I’m reading through The Curriculum of Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism at the moment so I’ve been trying to get my head around this lately. It would be super helpful if someone could, say, talk about some historical political development or some contemporary issue and tell me examples of what an idealist, nondialectical materialist, and dialectical materialist analysis of that issue might look like? Thank you 🙏
Idealism vs Materialism
Idealism is the principle that ideas are real / primary, and that material objects are imperfect instances (examples) of them. So, to an idealist, the ‘idea’ of a dog is what really exists, and all the dogs in the world are just examples of it. This idea came from Plato or Aristotle if I remember correctly, and nowadays nobody thinks this way (although if you are a programmer you might see some similarities to classes and objects).
Materialism is the other extreme - materialists see the physical world as real / primary. So it is the physical dogs that really exist, and our idea of ‘dog’ is a generalisation or abstraction. Nowadays most people (or at least most philosophers and scientists - the people who write about this sort of stuff) think this way.
There’s also (Cartesian) dualism, which says there is a world of ideas and a material world. This was a step up from the old idealist worldview, but has logical problems like causal closure.
Metaphysics vs Dialectics
Metaphysics tries to understand the world by breaking it down to its pieces, studying them, and putting the information about each component back together. Of course, this means that it assumes that patterns discovered in one place are true across space and time. This is a mostly valid assumption in the physical sciences - a proton weighs the same under almost all conditions, and two plus two is generally four.
Dialectics sees the world as evolving constantly, due to the interactions between its components. This view is more common in the life and social sciences, since animals and societies very clearly change over time and show differences from place to place. A dialectical approach also highlights the importance of contradiction - what seems true now may become false later, because it was only true under specific conditions. Most animals alive today need oxygen to live. But oxygen was toxic to the very first animals, who lived in a time when the earth’s atmosphere was nitrogen and carbon dioxide. This ‘contradiction’ can be resolved by learning that at some point in earth’s history, algae produced so much oxygen that most of the old animals died out, and the survivors evolved to exploit oxygen.