2. Ideas as a Reflection of Objective Reality

In an immediate sense thinking is of course the activity of the brain as “matter which thinks” but the brain itself only functions as part of human activity in general, relying upon the stimuli it receives (via the nervous system) from our practical contact with the world at large. In fact, without this practical contact with things around us, we would have no ideas at all: the brain would remain a mere fossil, embryonic and undeveloped.

It is because the source of our ideas lies in our social activity — the relationships we have with other people and surrounding nature — that the character of our ideas takes the form of reflections in our minds of the objective world outside of us. It is obvious that a peasant farmer whose life is spent herding cattle in some remote district of the Transkei will have a very different outlook on life from someone who lives in one of the large townships on the outskirts of Cape Town or Johannesburg. The small shopkeeper who works by himself with the help of his family will see things quite differently from a man who has to work in a large factory or down a mine. If the practical experiences of people differ, so too must their ideas because these ideas are basically a mental reflection of the world around them.

It is true that this concept of ideas as a reflection of reality is sometimes taken to imply a rather static concept of the mind as a “mirror” which passively “reflects” the objects around it, and it is argued by some philosophers that if this is the case, then in fact we would never be able to acquire any real knowledge about the world our ideas reflect, since all we would have would be a series of images, often contradictory in character in the way, for example, that a penny is sometimes circular, sometimes elliptical, sometimes large, sometimes small: it all depends on how you look at it! Now this argument, that if thought reflects reality then the real world simply “lies in the eye of the beholder," rests upon a completely mistaken attitude to the way our mind actually works and produces its reflections of external reality. The fact is that ideas only arise as part and parcel of our living practice. They are not drawn “mirror like” from the world in a passive way, but are derived solely from the practical activity through which we discover things, learn to identify them and understand how they work, “opening them up," so to speak, altering their character, even making them ourselves so that we are able to understand what life is really like. The “skeptical” position which questions whether the real world actually exists outside of our reflect ed images, wrongly assumes that thinking simply involves “contemplating the world from afar." Of course this is how the activity of thinking may appear to bourgeois philosophers who live off the wealth which others produce, but it is not how thinking actually takes place.

It is important here that mental reflection — the basic property of human ideas — should not be confused with mere “sensations” or “impressions” as they are some times called. A sensation simply refers to a stimulus that our senses receive from the outside — a reaction by our body to extremes of hot and cold, for example — where as a mental reflection involves some degree, however minimal, of conscious under standing so that we can identify objects through language and express our thoughts through speech. The first is an instinctive activity which we share with animals; the second is a specifically human act which has to be learnt through social practice. Naturally as people develop they become able to perform many quite complicated acts — like riding a bicycle, driving a car, writing their name—almost unconsciously, but all these activities have had to be learnt through practice: they develop as the result of an infinite number of daily experiences which our mind continually reflects.

Indeed, this concept of an idea as a reflection of the real world is vital if we are to tackle the question of [...click "Next"]