![]() For instance, when I find myself wanting to tie my shoelaces, my shoelace-tying model automatically makes itself available, enabling me to tie my laces without even consciously thinking about it, and then makes way for other programs as soon as the job is over. They are quite like computer programs, except that they are self-loading. These models are our ‘ideas’, our ‘conceptions’ of the world. They claim that the human organism strives (automatically and unconsciously) to reproduce within the brain models (which it does by the million) of the phenomena it encounters in the material world. If ideas were merely a faithful reproduction in the human mind of what is happening in the material world, then everybody’s ideas would be the same, and none of them would ever be wrong.īut materialists would never claim that people’s ideas represent at any given time a fully accurate, fully detailed model of the material world that has given rise to them. We also have ideas we believe to be correct, but in fact turn out to be wrong – which obviously do not reflect the material world. ![]() For instance, we can imagine a purple sun, although we have never seen any such thing. Idealists object to materialism by pointing out that people are well able to have ideas that have no equivalent in nature. Lenin’s above-mentioned pamphlet shows that these would-be compromisers, who think they have bridged the unbridgeable gap between materialism and idealism, end up logically 100 percent in the idealist camp, since they are forced to concede that until humanity came on the scene, the world could not have existed, because humanity was not there to contribute its ideas to that part of ‘reality’ which necessitated, according to their theories, the human touch. Standing ‘between’ materialism and idealism (or rather wavering between materialism and idealism and not knowing which to accept) are various philosophers who have tried to ‘reconcile’ these two opposite conceptions by suggesting that knowledge (truth) is made up partly of ideas and partly of the material world – that it is a fusion of both. In this, materialism is opposed by idealism, which considers that, on the contrary, what we think of as the natural, material world is but a creation of our own ideas. This is what is meant when materialists say that matter is primary and ideas are secondary. ![]() If, on the other hand, humans were not around with their ideas, this would not affect the existence of the material world one jot. If there were no material world, we would have no ideas. ![]() MaterialismĪccording to materialism, which Marxism embraces, all our ideas have but one source – the material world. (1908)īefore embarking on explaining just how Chomsky’s philosophical views are wrong, and demonstrating their relationship to positivism, let us briefly recap the essence of materialist philosophy, to which positivism is opposed. Even on other political issues, such as, for example, his analysis of the Spanish civil war, which takes the same anti-working class, anticommunist, line as the MI5 informer George Orwell, his understanding is unreliable.Īnd when we look at his philosophical views, we can see why he is prone to make political mistakes, notwithstanding the finer points of his character.įor Chomsky’s philosophical views are influenced by assumptions taken from the positivist, empirio-criticist stable, thoroughly criticised and denounced by Lenin in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a book Lenin felt constrained to write because he found that comrades who could not properly distinguish between positivism and materialism, besides getting hopelessly muddled, were in danger of losing their way and ending up in the enemy camp, siding with the reactionary classes rather than the revolutionary proletariat. This, unfortunately, is not at all the case. Noam Chomsky, the American professor of linguistics, is well known in progressive circles for the courageous stand he took against US imperialism on the question of the Vietnam war, and which he continues to take on the question of peace in the middle east.īecause he sets a fine example of courage and principle on these issues, it might be thought that he was also progressive as regards his philosophic thought.
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