Materialism is a philosophical movement that denies the spiritual essence of things, relying primarily on the evolutionary component in the genesis of the external, in relation to man, world. A characteristic feature of this approach is the complete denial of the existence of God and other higher substances.
In addition, for materialists it is important not so much to comprehend the essence of the processes occurring around, as to search for a logical and pseudoscientific explanation of the origin, existence of physical space. In this sense, it can be argued that materialism is a doctrine of the corporeality of the world and things in this world. For comparison: idealism with its concept of the primary nature of a higher ideal (no matter what form it is in) makes the main bet on self-knowledge of the ideal, the search for God within itself. In other words, for the representatives of materialism, the main category is the physical world as an objective reality, for idealists - the human "I" as a spiritual projection of higher forces.
Human consciousness and physics of the world
The denial of the spiritual principle led to the fact that materialists, starting from the Renaissance, needed to somehow integrate human consciousness into the evolutionary physics of everyday reality. And here a problem arose, since the Christian worldview did not allow to completely deny the divine essence of man. A solution was found in the search for a moral and ethical ideal - the humanists went this way, turning materialism in philosophy into a prototype of social and political theory. Later, French thinkers only formalized the established concepts into proto-modern theories of law and constitutionalism. Materialism is ethics and law. So can conditionally denote the value era of the 15-18 centuries.
Two approaches
The revival of materialism clearly posed the question: what is primary and what is secondary? It turned out that materialism is not only a search for the general laws of the development of nature, but also a definition, more precisely, an awareness of the primary source of the world. Vulgar materialism was looking for primordial matter, in fact, it was a continuation of the Greek tradition (Democritus, Empedocles). Consistent materialism proceeded from the mechanical principle of explaining objective laws that exist outside of human consciousness. However, paradoxically, it was precisely consecutive materialism in transit through dialectical materialism that came to the conclusion about the phenomenological nature of matter. According to this logic, which V. Lenin finally laid out, it turned out that the surrounding reality is just a representation that exists in our consciousness, and consciousness itself is an objective reality. And this, in turn, meant that the outside world can be constructed in its own image and likeness. As a result, man took the place of God, which was especially clearly seen in Soviet Marxism.
Cartesian doubt
In addition, we must not forget that the theory of materialism was substantially transformed after R. Descartes introduced his principle of doubt. It turned out that all the logical arguments of the materialists, however, like other philosophers, do not go beyond the framework of the logical circle: if consciousness is recognized as a part of the objective world, knowledge of this very objective world is possible only through individual consciousness. Breaking the circle means recognizing some things not only objectively existing, but also believing in them. And this means that the source of any materialistic concept is the idealistic position of the philosopher himself.
