Theism vs DiaMat vs Idealism vs Physicalist Naturalism vs etc

Can you give a run down of this? Im just curious. I haven't actually read (for example) Zizek's book on DiaMat/Hegel which goes through Heidegger and Nietzsche and why they fail in certain areas.

No problem, I'll go over it in each of their cases.

Nietzsche attempted to call into question truths as a whole and philosophy's search for them, without lapsing into skepticism. For him, truths were an expression of the will to exist and exert oneself and thus a deeply personal affair. While he offers plenty of jabs at Kant and other idealists, Nietzsche's conception of existence as a constant flux of differing exertions of the Will to Power fits snugly within his fellow German thinkers. Nietzsche thinks there are no eternal truths to the world, so he completely excludes the idea of a fixed reality outside of mental perception and personal biases. All ideals must rise, fall and change for Nietzsche, but he still takes these ideals to be the only access to existence we have.

Heidegger understands Nietzsche but questions as to what background assumptions about existence would be required for something like a "Will to Power" to exist as an ideal in the first place, his answer to this is the concept of Being, as in existence itself, and Being-in-the-world, existence within a particular historical period. Heidegger rejects scientific materialism and common sense realism because he doesn't believe that theorizing about Being or practical assumptions of what Being does exhaust what Being is. Heidegger runs into the issue though that if Being is existence, and non-Being is nonexistence, and humans are Being-in-the-world by virtue of sentient consciousness, then can there really be Being by itself without humans having the idea of existence by existing in a particular world? Heidegger struggles with this problem for all of his philosophic career and never quite finds an adequate answer.

Foucault is usually seen as a materialist because of his emphasis on historical documentation and conditioned structures when it comes to crafting a theory of the human subject. But this last part is precisely why Foucault's materialism runs into the same problems that Marx's does: the subject is shaped by these conditions outside the subject, but the subject itself is the only agent capable of positing this distinction of the subject opposed to object(s). Foucault never really develops a theory of existence itself, he sees that as a Heideggerian dead end. Instead he focuses his theory on how human existence has been historical conditioned through systemic means and relations of power. And these relations are only for human beings, between conscious minds, not between humans and an external reality outside the mind.

Someone doesn't understand the difference between ontology and epistemology.

Marx actually argued that a mistake early political economists made before him was starting by analyzing abstract categories, such as population, and then proceeding to even further abstractions until simple definitions are reached. Once that has been accomplished they return to the category as a totality of determinations and relations drawn from those abstract definitions – a very idealist approach. The conscious idea of matter came first. Marx disagreed.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/appx1.htm
So of course he thought there was a "concrete world" outside of consciousness – unlike Hegel, that's where he started.

Only Hegel considered historical progress as a series of events driven not by real phenomena but by the Weltgeist.
marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prstate.htm#PR346
Again, conscious ideas come first; ideas alone drive history; history is mind. Unlike Hegel, Marx didn't attribute historical progress to people as servants of the Weltgeist but to people engaging with the material conditions of their time. Real phenomena being historically developed – "given and transmitted from the past" – ensures whatever history is made is, essentially, a practical development of what came before.

So what?

Other human beings reside in external reality, you dimwit, we're not some Hegelian collective consciousness.

You're entirely misinterpreting what Weltgeist means, it's not a transcendental collective ghost leading people along through history, it's literally just a method of philosophizing about world history through the conflict between groups of engaged subjects. This isn't a wholly collective idea, the particular individual interests of individuals throughout history such as Alexander the Great and Napoleon have shaped historical consciousness just as much as collective action has. The concept of the universal is always best exemplified by one instance of the particular.
Soooo it means that the distinction that can be made between mental phenomena and the reality 'out there' is already mediated within the subject's consciousness itself.
Marx would like to think that, but he's trapped again by his idealist roots. Any 'evolution of the concrete world itself' is not an evolution for itself, it's an evolution projected onto it by conscious mediation. Natural objects such as animals, geological structures and planets only exist within Space while conscious beings exist within Time also, because these natural objects lack the dimension of historical Time they have no evolution in themselves, their evolution is an evolution for our own gaze. We can never 'start' with the concrete natural world because it has no consciousness. Marx can disagree with this approach all he wants, but he's not able to philosophically reduce existence to matter without becoming a panpsychist.

lacan.com/badbodies.htm

Marx, in some ways like Foucault, was a practical man; Zizek stated he wasn't a philosopher, and that was to his credit imo. He wasn't interesting in metaphysical bullshit but in "the rational kernel within the mystical shell" – avoiding Foucault's Heideggerian trap as it were.
Unsurprisingly this is how Hegel justified the monarch as the personality of the state; a person enshrining "the actuality of the concept, and only when the concept is determined as a person is it the Idea or truth." Marx caustically observed "Hegel could just as well conclude that because the individual man is one the human species is only a single man." He argued "Hegel needed to go further, for clearly the one has truth only as many one's. The predicate, the essence, never exhausts the spheres of its existence in a single one but in many one's."

One instance of the particular does not stand alone but in society, "hence the socially determined production of individuals, is…the point of departure." Marx starts from people in social relations not the universal (the state in this example) as exemplified by an individual. This is drawn from his materialism.

You've yet to explain how this hobbles Marx's materialism, you've just restated the same thing over again.

This is the aforementioned metaphysical bullshit.

And you can disagree with Marx, but he actually innovated off a critique of Hegel, while your criticism is regurgitating Hegel while ignoring Marx's critique, ironically dismissing it because he started with Hegel.

He said the same thing about Marx

what is it with people here liking diamat? It's a rigid, non-dynamic system which searches the "one truth". It's essentially idealism and has nothing to do with Marx's and Engels's materialism.

Yeah, that's what I meant, poorly worded though.
Also meant "interested".

and Marx would've probably said the same, given his comments on the inability of philosophy to actually achieve any progress.

Whatever the metaphysical ground of reality is (if there is one), I maintain that materialism is the sanest basis for handling political and economical questions. All else is doomed to devolve into subjectivity what should be an objective playing field if it were to be remotely successful.

How has dialectical materialism got nothing to do with Marx and Engels' materialism?

This is totally correct. Marx didn't care so much about metaphysics, which is fine if one wants to just have a leftist political project against capitalism. All I'm saying is that this focus on political economy makes Marx a poorer philosopher.
It's fairly evident but I'll explain it in bare terms: you cannot posit matter without first possessing the consciousness to conceive of the idea of matter. One does not go out into the world automatically conceiving of everything as being composed of the same substance, it's a theory that's formulated. And like all undermining/reductionist theories, it does not exhaust existence itself, it merely serves as a monism that takes objects in nature to be always less than themselves.

I agree with Marx on this point, Hegel didn't go far enough in elaborating his own principle.
Marx innovated in the realm of political economy by taking some bits from Hegel and others, this isn't an issue for me. What bothers me with Marx is when he takes his practical line of theory concerning political economy and then tries to project it back into the philosophical realm, upon which it only seems sound in relation to Pre-Kantian theory.

Marx's core critique of Hegel is that Hegel failed to take into account for modern political economy that was emerging with capitalism, which is true, Hegel's conception of the state and economy on the whole is the most regressive part of his thinking. But then Marx tries to take this claim and say that because Hegel was wrong about political economy, he was also wrong metaphysically, so that needed to be 'flipped on it's head' as well, resulting in Marxist materialism. That's the part I disagree with, and since this thread is concerned with metaphysics, it constitutes my single opposition to Marx. Marx is right when it comes to political economy, but against philosophy his views are a shaky foundation at best, which is why I much prefer later Marx, as early Marx was a bit too eager to apply philosophical critique to everything and anything regardless of what the result turned out to be.

For the Marxist engagement with politics, this is entirely true.

it's a plekhanite stalinist bastardization of materialism for the reasons I laid out. Instead of being a dynamic method of thought diamat is rigid, static 'all-explaining' bogus.

What the fuck have you been reading?
Trotsky doesn't think so

I don't really care, I'm not a trot and neither is the majority of revolutionary leftists.
And I've been reading Adorno.

You can dance around with philosophic terminology as much as you like, but it isn't refuting anything. I don't recognize anything of that in what I've read of Marx or his critique of Hegel. The reductionist allegation is particularly ridiculous considering Marx was at pains to preserve Hegel's dialectic with a materialist foundation – the famous "inversion".

Marx didn't produce any philosophical treaties (at best the early 1844 manuscripts), so you're going to have to be more specific in regards to what you find disagreeable.

Without Marx's philosophic critique of Hegel (and Feuerbach) he would not have produced such stellar political economy, so I find this point of view a little bizarre. Later Marx, if anything, was more philosophical because by that point he had thoroughly read Hegel's Science of Logic and reformulated his earlier ideas as a result.

...

That text is literally the image of what leftcom said tho.

stay pleb, trotbot

I'm using philosophic terminology to explain philosophy, but if you find that inadequate then I don't know what to tell you comrade.
In terms of his many critiques, The German Ideology is mainly what I have in mind.
That's exactly my point. Marx's critique of philosophy's lack of effectiveness in describing political economy is what made Marx's political economy so revolutionary. Later Marx while reading The Science of Logic dropped much of his pretensions in metaphysics and began vigorously applying dialectical logic in Capital, his reformulation of his earlier ideas was ultimately for the better because he wasn't so interested in providing a youthful critique of what was presently popular in philosophy at the time like Early Marx with Young Hegelianism, and instead chose to systematize his critique of capitalism into a weighty analysis.

What's wrong with Adorno?

Ui is a miracle of the universe.

Metaphysics is entertaining to think about, but ultimately it has zero bearing on the world we inhabit and how it relates to our conscious being, whether said world is the product of our ideas or not.

I think an earlier poster was right and that you're confusing ontology with epistemology. Eg. Zizek, as far as I understand him, is an ontological materialist from Lacan, while he's an epistemological idealist from Hegel. Marx was a materialist through-and-through, but applying it to everything was more Engels' thing, such as in Dialectics of Nature.

That's mainly a polemical critique of the Young Hegelians and our resident meme philosopher, Stirner. Not exactly what I would have thought of when it came to systematizing his own philosophy, but ok.

What? I mean, I don't disagree with what you wrote after that, but that sentence is a little wonky.

"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

Oh, of course.

I'm a theist. I'm also a Hegelian idealist.
These 2 don't oppose.

DiaMat is false. Hegel had it right the first time. History is a spiral; the struggle of authoritarian ideologies. This struggle will give rise to a new individualist utopia with an irrational central democratic philosopher-king.

...

You've gotten so memey that I can't even tell if you're trolling now.

triple dubs speak gospel

What is metaphysics?

Great quads.

Philosophy noob here, I consider myself a materialist because I think the universe is made of matter (ie, there are no god, spirits, souls and so on). Is it a good definition of materialism? Also what are idealism, diamat and physicalist naturalism?

The scope of this thread is troubling.

tbh idealism has no way of accounting for ancestrality

The 19th century is over grandpa. The future of metaphysics is a unity of realism and idealism in which the real is both wholly contingent and wholly our property. The noumena is a twisting Azathoth that the epistemic Look of the Ego peels back over and over again and makes its property.

Doesn't left-communism follow Diamat too?