The formation of abstract ideas.
While thought and ideas, like language, originate from work, men also develop their thinking and ideas in the course of all their social activity.
When writing about the development of ideas or human consciousness for the peculiarity of human consciousness, it is that man is aware of things not only through complete perceptions but also through ideas Marx and Engels showed that consciousness from man it arises and develops “only from necessity, necessity, from relations with other men. Consciousness is, therefore, from the beginning a social product, and will continue to be so as long as men exist.”
Ideas are not the product of a pure intellectual process, nor are they mere automatic responses to stimuli that come to us from external objects. They are produced by human brains in the course of human social activity. They reflect the connections of men with each other and with the outside world, the real conditions of the existence of men.
The first and most elementary ideas derive directly from the immediate practical relationship with other surrounding people and objects. They are formed by naming the common characteristics of recognizable things in perception. From the beginning, as Marx has emphasized, “the production of ideas” arises from “the material activity and material exchange of men.” And from this activity and material exchange at its most elementary level, a complex of elementary ideas of external objects, of the self and of other people is already formed about the types and properties of objects and their various connections and uses for people.
In such ideas the salient characteristics of human objects and activities are more or less directly reflected, since we are immediately aware of them in perception. Such ideas constitute the basic and elementary equipment of human thought and communication. They are expressed in words that denote familiar objects, properties, and relationships of everyday objects and activities.
We all have a rich team of such ideas. Our possession of them represents considerable social achievement, but we take them for granted, we use them all the time, and all children learn them at an early age. Such are our ideas of the things of ourselves that concern our normal affairs, such as men and women, tables, chairs, cars, trees, flowers, dogs, etc. of the sensible properties of things, such as red, blue, hard, soft, large, small, etc. and of actions and relationships, such as running, walking, falling, up, down, etc., our own set of elementary ideas is obviously much larger than that of primitive man, precisely because we do so much more and are concerned with so many more objects. and relationships. However, the consciousness represented by such elemental ideas remains, “consciousness refers to immediate connection with other people and things.”
Learning to think
A condition for the development of abstract ideas is the separation of mental work from material. And it contains in itself contradictory potentialities. On the one hand, it allows the acquisition of a deep knowledge of the real connections of things and of the conditions of human existence that is contained in the immediate perceptual consciousness. On the other hand, it allows the growth of all kinds of fantasies and illusions.
Consequently, the whole process of intellectual development of society presents contradictory aspects. On the one hand, there has been an undoubted growth of genuine knowledge, that is, of true ideas, whose correspondence with reality has been verified, about nature, society and the relationships of men with nature. On the other hand, there has been the growth and elaboration of illusory ideas. As society has developed, men have developed illusions in their minds about themselves and the world in which they inhabit. Each epoch has been added to the sum total of human knowledge. And at the same time, each epoch has produced its characteristic illusions, which circumscribed, penetrated and colored all the intellectual production of that epoch.
It is here, then, that we find the root of the opposition and struggle of the materialistic and idealistic tendencies that has traversed the entire development of thought.
The opposition of the materialistic and idealistic tendencies is a fundamental opposition, arising from the very nature of thought itself, once it has developed to the level of abstract ideas. It arises with the separation of mental work from the material. When mental work begins to “emancipate itself from the world” as a theoretical activity, and to “become something other than existing practice,” the two alternative paths of theory immediately emerge to endeavor to understand things in their own connections and to explain what happens in the material world from the material world itself, which is materialism; or to launch into the realm of pure thought and represent the material and sensual world as dependent on thought and the product of thought, which is idealism. In other words, consider being as before thinking or thinking as before being.