I was reading an easy primer on dialectical materialism. I didn’t get far because a nagging in the back of my mind telling me the foundation was unsteady.

I don’t have the original article handy, but they’d posited that idealism and materialism are fundamental opposites (before presenting arguments).

My question is: “why not both”? We have space & time and (as far as I know) nobody says one is the product of the other. Why couldn’t the material and the idea be like orthogonal axis? Or why couldn’t you posit that all is the ideals of some greater thing, appearing as material to us?

I guess I’m looking for a stronger foundation for materialism. I think valuable insights could be gleaned from it, but I don’t trust it’s foundations enough to use it.

  • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 个月前

    You know you’re not saying anything new. People have been having this debate for centuries. I recommend Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism for understanding why the two schools can’t mix this way.

    Your proposition that everything could be just a projection from god’s mind is a rehashing of George Berkeley’s position. He was an ardant idealist who hated materialists, and he thought that the only reason things still exist when you stop perceiving them is that god is keeping them there. Where does god exist if this is all a projection?

    Rene Descartes (also Christian) thought that there was some ideal realm where souls lived and they were somehow freely controlling human bodies in the material realm. That’s an absurd idea because how can things interact if they are not part of the same world.

    There is the kantian and humean idea that we can never know beyond idealism because we are subjectively observing things and cannot know the “thing in itself.” They have the logic there, and it’s definitely true that we can only know relative truth from a materialist perspective (recommend the Ego Tunnel on this topic).

    Still, the Marxists are most compelling that it doesn’t matter what elaborate ideas we think up if they do not correspond to how things are in practice. Functionally there is socially informed objective reality and reliable sensations. If this were not the case then how can people make computers and such? Why can’t someone invent things based on their own contradictory physics? Are experiences on drugs or while asleep equally real as everything else? Surely there are rules embedded in the world we inhabit. Whatever someone thinks doesn’t matter unless it corresponds to practice.

    Anyway, read theory and think critically about it before you come up with your own silly theories.