Philosophy Primer

 “The History of Philosophy – A Marxist Perspective” by Alan Woods, 2021

I read Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy in high school, which pointed me to the actual writings of philosophers who made sense, like Socrates, Nietzsche, Voltaire and Spinoza.  Unfortunately that book was written in 1924 and had a conventional angle, ignoring Hegel and Marx among others.  I didn’t know about Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, as that would have been better.  But it put me on the trail, eventually leading to existentialism and then Marxism.  Now that Woods has published his history, this is definitely the place every leftist, no matter their age, could start.

Woods openly says the book is a Marxist look at mostly western philosophy, so unlike people like Durant, he’s not hiding his perspective.  Woods, like Marx, Engels and Lenin, tracks the development of philosophy as a battle between forms of materialism and forms of idealism, linking it to class struggle and the historical / economic context of each period. As is clear from history, philosophy begins where religion ends.  This is a sketch of Wood’s narrative.

IONIA, GREECE & ROME

Western philosophy (philo-sophos – ‘lover of wisdom’) originally came about around the Ionian Sea in Turkey as a break with religion and superstition.  The first Ionian philosophers were materialists, dedicating to understanding the world through their senses, through reason and logic, through observation and experimentation. Later Greek materialists developed dialectics by understanding the role of contradictions in everything (dialectike – art of discourse and discussion.)  The dialecticians, early sophists, atheists, materialists and atomists developed many basic principles of the physical sciences, reasoning and argument – Thales, Anaximander, Democritus, Epicurus, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Lucretius.  

Philosophy’s goal is the closest perception of reality, and they took giant steps towards understanding the real world.

On the other side of the tracks, Woods traces the first inspiration for idealist philosophy to Pythagoras, who thought reality consisted only of numbers derived from math, a math which was based on a supra-normal reality, not on our 10 fingers and 10 toes or our feet. He inspired Plato, who considered reality to be a shabby version of pure forms, archetypes and ideas residing in some ethereal location. Aristotle broke with Plato, pursuing actual investigation of reality, but not completely from idealism. These two philosophic schools were not equal, as the subjective idealists were supported by the rulers and the religious – and still are. This was in the context of slave revolts, which gave a push to their intolerance.

Some of the ideas developed by Ionian materialists and dialecticians:  the idea of atoms; the concept of infinity and the infinite universe; the role of contradictions; opposition to dualistic thinking; the sun as the center of the solar system; induction and generalization; the limitations of formal logic; understanding motion as a contradiction; knowledge coming from sense information; matter could not be created or destroyed; evolution of humans out of fish; geometry; a primitive steam engine; that matter is invested with energy; that the earth was round. 

MEDIEVAL TIMES

The Roman Emperor Constantine incorporated Christianity into his rule, deciding on the content of the Bible at the Council of Nicea.  This changed Christianity into an ideology in league with ignorance and the colonial and slave economy.  The last philosopher and scientist of the Greek/Roman period, a woman named Hypatia, was executed by a mob of fanatical Christian monks in Alexandria for her alleged paganism on orders of the local Bishop.  They also went about destroying the Library of Alexandria.  During the subsequent Dark Ages based on feudalism, the only relief from the cruel and backward obscurantism of the Catholic Church in Europe were the Islamic Moors of Spain, who kept alive Greek philosophic gains, materialism and continued to develop astronomy, math, medicine, science and practical arts like irrigation, glass-making, weaving, metal and leather-work. They tolerated other religions and were eventually crushed by cruel Christian crusaders. This dark period in Europe lasted 1,000 years. 

Feudalism did not demand many scientific improvements, only a rigid ideology adapted to a rigid economic pyramid. St. Augustine was the first theoretical pillar of this Church, decreeing mystical and neo-Platonic idealism, the ‘truth’ residing in the mind of God and nowhere else. As feudalism reached a high point and the productive forces – mercantilism – began to develop, debates occurred, first only about religious ideas, then about the validity of Augustine’s philosophy, led by Abelard.  Thomas Aquinas attempted to forge remnants of Augustinian thought with distorted ideas of Aristotle, and to this day the Catholic Church is still based on his Thomism… an ideology from the mid-1200s.

Some Want to go Back to the Dark Ages

SCIENCE and PHILOSOPHY REVIVE

A philosophy that understands reality will result in scientific and social advances.  One that has no relation to anything but groundless ideas will not. As capital developed and feudalism/Catholicism became stagnant and defeated, scientific methods and inventions multiplied with a return to materialist and rationalist solutions.  English utilitarianism, empiricism (much of which was imported into the U.S.) and the ‘industrial revolution’ led to mechanical materialism in the philosophic realm – Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Newton. They were theists who believed perhaps God got the ball rolling, but then became a bystander. Theism has always been a cover for thinkers who do not want to be accused of the dangerous ‘heresy’ of atheism.  Many of the founders of the U.S. were theists.

The idealist and religious counter-attack was by Bishop Berkley, who claimed that all knowledge of the world was subjective and that nothing existed independently of the human mind - except in God’s ‘cosmic mind.’  Sound familiar? Hume later announced that causality itself was impossible to verify, just unconnected facts, supporting the idea of pure skepticism and anti-science attitudes.  The English were then over-shown by the revolutionary materialists and rationalists of France – Descartes, Voltaire, Diderot, Concordet.  Their ideas led to the French Revolution and the formal overthrow of the monarchy, feudalism and it’s Church.

THE FRACTURED BATTLE CONTINUES    

Baruch Spinoza studied Descartes but unlike him, theorized that mind and body were the same and so were ‘God’ and nature, all of which were eternal and could not be created or destroyed.  This undermined the political and religious authorities.  Leibniz brought these unified thoughts down to the almost atomic level, but with the understanding that every ‘thing’ was in flux and motion.  Both were still imbued with idealist metaphysics, but scientific discoveries were beginning to undermine metaphysics.

Woods then tackles Kant and Hegel. Kant, an idealist, believed time and space were ‘a priori’ – known separate from experience and matter, at birth.  He also postulated that the out-there ‘Thing in Itself’ could never be known by the cognizant mind.  This reintroduced an alienation between the world and human cognition, a cognition which actually forms a bridge between them.  Kant tried to ban contradiction in his theory, claiming they were only part of the sensual world, separate from the judgments of the mind, which were based on an absolute unity. 

Hegel corrected Kant’s empty abstractions but used the dialectic, though on Kant's idealist basis, seeing it as only operating in thought, not in everything. He determined the difference between the base level of sense impressions, the medium level of understanding and the highest level – the use of reason – in which dialectics was the most explanatory form.  This refuted abstract logic, which he saw as limited.  Hegel backed the concepts of unity of opposites, the universal presence of contradiction and quantity into quality, based on his accurate study of the history of philosophy and science.  Just as an example of the first, how did organic life occur out of inorganic compounds? Yet it did.  Even chaos hides organization, perhaps at another level, but it is there.  A north demands a south, a positive electrical pole demands a negative.  And so on.

GWF Hegel - All but Forgotten Until ...

Marx ‘right-sided’ Hegel, basing dialectics instead on material developments, not just thought.  He could not accept Hegel's "Absolute Idea" behind realty. In the process Marx and Engels had to combat the "Young Hegelians" and later Feuerbach, who, while a hard atheist and materialist who challenged Hegel, still endorsed individualism and solutions like 'love.' Here we reach Marx and Engels great achievement and method of understanding the motion of reality and thought, based on the development of philosophy, science, history and society since Ionia – dialectical materialism.  As Woods puts it, abstract philosophy is superseded by practice as a "non-philosophy" philosophy - by the scientific method and the entrance of the conscious human majority into history.  Thought is not a separate strand, it is a function of the whole body, of social development.  It is a product of practice, of human labor, not of abstractions.

The one drawback to this book is the somewhat giddy and positivist tone about how science will always continue to illuminate the dark corners of existence and the universe.  Given an understanding of history, it is quite possible that we can also be thrown back into a 'new dark age'  where science is again an outcast from society.  Given science has also been used for reactionary purposes, that also gives pause.

The book is a clear, fascinating read, which gets a bit repetitive at times towards the end in dealing with Hegel.  It is not really a history of all philosophy, but a history of the battle between idealism and materialism up to Marx.  It ignores certain philosophers not germane to the main subject matter, like Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Nietzsche or those who came later, like Dewey, Russell and Sartre, on up to the movement of post-modernism.  Woods says that Kantian subjective idealism is still current in various 'wordy' modern philosophic forms in bourgeois society like post-modernism. Or as the Bush administration once said, "...we create our own reality."

So these issues are still hugely relevant, especially regarding the current and openly reactionary role of religion in society, whether we are talking about the U.S, Hungary, Poland, Myanmar, India, Israel, Brazil or Saudi Arabia.  Religion functions as idealism's bedfellow and prop, and a prop to the very real ruling classes.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive:  “Reason in Revolt” (Woods/Grant); “The Philosophy of Space/Time” and “The Einsteinian Universe”(Malek); “The Ten Assumptions of Science,” “History and Class Consciousness” (Lukacs); “Marx and Human Nature,” “Living in the End Times” (Zizek); “The Young Marx,” "Spinoza Lives!" "Ubiquity," "Monsters of the Market" (McNally).         

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 26, 2021