That’s not what idealism means in this context. Idealism means “ideas shape reality” whereas materialism is “reality shapes ideas.” Idealism is ignoring material conditions in order preserve an idea, instead of changing the idea to match the material conditions we face.
I’m not the OP, but I would like to speak on this matter and, perhaps get some relevant input.
That seems to be a roughly correct assessment of what idealism is if we replace the word ‘reality’ with ‘material part of reality’ (because non-material part of reality is still a part of reality). However, I see a couple of issues with the assessment of Marxism as supposedly being a materialist and anti-idealist school of thought:
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I’m not sure what the argument is for how the ideas encountered in math depend on material part of reality. There is no such dependency as far as I can see as a person with a background in mathematics.
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I am not aware of any Marxist positions that are in conflict with idealism. If there are such positions, I’m all ears.
1: Math is the literal representation of the the laws of matter. Math would not make sense if it didn’t follow the laws of matter that we have developed throughout all our history.
2: “The question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of spirit to nature is the paramount question of the whole of philosophy… The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature … comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.” (Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 329.) The entire foundation of Marxism (dialectical materialism) is in conflict with the foundation of idealism.
Math is the literal representation of the the laws of matter
It is not, especially not in the sense of math as what mathematicians study, but, again, math as an academic discipline is also not that. Math as an academic discipline says nothing about matter. Physics and chemistry (as academic disciplines) do.
In an academic work of physics, you would encounter passages like ‘a body’s movement can be described this way’, or ‘spectral analysis indicates that this planet’s atmosphere has such-and-such gases’.
In an academic work of chemistry, you would encounter passages like ‘when mixed, these two substances enter a reaction the result of which are these substances’.
In an academic work of math, you would instead encounter passages like ‘the annulus of convergence of this Laurent series has such-and-such radii’, or ‘this surface has this Euler characteristic’, or ‘this shape is a wild embedding of a sphere into R^3’.
Unlike bodies of matter, planets and their atmospheres, substances, etc., none of the objects mentioned in the quotes in that last part are material.
Math would not make sense if it didn’t follow the laws of matter that we have developed throughout all our history
It’s the other way around, however. Math as what mathematicians study is not dependent on matter in any way (if you disagree, you can try exploring what properties matter would need to have to, for example, annihilate the idea of the field of rational numbers). Meanwhile, if a material system works in a way that corresponds to some non-self-contradictory system found in math, it is not going to produce any results that would somehow cause a contradiction in the math system, so long as the material system works in accordance with the correspondence to the math system. You are not going to, for example, start out with 2 apples, give one apple to your comrade and be left with 3 apples, so long as giving an apple corresponds to subtracting 1 from a natural number that starts out as the count of how many apples you have and so long as there are no other ways to change how many apples you have.
The entire foundation of Marxism (dialectical materialism) is in conflict with the foundation of idealism
I am yet to encounter any conflicts in this regard. I have been unable to find them on my own, and the people that I have talked to so far, including outside of this thread, have not managed to find any such issues. I hope to resolve this matter at some point, one way or another.
I would like to clarify some things. It is not exactly true that Marxism is a materialist philosophy. Marxism is a dialectical materialist philosophy. One of Marx’s key innovations in philosophy was to conceive of a feedback relation between ideas and matter. Matter constrains and guides the development of ideas, and ideas influence matter through human action.
Another aspect here is that this feedback relationship is self similar. If you zoom in to smaller parts of reality, you find new iterations of this loop. For example, you could find a feedback relationship between the legal system and the economic mode of production. But if you zoom into the legal system themselves, you will find some relation between the material base of the legal system (the courts, prisons, lawyers) and the ideal part (the laws on the books, the common juridical worldviews).
I think it’s more correct to say dialectical materialism is a subset of materialist philosophy. It’s not a dualist philosophy because the mental realm is not conceived of as a separate thing. Rather information and ideas are embedded in the complex chemistry of the human brain.
I think the true utility of dialectics to Marx was that it allowed him to intuit how change actually occurs in our material world without relying on the science of thermodynamics which didn’t exist yet.
I would like to clarify some things. It is not exactly true that Marxism is a materialist philosophy. Marxism is a dialectical materialist philosophy. One of Marx’s key innovations in philosophy was to conceive of a feedback relation between ideas and matter. Matter constrains and guides the development of ideas, and ideas influence matter through human action
However, why call this ‘dialectical materialism’ if it can just as well be work just fine within an idealist framework/alongside subscription to idealist schools of thought? There doesn’t seem to be any conflict in this regard.
As far as I understand it math is the symbolic representation of formal logic which is itself a reflection of thermodynamic principles.
Mathematics as what mathematicians study is not itself a representation (of, well, itself), so that’s obviously false in that sense, and I’m not sure how representation of it is relevant to its own nature. And, of course, math itself isn’t dependent on what is studied in thermodynamics.
This may be of some relevance:
Cornforth on 'realism'
From 22–24 of Maurice Cornforth’s Materialism and the Dialectical Method:
Some Varieties of Present-day Idealist Philosophy
Another compromise philosophy is known as “realism”. In its modern form, this philosophy has arisen in opposition to subjective idealism.
The “realist” philosophers say that the external material world really exists independent of our perceptions and is in some way reflected by our perceptions. In this the “realists” agree with the materialists in opposition to subjective idealism; indeed, you cannot be a materialist unless you are a thoroughgoing realist on the question of the real existence of the material world.
But merely to assert that the external world exists independent of our perceiving it, is not to be a materialist. For example, the great Catholic philosopher of the middle ages, Thomas Aquinas, was in this sense a “realist”. And to this day most Catholic theologians regard it as a heresy to be anything but a “realist” in philosophy. But at the same time they assert that the material world, which really exists, was created by God, and is sustained and ruled all the time by the power of God, by a spiritual power. So far from being materialists, they are idealists.
Moreover, the word “realism” is much abused by philosophers. So long as you believe that something or other is “real”, you may call yourself a “realist”. Some philosophers think that not only is the world of material things real, but that there is also, outside space and time, a real world of “universals”, of the abstract essences of things: so these call themselves “realists”. Others say that, although nothing exists but the perceptions in our minds, nevertheless these perceptions are real: so these call themselves “realists” too. All of which goes to show that some philosophers are very tricky in their use of words.
