Second Observation
Idealist philosophers start from the mind, and the development of ideas within it, via thought, and proceed to a view of the world constructed from these ideas. Materialist philosophers start from the existence of the material world, outside the human mind, a world that existed before mind, and, given the possibility that our own existence is transitory, continues to exist after it. The materialist says that the tree still falls in the forest, even if there is no one there to see it. Our understanding of quantum physics, and the uncertainty principle, gives nuance to this, at the quantum level, and has implications for our understanding of time, and also the possibility of infinite realities, in a multiverse, but, in any given reality, it does not change the materialist conception.
Proudhon adopts the Idealist philosophy.
“Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production, M. Proudhon, holding this upside down like a true philosopher, sees in actual relations nothing but the incarnation of the principles, of these categories, which were slumbering – so M. Proudhon the philosopher tells us – in the bosom of the “impersonal reason of humanity.”” (p 101-2)
Why this idealist view is adopted by bourgeois thinkers, not only in relation to Economics, is not hard to fathom. They see the bourgeois world around them as a world that has been constructed, by Man. Manufacture is the most obvious manifestation of this conscious construction of the material world. If we take something like a computer, no such thing existed, or would exist, in the material world, unless someone had gone through a thought process, and developed all of the ideas about what it was they wanted to construct, why they wanted to construct it, and how they would construct it, and its components.
Of course, its not possible to build an electronic computer without electricity or electrical components, and so the idea of an electronic computer requires a whole history of previous, similar thought processes that led to the creation, in the material world, of all these other components. Babbage, of course, developed a purely mechanical computer, and the Jacquard loom used punch cards that perform the same function as punch cards in the early electronic computers. There were earlier water-powered computers, and the Chinese abacus is a form of manually operated computer. It would be impossible to come up with the idea of an electronic computer, without all of these previous things actually existing in the material world.
If we take an aeroplane, it can't be developed until there is the means to power it, which left Leonardo with all the drawings for one, but no means of creating it. For the bourgeois Idealist, therefore, the material world is manufactured by Man, who may or may not be the instrument of God, as the first manufacturer, and who proceeds from The Idea, to its realisation. But, the material world existed before Man and Mind, which is why the Idealist can only explain it by reference to God or The Idea, as some external force, itself operating independently of Man and Mind. The existence of fundamental laws, or the concept of a mathematical universe, does not change this, as indeed quantum theory, the uncertainty principle and chaos theory indicate.
Think of a snooker game. All of the same rules apply, but no two games are the same. There are more possibilities in a game of chess than atoms in the universe. Run a computer simulation of the evolution of the Universe, several times, and each time will be different. And, the computer analogy is useful. Suppose we are all living in The Matrix. Our own evolution is part of this simulation, whose rules are pre-set. It would not change our perception of this reality from what it is, and has been, from the point we entered it. This sim world would have been there, before us, and we would have to take it as we find it, explore it, analyse it, categorise it, and so on, before we could understand it, and its laws of motion, before we could consciously change it.
Indeed, this is the way that machine learning, as part of Artificial Intelligence, operates. Whether its a robot dog learning to walk, and resist being pushed over, or a simulation of that, the process is the same.
So, whether it is a sim world or a material world, Man came into it with all of its rocks, rivers, trees and animals and so on. Man develops, via language, labels, “words”, for these pre-existing phenomena, which is the basis of categorisation. Man did not develop the idea "rock", and a rock appears or is created. Man sees rocks around him, and gives them a name “rock”, or its various equivalents in other languages. Man sees the potential to use the rock, in the same way that other animals had done, For example, birds use rocks to drop on shelled animals, or drop snails on to rocks to break the shell. Man uses sticks in the way other animals had done, and so these already existing things that Man finds, provided free by Nature, and to which he gives names, then obtain another name, resulting not from an idea in Men's heads, but from his actual activity in the material world, i.e. they obtain the name tools or weapons.
And, as Marx and Engels describe, in Anti-Duhring, this activity, in the real world, to take these pre-existing sticks and stones, to use as tools and weapons, does not spring from the world of ideas either. It derives from the need of Man to eat, and so to utilise what he finds around him, to satisfy that basic material need, by the most efficient available means, which is also the basis of The Law of Value, as a Natural Law, and drives his subsequent social development.
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