I met someone today that described themselves as a materialist. Which has hitched me, for whatever reason. Maybe because the conversation had a stilted quality to it. Like two people waiting for a surprise that the other was not going to, was not willing to deliver. In any case it got me thinking of the nature of idealism as opposed to materialism (this person said, 'I am a materialist, I do not believe in the utopian'. To which I think ‘then what the hell is any of this for’. But also maybe that’s why their standing on the corner distributing goods to people who need them and I am sitting around thinking about materialism versus idealism). I am an idealist, by way of a fairly basic understanding. It has crossed the bar into self myth at a certain point. When I reach into my memory for a reason, for an origin I plunge my hand into a murky stream and pull up the phrase: “That which is right is good and that which is good is right.” I have no idea where I heard this. I just know it is true and it is what I believe and I call it idealism.
A quick google search reveals that materialism is a philosophy propagated by Marx which deals wholly with the material, as opposed to the ideal; the spiritual realms. This is a philosophy of form manifest in the bodily consciousness. The ideal is that which is spiritual or non-embodied, or so says the google search. My main gateway through idealism is Hegel and his dialectic on the nature of recognition: “the lord-bondsman dialectic.” A piece certainly possessed of the ideal. A dialectic which brings us the material. Marx, having drawn on Hegel, could never have conceived of the proletariat, illuminated the hierarchy of class fundamental to his materialism, without the idealism of Hegel. Without Hegel's idealist notion of work. That the lord separates the bondsman from their labor, as Marx would say the factory worker was from theirs by the factory foreman, and thus separated from themselves, as Marx would say of the factory worker, obliterated by the piecemeal nature of their singular task. The ideal provides, as it often does, the heart of the material.
And so I think about the relationship between the material and the ideal. They are written about as being oppositional, but we see they are indeed lineal. Corroborative. The ideal, dare I say the utopian, paves its ground for the material concern. What does the material mean to me if I cannot have my spirit. What's that line: ``I don't want to join your revolution if I can’t dance”. What is dancing but ideal.
