this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
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I have read all of those books. Honestly, an overrated series by far.
I've hated much of philosophy but it's because I have a somewhat contrarian and view which I am very convinced is correct but few else agree with me.
Most every philosopher implicitly or explicity adopts a dualist structure similar to (or directly taken from) Kant's phenomenon-noumenon distinction. Although Chalmers later popularized a renaming of this to the "subjective experience" and "objective reality" distinction.
Idealists point out that the noumenon is problematic because by definition it is outside of observation therefore fundamentally unobservable directly or indirectly so we can never say anything about it, so they advocate getting rid of it, leaving us just with the phenomenon.
That is where 99.9% of philosophers sit: either they believe in this dualist distinction (which I will just refer to as "representationalism" but maybe it's not the best label), or they only believe in the phenomenon (idealism).
But Kant himself stated quite clearly that his noumenal-phenomenal distinction requires both concepts together because they are defined in relation to one another, so logically it makes no sense to speak of the noumenon without explicitly or implicitly contrasting it with the phenomenon, and vice-versa.
That is to say, the two concepts come and go together... and I don't take this to mean we should keep both, but the opposite: the two must be discarded together.
Idealism is a bizarre one-sided philosophy that personally I don't even agree is fully coherent because it relies on concepts to define itself which inherently imply an "outside" "noumenal" world to even make sense yet then denies it.
They are right to question the noumenon but end up at nonsense because they don't go the full way: you have to throw out the entire representationalist framework. Every book that tries to establish idealism starts by assuming representationalism and then later denying half of it. Not a single one of them just derives it from its own premises, and that leaves me skeptical it's even possible to do so.
I'd highly recommend the book Toward a Contextual Realism by Jocelyn Benoist. He's one of the few I'm aware of who criticizes representationalism. If you abolish the whole dualist framework, then you also by extension abolish the supposed "explanatory gap" between what we observe and the real world. As Benoist argues, there is actually nothing logically inconsistent about taking what we perceive for being reality as it is, not a "representation" of reality "in the mind" but reality as such.
Benoist does a great job tearing down all the arguments that supposedly establish that we can't see the real world, such as arguments from illusions or dreams or "phenomenoality" or whatever. People constantly repeat arguments that they think are slam dunks in favor of representationalism that fall apart with like five seconds of scrutiny.
When you come to this position, a significant portion of philosophy becomes boring. Without representationalism, you can't derive, for example, Chamlers' so-called "hard problem" or even his concepts of "subjective experience," and thus you cannot even derive his concept of "consciousness."
A significant portion of western philosophy is to supposedly "solve" Chalmers' hard problem by introducing a "theory of consciousness," but all of this is entirely meaningless if you are not a representationalist to begin with.
I have seen so many books and papers where I start reading and they start immediately using representationalist categories like "subjective experience" or "phenomenonality" and I roll my eyes and immediately put it down.
When it comes to philosophy I tend to have an extremely conservative stance, which tends to make me very contrarian because philosophy books sell better if they are weird and mysterious, but any time someone says something bizarre, I become highly skeptical and ask if we really need to believe that bizarre claim and if they have genuinely established it as necessary.
Representationalists I just do not find have convincingly established that you have to abandon the idea that you can perceive the world. Especially since it leads directly to problems like the "hard problem," it doesn't seem logically consistent to claim you can't perceive the world, and then somehow later explain how the world is knowable through perception that supposedly had nothing to do with it.
I tend to be very contrarian because I apply this conservative approach to everything. I've been critical of the whole change from "materialism" to "physicalism" you see in the literature which originated by the reification of fields, but I've written articles on my blog criticizing this because nothing about the mathematics of fields implies we have to think of them as physical entities in the world, but rather ways of describing the dispositions of the objects we do perceive, and so traditional materialism is perfectly compatible with the mathematics of fields.
I also wrote a whole book on how people misrepresent the mathematics of quantum mechanics and special relativity to necessarily imply we need to abandon materialism, and I step through the mathematics of every famous paper on the subject and show that none necessitate that conclusion at all, but they ways arise from a long list of assumptions which we could drop one of those other assumptions instead.
(i.e. if you assume X, Y, and Z to disprove materialism, it could mean materialism is false, but it could also mean X, Y, or Z are false.)
My views are wacko and contrarian because I believe we can see reality and that reality consists of matter governed by nomological laws of motion, whereas almost every modern day thinker invents far more complicated towers of metaphysics, claiming we live in some giant multiverse governed by consciousness or some bizarre shit, and my view is that a critical analysis of their arguments all shows them to fall short of necessitating these conclusions.
Of course, you may say you believe in something for reasons other than necessity. But my contrarian view is that we should be skeptical of any extraordinary philosophical claim unless it is shown to be necessary, and that's a burden people constantly pretend they have met while never having actually met.
This has made my views on much of modern philosophy and especially western philosophy very negative because just any paper or book you start reading clearly begins with a bunch of questionable metaphysical claims they never justify and it makes me hard to get past the first page before I'm already completely off of the train with what they're trying to argue.
Anyways sorry for the rant but it is tiresome how obsessed philosophers are with abstract towers of bizarre metaphysical and how little they ever care to scrutinize their premises, to actually question whether or not those bizarre claims are actually necessary, probably because of audience capture: everyone wants to be told something bizarre because that makes the philosophy "interesting," and I am the boring skeptic who always comes a long and says "erm actually..."
"What if nothing is real and everyone who tries to search for answers is dumb" <- Western philosophy since the 70s.
Western philosophy is stuck repeating the idealism of the 18th to 19th century to avoid ever engaging with diamat.
Too bad Lenin died in 1924 because I would love to see his critiques of Postmodernism.
He criticized positivism which is the cultural hegemon of western science, which goes hand in hand with post-modernism the hegemon of culture.
I hate that every 18th century philosopher can't use simple language.
Marx and Engels' biggest achievement was making Hegel make sense.
I can at least respect them because all non-Marxists of the 20th century compete to be as confusing as possible for no real reason while they at least tried to think of something useful.
What is even worse is that academics will also not use simple language to describe 18th century philosopher's work. So it is a double whammy.
Reject modern academics, embrace Lenin's notes on Hegel lol
I have not read Lenin's notes on Hegel, but I have read Lenin before such as The State and Revolution and Imperialism, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, What Is to Be Done?, and the Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism. I am good at reading his political writing, but I stumble among anything economic which the Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism had much of, although I also stumbled upon Karl Marx's Wage Labour and Capital.
I recommend you to read it. Not because it's as important as other Lenin's works^[to be clear: it's not useless. You can learn how Lenin learned. It's just not very practical] (you can safely skip it) or very informative (other Marxists like Mao have already done the job to take important insights), but because it's hilarious that sometimes Lenin goes like "wtf is this" at some paragraph written by Hegel.
hence the "lol" since Lenin's confusion is way more informative than modern academics.
Here's an example:
Two important things: (1) Die Objektivität # des Scheins[39]
Note: "NB: unclear, return to it!!
Lenin is so sassy, they are entertaining works.
I will look into it.
"Philosophy is and always has been class philosophy. Philosophers may not realise this, but that does not alter the fact. For people do not and cannot think in isolation from society, and therefore from the class interests and class struggles which pervade society, any more than they can live and act in such isolation." - Maurice Cornforth
Western philosophers are like: "You sit in a dark room, covered in piss. Do you still smell bad if your nose has stopped working? Takes hit of pipe. This is a metaphor for class struggle which isn't real and all your suffering is in your head. Now go clean my toilet, Jarvis."
“what if i’m the only that’s sentient and everybody else is a fucking NPC meatbag” solipsism
No major philosopher has ever been a solipsist, nor is it taken as a serious possibility by the philosophical community. Am I missing something?
I hate philosophy.
"If my premises are true, then my conclusion is true."
But you haven't demonstrated that the premises are true, and often the logic leading to the conclusion is flawed. Stupid people eat it up and shit it back out into society.
Not to sound cheeky, but we have to make some assumptions to get anywhere. We have very strong reasons for accepting dialectical materialism, but I'm not sure even those could be a demonstration that it's true. So we're left with "if dialectical materialism is true, then __".
We have very strong reasons for accepting dialectical materialism
Such as?
It's explanatory and predictive power. We can make sense of past events in terms of balance of forces. And, in the case of capitalism, it allows us to predict its replacement with socialism. Capitalism produces its own gravediggers, as Marx put it.
I'm not understanding. Can you connect the dots between dialectial materialism and how it predicts socialism?
Sure thing. So the dialectical materialist view of capitalism is that it is a relation between workers and capitalists. Crudely, the capitalist class wants the working class to produce as much as possible for as little as possible (provided the working class as a whole gets enough to reproduce itself). The working class resists the attempts of the capitalist class to do so.
But the capitalist drive for profit (surplus value from exploited labor) leads to periodic crises. Worse, for capitalists, the means of production (think factories, farms, shipyards, etc) keep accumulating as well. This is a core contradiction in capitalism: the need to accumulate undermines the ability to accumulate.
In short, capitalism gets so good at producing stuff that it requires different management techniques. This is socialism: very large enterprises under the democratic control of workers.
Why? Again, because the contradictions inherent in capitalism require it.
(Well, so long as capitalism doesn't succeed in overheating the planet first.)
I'm still trying to understand what "dialectical materialism" means.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/dialectical-materialism
For Marx and Engels, materialism meant that the material world, perceptible to the senses, has objective reality independent of mind or spirit.
Sounds right to me. Although I want to clarify, are they including light? We observe it with our senses, but it is massless, technically not matter.
Hegelian dialectics considers things in their movements and changes, interrelations and interactions.
Sure, that makes sense.
Everything is in continual process of becoming and ceasing to be, in which nothing is permanent but everything changes and is eventually superseded.
This gives me pause. Do we know this to be true? There is not a hard line between when a seed becomes a fruit. The macro objects we observe change, but the underlying particles just move. Molecules change; atoms change; baryons do not.
Marx and Engels change was inherent in the nature of the material world. They therefore held that one could not, as Hegel tried, deduce the actual course of events from any “principles of dialectics”; the principles must be inferred from the events.
It sounds like it has little to no predictive power. We observe events and infer "principles" from them. In hard science terms, we observe, hypothesize, experiment, and theorize. Repeatable experiments help us predict what will happen under similar conditions.
The concept of dialectical materialism—which is a theoretical basis for a method of reasoning—should not be confused with “historical materialism,” which is the Marxist interpretation of history in terms of the class struggle.
Is that the one you were referring to?
the contradictions inherent in capitalism require it. (Well, so long as capitalism doesn't succeed in overheating the planet first.)
Right, so... I still have no reason to believe dialectical materialism. The argument was that it has predictive power, but we don't know what will happen.
Another possibility I am thinking of: the capitalist class uses their resources to effectively enslave the working class through a combination of automation and surveillance. In this hypothetical, their control is airtight and revolution is impossible. Any dissent is punished with death. Forced breeding maintains the slave population if necessary, humans become more expendable. I am curious how that scenario might end.
I agree that capitalism is unsustainable and I would like to try some form of socialism, but I don't see how socialism is the inevitable outcome.
It's possible I'm just not understanding, or that I found a flawed definition. Thank you for the explanation.
Well, I won't be able to do this topic justice due to limited time, but I hope I can at least point you in the right direction.
Maybe the best place to start if you're new to this is the Communist Manifesto. It's short and to the point, and contains gems like:
the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
The serf-lord relation of feudalism came under threat with the development of productive forces. The lords/aristocrats had the basis of their economic power, land ownership, undercut by new economic power managed by the new capitalist class. The more the latter developed, the more unsustainable the former became, until the serfs were "liberated" from their feudal plots, becoming landless members of the new working class.
The "dialectical" part here is the relationship between the opposing forces, and the "materialism" is the economic aspect. As you say, unlike Hegel, Marx and Engels rejected the idea that it was "thought" that caused such changes in class relations. Rather, changes in thought followed those changes.
I'll have to leave it there for now, but some additional resources are:
- this excellent study guide put together by comrade Cowbee (you could jump straight to section 3, but I'd highly recommend Why Socialism? by Einstein)
- or, if you want to jump right in to the deep end, John Bellamy Foster has a great interview related to these topics here
Most importantly, I hope you stick around on Lemmygrad. Keep reading, ask questions when you're not sure about things, and comrades will be here to answer!
That was one of my problems with philosophy 101 when we were talking about what is 'good (moral)' versus what isn't. My first question was "how are you defining good?" and that was laughed at and we just moved on. Like.. uhhh okay I guess I'm dumb?
On that point, she let us fight it out, mainly because she was big on writing assignments.
That's a fair critique of pure philosophy (like the Analytical tradition), but modern science is mostly "if the null hypothesis is rejected, then this will happen."
The argument itself is a way to look for things in the real world and can, and should, be discarded as soon as demonstration proves it false.
Philosophers explain the world, but they need to use philosophy to change it.
The argument itself is a way to look for things in the real world and can, and should, be discarded as soon as demonstration proves it false.
Holy shit, that is so backwards it hurts.
Don't accept claims without sufficient evidence.
Superstition is deadly.
To be clear, I agree with you. I don't think I was clear in my comment.
Thank you, that was not clear.
Philosophers explain the world, but they need to use philosophy to change it.
But they explain the world with magical thinking, and as a result they might change it for the worse without realizing. I am a big fan of relying on physical evidence to guide our decisions.
Imagination is good. That's the point. But not everything we imagine need be enacted. Most of us get caught up in imagining what's easy for us to envision. The mistakes come in not being able to envision variables that change everything.
In sociology, they called it latent and dominant effects.
Key word, "if." I liked Syllogistic Logic, too, but also critical reading was a prereq.
I know this isn’t really what you mean, but technically Marx, Engels, and a sizeable chuck of Marxist theorists were western philosophers lol
This was a vent post and I meant to say I hate parts of western philosophy especially the stuff I am being taught in my American college class on business ethics.
I hope you have an instructor who doesn't give you low marks for not giving "in the box" answers on essay questions. I was failing about a quarter through, and I finally asked "the smart kid," with whom I regularly explored philosophy and religions, among other things, how he was doing so well. Luckily he told me she wanted textbook answers, so I pulled it up to a B. Otherwise, I enjoyed it.
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All my homies HATE Reneé Decartes (if I got that right, fuck him anyway)
any specific reason? I never saw someone hating him
He did cogito, ergo sum or "i think therefore i am" which is taken as gospel in the West. This is a foundational piece of idealism which believes ideas create material conditions which is rival to materialism and Marxism which says that material conditions are largely responsible for shaping ideas. Cogito, ergo sum is ingrained to children as fact in schools despite it lacking any scientific credibility as it is only a philosophical theory.
he redeemed himself through mathematics, at least, with the Cartesian plane, which was very important to shape today's material conditions in positive ways. I think Kant is way more guilty than Descartes since he was 100% into idealism.
He was a merc.
Descartes is typically interpreted as claiming that there are actually two fundamental substances: the material and immaterial, often framed as "mind & body". This is called "Cartesian Dualism". How they supposedly interact is less clear.
I mean, I haven't studied him extensively but Kant seems okay. Although maybe im biased because I find him relatable personally
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