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Defining DiaMat




Somebody at Yahoo!Answers asks what is "dialectical materialism."

When answering such a question I try to abstract from the whole question of my personal reaction to the thing to be defined and just ... well ... answer the question.  Regular readers of this blog will know perfectly well that my reaction to DiaMat is negative. But that wasn't asked!  So I went with this:

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 Dialectical materialism is the metaphysical side of Marxism.

On the one hand there is Hegel, the Towering Figure of mid 19th century German thought. Hegel developed a system sometimes known as "dialectical idealism" which says that the world moves in zig-zags, and that the ultimate goal of the movement is an Absolute Idea that knows itself and is all in all. God, then, is not the Creator of the world but its summation and Judge, and the world moves in its zig zag (back-and-forth among contraries, but nonetheless forward) because this is the way it can create its own judge.

On the other hand there is Feuerbach, a prominent materialist best known for his 1841 book THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. In Feuerbach's view Christianity and other theisms simply involve projection. Humans group our own best qualities together, imagine them in infinite degree, and project them into the heavens. In reality we are material creatures and ought to learn to do without our sacred stories.

"Dialectical materialism" is Marx's attempt to incorporate the apparent contraries of Hegel and Feuerbach. To apply the zig-zag system where Hegel left off, incorporating Feuerbach too.

Marx regards history as moving forward through conflicts between contraries and with a lot of back-and-forth. He also takes the epistemological point of view that one has to follow a similarly dialectical process in order to learn about the world. BUT it is all material, and Marx shaves off of his Hegelianism the stuff about an Absolute Idea.

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