"To be a materialist is to acknowledge objective truth, which is revealed to us by our sense-organs. To acknowledge objective truth, i.e., truth not dependent upon man and mankind, is, in one way or another, to recognise absolute truth(...)It is unconditionally true that to every scientific ideology (as distinct, for instance, from religious ideology), there corresponds an objective truth, absolute nature. You will say that this distinction between relative and absolute truth is indefinite. And I shall reply: yes, it is sufficiently ‘indefinite’ to prevent science from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term, from becoming something dead, frozen, ossified; but it is at the same time sufficiently ‘definite’ to enable us to dissociate ourselves in the most emphatic and irrevocable manner from fideism and agnosticism, from philosophical idealism and the sophistry of the followers of Hume and Kant"
Thats Lenin, because it grounds you in the material world, there is matter that exist objectively regardless of human perception, matter that has internal laws that govern its behavior, laws that can be learned (however partially) through careful study and experimentation.
Because that's what science has proven, as much as something can be known we know that matter exist. We know we are made of cells, we exist in a planet, surrounded by a star, composed of atoms. All science, including social sciences have an underlying assumption that reality is material, that's good enough for me. It's good enough to change the world and I don't really need it to be more than that.
It's the best quote I could find in my book, dialectical materialism is not empiricist and does not rely solely on sensory experience, otherwise it would be useless to analyze something like capitalism, which is a social process that exists objectively, but we can't see or touch.
No, science does not prescribe such a metaphysical leap, as long proven in modern philosophy: it only concerns with matter in terms of its content, not how matter in its entirety as such should apply its authority over subjective worldviews — so once again, you’re in fact grounding your prerequisite in idealism
You only said “not solely” and didn’t answer what otherwise it then relies on
There’s some miscommunication here. I think ‘objective truth’ is perhaps being used to mean something which would more accurately be communicated as ‘concrete truth’.
The question of truth in dialectical materialism is in itself the seemingly unending contradiction of the subjective and the objective - all human knowledge, perception and thought is composed of both subjective and objective forces. Objective reality is the basis of the human brain and all processes and experiences involved; the subjective is the mind which interprets and acts upon the objective world - abstracting patterns from perceived reality and combining them into a network of relational knowledge. Without objective reality the subjective would not exist, and without the subjective there would be no means to perceive and interpret reality.
The objective world (which goes beyond matter with advances in science since dialectical materialism was named) exists as a concrete truth.
“The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.” - Karl Marx, Gundrisse. Concrete truth still retains an inevitably subjective element, however through a concentration of determinations (I get hungry and weak if I do not eat, other creatures can be observed to die without access to food, I have learned from other people that I must consume food to stay alive -> I will die if I don’t eat and biological beings need a source of food/energy to live) there is patterned truth that can be abstracted and concretised through multitudes of interactions between the mind and the world. This is also the basis of the scientific method in a way, reproducibility is a vital part of proving something.
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u/TraditionalDepth6924 4d ago edited 4d ago
In what way in your view?