Mark Phillips: The American Question

What does "materialism" mean?

I have the sense that, historically, Idealism is more rigorously constituted. There are the Platonist and the Neoplatonist traditions in Western thought which have long histories of clear articulation. The "world" of "ideas" is more "real" than the physical world in which we live. "Ideas" are prototypes of real objects and thus have ontological and practical priority. This is not only a long tradition of thought, it's a tradition of practice: the Western ritual magical tradition in its various forms back to the second century is based on this thinking.

I used the word "practice" just there as a sort of provocation. Since the '60s we've tended to define our Marxist "materialism" as the priority of practice. I'm not sure what practice takes priority over, or what it is about practice which is so interesting, or just exactly what practice has to do with "materialism".

Prior to the ascendency of practice there's really not that much of a philosophical tradition of materialism. There are certain of the Greeks; there's Helvetius' yucky mechanical materialism; there's the tradition of scientific practice and theory, which has not tended to think of itself as part of some spectrum of materialism versus idealism; there's Engels; and there's Lenin's book on Bogdanov. What's missing from the list?

I think we inherit the idea that the history of philosophy can be divided into "idealism" versus "materialism" from Lenin, for whom the generation of dividing lines was a specific method. Is it reasonable to do this?

What does "materialism" mean post-Einstein?

I know of just one attempt on the Marxist left to try to sort some of this out: Sebastiano Timpanero's book On Materialism. Are there others?