A few weeks ago I finished reading Alan Woods’s book The History of Philosophy. I can’t recommend this book enough. Using the method of dialectical materialism, Woods gives a broad overview of philosophy’s development, looking at how different thinkers and schools of thought reacted to and built upon those that came before them. As a general history on the topic, it blows Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy out of the water. Take a look at Alan’s introduction and see if you aren’t immediately hooked.
I went through the book as part of a reading group. Over the years I’ve been in reading groups that have studied Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (there’s no way I could have gotten through that text otherwise), and Spinoza. I always came out of each discussion enthused and wanting to share the ideas discussed with family and friends.
When I tried to summarize what we’d talked about, however, I often found others uninterested. Of course there’s the possibility that I’m simply not explaining these concepts in a riveting enough way. But there might be another reason: many people think philosophy has no impact on their lives.
I can completely sympathize with that view. Questions like the nature of reality, or how we can know truth, can seem esoteric and of purely academic interest. The work of many who call themselves philosophers doesn’t do much to change those opinions. My dad once said philosophy reminded him of guys he knew in university who tried to convince him that the world isn’t real. Hearing that kind of nonsense would make anyone skeptical about philosophy!
Woods’s book has its roots in an earlier work he wrote with Ted Grant, Reason in Revolt, which applied a Marxist philosophical lens to modern science. The authors of Reason in Revolt, which was first published in 1995, offer one of the best explanations I’ve heard about why philosophy is so important:
Is it really necessary for us to bother about complicated questions of science and philosophy? To such a question, two replies are possible. If what is meant is: do we need to know about such things in order to go about our daily life, then the answer is evidently no. But if we wish to gain a rational understanding of the world in which we live, and the fundamental processes at work in nature, society and our own way of thinking, then matters appear in quite a different light.
Strangely enough, everyone has a “philosophy”. A philosophy is a way of looking at the world. We all believe we know how to distinguish right from wrong, good from bad. These are, however, very complicated issues, which have occupied the attention of the greatest minds in history. When confronted with the terrible fact of the existence of events like the fratricidal war in the former Yugoslavia, the re-emergence of mass unemployment, the slaughter in Rwanda, many people will confess that they do not comprehend such things, and will frequently resort to vague references to “human nature”. But what is this mysterious human nature that is seen as the source of all our ills and is alleged to be eternally unchangeable? This is a profoundly philosophical question, to which not many would venture a reply, unless they were of a religious cast of mind, in which case they would say that God, in His wisdom, made us like that. Why anyone should worship a Being that played such tricks on His creations is another matter.
Those who stubbornly maintain that they have no philosophy are mistaken. Nature abhors a vacuum. People who lack a coherently worked-out philosophical standpoint will inevitably reflect the ideas and prejudices of the society and the milieu in which they live. That means, in the given context, that their heads will be full of the ideas they imbibe from the newspapers, television, pulpit and schoolroom, which faithfully reflect the interests and morality of existing society.
Most people usually succeed in muddling through life, until some great upheaval compels them to reconsider the kind of ideas and values they grew up with. The crisis of society forces them to question many things they took for granted. At such times, ideas that seemed remote suddenly become strikingly relevant. Anyone who wishes to understand life, not as a meaningless series of accidents or an unthinking routine, must occupy themselves with philosophy, that is, with thought at a higher level than the immediate problems of everyday existence. Only by this means do we raise ourselves to a height where we begin to fulfil our potential as conscious human beings, willing and able to take control of our own destinies.
The fact is that understanding the nature of truth and reality has massive implications—not just for how we interpret the world, but how we act in and change that world. “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” Karl Marx famously wrote. “The point, however, is to change it.”
Why do we believe what we believe? What is reality? Why are things the way they are? What does it mean to be virtuous? How should we live? What is the best way to organize society? These are profoundly important questions, which are asked more and more often in times of great suffering when people begin to question the existing order. Grant and Woods wrote Reason in Revolt at a period when liberal capitalism appeared triumphant and its defenders touted the “end of history”. Today, capitalism is on the defensive as it offers nothing but unending crisis—“horror without end” as Lenin put it. People see children slaughtered in elementary schools while police do nothing, amid daily mass shootings. They see their standard of living eroding with inflation; people dying because of malnutrition, lack of health-care or clean drinking water; forever wars, an unending pandemic, a global climate crisis, and on and on.
The dangers of philosophical idealism
In such times of crisis, people look for answers and explanations. But without a firm philosophical outlook, they can find themselves very far from reality. The rise of conspiracy theories is one example. People cope with a rapidly warming planet or a global pandemic by simply pretending these problems don’t exist, that it’s all a hoax. Unable to accept objective truths, they retreat into an imaginary reality. A decade ago, in the wake of an even deadlier mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones maintained that the shooting was “completely fake” and a “giant hoax” carried out by opponents of the Second Amendment; that no one was actually killed and that the victims were “child actors”. This is an extreme example of the bizarre ideas that can take hold when one has a shaky grasp on reality.
A similar coping mechanism is a retreat into mysticism, idealism, and the worst kinds of reactionary barbarism. In his 1933 article “What is National Socialism?”, Leon Trotsky describes “the immense poverty of National Socialist philosophy” and how Nazi ideology corresponded to the outlook of the ruined middle classes struggling amid the Great Depression: “To evolution, materialist thought, and rationalism – of the twentieth, nineteenth, and eighteenth centuries – is counterposed in [the petty-bourgeois] mind national idealism as the source of heroic inspiration.” Noting the backwardness of the Nazis’ racialist worldview, he adds: “The theory of race, specially created, it seems, for some pretentious self-educated individual seeking a universal key to all the secrets of life, appears particularly melancholy in the light of the history of ideas.” Unfortunately, such philosophically barren, irrational worldviews can find an audience in times of desperation when people have lost hope for a socialist alternative or when none presents itself.
Nonsensical ideas take hold more easily when one does not have a solid philosophical foundation. The idea that the world is not real seems ridiculous, and yet some of history’s most influential thinkers have seriously put forward this concept. Subjective idealists such as George Berkeley denied that material substance exists and maintained that objects are only ideas perceived by the mind.
To most people this seems absurd, and for good reason. Even the subjective idealists do not live out their own theories in their day-to-day lives. They act like the world around them is real, because it is. Yet subjective idealism continues to maintain a stubborn hold over many artists and intellectuals. Consider the famous scene in The Matrix where Neo is able to bend a spoon with his mind because, as a child tells him, “there is no spoon.” Major media and public figures have recently suggested with a straight face that what we call reality is a computer simulation. Like Berkeley, they suggest that all we can know is what we perceive as individuals. This is just another form of subjective idealism, the logic of which always leads back to solipsism: the idea that only I exist.
Immanuel Kant put forward his own concept of idealism, in which we can only interpret an object as we perceive it, but never know its true nature—what Kant called the “thing-in-itself”. Again, this can seem of purely academic interest with no relevance today. But Kantian ideas actually have tremendous influence in the form of postmodernism, currently the dominant philosophical trend. Postmodernism holds that there is no objective truth, but simply different “narratives”. This is the school of thought that underlies identity politics, in which we can never know the lived experience of someone who is of a different race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on.
The dominance of these ideas has a real effect, for example in how we fight racism. Is racism rooted in material causes, in which case we can end racism by transforming our material conditions? Or is racism the result of subjective ideas that can be changed by, for example, calling things different names? Do we beat racism through class solidarity across racial lines, or by “staying in our lane”? One’s philosophical outlook will determine the answer to these questions. In the context of issues such as rampant police killings of Black and Indigenous people, whether we have the right ideas to successfully overcome racism is quite literally a matter of life and death.
For a scientific worldview
Dialectical materialism is the philosophy of Marxism. It holds that the material world is real, that we can understand it and change it. The universe is not static, but rather in constant motion. Contradictions are the motor force of change. Mind is the highest expression of matter. Unlike philosophical idealism, dialectical materialism offers a truly scientific worldview.
Trotsky again: “Thoughts are scientific if they correspond to an objective process and make it possible to influence that process and guide it.” The proof that the world is real comes through our changing it. We can use our knowledge to start a fire, to build a chair, to split the atom. We can use theories of chemistry to make new compounds and materials.
The same principle holds true for the social sciences. A scientific approach to politics and economics is one that not only corresponds to objective reality, but proves itself right in practice. These are the key questions that anyone seeking to end the non-stop horrors and crises of our world today need to answer. A firm philosophical outlook gives us the tools we need both to interpret the world and to change it. I’d say that makes studying philosophy not only worth your time, but indispensable.
Excellent.