1. Materialism and Nature
2. Humanity in Relation to Nature and Society
3. Evaluation of Social Practice

In debating societies, it is customary to begin from definitions. In order to understand what is meant by materialism, this would be especially unhelpful. The word is commonly used to denote the crude reduction of society, consciousness, and so on, into the behaviour of matter. Such a materialism goes hand in hand with an idealistic conception of humanity: where reduction fails, mysticism strides onwards. Philosophy becomes the study of the subject in isolation and the study of nature as an object. Nature is either passively reflected in, or inaccessible to, human consciousness.

A preferable phrase would be "dialectical materialism", as the aim here will be to show how a dialectic understanding of reality negates the reductionist connotations of materialism. However, this phrase, contracted to the "diamat", has become utterly discredited due to its distortion at the hands of the Stalinist regimes. Under Stalinism, scientific theories as important as Einstein’s relativity or Darwin’s natural selection were ruthlessly attacked as undialectical. The practice of science in the Stalinist regimes is not merely an interesting digression. Such distortions have greatly set back any attempt to apply the dialectic in an ontological manner, and have led to the widespread rejection of much of Engel’s pioneering work on the dialectic of nature along with its Stalinist caricature. Of course, soviet science was never reduced to the status of a mere ideology; just as in the West, an objectivity is required within science if it is to be useful at all in the accumulation of capital.

The subordination of science to accumulation has a contradictory nature. Firstly, capitalism distorts all social practices. The non-neutral nature of science is apparent in its methodology as much as in its utilisation. Nevertheless, the sciences do require an objective kernel if they are to be of useful as a means of improving the forces of production and furthering the competitive aims of capitalists. Indeed, the investigation of nature can force scientists beyond the limits of their methodology and towards a dialectic understanding of nature. As the verification process in the natural sciences (compared to the social sciences) is often comparatively simple, consisting of reading empirically from experimental data derived under ideal conditions, the dialectic is often readily apparent. There are even branches of system dynamics, such as catastrophe theory, that set out to model the transformation of quantity into quality, which I will later show to be an important feature of a dialectic process.

There is another sense in which the term, materialism, harking back to an earlier era when the scientist could happily presuppose a universe composed of real material substance interacting in an essentially mechanistic way, is flawed. This view of nature has been progressively undermined during the course of the 20^th century due to the ascendancy of quantum mechanics, field theories, relativity and so on. However, it would be wrong to take the view, common in popular science writing, that these revolutions in physics were anti-realist. The acceptance of objective probability (which is the aspect of quantum mechanics that is often held to be at the root of a denial of realism) is not universal within the world of physics. There are, for example, many versions of quantum theory based on the theory of hidden variables, which have not yet been decisively refuted. Aside from this, even the more radical interpretations have seldom rejected the a priori existence of an external reality.

Of the widely accepted accounts of quantum mechanics, perhaps the most problematic is that devised by Bohr. There are unpleasant idealistic connotations to Bohr’s attempt to make a rigid separation between the macroscopic concepts that must be used in human interpretation and observation on the one hand and the microscopic realm of objective probability on the other. The lack of any mechanism giving rise to such a separation makes the explanatory value of Bohr’s philosophy dubious. But there are far more satisfying interpretations available that attempt to explain Schrodinger’s cat type paradoxes without retreating into subjectivism. Indeed the dialectic might lend itself to a sophisticated attempt to understand the collapse of the wave-function as an example of the transformation of quantity into quality. This would have to be combined with some mechanism showing how macroscopic or massive bodies, impinging on the microscopic world, bring about such a transition in the wave-function at a critical point.

Moving on from these subtleties, we can start to construct our materialist account by positing the existence of a reality, comprising nature and society, a priori and independently of the consciousness of individual agents. (The precise definition of society and nature against and in relation to each other will concern us later.) Materialism contends that nature has a primacy over society. This primacy is both historical, in that nature exists before society, and structural. The concept of structural primacy will be clarified when we consider the problems of reduction and determination. Suffice it to say, for now, that intelligent materialism (to borrow a phrase from Lenin) ardently denies the possibility of reducing society into nature. Intelligent materialism also rejects crude empiricism, despite contending that the human senses allow the perception of external reality. The relationship between humans and nature will later be characterised by its critical, rather than sensual, nature.

Most of this groundwork is fairly uncontentious from the intelligent materialist standpoint. Controversy begins with the speculative introduction of laws of nature. The specific scientific laws governing the behaviour of physical entities is not of immediate concern here. Instead, we will posit a set of "ontological concepts" as the conditions upon which reality (and our knowledge of reality) is predicated. There are several prominent candidates for the category of ontological concepts. The most obvious is that of space-time. This is (outside of pathological examples such as singularities) the manifold upon which laws of nature may be inscribed. Space-time forms a set of co-ordinates with some given dimensionality. These co-ordinates determine intervals between entities (usually referred to as "events" by virtue of their temporal nature) The interval between entities or events is important in physics as it determines whether communication, or other forms of interaction, can take place between them. The dimensionallity of space-time determines the degrees of freedom held by some of an entity’s properties, such as its motion.

Other ontological concepts might include: formal logic, causality, (some elements of) mathematics and symmetry. All of these are abstract features of reality and appear to be properties of the universe we inhabit; none of them are easily derivable as a result of properties that are more general or abstract. The reasons why formal logic, as we understand it, applies to the universe is usually deemed metaphysical rather than scientific. Actually, the distinction between ontological concepts and the most basic laws of physics is an analytical distinction. It is likely that the ultimate building blocks of physics (such as the standard model or superstring theory, or some future equivalent of these) are equally impossible to derive without recourse to metaphysics, and that these most basic principles of physics form a unity with the ontological concepts. However, the analytical distinction is a useful method of modelling our ignorance.

A recurrent theme here will be that these ontological concepts manifest themselves universally but not uniformly across reality. Causality, for example, conditions the behaviour of nature and of society in the sense that events are taken to have real causes (ignoring, for the moment, the apparent objective-probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics). However, the causality of nature is often readily apparent from experimentation, whereas in society the free will of agents (considered later) often undermines our attempts to understand the causal connections between phenomena.

The universality of ontological concepts means that the most prominent usually play a subsidiary role in scientific explanations, for example in statements of the form "A is caused by B", where B is a more abstract physical law. If science as a social practice consists of scientific programmes with a dogmatic core, challenged only in revolutionary upheavals in science, then certain ontological concepts are a component of each core. Viewed from another angle, metaphysics can be taken to be the complete set of ontological concepts forming a scientific programme with the study of reality as its problematic. The generally dogmatic acceptance of certain ontological concepts does not mean that they never come under suspicion. The example of causality is a good one, in that quantum mechanics does appear to show an objective probabilistic structure to reality. However, it is usually taken for granted that these uncertainties in the subatomic realm are a departure from the basic causal structure of reality (even if they are taken to be causally relevant to wider spheres of reality).

Dogmatic though they may be, ontological concepts are an essential pre-requisite to knowledge and this appears to be one of the key points of connection between epistemology and ontology. It seems at least plausible to suggest that the ontological structure of the brain conditions the mind, especially in terms of the mind’s innate conceptual tools. Such a view would imply, for example, that the way we use the concepts of causation and space-time to comprehend reality is a consequence of the fact that our brain functions causally in space-time. Thus, these ontological concepts are not derived from experience (though they may be verified through experience).

We can construct a dialectic materialism by positing the dialectic as an ontological concept. The dialectic can be understood as a set of abstractions about the dynamism of systems. Here, a system is a collection of entities that can, to some degree of approximation, be considered in isolation. In saying this, it should be noted that the question of what constitutes a system is a question that is often falsely posed and answered without recourse to dialectics. One of the characteristics of undialectical thought is that it conceives of reality in a fragmentary way, without comprehending the relationship between entities, or the importance of studying systems as a totality. Thus, what is typically regarded as a closed system may actually be a part of a wider system. The key notion in dialectics is that changes occurring in a system are a result of the relationship between subsystems (in the classical case two subsystems) of the system. It is therefore necessary to conceive of a system as a totality, at least until the influence of certain subsystems is deemed inconsequential. Conversely, it may be necessary to extend the scope of a system until the causes of its dynamism are comprehended.

The dynamic qualities of a system (which are usually the most interesting aspects) are then a consequence of the relationship between subsystems. Dynamic relationships are of a contradictory nature, and are often mediated by other subsystems. Here, mediation refers to the propagation of the contradictory relationship in such a way as to modify the relationship. The relationship is contradictory in that it cannot be immediately resolved. There is an increasing tension such that the two subsystems are increasingly unable to coexist in the system in their immediate states. Thus, dialectic relationships are resolved in a catastrophic manner. This manifests itself in the sudden transformation of quantity into quality.

This is the essence of the dialectic. The term, essence, is counterpoised to appearance; that these two categories do not coincide was held by Marx to be the reason why science was required. A methodology is scientific if it shows how to abstract away from appearance to reveal the underlying essence of a phenomena, i.e. the theoretical laws and concepts governing the behaviour, in order to allow the subsequent reconstitution of concrete reality leading to the practical verification of the theory. This methodology has consequences for our understanding and use of the dialectic at a concrete level. Like all ontological concepts, the dialectic does not apply uniformly across concrete reality (if it did, essence and appearance would coincide). The dialectic of nature is not identical to the dialectic of society. Generalising from this point, the dialectic is not in itself an explanation for phenomena. Specific phenomena, natural or social, are governed by the specific material conditions of their occurrence. Thus, an understanding of the dialectic cannot be a substitute for a comprehension of the material laws governing the concrete manifestation of phenomena.

The dialectic understanding of reality outlined quite clearly rejects reductionist or determinist modes of thought. However, given the importance placed on causality, and the basic materialist framework, questions regarding reduction will be raised by the above account. Firstly, we must ask to what extent phenomena are caused by other phenomena at a more basic level. Secondly, we must ask whether such causal relationships, if they occur, can be determined. We can refer to the two problems as "the ontological reduction problem" and the "epistemological reduction problem" respectively. Both questions presuppose the existence of a basic level upon which reality rests. It is usually the contention of reductionist accounts that the most basic level is that of physics and that a hierarchy of sciences (chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology) can be built upon this as a series of layers. It is quite revealing to consider, in this light, the relationship between physics and chemistry.

We can contemplate the simplest form of monatomic inorganic chemistry, taking this to be the study of the electronic configuration of atoms (especially the outer electrons). Then we could consider the subset of physics dealing with the nucleus in itself and the electron in itself. This crude and simplistic reduction fails at a number of levels. The configuration of the electrons is not derivable from a study of the isolated nucleus or the isolated electron, but only from the relationship between different kinds of subatomic particle. Indeed, in modern physics the field theories describing the individual particles cannot easily be divorced from the theory of their interaction. Furthermore, in order to derive the entire behaviour of electrons orbiting an atom, it is necessary to bring in further areas of physics, such as nuclear physics. If reduction means anything, it means that behaviour at one level of reality can be modelled with certainty with recourse to a more basic level.

In answer to the ontological reduction problem, we conclude that it is possible to reduce anything into physics if physics is conceived extremely broadly, a process we will refer to this as "ontological reduction". (It is contended that ontological reduction is only possible into this most basic level. For example, biology is not reducible into chemistry, as biology consists also of physical relationships not usually categorised as chemical.) However, this reduction is meaningless. Aside from the fact that the category of physics becomes all encompassing, we cannot solve the epistemological reduction problem in this manner. The ability to understand phenomena in terms of physics is referred to as "epistemological reduction". There are several problems with the epistemological reduction of even the simple chemistry described above. Firstly it is intractable computationally, secondly human knowledge does not currently give a sufficient understanding of physics, thirdly there may be fundamental mathematical reasons why reduction cannot occur (such as the insolubility of the equations). There is also a problem with the over-simplistic view taken of chemistry as the study of electronic configurations. As a social practice, chemistry is the study of a phenomenology, something that only makes sense within a wider context, which would presumably have to be reduced also. Given that only the universe constitutes a truly closed system, all aspects of the universe, past and present, causally connected with a phenomenon would have to be studied at their most basic level. The constitution of chemistry as a separate science is the recognition of the intractability of epistemological reduction and of the need to understand reality in a pragmatic manner. In this sense, chemistry is irreducible into physics.

Irreducibility plays an important role in the use of a materialist ontology to describe reality. The model outlined above can be generalised, albeit in an approximate way, to describe many other layers of explanation of reality. This is obvious if we consider social practices. For example, the law, a part of the "social superstructure", rests upon the "economic base" of society. (This must be qualified by stating that the law rests upon more than just the economic structure.) Marxism contends that the relationship between economics and law is the primary factor determining the nature and historical development of law, where economics must be understood as an entire process which itself develops historically. Here, law arises from the economics of society, but is irreducible into economics (even in an approximate sense, assuming a society with just these two social practices). Many legal systems are conceivably compatible with a given economic base, but the general contours of the legal system arise from the economic interests of agents. This picture is made subtler when ideological and other superstructural elements are included (and in practice, laws do not crudely and rationally reflect economic interests). It should also be noted that the superstructure reacts back on the base. Should the dialectic at work within the base lead to a deep enough crisis, the superstructure may even determine whether a new mode of production becomes dominant (the relationship between socialist revolution and capitalist crisis). The relationship between base and superstructure is dialectical, in that it comprises two related poles that may at times come into contradiction. Such a dialectic, in which one of the poles has primacy over the other, is quite typical, and in all cases, the poles of a dialectic relationship must be mutually irreducible.

In summary, we have seen how a materialist ontology can be constructed that is not crudely reductionist. This is a realist scheme governed by certain ontological concepts that cannot be derived, but which affect different aspects of reality in different but generalisable ways. One possible ontological concept is the dialectic based on the notions of totality, contradiction and change.

The term "nature" has been accorded different meanings in philosophy. I shall use nature to describe those aspects of reality that are not related to society. More precisely, nature is defined in opposition to the social relationships and practices from which society is constituted. This also implies that nature is defined in opposition to human consciousness and labour. There latter are, as will later be shown, part of the definition of agency and are inseparable from society itself. Such a definition will also allow us to subsume animals under the category of nature. That is not to reduce the concept of an animal to that of an automaton; animals are clearly a distinct part of nature. Just as humans are irreducible into animals, animals are irreducible into the rest of nature. Nevertheless, it is useful to separate society from the rest of reality in an analytical manner in order to clarify the distinct features of human social conduct. The irreducibility of society into other categories is the crucial claim made here.

It is suggested above that consciousness is not a property that evolves of itself in the individual agent. Marxism, in defining the agent, aims to analyse the point at which humans distinguish themselves from nature. Agents begin to distinguish themselves in two ways. Firstly they begin to labour critically on their environment to produce the means of subsistence (labour is defined as action that is purposive, critical and transformative). Secondly human society has a history, as distinct from evolution, for example, through cumulatively extending their productive know-how through the production of tools. Both features of society imply the development of a critical consciousness. The critical nature of consciousness can be characterised as follows. Firstly, such a consciousness has the capacity to develop a set of sophisticated concepts referring to elements of reality. Secondly, abstraction and generalisation about the properties of elements of reality can be made. Thirdly, novel situations can be conceived involving such elements (particularly their interaction). Fourthly, the agent posits themselves in relation to other elements of reality. Fifthly, agents can, to a greater or lesser extent, apply their critical capacity intentionally to certain problems, concepts or situations. Finally, the claims of critical consciousness can be verified through practice. From this definition it will be clear that language is an important form of critical consciousness, however, the latter is defined more broadly than language.

Language develops primarily through co-operative relationships (initially linked to production in a direct manner, e.g. hunting) and is social in its nature. Language distinguishes itself from signalling by its grammatical richness, its ability to express past activity, future intent, and so on, and by its constructed in the form of sentences rather than a fix set of signals. These allow it to take on the role of critical consciousness when language is reflected inwards as inner speech, one of the ways that agents define themselves. Hence, the sense of self is inextricably linked to the sense of other. We relate to ourselves critically only through our recognition of other agents. Thus the property of critical consciousness, that of positing the agent in relation to elements of reality arises, in the case of language, from a social need inseparable from production.

Another of the properties of critical consciousness, its intentional nature, can lead to a paradoxical situation, the old philosophical problem of "thinking about thought", or posed in this sense, "how do we think what we should think". Again, the category of production is central to our understanding of this aspect of critical consciousness. One of the great strengths of Marxism is that it contends that thought processes rest on a material base. This material base is the productive process through which our nature coincides with our needs as agents, i.e. the need to subsist.

We now consider the relationship between the critical consciousness of agents and the rest of reality. Given that, it is contended, humans are irreducible into nature, several questions are raised about the heritage of nature in relation to human consciousness. Can we posit a kind of "id" at the core of human behaviour that is inherited from nature? This question in turn raises the spectre of a "human nature". Most ideological systems that might be regarded as such in the pejorative sense (from the point of view of Marxism) rest upon some static conception of human nature. However, the Marxist posits human nature as the dynamic aspect of human development, i.e. the tendency of agents to labour on their environment. This purposive critical transformative action impacts upon nature, but also upon the agent because consciousness rests upon material reality and upon our ability to transform that reality. This emergence of a human nature characteristic of the species is the result of the interplay between natural selection and the development of society that reinforces the process of evolution.

Human consciousness is markedly different from the consciousness possessed by animals. The critical aspect is not merely grafted onto a natural heritage. The critical capacity of humans, and their nature as labourers, transforms the consciousness at every level. The animal has an awareness, which is contingent upon its impressionistic and immediate knowledge of external reality. This awareness is impinged upon by the impulses arising from its nature as an animal of a given species, its biological needs and the conditioning of its memory.

This is in contrast to a human agent. For the human, knowledge of external reality is given by the senses, but is immediately subject to a semi-critical awareness, and which can pass into full critical consciousness (for example, by entering our linguistic thought processes). Likewise the relationship between human awareness and the human memory is an active and semi-critical relationship. All components of the human’s mind are therefore radically altered from those of the animal mind by virtue of their critical interrelationships, and through the tendency to labour. Awareness is semi-critical in that consciousness is not merely a critical capacity. Consciousness as a whole is derived from memory, sense data, moods and so on. However, a rigid separation cannot be made between these factors because the critical nature of humans places the mind in an active relationship with itself that transforms the mind as a totality. For the human, all urges and impulses are sublimated by the critical awareness and subsequently transformed by the mind as a whole. Impulses that appear superficially identical to animal impulses (hunger, lust, etc.) can only reach consciousness in a way that we are at least partially critical of, and these sublimated impulses can only be acted on within the context of social being. The action then passes into memory as a critical action on external reality.

In summary then, the critical capacity, evolving through chance mutation and reinforced by natural selection (through co-operation as much as competition) acting on social groups and individual organisms, transforms the rest of the consciousness. The mind as a whole becomes semi-critical, with the intentional aspects of criticism asserting themselves against the welter of sense impression, impulses derived from needs, etc. This semi-critical nature gives a social and critical dimension to human behaviour in general. Finally, the process of labour is part of human nature in that the relationship it creates between agent and environment affirms the agent materially and in the sense of verifying the awareness in practice.

This view of the workings of the human mind appears to leave little place for free will. However, the aim is not to relegate agency to the role of rational evaluation and the performance of action on this basis. The various histories of individuals will ensure that individual agents do not respond in an obvious or predictable way to every circumstance. However, the materialistic account of reality described earlier does raise questions about the nature of free will. Of course, the paradox of free will is part of the heritage of the enlightenment and modernity. The increasing obsession with the individual (presupposed in the Cartesian manner) does not fit easily with the rational structure of the natural sciences that emerged at a similar time. Both factors were the result of the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, which necessarily posits humans in an individualistic manner, and which necessarily seeks scientific knowledge in an attempt to revolutionise the means of production.

This problem is solved if we return to the distinction raised earlier between epistemological and ontological reduction. The ontology of the mind does rest on the interactions of the brain (which encodes consciousness is some manner), the natural world and so on. (The one qualification to this is the probabilistic influence of quantum mechanics which may impinge upon consciousness.) Nevertheless, free will cannot be reduced into physics (or anything else) because such a reduction is intractable, and because such a reduction would ignore the context in which a phenomenology of consciousness must be described. Human action can be guessed at in advance through an evaluation of social factors, individual psychologies and so on, but the human in question can always surprise or behave in a socially novel manner. Thus, the phenomenon of free will is neither mystical nor illusory. It is a consequence of the irreducible nature of consciousness.

Needless to say, I would also give great weight to the influence of social structures, irreducible into individual agency, in conditioning consciousness. However, Marxism does also stress power of agents to affect social structures. This is well summed up in Marx’s famous dictum "individuals make history, but they do not do so in conditions of their own choosing".