so i’ve wondered for a long time about how leftists use the terms ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’, and how it relates to those terms usage in broader philosophical discussions on epistemology.
i may be incorrect in my interpretations, but it seems to me that leftist uses of the term (even its usage in some of marx’s writings, from what little i’ve read) are such that ‘materialist’ means ‘understands that the material conditions of a society drive its development via dialectical processes’ and that ‘idealist’ means ‘focuses on artificial/socially constructed ethical or legal principles (such as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘rule of law’ and ‘free speech’) rather than material conditions of society like quality of life, literacy, etc.’.
the broader philosophical definitions of these terms are slightly different, however.
epistemologically, a ‘materialist’ is someone who believes that we can (and do) directly apprehend the mind-independent external world. this is contrary to epistemological idealism, which argues that we can only ever know the contents of our own mind. we can use these contents to infer things about ‘true reality’ but can never truly verify them.
ontologically, materialism argues that all of reality can be described in terms of physics, or that all facts of the universe are causally dependent on or reducible to physical processes. this is again opposed to Idealism, which argues that existence is in some way irreducibly and fundamentally mental.
so my first question for you beautiful posters is, are my perceptions of these definitions and usages overall correct or incorrect? How exactly does Marx (or Engels or any other marxist philosopher) use these terms, and do they intend an epistemological, ontological, or other interpretation? am i missing something fundamental about the philosophical definitions or about the colloquial/leftist usage? What’s the deal with that ‘philosophy is pointless, the goal is to change the world’ quote, is understanding reality not a benefit for efficiently manipulating it?
My next point, is that it seems to me like Marx and Engel’s Dialectical Materialism, or at least the political program and methods of Socialism/Communism, are not necessarily at all incompatible with either philosophical Idealism or Materialism, in terms of epistemology or ontology. Neither is necessarily incompatible with basic empiricism, but is rather a difference in interpretation of what our empirical knowledge is. Whether reality is fundamentally mental or matter, it consists of opposing energies and dialectical processes that play out in our experience with the extrinsic appearance of physical matter. Whether the world is in the mind or ‘really out there’, our experiences of it are the same.
A bit ago i stumbled across this article that seemed to be making a similar point, a point i’ve never really seen made by anyone else before. I haven’t read past the abstract yet, and It seems like someone random person’s college dissertation or thesis or something so I’m probably not well read enough to interpret this without context, so i was wondering if anyone had seen any similar discourse? What would Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao say about this line of thought? is it a heresy against socialism, a useless detour into pointless philosophical questions that serve no practical purpose for the revolution, or is it something potentially useful in framing Marxism’s relationship to epistemology and ontology?
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There isn’t really a unified Marxist or dialectical materialist epistemology or ontology, so I can only give you a version of it. I’m sure there is a Marxist who disagrees with everything I am about to say.
Marxist dialectics believes there exists an objective world that we can get information about using our senses. This world, however, is not made naturally of things that are separate from each other, it is fundamentally whole but with an objective internal structure that is constantly changing. The human mind is not capable of thinking about the whole material reality, so we abstract it into parts (not necessarily individually, it is a social process). These parts are then “real” to a degree and only so far as they help us understand the whole they are part of.
I would argue that this is ontologically and epistemologically materialist, though in an anti-reductive way.
i don’t really see how it is ontologically materialist specifically, though. the ‘external world’ could be ‘made of mind’ for example, and appear to us as physics extrinsically, and this would all work the same way. materialism without physical reductionism can only be trivially true, if we define ‘matter’ to include some form of ‘mind’ via some mysterious process of abstraction and self-representation that can’t be explained with physics, it kind of loses its meaning. no serious philosophy ontology or epistemology can deny the empirical evidence of our senses, only reinterpret and recontextualize what they mean. like, this doesn’t address what the human mind or world even is, or what it is doing when we abstract reality . i would argue, for example, that matarialist/physicalist realism is an arbitrary, fictitious abstraction of what is a fundamentally unknowable whole through the concrete reality of our minds and experiences, into what we conceive of as discrete external physical objects, losing vital information in this process of abstraction but creating useful mental tools to solve specific problems.
I think what you said could also fit well with what’s called “the correspondence theory of reality” which if I remember correctly is quite popular with contemporary philosophers.
I haven’t looked through the paper linked yet, but I think that their definition of materialism develops through a negation of Hegel’s system, since M&Es’ “world systems” are heavily taken from the systems Hegel posed himself.
I think a close reading of how the structure of dialectics comes to being and develops through Hegel and subsequently through M&E will show that this dichotomy is more about one’s orientation within the domain of natural and social sciences as knowledge machines for understanding reality rather than strictly about epistemology or ontology (it is in fact a bit of both).
As an aside, these latter categories and frameworks about what’s real (i.e. the existence quantifier in logic) are framed by rigid analytic traditions that took off in Anglo philosophy where philosophers agonize in circles over what constitutes reality. Here, materialism is often denoted as “metaphysical realism”, i.e. the mind independent stuff. Things-in-themselves as notions are brainteasees and an analytical struggle with this will not help any revolution whatsover. Social facts and social reality are real to us, whethe electrons are negatively charged in and of themselves is really intellectual brainmelt M&E rightly stayed away from. (For a cool way out of this hellscape, check out ontological structural realism.)
In more continental-leaning proses I find philosophers often prefer to de-emphasise such heavy categorizations; you can say the point of German idealism is to establish connections between what’s in our mind and what’s in front of us, rather than to separate the two.
Back to Hegel and M&E. It seems like materialism is the recognition that nature as constantly developing over time has always been changing, and will change forever. As such, there is no need for a beginning or end in an endless flow (and thus no creation, no Absolute Idea or God). To align our minds and knowledge to this nature means to recognize that science is a process of finding present understandings and synthesis, which can over time become too abstract and divorced from new development (it becomes a dogma), but then also recognizing the need to make concrete new ideas from new development, which is akin to progress in science. “Materialism” would be the constant strive to produce interpretations in accordance with nature’s ebbs and flows instead of imposing what we think it should be. If “idealism” is in tension with this, then it fails to recognize the process I just described, like imposing principles and laws as universals or as static and unchanging. Very undialectical.
This brings me onto “ontology materialism”, which, to answer your question, I think they, or at least Engels, never intended to understand “matter” as an essence/substratum. Anyway, I think dialectical science is against a universal appraisal of Cartesian reductionism which intends to unify all sciences under one lineage (physics -> chemistry -> biology and so on). I think it’s still fine to say events are caused but what kind of substrata things belong to aren’t really a part of M&E’s materialism.
this concept of materialism is indistinguishable from empiricism though, and serious ontology, idealist or not, religious or not, has to account for the evidence we can verify with our senses somehow. I agree that no kind of ontology will really help a revolution more than any other as long as empirical methods are used, and that it doesn’t really matter what ‘reality’ is ‘made out of’, i guess the different uses of the words confuse me.
the only real consequence of this discussion for me, and i may be revealing some strong, maybe even unsettling emotional and ethical biases here, involve:
CW: self harm
the question of the existence of the self, the value of human minds, and the question of suicide. in other words the meaning of life. under certain formulations of strict ontological physical reductionist materialism, the human mind, the self, literally does not exist (see Daniel Dennett for this kind of onotology), it is illusory, basically the same as a complex computer operating system - just mindless matter bumping into each other according to deterministic physical rules producing a fictitious theater that allegedly represents the ‘real world’. in this kind of universe, there is no non-arbitrary reason to avoid suicide or death of any kind. i can strive for pleasure, but its also meaningless, the same as striving for death or love or revolution. the experiences of others are literally not real in this kind of ontology so they do not and can not matter, the feelings of hurt and the suffering i might cause to myself or others are fundamentally the same as the sun shooting out a jet of plasma or a rock falling down a cliffside. i might as well be smashing a casio calculator watch under my boot as a human skull. wars might as well be two really big sprockets grinding against each other or a volcano going off. there is not even the possibility of ‘inventing meaning’, anything in my ‘mind’ is an illusory appearance of physical matter and nothing more. the only conclusions i come to under this worldview are suicide or hedonism or a bastardized amoral and nihilistic kind of egoism.
Under Idealism, however, or at least certain formulations of it, Mind is the only thing that i can really ever know does exist, and this opens up the possibility (but does not definitively prove) that others have minds as well - in physicalism, we do not assume that the world we can immediately perceive is all that exists, and i see no reason to interpret idealism differently in this regard - who knows how much mind there could be ‘out there’. this doesn’t necessarily make ‘life’ or the experiences of others meaningful, but in this worldview they definitely exist and are therefore worthy of some kind of consideration or contemplation. there is a real ‘me’ in this kind of world, a real mind that really experiences real suffering and real feelings, and since my real experiences show that others i see behave similarly to me but in noticeably different configurations every time, i can infer that others likely have real minds and real experiences that really mean something to them. that are not just rocks bumping into each other and producing fictitious self-referential representations of its surroundings.
if someone can convince me that this interpretation of the conflict between idealism and materialism is somehow logically flawed or incorrect or otherwise not the way one should look at the question, i would love that, i have been struggling with existential despair for years. solving the most fundamental questions in life is probably not within the purview of a community like this however.
Empiricism is a narrower concept. It requires one to setup a system which defines “evidence”, “verification”, and a criterion for “true knowledge”, and probably more. Afaik, Marx did not busy himself with this, and both him and Engels did not like the static manner in which British empiricism treats knowledge and reality.
While this “materialism” might sound positivistic, it isn’t just merely about empirical evidence (where do raw senses stop and interpretive perception starts?) but rather it’s more about aligning and rationalising our cognition as to make sense of everything (myself and everything else); to encompass as much of the whole and not only selective parts of it that bode well to our feelings and will-to-power (like superstitions or irrationalism, or fascism).
At this point I’ve strayed far from existence and “true meaning”, which you’ve discussed under the CW section. You mentioned physicalism and lost of “meaning”, and idealism, or turning to the primacy of minds, as an existential escape from this. Here, you come round to justify meaning with inferences from seeing others. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but some will take issue in analytical philosophy of minds and the like, with all kinds of problems: hard problem of consciousness, problem of other minds (solipsism) etc.
You’ve mentioned meaning quite a lot that I think you should additionally look at phenomenology for the existential question, maybe with Merleau-Ponty, then all kinds of feminist philosophy, metaphilosophy, hermeneutics, philosophy of history etc.
I have found this top down approach more empowering than looking for answers to life within the rigid framework of (often white men’s) Anglo philosophy that, from bottom up, relies too heavily on the existential quantifier, a literal logical notation, to more fully deliver meaning to life.
to add (if i may) feminist epistemology and it’s critiques of science and the dominant epistemic practices were quite eye-opening and informative for me.
Honestly, look into the history of computers and computation; you can read John von Neumann (originator and credited with von Neumann Architecture which is what all modern computers use) and his work The Computer and the Brain. On perceptron’s (very early ‘machine learning’ and ‘ai’ system; back then i think it was called statistical learning) and other computer-adjacent stuff which nearly draws all inspiration in one form or another from nature. von Neumann was inspired by the nervous system (how neurons worked was not known at that time) and what was known about the brain.
aw man, I can’t say I’m a fan of the “brain & mind” ≈ “hardware & software” interpretations of folks who I consider sophists first, hacks second, and overwhelmingly outside of their depth such as Dennett, Pinker, Yudkowsky, Sam Harris, Ray Kurzweil, Lex Fridman, Douglas Hofstadter (ok he might be a stretch), among others.
If you are on the tech-adjacent kind of philosophy, I would really urge you to read John Searle. He has a talk at google I will link below which Kurzweil was at, and he does a good job of putting a nail in the coffin of “a complex enough computing machine can have emergent consciousnes somehow.”
This is a kind of vulgar rationalism which places humans at the apex of all life, is prescriptive, tends to misconstrue darwinian evolution and what fitness means (it’s more like suitability than superior), and use ad hoc or ex post facto reasoning to justify and indemnify the status quo.
Video here
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
What is “really real” can get a bit stonery.
I think materialists generally agree with idealists that we can only perceive things through our “minds”, though materialists would usually not say “minds” but “brains” and “senses”. I think materialists usually take the world to be “real” because we develop theories of the world from what we take in through our senses (and the tools we build for extending our senses), and that these theories generally have become more & more self-consistent and more & more successfully predictive. And we call this process science. We don’t think we’re just making things up in our minds because these scientific theories have become rather reliable.
In contrast, idealists are solipsists, or at least that’s what Marxist materialists usually insist about idealists.
These aren’t irrelevant questions to Marxists, who take philosophy seriously. I don’t know if this is the best short book on the topic, and it’s a bit dated, but it’s what I know of off the top of my head: Georges Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy.
Consequences of idealist arguments
The proposition being “everything exists only in our minds,” we must conclude that the exterior does not exist.
Pushing this line of reasoning to its conclusion, we would say, “I alone exist, since I know other men only through my ideas, since other men are, like material objects, only collections of ideas.” This is what is called in philosophy “solipsism” (which means only myself).
[George] Berkeley, as Lenin tells us in his book mentioned above, defends himself instinctively against the accusation of supporting such a theory. We even find that solipsism, the extreme form of idealism, has been supported by no philosopher.
This is why, in our discussions with idealists, we should insist on bringing out the fact that arguments which deny the existence of matter, to be logical and consistent, must ultimately lead to this absurd extremity, solipsism.
i think this is an overly simplistic reading of Idealism. In Idealism, even my experience of my self occurs ‘in mind’. notice i did not say ‘my mind’ because i make no claims about the structure of mentation or cognition or experience, i only acknowledge its irreducible existence. like, in Idealism, just because i am not currently seeing China, doesn’t mean that China does not exist. It might exist in someone else’s mind, or God’s mind, or some kind of non-anthropomorphic, non-unified Universal Background Mentation that is fundamental to the structure of reality. Solipsism is independent of ontology.
I can’t speak for all Marxists, but this is where I see idealist arguments veer into stoner talk, what’s “really real.” They’re unfalsifiable musings. And even if one of these many unfalsifiable musings happens to be The Truth, that Truth is not only unknowable to us, but also it would change our lived experiences not one whit. There’s no practical value in them. This is how you end up with religions and the fascist ideologies of e/acc tech chuds.
Even if we could somehow prove that one of these idealist theories is true, what’s to say there isn’t yet another layer of Truth deeper than that? It’s turtles all the way down silliness. There can never and therefore will never be an answer to the question of what is “real”.
glad you pointed out EA, e/acc; i deal with it enough in my day-to-day i feel like im screaming into the void talking to some of these folks
empirical unfalsifiability and impracticality is not only true of idealism, though, it applies to materialism as well. whether reality and what we percieve is ‘ideas’ or ‘matter’, we can never really know, but it all works the same way empirically. empiricism or empirical methods are all that’s required to account for the regularities of human experience, materialism and idealism both are superfluous. so why is this an argument against idealism specifically, and not all kinds of ontology including materialist ones? i understand and might even agree that ontology is of questionable practical value in terms of solving immediate human needs (assuming there is no human need for metaphysical inquiry or a sense of place in the universe, which i am skeptical of but will accept for the sake of this discussion), but then why are so many marxists seemingly so committed to a specific materialist ontology rather than simple empiricism - verifying through experience that the reality operates according to regularities (ignoring the problem of induction that plagues basically every ordered logic)?
i understand and might even agree that ontology is of questionable practical value in terms of solving immediate human needs
I would argue that they’re of no practical value, full-stop. I can’t think of a single one.
why are so many marxists seemingly so committed to a specific materialist ontology rather than simple empiricism
Which Marxists are doing anything other than empiricism? If a Marxist is clinging to an unproven theory or one that has since been proven wrong empirically, then that should be pointed out to them, and they should drop it.
I’d argue that ontology itself is an idealist, metaphysical rabbit hole that Marxists aren’t interested in engaging with. We’re not interested in the idealists’ various unfalsifiable conceptualizations of what is “real.” Smart people eventually leave their skunky college dorm rooms and stop asking idle questions that are known to be unknowable.
questions like this can determine ethical and cultural questions such as the classic ‘existentialist question’, the ‘meaning of life’, the value of humans and other people and nonhuman animals, etc. for example if ‘mind’ does not exist or is illusory then why take the minds of the self or others into consideration when determining your actions and beliefs? where do you get your ethics from? should i be a pure nihilist egoist or something and just pick and choose the ones i happen to like or that will benefit me personally the most? these are all real questions with real societal impacts.
the fact that you insist on using specifically ‘Idealist’ as a pejorative for all allegedly useless philosophy belies an ontological bias for at least some marxists, does it not? if its no sillier than materialist phyiscalist realist ontology, and if empiricism is superior to both kinds of ontology anyway, whence the (at least linguistic) disdain specifically for idealist ontology and not materialist ontology? why is it any sillier to propose an ‘external world’ that conforms to certain empirically verified patterns, and is fundamentally mental in some unknown way, as opposed to proposing an ‘external world’ that conforms to certain empirically verified patterns, and is fundamentally mindless or reducible to mindless physical processes in some unknown way? either way you come to similar conclusions on the mechanics of the interactions regardless of what you think the ‘object of study’ is. why not maintain epistemological nihilism in this case instead of attacking only Idealism? or is this another case of using the term Idealist only colloquially in the marxist sense of ‘foolish person who ignores empiricism’? i’m not trying to be confrontational i’m honestly confused, i can have a hard time interpreting the specific meanings of speech and text sometimes.
questions like this can determine ethical and cultural questions
Questions that cannot have falsifiable answers cannot actually answer anything. Idealisms, being unfalsifiable, can allow any answer, and their veracity comes from the end of the spear: that of the Vatican or the king or the bourgeoisie. Idealist ideologies are weapons. That’s why we use idealism pejoratively.
This line of reasoning about the basis of morality is scarcely different from the Abrahamic one: that without God there can be no morality. Which firstly, as a life-long atheist, I can tell you is bullshit, but secondly I think any Marxist-Lenninists worth their salt is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. Liberal morality is the hegemonic bourgeois idealist morality that we need to get out of.
why is it any sillier to propose an ‘external world’ that conforms to certain empirically verified patterns, and is fundamentally mental in some unknown way, as opposed to proposing an ‘external world’ that conforms to certain empirically verified patterns, and is fundamentally mindless or reducible to mindless physical processes in some unknown way?
I don’t think the question is answerable nor that the answer would make any difference. The only reason Marxists give any sort of answer to these kinds of questions is because idealists still exist and keep asking them.
I agree with your bit on morality, when I use the term I use it descriptively; i.e. a normative framework which tends to vary in different cultures, subcultures, periods of time, etc. which is intrinsically linked with how members intragroup and intergroup conduct themselves
my point is that you say there is no answer to ontology or any difference between answers, yet you still exclusively use the term ‘idealist’ when describing any ontology at all, when you could say the same thing for non-idealist ontologies, including materialist/physicalist realist ones.
to reiterate: Materialist Ontologies are EXACTLY as unfalsifiable as Idealist Ontologies
so why exclusively use Idealist as a pejorative, instead of ontological or metaphysical? and besides, in the philosophical sense, Materialists/physical realists/scientific realists do indeed make metaphysical claims, they are indeed doing metaphysics. i recommend the Stanford article about scientific realism/antirealism elsewhere in the thread.
For the most part, Marxism sidesteps a lot of epistemology and the materialist/sophist debate; Immanent truth is less important than the question ‘what brings the world closer to communism?’ (this is mainly cribbed from J Mouffawad-Paul in ‘The Communist Necessity’) For example, a Marxist is less likely to care whether race is ontologically/biologically real vs. constructed and more likely to care about liberation from racial oppression. A framing that is helpful to me is that Marxism seeks to produce an objective and actionable understanding of socially constructed phenomena.
Mao summarizes this succinctly in ‘On Practice’:
Marxists hold that man’s social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world. What actually happens is that man’s knowledge is verified only when he achieves the anticipated results in the process of social practice (material production, class struggle or scientific experiment).
Mao is fundamentally a ‘materialist’ in the sense that you describe; he believes that there is an objectively existing external world. He believes our sense impressions are an accurate-enough reflection of the external world. However, he argues that the synthesis of sense impressions and social practice are more significant than that first level of ‘phenomenal’ knowledge. Again from on Practice:
In the process of practice, man at first sees only the phenomenal side, the separate aspects, the external relations of things. For instance, some people…come to Yenan…they see its topography, streets and houses; they meet many people, attend banquets, evening parties and mass meetings…the separate aspects and the external relations of things. This is called the perceptual stage of cognition, namely, the stage of sense perceptions and impressions. That is, these particular things in Yenan act on the sense organs of the members of the observation group, evoke sense perceptions and give rise in their brains to many impressions together with a rough sketch of the external relations among these impressions: this is the first stage of cognition. At this stage, man cannot as yet form concepts, which are deeper, or draw logical conclusions.
As social practice continues, things that give rise to man’s sense perceptions and impressions in the course of his practice are repeated many times; then a sudden change (leap) takes place in the brain in the process of cognition, and concepts are formed. Concepts are no longer the phenomena, the separate aspects and the external relations of things; they grasp the essence, the totality and the internal relations of things. Between concepts and sense perceptions there is not only a quantitative but also a qualitative difference. Proceeding further, by means of judgement and inference one is able to draw logical conclusions…This stage of conception, judgement and inference is the more important stage in the entire process of knowing a thing; it is the stage of rational knowledge.
Quoting Lenin’s ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic’, Mao concludes “abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short, all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely.”
Which is to say that all sense impressions imperfectly reflect an objective, mind-external world, and that we need to work through subjectivity and imperfect impressions to grasp it. The tool we use to grasp it is ideology.
Idealism in the sense meant by Mao and marxists generally is much different than the one you highlight. In ‘On Contradiction’, Mao describes idealism as the belief that “sees things as isolated, static and one-sided. It regards all things in the universe, their forms and their species, as eternally isolated from one another and immutable. Such change as there is can only be an increase or decrease in quantity or a change of place.” He ascribes this outlook to “mechanical materialism in the 17th and 18th centuries and…vulgar evolutionism at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.” Which is to say ‘idealism’ to Marxists encompasses philosophical materialism/simple empiricism.
First and foremost, Marxism is a teleology (revolution), that developed an epistemology (dialectical materialism) to meet that end. This has an added benefit of making Marxism and its offshoots falsifiable: ask ‘does practicing this theory bring us closer or farther from revolution?’
What a great post.
I took a course in Philosophy of Science, the way you described epistemic materialism and idealism line up well (and are quite fleshed out in) the contemporary discussion on Scientific Realism which represent realism and antirealism.
We know Lenin is cool and all, but, once Iearned about Mach, Berkeley, and eventually Einstein’s writing & inspiration from Mach (he wrote to him) and then read Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism; my respect went up like, a super ton. He ragged on folks using my most liked term for a group I vehemently disagree with, solipsism.
I wasn’t aware before Lenin was knowledgeable in what seemed to be outside his immediate purview.
Really suggest looking into other works like Herbert Marcuse’s From Luther to Popper.
Intro book to PhilSci: Theory & Reality by Godfrey-Smith.
Terms to keep you busy:
- sophism
- solipsism
- relativism
- physicalism
- instrumental realism
- structural realism
- perspectivism
- empiricism (Bacon, Russell, & others) etc etc
Oh you might be interested in Popper’s Three Worlds, it’s the bit by him I find interesting.
Popper says that Darwinian Evolution is not a scientific theory, rather a metaphysical one with notable ontological commitments. I always thought ML was the same and the mechanics were, instead of Natural Selection, explained by Dialectical Materialism. Curious as to what you think.
To be honest i always confused Karl Popper with Steven Pinker (who i hate) whenever i read their names, so i’ve somehow avoided him so far, but from reading his wikipedia entry at least i find a lot that i could agree with. the Three Worlds thing reminds me of social constructivism, with socially created myths leading to new scientific theories and discoveries and eventually sometimes becoming falsifiable when before they were not. Like when we separate any particular part of the observed universe from another to analyze or name, we do that as a more or less conscious choice, made by people in cultures for reasons to accomplish goals.
vis-à-vis scientific realism, here’s my goto formulation from Godfrey-Smith’s Theory & Reality. I noticed I forgot about the optimistic and pessimistic outlooks, hope you’ll forgive me for that.
With comrade’s in-person; I’ve honestly considered their takes vis-à-vis causality and morality and the assurance of knowing things to be reactionary. I never really found the opportunity to discuss with them. What was really frustrating was that they tended to make sweeping comments on scientific disciplines (usually the natural sciences) with which they were very poorly acquainted. I’ve taken courses (not that it means I know anything) but more so attended seminars at my institution and others (Royal Society, Salk, UC institutions, plenty of state schools; they don’t actually check if you’re a student or a prof or anything, you can just find events or newsletters and get the zoom/teams link and attend and ask questions!) with knowledgeable folks and premier experts with substantial evidence making quite modest claims with whom comrades would vehemently disagree.
^That is the stuff I tend to refer to as relativism (though it’s not the standard way probably of using it…; often times folks who subscribe to postmodernism, i.e. there is no grand narrative nor truth which can be known, truth with a capital T can exist and humans simply do not have access it, are referred by rationalists and some realists as relativists)
You’re just putting out all the bangers. Ok I have sympathies for antirealism, much of it is from the skepticism I more or less hold after reading David Hume and broadly agreeing with his is–ought problem and problem with induction.
Part of the problem with solipsism isn’t that it’s not tenable, that was never what I thought at least, more so it’s not very productive. It would be difficult to discuss if the truth state or value of something corresponded solely internally to one or some other’s mind.
I think there are flavours of antirealism which will have issues with Marxism & co. I guess the first questions I’d ask someone is:
- Do you think humans are special in some way as compared to other organisms?
- If humans are special or different, would this be to abilities of higher cognitive functioning?
- Does this higher cognitive functioning (or large and particular mass of neuronal tissue) imbue human’s with reason?
- Does this reason have some special relation to a mind-independent world?
- Are humans, through their labor, able to enact changes to their environment in ways (i.e. quicker, to their desires) which seem unlike other organisms?
- Is there an ‘independent’ human? Or does the context of knowledge or information, i.e. what is experienced, necessarily need a social context? (so like does it make sense to say one can have what appears to be a cooperatively and socially produced knowledge in-and-of-themselves?)
- If there is a reality outside of human minds, experience, consciousness, etc. is it obtainable by humans or do we only deal with derivatives and facsimiles of it?
- Is this reality obtained through contemplation (i.e. rational thought), or sense-experience (i.e. empirical means)?
- If there is a reality, is there more than one way to access it?
Typically postmodernism, rationalism, obv. idealism are considered at odds with materialism and/or dialectical materialism. You might find some folks in older literature (Popper does this in his Open Society & other book, Conjectures & Refutations, where he refers to Marxism & co as historicism which I always understood to be a claim of relativism against Marxism & co; argument goes roughly like human rationality, liberty, independence, and propensity for novelty necessitates that there is no meaningful way to predict or shape the course of human societies; cool tidbit, Popper and Hayek were not fans of Behaviourism à la B.F. Skinner, incl. Friedman, where some Nobel Prizes in Economics [not the ‘real’ Nobel FYI] were awarded at that time behaviourism was being developed in some response to it; afterwards someone like Daniel Kahneman surprise surprise is an economist who includes tenets of behaviourism in his work AND hey, won a Nobel in Economics for it! Wow! what are the odds?)
well the thing is that i don’t think I am a solipsist just because i’m an anti-realist? i believe that other people exist in some sense or form independently of my individual experience of them, i just don’t think mind is reducible to physical processes in a way that doesn’t lose meaning, and i don’t think i can directly access that existence.
i would answer the questions as follows:
- humans are different in some senses to other organisms, yes
- some of these differences include differences in cognition, among other things
- i think humans posses the capability to perform certain kinds of cognition we call reason, but i’m not sure if this is entirely unique to humans or if we are just the best at it so far. does reason necesitate abstraction? or is it just any problem solving cognition? birds use tools, mourn their dead, and speak in regional dialects, for example - is this reason?
- I don’t think there is a mind-independent world in the traditional sense. the world might be independent of my mind, but i can’t say if it is independent of all mind or any mind. i wouldn’t claim to know enough about ‘mind’ outside of my own limited experience, for all i know every quark and electron has its own ‘spark of consciousness’ in some sense. ‘reason’ is like a procedural, even cultural story-telling process used for the purpose of rendering the patterns of our experiences parse-able. this kind of cultural exchange might be limited to humans, but i think the existence of regional bird call dialects and the fact that certain kinds of birds can seem to remember individuals across generations is evidence against that uniqueness.
- humans do indeed possess tools and demonstrate behaviors that are at least unique in their extent if not necessarily their fundamental nature to other animals. beavers build dams but we build bigger, bird speak language but ours is probably more complex, monkeys hunt with wooden spears but humans build guns, etc. i think a lot of the alleged separation of human and other animal is artificial, arbitrary cultural baggage, but there are significant and real differences. You might as well ask if there is something about black-eyed tree frogs that sets them apart from every other animal - of course there is, in their DNA, phenotype, and behaviors at least if nothing else. but is it a fundamentally different kind of thing or just another variation of animal life?
- since i’m pretty sure feral human children don’t develop language i would say that there probably is no context-independent knowledge. i don’t know if there is context-independent anything. you might have a machine that can detect electrons, but without anyone to talk about it with its just one isolated mind’s experience, it can’t be independently verified even in the usual indirect sense of ‘asking someone else if they are seeing this shit’. is a human even a human without a society? i honestly don’t know. How can an ‘independent’ human exist, without a world to exist in, without parents to be born from, without an environment to interact with? i don’t know if this is even a meaningful or sensible question. Do feral children possess knowledge? perhaps, but in a form thats completely different to how we usually think about it. Does a wild lonely lion possess knowledge? yeah, maybe in some sense at least, but i don’t know if its ‘rational’ knowledge or simply recalled experience. Is instinct a kind of knowledge?
- if there is an external reality, i think we can only deal with it indirectly, and i think that this means that we have to be careful about our epistemological commitments to certain metaphysical implications in certain theories.
- sense-experience is probably the least-deniable evidence of anything’s existence humans can ever have access to. Rational thought only helps us to analyze and tell coherent stories about our sense-experiences, but it is still useful as long as it conforms to those sense-experiences which are particularly replicable and regular. like, its reasonable to dismiss a singular anomalous occurrence if you can’t replicate it - it could be a dream, or a hallucination, or a temporary portal to another universe, or a misinterpretation of something - but if you can’t replicate it or derive some kind of predictive or useful verifiable information from it, it probably is not relevant to your usual life.
- since i remain agnostic on the existence of any reality outside of experience or mind, i cannot say how many ways there may or may not be to access it. i think that so far all we have is our sense experiences, including experiences of other people and cultural stories and collections of experiential reports/empirical accounts.
i do think that humans have a basis for intentionally shaping the development of human societies, the same way beavers have a basis for intentionally building dams, or birds have a basis for intentionally building nests, or monkeys have a basis for mourning their dead. we can do all that we are capable of, and we are apparently capable of shaping societies intentionally - the historical record shows this if nothing else, it is empirically verified that we can do it. so why artificially limit ourselves with arbitrary social constructs, when we could construct these social constructs in a way that can benefit us instead of leaving us victim to whoever happens to already be in charge? if we can do something, and it will be beneficial, we should. do bird ever ask if they are allowed to fly, if flight violates the principles of rationality, gravity, and the natural order? no - the bird, and any other animal including humans, on the specied level, develops and expresses any capacities it may have as fully as it is allowed to by its circumstances.
i actually have read lenin’s materialism and empirio-criticism, and this post was partially inspired by my lack of understanding as to how the terminology was being used. i read some of the stanford article on scientific realism just now and i think i would describe myself as some kind of social constructivist. i also at least generally agree with the notion that the usfulness of a theory either is identical to or at least correlates with ‘the truth’. My question at this point is what these epistemological attitudes have to do with marxism, how do they relate and interact? are they incompatible? would i be ‘disabused of my idealist notions’ if i ‘read more theory’? i’ve kind of always been intuitively an ‘anti-realist’ kind of thinker, would Lenin consider that ‘solipsism’?
Marxism takes a scientific approach, to understand-discover then mod reality, repeat as required to follow as you phrase it, vs one of purely necessity I’ve seen some like Foucault take isn’t quite there. Don’t want to go too far down the path of materialism alone neither and end up in rigid mechanical materialism which stackloop overflows into absolute idealism if you push it far enough (really easily done by nerds, if you don’t believe me
is this mindset at its foulest). Remember, Marx inverted Hegel to come up with diamat, so you can always step back to there if you’re wondering about things.Need to also remember the brain-mind isn’t a perfect scribe of our reality, as a sociology prof of mine said ‘this is a world of both walls and social constructs’. This is why diamat is a great tool but you still need to go out there and experience and collaborate to get data, your little data point into the world alone isn’t enough. Reality is a little of everything, I realize that’s a cheap answer, we make it together, you see it in some way by your environment-senses, and then there’s something outside us, we try to learn about all these aspects.
When I was in an org in college they were big on called Marx/Engels sociologists over philosophers because of that thing Marx went on philosophy. Tbh I still think its useful since its a study of the conditions one’s in, though its more for the academic crowd. There’s other approaches to this whole thing too, like let’s say the arts using self expression modifying one’s reality as a vehicle to make discoveries.
