“Thus, the materialist theory, the theory of the reflection of objects by our mind, is here presented with absolute clarity: things exist outside us. Our perceptions and ideas are their images. Verification of these images, differentiation between true and false images, is given by practice.”
This is Lenin’s explanation of materialism and the materialist theory of knowledge in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. With this understanding of reality comes many question as far as human existence goes. What we will focus on here is the question of meaning and of purpose.
Materialism, as has been identified, asserts that an objective reality exists beyond our ability to perceive it and the manner in which our sensations take it in. The thoughts in our minds, our idealized images of thinks, indeed, the entirety of our thought processes come from the input which our sensations seize from real things beyond that input. Objective truth is found among the subjectivities of our sensations through practice. What does this mean? Let us consult Engels, from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:
“Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon the information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive through them? And he proceeds to inform us that, whenever we speak of objects, or their qualities, of which he cannot know anything for certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on his senses. Now, this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before there was argumentation, there was action. Im Anfang war die That. [from Goethe’s Faust: ‘In the beginning was the deed.’] And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perception. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But, if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is proof positive that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves. And, whenever we find ourselves face-to-face with a failure, then we generally are not long in making out the cause that made us fail; we find that the perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and superficial, or combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by them — what we call defective reasoning. So long as we take care to train our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long as we shall find that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in one single instance, so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perception, scientifically controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are, by their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it.”
Having given a brief overview of the materialist conception of reality, and how truth is confirmed, we come to the question of meaning and purpose. What is meaning? Meaning is the concept of a body communicating a particular message. What is purpose? Purpose is the concept of something holding a reason for existence, based on the idea of it being designed for that task. The essentialist, the metaphysical philosophies assert that meaning and purpose are objective, typically divinely bestowed. Their answer to the question of the purpose of life is that it is to complete a particular task; to be sinless, to be happy, to make others happy, to combat suffering, to teach. Meaning is derived from these purposes, the correct interpretation of something is always its intent.
Marxism, as an atheistic philosophy, one which rejects the metaphysical in favor of the dialectical, of eternal motion, also rejects this understanding of meaning and purpose. Is there objective purpose behind anything? Perhaps if one defines it according to the actions and creations of intelligences, but this is merely their intent, and does not necessarily mean it is what something will be used for or what its effect will be. If a person creates a dress with the intent that a baby will wear it, what guarantee do they have that it will be put on a pug instead. For things that weren’t created by intelligences, there is no objective purpose, nor even intent. When discussing evolution, it is common that people will say this or that adaptation’s “purpose” is xyz. For example, that a poison dart frog is brightly colored with the purpose of discouraging predators from consuming them, to communicate that they are poisonous. This is a deeply inaccurate manner of describing unconscious adaptation. Engels discusses this in Anti-Dühring:
“What, then, is adaptation without conscious intention, without the mediation of ideas, which he [Eugen Dühring] so zealously opposes, if not such unconscious purposive activity? If therefore tree-frogs and leaf-eating insects are green, desert animals sandy-yellow, and animals of the polar regions mainly snow-white in colour, they have certainly not adopted these colours on purpose or in conformity with any ideas; on the contrary, the colours can only be explained on the basis of physical forces and chemical agents. And yet it cannot be denied that these animals, because of those colours, are purposively adapted to the environment in which they live, in that they have become far less visible to their enemies. In just the same way the organs with which certain plants seize and devour insects alighting on them are adapted to this action, and even purposively adapted.”
These adaptations do not have intent, and therefore do not have purpose, though they fulfill certain purposes. To ascribe purpose to evolutionary processes is to misunderstand evolution. Evolution has very little room for conscious, self-determination in its processes. Organisms are not literally “chosen” for survival. Rather, the characteristics favored by natural selection are favored by unconscious means. Animals with characteristics that enable them to survive and reproduce most effectively given the context they exist in are favored in the gene pool, leading to a long-term tendency toward the pronunciation of those favored characteristics, essentially by process of elimination. This occurs without the intervention of intent, except of course in the case of intelligences organizing artificial selection. When something performs a task without conscious intent, it is more accurate to say that it is performing a function rather than having a purpose.
Given that purpose is not necessarily objective, how can meaning be? Meaning, as the value judgement the mind makes on sensations, in fact entirely lacks any objectivity. A rock itself does not have meaning. It only “has” meaning when a person’s mind conceives of it as having such. Purpose is the output of intent, of communication in some cases, meaning the input of the effect of that communication, not always as intended. An art piece can have the intent to communicate a particular message, but this does not necessarily guarantee that its audience will find the same meaning as its creator intended. John Carpenter’s Halloween is famously analyzed by feminist scholars for misogynistic themes in the movie, especially interpretations of the victimization of the lustful and the survival of the virgin as communicating patriarchal morality in reaction to the US sexual revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s. Carpenter himself has dismissed these analyses, saying that he had the lustful characters killed in the story not to communicate a moral judgement, but because such characters would be too distracted to notice Michael Myers creeping up on them. His intent was not necessarily the meaning that audiences took in. Further, his assertion that he did not have the conscious intent to communicate a misogynistic message brings us to the unconscious reflection of the dominant ideology in meaning.
We have explained that materialism asserts a world beyond our sensations. Meaning, along with the morality tied to it, is the value judgement we make about this reality. The meaning is not in the reality itself, nor necessarily in our sensation of it itself, but in our mind’s value judgements of it. And these value judgements do not come from within. They are either reifications of the dominant ideology, or they are abstractions of our interests according to our class, colonial, and gendered status. The existentialists famously asserted that we must make our own meaning for life. This is a hopelessly incorrect, idealist understanding of meaning and how it is constructed. The individual does not arbitrarily choose meaning for life. What they see as the meaning of life, their value judgement of the objective, is, again, either a reflection of the dominant ideology, or a reflection of their material existence. One cannot construct their own meaning in a void, nor is this necessarily liberating. To understand meaning, one must understand that it is an abstraction of the material world. Once one has recognized this, they can begin to investigate its basis, and to express desires for liberation in real, material terms, in class terms, not in abstracted, metaphysical terms.
This does not mean one must reject the study of meaning and purpose. Rather, it means one must study how meaning and purpose are constructed from the material world, whose interests they are an expression of, and how they influence our perception of the material world. How masses of people interpret meaning can either be a reflection of the dominant ideology of the ruling class, or it can be an abstraction of their class interests. We must identify which is being expressed, or the degree to which each is expressed, in how people consume communication. The study of culture is the study of how people express and interpret their experience in the material world. People do not always directly express their class interests or their feelings about their place in the system of social relations. Most frame them in the terms of abstraction. And the first step to bringing people into a state of consciousness is to meet them where they dwell, even in the realm of abstraction. You cannot bring someone out of this realm if you do not acknowledge that they are within it. You must identify what is being abstracted before they can fully appreciate the scope of the material world and their interests within it. Battling primarily in the realm of the idea is incorrect practice, and can never bring liberation, but it is still important to acknowledge it. Let us finish with Marx, from The German Ideology:
“Further, the man who, as a youth, stuffed his head with all kinds of nonsense about existing powers and relations such as the Emperor, the Fatherland, the state, etc., and knew them only as his own ‘delirious fantasies’, in the form of his conceptions-this man, according to Saint Max [Stirner], actually destroys all these powers by getting out of his head his false opinion of them. On the contrary: now that he no longer looks at the world through the spectacles of his fantasy, he has to think of the practical interrelations of the world, to get to know them and to act in accordance with them. By destroying the fantastic corporeality which the world had for him, he finds its real corporeality outside his fantasy. With the disappearance of the spectral corporeality of the Emperor, what disappears for him is not the corporeality, but the spectral character of the Emperor, the actual power of whom he can now at last appreciate in all its scope.”
