The whole history of philosophy from the Greeks down to the present day consist of a struggle between two diametrically opposed schools of thought—materialism and idealism. Here we come across a perfect example of how the terms used in philosophy differ fundamentally from everyday language.
When we refer to someone as an "idealist" we normally have in mind a person of high ideals and spotless morality. A materialist, on the contrary, is viewed as an unprincipled so-and-so, a money-grubbing, self-centred individual with gross appetites for food and other things—in short, a thoroughly undesirable character.
This has nothing whatever to do with philosophical materialism and idealism. In a philosophical sense, idealism sets out from the view that the world is only a reflection of ideas, mind, spirit, or more correctly the Idea, which existed before the physical world. The crude material things we know through our senses are, according to this school, only imperfect copies of this perfect Idea. The most consistent proponent of this philosophy in Antiquity was Plato. However, he did not invent idealism, which existed earlier.
The Pythagoreans believed that the essence of all things was Number (a view apparently shared by some modern mathematicians). The Pythagoreans displayed a contempt towards the material world in general and the human body in particular which they saw as a prison where the soul was trapped. This is strikingly reminiscent of the outlook of mediaeval monks. Indeed, it is probable that the Church took many of its ideas from the Pythagoreans, Platonists and Neo-Platonists. This is not surprising. All religions necessarily set out from an idealist view of the world. The difference is that religion appeals to the emotions, and claims to provide a mystical, intuitive understanding of the world ("Revelation"), while most idealist philosophers try to present logical arguments for their theories.
At bottom, however, the roots of all forms of idealism are religious and mystical. The disdain for the "crude material world" and the elevation of the "Ideal" flow directly from the phenomena we have just considered in relation to religion. It is no accident that Platonist idealism developed in Athens when the system of slavery was at its height. Manual labour at that time was seen, in a very literal sense, as a mark of slavery. The only labour worthy of respect was intellectual labour. Essentially, philosophical idealism is a product of the extreme division between mental and manual labour which has existed from the dawn of written history down to the present day.
The history of Western philosophy, however, begins not with idealism but with materialism. This asserts precisely the opposite: that the material world, known to us and explored by science, is real; that the only real world is the material one; that thoughts, ideas and sensations are the product of matter organised in a certain way (a nervous system and a brain); that thought cannot derive its categories from itself, but only from the objective world which makes itself known to us through our senses.
The earliest Greek philosophers were known as "hylozoists" (from the Greek, meaning "those who believe that matter is alive"). Here we have a long line of heroes who pioneered the development of thought. The Greeks discovered that the world was round, long before Columbus. They explained that humans had evolved from fishes long before Darwin. They made extraordinary discoveries in mathematics, especially geometry, which were not greatly improved upon for one and a half millennia. They invented mechanics and even built a steam engine. What was startlingly new about this way of looking at the world was that it was not religious. In complete contrast to the Egyptians and Babylonians, from whom they had learnt a lot, the Greek thinkers did not resort to gods and goddesses to explain natural phenomena. For the first time, men and women sought to explain the workings of nature purely in terms of nature. This was one of the greatest turning-points in the entire history of human thought. True science starts here.
Aristotle, the greatest of the Ancient philosophers, can be considered a materialist, although he was not so consistent as the early hylozoists. He made a series of important scientific discoveries which laid the basis for the great achievements of the Alexandrine period of Greek science.
The Middle Ages which followed the collapse of Antiquity were a desert in which scientific thought languished for centuries. Not accidentally, this was a period dominated by the Church. Idealism was the only philosophy permitted, either as a caricature of Plato or an even worse distortion of Aristotle.
Science re-emerged triumphantly in the period of the Renaissance. It was forced to wage a fierce battle against the influence of religion (not only Catholic, but also Protestant, by the way). Many martyrs paid the price of scientific freedom with their lives. Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake. Galileo was twice put on trial by the Inquisition, and forced to renounce his views under threat of torture.
The predominant philosophical trend of the Renaissance was materialism. In England, this took the form of empiricism, the school of thought that states that all knowledge is derived from the senses. The pioneers of this school were Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704). The materialist school passed from England to France where it acquired a revolutionary content. In the hands of Diderot, Rousseau, Holbach and Helvetius, philosophy became an instrument for criticising all existing society. These great thinkers prepared the way for the revolutionary overthrow of the feudal monarchy in 1789-93.
The new philosophical views stimulated the development of science, encouraging experiment and observation. The 18th century saw a great advance in science, especially mechanics. But this fact had a negative as well as a positive side. The old materialism of the 18th century was narrow and rigid, reflecting the limited development of science itself. Newton expressed the limitations of empiricism with his celebrated phrase "I make no hypotheses." This one-sided mechanical outlook ultimately proved fatal to the old materialism. Paradoxically, the great advances in philosophy after 1700 were made by idealist philosophers.
Under the impact of the French revolution, the German idealist Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) subjected all previous philosophy to a thorough criticism. Kant made important discoveries not only in philosophy and logic but in science. His nebular hypothesis of the origins of the solar system (later given a mathematical basis by Laplace) is now generally accepted as correct. In the field of philosophy, Kant’s masterpiece The Critique of Pure Reason was the first work to analyse the forms of logic which had remained virtually unchanged since they were first developed by Aristotle. Kant showed the contradictions implicit in many of the most fundamental propositions of philosophy. However, he failed to resolve these contradictions ("Antinomies"), and finally drew the conclusion that real knowledge of the world was impossible. While we can know appearances, we can never know how things are "in themselves."
This idea was not new. It is a theme which has recurred many times in philosophy, and is generally identified with what we call subjective idealism. This was put forward before Kant by the Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley and the last of the classical English empiricists, David Hume. The basic argument can be summed up as follows: "I interpret the world through my senses. Therefore, all that I know to exist are my sense-impressions. Can I, for example, assert that this apple exists? No. All I can say is that I see it, I feel it, I smell it, I taste it. Therefore, I cannot really say that the material world exists at all." The logic of subjective idealism is that, if I close my eyes, the world ceases to exist. Ultimately, it leads to solipsism (from the Latin "solo ipsus"—"I alone"), the idea that only I exist.
These ideas may seem nonsensical to us, but they have proved strangely persistent. In one way or another, the prejudices of subjective idealism have penetrated not only philosophy but also science for a great part of the 20th century. We shall deal more specifically with this trend later on.
The greatest breakthrough came in the first decades of the 19th century with George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel was a German idealist, a man of towering intellect, who effectively summed up in his writings the whole history of philosophy.
Hegel showed that the only way to overcome the "Antinomies" of Kant was to accept that contradictions actually existed, not only in thought, but in the real world. As an objective idealist, Hegel had no time for the subjective idealist argument that the human mind cannot know the real world. The forms of thought must reflect the objective world as closely as possible. The process of knowledge consist of penetrating ever more deeply into this reality, proceeding from the abstract to the concrete, from the known to the unknown, from the particular to the universal.
The dialectical method of thinking had played a great role in Antiquity, particularly in the naïve but brilliant aphorisms of Heraclitus (c.500 B.C.), but also in Aristotle and others. It was abandoned in the Middle Ages, when the Church turned Aristotle’s formal logic into a lifeless and rigid dogma, and did not re-appear until Kant returned it to a place of honour. However, in Kant the dialectic did not receive an adequate development. It fell to Hegel to bring the science of dialectical thinking to its highest point of development.
Hegel’s greatness is shown by the fact that he alone was prepared to challenge the dominant philosophy of mechanism. The dialectical philosophy of Hegel deals with processes, not isolated events. It deals with things in their life, not their death, in their inter-relations, not isolated, one after the other. This is a startlingly modern and scientific way of looking at the world. Indeed, in many aspects Hegel was far in advance of his time. Yet, despite its many brilliant insights, Hegel’s philosophy was ultimately unsatisfactory. Its principal defect was precisely Hegel’s idealist standpoint, which prevented him from applying the dialectical method to the real world in a consistently scientific way. Instead of the material world we have the world of the Absolute Idea, where real things, processes and people are replaced by insubstantial shadows. In the words of Frederick Engels, the Hegelian dialectic was the most colossal miscarriage in the whole history of philosophy. Correct ideas are here seen standing on their head. In order to put dialectics on a sound foundation, it was necessary to turn Hegel upside down, to transform idealist dialectics into dialectical materialism. This was the great achievement of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Our study begins with a brief account of the basic laws of materialist dialectics worked out by them.
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