I was reading an easy primer on dialectical materialism. I didn’t get far because a nagging in the back of my mind telling me the foundation was unsteady.
I don’t have the original article handy, but they’d posited that idealism and materialism are fundamental opposites (before presenting arguments).
My question is: “why not both”? We have space & time and (as far as I know) nobody says one is the product of the other. Why couldn’t the material and the idea be like orthogonal axis? Or why couldn’t you posit that all is the ideals of some greater thing, appearing as material to us?
I guess I’m looking for a stronger foundation for materialism. I think valuable insights could be gleaned from it, but I don’t trust it’s foundations enough to use it.
This is liberal arrogance. Don’t worry, most of us educated in the Western system were brought up this way. It took me years to get through mine.
The answer is: be humble, your trust is not necessary for you to learn about materialism, you have no place worrying about USING it yet when haven’t even spent the requisite time learning about it.
An ananolgy might be an undergraduate dismissing linguistics after a primer on Wittgenstein. They never read a full text of Wittgenstein, they never read the debate between and among linguists, and they never struggled to understand what was actually being said. They just used their naiive undergrad vibes to be like " that sounds dumb" and ignored it for years, or forever.
You don’t have the privilege of us trying to convince you because you haven’t bothered to spend the time reading and learning enough to even make a meaningful post on the topic.
Don’t worry about whether or not you trust it. Go in humbly, learn, evaluate it, get deep, keep questioning it, read the debates. Don’t ask for vibes to counter your vibes.
No investigation, no right to speak.