Library:Elementary principles of philosophy

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Preface by Maurice Le Goas

This elementary textbook reproduces the notes taken by one of the students of Georges Politzer, during the classes taught by him at the Workers' University (l'Université Ouvrière) in the school year 1935-1936. In order to understand its character and scope, it is first necessary to specify the aim and method of our teacher.

We know that the Workers' University was founded in 1932 by a small group of professors to teach marxist science to manual workers and to give them a method of reasoning that would allow them to understand our times and to guide their actions, as much in their technique as in the political and social fields.

From the very beginning, Georges Politzer took on the task of teaching marxist philosophy, dialectical materialism, at the Workers' University: a task all the more necessary as official teaching continued to ignore or distort this philosophy.

None of those who had the privilege of attending these courses – he spoke each year before a large audience of people of all ages and professions, but dominated by young workers – will forget the deep impression that everyone felt before this big redheaded young man, so enthusiastic and learned, so conscientious and fraternal, so attentive to bringing an arid and ungrateful subject to an inexperienced audience.

His authority imposed on his class a pleasant discipline, which knew how to be severe, but always remained just, and there was emanating from his person such a power of life, such a radiance that he was admired and loved by all his pupils.

In order to make himself understood, Politzer first removed from his vocabulary all philosophical slang, all the technical terms that only the initiated could hear. He wanted to use only simple words known to all. When he was forced to use a particular term, he did not fail to explain it at length using familiar examples. If, in discussions, one of his students used learned words, he would take it back and mock it with the biting irony that was familiar to all who approached him.

He wanted to be simple and clear and always appealed to common sense, without ever sacrificing the accuracy and truthfulness of the ideas and theories he put forward. He knew how to make his lessons extremely lively by involving the audience in discussions before and after the lesson. At the end of each lesson, he would give what he called one or two control questions, which were designed to summarize the lesson or apply the content to a particular topic. Students were not required to cover the topic, but many did and brought a written assignment with them at the beginning of the next lesson. He would then ask who had completed the assignment, raise his hand, and select a few of us to read our text and complete it with oral explanations if necessary. Politzer would criticize or praise and provoke a brief discussion among the students, and then he would conclude by learning from the discussion. This lasted about half an hour and allowed those who had missed the previous class to fill in the gap and relate it to what they had learned before; it also allowed the teacher to see how well it had been understood; he insisted on delicate or obscure points if necessary.

He would then begin the day's lesson, which lasted about an hour; then the students would ask questions about what had just been said. These questions were generally interesting and insightful, and Politzer would take the opportunity to clarify and rephrase the essence of the lesson from a different perspective.

Georges Politzer, who had a thorough knowledge of his subject and an intelligence of admirable flexibility, was concerned above all with the reactions of his audience: he took the general "temperature" each time and constantly checked the degree of assimilation of his students. He was also followed by them with passionate interest. He helped to train thousands of activists, many of whom are now in "responsible" positions.

We, who understood the value of this teaching and who thought of all those who could not hear it, and especially our provincial comrades, wanted the publication of his lectures. He promised to think about it, but, in the midst of his immense work, he never found the time to carry out this project.

Then, during my second year of philosophy at the Workers' University, where they had created a higher course, I had the opportunity to ask Politzer to correct some homework for me, and I gave him, at his request, my course notebooks. He found them well done, and I suggested that he write the lessons of the elementary course according to my notes. He encouraged me to do so, promising to review and correct them. Unfortunately, he could not find the time. His occupations being more and more heavy, he left the upper course of philosophy to our friend René Maublanc. I informed him of our plans and asked him to review the first lessons I had written. He eagerly accepted and encouraged me to finish this work which we were then to present to Georges Politzer. But the war came: Politzer was to die a heroic death in the struggle against the Hitlerian occupier.

Although our professor was no longer there to finalize a work he had approved and encouraged, we thought it would be useful to publish it according to my lecture notes.

Georges Politzer, who began his philosophy course at the Workers' University each year by establishing the true meaning of the word materialism and protesting against the slanderous deformations that some people subjected him to, energetically recalled that the materialist philosopher is not lacking in ideals and that he is ready to fight to make this ideal triumph. Since then he has been able to prove it by his sacrifice, and his heroic death illustrates this initial course, in which he affirmed the union, in marxism, of theory and practice. It is not useless to insist on this devotion to an ideal, this abnegation and this high moral value at a time when, once again, one dares to present marxism as "a doctrine which transforms man into a machine or an animal barely superior to the gorilla or the chimpanzee" (Lenten Sermon at Notre-Dame de Paris, pronounced, on February 18, 1945, by the R. P. Panici.).

We can never protest enough against such outrages to the memory of our comrades. Let us only remind those who have the audacity to pronounce them the example of Georges Politzer, Gabriel Péri, Jacques Solomon, Jacques Decour, who were marxists and who professed at the Université Ouvrière de Paris: all good comrades, simple, generous; fraternal, who did not hesitate to devote a good part of their time to come to a lost neighborhood to teach the workers philosophy, political economy, history or science.

The Workers' University was dissolved in 1939. It reappeared, after the Liberation, under the name New University. A new team of dedicated professors, taking over from those who had been shot, came to resume the interrupted work.

Nothing can encourage us more in this essential task than to pay tribute to one of the founders and animators of the Workers' University, and no tribute seems to us more just and useful than to publish Georges Politzer's Elementary Principles of Philosophy.

Maurice Le Goas.

The philosophical problems

I. Introduction

Why should we study philosophy?

In the course of this book, we propose to present and explain the elementary principles of materialist philosophy.

Why is this? Because marxism is intimately linked to a philosophy and a method: those of dialectical materialism. It is therefore indispensable to study this philosophy and this method in order to understand marxism and to refute the arguments of bourgeois theories as much as to undertake an effective political struggle.

Indeed, Lenin said: "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. "(Lenin: What is to be Done?) This means, first of all: it is necessary to link theory with practice.

What is practice? It is the act of realizing. For example, industry, agriculture realize (i.e., put into reality) certain theories (chemical, physical or biological theories).

What is theory? It is the knowledge of the things we want to achieve.

We can only be practical - but then we realize by routine. We can be only theoretical - but then what we conceive is often impossible to achieve. So there has to be a connection between theory and practice. The whole question is to know what this theory should be and how it should relate to practice.

We think that the worker activist needs a method of analysis and reasoning that is just in order to be able to carry out a just revolutionary action. That he needs a method that is not a dogma giving him ready-made solutions, but a method that takes into account facts and circumstances that are never the same, a method that never separates theory from practice, reasoning from life. Now this method is contained in the philosophy of dialectical materialism, the basis of marxism, which we propose to explain.

Is the study of philosophy a difficult thing?

It is generally thought that the study of philosophy is for workers a difficult thing, requiring special knowledge. It must be admitted that the way in which bourgeois textbooks are written is well done to confirm these ideas and can only repel them.

We do not intend to deny the difficulties involved in the study in general, and in the study of philosophy in particular; but these difficulties are perfectly surmountable, and they come above all from the fact that they are new things for many of our readers.

From the outset, we will, moreover, by making things clearer, call upon them to review certain definitions of words that are distorted in everyday language.

What is philosophy?

Vulgarly, we understand by, philosopher: either the one who lives in the clouds, or the one who takes things in the right direction, the one who does not "worry". But, on the contrary, the philosopher is the one who wants to give precise answers to certain questions, and, if we consider that philosophy wants to give an explanation to the problems of the universe (where does the world come from? where are we going? etc.), we see, therefore, that the philosopher is concerned with many things, and, contrary to what is said, "cares a lot".

We will therefore say, in order to define philosophy, that it wants to explain the universe, nature, that it is the study of the most general problems. Less general problems are studied by the sciences. Philosophy is therefore an extension of the sciences in the sense that it is based on the sciences and depends on them.

We immediately add that marxist philosophy provides a method for solving all problems and that this method comes under what is called: materialism.

What is the materialist philosophy?

Here again, there is a confusion that we must immediately denounce; vulgarly speaking, the materialist is the one who only thinks of enjoying material pleasures. By playing on the word materialism - which contains the word matter - we have thus come to give it a completely false meaning.

By studying materialism - in the scientific sense of the word - we are going to give it back its true meaning; being materialistic does not prevent us, as we shall see, from having an ideal and from fighting to make it triumph.

We have said that philosophy wants to give an explanation to the most general problems of the world. But, in the history of humanity, this explanation has not always been the same.

The first men did try to explain nature, the world, but they did not succeed. What makes it possible to explain the world and the phenomena that surround us are the sciences, and the discoveries that have allowed the sciences to progress are very recent.

The ignorance of the first men was therefore an obstacle to their research. This is why, in the course of history, because of this ignorance, we see religions arise, which also want to explain the world, but by supernatural forces. This is an anti-scientific explanation. But as, little by little, over the centuries, science will develop, men will try to explain the world by material facts based on scientific experiments, and it is from there, from this desire to explain things by science, that materialistic philosophy is born.

In the following pages, we are going to study what materialism is, but, from now on, we must remember that materialism is nothing other than the scientific explanation of the universe.

By studying the history of materialist philosophy, we will see how bitter and difficult the struggle against ignorance has been. It must be noted that this struggle is not yet over, since materialism and ignorance continue to exist side by side, side by side.

It is at the heart of this struggle that Marx and Engels intervened. Understanding the importance of the great discoveries of the nineteenth century, they enabled materialist philosophy to make enormous progress in the scientific explanation of the universe. This is how dialectical materialism was born. They were the first to understand that the laws that govern the world can also explain the workings of societies; they formulated the famous theory of historical materialism.

In this book, we propose to study first materialism, then dialectical materialism and finally historical materialism. But, above all, we want to establish the relations between materialism and marxism.

What is the relationship between materialism and marxism?

We can summarize them as follows:

1. The philosophy of materialism constitutes the basis of marxism (See Lenin: "Materialism and the Philosophy of Reformism", Karl Marx and his Doctrine, Social Editions 1953, p. 60).
2. This materialist philosophy which wants to bring a scientific explanation to the problems of the world progresses, in the course of history, at the same time as the sciences. Consequently, marxism stems from the sciences, rests on them and evolves with them.
3. Before Marx and Engels, there were, on several occasions and in different forms, materialistic philosophies. But in the nineteenth century, with the sciences taking a great step forward, Marx and Engels renewed this ancient materialism from the modern sciences and gave us the modern materialism, which is called dialectical materialism, and which forms the basis of marxism.

We see from these few explanations that the philosophy of materialism, contrary to what is said, has a history. This history is intimately linked to the history of science. Marxism, based on materialism, did not come out of one man's brain. It is the culmination, the continuation of ancient materialism, which was already very advanced in Diderot. Marxism is the flowering of materialism developed by the Encyclopedists of the 18th century, enriched by the great discoveries of the 19th century. Marxism is a living theory, and to show right away how it sees problems, we will take an example that everyone knows: the problem of class struggle.

What do people think about this issue? Some think that the defense of bread dispenses with political struggle. Others think that it is enough to punch in the street, denying the need for organization. Still others claim that only political struggle will bring a solution to this issue.

For the marxist, class struggle includes:

1. An economic struggle.
2. A political struggle.
3. An ideological struggle.

The problem must therefore be posed simultaneously on these three terrains.

1. One cannot fight for bread without fighting for peace, without defending freedom and without defending all the ideas that serve the struggle for these objectives.
2. The same is true in the political struggle, which since Marx has become a true science: one is obliged to take into account both the economic situation and ideological currents in order to wage such a struggle.
3. As for the ideological struggle, which manifests itself through propaganda, in order for it to be effective, one must take into account the economic and political situation.

We see, therefore, that all these problems are intimately linked and, therefore, that no decision can be taken in front of any aspect of this great problem of class struggle - in a strike, for example. - without taking into consideration every aspect of the problem and the whole problem itself.

It is therefore the one who is capable of fighting on all terrains that will give the movement the best direction.

This is how a marxist understands this problem of class struggle. Now, in the ideological struggle that we have to wage every day, we are faced with problems that are difficult to solve: immortality of the soul, existence of God, origins of the world, etc. It is the dialectical materialism that will give us a method of reasoning, that will allow us to solve all these problems and, as well, to unveil all the campaigns of falsification of marxism, which pretend to complete and renew it.

Bourgeois campaigns against marxism

These attempts at falsification are based on a wide variety of bases. One seeks to set against marxism the socialist authors of the pre-marxist period (before Marx). This is how we very often see the "utopians" used against Marx. Others use Proudhon; others draw on the revisionists of before 1914 (though masterfully refuted by Lenin). But what must be emphasized above all is the campaign of silence that the bourgeoisie is waging against marxism. It has done everything in particular to prevent materialist philosophy from being known in its marxist form. Particularly striking in this respect is the whole of philosophical teaching as it is given in France.

Philosophy is taught in secondary schools. But one can follow all this teaching without ever learning that there is a materialist philosophy elaborated by Marx and Engels. When, in philosophy textbooks, we talk about materialism (because we have to talk about it), we always talk about marxism and materialism separately. Marxism, in general, is presented only as a political doctrine, and when we speak of historical materialism, we don't speak of the philosophy of materialism; finally, we don't know anything about dialectical materialism.

This situation does not only exist in schools and high schools: it is exactly the same in Universities. The most characteristic fact is that one can be a "specialist" in philosophy in France, with the highest diplomas awarded by French universities, without knowing that marxism has a philosophy, which is materialism, and without knowing that traditional materialism has a modern form, which is marxism, or dialectical materialism.

We want to demonstrate that marxism has a general conception not only of society, but also of the universe itself. It is therefore useless, contrary to what some people claim, to regret that the great defect of marxism is its lack of philosophy, and to want, like some theorists of the workers' movement, to go in search of this philosophy that marxism lacks. For marxism has a philosophy, which is dialectical materialism.

The fact remains, moreover, that despite this campaign of silence, despite all the falsifications and precautions taken by the ruling classes, marxism and its philosophy are beginning to become more and more known.

II. The fundamental problem of philosophy

How should we begin the study of philosophy?

In our introduction, we said several times that the philosophy of dialectical materialism was the basis of Marxism.

Our goal is the study of this philosophy; but to reach this goal we must advance in stages.

When we speak of dialectical materialism, we have before us two words: materialism and dialectical, which means that materialism is dialectical. We know that before Marx and Engels materialism already existed, but that it was they, with the help of the discoveries of the nineteenth century, who transformed this materialism and created "dialectical" materialism.

Later we will examine the meaning of the word "dialectical," which refers to the modern form of materialism.

But since, before Marx and Engels, there were materialist philosophers (for example, Diderot in the 18th century), and since there are points in common to all materialists, we need to study the history of materialism before discussing dialectical materialism. We also need to know the conceptions that are opposed to materialism.

Two ways of explaining the world

We have seen that philosophy is the "study of the most general problems" and that it has to to explain the world, nature, man.

If we open a textbook of bourgeois philosophy, we are astonished by the multitude of different philosophies that can be found in it. They are designated by multiple more or less complicated words ending in "ism": criticalism, evolutionism, intellectualism, etc., and this multitude creates confusion. The bourgeoisie, moreover, has done nothing to clarify the situation, quite the contrary. But we can already sort out all these systems and distinguish two great currents, two clearly opposed conceptions:

1. The scientific conception.
2. The non-scientific conception of the world.

Matter and spirit

When philosophers set out to explain the world, nature, mankind, everything that we Finally, they were called upon to make distinctions. We see for ourselves that there are things, objects that are material, that we see and touch. Then, other realities that we do not see and that we cannot touch or measure, like our ideas.

So we classify things in this way: on the one hand, those that are material; on the other hand, those that are not material. are not material and are in the realm of mind, thought, ideas.

This is how philosophers found themselves in the presence of matter and spirit.

What is matter? What is the spirit?

We have just seen in a general way how we have been led to classify things according to whether they are matter or spirit.

But we must specify that this distinction is made in different forms and with different words.

Thus, instead of talking about spirit we talk about thought, our ideas, our consciousness, the soul, just as when we talk about nature, the world, the earth, being, it is matter that we are talking about.

So again, when Engels, in his book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, talks about being and thinking, being is matter; thinking is spirit.

To define what is thought or spirit, and what is being or matter, we will say:

Thought is the idea that we have of things; some of these ideas usually come to us from our sensations and correspond to material objects; other ideas, such as those of God, philosophy, infinity, thought itself, do not correspond to material objects. The essential thing we must remember here is that we have ideas, thoughts, feelings, because we see and feel.

Matter or being is what our sensations and perceptions show and present to us, it is, in a general way, everything that surrounds us, what we call the "external world". Example: My sheet of paper is white. Knowing that it is white is an idea, and it is my senses that give me this idea. But the matter is the sheet itself.

That is why, when philosophers talk about the relationship between being and thinking, or between mind and matter, or between consciousness and the brain, etc., it all concerns the same question and means: what is, of matter or mind, of being or thinking, the most important term? Which is the one that precedes the other? This is the fundamental question of philosophy.

The fundamental question or problem of philosophy

Each of us has asked ourselves what we become after death, where the world came from, how the earth was formed. And it is difficult for us to admit that there has always been something. We tend to think that at some point there was nothing. That's why it's easier to believe what religion teaches: "The spirit hovered above the darkness... then came the matter. "In the same way, we wonder where our thoughts are, and so the problem arises for us of the relationship between mind and matter, between brain and thought. There are many other ways of asking the question. For example, what is the relationship between will and power? Will is, here, mind, thought; and power is what is possible, it is being, matter. We also often encounter the question of the relationship between "social consciousness" and "social existence".

The fundamental question of philosophy thus presents itself under different aspects and we can see how important it is to always recognize the way in which this problem of the relationship between matter and spirit arises, because we know that there can only be two answers to this question:

1. a scientific answer.
2. a non-scientific answer.

Idealism and materialism

This is how philosophers have been led to take a stand on this important issue. The first men, completely ignorant, having no knowledge of the world and of themselves, and having only weak technical means to act on the world, attributed to supernatural beings the responsibility for everything that astonished them. In their imaginations, excited by the dreams in which they saw themselves and their fellow creatures living, they came to this conception that each of us had a double existence. Troubled by the idea of this "double", they came to believe that their thoughts and feelings were produced not by their

own bodies, but by a particular soul living in that body and leaving it at the moment of death

This idea of the immortality of the soul and of a possible life of the spirit outside of matter was born later on.

Likewise their weakness, their anxiety before the forces of nature, before all those phenomena which they did not understand and which the state of the art did not allow them to control (germination, storms, floods, etc.) led them to suppose that, behind these forces, there were all-powerful beings, "spirits" or "gods", beneficent or evil, but, in any case, capricious.

In the same way, they believed in gods, in beings more powerful than men, but they imagined them in the form of men or animals, as material bodies. It was only later that souls and gods (and then the One God who replaced the gods) were conceived as pure spirits.

This led to the idea that in reality there are spirits that have a very specific life, completely independent of that of bodies, and that do not need bodies to exist.

Subsequently, this question was posed in a more precise way according to religion, in this form:

Was the world created by God or does it exist from all eternity?

Depending on how they answered this question, philosophers were divided into two main camps

Those who, adopting the non-scientific explanation, admitted the creation of the world by God, i.e. affirmed that spirit had created matter, these were the camp of idealism.

The others, those who tried to give a scientific explanation of the world and thought that nature, matter was the main element, belonged to the different schools of materialism.

Originally, these two expressions, idealism and materialism, did not mean anything other than that.

Idealism and materialism are therefore two opposite and contradictory answers to the fundamental problem of philosophy.

Idealism is the non-scientific conception. Materialism is the scientific conception of the world.

We will see later the proof of this affirmation, but we can say, from now on, that if we observe well in experience that there are bodies without thought, like stones, metals, earth, we never observe, on the other hand, the existence of mind without body.

To end this chapter with an unequivocal conclusion, we see that to answer this question: how is it that man thinks? There can only be two completely different and totally opposite answers:

1. Man thinks because he has a soul.
2. Man thinks because he has a brain.

Depending on which answer we give, we will be trained to give different solutions to the problems that arise from this question.

Depending on our answer, we will be either idealistic or materialistic.

III. Idealism

Moral idealism and philosophical idealism

We denounced the confusion created by everyday language with regard to materialism. The same confusion is found with regard to idealism.

We must not in fact confuse moral idealism with philosophical idealism.

Moral idealism consists in devoting oneself to a cause, to an ideal. The history of the international labor movement teaches us that an incalculable number of revolutionaries, of Marxists, devoted themselves even to the sacrifice of their lives for a moral ideal, and yet they were the adversaries of this other idealism which one calls idealism. philosophical.

Philosophical idealism is a doctrine based on the explanation of the world by the mind.

It is the doctrine which answers the fundamental question of philosophy by saying: "it is the thought which is the principal element, the most important, the first". And idealism, by affirming the primary importance of thought, affirms that it is this which produces being or, in other words, that "it is the spirit which produces matter".

This is the first form of idealism; it found its full development in religions by affirming that God, "pure spirit", was the creator of matter.

The religion which has claimed and still claims to be outside philosophical discussions is, in reality, on the contrary, the direct and logical representation of idealistic philosophy.

However, science intervening over the centuries, it soon became necessary to explain matter, the world, things other than by God alone. For, from the 16th century, science began to explain the phenomena of nature without taking God into account and by dispensing with the creation hypothesis.

To better combat these scientific, materialist and atheistic explanations, it was therefore necessary to push idealism further and deny the very existence of matter.

This is what an English bishop, Berkeley, who has been called the father of idealism at the beginning of the 18th century.

Why should we study Berkeley's idealism?

The goal of his philosophical system will therefore be to destroy materialism, to try to show us that material substance does not exist. He writes in the preface of his book Dialogues of Hylas and Philonoüs:

If these principles are accepted and regarded as true, it follows that atheism and skepticism are, by the same token, completely shot down, obscure questions cleared up, almost insoluble difficulties solved, and men who enjoyed paradoxes brought back to common sense. [P. 13. Collection "Les classiques pour tous", Librairie Hatier, Pans.]

Thus, for Berkeley, what is true is that matter does not exist and that it is paradoxical to claim the contrary.

We will see how he goes about demonstrating this to us. But I think it's not useless to insist that those who want to study philosophy should take Berkeley's theory very seriously.

I know that Berkeley's theses will make some people smile, but we must not forget that we live in the 20th century and that we benefit from all the studies of the past. And we will see, moreover, when we study materialism and its history, that the materialist philosophers of the past also sometimes make people smile.

It should be known, however, that Diderot, who was, before Marx and Engels, the greatest of materialist thinkers, attached some importance to the Berkeley system, since he described it as a

system which, to the shame of the human spirit and philosophy, is the most difficult to fight, albeit the most absurd of all! (Diderot: " Lettre sur les aveugles ", Textes choisis, t. I, Editions sociales " Classiques du peuple ", p. 87)

Lenin himself devoted many pages to the philosophy of Berkeley and wrote:

The most modern idealistic philosophers have not produced against the materialists any ... argument that one cannot find in Bishop Berkeley. (Lenin: Materialism and Empiriocriticism, p. 18, Social Editions, 1946).

Finally, here is the assessment of Berkeley's immaterialism given in a textbook on the history of philosophy, used in high schools:

A theory which is still imperfect, no doubt, but admirable, and which must destroy forever, in philosophical minds, the belief in the existence of a material substance. (A. Penjon: Précis d'histoire de la philosophie, p. 320-321. Paul Delaplace bookstore).

That is to say the importance for everyone - although for different reasons, as these quotations have shown you - of this philosophical reasoning.

Berkeley's idealism

The purpose of this system is therefore to demonstrate that matter does not exist.

Berkeley said:

Matter is not what we think it is by thinking that it exists outside our mind. We think that things exist because we see them, because we touch them; it is because they give us these sensations that we believe they exist. But our sensations are only ideas that we have in our mind. So the objects that we perceive through our senses are nothing but ideas, and ideas cannot exist outside our mind.

For Berkeley, things exist; he does not deny their nature and existence, but he asserts that they exist only in the form of the sensations that make them known to us, and concludes that our sensations and objects are one and the same thing.

Things exist, that's for sure, but in us, he says, in our mind, and they have no reality outside the mind.

We conceive things with the help of sight; we perceive them with the help of touch; smell tells us about smell; taste tells us about taste; hearing tells us about sound. These different sensations give us ideas, which, combined with each other, make us give them a common name and consider them as objects.

We observe, for example, a certain color, taste, smell, shape, consistency... We recognize this set as an object that we designate from the word apple.

Other combinations of sensations give us

other collections of ideas [that] constitute what is called stone, tree, book and other sensitive objects. (Lenin: quoted work, p. 5.)

So we are victims of illusions when we think, when we know the world and things as external, since all that exists only in our mind. In his book Dialogues of Hylas and Philoüs, Berkeley demonstrates this thesis in the following way:

Isn't it absurd to believe that the same thing at the same time can be different? For example, hot and cold at the same moment? So imagine that one of your hands is hot and the other is cold, and that both of them are immersed at the same time in a vase full of water at an intermediate temperature: won't the water appear hot to one hand and cold to the other? (Idem, p. 21.)

Since it is absurd to believe that a thing at the same time can be, in itself, different, we must conclude that this thing exists only in our mind.

So what does Berkeley do in its method of reasoning and discussion? He strips objects, things, of all their properties.

"You say that objects exist because they have a color, a smell, a flavor, because they are big or small, light or heavy? I will show you that this does not exist in objects, but in our minds.

"Here's a coupon of cloth: you tell me it's red. Is that right? You think the red is in the fabric itself. Is that certain? You know that there are animals with eyes different from ours that will not see this red cloth; likewise a man with jaundice will see it yellow! Then what color is it? It depends, you say? So the red is not in the cloth, but in the eye, in us.

"You say that this cloth is light? If you drop it on an ant, she will certainly find it heavy. Who is right? Do you think it's warm? If you had a fever, you'd think it was cold! So is it hot or cold?

"In a word, if the same things can be red, heavy, hot at the same time for some, and for others exactly the opposite, it is because we are victims of illusions and things only exist in our minds. »

By removing all their properties from objects, we come to say that they only exist in our thinking, that is to say that matter is an idea.

Already, before Berkeley, the Greek philosophers said, and this was right, that certain qualities such as flavor, sound were not in the things themselves, but in us.

But what is new in Berkeley's theory is precisely that he extends this remark to all the qualities of objects.

The Greek philosophers had, in fact, established the following distinction between the qualities of things: On the one hand, the primary qualities, i.e., those that are in objects, such as weight, size, resistance, etc., are the qualities that are in objects.

On the other hand, the second qualities, that is, those that are in us, such as smell, taste, warmth, etc., and that are in objects, such as weight, size, resistance, etc.

Berkeley applies to first qualities the same thesis as to second qualities, namely that all qualities, all properties are not in objects, but in us.

If we look at the sun, we see it round, flat, red. Science teaches us that we are wrong, that the sun is not flat, is not red. We will therefore abstract, with the help of science, certain false properties that we give to the sun, but without concluding that it does not exist! It is however to such a conclusion that Berkeley reaches.

Berkeley was certainly not wrong in showing that the distinction of the ancients did not stand up to scientific analysis, but he commits a fault of reasoning, a sophism, in drawing from these remarks consequences that they do not entail. He shows, in fact, that the qualities of things are not such as our senses show us, that is to say that our senses deceive us and distort material reality, and he concludes immediately that material reality does not exist.

Consequences of "idealistic" reasoning

The thesis being: "Everything exists only in our mind", we must conclude that the outside world does not exist.

Pushing this reasoning to its logical conclusion, we would come to say: "I am the only one who exists, since I only know other men through my ideas, that other men are for me, like material objects, only collections of ideas". This is what in philosophy is called solipsism (which means alone me).

Berkeley, Lenin tells us in his already quoted book, instinctively defends himself against the accusation of supporting such a theory. We even note that solipsism, an extreme form of idealism, has not been supported by any philosopher.

This is why we must try, when discussing with idealists, to emphasize that the reasonings that effectively deny the matter, in order to be logical and consequent, must come to this absurd extremity that is solipsism.

The idealist arguments

We have endeavored to summarize Berkeley's theory as simply as possible, because it was he who, most frankly, set out what philosophical idealism is.

But it is certain that, in order to fully understand this reasoning, which is new to us, it is now indispensable to take it very seriously and to make an intellectual effort. Why? Because we will see later on that, if idealism presents itself in a more hidden way and under the cover of new words and expressions, all idealistic philosophies only take up the arguments of "old Berkeley". (Lenin).

Because we will also see how much, the idealistic philosophy that has dominated and still dominates the official history of philosophy, bringing with it a method of thought that we are impregnated with, has been able to penetrate in us despite an entirely secular education.

The basis of the arguments of all idealistic philosophies being found in the reasoning of Bishop Berkeley, we will therefore, to summarize this chapter, try to identify what are these main arguments and what they try to demonstrate to us.

The spirit creates matter

This, as we know, is the idealistic answer to the fundamental question of philosophy; it is the first form of idealism that is reflected in the different religions, where it is asserted that the spirit created the world.

This assertion can have two meanings:

Either God created the world, and the world really exists outside of us. This is the ordinary idealism of theologies. (Theology is the "science" (!). that deals with God and divine things.)

Or God created the illusion of the world by giving us ideas that do not correspond to any material reality. This is Berkeley's "immaterialist idealism" which wants to prove to us that spirit is the only reality, matter being a product made by our spirit.

This is why the idealists assert that:

The world does not exist outside of our thinking

This is what Berkeley wants to demonstrate to us by saying that we are making a mistake by attributing to things properties and qualities that would be their own, whereas these only exist in our mind.

For the idealists, benches and tables do exist, but only in our thinking, and not outside of us, because

It's our ideas that create things

In other words, things are a reflection of our thinking. Indeed, since it is the mind that creates the illusion of matter, since it is the mind that gives our thought the idea of matter, since the sensations we feel in front of things do not come from things themselves, but only from our thought, the source of the reality of the world and of things is our thought and, therefore, everything that surrounds us does not exist outside our mind and can only be the reflection of our thought.

But since, in the case of Berkeley, our mind would be incapable of creating these ideas by itself, and since, moreover, it does not do what it wants with them (as would happen if it created them on its own), we must admit that it is another, more powerful mind that is the creator. It is therefore God who creates our spirit and imposes on us all the ideas of the world we encounter in it.

These are the main theses on which the idealistic doctrines rest and the answers they bring to the fundamental question of philosophy. It is now time to see what is the response of materialist philosophy to this question and to the problems raised by these theses.

IV. Materialism

Why should we study materialism?

We have only seen this problem: "What is the relationship between being and thinking? "there can only be two opposite and contradictory answers.

We have studied in the previous chapter the idealistic answer and the arguments presented to defend the idealistic philosophy.

We now have to examine the second answer to this fundamental problem (a problem, let us repeat, which is at the basis of all philosophy) and see what arguments materialism brings to the defense. All the more so because materialism is for us a very important philosophy, since it is that of Marxism.

It is, therefore, indispensable to know materialism well. Indispensable especially because the conceptions of this philosophy are very badly known and have been falsified. Indispensable also because, by our education, by the instruction we have received - whether primary or more developed, - by our habits of living and reasoning, we are all, more or less, without realizing it, impregnated with idealistic conceptions. (We will see, moreover, in other chapters, several examples of this affirmation and why it is so).

It is therefore an absolute necessity for those who want to study marxism to know its basis: materialism.

Where does materialism come from?

We have broadly defined philosophy as an effort to explain the world, the universe. But we know that, according to the state of human knowledge, its explanations have changed and that two attitudes have been adopted throughout the history of humanity to explain the world: one, anti-scientific, calling upon one or more superior minds, upon supernatural forces; the other, scientific, based on facts and experiences.

One of these conceptions is defended by idealistic philosophers; the other by materialists.

This is why, from the very beginning of this book, we have said that the first idea we should have of materialism is that this philosophy represents the "scientific explanation of the universe".

If idealism was born out of human ignorance - and we will see how ignorance was maintained, nurtured in the history of societies by cultural and political forces that shared idealistic conceptions - materialism was born out of the struggle of science against ignorance or obscurantism.

This is why this philosophy was so much fought against and why, in its modern form (dialectical materialism), it is little known, if not ignored or misunderstood by the official academic world.

How and why materialism has evolved

Contrary to the claims of those who fight this philosophy and who say that this doctrine has not evolved for twenty centuries, the history of materialism shows us in this philosophy something alive and always in motion.

Over the centuries, man's scientific knowledge has progressed. At the beginning of the history of thought, in Greek antiquity, scientific knowledge was almost nil, and the first scholars were, at the same time, philosophers, because, at that time, philosophy and the nascent sciences formed a whole, one being the extension of the others.

Later on, as the sciences brought precisions in the explanation of the phenomena of the world, precisions that hindered and even contradicted the dogmas of idealistic philosophies, a conflict was born between philosophy and the sciences.

The sciences being in contradiction with the official philosophy of that time, it had become necessary for them to separate from it. Also

they were in no more hurry than to free themselves from the philosophical hodgepodge and leave the philosophers the vast hypotheses to make contact with restricted problems, those which are ripe for a solution in the near future. So this distinction is made between science... and philosophy. (René Maublanc: la Vie ouvrière, November 25, 1935).

But materialism, born with the sciences, linked to them and dependent on them, has progressed, evolved with them, to arrive, with modern materialism, that of Marx and Engels, at reuniting, once again, science and philosophy in dialectical materialism.

We will study this history and this evolution, which are linked to the progress of civilization, but we already see, and this is what is very important to remember, that materialism and science are linked to each other and that materialism is absolutely dependent on science.

It remains for us to establish and define the bases of materialism, bases that are common to all philosophies which, under different aspects, claim to be materialistic.

What are the arguments and principles of materialism?

To answer, we must return to the fundamental question of philosophy, that of the relationship between being and thinking: which of one or the other is the main one?

The materialists affirm first of all that there is a determined relationship between being and thinking, between matter and spirit. For them, it is the being, the matter, which is the first reality, the first thing, and the spirit which is the second, posterior reality, dependent on the matter.

Therefore, for materialists, it is not spirit or God who created the world and matter, but it is the world, matter, nature that created spirit:

Spirit is itself only the superior product of matter. (Friedrich Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 18.)

This is why, if we take up the question we asked in the second chapter: "Where does man think? "the materialists answer that man thinks because he has a brain and that thought is the product of the brain. For them, there can be no thought without matter, without a body.

Our consciousness and our thought, however transcendent they may seem to us, are only products of a material, bodily organ, the brain. (Idem, p. 18.)

Therefore, for materialists, matter, being are something real, existing outside of our thought, and do not need thought or mind to exist. Likewise, since spirit cannot exist without matter, there is no immortal soul independent of the body.

Contrary to what the idealists say, the things around us exist independently of us: they are what give us our thoughts; and our ideas are only the reflection of things in our brain.

This is why, in front of the second aspect of the question of the relationship between being and thinking: -

What relationship is there between our ideas about the surrounding world and this world itself? Is our thought in a state to know the real world? Can we, in our conceptions of the real world, reproduce a faithful image of reality? This question is called in philosophical language the question of the identity of thought and being. (Friedrich Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 15.)

- Materialists affirm: Yes! we can know the world, and the ideas we have of it are more and more correct, since we can study it with the help of science, that science proves us continuously by experience that the things around us have a reality of their own, independent of us, and that these things, men can already partly reproduce them, create them artificially.

To sum up, we will say that the materialists, faced with the fundamental problem of philosophy, assert:

It is matter that creates the spirit

It is matter that produces spirit and, scientifically, we have never seen spirit without matter.

Matter exists outside any spirit

Matter exists outside of all mind and it does not need mind to exist, having an existence that is particular to it, and, therefore, contrary to what idealists say, it is not our ideas that create things, but, on the contrary, it is things that give us our ideas.

Science and experience allow us to know things

We are capable of knowing the world, the ideas we have of matter and of the world are becoming more and more accurate, since, with the help of science, we can clarify what we already know and discover what we do not know.

The philosophical materialism

Study of metaphysics

Study of dialectics

The historical materialism

Dialectical materialism and ideologies