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p The first theoretical questions sprang historically from the soil of everyday observation of the phenomena of nature and human life, private and public. But everyday experience, though it may allow one to a greater or less extent to describe phenomena, does not offer sufficient material to explain the causes, the essence, the laws of phenomena. The philosophers and naturalists of ancient times and the Middle Ages were, as a rule, unaware of this, that is to say, they failed to grasp the fact that mere everyday observation is not enough to enable us to solve theoretical problems, and gave their answers without more ado.

p Thales did not confine himself to stating that a magnet attracts metal; he asked why this happened. For his answer he resorted to the wellknown and, as it seemed to him, perfectly comprehensible conception of the soul. Heraclitus did the same when he maintained that a drunken man could not stand straight because his soul, a bright 238 fire and hence extremely dry by nature, had become damp.

p Lucretius asked why sea water is salty. His reply was that the sea sweats, and sweat, as everyone knows, is salty.  [238•1  The ancient Romans did not do without salt in their cooking, which was quite sophisticated, but they were ignorant of how salt is formed. The questions could only be answered by someone with a scientific conception of the chemical elements and their compounds, able to carry out experiments. Such knowledge was not available to the ancients. Their answers were based on extremely daring analogies. The modern man finds it hard to understand why the thinkers of early times believed their assumptions, which were at least unfounded, to be firmly established truths. They were already adept at distinguishing between opinion and truth, but they all seem to have believed that other people, the “crowd”, were purveyors of opinion, and not themselves.

p Plato says: "If You put a question to a person properly, he will give a true answer of himself."  [238•2  One may agree that leading questions imply a certain answer that is not immediately obvious. But Plato is talking about any question. The proper posing of any question, however, presumes a knowledge of any question, which is, of course, impossible. This means that he failed to make a distinction between pedagogical questions and 239 investigatory questions, the posing of which can only help to give some direction towards what is unknown.

p The formation of specialised scientific disciplines is inseparable from the development of special methods of observation, inquiry and testing, by means of which the scientist discovers phenomena and relations between them that are inaccessible to everyday experience. As the specialised sciences develop, the posing of theoretical questions tends to become, like the answers to these questions, more and more the result of inquiry, that is to say, it loses its immediate, direct form. Specialised, theoretical questions occur only in the mind of the specialist, and are of direct interest only to him. Here, as in other spheres of scientific activity, the social division of labour exerts its inevitable effect.

p So, whereas in the course of their development the specialised scientific disciplines tend to get further away from immediate (everyday) experience, philosophy is always closely connected with it and hence with the questions that spring from it. This is true not only of materialist doctrines but also of the most abstract idealist theories, which would seem at first glance to be completely out of this world.  [239•1 

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p Everyday experience tells us about many extremely important things. It tells us that people are born and die, fall asleep and wake up, experience joy and sorrow, treat each other in different ways, love and hate, strive for various goals, grow old, become sick, and so on. It would be naive to assume that these facts, which the early philosophers sought to understand, are of no interest to the philosophers of today. They have, it is true, become the subject of specialised research. All the same they are still of great interest to everyone and cannot therefore fail to hold the attention of philosophers.

p Philosophy is mainly interested in what is known to everyone and yet still remains incomprehensible. "The known in general is what it is because it is known, but not yet cognised,"  [240•1  Hegel says. A man who begins to reason about what is known but not cognised makes a problem of something that previously seemed clear to him mainly because he had never thought about it before. Everyone knows that horses are born of horses, that a cherry-tree grows from a cherry-stone, and so on. The philosophy of early times, proceeding from such commonplace facts, arrived at generalisations: like is born of like, everything has certain definite beginnings (“seeds of things”), nothing comes of nothing and nothing becomes nothing. These abstract propositions are inferences from everyday experience, although they generalise too widely for the limited data available.

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p The ancient atomistic materialism, though based on the facts of everyday experience, strikes out resolutely beyond its boundaries. The arguments of the atomists show that their speculative notions about absolutely solid atoms and absolute vacuum were an attempt to explain such facts observed in everyday life as the motion of bodies, differences in the specific weight of substances, etc. S. I. Vavilov writes in this connection: "The most natural conclusion is that the atomism of the ancients is not some amazing feat of insight, an anticipation of the future of science, but a qualitative formulation that followed almost inevitably and unequivocally from everyday observation.”  [241•1 

p We see that the first philosophers are interested mainly in what everyone knows, in what everyone has grown so accustomed to that no one thinks of questioning it. The fact that philosophy begins with a theoretical examination of the world that is open to everyone is a great step forward in mankind’s intellectual development, because man’s environment had up to then been cloaked in a fog of religious notions. In this sense philosophy opens up a world that everyone has seen and perceived but does not yet know, something real, compared with the unreal of which religious legend talks with such assurance.

p At every step people encounter phenomena that are well known to them and yet so incomprehensible that they never pause to think of the mystery behind the obvious. Such commonly observed phenomena may be compared with subliminal perceptions. But there comes a moment when a man starts asking questions about the familiar and 242 commonplace. Why does fire burn? Why is ice cold? Why does a stone that is thrown up return to earth? Man starts philosophising because the familiar has suddenly become mysterious, and he wants to solve the mystery. He may, for instance, become interested in what distinguishes dream from reality. This question will never occur to the non-philosopher, who is firmly convinced that he will never mix up what he has dreamt with what exists in reality. The philosopher may be equally convinced of the same thing, but he demands a reason for it, so that the difference between these two phenomena can be established not on the basis of personal impressions but by proceeding from a definite criterion of reality.

p In the works of philosophers, ancient and modern, we find explanations of such psychological states as joy, grief, compassion, anger, despair, hope, pride and contempt, despite the fact that anyone who does not study philosophy is perfectly capable of distinguishing one state from another on the basis of his own experience. But the philosopher seeks to detect the inner connection between different psychical states. He may, for instance, single out feelings that are pleasant and unpleasant and take them as basic, elementary emotions. He then tries to classify the multiplicity of human emotions as various modifications of pleasure and non-pleasure, i.e., to reveal the universal forms inherent in emotion and sensibility, to trace the unity of all these manifestations, to assess each one of these emotions ethically, proceeding from a conception of what constitutes the highest Good for man, and thus substantiate a clearly defined moral ideal.

p According to Greek mythology, the souls of the dead descended into the subterranean kingdom 243 of Hades, where each received a reward or punishment for its deeds on earth. The ancient philosophers (idealist as well as materialist) are not satisfied with this claim because it is merely a claim and has nothing to support it. Even those who agree with it remain dissatisfied because every assertion about that which is not seen to be obvious must be substantiated. The necessity for substantiation, for reasonable grounds, emerges in the form of questions. What is the soul? How does it differ from the body? Is it possible for the soul to exist apart from the body? Did the soul exist before the man was born? Will it exist after his death? If so, why? How then does death differ from life? Is death an absolute evil? Or perhaps it is not an evil at all but a blessing? Is death to be feared? How can the fear of death be conquered? All these questions arise from everyday experience as soon as one begins to analyse it and thus break away from the religious explanation of things, which rules out any independent asking and answering of questions on one’s own account. For as soon as a man answers questions, particularly questions that were never asked before his time, or which he poses in a new way, he becomes a philosopher. And then it turns out that, proceeding from everyday experience and the notions arising from it, he comes to conclusions that in one way or another contradict these notions. This contradiction must be resolved. But everyday experience is too restricted. It becomes necessary to refer to historical experience, to the experience of all mankind whose countless generations hand down their accumulated knowledge to one another. It becomes necessary to turn to the numerous specialised sciences, each of which is discovering objective truths in its admittedly restricted field. The 244 history of philosophy shows, however, that philosophers very rarely had the courage to take this; decisive step.

p Thus we see that philosophy never loses interest in the evidence of everyday experience and the questions that it raises. This unique quality of philosophy, which casts light on the origin of many philosophical problems, is interpreted quite wrongly by idealism. We shall now examine some idealist interpretations of the essence of philosophical problems, since this will help us to elucidate their actual specific qualities.

p Henri Bergson, obviously ignoring the indissoluble unity of cognition and life and treating the latter as the essence of all that exists, asserts that the basic philosophical questions cannot be solved by the soulless methods of science, which are alien to immediate, directly perceived life. Natural science’s theory of time, he believes, does not account for its true nature—duration, becoming—which is revealed only to the vital sense, to intuition and instinct, which are independent of science. The inability of science to solve philosophical problems, particularly the problem of becoming, arises from the nature of thought, which can conceive of motion only as the sum of states of rest because "the mechanism of our everyday cognition is cinematographic in character”,  [244•1  and science is not in principle in any way different from everyday cognition. "Modern science,” he says, "like that of ancient times, proceeds according to the cinematographic method. It cannot do otherwise; all science is subject to this law."  [244•2  Bergson, who wrote these lines at the beginning 245 of the century, did not foresee that the development of cinematic equipment and its use in biology, physics, astronomy and other sciences would open up fresh possibilities for a more profound understanding of the processes of motion, change and growth.

p Existentialism, in asserting philosophy’s permanent affinity to the "human reality”, seeks to prove that philosophical problems, unlike those of science, always have a personal significance, a meaning for the individual. Pointing out the tendency of science to turn everything personal into a subject of specialised inquiry, pointing out the progressive differentiation of scientific knowledge, and its technological significance, existentialism declares that scientific problems relate only to things, whereas philosophical problems treat of being, of life, which cannot be subjected to scientific inquiry precisely because it has no objective form.

p What is studied by science is allegedly outside human existence, whereas philosophy, according to Karl Jaspers, "asks about being, which is cognised thanks to the fact that / myself am".  [245•1  Science, Jaspers says, is not capable of pointing out the purpose of life or answering the question of its own meaning; such questions as God, freedom, duty are alien to it. Gabriel Marcel, developing the same theme, argues that science is concerned with problems, and philosophy with mysteries.

p If one considers the existentialist interpretation of the specific nature of philosophical problems, it becomes clear that existentialism absolutises and makes a mystery not only of philosophy’s link with everyday experience, but also of the 246 characteristic features of the problems of idealism and of philosophical problems in general. Needless to say, many philosophical problems, particularly in the form in which they are posed by idealism (and particularly existentialism) are indeed alien to science. But it is one thing to state this fact, and another to pretend that it is true of all philosophy.

p Existentialism turns philosophical problems into mysteries, unknowable mysteries. This is not, of course, a new interpretation of philosophical problems regarded from the standpoint of the history of philosophy. Zeno of Elea’s aporia, and Greek scepticism in general, implied a denial of any possibility of solving philosophical problems. According to Kant, the problems arising from the basic, a priori metaphysical ideas, are theoretically insoluble. Kant’s doctrine on the antinomies implied that turning a philosophical problem into an antinomy was as far as theoretical inquiry could proceed. Hartman’s assumption of the insoluble residue that remains in any philosophical problem is a toned-down version of this idea of Kant’s.

p Existentialism seeks to put a new interpretation on the old proposition of the fundamental insolubility of philosophical problems. Inquiry into any philosophical problem from this standpoint amounts to nothing more than making it “open” to the consciousness, i.e., in bringing home its intransient meaning. The existentialist truth of a philosophical problem consists precisely in this “openness”, which makes no claim to be a solution. Existentialist truth is truth for man, but by no means objective truth, what the existentialists term “impersonal” or “depersonalised” truth. Science, on the other hand, resolves problems by “closing” them, locking them up in files and forgetting about them. This is a justifiable claim in so far 247 as science has nothing to do with "human reality”. Even when it investigates man, it deals with things. Thus, the essence of philosophy, according to the existentialists, lies not in answering the questions posed, but in the way the questions are posed. Paul Ricoeur, who is near to existentialism, declares categorically: "The great philosopher is the man who discovers a new way of asking questions.”  [247•1 

p It is not hard to see that existentialism absolutises one of the actual features of philosophical problems, the fact that they are originally comprehended as questions, which the thinker puts to reality and hence to himself. The historical beginning of philosophy is important not for its statements but for the questions that they imply. When Thales declares that everything comes from water and returns to water, the most interesting thing about this belief is the question: Does everything consist of one thing? Is not the whole sensibly perceived multiformity of things merely the mode of existence of some one thing?  [247•2 

p Anaximander of Miletus, Anaximenes and Heraclitus answer the same question. These thinkers are original not because one says the origin of all things is "indefinable matter”, another “air” and the third “fire”, but because in developing the question posed by Thales they ask what properties this one substance must possess for so many things 248 to have originated from it. The Eleatic school denies that the diversity perceived by the senses could arise from one or even many sensibly perceived principles. Their fundamental belief may be formulated as a question: Does not the sensibly perceived arise from that which is not perceived by the senses and does not possess the properties of sensibly perceived things?

p W. Heisenberg points out that what primarily interests the natural scientist in philosophy is "the statement of the question, while the answer takes only second place. Statements of questions appear to him extremely valuable if they turn out to be fruitful in developing human thought. The answers, on the other hand, are mostly of a transient nature, losing their significance in the course of time thanks to our wider knowledge of the facts."  [248•1  In support of this idea Heisenberg refers above all to Democritus and Plato and stresses that even for the modern theory of elementary particles the questions posed by these thinkers have retained their striking importance, whereas their answers have naturally lost their value. Heisenberg is perfectly right in assuming that philosophical problems outgrow in significance their limited solutions provided by philosophers and, let us add, natural scientists as well. However, a closer examination of these questions that were posed so long ago reveals that they retain their significance in the present in so far as they have been reified and developed, and this was possible only because they were in some way or other answered.

p It would be naive to expect scientific answers even from the philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, let alone the philosophers of the ancient 249 world. The surprising thing is that in Anaxagoras’s theory of homoeomeries we find a brilliant insight into the molecular structure of matter, and in Democritus and Leucippus, the idea of the existence of atoms. The history of alchemy, like that of ancient and medieval philosophy, left to coming generations of researchers answers that are mainly of significance as evidence of the posing of certain questions. However, what the existentialists present as an eternal law of development of philosophy, actually characterises only certain periods in the development of philosophical and also natural scientific knowledge. It is not eternal fate but the concrete history of philosophical problems that allows us to trace the development not only of questions but also of answers. Eduard Spranger is profoundly mistaken therefore when he declares quite in the spirit of existentialism: "No one obtains in philosophy an answer that is wiser than the question that provoked it.”  [249•1  In one historical situation the questions that philosophy poses are more important than the answers it gives to them, in another historical situation the picture may be quite different.

p The existentialist devaluation of philosophical answers is a revival of the sceptical interpretation of the results of philosophical development, an unsubstantiated extension of trends that were inevitable at certain stages in the development of philosophy to the nature of philosophical knowledge in general. Existentialist philosophy restricts its task to the scrupulous analysis of questions, and understandably so since scientific data are considered to be valueless for providing answers. The existentialists maintain, for example, that the 250 problem of man is of great urgency and the answers to the questions it asks are becoming ever more difficult to find, despite the fact that dozens of scientific disciplines are engaged in the study of man. Here they obviously ignore the fact that it is the multitude and diversity of scientific data about man that create quite natural difficulties when it comes to making a philosophical generalisation, not to mention the additional fact that the intensification of antagonistic contradictions of the present age has added to the urgency of the problem.

p The statement of the fact that philosophical problems take shape initially on the basis of everyday experience becomes its distortion when everyday experience is declared to be the only source of philosophical problems. This is basically the position of neo-Thomism. Otherwise it would have to renounce the teaching of "Doctor Angelicus”, which reflected the historical limitations of his age and the condition of science at that time.

p The American neo-Thomist Mortimer J. Adler asserts that philosophy "relies on and appeals only to the common experience of mankind which, at its core, is the same for all men, at all times and places".  [250•1  From this proposition on the changeless "core of common experience" that is the same for all times and peoples Adler infers that the problems of philosophy bear no relation to those of science, and that the solution of these problems does not depend on the level of scientific knowledge. The untenability of this argument lies first of all in the attempt to create a dichotomy between everyday experience and scientific experiment. Everyday experience, according to Adler, is 251 something that we acquire unconsciously, without the intervention of the will. "These are the experiences we have simply by virtue of being awake —with our senses alive and functioning, with an awareness of our inner feelings or states, but without asking any questions, without trying to test any conjectures, theories, or conclusions, without making a single deliberate effort to observe anything.”  [251•1 

p At bottom Adler counterposes everyday experience not only to scientific knowledge but to knowledge in general, since ordinary consciousness does not, in his opinion, form part of everyday experience, but is only its interpretation. He states that everyday experience asserts nothing and denies nothing: "It is neither true nor false; it is simply whatever it is.”  [251•2  This implies that everyday experience is in principle irrefutable, since only assertions or denials are refutable, whereas everyday experience is an assemblage of spontaneously formed impressions and feelings as a result of which the individual eats, drinks, sleeps, wakes up, notices the passing of the seasons, of day and night, distinguishes life from death, rest from motion, heat from cold, and so on. By cutting down the sphere of experience to the bare minimum and excluding from it the elements related to the development of society, its material and spiritual culture, man’s labour activity, Adler makes this metaphysically interpreted experience the sole object of philosophical comprehension. From this standpoint all philosophers at all times have possessed exactly the same material and differ from one another only by giving different interpretations of it.

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p Once we assume a core of immutable human experience it is but one step further to assume changeless human nature. One myth is enlisted to support another. But in fact they only expose one another. There is no such thing as this changeless everyday experience that asserts nothing; nor is there any such thing as changeless human nature. Everyday experience whose significance in the process of the formation of philosophical problems is quite obvious, historically develops and becomes richer thanks to production, cognition and science, so that even the elementary facts that people’s consciousness has registered throughout the ages are variously apprehended and therefore play very different roles. The people of tribal society, for instance, of Ancient Greece, of the Christian Middle Ages, and the epoch of the Renaissance apprehended the elemental forces of nature, the immediate social environment, human birth, death, and so on, in different ways. Adler may retort, of course, that appraisal of various phenomena, the attitude adopted towards them, does not form part of everyday experience and can only be regarded as its interpretation. But this argument falls to the ground because we are not talking about theoretical conceptions, but about how people of various epochs apprehended, experienced certain events. Despite Adler’s assertions, everyday experience is never "simply whatever it is”, that is to say, it is always coloured in some way, quite apart from its interpretation.

p Adler refuses to consider people’s experience of life in all its diversity. He refuses to take into consideration what distinguishes the everyday experience of one people from that of another, of one historical epoch from that of another. The whole content of everyday experience is reduced 253 to a narrowly interpreted individual experience; in other words, Adler completely ignores social and historical experience. So, philosophical problems are, so to speak, shut up in a cage of narrow and unchanging everyday experience. With its capacities thus rigidly curtailed philosophy is denied the right to pass judgement on matters outside the commonplace.

p The next conclusion that neo-Thomist restriction of philosophy to the metaphysically interpreted sphere of everyday experience imposes is also self-evident: philosophy can obtain nothing from science. Neo-Thomism ignores the philosophical problems posed by the sciences, although it is not averse to using scientific data to “confirm” theological speculations. It may easily be assumed that the neo-Thomist understanding of the peculiar nature of philosophical problems perpetuates the opposition of philosophy to science under the pretext of ensuring philosophy’s “autonomy”, that is to say, its right to preach anti-scientific views.

p Both existentialism and neo-Thomism approach the question of the specific nature of philosophy without regard for history, whereas, in fact, it is essential to distinguish at least a few periods in the history of philosophy. There was a time when philosophy was able to anticipate the problems of the specialised sciences that had not yet come into being. The character of philosophical problems changed substantially in the period when these sciences arose and philosophy became juxtaposed to them. It was at this point that rationalist metaphysics posed the problem of knowledge beyond experience, i.e., superscientific knowledge, which is alien to the sciences. Incidentally it is not hard to see in this approach to the question the 254 quite justifiable need to overcome narrow empiricism which was understood in philosophy earlier than in natural science. Paradoxical though it may seem, the metaphysical problem of knowledge beyond experience arose on the basis of the scientific development of the New Age.

p The problems of the origin of theoretical knowledge, the relationship between the rational and the sensual, between theory and practice, the problems of proof, logical inference, criterion of truth and theoretical research in general—all these problems which inspired philosophy in the 17th century took shape under the direct influence of mathematics, mechanics and the experimental science of those days. The investigation of these problems fertilised not only philosophy but also the specialised sciences.

p Thus the reduction of philosophical problems to everyday experience is an obviously untenable position. Ontological as well as epistemological problems reach out far beyond its bounds. Philosophical problems both in origin and content are organically related to the whole multiform historical, and particularly spiritual, activity of mankind. Some philosophical problems are directly connected with the development of special scientific knowledge, others have an indirect bearing on them. Even the philosophical problems that express the essential content of man’s personal life undergo considerable changes under the influence of the specialised sciences.

p There are some philosophical problems, of course, that do not fit in with the scientific approach. But they, as a rule, do not fit in either with the evidence of everyday experience. So, the declaration of logical positivism to the effect that philosophical problems are, in fact, not problems 255 at all, but imagined questions that disappear in the light of logical semantic analysis, turns out to be theoretically unfounded. Logical positivism neglected to make a qualitative typological analysis of philosophical problems. Nor was it able to detect the kernel of truth that is to be found in the way many philosophical problems are posed by speculative-idealist philosophy.

p Needless to say, there have been and still are pseudoproblems as well as real problems in philosophy. Medieval scholastic philosophy, particularly when it was laying itself out to substantiate the Christian dogmas, invented a good many pseudoproblems. Ignoring the scholastic “ problems” that are not philosophical at all (“Can God create a rock that He is unable to lift?”) one may cite the question of whether God could create the world out of nothing as an example of a pseudoproblem. The hallmark of the pseudoproblem is unfoundedness of all its implied concepts and assumptions. No one has ever proved that there was a time when the world did not exist. Absolute genesis is a conception that cannot be confirmed by even one example. Nevertheless the theologian propounds the question not only of absolute genesis but also of the creation (a personal act, presuming the existence of a creator), and, what is more, out of nothing. But what is nothing? If it exists, then it must be something.

p The neo-positivists, who have turned the concept of the pseudoproblem into a universal weapon for combating “metaphysical” philosophy, have been unable to supply even a half– satisfactory definition of this concept. This is natural enough because they have put too wide an interpretation on the concept of the pseudoproblem without drawing any distinction between it and the 256 problem which, though obscured and falsely propounded, is actually quite real. Most of the philosophical problems which the neo-positivists (and others) regard as pseudoproblems are in fact merely problems that have been wrongly propounded. The problem of the first cause is, I would say, a typical pseudoproblem because the concept of cause and effect has significance only when applied to individual phenomena, and becomes quite meaningless in relation to the Universe as a whole. On the other hand, the problem of a preordained harmony propounded by Leibnitz would seem to be a real problem, wrongly formulated, concerning the unity of the world and the universal connection of all phenomena. Equally real, though wrongly formulated, so it seems to me, is the problem of innate ideas, which to Locke and other empiricists appeared to be utterly devoid of meaning. M. K. Mamardashvili points out: "The proposition of 17th-century idealist rationalism on innate ideas was influenced by the fact that in scientific knowledge, taken as a separate element (an ‘idea’), one finds not only properties generated by the presence of the separate object of this knowledge existing outside the consciousness, but also properties generated in it by the connection with other knowledge and the general system of thought. This is the actual subject and source of the rationalist thesis, the real problem of the theory of innate ideas concealed behind the historical context of their specific assimilation and expression.”

p These examples show that there is no formal attribute that makes it possible to draw a fundamental line of distinction between the pseudoproblem and the wrongly stated problem; only the actual development of cognition and special 257 research can give a concrete answer concerning any individual problem, pseudo or wrongly stated. The neo-positivists obviously made things easier for themselves when they declared all historically formed philosophical problems to be non-existent in reality. As J. Piaget observes, "nothing gives final grounds for defining a problem as scientific or metaphysical".  [257•1  The a priori juxtaposition of scientific and philosophical problems undoubtedly restricts the ability of science to solve problems that are misstated owing to lack of information or other historically determined causes. Science, Piaget says, is capable of solving any problem, i.e., it "is essentially ‘open’ and retains its freedom to embrace more and more new problems, which it wants to solve and can solve to the extent that it finds methods of interpreting them".  [257•2  Thus, we have no right to reject out of hand the problems propounded by idealism merely because they are inevitably stated in mystifying terms; these problems must be deciphered. This is how scientific inquiry into idealist philosophy should be conducted, in the teeth of vulgar criticism.

p The interrelation of real, imaginary and misstated problems reflects, though far from directly, the fundamental dichotomy between materialism 258 and idealism. It would be a tremendous oversimplification to present the situation as if real problems have been dealt with only by materialist philosophy. No matter how hostile materialism and idealism may be to one another, these dichotomies are dialectical, since materialism and idealism usually discuss the same questions, from which it should not be inferred, however, that the questions themselves are neutral and bear no relation to their possible solutions. Philosophical problems are not simply sentences that end in a question mark. They may be assertions or denials, they are not free of certain assumptions and quite often they represent a tentative formulation of a certain principle that demands substantiation. The opposition between materialism and idealism manifests itself not only in the different answers given to questions that are common to both philosophical theories, but also in the existence of opposite—materialist and idealist—sets of problems, in the existence of materialist and idealist ways of stating these problems. From this standpoint it may be said that materialism, like idealism, has special questions of its own. Specifically idealist questions are partly pseudoproblems and partly wrongly stated problems with a perfectly real content.

p The metaphysical juxtaposition of philosophical and scientific problems is just as bad as ignoring the qualitative difference between them, described above. This qualitative distinction depends not so much on the specific nature of philosophical problems as on their content.

p Optimum universality is a qualitative characteristic in so far as we are discussing not one or another truth that has general and necessary significance, but also the nature of truth in general, 259 not only the most general laws of all that exists, but also the content of any law. What is truth? What is knowledge? What is law? What is matter? What is man? What is the world? The very form of these questions differs from the. questions that usually confront the physicist, the chemist or any other natural scientist. For the chemist, such questions as "What is metal?”, "What is a metalloid?”, "What is an element?" are of secondary importance, because his primary interest is in the special properties of each individual metal, metalloid or element, or their compounds. The question of the "What is...?" type is, of course, not without meaning in chemistry or any other specialised science, but in philosophy it is of primary importance.

p The form of the philosophical question, like any form, expresses the peculiar nature of its content. Diderot says: "the physicist ... will reject the question ’What for?’ and concentrate only on the question ’How?’".  [259•1  The question "What for?”, particularly in natural philosophy, makes a teleological assumption, and the physicist, consciously or unconsciously basing himself on materialism, repudiates it. The physicist is far more interested than the philosopher in the question "How?" than the question "Why?”. Philosophy, on the other hand, is not satisfied with knowing merely how certain processes take place. It wants to know why they take place in one way and not another. The philosopher, for instance, asks not only "Do we know the world?" or "How do we know the world?" He also asks "Why is the world knowable?”, "Why do we know it?”.

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p More than a century ago positivism declared the question "Why?" to be impermissible, metaphysical and basically insoluble. Yet the history of science shows that in any special field of research this question may in a certain context acquire profound scientific meaning. Newton did not explain why bodies attract one another not because he thought it a waste of time but because he was well aware that science did not yet possess the necessary data to answer this question.  [260•1  Nor does modern physics see this question as a pseudoproblem, although, in attempting its solution, it has got no further than the hypotheses of which Newton so heartily disapproved.

p The natural scientist asks the question "Why?" primarily in connection with the concrete data of observation or experiment, and this immediately distinguishes the natural science form of stating this question from its philosophical statement. For example, after Albert Michelson’s famous experiment failed to produce the expected results, the question naturally arose as to why it had failed. Einstein replied to this question as follows: ether does not exist and the speed of light is constant, i.e., cannot increase through the compounding of velocities. There were other answers to this "Why?”. This was no accident because the very form of the question allows a multiplicity of answers.

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p When the natural scientist makes a definite hypothesis, which is confirmed by certain facts, and it is then discovered that other facts contradict his hypothesis, the question "Why?" arises once again. This was the situation in physics when it was found that some facts testify to the wave and others to the corpuscular nature of light. The answer to this "Why?" was given by de Broglie, who proved that the nature of the electron is both corpuscular and wave.

p It should be noted, however, that the question "Why?" confronts natural scientists not only in a particular form, but also in its wider philosophical aspect. "Science,” M. V. Keldysh points out, "has still done very little to elucidate such grandiose problems as the origin of life on Earth, or the foundations of the organisation of animate matter; we do not know how animate matter appeared and why the development it acquired was inevitable.”  [261•1  In this case, as we see, the questions "How?" and "Why?" have equal status.  [261•2  In making a distinction between the two we should not regard them as fundamentally incompatible.

p To declare any "Why?" a forbidden form of question means taking up the agnostic position, which is what positivism actually did. It is 262 another matter that it took philosophy thousands of years to realise the significance of this question.

p The meaning of the question "Why?" becomes still more obvious when we turn from the study of nature to the study of society. Natural processes, in so far as they are studied in their natural form without the intervention of social production, take place spontaneously and, consequently, cannot be regarded as being at all dependent on mankind. The socio-historical process, on the contrary, is even in its spontaneous form a result of people’s common activity. The student of social life has no right to consider historical events, economic or political facts (for instance, the revolution of 1905 in Russia, private ownership of the means of production, race discrimination) without asking the question "Why?”. Needless to say, some historians, economists and sociologists restrict their task to establishing and describing facts, the course of events, and so on. In this case, ignoring the question "Why?" often becomes a refusal to make a critical analysis and appraisal of social phenomena.

p The philosopher is less able than any other student of the humanities to ignore the question "Why?”. In fact, he can never avoid it. This is not to say, of course, that merely by posing the question the philosopher safeguards himself againts a non-critical attitude to social reality; the substance of the question is as important as its form, not to mention the answer. For example, when speaking of private property, the philosopher, just because he is a philosopher, cannot and usually does not evade the question of why it exists. But if he makes no concrete analysis of this question and simply asserts that private 263 property exists because human nature is such, he is no different from the ordinary bourgeois apologist economist. But let us take the philosopher who does deal with the question in concrete terms. Is private property to be identified with man’s impropriation of the substance of nature in general? How does ownership of the means of production differ from ownership of other things, personal goods, for example? Have other forms of property existed in the history of mankind? Or are "private property" and "property in general" synonymous phrases? Is human nature unchangeable? It is not hard to realise that this posing of the question "Why?" reveals how many aspects it may have. We must not conclude, however, that a thinker can state his question correctly merely by wishing to do so; the correct statement of the question presupposes both a certain level of knowledge and also certain social prerequisites.

p The question "Why?" may be relevant or irrelevant. There is nothing easier than to accompany every statement with a portentous-sounding "Why?" without going to the root of the question, the fact or subject about which something has been said. Such questioning becomes a kind of children’s pastime that, of course, has nothing in common with the essential philosophical question. Children who merely ask "Why?" and adults who imitate children, or remain at their level, do not become philosophers by doing so. If the positivists tried at times to reduce philosophical questions to the child’s "Why?”, it only goes to show that in their noisy polemic against essentialism, which was supposed to be restoring medieval conceptions of occult (i.e., fundamentally unobservable) qualities, they failed to notice the essence of philosophical questions and the 264 essential relationships in reality to which they refer.  [264•1 

p Analysis of the form of the philosophical question discloses the specific content that cannot be 265 reduced to the subject-matter of the specialised sciences. In other words, it is not a particular way of stating the problem that makes it philosophical, but its content. Hence even nonphilosophers, when they come up against these problems, also philosophise. This shows that philosophical problems cannot be solved by mathematics, physics or chemistry, although mathematics, physics and chemistry may contribute to their solution. Even so, such questions as—What is law? What is truth? What is the nature of the most general laws? Why is the world knowable? Why is knowledge a reflection of objective reality?—like all other philosophical questions, cannot be answered by any of the specialised sciences because they are related to the content of all the sciences. Therefore, while rejecting the idealist proposition that philosophical problems are above science, we maintain that they can be solved only scientifically. This means that the solution of philosophical problems is founded on the sum-total of scientific data, but the actual solving of these problems, at least in their direct form rests with philosophy.

p So there actually are questions that only philosophy can answer, although not without the help of the other sciences. And it is these questions that are actually philosophical problems. This apparently obvious statement (what is philosophy for otherwise?) still demands elucidation, however, since problems that for centuries were considered to be philosophical are constantly passing into the sphere of the specialised sciences and, thanks to this, acquiring scientific solutions.  [265•1 

266

p Close analysis of such problems shows that they were specialised questions and philosophy studied them only because there was no appropriate specialised science. Thus, the questions which philosophy has been studying for thousands of years may be divided into two basic types. First, the most general questions, which arose, developed and received certain definite solutions in the course of the history of philosophy. Second, the particular questions mentioned earlier that gradually broke away from philosophy.

p The process of the separation from philosophy of questions that are investigated by the specialised sciences, which in our time is reaching its 267 culmination, makes for further development and enrichment of the specifically philosophical problems or, in other words, makes the questions that philosophy now studies more philosophical, i.e., questions that by their very nature cannot be solved within the framework of the already existing or conceivable specialised scientific disciplines. Naturally the relationship between philosophy and the specialised sciences changes accordingly: philosophy no longer concerns itself with the preliminary preparation of questions that are destined for the specialised sciences. Instead of its previous function of speculatively anticipating the scientific positing of questions, philosophy, to the extent that it concerns itself with the problems of the specialised sciences (by no means the whole range of its subject), performs the function of providing a world-view comprehension, generalisation and comparative analysis of scientific discoveries and methods of inquiry, the function of theoretical elaboration of the methodological problems of science. This change in the relationship between philosophy and the specialised sciences is also determined by the fact that, at present, anticipation of the future discoveries of natural science is possible only on the basis of theoretical analysis of the special empirical data obtained by experiment and instrumental observation, and this, of course, can be done only by the theoretical scientist and not by the philosopher. The fact that in the 20th century philosophy did not anticipate the discoveries made by the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and cybernetics, that these discoveries were just as much a surprise to the philosophers as to the great majority of scientists, is to be explained, in our view, by the changed character of philosophical problems 268 and hence the very function of philosophy and the nature of philosophical inquiry. Once philosophy gives up the study of specialised questions, it naturally cannot anticipate their subsequent solution.  [268•1 

p The proposition that there are different types of philosophical problem may give rise to objections that we must consider in some detail. First objection. Are not general and, particularly the most general, philosophical problems in effect wrongly formulated problems, since every general question can and should be broken down into the particular questions of which it is composed? And if so, then are there any philosophical problems in general, or do they exist only to the extent that the general questions have not yet been fully comprehended and analysed?

p To be sure, any general question, including the philosophical, can be broken down into a number of particular questions. But the philosophical question differs from other non-philosophical 269 general questions in that it still retains its meaning and significance even after being broken down into particular questions, and even after the solution of these particular questions by the specialised sciences. Moreover, the significance of the philosophical question increases thanks to its being broken down into a number of specialised, particular questions. When these have been solved, the significance of the general philosophical question is once again appreciated. For example, the problem of infinity is undoubtedly acquiring an ever more clearly defined philosophical content owing to the fact that various aspects of this problem are being successfully investigated by mathematics, physics, and other sciences. The philosophical question of the nature of man, as we have already stressed, has become even more relevant thanks to the fact that anthropology, psychology, physiology, history and other sciences have investigated certain particular aspects of it.

p Second objection. Obviously it is possible to abstract particular questions from the general. But to what extent may general questions be separated from the particular? A considerable portion of general, philosophical questions are the same particular questions applied to an unlimited sphere of inquiry. In this case are not philosophical and non-philosophical problems merely .two sides of one and the same coin?

p Such questions as the relationship between the spiritual and material, the problem of man, the problem of infinity, inevitably become the subject of special scientific inquiry while remaining at the same time highly important philosophical problems, whose philosophical solution depends to a great extent on the advance of the specialised 270 sciences. Mortimer J. Adler calls these questions “mixed” questions, assuming that as distinct from purely philosophical questions they are solved by the joint efforts of philosophy and the specialised sciences. But the whole point is that with the exception of pseudoproblems there are no purely philosophical questions, whose content and solution can be independent of the data supplied by the specialised sciences. Besides, the questions Adler calls “mixed”, and which in his proposed classification of philosophical questions are classed as questions of the third order,  [270•1  are in fact (if 271 one does not adopt the stance of speculativeidealist metaphysics) philosophical problems of the first order.

p Thus, the specialised questions that in the past engaged the attention of philosophy leave the philosophical fold and are solved by the specialised sciences. The questions that are studied by both philosophy and the specialised sciences are obviously at the same time general and particular. Psychology, anthropology, history, medicine, and biology study man in different ways, each concentrating on a certain special form of human existence. Philosophy, on the other hand, generalising the achievements of these sciences, tackles the problem of man as a whole, i.e., solves the question of the nature of man and its historically proceeding change, the relationship between the individual and the social, the anthropological and the social, the material and spiritual life of society, the most general laws of social development, the laws of man’s practical activities, cognition, artistic assimilation of the world, alienation, and so on. In the framework of philosophy not one of these questions is particular, and they are all merely different aspects of one and the same question that interpenetrate one another. Thus, for example, the question of the relationship 272 between the individual and the social, which in psychology has a specialised character, cannot in philosophy be solved without investigating all the other above-mentioned questions. This interdependence of philosophical problems, their general correlation, their historically emerging comprehensive unity place these questions essentially apart from the questions of any specialised science, where each question is related only to a certain part of other special questions, but of course not to the whole range of problems of the given science. The advance of specialisation within each specialised science indicates a growing relative independence of the questions it studies. The situation is quite different in philosophy, where the interpenetration of philosophical problems creates quite considerable difficulties for research, since the solving of one philosophical problem actually entails the solution (at least in general outline) of all the other problems of philosophy.

p Philosophy is often reproached for studying “premature” questions, whose solution has not been prepared by the development of the specialised sciences. But natural science, so it seems to us, did pose (and continues to pose today) quite independently of philosophy similarly “ premature” and “untimely” questions that obviously cannot yet be solved but nevertheless merit attention. Today, when philosophy does not as a rule claim any anticipatory (always in some measure “speculative”) solution of particular problems, these problems are handled by the natural scientists themselves, but not, of course, as the natural philosophers used to handle them.

Thus, the urge to answer this or that particular or general question before sufficient empirical 273 material has been accumulated, may be felt in any field of knowledge. It arises not simply from impatience but rather because the lack of empirical data is revealed only in the process of the inquiry that has been stimulated by the “ premature” positing of such questions. Consequently, even in natural science there are questions that cannot be left without at least a preliminary answer. Their progressive significance is undeniable. In philosophy such questions occupy a far bigger place, and this also characterises the specific nature of philosophical problems. It sometimes happens that a man sets himself a very restricted problem and solves it completely. It may also happen that a man sets himself a tremendous problem, but manages to solve it only partially. The specialised sciences as well as philosophy need such “dreamers”. This comparison may also be applied to the characterisation of philosophical problems.