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p In the cosmological meditations of the ancient philosophers, particularly the materialists, we discover the first fundamental theme of philosophy—the problem of absolute reality, independent of man (and mankind), upon which man depends and which is boundless, intransie^it, and infinitely exceeds his strength. Heraclitus said: "The world, which embraces everything and is not contingent with any other worlds or any creator, was not created by any of the gods or people; it has always existed and will exist forever as living fire, now flaring up, now dying down.”  [302•1  Greek mythology depicted the world bounded by the limited geographical notions of the ancients as having been wrought out of chaos by the might of the god titans, who in their original form were animistic personifications of the spontaneous forces of nature. Philosophy breaks with these notions and the first materialists try to explain the world out of itself, to replace the supernatural forces incomprehensible to the thinking person by natural, generally observable processes and phenomena. The original materialist conception of the world’s unity, of the prime cause, and of the primordial matter from which all things were created, implies nothing more than a desire to understand the natural connection and the interdependence of phenomena, and thus exclude the religious notions of supernatural beings. Of course, 303 the idea of the prime cause and primordial matter is not scientific but, if we remember that what is meant is not the beginning of the world in time but only the general basis (and source) of the diversity of individual things, it becomes clear that this original proposition does not contradict the fundamental materialist contention and contains a profound dialectical insight into the unity of the finite and the infinite, the transient and the eternal, the individual and the general.

p In our day philosophy, in so far as it rests on natural science, does not claim to create its own special picture of the universe; it proceeds from the natural scientific picture of the world and explains, interprets and generalises this picture by means of philosophical categories, drawing conclusions that are at any rate not directly implied in the data of natural science and at the same time do not contradict them. We have in mind, of course, materialist philosophy, since idealism, even in its scientifical form, rejects the idea of explaining nature out of nature itself and quite often refuses to admit that it exists apart from human consciousness.

p Thus even today, just as at the dawn of civilisation, the first question that the philosophically minded person asks himself is: What is the world in which we live and which we think we more or less know? What is it that we do not know, but that undoubtedly exists—unless, of course, we hold the view that what we do not know does not exist? Is this unknown, this thing that’ is not yet known but that nevertheless exists, something more or less resembling that which exists and which we know? Or is it so different that the knowledge we have already acquired will not help us at all to comprehend it?

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p Already in ancient philosophy we find many answers to these and other similar questions. The ancient Greek materialists proceed from a sensorily perceived picture of the world and in this respect differ little from the scientists of modern times, who have at their disposal far more extensive sensory data and thanks to the development of theoretical knowledge have been able to analyse these data critically. The ancient materialists do not consider the sensorily perceived picture of the world to be exhaustive. On the contrary, they set out to discover what is not directly perceivable by the senses but may be discovered on the basis of sensory data by means of ratiocination, by inference. This is how the questions of the first cause, elements, homoeomeries, atoms, the essence of the sensorily perceived world in general, the ideas of the multiplicity of worlds, of the infinity and unity of the Universe, and so on, have arisen. Even those materialists who regard primordial matter or elements as sensorily given reach this conclusion by means of inferences because it does not directly follow from the fact of a definite sensorily given matter that it is primordial, or that it forms an essential component of all that exists. This matter must be singled out from the great diversity of sensorily given phenomena and proof must be furnished of its peculiar role in nature. It is in connection with attempts to classify sensorily perceived phenomena, to establish relations of similarity and dissimilarity, coordination and subordination between them, that the basic category characteristics of objective reality are formed, such as being, becoming, identity and difference, the unity of opposites, the individual and the general, the single and the many, essence and phenomenon, necessity, form and content, or 305 matter. The philosophical categories are expressed in the words of the natural, everyday language, which gradually accrete meanings extending beyond ordinary everyday usage. Thus the word “being” in the teaching of Parmenides has the meaning of category, since it refers not to everything that exists, but rather to that which fundamentally differs from sensorily perceived reality.

p The philosophical doctrines of ancient times, diverging from the original spontaneous materialism, interpret what cannot be sensorily perceived, the general, the essential, as radically opposed to the evidence of the senses, thus preparing the ground for the idealist teaching on the dual nature of existence, mundane and transcendental. To the idea of the unity of the infinite diversity of the phenomena of nature, which in its original form is synonymous with the materialist world view, Plato’s idealism counterposes the doctrine of the fundamental opposition between the sensual reality and the reality that cannot be perceived by the senses but is theoretically conceivable. Moreover, the reality perceived by the senses is interpreted as something generated by a higher, transcendental, incorporeal reality. Thus, there arises the idea of the fundamental opposition between the general and the particular, the material and the ideal, the idealist devaluation of sensorily perceived reality as something untrue and unreal although existing. Epistemologically, this propounding of the question is a metaphysical opposition of theoretical knowledge to the empirical, of concepts to sensory data, of words to individual objects. The higher thing, the key factor, in the process of cognition is interpreted ontologically, and in place of the naive mythology that made no claim to explain the world 306 theoretically there arises a theoretically substantiated, idealist myth-making. This is particularly obvious in the teaching of Plato, who not only reproduces the ancient myths, but also makes wide use of them to explain the idealist conception of the Universe. Thus, already in ancient times we are confronted with an irreconcilable opposition between the two basic philosophical views of nature, of the world as a whole, and of the external world.

p One of the great ideas bequeathed by the ancients to the philosophy of subsequent ages is the idea of substance, which is a collective concept embracing, besides the ordinary notion of the necessity of that on which everything “depends”, the scientific principle of explaining the world out of itself, the principle of the unity in all the diversity of existence, the idea of the unity of the general, the particular and the individual, and the notion of universal necessity, causality, and so on.

p “The logical idea of substance,” writes Ernst Cassirer, "is in general paramount to the scientific view of the world; historically it is a divide between investigation and myth.... The attempt to infer the diversity of sensual reality from a single primary substance implies a universal demand which—no matter how imperfect in its first attempts—is a characteristic expression of the new mode of thought and the new posing of questions.”  [306•1  While correctly stressing the significance of the problem of substance as forming the central point of the first basic “cosmic” theme of philosophy, Cassirer, like Kant, interprets substance only as a subjective logical concept with the aid of which the seeker after knowledge constructs the 307 world out of sensory data. The problem of the world as such, existing outside and independent of human consciousness, a world unencompassable, inexhaustible and spontaneous, although governed by certain laws, is replaced by the problem of the oneness of human knowledge. This belittling of objective reality that is characteristic of idealism commits to oblivion the most important philosophical generalisation of ancient times.

p The European Middle Ages, whose dominant idea was the Christian notion of an almighty creator of a finite world, that is to say, a world limited in space and time, was unable to make any essential contribution to the philosophical doctrine of substance, since these religious postulates excluded the original content of the problem that awaited its further development. The scholastic idea of a multiplicity of substances created by God reduced the concept of substance to an empirical conception of qualitatively changeless forms and generic essences. It is therefore no accident that the anti-feudal philosophy of the age of early bourgeois revolutions set up in opposition to the scholastic conception of the contingency of the world the great idea of the substantiality of nature. This idea was essentially proved by Descartes, despite the dualistic nature of his philosophy. "Descartes in his physics,” Marx and Engels observe, "endowed matter with selfcreative power and conceived mechanical motion as the act of its life. He completely separated his physics from his metaphysics. Within his physics matter is the only substance, the only basis of being and of knowledge.”  [307•1  The tendency that emerged in Descartes attained its brilliant 308 culmination in the materialist doctrines of the 17th and 18th centuries.

p The scholastic idea of the contingency, the chance nature of the world, inseparably connected as it is with creationism, with the notion of the spatial and temporal finitude of nature, was discredited by the heliocentric world view, which overthrew the conventional picture of the world that appeared to be consistent with everyday experience and also had the sanction of Biblical legend. Henceforth the earth was presented to man not as the centre of a finite Universe but as one of the planets in one of countless solar systems. Copernicus’s heliocentric system and the conclusions that were drawn from it by Giordano Bruno and other philosophers revealed to human eyes the physical infinity of the material world and at the same time provided a new yardstick for measuring the processes at work on Earth.  [308•1  This transformation of the question of infinity, which had previously confronted philosophers mainly in connection with the mathematical notions of the natural succession of numbers and infinite divisibility, signified, at least for the materialist (and consequently also for the natural scientific) world view, the merging of the problem 309 of substance with the problem of the substantiality of nature, that is to say, a return, admittedly on a new, scientifically enriched basis, to the ancient notions of the infinite Universe which exists eternally and eternally generates an infinite diversity of phenomena.

p From the hazy notions of a first cause and abstract, essentially tautological propositions (such as the famous "nothing comes from nothing”) the materialist philosophy of the new age in the struggle against theology and idealist doctrines comes ever closer, thanks to the philosophical explanation of the discoveries of natural science, to the scientific propounding of the problem of objective reality. The substance which the naive philosophical consciousness of ancient times had conceived as the absolute prime substance comes to be regarded in the philosophy of the new age no longer as an absolute substance, as primordial matter on which the Universe “rests” or out of which it is created.

p Spinoza’s concept of nature as substance, as the cause of itself, opens up the splendid vista of the scientific and philosophical cognition of the material unity of the world. But Spinoza’s substance lacked motion and activity. Leibnitz endowed substance with force. In fact, he turned it into a force, but idealistically counterposed it to an allegedly passive matter and, not daring to break with the theological interpretation of the Universe, regenerated the idea of pluralism of substances, which in turn involves acknowledgement of predetermined harmony.

p Locke’s criticism of the concept of substance is aimed against the idealist conception of the transcendental essence of things sensorily perceived. Locke rejects the purely speculative, rationalistic 310 notion of supersensual substance, because everything real, he maintains, can be registered on the basis of the evidence of the senses, observation and experiment. Locke’s successors of the materialist school reduce the concept of substance to the concept of matter and, developing Spinoza’s idea, formulate the major proposition on the selfmotion of matter (John Toland and the French materialists of the 18th century).

p The advocates of idealist sensualism ( phenomenalism), on the contrary, discard the category of substance. Berkeley, for instance, dissolves the material world into man’s sensations on the one hand, and on the other, seeks the absolute cause and basis of this world of sensations in God. In place of an incomprehensible, undiscoverable supernatural essence objective idealism tries to set up "universal reason”, as allegedly inherent in nature and expressing itself ultimately in man, in human history. According to Hegel, substance is the all-embracing dialectical unity of the subject and object, absolute thought forming both nature and man, the unity of opposites, and the universal process of motion, change and development. Therefore, Hegel says, substance must be regarded not only as the beginning but also as the result of the development of reality. This speculative conception is the idealist-dialectical interpretation of the universality and essentiality of the process of development, which is thus regarded as a substantial process. In the Science of Logic substance is regarded as one of the basic definitions of essence, which Hegel characterises as a system of interconnected categories. He applies the concept of substance not only to nature but also to society, in which he tries to find substantial differences and their unity. Hegel’s aesthetics 311 treats of "substantial characters”, which manifest themselves in tragic situations.

p Dialectical and historical materialism, which critically summarises previous philosophy and generalises the scientific proposition on the transformation of the forms of the motion of matter into one another, argues that substance is not any particular absolute essence, the immutable foundation of a diverse and changing reality. Spinoza’s concept of reality, Engels points out, expresses the reciprocal action of phenomena. The dialecticalmaterialist interpretation of this interaction is based on recognition of the universal transmutability of the forms of motion of matter. "We cannot,” Engels wrote, "go back further than to knowledge of this reciprocal action, for the very reason that there is nothing behind to know."  [311•1  Substance is, therefore, the unity of matter and motion, universal determinism, which manifests itself in all its aspects in motion, change and development, in the unity of mutually exclusive opposites or, in other words, in the eternal dialectical process of self-motion, self-development immanent in matter, whose various forms are united both genetically and in the process of coexistence. Substance as an absolute substratum, as something distinct from matter and its inherent motion is a metaphysical abstraction which has been entirely invalidated by the philosophy of Marxism and the sciences of nature.  [311•2 

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p Substance is the material unity of the world or, in other words, the material unity of the world is substantial, i.e., unlimited in time and space and hence eternal, absolute and all-embracing. "The unity of the world,” Engels says, "does not consist in its being, although its being is a precondition of its unity, as it must certainly first be before it can be one. Being, indeed, is always an, open question beyond the point where our sphere of vision ends. The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved not by a few juggled phrases, but by a long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science."  [312•1  This means that not only materialist philosophy but also the collected data of science and practice prove that the phenomena of nature and society do not have a dual existence (in this world and the next), that there is nothing external to the world, i.e., above it or below it, just as there is nothing within the world which differs fundamentally from the material processes that mankind cognises and transforms. Of course, as Engels 313 points out, "the formation of an exact mental image of the world system in which we live is impossible for us, and will always remain impossible".  [313•1  The problem remains open for advancing knowledge, and thanks to the achievements of the latter it is forever closed to idealist mystification.

p This, then, is the first theme of philosophy. Its development leads logically to the formation of philosophy’s second fundamental theme—the problem of the subject. Protagoras maintained that man is the measure of all things, assuming that no matter how different the perceptions of various individuals may be they all point to the existence of that which is contained in sensory perception. Hence, according to Protagoras, honey is both sweet and bitter: the man with jaundice perceives honey as bitter, which means that he discovers in it a bitterness that the healthy person fails to notice.

p Protagoras apparently did not counterpose subject and object, although he regarded sensual consciousness as the criterion of reality. This consciousness had no subjective content, since the consciousness always reflected, or reproduced, the objectively real. However, recognition of man as the measure of things did imply a possibility of subjectivist interpretation of reality. This possibility was later to be realised by various idealist doctrines.

p The philosophical cosmology of the ancient Greeks could not be concretely elaborated because of the absence of natural scientific data, and also because there was not as yet a developed epistemological and logical analysis of concepts allowing the problem to be systematically broken down 314 for the purpose of investigating it in all possible directions. The disagreements between the ancient natural philosophers were to a certain extent of a subjective nature, just as their beliefs concerning primordial matter or the basic elements were suppositions rather than knowledge, confirmed by facts. This brings us to the turning point in ancient Greek philosophical thought connected with the activities of the Sophists and, later, of Socrates.

p The Sophists repudiated cosmological problems because they were interested only in what had a direct bearing on the life of the individual. Socrates, while disapproving of the Sophists’ methods of reasoning and proof, actually continues and deepens this turn away from consideration of the Universe to the examination of man. Socrates declared that philosophy was incapable of solving cosmological problems, and that they should not really concern the lover of wisdom, who should be aware that the main thing in philosophy is for man to know himself. However, this opposition of the task of knowing the external world to the task of self-knowledge turns out on closer inspection to be a further development of the very intellectual need that generated philosophical cosmology. While the natural philosophers sought to create a view of the external world, the world as a whole, independent of mythology, the Sophists and Socrates set about evolving a philosophical view of man that would be independent of mythology.

p Regarding Socrates’s teaching, Hegel remarks that in it "the subject took upon itself the act of making a decision”. This, in fact, is the philosophical expression of the antimythological tendency generated by the development of slave-owning society.

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p For Socrates the chief philosophical questions are the questions of the nature of human essence (soul and body,, life and death, the meaning of life, man’s destiny), the nature of knowledge, truth and justice. Admittedly, Socrates is not interested in man as an individual distinct from other individuals, man in his subjective aspect. He regards man’s essence not as a corporeal, sensual, individualised essence. Human essence, according to his teaching, is incorporeal and immortal, and man’s body is only a transient envelope that imprisons the soul, an envelope that dissolves upon the death of the corporeal individual, thus releasing the imperishable soul. But what is the essence of the soul if it is internally alien to man’s corporeal existence? This question receives a thorough answer from Plato: The soul is knowledge of the other world of ideas from which the human soul arrived into this alien world of sensual things. Human souls differ from one another in the amount they know about the transcendental. Plato attaches no significance to any other distinctions because he believes them all to be derived from knowledge. But this knowledge is divorced from the real, sensorily perceived world, whose phenomena at best may help the soul to recall that which it has known all along.

p This idealist, intellectualist conception of the subject is consistently argued by Plato not only in his teaching on knowledge and its origins but also in aesthetics and the theory of the emotions. The path of aesthetic knowledge leads from the beautiful in its bodily, transient form to the beautiful soul, and thence to the transcendental idea of the beautiful.

p Plato’s attempt to reveal the transcendental essence of love as a feeling directed towards the 316 absolutely beautiful, which is incompatible with affection for anything single or individual, is also organically connected with this conception of the beautiful. The beauty that is worthy of love, Plato says, is to be seen not ”. . . in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any individual being as, for example, in a living creature, whether in heaven or on earth or anywhere else; but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which is imparted to the ever growing and perishing beauties of all other beautiful things, without itself suffering diminution, or increase, or any change".  [316•1 

p Thus, Greek philosophy, having posed the question of the subject, still does not single out clearly enough human subjectivity, or rather does not oppose the subjective to the objective.  [316•2 

p The Greek philosophers’ characteristic use of words corresponds to this approach. The bearer of certain qualities, the substratum, the substance, and also the subject of a proposition, are all described as subject. What the Greeks called the subject, therefore, is often what we in modern times call the object. This shows itself in the way the Greeks tackled the problem of man, whose specific attributes they interpreted as the special qualities of a certain object possessing a soul, sense organs, bodily attributes, and so on.

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p Medieval European philosophy adheres to this usage, although it goes beyond the bounds of the ancient Greek understanding of the human personality in that it endows it with free will, which is usually interpreted as license, i.e., a departure from the divinely established order of things. This is a negative characterisation of human subjectivity, which is wholly consistent with the medieval view of man as a creature predisposed to wickedness on account of his bodily, sensual nature.

p The new posing of the question of the subject, of the conscious self, arises in the bourgeois philosophy of the 17th century, which reflects the struggle of the bourgeoisie to liberate the individual from the fetters of feudalism. Descartes proclaims human reason the infallible judge in questions of truth and error, for reason is in fact the ability to present things clearly, in a way that excludes all doubt. According to Descartes, error is caused by free will, which is independent of the reason and prefers the desired to the true. This view of the will, which is close to that of John Duns Scotus, helps Descartes to magnify human reason, which is accordingly absolved of responsibility for error. Reason recognises no authorities; it trusts only in itself, its intuition, which reveals axiomatic truths—the basis of all deductive knowledge the ideal of which is mathematics. The first of such absolute axiomatic truths is the thesis "I think, therefore I exist”. All else is subject to doubt, at least until its existence has been proved in logic which proceeds from this fundamental intuitive truth.

p Descartes glorifies the critically thinking individual as the subject of cognition, the knower, but his notions of the moral nature of man are not devoid of medieval prejudice: he regards 318 religion as the basis of morality because the will’s independence of reason makes it incapable of submitting to its authority. The will needs another authority, and this is to be found in religion, good traditions and the order of things established by the state.

p In contrast to this abstract rationalistic conception of man, which sees man’s sensuality and emotions as the lowest, almost as animal manifestations of the human essence, the materialist philosophy of the 17th and particularly the 18th century evolved an empirical theory of the subject, proceeding from the sensualist proposition that knowledge and man’s whole emotional life originate from sensory perception of the external world. Mechanistic materialism treats man as a natural body subject to the laws of nature. This conception of man’s “natural” essence, necessarily conditioned by the surrounding reality, is a humanistic rehabilitation of sensual human life, which was condemned by religion and obviously underestimated by the rationalism of the 17th century.

p La Mettrie, unlike Spinoza, rejecting the opposition of the rational and the sensual, argues that sensual life can and should be varied and fullblooded, but at the same time rational and natural. "I neither moralise, nor preach, nor declaim, I simply explain,” La Mettrie writes.  [318•1  And in explaining that "man is a machine imperiously guided by unconditional fatalism”,  [318•2  La Mettrie is far from bewailing man’s miserable fate. On the contrary, he assumes that man, determined by his feelings, can be happy, because his own reason 319 also takes part and is an essential factor in this determination. Therefore man is not merely a machine, but "a machine which itself supplies its own (emphasis added—7’.O.) resources; the living image of perpetual motion".  [319•1 

p Diderot, who firmly disagrees with La Mettrie on a number of questions and maintains despite his predecessor that "man is not a machine”,  [319•2  nevertheless cannot forego mechanistic analogies: "We are instruments endowed with sensation and memory.”  [319•3  He, of course, has in mind musical instruments and he compares man to the pianoforte with nature operating its keys.

p In the view of the present author historicophilosophical literature has not done enough to show that the central problem of mechanistic materialism is the problem of the human subject, of man as a conscious being. Philosophical mechanicism cannot be treated merely as the mechanistic explanation of nature, which was proposed by natural science. Materialist philosophy develops its methodological principles and applies them directly to man, to society. In Spinoza, the study of nature is merely an introduction to his system, the exposition of its fundamentals, while the system actually pivots on the problem of man and his freedom, to which three quarters of his Ethics is devoted. Thomas Hobbes also sees it as his main task to evolve a doctrine of man (the citizen) and society. Locke’s essentially epistemological doctrine is primarily a doctrine of human sensuality, in which the philosopher sees not only the 320 basis of all human knowledge, but also the source of morality.

p Marx and Engels stress that the problems of human life are central to the teaching of French 18th-century materialism. Characterising Helvetius’s philosophy, they point out: "Sensuous qualities and self-love, enjoyment and correctly understood personal interests are the bases of all morality. The natural equality of human intelligence, the unity of progress of reason and progress of industry, the natural goodness of man and the omnipotence of education are the main points in his system.”  [320•1  It may appear that in Holbach’s philosophy, most fully expounded in The System of Nature, the problem of man, of social life, occupies a secondary place. It should be remembered, however, that the doctrine of nature forms the content of only the first five chapters of this work. The remaining twelve chapters of the first part, like the whole second half of this work, are devoted to the nature of man and to the criticism of religion as a system of prejudices that deform human nature. As for Holbach’s other works, they are all concerned with the analysis of social problems and substantiating the ideals of bourgeois humanism. Nature interests the French materialists as the immediate foundation of human life, as the sensual evidence the study of which refutes the religious picture of the world.

p French 18th-century materialism is the ideology of the revolutionary bourgeoisie whose anti-feudal, humanistic attitude determines the range of its philosophical problems. The key issue in the teaching of the French materialists is ultimately 321 the question of people’s interests, in the propounding of which they take a step forward in comparison with the materialists of the 17th century, who treated man as analogous to a natural body experiencing external influences and reacting to them. According to the French materialists, a person has his own interests, which it is his duty to realise in his own interests.

p Summing up the fundamental tenets of French materialism, the founders of Marxism write: "If correctly understood, interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is unfree in the material sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social source of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human.”  [321•1  Marx and Engels also point out the connection between Utopian socialism and French materialism.

p German classical idealism, in which the problems of bourgeois humanism are modified according to the objective conditions of development of an economically and politically backward Germany, investigates the problem of "the subject" from the standpoint of an abstractly understood epistemological and ethical ideal of humanity. Kant rejects materialist teaching on human nature along with all the conclusions to be drawn from it. Nor is he satisfied with the concept of the subject devised by 17th-century rationalism. 322 Kant’s philosophy is a radical reassessment of the cognitive abilities of the human self and at the same time a fundamentally new posing of the question of the fundamentals of morality. In both respects Kant is diametrically opposed not only to the materialists of the 17th and 18th centuries, but also to rationalist idealism. He denies the possibility of intellectual intuition, the knowability of the world independent of consciousness, and the ability of the reason (clearly distinguished from intellect) to resolve the theoretical, or rather philosophical, problems confronting it. Cognition, according to Kant, is confined to the world of phenomena, these latter being formed by the human intellect and the productive force of imagination out of the chaos of the sensations evoked by the unknowable "things in themselves" that awaken our sensuality. Kant criticises the teaching of Descartes and his followers for its invalid claim to knowledge that is beyond experience, such as knowledge of a reality independent of the subject, which he regards as impossible.

p Kant’s agnosticism, as he himself admits, restricts reason in order to make room for faith. But unlike Descartes, Kant maintains that faith is not the basis of morality, that, on the contrary, religion is founded on moral consciousness. Kant thus seeks to prove the moral foundation of religion as opposed to the religious foundation of morality. According to Kant, a person may be moral without being religious, while he becomes religious because he has an inherently moral consciousness. The moral consciousness is autonomous, that is to say, independent of everything else, including feeling, interest, and religion. It is subordinate only to itself, heeds only its own voice and is determined by its a priori form—the 323 categorical imperative, which it obeys because it is truly moral. Man’s potential moral capacity exceeds his cognitive abilities. Whereas for Descartes the sole intellectual ideal of humanity is the theoretical reason, clear and definite thinking, capable of knowing all that exists, for Kant the only possible ideal is practical reason (pure moral consciousness), freely obeying the moral law inherent therein. Therefore the supreme goal of philosophy, Kant says, is to help man to assume his proper place in the world, to teach him "what he must be in order to be a man".  [323•1 

p Fichte, Kant’s immediate successor, seeks to overcome the contradiction between Kantianism and classical rationalism. His philosophy is built around the idea of the substantial subject, the self as substance. Taking Kant’s transcendental apperception as his starting point, he goes against Kant in interpreting man’s a priori consciousness of his own Self as intellectual intuition, which makes it possible to discover in the self-consciousness of the empirical Self and Absolute Self, the mystical expression of the unlimited theoretical and practical power of Man to the fullest possible extent of his historical development. Potential infinity is transformed into actual infinity, which is realised to the extent that human individuals and their purposeful association (society) become aware of their omnipotent Self, in which the will and reason are identical, i.e., the will is reasonable, and reason is not only knowledge but also universal, practical, all-creating activity. The Cartesian infallible reason is realised in Fichte’s Absolute Self, which creates all reality that is 324 external to the Self (the Non-Self) as the essential condition and material for its creativity. The unknowable Kantian “thing-in-itself” is discarded and mankind, according to Fichte, creates not only the world of phenomena but the whole universe and, hence, itself. The true subject-matter of philosophy thus emerges, according to this view, as the Absolute Self—its point of departure and culmination, thanks to which philosophy is interpreted as the science of the principles of all knowledge and creativity, the science of sciences.

p Hegel revises Fichte’s subjective idealist doctrine of the Absolute Self from positions of objective, dialectical idealism. Substance, he teaches, must be understood in the same way as the Self. The Absolute Self merges with Spinoza’s idealistically interpreted substance, and the substantiality of nature (“Absolute Idea”) develops into the substantiality of mankind (“Absolute Spirit”).

p In all these outstanding speculative idealist doctrines the empirical human self dissolves into its generic essence, into mankind. The "subjective spirit" (anthropology, phenomenology and psychology) is, according to Hegel, only the lowest stage of development of the human essence. A higher stage, it is argued in his Philosophy of Mind, is the state, and the supreme and final stage of human development is "Absolute Spirit”, art, religion, philosophy (the latter, according to Hegel, includes the philosophically interpreted sciences). German classical idealism strives to reveal the unity of the individual and the social in its historical development, to understand social progress as development of the human personality, but the abstract, idealist conception of personality is inevitably impoverished by the idealist 325 reduction of the personality and human activity to consciousness, self-consciousness and knowledge. The individual is treated as identical to the social, and the difference within this identity is regarded as removable by dialectics. The relations between individuals are only a means of realising the common human goal, that is to say, in themselves, simply as human relations, they are meaningless. The individual’s ultimate self-consciousness is lost in the infinite self-consciousness of mankind, which in its turn is treated merely as the selfexpression of a rationalised God. The idealist opposition of the spiritual to the material “ dialectically” overcomes people’s actual relationship to nature, since the natural, including man’s “natural” essence, is regarded by Hegel as alienated existence, unworthy of its true essence.

p Ludwig Feuerbach had good reason to believe that his philosophical anthropology was the materialist conclusion to be drawn from the history of German classical idealism. He makes a thorough investigation of the evolution of the speculative idealist conception of the spiritual. In his view this evolution inevitably leads to the conclusion that man, and man alone, is the reality of what was originally regarded as God and subsequently as the developing universal reason. Philosophical analysis of the essence of Christianity convinces Feuerbach that religion, which the French materialists believed to be incompatible with “natural” human feelings and common sense, is the alienated existence of man’s sensual essence. The source of this contradictory duality of man is not sensuality in itself but the human essence that suffers and cannot find its path to happiness. Man is for Feuerbach the point of departure for understanding all that exists in society, no matter 326 how deeply it contradicts man’s feelings and reason. What is more, Feuerbach maintains that through knowing the essence of man we also get to know nature, because it is in man—nature’s supreme creation—that nature perceives and understands itself. By turning philosophy into philosophical anthropology, Feuerbach summarises the efforts of his materialist predecessors to understand the unity of man and nature, and rejects the supernatural and superhuman as products of the alienated human consciousness. But the unity of man and nature lies in social production, whose true significance is revealed only in its historical development. And pre-Marxist materialism, limited by its materialist (and usually metaphysical) examination only of nature, finds no answer to the problem it has posed. The solution is to be found only by proceeding from the positions of historical materialism.

p We have briefly outlined two basic philosophical themes and, in so doing, have arrived at the third basic theme of philosophy: the relationship between subject and object. G. V. Plekhanov observes that the opposition between materialism and idealism is closely bound up with their different approaches to the problem of subject and object, self and non-self: "Anyone who starts from the object, if only he has the ability and daring to think consistently, will build up one of the varieties of materialist world view. The person whose point of departure is the subject, the Self, again if he is not afraid to go through with it, will turn out to be an idealist of one shade or another.”  [326•1  Needless to say, the subject-object 327 problem is not only an ontological but also an epistemological problem. As such it draws most of its development from the middle of the 19th century, when philosophy is generally becoming aware of the necessity for an epistemological proof of ontological premises. What philosophy has to say about practice is also an epistemological (in Marxist doctrine, historical-materialist) development of the subject-object problem. From this standpoint philosophy is the movement of cognitive thinking from the object (material reality) to the subject, the Self, understood as derivative; or, vice versa, from the subject, the Self, understood as spiritual, to its opposite, the material.

p The classics of pre-Marxist philosophy usually realised the inevitability of this alternative. Schelling, for instance, wrote that there are two possible paths for a philosophy that systematically develops its propositions: "Either one takes the objective as primary and asks how anything subjective that agrees with it comes to be here."  [327•1  "But it is possible,” Schelling wrote further, "also to take the subjective as primary, and then the task is to find out whence comes anything objective that agrees with it."  [327•2  Though clearly aware of the radical opposition between these two approaches, Schelling tried to marry them, and on the basis of idealism at that. In his natural philosophy he starts from the object, understood as the absolute identity of the subjective and objective ( unconscious state of the world spirit) and comes to the subject—the human intellect. In his System of Transcendental Idealism Schelling chooses the 328 opposite, but also idealist, approach; taking the human Self, subjectivity, as his point of departure, he tries to explain the genesis of the objective in human knowledge.

p Hegel, having rejected Schelling’s idea of the primary absolute identity of subject and object, argued that the identity of thinking and being that he postulated as his point of departure always, by virtue of its dialectical nature,’ comprises the difference between the subjective and objective. Absolute thought, forming the universal essence of all that exists, is thus thought about thought; it is therefore both subject and object in equal degree. Thus, Hegel, like Schelling, ruled out any other alternative; either the subject or the object must be taken as the point of departure. They interpreted reality as the subject-object. But Hegel, like any other idealist, took the subjective, the spiritual, as his point of departure.

p We have dwelt on these classical examples to show that the philosophical theme is constantly modified in the course of the development of philosophical knowledge. As far as the object is concerned, some philosophers regard being as absolute reality, as something that exists without any relation to the subject; others, on the contrary, regard the object as something carved out of being by the consciousness, and therefore differing from being in itself, and only existing for the subject; and yet others oppose the fundamental distinction between object and subject, regarding this very distinction as derivative, secondary, subjective, and so on. Subjective idealism counterposes to the idea of the object’s independence of the subject, the Knower, the idea of their correlation. In the doctrine of Richard Avenarius this conception of coordination on principle is designed 329 to perfect Berkeleianism, which regards the subject as spiritual essence independent of the object (matter). Avenarius, on the contrary, maintains that the subject is impossible without the object, but that neither does the object (objective reality) exist without relation to the Self. This amendment to Berkeley’s idealism does not affect his basic proposition because objective reality (interpreted as merely a possible object of cognition) is regarded as conditioned by the subject.

p Thus, the themes of philosophy also comprise a definite understanding, interpretation of their content; these themes and “subthemes” constantly vary owing to the realisation of the possibilities that are implied in this unity of philosophical theme and its interpretation. In the final analysis these variations are conditioned by the development of philosophical knowledge itself and the struggle of the basic trends in philosophy.

p Heinrich Rickert distinguished two basic methods in philosophy—objectivism and subjectivism. Objectivising philosophy proceeds from the concept that the world exists independently of man, and regards everything subjective, including the mental, as part of the world and subject to its laws. According to Rickert, of course, the objectivising philosophy that allegedly ignores the problem of the Self is chiefly materialism. However, as a subjective idealist, Rickert also classes as objectivising philosophy pantheism, which he calls panpsychism. (Actually this is objective idealism, which strikes Rickert as naive from the standpoint of neo-Kantian "scientific idealism".) Rickert believes that objectivism, while fully justified in natural science, has nothing to offer in philosophy, whose chief content should be axiological problems. "Only subjectivism,” he 330 maintains, "actually gives us a unified concept of the world, a concept that explains to us our relationship to the world, whereas objectivism only aggravates the universal problem, endlessly deepening the gulf between life and science.”  [330•1  It is not hard to see that the neo-Kantian opposition of objectivism to subjectivism stems from the idea that the object and the subject are logical constructions of cognitive thinking that give shape through their a priori forms to the sole reality accessible to man—the chaotic flow of sensations. Cognition brings order to this flow of human sensations, builds them into a world, that is to say, according to neo-Kantian doctrine, into a definite construction, because the world does not exist as anything else but the object of the specialised sciences. For this reason subjectivism or subjective idealist interpretation of the sensorily perceptible reality, is characterised as a mode of philosophy that completely discards the illusions of naive realism. In fact, certain illusions are merely replaced by others.

p Marxist philosophy proceeds from acknowledgement of the dialectical unity of subject and object. This unity takes many forms. The subjective— man, consciousness, self-consciousness, cognition—is the product of the development of the material world. The subjective comprises an objective content inasmuch as it reflects objective reality. The existence of the subjective is an objective fact, independent of man’s consciousness. Consequently, even the opposition between the subjective and the objective is relative. "There is a difference between the subjective and the 331 objective,” Lenin writes, "but it, too, has its limits."  [331•1 

p The philosophy of Marxism differentiates between qualitatively different forms of the objective and interprets the multiplicity of the subjectiveobjective relationships accordingly. The objective is above all a reality independent of the subject, and the fact that for the subject it exists only in so far as the subject exists, is not, of course, a condition of its own existence. The object as an epistemological category presupposes the singling out of certain fragments of reality in the process of cognition. Since this singling out is performed by the cognising subject, the Knower, the object emerges as the content of the process of cognition. But it continues to exist in the objective world independently of the will and consciousness of man. Here there is none of the "coordination on principle" of which Avenarius spoke: there is correlation only between the subject and the apparent object of cognition. Even abstract objects are idealised reflections of objective reality and are, therefore, objective in their basic content.

p The objective exists also in the subject, and not simply in the sense that man—his biological, anthropological and social characteristics—is an objective reality, like any product of the development of matter. The objective also exists in the theory of knowledge: objective truth, the laws of the sensory and logical reflection of the external world.

p But man does not only reflect the external world. He also transforms it and thus creates something that did not previously exist in the world—"second nature”, that is to say, society. 332 What man has created in nature is an objective reality, subordinate to the laws of nature. Here, however, there is "dual subordination”, since man constructs machines, buildings, makes new substances and, consequently, directs objective processes the essence of which is independent of his consciousness and will. The instruments of labour, Marx said, "are natural material converted into organs for the domination of the human will over nature or organs for the execution of this will in nature".  [332•1  The productive forces of society are the spontaneous forces of nature converted by social labour into human forces, that is to say, the forces of the subject of the socio-historical process. Man in changing nature creates new objects. "Nature,” Marx wrote, "does not build machines, locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules, etc. All these are products of human activity.”  [332•2 

p The objective in the socio-historical process is the result of objectification of the activity of succeeding generations of people. Its objectivity is specific: the social conditions determining the development of society (productive forces and production relations) are created by people in the course of human history. This is a new ontological relationship between subject and object which does not exist in nature: here the subjective and objective form a unity of opposites that are transformed into each other. Hence the philosophy of Marxism fundamentally enriches this third, basic philosophical theme as well.

Thus, while not considering it possible to recognise a single subject of inquiry, one and 333 united for all the philosophical doctrines that have ever existed, we are able nevertheless to single out the subject-matter of philosophy, which changes historically within the limits determined by the specific nature of philosophical knowledge. Not one of the basic philosophical themes can be discarded or completely isolated from the others. But some philosophical doctrines deal mainly with the problems of the object, objective reality and existence, while others, on the contrary, reduce the subject-matter of philosophy to investigation of the subject, the subjective, and yet others, to the subject-object relationship. In the philosophy of Marxism all the basic philosophical themes are regarded as equally significant and organically linked with one another.