Being

In Marxist philosophy, “being” is a category which is relative to thinking and consciousness and is synonymous with matter. Engels said: “The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being.” “Philosophers fall into two large camps depending on how they answer this question.” Whoever asserts that thinking is original to being, or spirit to nature, belongs to idealism. Whoever holds that being and nature are original belong to materialism. Marx said: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

In different schools of philosophy, the word “being” is used in different meanings. In Hegelian philosophy, “being” is the simplest determination of the absolute Idea. Hegel’s logic starts from being and deduces the whole world from being. Imitating Hegel’s concepts and methodology, Dühring’s “world schematism” deduced the “unity of the world” from the “oneness of being” and deduced the conclusion that “the world is unified in being”. Marxism upholds that matter is the origin of the world and opposes any attempt to give vague accounts of the unity of the world in terms of some kind of “being” beyond matter and consciousness. Against Dühring’s view, Engels said that “the unity of the world does not consist in its being”, but that “the real unity of the world consists in its materiality”, and that such materiality “is proved not by a few juggled phrases, but by a long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science.”