Hegelian Idealism vs. Marxist Materialism

[Petros Agapetos]

Materialism says matter exists and it is physical in nature. Matter is prime. Ex. Marxism
Idealism says matter exists but is "mental"/Ideal in nature. Idea is prime. Ex. Hegelianism

Hegelian Idealism/Philosophy of Religion/Spirituality
Religion is the union of man and God.

The totality of consciousness, includes all conscious things; and in Idealism is beyond the mere natural world. Idealism is a supernaturalist philosophy. Materialism, on the other hand is naturalist (ontologically/philosophically naturalist).

The Totality of Consciousness has the following divisions:
God
Religion
Spirit
Reason
Self-consciousness
Consciousness

The shape of consciousness assumed by "religion" is existence contained and preserved in though as well as a something thought which is consciously existent.

The development of Religion follows these various ways in which objects are given in experience , and the three chief divisions of Religion are determined accordingly:

(i).Natural Religion is religion at the level of consciousness.

(ii). Art, Religion at the level of self-consciousness;

(iii). Revealed Religion is religion at the level of Reason and Spirit

[Petros Agapetos]

Idealism vs. Materialism: Why does the debate between Materialism and Idealism exist?

There are certain questions to which philosophy cannot give conclusive answers.
Among these questions are the question of the existence of the physical world.

As one looks at blue light, the blueness one perceives is in the mind, yet the physical object, the light of frequency ‘blue’, belongs to the domain of the physical world and has physical properties, such as having a certain frequency and being located in time and space as well as being determinate, public, and persistent in nature. While objects which are perceived by the mind, the blueness of the light, have the properties of sense data, they are indeterminate, private, and instantaneous, and belong to the domain of the mind. If two things have different properties and belong to domains of a different nature, they are distinct. Therefore sense data (blueness) and physical objects (light of frequency blue) are distinct. Any attempt to verify the existence of public and persistent objects by the testimony of other conscious agents who perceive the physical objects would be circular because it would presuppose that those conscious agents exist in the first place and aren’t merely the result of sense data alone. Therefore there can be no non question begging deductive argument for the existence of blue light by the mere sensation of blueness that one sees when looking at blue light. No contradiction arises from the supposition that sense data are as they are yet physical objects, like light of frequency blue, do not underlie them, and sense data are perceived in such a way as to create the illusion that they are coming from an external world while in reality they could merely be correlated with collections of sense data induced in the mind. The mind being a pattern seeking entity infers to the best possible explanation for the determinate, public and persistent apparent nature of physical objects, namely that they exist. The belief that the material world exists harmonizes our experience of sense data and is an instinctive belief that cannot be definitively demonstrated by any deductive argument. There is a genuine limitation in the ability of philosophy to give an answer to the question of the existence of the material world. It is naïve to suppose philosophy could give us a definitive answer.

[Petros Agapetos]

Why do we say that Hegel is an “idealist”?

Hegel described himself as an Idealist
Hegel was the final product of the philosophical movement known as “German Idealism,” which arose in Germany in response to Immanuel Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Kant’s had aimed to resolve the impasse between largely British Empiricism and largely French Rationalism. These philosophical currents were driven by problems which had arisen from the rapid development of natural science since Galileo, chiefly the nature of reality, and the sources and limits of human knowledge of Nature. Kant had proposed that a thing existed “in itself” but human beings could have knowledge only of phenomena, i.e., appearances, while the nature of the thing-in-itself remained unknowable. Kant’s approach generated many troubling dualisms and contradictions, and the German Idealists attempted to resolve these contradictions by focusing on forms of knowledge, rather than by speculating on the nature of a reality outside of human practice – which was the preserve of the Materialists.

Hegel put it this way:

“The proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes Idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out. ... A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existence as such, would not deserve the name of philosophy; the principles of ancient or modern philosophies, water, or matter, or atoms are thoughts, universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, ... in fact what is, is only the one concrete whole from which the moments are inseparable.” (Science of Logic, §316, Hegel, 1812)

So the archetypal materialists were the ancient Greek Atomists – everything, including human life, was the result of interactions between atoms. Modern materialism, which arose after Hegel, has a broader concept of material reality which is inclusive of social relations, but earlier materialists tended to be blind to the social formation of knowledge and consciousness.

It was the Idealists, Hegel in particular, who discovered the social character of consciousness and knowledge, not the materialists. However, the idealists did not make forms of practice explicitly the subject matter of their systems; rather they took logical categories, concepts, ideas, etc., as their subject matter, thus justifying their description as “Idealists.” A critical reading of Hegel will show however that content of these ideal forms is forms of activity.

Not all forms of idealism are the same. In particular, Hegel distinguished between subjective idealists like Bishop Berkeley, and objective idealists, such as Schelling and Hegel. That is, for Hegel, thought forms were not chimera existing only inside your head, but existed objectively, in activity and material culture, independently of any single individual, and which individuals acquired in the course of their activity.

[Petros Agapetos]

Overall, Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach is a defence of Hegel’s idealism.

Hegel took the social elite to be the agents of change
Having witnessed social change in Britain thanks to industrialisation, and in France thanks to the guillotine, Hegel looked forward to a less traumatic and chaotic revolution in Germany which he saw as led by the social elite – philosophy professors, enlightened monarchs and a meritocratic civil service, rather than the blind destruction wrought by mobs and factories. Although he supported the right of slaves and oppressed nations to throw off their oppressors, he wanted his native Germany to achieve modernity through the perfection of a state which would guarantee the freedoms of its citizens. He saw states as guarantors of freedom, not instruments of oppression and was resolutely opposed to destructive, revolutionary methods of achieving social progress. He regarded the poor and working class as incapable of being agents of social progress – their misery was a social problem which could be solved only by the intervention of the enlightened elite.

When a work process is improved is it thanks to the supervisor who devises the improved method, or is the improvement implicit in the work process itself, so that we should credit the workers not the supervisor for the improvement? When a social problem is solved by the passing of a new law, do we credit the parliamentarians who passed the new law, or the social movement who agitated for it? Do we get to a better world by (at least some) people forming an image of that better world and then going out and fighting for it, or does the better world arise out of contradictions inherent in the present state of affairs which drive people into actions irrespective of whether they can foresee the outcome? We call those people “idealists” who think that the social class whose business is plans and ideas are the agents of change, rather than the masses who act out those ideas. We call those people “materialists” who see social change arising directly out of the conditions of social life with ordinary people as its agents.

But recall Thesis 5 quoted above: if, as materialists, we see people as products of their social conditions we reduce them to passive objects of change, leaving consciousness of change to the intelligentsia or the Party. Hegel and the Idealists erred on the side of change-from-above, but exclusive focus on change-from-below is equally mistaken because it makes the people passive objects of structural forces beyond their control.

Hegel believed that institutions tend to be true to their concept
Anyone will recognise that over the years automobiles have come to better accord with their concept than they used to, conveying passengers to their desired destination in comfort without breaking down; likewise, washing machines have become more and more likely to wash your clothes and not wreck them since they were first invented in 1908. Hegel believed that this idea, which has been called “normative essentialism,” applies to social institutions as well as well as useful artefacts, and is crucial to his social philosophy.

Although states originate in violence, according to Hegel, the concept of the state is Freedom – freedom from crime, famine and outside attack, freedom for personal development and the enjoyment of culture. That is to say, a worthwhile concept, once it comes into being, will tend to realise itself in increasingly perfect forms but falls into crisis when its concept no longer makes sense. In this sense, Hegel sees the logic of ideas and concepts as the driving force in history. Marx responded:

“History does nothing, it “possesses no immense wealth,” it “wages no battles.” It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” (Holy Family, 1845)

Marx here is expressing a materialist position, in which people are not to be seen as captive of ideas but real actors. But if Marx is not to be accused of voluntarism, we must take account of his aphorism:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” (The Eighteenth Brumaire, 1852)

That which is “transmitted from the past” – the institutions, symbols and beliefs built up by a people over centuries ? unfolds in a way Hegel ably described with his dialectical idealist philosophy. But how people make use of those conditions is not always logical; people do not always do what they have to do, so to speak, so Marx’s insistence that the realisation of an idea is a matter of struggle is an important corrective to the Idealist vision of history unfolding according to rational principles. The fact remains however that Hegel’s Idealism is a powerful principle of historical development and historically, it has always been the idealists who have emphasised human agency in social change.