A history of materialism, Part 1: Blind reason

The first of a four-part series on Marx's science and epistemology.

Note: I received an unusual amount of feedback after my recent post On materialism from readers asking if I could expand on it and provide some historical perspective. In the coming weeks, I will oblige with a 4-part series on covering the history of various epistemelogical-scientific perspectives and how they culminated, at last, in Marx’s materialism. This is going to be (for this blog) an unusually dense and academic series, but I will try to break it up with more of the usual posting.

I have done my best to make sources clear in-text, but at the conclusion of this series I will be posting a footnoted edition on Google Docs. They just don’t transfer well over to Substack.

I. INTRODUCTION.

“Material analysis” and “historical materialism” are phrases that Marxist writing often invokes but rarely explains – a neglect that has led to much intellectual mischief over the years. Colloquially, materialism usually means a preference for wealth and luxuries over the spiritual and intellectual; this is the materialism of Madonna’s “Material Girl” who sings that “the boy with cold hard cash is always Mr. Right.” Less often, we use materialism to refer to a belief about what does or does not exist; so we say that atheists are materialists insofar as they believe that there is no spiritual realm outside of the physical universe we inhabit.

But what does any of this have to do with Marxism? It is true that Marxist thought is always concerned with physical rather than spiritual affairs, and it is also true that many Marxists – including Marx himself – have been atheists. None of this, however, implies much about what historical materialism is or how material analysis works, or about how either leads us to the conclusions of Marxist philosophy. The term is completely opaque. I am reminded, here, of an old Soviet joke:

“What is philosophy? It is trying to find a black cat in a dark room. What is materialism? It is thus, but there is no cat. What is Marxist materialism? There is no cat, but someone says that he found it.”

As it turns out, even the communist rank-and-file occasionally found Marxist terminology to be obscure. And so it is with contemporary Marxists, who – along with their critics – often use the term “materialism” in all kinds of unclear and conflicting ways.

This is a misfortune. The materialist perspective is essential for understanding Marx, but it is not just relevant to Marx. It is, I would argue, a far less controversial idea than one might think; indeed, in the sciences at least, it has become the dominant viewpoint since the Enlightenment. To appreciate how materialism emerged from that era, I propose that we review three modes of thought: blind reason, strict empiricism, and scientific materialism.

II. BLIND REASON

A magical chariot pulled by two flying steeds carries the spirit of Parmenides to the threshold of mighty gates in the sky. They open, and a goddess awaits within. “There is need for you to learn all things,” she declares. “So come now, and I will tell you…about those routes of investigation that are the only ones.”

So begins the fragments of Parmenides, written around 475 BC. Written as a divine revelation, the fragments contrast two ways to gain knowledge about the world. “I bid you to ponder, for that is the first route of investigation,” the goddess says. Then, she adds, there is a second route: the route of the senses. “But do not let habit compel you along this route,” she warns, for one cannot rely on “an aimless eyes and an echoing ear and tongue.”

This is the sensibility of blind reason. It is a way of understanding the world that relies not on the senses, but on speculation and conjecture. And this mode of thought dominated the world before science.

One might argue that the sensibility of blind reason originated not with Parmenides, but with the mystical religions of the Indus river. Trade routes between India and Italy likely brought with them currents of Hindu and later Buddhist philosophy – currents that likely influenced Parmenides himself. Thus as early as the eighth century BCE, the Hindu Kena Upanishad described Brahman as “That which is not seen by the eye…That which is not heard by the ear”; centuries later, the Buddhist Nyānānusāra Śāstra would explain of the material world that

That object which is taken as really existent is in fact ultimately non-existent…Being able to beguile and deceive one, it is known as a “deceiver of the eye.”

The Hindu tradition of blind reason appears to stretch back into prehistory; but in both, we see that reality was ultimately apprehended through various acts of contemplation and mystical insight.

Moving to the edge of history, let us now consider Democritus – whose own words are lost to time, but whose ideas are extensively reported by secondary sources. They are more complicated than any we have examined so far, as Karl Marx notes:

The opinion of Democritus concerning the truth and certainty of human knowledge seems hard to ascertain. Contradictory passages are to be found, or rather it is not the passages, but Democritus' views that contradict each other.

Marx’s assessment is understandable. On one hand, Democritus is often thought of as the first empiricist. In Against the Logicians, Sextus Empiricus notes that Democritus “promised to ascribe confirmatory evidence to the senses”; elsewhere, Democritus, speaking on behalf of the senses, gloats:

Poor mind, from the senses you take your arguments, and then want to defeat them? Your victory is your defeat.

In other words, all intellectual arguments against the senses inevitably invoke them, and thus ironically affirm that they are the basis of knowledge. Aristoxenus notes that “Plato wished to burn all the writings of Democritus that he could collect,” and such arguments were likely the cause.

But such arguments are also directly undercut by a strong current of skepticism running through his surviving work. As Empiricus writes elsewhere,

Democritus in some places abolishes the things that appear to the senses and asserts that none of them appears in truth but only in opinion, the true fact in things existent being the existence of atoms and void.

This is his most famous achievement, of course: the theory of the atom. But we cannot see the atom, for it is too small; we can only reason that it exists through logical conjecture. Thus Democritus, Empiricius continues, lays out a textbook declaration of blind reason:

He says that there are two kinds of knowledge, one by means of the senses, the other by means of the intelligence; and of these he calls that by means of the intelligence “genuine”...but that by means of the senses he terms “bastard,” denying it inerrancy in the distinguishing of what is true.

This epistemology is impossible to reconcile with empiricism. The most we can do, I suspect, is acknowledge as Marx did that some of the ideas associated with him are contradictory – but to conclude, also as Marx did, that in his most important work Democritus rejected the senses and relied on reason to deduce the existence of the atom.

Plato is said to have wanted to burn Democritus’s books, and perhaps this intellectual confusion explains why – for there is no ambiguity in his writing. If Parmenides was the protypical advocate of blind reason, Plato was its most influential. Time and again, Plato affirms the two principles expressed by Parmenides’ goddess. Speaking through the voice of Socrates in Theatetus, Plato declares that “knowledge is not in the sensations, but in the process of reasoning”. The senses, he writes in Phaedo, are distracting: “the body is constantly breaking in upon our studies and disturbs us with noise and confusion, so that it prevents our beholding the truth”. Thus, he concludes in the Republic, only reason can save us from the illusions of perception: for “when the eye of the soul is really buried in a barbaric bog, dialectic gently draws it forth and leads it up”. For Plato, reason provides true knowledge through the mystical process of anamnesis: for “since the soul is immortal and has been born many times…she has acquired knowledge of all and everything; so that it is no wonder that she should be able to recollect all that she knew”.

From Plato, one can trace a philosophical genealogy through Plutarch, who declares that “Our senses, through ignorance of reality, falsely tell us that what appears to be is.” Elsewhere he writes, “Two elements in man's nature are supreme over all — mind and reason.” Similarly, Plotinus argues: “There is a lack of confidence about even those objects of sense-perception which seem to inspire the strongest confidence in their self-evidence…and they need intellect or discursive reason to make judgments about them.” Augustine, in Confessions, concedes that our perception of the physical world arrives “through the senses of my body”; but in Against the Academicians he adds that “whatever the spirit receives by way of bodily sense can generate opinion indeed, but not knowledge…[knowledge] is found only in the intelligence and, far removed from the senses, abides in the mind.”

Since Platonic and Augustinian thought would dominate western philosophy for the next millennium, it is worth reflecting on how blind reason persisted as a dominant sensibility. There are historical reasons of course, but I would argue that one of the most powerful explanations is psychological.

Like all creatures that surveill the world around them for predators, humans are imbued with a foundational paranoia. In particular, we doubt our senses: we look over our shoulder a second time, we listen a little more carefully. This is a crucial instinct for animals trying to survive in the wild because they often should doubt their senses; predators are quiet, they are camouflaged, they try to sneak up on you from behind. But as intelligent creatures, this compulsive doubt of our senses creates an impossible intellectual problem. If we cannot rely on our senses, where can we find reliable knowledge? This is a puzzle that you can ruminate on endlessly if you let yourself, and the only escape is to decide that the evidence of our senses is good enough.

The psychology of blind reason, then, vacillates between two states. Relying on the senses, it is relentlessly plagued with doubts about whether they are trustworthy; and the more important certainty is, the more troubling these doubts become. Alternatively, we may try to think our way out of this epistemelogical problem, but that is simply impossible; and so we are trapped in irrational rumination. That irrationality is a crucial feature of blind reason, for it explains why blind reason so often segues into error and mysticism. If you are Parmenides, for example, your search for “the Way of Truth” – that is, for precisely that certain knowledge which the senses cannot provide – will lead you to all kinds of wild conclusions like believing that all distinctions are illusory and all is one.

Platonic and Augustinian thought endured precisely because they facilitated this instinctive pattern of human psychology. Both posited that we could not ultimately rely on our senses to understand the material world, a belief that our instinctive paranoia affirms and draws us back to over and over again. And both insist that it is through our inner life – that is, through rumination – that we must search for knowledge instead. As long as that basic philosophical structure was in place there was considerable room for variation in detail; thus we find philosophers from Boethius to Alcuim to Anselm putting forward very different ideas while maintaining the basic sensibility of blind reason. Thus we have Duns Scotus, who in the early 14th century observes that

Sight always says the sun is of less size than it is…in such things there is certitude about what is true…so the intellect judges which sense errs…through something more certain than any act of sense.

This is precisely the sort of argument Plato advanced 1700 years earlier as proof that we gain certain knowledge by remembering past lives. By the 15th century, a full-scale revival of Plato had begun, led by Marsilio Ficino. Again, in Platonic Theology, we find the philosophy of blind reason: the mind, he writes, “is deceived by the senses…contrariwise…when the senses have been allayed…then the intellect discerns truly and is at its brightest.”

Though I have necessarily provided here only the barest genealogy of blind reason, its historical persistence and epistemelogical disposition should be clear. Man has long maintained a profound skepticism of his own senses, one that seems to have deep roots in animal psychology. Deprived of certain knowledge from the outside world, his tendency has been to turn within and seek it there. But untethered from material reality, we find time and time again that the search for knowledge through reason inevitably becomes lost in abstraction, mysticism, and error.

---

Thanks for reading! My blog is supported entirely by readers like you. To receive new posts and support my work, why not subscribe?

Refer enough friends to this site and you can read paywalled content for free!

And if you liked this post, why not share it?