Ancient simple materialism is the original form of materialist philosophy. The basic feature of naive materialism is to try to find the unity of natural phenomena with infinite diversity in some concrete and tangible objects and some special things. Naive materialism affirms the material origin and unity of the world, but due to the limitation of the level of understanding, one or a specific material form is always regarded as the material basis of the material origin and unity of the world. For example, Thales in ancient Greece believed that everything was born and returned to water, and China's ancient five-element theory believed that gold, wood, water, fire and earth were the five basic elements of everything. These are typical views of ancient naive materialism. The atomism of democritus and Epicurus in ancient Europe and the monism of qi in ancient China, although they broke through the limitation of attributing the origin of the world to one or a specific material form to some extent, still belong to the category of simple materialism.
The second form of materialist philosophy is modern metaphysical materialism, namely mechanical materialism. First of all, the basic feature of metaphysical materialism is to admit the materiality of the world, but to explain the world with an isolated, static and one-sided view, we can't see the universal connection and development between things and phenomena in the world, or only admit the mechanical connection and mechanical movement, thus showing the mechanical and metaphysical characteristics. Secondly, the second limitation of metaphysical materialism is mechanical. The emergence and formation of modern metaphysical materialism is closely related to the characteristics of natural science development in this period. During this period, natural science was still in the stage of collecting, sorting out and analyzing empirical materials, and only mechanics developed into a relatively perfect form. This situation is reflected in philosophy. The dominant metaphysical way of thinking in this period was to observe and explain the world from an isolated, static and mechanical point of view, which caused the unique and inevitable limitations of modern metaphysical materialism at that time. Thirdly, another limitation of metaphysical materialism is its incompleteness, which is mainly manifested in its materialism on nature and idealism on social history. /kloc-British materialism in the 0/7th century,/kloc-French materialism in the 0/8th century, and Feuerbach materialism in Germany in the 1940s and 1948+09 are the main schools of modern metaphysical materialism. Marxist dialectical materialism and historical materialism are the most thorough and scientific forms in the development of materialism and the third form in the history of materialism. It was founded by Marx and Engels in the 1940s of 19. It summed up the experience of proletarian class struggle and the latest achievements of natural science development, critically inherited the excellent heritage of human culture, especially critically absorbed the reasonable factors of German classical philosophy. Dialectical materialism and historical materialism overcome the limitations and incompleteness of metaphysical materialism, organically unify materialism and dialectics, materialist view of nature and materialist view of history, and form a very complete and rigorous scientific theoretical system. Practical materialism attaches importance to both theoretical explanation of the world and practical transformation of the world. This is the highest form of materialist philosophy development so far, and it is the most scientific and revolutionary philosophical form.
Historical idealism can be traced back to slave society. But in ancient times, his idealism only involved some fields such as country and politics, and was not an understanding of human society as a whole. The idealistic view of history is contained in the universal world view, and there is no independent and systematic theory. The relatively formed historical idealism is an idealistic theological view of history formed in feudal society. In medieval Europe, the historical idealism attached to theology and became a branch of theology. The theologian Augustine described the whole social history as a history of struggle between believers of God and those of the devil. As a result, the followers of God won and established an eternal kingdom on the earth, so the secular ruler is the representative of God on the earth. His Das Kapital laid the foundation of the theological view of history. The idealistic view of history was expressed in other countries in feudal times in the form of theology. In view of God-centered theological historical view, the emerging bourgeoisie put forward human-centered theory of human nature and humanitarian historical view. This view of history opposes the use of "providence" and "heaven" to explain history, and advocates finding the ultimate reason for social and political changes in people's understanding of eternal truth and justice. It regards unchangeable human nature as the yardstick of historical progress and rationality, that is, people's understanding of their own nature, as the driving force of social development. Hegel, a modern bourgeois philosopher, attributed the historical foundation to "rationality" and "spirit". After the emergence of historical materialism, modern bourgeois philosophy of history opposed this scientific view of history and continued to promote the idealistic view of history in a new form. The social and historical theories of philosophical schools such as pragmatism, positivism, existentialism, structuralism and neo-Thomas continue to explain the social history with the mental factors such as rationality, internal needs, passion and feelings, while especially denying the objective laws of social development and the possibility of understanding and foreseeing the historical process.
The manifestations of historical idealism can be summarized into two theoretical forms: the subjective historical idealism that people's subjective will determines history and the objective historical idealism that some mysterious spiritual entity determines history. These two forms of historical idealism are essentially the same, both insist that social consciousness determines social existence, and in fact, both explain history with factors other than history itself. Their basic propositions are as follows: ① Restore social history to the history of consciousness, ignore material production activities, and reverse the true relationship between social existence and social consciousness. ② It is believed that only a few outstanding figures, such as emperors and princes, heroes and heroes, are the masters of history, and the whole world history is only the process for heroes to realize their thoughts and will. Even the highest will can only "enlighten" them and express them through them. ③ obliterate the objective laws of historical development.
Historical idealism replaces the real connection of social history with subjective and artificial connection, which is essentially a distortion of the true face of social history and hinders the development of human understanding and truth. However, as a certain development stage in the process of human exploring the historical essence of society, its existence has its historical reasons and inevitability. Historical idealism has accumulated some ideological materials for human understanding of society in the long-term evolution process; The questions it raises from the opposite side also prompt people to think deeply; In the theoretical system of historical idealist philosophers and thinkers, there are also valuable historical dialectics and some historical materialism factors or buds. All these have prepared for the emergence of the scientific view of history.