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The fundamental question of philosophy
The fundamental question of philosophy is a question, the answer of which is of fundamental importance for the continuation of all other philosophies. This great significance lies in the fact that by answering the basic question (see also  Arché ) Before  Decision, which determines in advance the treatment of all subsequent [e] problems. With the help of the basic question or its answer you can find your way around the philosophy. Whether it makes sense at all that philosophy takes its starting point (beginning and end) in a fundamental question has become the subject of postmodern critique , Objectivism denies the fundamental question of philosophy and rejects the relevant struggle between materialism and idealism.

meaning
The concept of the basic question is used in both the singular and plural. Thus basic questions of ethics, epistemology or ontology are discussed. All the more surprising is the fundamental question of philosophy as the sole fundamental question. Returning questions to a single fundamental question is desirable in a generalized sense, but it makes the search for answers difficult, for example B. because of ambiguity or conceptual ambiguity (see Theory of everything). The basic question of philosophy is that the answers to all questions of all areas of philosophy, such as those of metaphysics, of epistemology or of ethics are related to an essential question, Conversely, this means that all philosophical questions must have similar characteristics that ultimately the object of philosophy can be limited, that the world is a unified whole (monism). But that is rather denied today. Quite in contrast to the materialism, which explains philosophy as the science of the most general laws of motion of nature, of human society and of thought, which proceeds monistically from the existence of only one substance, matter.

L. Feuerbach on this: "The question of whether a God created the world, the question of the relationship of God to the world, ... I notice ... that this question is one of the most important and at the same time most difficult questions of human knowledge and philosophy, as already From this it is evident that the whole history of philosophy is really only concerned with this question ... "

With the fundamental question of philosophy, materialism separates itself from all other philosophies. The idealistic solution of the fundamental question of philosophy allegedly proceeds in all variants from the primacy of consciousness towards matter.

Answering the basic question of philosophy is important for all other sciences as well as for practical life, in particular for politics and ethics with, for example the question of whether there are objective values ​​beyond subjective values ​​and desires.

Plato
Already in antiquity Plato with his so-called theory of ideas and  psychology has examined the relation of objects and findings. He distinguishes between the sensible and the sensually not perceptible. For him, knowledge is the remembrance of ideas that the soul has seen before entering the body in a "supernatural" place. Knowledge and knowledge therefore point to a realm of ideas. What man has forgotten through the one-body (philosophy of mind), he can recover with the help of sensory perception and conversation and the guidance of a teacher. The sensory perceptions refer to real material bodies and convey to the soul the recollection of corresponding (divine) ideas. Ideas are for him the essential, the primary, because of their divine character.

Descartes
Descartes is considered one of the founders of modern philosophy. Ideologically, he is dualist. He starts from two independent eternal substances: the material substance and the spiritual substance. The strange "correspondence" of the physical and spiritual worlds - their "knowledge" of each other - is ultimately explained by God as an infinite and inexhaustible substance. Epistemologically Descartes adheres to native ideas.

Hobbes
Hobbes rejects Descartes' native ideas. Perceptions in human consciousness are for him images of things. He reduces matter to the physical reality and its movements. He even understands mental activity like this. He answers the basic question of philosophy as the first in modern times consistently materialistic.

Fichte
For Fichte there are only two consistent philosophical systems: the idealistic, which derives being from thinking - Fichte calls this the perfection of idealism - and the materialistic, which derives the idea from the thing. Each of these two systems is so consistent in itself that neither can directly disprove the other. Fichte criticizes the mechanical character of the materialism of the time, which allegedly makes the mind a thing and denies its freedom. From him comes the famous saying: "What philosophy you choose depends on what you are for a human being; ..

Engels
Friedrich Engels refers to Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy in 1888 that there is a problem on whose resolution every other philosophical decision depends: "The great fundamental question of all, especially recent philosophy is that of the relationship of thinking and being ... of mind to nature ... The question: what is the original, the mind or the nature? After this question has been answered one way or another, the philosophers split into two great camps, those that claimed the originality of the Spirit toward nature, that is, in In the last instance a creation of the world of any kind ... formed the camp of idealists. The others who regard nature as the original belong to the various schools of  materialists. " This view is particularly cultivated by  dialectical materialism and similar theoretical buildings determined by Marxism.

Lenin
Only with the concept of matter (philosophy) as objective reality - in physics only a synonym for substances - as the disjunctive to consciousness at the beginning of the 20th century, the fundamental question of philosophy was formulated as the question of the relationship between matter and consciousness. Since the concepts of matter and consciousness as philosophical basic concepts ( categories) are not traceable to other concepts, they can only be determined by comparing and clarifying their relationship to each other. The basic question of philosophy becomes pointed out in the question of the primary: matter or consciousness? Only two answers are possible if matter and consciousness are defined as disjoint terms - which also makes sense of these concepts. The materialists see in matter the primary, the idealists in consciousness. The materialists declare consciousness as the product of matter. The objective idealists separate the human consciousness from the subject as an independent objective entity; the subjective idealists explain the contents of consciousness by emphasizing sensory knowledge as the primary.

Heidegger
In the course of his project of overcoming metaphysics - including metaphysical distinctions such as idealism and materialism - Martin Heidegger introduces the distinction between  Leitfrage  and  Grundfrage . The central question is the metaphysical questioning of beings as beings and the being of beings (mind / matter), which then led to different answers in metaphysics and ontology since Plato and Aristotle, whereas Heidegger, with his formulation of the fundamental question, was aiming at being as such, that is to say, examining in the course of history various constructions and degenerations of being in the event. The goal is to no longer determine being, but to investigate how such determinations actually came about.

For Heidegger, the distinction between the fundamental and the central question is accompanied by a rejection of the former concept of the fundamental question. Heidegger sees in metaphysical central questions about the highest beings (for example, mind / matter), although the defining moment in the history of philosophy. With his reformulation of the basic question, however, he rejects this approach and puts to this point a very differently formulated basic question: why at all and in what way are the different metaphysical determinations in the course of history?