The Principle of the Material Unity of the World

The answer of the Marxist philosophy to the question of the unity of the world is: innumerous things and phenomena in the world are unified in matter, and matter is the origin of the world. The real unity of the world consists in its materiality.

What is the origin of the world? Is it matter or spirit? Materialism and idealism give different answers to this question. Idealism holds that the world is unified in spirit, and ideas, consciousness and spirit are the sole origin of the world, and that various kinds of things in the world are a product of the spirit; on the other hand, materialism holds that the world is unified in matter, and all the things and phenomena in the world are forms of appearance and products of matter. Marxist philosophy upholds materialism. But before Marxism, old materialism had a limited knowledge of matter. Old materialism reduced the concept of matter into a certain substance, into structures of matter (molecules, atoms, etc.); Marxism further abstracted and refined the concept of matter, and put forth that the sole property of matter is to be an objective reality. Engels’ determination of the concept of matter is that “matter is nothing but the totality of material things from which this concept is abstracted and motion as such nothing but the totality of all sensuously perceptible forms of motion; words like matter and motion are nothing but abbreviations in which we comprehend many different sensuous perceptible things according to their common properties.” Lenin summed up the essence of the crisis of physics in the early 20th century and clearly pointed out that the property of matter in philosophy is “objective reality”: “Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.” The sole “property” of matter is to be an objective reality, of existing outside our consciousness, it is objective reality that is independent of human consciousness but reflected by human consciousness. The concept of matter of the Marxist philosophy includes two basic points: one is that matter has objective reality and does not depend on human consciousness; the other is that matter and its laws of development can be known by man.

The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, which is proved by the long-term, constant and sustained development of philosophy and natural science. First of all, by constant enrichment and development of science, such as geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, life sciences, etc., vigorous irrefutable facts have proved that the universe is the material world, that the universe, including the earth, is composed of helium, oxygen, magnesium, nitrogen, carbon, sulfur, calcium, sodium, nickel and other chemical elements, and that there is no supra-natural God. The phenomenon of life is a particular form of motion of matter, it is the mode of being of protein body, and life activity is the supersession of the old by the new based on proteins and nucleic acids. There is no insurmountable gap between the inorganic and the organic world. As a natural and living real being, man is the result of long evolution of nature, appeared in the long evolutionary process of the material world from simple to complex and from the lower to the higher, an organic part of the unified material world. Further, man exists in a social mode, and human society has materiality. Man is a part of the nature, and the material means of life that man depends on for survival can only be obtained from the nature. Fundamentally speaking, the materiality of human society is determined by the objective materiality of man’s physical organization, his bodily organs and the resulting natural needs, as well as the means and modes of satisfying them. Natural needs are a universal interconnection between man, a being with life, and the external nature, an objectively existing relation; the mode by which man satisfies his natural needs through his labor is also an objective being. The material productive activity is the most fundamental activity of human social existence, and it is an objective activity that does not depend on human consciousness. Finally, the history of human society is the history of the production of material means. In the process of reshaping nature with the means of labor, productive forces of society are formed and certain relations of production of matter are formed among men. Productive forces are man’s material power to change nature and the relations of production are the material relations formed in the process of material production, which are independent of human will. On the basis of the contradictory unity of productive forces and relations of production, a corresponding superstructure is formed. Productive forces determine the relations of production, and the economic foundation determines the superstructure, which is an objective law independent of men’s will, and determines the course of development of social formations.

The principle of the material unity of the world is the foundation of the dialectical materialist philosophy and the standpoint of the scientific world outlook and methodology. Acknowledging the material unity of the world is of great significance for objecting to all kinds of idealism and subjectivism in real life, and for upholding the principle of seeking truth from facts. Xi Jinping emphasized that we should learn and master the principle that the world is unified in matter, and that matter determines consciousness, and that we should uphold formulating policies and promoting work by starting out from the objective reality.