of that time, and with the metaphysical, i.e., anti-dialectical manner of philosophizing connected with it. Nature, it was known, was in constant motion. But according to the ideas of that time, this motion turned eternally in a circle and therefore never moved from the spot; it produced the same results over and over again. (Engels, Feuerbach, p. 27.)
This is the second fault of this materialism.
Its third mistake was that it was too contemplative; it did not sufficiently see the role of human action in the world and in society. Marx’s materialism teaches that we must not only explain the world, but also transform it. Man is an active element in history who can bring about changes in the world.
The action of Russian Communists is a living example of an action capable not only of preparing, making and bringing off a revolution, but also, since 1918, of establishing socialism in the midst of enormous difficulties.
Pre-Marxist materialism was not conscious of this concept of human action. At that time it was thought that man was a product of his milieu, whereas Marx teaches us that the milieu is a product of man and that man is therefore a product of his own activity in certain preestablished conditions. While man may be influenced by his milieu, he can also transform it and society; consequently, he can transform himself.
Hence, 18th century materialism was too contemplative, because it ignored the historical development of all things. This was inevitable at that time since scientific knowledge was not advanced enough to conceive of the world and things otherwise than through the old method of thinking: "metaphysics.”
Readings
K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), "The Holy Family.”
G. V. Plekhanov, The Development of the Monist View of History (New York: International Publishers, 1972), pp. 5-36.
F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1941), pp. 82-95.
Control Questions
Chapter 1
How could Pasteur be a scientist and a believer at the same time?
Chapter 2
Show how book learning is both necessary and insufficient.
Chapter 3
1. Why was dialectical materialism not born in antiquity?
2. Indicate the principal materialist currents from Greek antiquity to the 18th century.
3. What are the errors and the merits of 18th century materialism?
Written Assignment
Create a dialogue about God between an idealist and a materialist.
https://mega.nz/#!Zl4RnZ7Z!MFCuA6t8U1IoWdUiV0dfki0klzbkia1Ij2Hz4u9N-Oc
fape posted:do you take russell seriously?
maybe its time to russell up some muscle, put down the books and lift those books
wuyong posted:Hi. I did an OCR conversion to DOCX, formatted and proofread.
https://mega.nz/#!Zl4RnZ7Z!MFCuA6t8U1IoWdUiV0dfki0klzbkia1Ij2Hz4u9N-Oc
thankyou
unless i am overthinking this
tears posted:"teaching" of philosophy under bourgioisie education: lol. One doesnt start at the beginning of, idk, biology, physics, chemisty, whatever other science you want and then work your way forward lol. Like lets start with Pliny's Natural History and work our way forward adding all the additional knowledge gained, we'll get to the theory of Natural Selection eventually, but lets first consider the teliological "divine order" model of existence and work our way up from there. lmao.
U start with the most advanced science, and work backwards form a historical perspective, looking at how the most advanced level of knowledge developed. wtf, seriously, its like marxism-leninism isnt recognised as a science or somethign.
unless i am misunderstanding which parts of this posts are ironic and which aren't, i think you actually think people start at the advanced end of physics and chemistry (idk anything about biology) and work backward? which is not true, at least it wasn't for me. the first things you learn about physics are like "what is an inclined plane" which is straight up from archimedes and you go forward from there, eventually you get to like classical mechanics, etc, and only a billion years later does someone go "oh lol actually all of those things i said were true are actually completely untrue, let's look at how gravity actually works" and then if you're lucky someone eventually tells you "psst, relativity, here's how gravity actually ACTUALLY works" and then eventually you find out maybe it doesn't even work like that and no one really knows anything.
chemistry i guess is taught differently but i don't remember anything about chemistry really. something something alkanes. let's get high.
Or maybe not. I don't know much about chemistry or Marxism or teaching, because contrary to what I said above, education in America doesn't usually follow any kind of effective methodology.
drwhat posted:anyway i find working forward through historical philosophical perspectives to be really useful, it just takes way more time than anyone is actually willing to spend, i think
sort of? it's certainly a good learning experience to follow the genealogy of argument in the western tradition, in that it teaches you good logic & rhetoric skills (most importantly, recognizing and applying rhetoric disguised as logic) and inoculates against deprecated thought systems. however,
the canon "history of philosophy" as typically taught is eurocentric dogshit, the presocratics were just ripping off shit that was already better developed hundreds of years earlier in india which they happened to hear about from the persians, and they ignored the good bits like coherent accounts of empirical materialism and existentialism which wouldn't be "discovered" in the west for another two thousand years.
then you get to medieval christian philosophy and have to politely pretend that it isn't just brain damaged plagiarism of islamic scholarship, and and and
i hate philosophy departments
i totally spelled feuerbach right the first time and edited this post for completely unrelated reasons
Edited by shriekingviolet ()
shriekingviolet posted:drwhat posted:anyway i find working forward through historical philosophical perspectives to be really useful, it just takes way more time than anyone is actually willing to spend, i think
sort of? it's certainly a good learning experience to follow the genealogy of argument in the western tradition, in that it teaches you good logic & rhetoric skills (most importantly, recognizing and applying rhetoric disguised as logic) and inoculates against deprecated thought systems. however,
the canon "history of philosophy" as typically taught is eurocentric dogshit, the presocratics were just ripping off shit that was already better developed hundreds of years earlier in india which they happened to hear about from the persians, and they ignored the good bits like coherent accounts of empirical materialism and existentialism which wouldn't be "discovered" in the west for another two thousand years.
then you get to medieval christian philosophy and have to politely pretend that it isn't just brain damaged plagiarism of islamic scholarship, and and and
i hate philosophy departments
Can you point me to any books/articles with an accurate historical account of philosophy? I've just gotten interested in it, been reading works by Marx and Engels but some of its hard to grasp.
RTC posted:Can you point me to any books/articles with an accurate historical account of philosophy? I've just gotten interested in it, been reading works by Marx and Engels but some of its hard to grasp.
Not really, sorry, I just cobbled together the discrepancies throughout my time at university :/ Western chauvinist attitudes came up in discussions with good profs but weren't really featured in any of the texts I used.
Once you get to Hegel's era the plundering has already been a done deal for a long time anyways (with an occasional exception for confused fad interests like Schopenhauer) so if you're after a better understanding of Marx I'm not sure how much insight decolonizing the history of previous traditions will yield.
If you want a quick browse at some early materialist logics and epistemology that would show up again much later in the west, there are halfway decent articles at the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, even though it's barely any better than wikipedia and translated works on the Cārvāka are still scarce.
There's also a ton of stuff that went on in China which influenced western thought which I unfortunately know nothing about.
shriekingviolet posted:the canon "history of philosophy" as typically taught is eurocentric dogshit, the presocratics were just ripping off shit that was already better developed hundreds of years earlier in india which they happened to hear about from the persians, and they ignored the good bits like coherent accounts of empirical materialism and existentialism which wouldn't be "discovered" in the west for another two thousand years.
then you get to medieval christian philosophy and have to politely pretend that it isn't just brain damaged plagiarism of islamic scholarship, and and and
i hate philosophy departments
this isn't an argument against "we should learn the history of thought/philosophy/whatever", this is an argument for it.
drwhat posted:i am going to post again because i just love to post. hello
how's it going