The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.
This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.
I will not be able to go through the entire quote right now, so I will do so later. For now, I’d like to address the last part of your reply with my reply to another comment in this thread:
That seems to be a roughly correct assessment of what idealism is if we replace the word ‘reality’ with ‘material part of reality’ (because non-material part of reality is still a part of reality). However, I see a couple of issues with the assessment of Marxism as supposedly being a materialist and anti-idealist school of thought:
I’m not sure what the argument is for how the ideas encountered in math depend on material part of reality. There is no such dependency as far as I can see as a person with a background in mathematics.
I am not aware of any Marxist positions that are in conflict with idealism. If there are such positions, I’m all ears.
Note that the middle part of this reply is just hastily copied from elsewhere. I did not edit it in case there are some relevant positions covered in the quote.
Idealism is when you have ideas and the more you have the more idealist it is. And if you have really high level important ideas then it’s Platonism
PS it’s bad form to not read someone’s reference and proceed to “reply” with a canned response. If you don’t have the time to respond say so and use that comment as a reminder for when you do have time.
I will actually address your points when I get back from a doc appt
Edit: this looks like something I’ll want to make into a separate effort post. Will tag you when it’s done.
PS it’s bad form to not read someone’s reference and proceed to “reply” with a canned response
I did not have the time to consider the entirety of the reply, and I felt that there was a part that should have been clarified. Considering that I already had an answer that I could have used for that purpose at the time, and was lacking time to properly write a full response, I judged that option as appropriate.
Will be waiting for the promised post. Do consider that it might take me some time to go over it, as I will both be getting busier starting tomorrow and I am experiencing some stress discussing this, in particular because people might think as if I’m just trying to argue for arguing’s sake in this case or that I am trying to be rude.
So, I finished going over the quoted part, and Marx is talking about specifically the type(s) of idealism that I do not subscribe to. He is addressing specifically the types of idealism that posit that only material stuff and mental stuff exist, and that the latter has some sort of ‘primacy’ over the former. My view on this sort of idealism is echoed by what you quoted, and I find that type of idealism rather silly.
The quoted part does not address the type of idealism that I subscribe to, one which posits that non-material non-mental stuff, like what mathematicians study, exists as well, and that some of it has no dependency on the other stuff, i.e. it has ‘primacy’ over, in particular, material stuff in this sense.
Karl Marx - The German Ideologyhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
My understanding of this passage is that in idealist thinking, ideas shape reality but in materialist thinking, material reality shapes ideas.
I will not be able to go through the entire quote right now, so I will do so later. For now, I’d like to address the last part of your reply with my reply to another comment in this thread:
That seems to be a roughly correct assessment of what idealism is if we replace the word ‘reality’ with ‘material part of reality’ (because non-material part of reality is still a part of reality). However, I see a couple of issues with the assessment of Marxism as supposedly being a materialist and anti-idealist school of thought:
Note that the middle part of this reply is just hastily copied from elsewhere. I did not edit it in case there are some relevant positions covered in the quote.
Idealism is when you have ideas and the more you have the more idealist it is. And if you have really high level important ideas then it’s Platonism
PS it’s bad form to not read someone’s reference and proceed to “reply” with a canned response. If you don’t have the time to respond say so and use that comment as a reminder for when you do have time.
I will actually address your points when I get back from a doc appt
Edit: this looks like something I’ll want to make into a separate effort post. Will tag you when it’s done.
Please tag me too!
I did not have the time to consider the entirety of the reply, and I felt that there was a part that should have been clarified. Considering that I already had an answer that I could have used for that purpose at the time, and was lacking time to properly write a full response, I judged that option as appropriate.
Will be waiting for the promised post. Do consider that it might take me some time to go over it, as I will both be getting busier starting tomorrow and I am experiencing some stress discussing this, in particular because people might think as if I’m just trying to argue for arguing’s sake in this case or that I am trying to be rude.
So, I finished going over the quoted part, and Marx is talking about specifically the type(s) of idealism that I do not subscribe to. He is addressing specifically the types of idealism that posit that only material stuff and mental stuff exist, and that the latter has some sort of ‘primacy’ over the former. My view on this sort of idealism is echoed by what you quoted, and I find that type of idealism rather silly.
The quoted part does not address the type of idealism that I subscribe to, one which posits that non-material non-mental stuff, like what mathematicians study, exists as well, and that some of it has no dependency on the other stuff, i.e. it has ‘primacy’ over, in particular, material stuff in this sense.