Substance in philosophy

In the history of philosophy, the extremely broad category - "substance" (from Latin substantia - essence, what lies at the basis) is used to designate such a fundamental principle, which does not need for its existence in anything other than itself. Representatives of the first schools of philosophy as the first principle understood the substance from which all things are composed. As a rule, the matter was reduced to the accepted: earth, water, air, fire or mental structures, "first-brick" - an Apeiron, atoms. Later the concept of substance expanded to a certain ultimate basis - a permanent, relatively stable and existing whatever, to which all the diversity and variability of the perceived world was reduced. Such grounds in philosophy, for the most part, were: matter, God, consciousness, idea, phlogiston, ether, etc.

Different philosophical doctrines use the idea of substance in different ways, depending on how they respond to the question of the unity of the world and its origin. Those of them that proceed from the priority of one particular substance and build on it, build the rest of the world picture in the variety of its things and phenomena, were called "philosophical monism" (from the Greek tops - one, only). If two substances are taken as the first principle, then such a philosophical position is called dualism (from Latin to dual). And, finally, if more than two - pluralism (from Latin.

Varieties of monism

From the point of view of modern scientific ideas about the origin and nature of the world, as well as the struggle of various views that are most significant in the history of philosophy on the problem of the fundamental principle, two very common approaches to understanding the nature of the substance - materialistic and idealistic - should be distinguished.

The first of them, characterized as a materialistic monism, believes that the world is one and indivisible; it is original material, and it is materiality that underlies its unity. The spirit, the consciousness, the ideal of these concepts do not have a substantial nature and are derived from the material as its property or manifestations. We find such approaches in the most developed form in the representatives of the Miletus school, Heraclitus, Spinoza, Marx and his followers.

Idealistic monism, on the contrary, recognizes matter as a derivative of something ideal, possessing eternal existence, indestructibility and the fundamental principle of any being. At the same time, it can be identified as an objectively idealistic monism (for example, in Plato, these are eternal ideas, in medieval philosophy - God, in Hegel - a self-developing and self-developing "absolute idea"), and subjectively idealistic, as, for example, Mach, who deduced all the physical and mental states of reality from the "neutral" beginning - some speculative constructions, "elements" of the world.

Substance as the ultimate basis

The question of substance can not be ignored by any philosopher, since in the opposite case any of his arguments, no matter what they touch, seem to "hang in the air", for the question always arises of the ultimate grounds of what is at stake.

Take, for example, the theme of morality, seemingly far from clarifying what lies at the base of the world. At the same time, one can not ignore the fact that morality is directly related to both individual and public consciousness and only in close relationship with them and can be considered. But the question of the origin of consciousness in the history of philosophy is solved in different ways. So, for a representative of religious philosophy, the source and the foundation of morality, as well as the consciousness itself, will be God, at the same time for an atheist this task will have a fundamentally different solution.

If we embrace the history of philosophy with a single glance at the philosophy of how the entire diversity of the objective world was reduced to some ultimate, limiting reasons (and this was the question occupied and occupied by many minds, beginning with the first philosophers), then two such grounds are distinguished by nature and fundamentally irreducible to each other: matter and consciousness.

Both they and their interrelations have always been the subject of heated discussions, and the problem of the correlation of the material (natural) and the ideal (spiritual) one way or another, directly or indirectly, is found in virtually every philosophical teaching, which, as already noted in the first chapter, gave the foundation of F. Engels distinguish it as "the main issue of philosophy."