WHAT IS DIALECTICAL IMMATERIALISM?

You’ve heard of Dialectical Materialism – Marx’s beautiful theory of history. So what is Dialectical Immaterialism? Well, it’s the antidote to DM.

If you don’t think DM needs an antidote, look around you. At first glance it seems innocuous enough, even vaguely plausible; certainly high-sounding and idealistic. We love the image of Ché on T-shirts and proudly display our Chairman Mao fridge magnets. Cute, cuddly, avuncular, like the picture of Karl himself – long hair, white beard, Father Christmas bringing you gifts of liberation, equality and myrrh.

But the historical record tells us otherwise. It’s very much an iron fist in velvet glove sort of thing. Everywhere in the world Marxism has been given free rein it has proved disastrous, without exception. The horrors of Soviet communism and Mao’s China are the chief exhibits. Even today, in the democratic West, where Marxism has morphed into more benign forms, DM continues to be the underlying driver of much leftist political and cultural thinking, in areas such as inequality, discrimination, racism, gender and sexuality, even climate, and in doing so continues to exert a real influence, for both good and ill, in the world.

So what exactly is wrong with dialectical materialism? We had such high hopes for it, but somehow it has always let us down. What exactly is wrong, is the materialism. It ensures we only ever get half the story. This is where dialectical immaterialism comes in – it tells the other half of the story.

Madonna claims she is a material girl living in a material world. She’s referring to modern consumerist materialism – all that matters is the acquisition of money and material possessions. Philosophical materialism, however, of the sort Marx was interested in, simply says that all that exists is matter, that everything in the universe, in reality, is material. Sounds plausible, even obvious, and, like Madonna, aren’t we all just good little materialists these days!

Materialism is always as opposed to something, however. When people say they are materialists, they are implicitly opposing themselves to believing in something else, other than matter, that has historically laid claim to existence. What is this something else?

Well, it’s a little something we call, variously, “soul”, or “mind”, or “spirit”, or “consciousness. Such familiar words, and the thing they’re referring to is pretty familiar as well. It is “I”, “self”, “persona”; me, Ernest, and you, Gwendolen.

Historically, of course, people not only knew what they were referring to when they used words like “soul”, they believed the thing itself really existed. It was obviously not material, so it was conceived of as a sort of distinct, immaterial substance. But there was no doubt it existed. We conceived of ourselves as embodied souls – immaterial souls in material bodies – and even though it was often speculated that souls could somehow be disembodied, no-one was ever quite sure.

This is the other half of the story. Prior to, maybe, the last hundred years or so, no-one thought twice about believing that there were two types of things in the world: matter, of course, but also soul (or mind, spirit, etc.). We were all good little two-eyed dualists, in other words, not one-track-mind materialists, as we are now.

I say no-one thought twice, but in fact there were a few professional philosophers who were “monists” one way or the other: monist materialists like Marx, of course, who believed in nothing but matter, and monist “idealists” who believed in nothing but mind or spirit. One famous idealist was Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753), whose theory became known as “Immaterialism” – no relation (to the present theory), however.

It’s interesting that one of the last great idealists was G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), then Marx launched his radical version of materialism shortly after, specifically as a repudiation of Hegel’s theories. A right pair of monomaniacs!

Materialists as we are now: yes, we still use the words – soul, mind, spirit, etc. – but in our heart of hearts we know they are really just metaphors, manners of speaking. My soul doesn’t really exist; what’s really there is just my material brain, neurons firing and brain waves waving. Consciousness – my experience of myself as a self – is really just an impression, an illusion, a figment of my material brain’s function. Science has proved this, we confidently believe, or at least it has failed to find any evidence of such a thing. Neuroscience will eventually explain everything we need to know about the human psyche; no need to posit some wacky immaterial cause like a soul.

Freud famously thought that we conjure up the traditional Father God figure in our imagination, to ease the pain of life; perhaps we imagine ourselves, as well, to ease the pain of … what? – non-existence?!

Let’s leave aside the question of dualism and the real existence of the soul for the moment. Many of you will already be frothing at the mouth over my characterisation of Marx’s materialism. Marx was certainly no trivial, abstract, metaphysical materialist. Who cares whether the universe is ultimately just matter (and how would we ever know anyway?), what really matters is the particular sort of matter you and I are. Well, we are, in a word, bodies.

This is what you might call “somatic” materialism, from the Greek σῶμα, the body[1]. We are living, breathing bodies in the world, acting, engaging, striving, creating our lives through bodies and as bodies. So far so good, almost stating the bleeding obvious. But, yes, we are also living souls, just as I have already suggested, completely embodied. But (another but) for the somatic materialist this soul (or mind, consciousness, etc.) is nothing more nor less than the form of the body – it is not a distinct “substance” in itself, separate or separable from the body in anyway.

Yes, soul is just a metaphor, a manner of speaking. But it’s not just at all. There is something utterly real and distinct about it, something utterly immaterial. “Vitalist” materialists – you can look up such interesting historical figures as Spinoza, Bergson, even Nietzsche – see soul not just as some incidental, apparent “form”, but as an “animating principle”, an immaterial something which provides (or rather is) the will, the elan, the intentionality (instinctive or conscious), the animus, of the body. The very thing that turns the body from a lump of dumb matter into a living creature.

I like the word “agency”. So did Marx. He would never have seen himself as a vitalist materialist, because for him the repudiation of any idea of a metaphysical, immaterial soul was paramount, virtually axiomatic. Yet human agency is the centrepiece of the Marxist view of the world. Yes, it is material agency, and we live, work and create our lives in the world, necessarily through the medium of our bodies, which are material. But the agency itself is surely not material?!

I’m now going to quibble over the meaning of words. Marx was a somatic materialist, but he was also a vitalist materialist, and also, like me, a “somatic dualist”. Who cares? Karl was at pains to repudiate a false form of vitalism, which saw the soul as somehow distinct from and independent of the body, perhaps even existing in a higher, ideal metaphysical plain, very much an elitist, bourgeois, capitalist conception. He was also, in doing so, repudiating a false, “Cartesian” dualism, which just artificially inserted the soul back into a mechanical material universe it had previously been forced to vacate.

Only quibbling, yes. But not if rejecting the notion that the soul is anything other than the form of the body causes you to miss something really important about humanness. I think it does; I think it causes you to get only half the story.

For the somatic materialist, the fundamental, not to say sole, imperative of human life is material survival and subsistence. People might sometimes look as though they’re motivated by other things – the pursuit of happiness, the good of mankind, for example – but deep down it is really only their material, economic survival they care about. This where their main life effort – their agency – is always, in the final analysis, focussed.

This is definitely half the story. But before we get to the other, missing half, let’s think about what exactly is dialectical about Marx’s materialism. Well, dialectical sort of means struggle, especially struggle between opposing forces, or points of view. Dialectical materialism is more or less a continuation of Darwin’s theory of evolution (Marx and Darwin were close contemporaries) into human history. In pre-human days the struggle of life was against hostile nature, which included competition with other organisms for material resources. In human history now, humans being essentially social creatures, the struggle of life is a class struggle, especially between the rich (who own and control everything) and the poor (who have virtually nothing and must work to survive). It is a struggle for power, for control of the economic “means of production”.

Marx believed that the historical dialectic wouldn’t just go on, back and forth, to and fro, dog eating dog, indefinitely, however. Rather it would approach an actual resolution. Sooner or later the poor would rise up, seize control of the means of production, and institute a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, a workers’ utopia, in which all were economically equal. No more dialectic, no more struggle.

Sounds improbably optimistic, quixotic, don’t you think? Actually, it was a complete contradiction. If all is material, if all that ever motivates human behaviour is the desire for money and material possessions, then where are all these utopian workers, these ideal, perfectly good human beings, who are going to stop the struggle and start sharing nicely with each other once they have seized control? Nowhere; they can’t exist, even in principle. So there will never be a resolution of the dialectic of history. Help! We’re doomed to history forever repeating itself. But now, don’t cry, don’t give up yet, there is an alternative: welcome to dialectical immaterialism, the other half of the story.

You start by rejecting monochrome materialism and accepting the reality of soul – of agency – alongside matter, in a dualist vision of things. Yes, be a dualist; don’t be scared to admit it. We imagine we are real; isn’t that enough?! I imagine a nice house I might build, or a nice essay I might write, then sometime later they really exist. Likewise I imagine myself into real existence – so to speak, because there had to be an “I” to do the imagining in the first place!

Marx himself, as we have seen, was the most fervent of believers in real human agency. It’s the only way out of the historical dialectic-pickle we’ve got ourselves into. If the rich and the poor are always locked in a struggle for control of the means of production, how else can humanity ever escape this struggle except when a critical mass of people exercise their agency and decide that this is not the way they want to go? If we’re all just driven by material survival, then we have no real agency, but if we do have real agency we have half a chance. Marx was a dedicated clutcher at that half a chance, God bless him.

So, let’s be brave enough – or rather sensible and undogmatic enough – to be dualist. Be a somatic, Marxist one if you insist. But when you put your dualist spectacles on, you immediately realize that human beings are not just motivated by material survival, rather there’s something else – a soul-thing – which also floats our boat, and which over time becomes even more important for us than material survival.

What is this something else? I should ask you – you’re a human being. I’m a human being too, so I’ll answer. We are certainly animals, and so much of what we are we share with all those lovely creatures (well, maybe not with crocodiles), but we are also uniquely something else – we are, uniquely, conscious. Consciousness makes all the difference. Non-human animals are living souls like us, but their primary orientation to the world is non-conscious, instinctive, whereas we human animals have become increasingly conscious and intentional over time. Our growing consciousness gives rise to all those things we consider to be uniquely human – language, intelligence, tool-making ability, the capacity for global destruction, etc. – a nice mixture of blessings and curses.

Homo sapiens exceptionalism, chauvinism, you’re probably spouting. But more than any of these things, which after all are the products rather than the cause of our conscious life in the world, consciousness plants inside us a peculiar obsession, a deep, primal inner urge, which grows to become an even more powerful motivator of human behaviour than material survival. It is, no less, the urge, the desire, the desperate, hopeless yearning, to love and be loved. We are no longer satisfied with or solely motivated by material survival; now the quest for love – for spiritual transcendence – becomes our grand obsession.

There’s a great story to be told here of how consciousness gives rise to the urge for love. It’s a story the great bodily materialists – Marx, of course, and also, say, Freud and Nietzsche – somehow missed. My guess is that, in their different ways, these three great ones were blinkered by their respective intense, personal, psychological disaffection with the society they were born into, and, in their haste to reduce every last vestige of the soul to the body, threw away any chance of seeing what was truly unique about the human soul. It may be that, conversely, the great idealists and dualists of the tradition – Spinoza, Hegel, Bergson, say, apart from a great army of theologians and mystics – were overly conscious of love and spiritual transcendence, and failed to take full account of all the bodily, animal stuff the materialists saw. So, if we bundle all the materialists, idealists and dualists together, we might have a chance of seeing the full truth!

What exactly is the story (of how consciousness gives rise to love)? It goes like this. As conscious creatures we ever find ourselves in a divided state, on one hand elated by the thrill of experiencing our real existence, on the other devastated by the sudden consciousness of our utter separation and alienation from the world. It is all purely our imagination of course, but that is exactly the problem – once we start imagining, there is no turning back! Consciousness is a sudden, imagined, virtual disconnection from the world, the original out-of-body experience. We are suddenly, terrifyingly, existentially alone. So, naturally, automatically, immediately, desperately we seek re-connection. This reconnection, of course, is love. We don’t want to be alone, we want to be connected, soul to soul, with other people. We want them to love us, and we want us to love them.

Yes, the urge for love, reconnection, for spiritual transcendence: do I have to convince you of this? Don’t you just feel it inside yourself? I certainly do. As an adult human being I spend a lot of my time and mental energy on material subsistence – earning money, accumulating possessions, eating well, buying nice clothes – and a lot of this is just for me, me, me. But no, a lot of this is also for my family, and why should I care about them? – they’re not me! We care for our family out of love, of course, naturally, instinctively, selflessly. Love – the desire for it, the pursuit of it, the practice of it – dominates our lives.

Think of the worst human being on the planet – a tyrant, a criminal kingpin, a psychopathic killer. Material power obviously looms large in their motivation. But it’s power over people they really want. They desperately want to control people, even if that means murdering them and eating them (in the case of certain psychopathic killers). They want to control their bodies, surely, but much more than this (or rather by doing this) they want to control their minds, their souls. This soul-control is nothing more than a hopelessly distorted form of love. The tyrant, the criminal kingpin, the psychopathic killer – they’re just like you and me, they just want to be loved. But, no, they’re not just like you and me, because they haven’t, poor darlings, learned the most important thing in life: how to truly, effectively, undistortedly, love.

This is the rub. It is our inner, immaterial dialectic, which ever plays itself out in our lives, and through it one could tell the whole story of human history, more or less. We want love, and we want it more than life or breath itself, but what most of us quickly find out is that merely wanting love and expecting people to just give it to us doesn’t work. This is a profound shock, a moment of absolute spiritual alienation, like we’re suddenly thrown out of the garden into a hostile world and forced to fend for ourselves. At this point we have two dialectical choices, two paths we can follow in our lives: either use power in the futile attempt to make people love us, or learn to be ourselves the ones who give the love, so that in the end we are no longer in a position where we are in anyway dependent on others loving us.

Marx, one-eyed materialist that he was, would have seen this conception of fundamental spiritual alienation as a bourgeois fantasy, erected to mask the real, material alienation of humanity in the capitalist age. For Karl, the only alienation that really mattered was the existential alienation of workers in the industrial-capitalist division of labour. He dreamed of a future golden-age which was more or less a return to a past, pre-capitalist golden-age, in which the ties that had previously bound us together were restored.

So much credit must go to the great man for his penetrating insight and his heartfelt ideal. Yet, as always, it was only half the story. Workers, especially children, were passive victims of the capitalist machine; but no they weren’t, they were also active agents of their own destiny, in search of life, love and spiritual transcendence amid the limitations and hardships of their material circumstances. The bourgeois capitalists were the single-minded, active agents of capitalist oppression; but no they weren’t, they also were victims of the giant machine, as alienated by it as the workers. Both workers and bosses were motivated by much more than just bread and money; they had, though they mightn’t have admitted it, bigger fish to fry.

We see the truth of this in what happened next. It is a study in contrasts. On one hand, in countries around the world which acknowledged and respected human agency – democratic countries, in other words – workers were able to gradually climb out of poverty to the greater prosperity of the present day. Democratic reform of capitalist political-economy, and unionism, were important elements in this process, with, in some cases at least, the bourgeois capitalists themselves leading the way to more humane treatment and conditions for workers.

On the other hand, however, in those poor countries that were bitten by the Marxist bug – that had no real interest in or respect for the individual agency of the people – things went from bad to worse. A limited amount of economic equality was purchased at the price of an unlimited amount of spiritual slavery. In the Soviet Union, the foremost example, individual agency was rounded up and sent to the gulag, never to be seen again.  As Strelnikov says to Yuri in Dr Zhivago, “the personal life is dead in Russia; history has killed it.” Well, dialectical materialism killed it. Where the Tsars had oppressed the Russian people with whips, the communists oppressed them with scorpions, so to speak.

DM is a conspiracy theory that led to the greatest conspiracy of all, international communism. Oh the irony! For peasants, workers, oppressed peoples all over the world, communism was the great false dawn, proof positive of the folly of a one-eyed materialist view of life.

The bottom line is that human agency is real, not just a “form” ultimately determined by, and therefore always oriented towards, underlying material, bodily conditions. Rather, it is an immaterial will, elan, animus, impetus, effort, intentionality (whatever you want to call it), oriented to transcending underlying material, bodily conditions. The mind is ever at the task of transcending the body, you might say. Part (maybe half) of this is obviously just about keeping the body going, because the body can’t be the vehicle of transcendence if it is dead. But the other half is a spiritual impulse, the impulse to love and be loved. One half from our animal, evolutionary past; the other the fruit of our unique, human self-consciousness. Isn’t that lovely?

Now, if socialism is the socio-political program of DM, what then is the socio-political program of DIM? Well of course I’ve already said it: democracy. Sounds a bit boring, yes, I’m sorry, in case you were hoping for a radically new political theory. The same thing we’ve been working on for a long time; just need to get our noses back to the grindstone. One person one vote, all equal under the sunburnt sky – this is the only approach that takes the existence of human agency – of the human soul – as a fundamental reality, in a world that is also, not solely, material. Democracy alone can set us on the road to real spiritual and economic freedom. In the end it’s real freedom we want and need and hope for, not false equality.

DIM sees history in a dual aspect, both inward and outward, spiritual and material. Inwardly it is that imperative which challenges us every moment of everyday, how to create love in our lives and in the world, without wrecking it by trying to control it, make it happen. Outwardly it is the age old struggle of democracy against tyranny. Marx also arrayed himself against tyranny, but because he saw the world purely in material terms, his followers ended up imposing a tyranny that was worse still than anything that had come before.

Virtually no-one is crazy enough to be an out and out Marxist-Leninist-Maoist etc. these days, of course (maybe), with all that dreadful history crying out to us from the grave, but the spirit of DM lives on still in much political and cultural thinking in the West. The bogeyman erected by Marx – bourgeois capitalism – remains well and truly still in place, but now it is “the system”, with adjectives like global, patriarchal, western, racist, white, homophobic, etc. attached to it. But capitalism is not the problem and (therefore) socialism is not the solution. The proof of this is that many of the problems Marx so heroically railed against have now largely been resolved or mitigated in the democratic west, without dismantling capitalism. In fact the economic freedom that capitalism facilitates, when it is constrained and humanized by democratic polity, is a necessary (although not sufficient) element of true spiritual freedom.

Conversely, adding the adjective “democratic” to socialism, as appealing as it might sound, and as close to Marx’s original intention as it might be, cannot cancel out what is fundamentally wrong with it. This goes to the heart of the DIM thesis, in fact. People are seen merely as material victims of a material system, denying them the very thing that makes them human and is their ticket out of discrimination and disadvantage, namely their real, living agency. Denying them their very souls, in other words. With no agency, no soul, there is no way they can, to paraphrase the lovely cliché, attributed to Gandhi, be the change they wish to see in the world. But give me back my soul, then, wow, the world’s my oyster!

November 2020

[1]See, e.g. Materialism by Terry Eagleton (2016, Yale University), page 35.