Philosophy and Religion, Part 1c
Which
is master, mind or matter?
According to the Progress Publishers, Moscow, Dictionary of Philosophy,
1984 edition, the Fundamental Question of Philosophy is:
“…the question of the relationship of consciousness to
being, of thought to matter and nature, examined on two planes, first, what is
primary – spirit or nature, matter or consciousness – and second, how is
knowledge of the world related to the world itself or, to put it differently,
does consciousness correspond to being, is it capable of truthfully reflecting
the world?”
According to the well-known series of articles by “Dialego” (John
Hoffman) called “Philosophy and Class Struggle”: “Materialism Vs. Idealism [is] the Basic Question of Philosophy”.
We will look at Dialego in more detail later in this series.
The Soviet dictionary proposes a unity-and-struggle-of-opposites as
between human Subject and Objective nature. Dialego, on the other hand,
proposes a dialectic between Materialism and Idealism.
So which is it? Which one of these two is correct?
Dialectical logic insists that its struggling opposites are
interdependent. They define each other, and cannot escape each other, except
through the working out of their struggle. In just this way, the Subject defines
the Object, while at the same time the Object is the necessary condition for
the Subject.
But Idealism and Materialism are two mutually-exclusive philosophical
systems. They do not depend upon one another. If one prevails, the other one is
annihilated. This is not dialectical. This is only a “zero-sum game”.
Says Dialego: “…materialism
contends that people's ideas, like all other aspects of their behaviour, are
the product of material causes and can only be properly understood when these
causes are discovered.” This is also the position of other philosophies,
such as Post-Modernism, and Social Darwinism, both of which hold that human
free will is an illusion.
Says the dictionary: “The
philosophers who form the camp of materialism regard matter, being, as being
primary, and consciousness as secondary, and hold that consciousness is the
result of influence exerted on it by the objectively existing external world.”
This “materialist” view has been orthodoxy among many communists since
the 1920s. Among others who expounded it, and who consequently promoted
Dialectical Materialism were Joseph Stalin and Maurice Cornforth
(1909 – 1980), a British theoretician. Among those with a different view have
been the late Cyril Smith, and Paolo Freire.
In this ten-part course we are going to test the question of Dialectical
Materialism by interrogating the work of these and other thinkers.
The linked download, below, is relatively difficult to read. It is given
for the sake of the first few of its pages, and to show that although Marx and
Engels in their early writing did raise up the question of Idealism and
Materialism, in a chapter title, yet it is by no means clear from this that
they had any intentions to give birth to anything like Dialectical Materialism.
Although their work is saturated with philosophy, and particularly with
Hegelian philosophy, yet the amount of writing that Marx and Engels did that
was directly about philosophy was quite little. Much of it was in their early
days such as the period prior to the writing of the linked Part 1A of “The German Ideology”,
where they recall that:
"Principles ousted one another, heroes of the
mind overthrew each other with unheard-of rapidity, and in the three years
1842-45 more of the past was swept away in Germany than at other times in three
centuries."
The whole work was to be a "Critique
of Modern German Philosophy According to Its Representatives Feuerbach, B.
Bauer and Stirner, and of German Socialism According to Its Various Prophets”.
These were the Young Hegelians, personally well known to the young Marx and
Engels. The writing was polemical.
Does Marx support or advance
in any way the reduction of all humanity and human history to non-human,
molecular, chemical or nuclear sources? One view is that Marx is merely saying
that the human Subject is only comprehensible within a material, Objective
world. Or in other words, that the relationship of mind and matter is just
that: a relationship. A dialectical relationship.
“The first premise of all human history is, of course,
the existence of living human individuals.”
We will return to these
questions.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Idealism and Materialism, 1845, Marx.
