the-history-of-philosophy-a-marxist-perspective
TLDR
The thesis
Philosophy is a 2,500-year war between materialism and idealism.
Idealism is religion in secular clothes, ruling-class ideology, a way to justify the existing order by directing attention away from this world. Materialism is the class enemy of whatever order currently rules. University philosophy departments are “trenches in the war between the classes” disguised as ivory towers. Woods states his partisanship openly on page one and accuses all “objective” academics of hiding theirs.
The engine of real progress is dialectics: contradiction driving change, unity of opposites, quantity turning into quality, everything in flux. Every thinker gets graded on two axes: materialist vs idealist, and dialectical vs static/formal.
The arc
Ancient Greece. Ionian materialists (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Democritus, Epicurus) anticipate atoms, evolution, conservation of matter.
Heraclitus invents dialectics. Then Pythagoras and Plato mount an idealist counter-revolution — soul/body dualism, eternal forms — fueled by the social crisis of slave society and a priestly elite with leisure to despise manual labor. Aristotle wavers toward materialism but is later hijacked by the Church.Christianity and the Dark Ages. Rome decays, mystical oriental cults flood in, Christianity wins by being bought off by Constantine. The Church exterminates pagan science and philosophy. The murder of Hypatia is Woods’ emblem: rational culture butchered by a Christian mob. Europe is “lit only by fire” for a millennium.
Islam. The Arabs keep the flame. Islamic Spain — Cordoba, Granada — is vastly superior to Christian Europe in science, math, tolerance, culture. Averroes transmits Aristotle back into Europe. The Crusades are bloodthirsty barbarian raids by Christians against their cultural superiors.
Middle Ages. Scholasticism arguing about angels. The battle plays out as Realism (Augustine/Plato — universals are real divine archetypes) vs Nominalism (Abelard, Ockham — universals are just names). Nominalism is the materialist crack in the wall. Thomas Aquinas bastardizes Aristotle to save Platonism for the Church.
Renaissance. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bruno (burned), Harvey break the Church’s cosmology. Bacon and Hobbes revive materialism in English empirical form, but Woods flags a deep flaw: empiricism is a one-sided, mechanical materialism — man as passive observer, nature as dead clockwork. It produces science but ends up sterile.
Berkeley and Hume then push empiricism to its logical self-destruction: if we only know sense-data, we can’t know that matter exists (Berkeley — openly a reactionary, wanting to save God from Newton) or that causation exists (Hume). Subjective idealism sneaks back in through empiricism’s own door. This is the “dead end of empiricism.”
Spinoza and Leibniz. Paradoxically, the real advances come from the idealists, because they’re not shackled to narrow observation. Spinoza is the secret hero: his “God or Nature” is materialism with the name changed. One substance, thought and extension as its attributes, universe uncreated and eternal, freedom = understanding necessity. Leibniz anticipates atomism via monads and dialectics of motion.
French materialists (Holbach, Helvétius, La Mettrie, Diderot) civilize English materialism, push it to atheistic and revolutionary conclusions, prepare the Bastille.
Kant. Recognizes contradictions are inherent in reason (the antinomies — a huge merit, reintroduces dialectics), but chickens out by declaring the Thing-in-Itself unknowable. Agnosticism as a backdoor letting religion back in. His “unknowable” is the single most harmful idea modern bourgeois philosophy has seized on (Heisenberg, logical positivism).
Hegel. The pinnacle. Everything is process, contradiction, development. Quantity into quality, unity of opposites, negation of the negation. The entire system of dialectics worked out. But: upside down — idealist. History is the march of Spirit/Idea, not real humans in real production relations.
Feuerbach smashes Hegel’s idealism but throws out the dialectic with it. One-sided. Abstract “Man.”
Marx. Recovers the dialectic, flips Hegel onto his feet. Key move: thought isn’t contemplation, it’s practice. “Thought is matter that has become conscious of itself.” Humans transform nature through labor and thereby transform themselves. Truth is tested in practice, not in the study. The 11th Thesis on Feuerbach — philosophers have interpreted the world; the point is to change it — is the curtain.
Philosophy ends here. Not because nothing is left to think, but because philosophy-as-speculation dissolves into science + revolutionary practice. Everything since — analytic, logical positivism, postmodernism — is “senile decay of bourgeois thought,” a dog chasing its own tail over words. Woods quotes Peter Unger (a recanting analytic philosopher) as his witness: five decades of empty ideas.
The lens
Every thinker gets judged by:
- Did they push toward materialism or retreat into idealism?
- Did they grasp dialectics or cling to static formal logic?
- Whose class interests did their philosophy serve?
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Husserl, Russell — all absent or dismissed in passing. The book’s canon is explicitly pre-Hegelian Western + Marx/Engels/Lenin/Trotsky as authoritative interpreters. Oriental philosophy: gets an apology.
It’s a polemic — he says so — not a balanced history. Read as “here’s how an orthodox dialectical-materialist Trotskyist sees the canon,” it’s coherent and often sharp. Read as history of philosophy, it has obvious blind spots.
Clopus 4.7 on what woods would say to the ones that woulds did not give a chapter in the book
Nietzsche. Reactionary individualist masquerading as rebel. His “will to power” and contempt for “herd morality” is the ideology of an exhausted bourgeoisie in its imperialist phase, dressing up despair as aristocratic defiance. No dialectics, no real engagement with material history — just aphoristic posturing and a glorification of the strong individual that later fed directly into fascism. His critique of Christianity is sharp but stops where it matters: he diagnoses the sickness of bourgeois morality and prescribes more sickness.
Kierkegaard. The retreat into the individual soul carried to its logical conclusion. Faith as a “leap” against reason, the anguished ego as the final court — pure subjective idealism in religious clothing. Exactly the kind of introspective mysticism a Marxist expects from a society that has lost confidence in itself: give up on understanding the world, turn inward, suffer meaningfully. Woods would file him next to Plotinus — a symptom of decay, not a thinker.
Wittgenstein. Early and late, both wrong, both emblematic. The Tractatus is logical-positivist word-fetishism: draw a boundary around what can be said, declare the rest “mystical,” and hand metaphysics back to religion through the tradesman’s entrance. The late Wittgenstein’s “language games” is the same disease in fuzzier clothes — philosophy as semantic throat-clearing, the dog chasing its tail Woods names directly. Exhibit A for philosophy’s senile decay.
Heidegger. The ultimate mystification. Dense neologisms hiding reactionary content; Being inflated into a quasi-theological mystery; history reduced to “the history of Being” rather than class struggle. His Nazi sympathies are not an accident — they’re what you get when you treat rootedness, authenticity, and destiny as deeper than material conditions. Objective idealism at its most obscurantist, with none of Hegel’s honest rigor.
Husserl. Phenomenology as subjective idealism with better hygiene. “Bracket” the external world, study consciousness as it presents itself — in other words, make Kant’s Thing-in-Itself official policy and call it science. Woods would say it’s a sophisticated way of staring at your own perceptions while the real world carries on without you; Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach dispatched this move a century in advance.
Russell. Woods actually quotes him constantly — usually to use his admissions against him. Respects his intelligence, despises his philosophy: a vulgar empiricist in the Hume line who admits Hume led to scepticism and then shrugs. His “neither apple will taste like roast beef nor sun will rise has rational justification” is the reductio ad absurdum of the whole Anglo-Saxon tradition. Arrogant dismissals of Spinoza and Hegel betray exactly the narrow empirical mentality that’s been Britain’s philosophical curse since Bacon. Clever, witty, and wrong.
Chinese philosophy. Woods would tip his hat to the early dialecticians — he already quotes Hui Shih (“The sky is as low as the earth; each creature is just dying at birth”) approvingly alongside Heraclitus, and invokes yin/yang as intuitive grasp of the unity of opposites. Taoism’s flux-and-reversal, the I Ching’s play of opposing forces — all seeds of real dialectical thinking, arising independently in a different civilizational soil. But he’d argue Chinese thought got stuck at the intuitive-poetic stage, never forced through the Hegel-Marx crucible into scientific dialectics. The culprit is the “Asiatic mode of production” (Marx’s term) — a bureaucratic-imperial order with a weak merchant class that never broke through to capitalism, so no bourgeois revolution, no scientific materialism, no philosophical showdown with religion of the kind Europe had. Confucianism he’d read as straightforwardly ideological: a ruling-class code for hierarchy and obedience, the mandarin counterpart to Scholastic theology. Mohism’s materialist and utilitarian streak would get a nod. Overall verdict: brilliant anticipations, arrested development, waiting for Marxism to complete what it started.
Indian philosophy. Woods would single out Charvaka / Lokayata — the ancient Indian materialist, atheist, anti-Vedic school — as the hero, crushed by orthodox Brahmanism the way Epicurus was crushed by Christianity. Their insistence that only matter is real, that consciousness emerges from matter, that the priests are parasites living off superstition, would get pages of sympathetic quotation. The rest he’d treat harshly. Vedanta and most of the orthodox schools are the apotheosis of idealism — the world as maya, reality as Brahman, the self dissolved into the Absolute — exactly the “turning away from the world” he attacks in Plotinus and Plato. Buddhism he’d read with more nuance: an early revolt against Brahmanical caste ideology with genuinely dialectical elements (dependent origination, impermanence, everything-is-flux is pure Heraclitus) — but fatally otherworldly, prescribing withdrawal and nirvana instead of changing the material conditions that produce suffering. The social substrate is caste society and the Asiatic mode again: an enormously sophisticated philosophical culture developed in conditions that blocked its materialist wing from ever winning. He’d close by insisting that the depth of Indian logic and metaphysics is real, but without the European detour through bourgeois revolution, empirical science, and the dialectic on its feet, it couldn’t finish the job — and the job, for Woods, is always the same job.
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Plato’s Idealism
Plato’s theory of knowledge, which Aristotle says is different from that of Socrates, was based on the idea that the object of knowledge must be permanent, eternal, and since nothing under the sun is permanent, we must seek stable knowledge outside this fleeting and deceitful world of material things. When Diogenes ridiculed the theory of Ideas, by saying he could see the cup, but not ―cupness,‖ Plato retorted that that was because he had eyes to see, but no intellect. And it is true that merely to base oneself on sense-perception is not enough. It is necessary to go from the particular to the universal. The fundamental flaw here is to think that the generalisations of the intellect can stand on their own, divorced from, and counterposed to, the material world from which, ultimately, they are derived. Marx and Engels in The Holy Family explained: in the philosophy of Idealism, the real relations between thought and being are stood on their head, ―for the absolute idealist, in order to be an absolute idealist, must necessarily constantly go through the sophistical process of first transforming the world outside himself into an appearance, a mere fancy of his brain, and afterwards declaring this fantasy to be what it really is, i.e., a mere fantasy, so as finally to be able to proclaim his sole, exclusive existence, which is no longer disturbed even by the semblance of an external world.‖ (MECW, Vol. 4, p. 140.) The sophistical trick whereby this is done was wittily explained in the same work: ―If from real apples, pears, strawberries and almonds I form the general idea ‗Fruit,‘ if I go further and imagine that my abstract idea ‗Fruit,‘ derived from real fruit, is an entity existing outside me, is indeed the true essence of the pear, the apple, etc., then—in the language of speculative philosophy—I am declaring that ‗Fruit‘ is the ‗Substance‘ of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. I am saying, therefore, that to be a pear is not essential to the pear, that to be an apple is not essential to the apple; that what is essential to these things is not their real existence, perceptible to the senses, but the essence that I have abstracted from them and then foisted on them, the essence of my idea—‘Fruit.‘ I therefore declare apples, pears, almonds, etc., to be mere forms of existence, modi, of ‗Fruit.‘ My finite understanding supported by my senses does of course distinguish an apple from a pear and a pear from an almond, but my speculative reason declares these sensuous differences inessential and irrelevant. It sees in the apple the same as in the pear, and in the pear the same as in the almond, namely ‗Fruit.‘ Particular real fruits are no more than semblances whose true essence is ‗the substance‘—‘Fruit.‘ (Ibid, pp. 57-8.) Far from advancing the cause of human understanding, the idealist method does not take us a single step forward. Only a study of the real, that is to say, material world, can deepen our understanding of nature and our place in it. By directing men’s eyes away from ―crude‖ material things towards the realm of so-called ―pure‖ abstraction, the idealists played havoc with the development of science for centuries. ―By this method one attains no particular wealth of definition. The mineralogist whose science was limited to the statement that all minerals are really ‗the Mineral‘ would be a mineralogist only in his imagination. For every mineral the speculative mineralogist says ‗the Mineral,‘ and his science is reduced to repeating this word as many times as there are real minerals.
Spinoza's Monism
Spinoza, by the strength of reason, and with the very limited scientific results available to him, arrived at one of the greatest hypotheses of all time. Breaking with Descartes, with his notion of a body without a soul and a soul without a body, he advanced the idea that body and mind are two attributes of one and the same thing. The universe is not composed of mind and matter, as alleged by Descartes’ dualism. There is only a single Substance, which contains within itself all the attributes of thought and being. It is infinite and eternal, and possesses all the potential to give rise to the abundance of phenomena we see in the universe.
Spinoza gives this Substance the name of “God”. But in reality, to make God equal to nature is to abolish God – a fact which was not lost on Spinoza’s enemies when they accused him of atheism. In Spinoza’s universe, infinite and eternal, and therefore uncreated and unbounded by heaven or hell, there is no room for a separate deity. Indeed, there is no room for anything whatsoever except Substance, which is just another way of saying nature.
Thus, in a strange way, the philosophy of Spinoza, despite its idealist appearance, is the real point of departure for materialism in the dialectical, that is, non-mechanical sense of the word. All that is necessary is to substitute the word ‘matter’ for ‘God’ and we get a perfectly consistent materialist position.