The English Materialists | A Philosophy of Revolution

[applause] So, we're going to start in 1610. This is the year that Galileo points his telescope to the skies. And he sees that the moon is not smooth as it was once thought to be. Later, he sees that the galaxy has many stars. And then he turns his telescope to Jupiter. He sees that it has moons that orbit it. And with all of this evidence before him, he concludes that the Earth is not the center of the universe. This is a discovery that will go on to shake the world, opening up a new chapter in a long debate about our place in the universe. For over a thousand years, religious superstition has reigned supreme. All cultural and intellectual life was channeled through and subordinated to the church which taught that the church was the center of the world. The earth was the center of the universe. The sun and the moon orbited the earth in perfect circles as was God's design. Anything outside of this was the realm of the divine. Now Galileo wasn't the first person to pose a theory that counted this in the sciences. Capernacus and Kepler had already laid the foundations for the heliocentric model. But using this new innovation, the telescope, he was able to combine mathematical calculation with observation and experimentation to challenge the longheld mystical beliefs. Well, this took place in the Renaissance, a period of cultural and intellectual rebirth that began in Florence and spread across Europe, [snorts] where, as Engles described it, the dictatorship of the church over men's minds was shattered. Now, preceding this 300-year period, the foundations of feudalism began to shake. Medieval trading hubs become centers of long-distance trade and exploration. Money began to play a more central role. undermining the feudal relations that existed in Europe. The merchants they accumulated vast wealth through shipping and banking. And though the naent bourgeois were a very long way off from their decisive political victory, this did lead to the birth of wealthy citystates in places like Florence and Venice. And this vast uh expanse of trade, it led to the rediscovery of Greek and Roman philosophy, astronomy and mathematics through its preservation in the Arab world, which had a huge impact on the intellectuals of the Renaissance. Now, many of these wealthy families, they became patrons to polymaths, funding grand art and architecture products, allowing these these great minds like Michelangelo da Vinci and then later Galileo to focus on the development of culture, of science, and philosophy. And this turned these citystates into hubs of intellectual and artistic pursuits. And these new discoveries and ideas, they sent intellectual ripples around Europe, particularly around Western Europe. Everywhere, this old way of thinking was being challenged and significant advancements were being made in natural science. Now, of course, this wasn't all a very straightforward process. The church consciously held back the development of science and philosophy. They persecuted, exiled, and they burnt at the stake those who dared to challenge the status quo. But despite this, radical new philosophies were spreading like wildfire across Europe. Now, over in England, Francis Bacon was deeply inspired by this tide of of innovation uh and and scientific innovation. Like Galileo's discoveries that proved the significance of observation and experimentation and Bacon became the vanguard of this intellectual shift. He championed a philosophy that sought out the universal in every subject of study, calling for a true and lawful marriage between the empirical and the rational, that gathers material but also elevates it. and he likened this to how a bee collects nectar but also has the ability to transform it into honey. The foundation of the empirical method is that experience is the source of knowledge. But Bacon did not stop with the collection of data. He insisted that this must be synthesized with reason [snorts] that is processing and reflecting on experience to come to a greater understanding. Now these philosophical advancements they were a direct rejection of the rigid medieval scholicism that dominated philosophy and dogmatically accepted the church teachings as the absolute source of reason and authority. But Bacon poured scorn on the scholastics. He wrote that they resembled spiders who make cobwebs out of their own substance. They based themselves on these eternal truths and divine ideas, creating complex webs out of their own thoughts, but not advancing anything. And this rebuttal of scholicism, it drove a wedge between theology and philosophy. But Bacon went even further than this. He consciously separated the study of nature and the physical universe from religion. He didn't break with religion entirely. He thought that nature was created by God who didn't interfere after creation. But he did sideline it completely from science. He declared we cannot know God's nature. This is essentially him saying well we can't understand God. We can't understand how God operates. So he shouldn't be key to our scientific theories. And this was a big part of the battle to free science from the clause of theology. By making these backhanded concessions to God, he gave natural science a territory to expand into. To Bacon, philosophy was not there to justify the old order or aid theological dogma. It was aimed at helping to develop man's understanding of nature, digging to find its lawfulness and its truth. [snorts] He was a staunch materialist. Unlike the idealists of the past period who put ideas and thoughts as primary, Bacon understood that all that exists is material and is derived from matter. He argued that what is most you use useful in practice is most correct in theory. In other words, ideas are a reflection of the material world. And Bacon believed that knowledge is advanced through our interactions with nature which he saw as self-moving, dynamic and everchanging. And this understanding of motion uh as an inherent part of matter was a significant step towards dialectical materialism. He based himself on the logical method of induction. Instead of starting with general propositions like scholicism, it required careful observation of nature, inquiry and experiment, knowledge and theories are built up by moving from specific observations, collecting facts and data leading to universal principles. And this was a hugely progressive development that stimulated a huge shift in the sciences and became the foundation for the modern scientific method. To Bacon, knowledge is an active pursuit. By engaging with nature, we come to an understanding of its many secrets. He believed that there was no limit to the scientific process, no limit to how much we could eventually come to understand about the world. And this optimism of Bacons, it reflected the most advanced, most forward-looking outlook of the time and laid the basis for significant further developments in philosophy. And while Bacon's achievements they are enduring, there were limits to the conclusions that he could draw based on the very low level of science at the time. For example, he conceived of matter in a very broad sense. He could not go beyond the level of the ancient Greek atomists. And this meant while Bacon he he struck a very significant blow against idealism he was unable to develop a fullyfledged materialism with an understanding of the universal laws that govern the development of matter. And then in his successes Hobbes and Loach materialist philosophy would would become more mechanical and more narrow. I'll start with Hobbes. He wrote the majority of his work some 25 years after the death of Bacon. And he did so in the midst of the stormy period of the English civil war. While politically he was a monarchist, his philosophy was far too radical for his contemporaries. He actually got even closer to atheism than Bacon did. He formulated that God was not an active element, but a social cement, a passive element that binds nature together. He rejected the te theological argument of nature acting with final causes. And following in Bacon's footsteps, he argued that nature is the source of knowledge. In the first pages of his magnum opus, Leviathan, he stated, "There is no conception in man's mind that does not originate in the senses." However, this idea that all thought must enter the mind through sense experience is one-sided. This is just the starting point of thought. We do not simply perceive isolated objects. The mind actively organizes and compares sensory data, forming concepts that go beyond the immediate perception. Through a dynamic and active process, we transform impressions into something more, building and uncovering underlying processes that are not directly given to the senses. More so, I'd say Hobbes had a more rigid view of matter than Bacon. He believed that all natural phenomena could be explained mechanically. To him, the universe and all of its phenomena, including human beings, could be explained in this way. He wrote, "For seeing is but a motion of limbs. Why may we not say, automina, engines that move themselves by springs, as we as wheels, as doth a watch, have an artificial life? [snorts] For what is the heart but a spring, and the nerves, but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels?" I think this is a very beautiful passage, actually. But it does show that Hobbes believed that all of nature and society could be explained through these mechanistic uh principles and all types of movement from natural processes to political actions. They were all put into these mechanical categories. And this conception was was a step back from Bacon. Hobbes did not see matter as active in itself but as inert. And while change, action, and movement, all of these things did occur, matter itself to him had no internal motion. Motion was something that acted on fixed bodies through mechanical external collisions and impulses. And on this basis, the materialist understanding of the world became narrower. And the main reason for this shift, this mechanical shift in materialism was due to the developments of mechanical science. At the time, it was significantly ahead of any other branch of science. And multiple reasons why this was the case. starting point of mechanics of course is the observable world and it initially centered around these huge observable phenomena like physical masses in space and the shift towards investigation and experimentation in search of scientific explanation. Well, the clear place to start is with how objects in the physical world move, how they interact, how they respond to each other and deepening man's knowledge of nature through this practical experience. But the other side of it is that mechanics was developed by and enabled huge advancements in capitalist production. And take Newton whose achievements in the field of mechanics were unparalleled. Amongst his achievements was the development of the three laws of motion which he did by systematizing and giving form to previous discoveries while combining those with his own. And these became the foundational principles of classical mechanics. These universal laws were absolutely essential in beginning to scientifically understand motion in providing a framework for analyzing how objects move and respond to forces. And Newton showed that physical phenomena could be described using mathematical formulas. This meant machines no longer had to be designed by trial and error. And the enormous impact of classical mechanics on the development of the productive forces went far beyond Newton's lifetime. For example, his laws of motions would ultimately become the key to the production of improved steam power engines which were necessary for use in factories and transport. And these laws enabled the development of of mechanized production, industrialized techniques, helping engineers to optimize designs for machines before construction, including how different parts would function together, you know, their motion, the stresses, the loads that they could bear, how efficient they would be. And Newton's ideas really could explain so many different things and they were so useful that they became an intellectual monolith you know not just in the sciences but this bled into the realm of philosophy but of course classical mechanics had its limits know for the for Newton the universe was a vast mechanical system that only changed in accordance with mathematical laws that were established by God. These laws were eternal and unchanging across the universe. They did not evolve with time. Eventually, much later, these limits were hit upon by two great breakthroughs in physics, Einstein's theory of relativity, and the discovery of the quantum world. But these limits could be seen in philosophy far before they reached their limit in natural science as the monolith of one-sided mechanical movement became the primary influencer for the narrowing of philosophy in Britain. And while you can see this narrowing outlook in Hobbes, you can see it even more clearly with Loach who was a contemporary and a good friend of Newton. And he considered his work to be the philosophical counterpart to these developments in the natural science. Now Lock is often referred to as the father of liberalism. And he was writing when capitalism really was in its absolute heyday. And he devised a system that pulled together the old and the new ideas. And in a true liberal fashion, he went this middle way between the the radical conclusions of Hobbes that went too far for the bourgeois who wanted to be rid of the radicalism of the previous period and then the religious conservatives on the other hand. And he argued that the world, nature and its laws were like a machine invented by God who acted as the first cause putting the universe in motion but took a backseat in the running of things. You can really see the influence of uh mechanical science here, you know, which Loach fused into his philosophy. This is also very clear with Loach's theory of primary and secondary qualities uh which united Newtonian mechanics with empiricism. He argued that objects possess two different types of qualities and he drew a strict line between these two categories. According to Loach, things have primary qualities. These are things like shape, uh, solidity, numerical value, and other quantitatively measurable qualities. And then he said there are also secondary qualities, things like color, smell, taste, sound, texture. And he claimed that these qualities were the effects of the powers of primary qualities arising through interactions between the object and the perceiver. Sorry, that's a bit of a mouthful. Those are locks words and not mine. [snorts] But even from an empirical standpoint, this this doesn't really make any sense as a division. His so-called primary and secondary qualities, they stand on the same level in regards to our sense experience. Experiencing the solidity of an object depends just as much on our sense impression of touch uh as much as color depends on sight. But Loach gave a special status to the features that classical mechanics elevated for use in equations. But this was an entirely artificial division. All of our sense experience is our subjective impressions of objective qualities. For example, color, a so-called secondary quality, arises out of the interaction between light and the electrons within an atomic structure of an object. They absorb photons of certain frequencies. They emit photons of certain frequencies that are received by the eyes and turned into nerve signals to be interpreted by the brain. And this isn't something that was understood in lock's time. But with today's scientific advancements, we can clearly see how the properties of things are an expression of relationships between things that exist in and of themselves. [snorts] Sensations are nearly uh they're neither purely subjective creations of the mind nor identical with the external object. They are result of the interaction between the external world and the human sensory system itself a product of nature. Lo was certainly not a skeptic that denied we can know anything but he put definite limits on human knowledge. Like Newton, Loach believed that the intrinsic nature of reality is cut off from sense experience, therefore shut off from human knowledge. In his an essay concerning human understanding, he argued all human knowledge is inherently limited and that so many questions lie beyond what we can in no way attain whilst we're confined to this earth. But this is the limit of empiricist philosophy. If something is not revealed through sensory expressions, then it could not be understood. This is the logical conclusion of taking the facts before you and nothing else. More so, empiricism takes a very static impression of things separate from their development. What was unknown at the time would always be unknown and it was elevated to something that would always be unknown. The classical empiricists, they accepted the limitations of their own time as something that would be fixed forever. And this was a prominent idea and it reflected the limitations in natural science at the time which was which was so fragmented. It seemed like there would always be a barrier to a greater understanding that there would always be things beyond the bounds of what is known. And of course this is to an extent true, right? There will always be limits to what we personally can know as finite individuals or what can be known as a society in a given historical period. But there is no definite limit on human knowledge. Our capacity for knowledge evolves with economic developments in human society which in turn help us grasp the objective world and its laws. But Lock's understanding was so wound up with the limitations of the time which unlike Bacon he could not see beyond. But if the atomized individual and their experience is your starting point, then of course there's always going to be limits to human knowledge. But this was the starting point of the bourgeoa philosophers and scientists who uncritically assumed that this was the starting point. And from this assumption, you cannot get to the independence of the material world causing said experience. And this one-sided atomism in nature, it mirrors the bourgeoa ideals of the liberties and freedoms of the individual, the right to private property with the elevation of the individual above all else in bourgeoa society reflected in the individual experience as the primary reality of empiricism. Now, empiricism bases itself on the belief that knowledge comes from our sense experience. And of course, this is true. But human understanding is not simply registering isolated facts from the isolated individual but the relations between those facts and significantly from the vast amount of information that is transmitted from generation to generation in the form of culture. But by denying this empiricism falls back into metaphysics. Now in anti-during Engles described this as a one-sided limited abstract mode of thought that sees things in their isolation, not in their connection, in their repose and not in their movement, in their death and not in their life. To the empiricist, knowledge becomes a string of data of impressions with no universal theory. But empiricism resists such universals. Loach wrote, "General and universal belong not to the real existence of things but are inventions and creatures of the understanding. Things are particular in their existence. To say everything is particular is to say that everything is different. Everything is diverse. Therefore, things resist definition. They resist categorization. But human thinking is based on universals. Think of anything. say a rectangle. That's what I decided to use as an example. And what exists in your mind is not an accumulation of every rectangle that you've ever seen. The universal rectangle does not it itself exists in nature. You can't see this this perfect rectangle in nature. Rather, it's a category that describes a real feature shared by many different objects. A book, a window, a cereal box, a passport, different objects that are made from different materials for different purposes. And through these particular objects we abstract a universal concept. Every generalization is a simplification. It seeks to understand a thing stripped of its secondary or accidental features in order to grasp what is essential. And without this process, rational thought would not be possible. The basis of human knowledge is this movement from the particular to the universal and back to the particular again on a higher level of understanding. And this aversion to universals that knowledge is an accumulation of facts that shows a one-sidedness to lock. But facts do not pick themselves. They do not arrive as readymade self-interpreting pieces of information. Real understanding does not simply describe how outwardly things appear, but it seeks to uncover the essential relations that lie beneath those appearances. And as Hegel argued, universals that correctly reflect reality reveal a higher truth by going beyond the fleeting particular. They enable us to grasp not merely how things appear, but what they essentially are. If things were as they simply appear, then the world would be flat. That is what the immediate sense experience tells us. But scientific investigation has of course proved that this is not the case. And the philosophical inability to go beyond appearances, it also has its reflection in the classical bourgeois political economy. Think of Smith and Ricardo. They analyze money, commodities, prices, but their method did not allow them to uncover uh the secret of surplus value, the source of profit within the capitalist economy. On the surface and on the surface alone, it appears that the worker receives payment from the capitalist in full from their labor. But if this was the case, what would be the incentive for capitalist production? Where would profit come from? And they could not answer this question because it remained at the level of appearances. The payment of wages conceals the real social relation between the worker and the capitalist. On the surface, there appears to be an equal exchange for a wage for labor. But Markx uncovered those real relations. The worker possesses nothing but their labor power and is separated from the means of production and the wealth of society. They must sell their labor power in order to live. The real relationship, therefore, is one of exploitation. It is only through abstraction, through the formation of universal concepts and theories that we can move beyond the surface of things and uncover their inner connections and laws. Now, empiricism divides man from the world by making a rigid separation between mind and matter. It does not concretely answer whether reality actually exists outside of our perception. And this leads to an inherent ambiguity and invites consistency into the philosophy. As we've clarified, the starting point of empiricism is that knowledge is based on experience. But there are questions that then flow from this premise. First, what generates this experience? And second, what does experience inform us about? The answers to those questions could be developed in two ways. And thus, philosophy developed in two ways out of empiricism. One direction of travel was towards a more thorough materialism which began to develop in France through Lo's writings being translated into French. And this new materialism, it went much further. It was openly atheistic. It concluded that matter exists independently of consciousness. And it had very revolutionary implications. And this was part of the development towards dialectical materialism which we will return to. But for now, I'll say dialectical materialism rep represents a higher stage of materialism, one that took that decisive stand on the unity between objective being and subjective thought. It confirmed that there is a physical world that exists outside of human perception and sensation and that it is our interactions and connection to our social and natural environments that form ideas. And then on the other hand, Lock's British successors, they abandoned the idea that there was any lawfulness to nature or society, which amounts really to saying that nature and society cannot be understood. George Berkeley developed what he called the philosophy of immaterialism, which eventually became known as subjective idealism. And this is a philosophy that denies the existence of an objective material world. Instead, subjective idealists maintain that the reality is made up of our individual sensations and ideas. We do not experience things as they exist in themselves, but our own perceptions of things. Well, Berkeley was a bishop and his starting point was the defense of religion against what he rightly saw actually as the atheist conclusions of materialism. And to do this he seized upon the existing weakness of empiricism and he pushed it to its logical conclusions untethering it from materialism. Loach wrote that the mind has no other immediate object but its own ideas. And by this he meant that humans are barred from experiencing things as they actually are. Everything is mediated through mental representations in our mind. Ideas are the immediate objects of knowledge and therefore the only things that we can be certain of. But Berkeley took this separation between the material and the ideas and then he went much further with it. He denied that our sense impressions reflect an independently existing material world. His central premise was to be is to be perceived. In other words, we never perceive matter. We just perceive ideas. Matter is a fiction of the mind. All that exists are minds and ideas perceived by the minds. He argued that there's no material substance underlying these ideas. Ideas are produced and coordinated by God, the infinite spirit. And then empiricism came to a complete dead end with Hume, who argued that reality is nothing more than a string of impressions. He denied causation entirely, claiming that it was logically impossible to say that one thing could lead to another because this would go beyond the immediate sense impression that was registered by your senses in that moment. Causality then is just a habit of the mind. It's something that we project onto the world. His conclusion was that we cannot know anything. And with that, empiricism was transformed into a philosophy of doubt that denied that anything could be learned through our experience. And what is the point of this philosophy? Treating ideas as if they have an independent existence from the external world means to completely divorce philosophy from reality. And what can be learned from this? As Markx wrote in his thesis on foyerback, the dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. In other words, it's abstract speculation that separates thought from practical activity, making it completely meaningless philosophical debate. Philosophy construed in this way does not help us understand the world on a deeper level. It is only through practice through the material world that we can actually prove anything. And the next great developments in philosophy that would eventually be uh would come back to to help enable materialism to overcome the barriers that it faced actually came from Hegel, a brilliant idealist who was very critical of the materialism of the time. And the main flaw that Hegel saw with the materialism of his day was that it did not trace the development of whatever was being studied, but it presupposed it as being ready. These philosophers were unable to understand the world in its change and its transformation. This was especially the case, he said, with the English materialists who became obsessed with ideas of things rather than things in their development. They became even more rigid. They viewed things as static and in their isolation from one another. In other words, they slid back into metaphysics. Hegel attacked the one-sidedness of empiricism, the idea that all knowledge is found in sense perception and he argued the perception is transitory. When we look at a plant, we look at a particular plant and its appearance in that moment. But its shape, size, color, texture, all of these things change depending on the time of day, depending on the season, the angle that you view it from, the distance that you're viewing it from. This individual moment of sense perception in itself does not lead us to a deeper understanding of that plant. This is where knowledge begins not where it ends. Otherwise, all we would have is a collection of disconnected impressions. But induction goes hand inhand with deduction. And as Bacon said, knowledge is an active pursuit. No facts are not given to us as obvious self-interpreting pieces of information. They're discovered, selected, organized, interrogated, and contextualized. These facts can then be used as the basis for further investigation as they provide a framework through which we can determine what is most relevant and necessary. This is the process of going from the particular to the to the universal back to the particular again on a higher level. Take the plant. Like any matter, it cannot be separated from its motion. It grows. It decays, it dies. And at each stage of its life, from seed to adult plant, it is transformed. We also have to look at the plant in its relations with the natural world around it. Its existence depends on sunlight, on on water, on soil, uh temperature, insects, microorganisms, and countless other processes. No, the point I'm making is that no organism exists independently, but within a wider network of interconnected processes. It means we have to look at other plants to build up a universal picture of their characteristics so that we can determine different species and their different needs. And this investigation in turn helps us understand the specific even more. I think anyone who's ever tried to keep a house plant alive will know that they need very different conditions, temperature, sunlight, amounts of water in order to survive. You cannot treat every house plant exactly the same. And it's only building uh an understanding of the universal, what is common in plant life, that we can deepen our scientific understanding of processes like growth, reproduction, adaption, and evolution. And ultimately, this is the task of science to delve deeper beneath the surface to a more complete truth to uncover the lawfulness of nature. Now, Hegel was a monist. He understood that everything is part of the same world subject to the same laws laws that could be understood. He argued that there was no separation between ideas and the material world. And what is true is what accurately reflects the objective world, its laws and its properties. He contended that human consciousness is not a barrier to the world but a bridge that helps us access and understand it. Hegel took the best of past philosophies and he built them up into his own philosophical system that embraces the universe as a whole in all of its motion, all of its change, all of its transformation, all of its contradiction really. And he saw reality as a unified evolving whole. And this understanding was revolutionary and it completely broke philosophy out of its dead end. But the one limitation to Hegel was that he could not conceive being an objective world without thinking the subjective. To Hegel, the material world was a reflection of our ideas. History, which he did view in its development, was seen as evolving through the clash of opposing ideas that led to human thought for evolving. So to take a phrase that you all will have heard before, Hegel had the dialectic turned on its head and it needed putting on a materialist basis and this task of course fell to Markx and Engles who worked out the principles of dialectical materialism and as young men Markx and Engles were profoundly influenced by Hegel and the Hegelian left a group of young thinkers that emerged after Hegel's death who tried to draw more radical conclusions from Hegel's philosophy. And this school was very largely tied up in a critical analysis of religion speculative philosophy and they were unable to take human understanding to a higher level. And Markx and Engles they took up the battle against the limitations of this school of thought. They did not discard Hegel. They understood that Hegelian philosophy contains something very significant in the dialectic. But they saw that in Hegel the relationship between the subject and the object, between ideas and matter were inverted, and they placed it on firm ground, showing that ideas are a reflection of the material world. As Engles explained, Marx was the only one who could extract from Hegelian logic the kernel containing Hegel's real discoveries and established the dialectical method free from its idealist wrappings. Materialist philosophy needed dialectics. Past materialism formally separated man from nature and could not make that leap between the particular experiences of things to what is universal in them. But Marks and Engles they synthesized materialism with dialectical logic taking what was true in the mechanical materialism but elevating it to a higher level. Marxism views nature as an independent unified material process that is governed by laws that develop infinitely. Every natural formation is an evolutionary product of its given material conditions. And fundamentally Marxism brought this evolutionary view of nature into human history. It is not just an isolated series of events. It develops in a progressive direction as part of a process through the necessarily collective labor of human beings whose conditions determine their ideas. And history does not just progress very slowly, very gradually, but through revolutionary leaps in the mode of production driven by class struggle. And through this they were able to show that class antagonisms will drive the working class to attain a higher form of human society. And with this they provided a scientific basis for the revolutionary change in society. Now Marxism elevated materialist philosophy to new heights opening up a new epoch in human thought and providing the starting point for a new philosophical revolution. because they concretely showed that philosophical questions are resolved in the material world. So I'll leave the final words to Markx and Engles. Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it. [applause] >> [cheering]