343

p The empirically obvious diversity of philosophical theories (including the contemporaneous) is naturally associated even by those with a superficial knowledge of the history of philosophy with the notion of the great philosophers who created them. In itself this notion is an acknowledgement of historical fact. Heraclitus and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, like many other founders of philosophical doctrines, were indeed great philosophers, and it would be absurd to deny the tremendous part they played in advancing philosophical (and not only philosophical) culture. But if we confine ourselves merely to acknowledgement of the fact, that is to say, accept it as self-evident and requiring no explanation, if we turn this empirical fact into a methodological principle for our inquiry into the development of philosophy, we shall unwittingly fall in with the subjective idealist historico-philosophical conception according to which the outstanding philosopher is not the immediate but the ultimate cause of the philosophical system he creates. In 344 which case his philosophy loses its objective social content. Suppose we are asked why it was that at a given time in a given country such and such a philosophy appeared. Because, we reply, the philosopher who created it was born there at that time. But this, of course, is no answer. Hume could have been born a philosopher only in the England of the early 18th century, and this means that the philosophical ideas whose development subsequently came to be called Humism, emerged even before Hume appeared on the scene.

p Plato and Aristotle, who were the first to take an interest in the history of philosophy, evolved no theoretical conception of the historico– philosophical process. They simply expounded and criticised the views of their predecessors as the errors committed by philosophers on the path towards truth or away from it. Neither of them associated the theories under consideration with certain historical conditions, and they likewise considered their own doctrines to be entirely the result of their personal intellectual efforts. When pointing out that some of their predecessors took a different approach to a particular question, Plato and Aristotle saw in this only the individuality of the philosopher. Admittedly, Plato in his doctrine of chosen souls having been initially linked with the absolute, with the very subject of philosophical inquiry, laid the foundation for the mystical interpretation of the philosophical genius. But only in modern times has this conception of the divine inspiration of outstanding philosophers (and artists) been treated in a subjectivist way, that is to say, by reducing philosophical doctrine to a purely individual vision of the essence of things. The founders of bourgeois philosophy, however, were opposed to the subjectivist 345 interpretation of philosophical creativity. Francis Bacon wrote: "I myself certainly am wont to consider this Work rather as the offspring of Time, than of Intellect.”  [345•1  And elsewhere he similarly affirmed: "For rightly is truth called the daughter of time, not of authority.”  [345•2 

p An even more determined stand was taken by Descartes, who maintained that "the ability to judge correctly and distinguish truth from falsehood, which strictly speaking is what we call common sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men".  [345•3  What, then, distinguishes the outstanding thinker from other people? Descartes replies that it is knowledge of the correct method, thus assuming that everyone is capable of mastering it.

p The revolutionary age of the establishment of capitalist society evoked in the most progressive representatives of the new class an awareness of the historical necessity of their ideological aspirations. As bourgeois society developed, this awareness was lost by the majority of its ideologists.

p The theoreticians of romanticism (some of whom defended the old ways of feudalism, while others were petty-bourgeois critics of capitalism) created the theory of heroes and the crowd, which became their philosophical credo. Schelling in Germany and Carlyle in Britain endowed this theory with philosophical and historical meaning. In his Lectures on Aesthetics Hegel fulminated sarcastically against the romantic conception of art as the manifestation of the "divine genius" to which everyone and everything else are but "trivial creatures”. Condemning aesthetic aristocratism and the attempt to apply it in philosophy, 346 Hegel wrote: "Anyone who takes this stand of divine genius looks down with scorn upon all other people, whom he declares limited and dull.. . .” Hegel stressed that the arrogant subjectivism of the romantics is in no way higher than the common everyday things that it ruthlessly mocks: "If the T takes this standpoint, everything appears to it paltry and worthless, everything but its own subjectivity, which in ’ consequence becomes a hollow and worthless vanity.”  [346•1 

p Hegel saw in art (and even more in philosophy) something besides the self-expression of outstanding individuality. He understood an outstanding individuality as the individualised expression of the "people’s spirit"—the concrete-historical form of existence of the "absolute spirit”, that is to say, idealistically interpreted mankind. Whereas for the romantics "divine genius" appeared to be an asocial phenomenon, Hegel saw it as an embodiment of socio-historical necessity. In other words, far from contrasting it to the development of society, he viewed it as the rational solution to the riddle of genius. Far from belittling the role of outstanding historical figures, Hegel actually elevated them by seeking the “absolute” source of their greatness. For this reason he called them "the confidants of the world spirit”, stressing that the great men are "those that have understood the essence of the matter best of all and from whom everyone else has subsequently gained their understanding and approved it or, at least, reconciled 347 themselves to it".  [347•1  Hegel, however, was very far from underestimating the significance of human subjectivity; he proceeded from recognition of the dialectical unity of the subjective and the objective, rejecting only the subjectivity that is divorced from reality, the arrogance of subjectivity which forgets that the measure of its wealth is its penetration into objective reality. In this sense Hegel declared that the richest reality would be the most concrete and most subjective. Lenin stressed the significance of this Hegelian understanding of concrete subjectivity embodying the wealth of the objective reality it assimilates. This conception of subjectivity, of course, has nothing in common with the subjective, anti-historical interpretation of the originality of the philosophical (or any other) genius.

p In Hegel’s view the great man is great because his personal ideas coincide with historical necessity, of which he becomes aware at a time when other people either eannot see it or are actually fighting against it:*HThe great people in history are those whose personal aims contain the substantial element that constitutes the world spirit. It is they who should be called heroes, inasmuch as they have acquired their aims and vocation not merely from the calm and orderly course of things hallowed by the existing system, but from a source whose content had remained hidden and had not developed to the point of personal existence, from the inner spirit which is still below ground and knocking to be allowed into the outer world, as though pecking its way out of a shell, because this spirit is a different nucleus, and not the nucleus contained in this 348 envelope. Thus it appears that heroes create out of themselves, and that their actions have brought about a state of affairs and relationships in the world that are solely their work and their creation.”  [348•1 

p In our view this understanding of the role of great historical figures, which Hegel, unlike the romantics, applied to all spheres of human activity, not only excels the romantic conception in realism, but also points the way for concrete historical investigation of the actual content of social development, which finds its personified expression in the activities of the outstanding historical personality. As for the romantic conception of genius, it implies from the very start a failure to understand the meaningfulness of social life, which struck the romantics as the dull and desolate prose of a monotonous everyday existence.

p One can, of course, understand and to a certain extent justify the petty-bourgeois romantic protest against capitalist reality. But this does not warrant a theoretical conception compounded of idealisation of the patriarchal social system, failure to understand the objective necessity of social progress and its inevitable contradictions, and futile attempts to escape these contradictions in the sphere of a subjectivity that turns its back on realities.

p In contrast to Hegel, Schopenhauer, who largely anticipated contemporary irrational idealism, tries to develop the romantic conception of genius. Schopenhauer, it is true, does not speak of "divine genius" and tries to furnish a physiological explanation of the phenomenon of genius. In the main, however, that is, in examining the 349 relationship between genius and social conditions, Schopenhauer takes the romantic conception of alienation to its logical conclusion. He writes: "In order to have original, unusual and perhaps even immortal thoughts, it is enough to be completely estranged from the world and things for a few moments, so that the most ordinary objects and events appear quite new and unknown, because this is how their true essence is revealed.”  [349•1  A genius, according to Schopenhauer, differs from ordinary people in that for most of his conscious, creative life he experiences "estrangement in a world that is alien and unsuited to him”,  [349•2  with the result that all other people strike him as trivial, paltry and unbearable. The greatness of genius is relative because it is measured by the worthlessness of its entourage. So the genius cannot help being arrogant, modesty being the lot of the mediocre>The genius is, in principle, incomprehensible to his contemporaries because he belongs to the future.

p A physiological interpretation of genius (and an extremely naive one, incidentally) serves Schopenhauer as theoretical proof of his thesis on the inimicality of genius to society and the time in which he lives. According to Schopenhauer, the genius is a physiological anomaly. In ordinary and even talented people the intellect serves the will and practically oriented, impersonal aspirations. The genius, on the other hand, is the "intellect that has altered its destination”,  [349•3  that is to say, that has to a great extent freed itself of the will. The cognitive power of the genius, according to 350 Schopenhauer, is independent of accumulated human experience and knowledge. "The man of learning is someone who has devoted much time to study: the genius is someone from whom mankind will learn something that he has learned from no one else.”  [350•1 

p These statements of Schopenhauer’s imply a whole programme of subjectivist, irrationalist interpretation of art, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history, a programme that has been realised by contemporary existentialism and the doctrines related to it.  [350•2 

p The classic exponents of idealist philosophy regarded philosophy as an intellectual quest of the absolute. The conceptions of philosophical genius that they evolved presumed the comparative assessment of philosophical doctrines, the critical analysis of ideas, and the elucidation of their connection with preceding ideas, separation of the true from the false, and so on. The crisis of idealism which began in the second half of the 19th century marked a distinct break with this positive trend, which was superseded by attempts to prove the eternal significance of the pluralism of philosophical systems, the interpretation of philosophical doctrines as fundamentally 351 incommensurate with one another and expressing not a definite step towards objective truth but a unique vision of the world.

p The representatives of the Baden school of neoKantianism, having debarred from history regularity, repetition, determinism, continuity, and anything possessing any general essence, interpreted philosophical systems formalistically as the free constructions of genius, the specific expressions of the a priori ability to achieve theoretical synthesis, measured by the degree of the thinker’s independence of the philosophical legacy and historical conditions. "The History of philosophy,” wrote Wilhelm Windelband, "confirms that history is the realm of individualities, of unique and isolated units....”  [351•1 

p Ortega-y-Gasset, who discovered and continued the irrational tendency in the neo-Kantian interpretation of the outstanding historical personality, regards philosophical doctrines as intellectual revelations of the spiritual situation of the outstanding thinker who is bound to break with existing views and create his own vision of the world. The outstanding thinker studies the cultural legacy and the social environment only in order to set off his own ideas against them, because philosophy "is nothing but the tradition of rejection of tradition".  [351•2  Philosophy is thus interpreted as a mode of existence of the free human subjectivity, which is in constant opposition to the “inhuman” objectivity of science.

p Existentialism treats philosophy (unlike science) as a “human” and personal attitude to the world, 352 which may be acquired only to the extent that the individual frees himself from the power of impersonal social relations and thus acquires genuine existence. The great philosophers, declares Karl Jaspers, live both in time and simultaneously above it. The greatness of the philosophical genius lies not in the fact that he adequately expresses his epoch and makes an outstanding contribution to the cognition of reality, but in the fact that in passing through a historical epoch he comes into contact with that which is eternally transcendental. Thanks to this phenomenal independence of his time and the knowledge accumulated by humanity, the great philosopher reveals anew, through his own existence, the essence of philosophy and the initial reality, which in philosophy above all acquires the individual, imperfect form that is the only possible one for anthropologically limited man. "The great man,” Jaspers writes, "is a reflection, an endlessly significant reflection of being as a whole. He is its mirror or its substitute. Without losing himself on the surface, he stands within the all-embracing that leads him on. His appearance in the world is simultaneously a penetration through the world.”  [352•1  All these grand words may sound highly significant, but a moment’s consideration reveals their completely unoriginal source—the Christian faith, which Jaspers liberates from its dogmatic form in order to “deepen” its meaning.

p The "philosophy of the history of philosophy”, which has acquired significant influence in recent years, has much in common with existentialism. The key to this idealist trend of contemporary 353 bourgeois thought is the idea of the unconditional autonomy of philosophical creativity, that is to say, its fundamental independence of objective historical conditions, social practice and scientific knowledge. This conception, which Martial Gueroult, its main advocate, calls radical idealism, stems from the notion that every outstanding philosophical doctrine is "a world confined in itself, a universe of thought dependent on itself, in short, a system. Every system is, in fact, a proof of itself, perfect in itself and within the limits that it has marked out for itself a priori, that is, according to the norm established by fundamental thinking. This self-sufficiency is an attribute of its absoluteness, and it implies a claim to all– embracing and exceptional significance.”  [353•1  In Hegel’s day people were still asking themselves whether a philosophy was true or false. The contemporary "philosophy of the history of philosophy" resolutely dissociates itself from any such naive statement of the question. Reviewing the historicophilosophical process with all its hopes and disappointments, it claims to solve only one question: what was the philosopher trying to say? And since he was an original philosopher he must have said something that no one else had said before him. Therefore the principle of the historicophilosophical inquiry must be the "principle of singularisation”, that is to say, an interpretation of philosophical doctrines that takes uniqueness as the basic criterion of their significance. The question of the truth of certain philosophical propositions is not worth discussing, because "philosophical doctrines are no longer either true 354 or false, they are different".  [354•1  To what this maxim leads is shown by Augusto del Noce’s study of Descartes.

p Seeking to reveal the originality of the great thinker, del Noce isolates him from the ideological trends and from the tendencies of development of science in the 16th and the first half of the 17th century. He is not interested in the close connection Cartesian philosophy has with mathematics and the heliocentric picture of the world, despite the fact that the philosopher’s discoveries point straight in that direction. Acknowledging that some rationalist themes emerged even before Descartes, del Noce denies any fundamental difference between the Cartesian rationalist world view and the previous slowly emerging rationalist trend. Cartesian rationalism is in effect cast aside as something that does not express the philosopher’s real originality. Along with rationalism the significance of the cogito—the central point in the Cartesian revolution in philosophy—is also played down. What then is left that may be considered great in the teaching of Descartes? "Descartes,” del Noce replies to this question, "begins modern philosophy inasmuch as his position among the theoreticians of the new science is unique and his philosophy may be regarded as a ’metaphysical accident’ in the history of mechanistic physics.”  [354•2 

p So, according to del Noce, it is not Descartes’s rationalism but his mechanicism that constitutes his main and unique contribution to philosophy. In the days of Descartes, we are told, there was a 355 general tendency to agnosticism and empiricism. This assertion is an obvious exaggeration, but even if we accept it, it should be stressed that Cartesian rationalism was opposed to these tendencies.

p Del Noce says that Hobbes, Gassendi, Roberval, Pascal and Mersenne launched polemics against Cartesian mechanicism. But the first three of these philosophers were themselves mechanists, which shows that, despite del Noce’s claim, Cartesian mechanicism, like his rationalism, was only the supreme, systematically and creatively applied expression of the historical trends in the science and philosophy of his time. There is no basis for juxtaposing mechanicism and rationalism in the teaching of Descartes. On the contrary, they are merged into one, as though confirming Leonardo da Vinci’s well-known remark that mechanics is a paradise for the mathematical science. It is no accident that the great mathematician Descartes was also the great founder of the rationalist and mechanistic line in philosophy, whose significance in the fight against the theological interpretation of nature was enormous.

p Unlike del Noce, Descartes was well aware that his teaching was organically linked not only with the great discoveries of mathematics and natural science of his day, but also with the trends of capitalist development. Not by chance did he proclaim that it is the chief task of philosophy (which he did not separate from other sciences but regarded as the first among them) to seek truth for the purpose of mastering the forces of nature. Nor was it accidental that Descartes left feudal France for the Netherlands, where a bourgeois revolution had occurred.

p The example of del Noce illustrates clearly enough what kind of subjectivist, anti-historical 356 interpretation of philosophy is produced by the idealist doctrine of the uniqueness of philosophical genius. The real originality of the brilliant philosopher, mathematician or natural scientist is reduced to a meaningless subjectivity, the source of which is proclaimed to be an amazing ability to isolate oneself from one’s day and age. Del Noce writes that "philosophical analysis leads us to a Descartes, who stands in isolation (my italics— 7.O.) with regard to the men of the new science. . . ."  [356•1  This profoundly erroneous conclusion follows directly from the metaphysical opposition of the individual to the social, the absurdity of which becomes all the more apparent in the case of a truly great thinker. In point of fact, however, it is the great thinker in contrast to the ignoramus who is most receptive (critically so, of course) to the social content and intellectual attainments of his age.

p The advocates of the “singularisation” of philosophy counterpose philosophical creativity to cognition of reality, which is allegedly the domain of the specialised science. They obliterate the qualitative distinction between philosophical studies and works of art.  [356•2  Investigation of the content of philosophical doctrines is virtually replaced by 357 their formalistic interpretation. The main thing in philosophical doctrines from this standpoint would appear to be not so much their content as the originality of their mode of expression, and particularly that of the philosopher’s own personality. Whereas in science more and more emphasis is being laid upon teamwork in research, continuity, mutual assistance, the division of labour and specialisation—none of which has prevented the emergence of great theories—philosophy is, from the standpoint of historico-philosophical subjectivism, doomed forever to remain a kind of intellectual hackwork that turns its back on modern methods of scientific research.

p Contemporary bourgeois philosophy, particularly the irrational school, is in a state of permanent conflict with positive knowledge and the practical activity on which this knowledge is based. This conflict requires some apology, and the " philosophy of the history of philosophy" supplies it by arguing that philosophical propositions possess only human content, whereas science is interested only in objects and, in so far as it considers man at all, treats man, too, as an object. This breach between philosophy and science is clearly an expression of the profound crisis that contemporary bourgeois ideology is experiencing.

p Historico-philosophical subjectivism is inevitably anti-historical. The historical approach to philosophy is treated by the advocates of this school as almost sacrilegious.

p The fundamental defect in the individualisticirrationalist characterisation of the philosopher (and philosophy) is not that it stresses the individuality or greatness of the genius whose works are of epochal significance, but that it makes a mystery of his originality and independence, 358 opposing these real qualities of genius to the socio-historical process, to the preceding achievements of culture and advances in knowledge. So the outstanding thinker’s intellectual independence is interpreted metaphysically, that is to say, it is contrasted to his equally obvious dependence on the historical conditions and achievements of the age, which are acknowledged only as a springboard for the leap into the unknown.

p Historical determinism is rejected on the basis of an oversimplified interpretation of determinism as the total conditioning of the individual by external circumstances. But the individual, who is totally determined by external factors, ceases to be a subject, i.e., he becomes merely the consequence of circumstances beyond his control, which rule out all freedom and creativity. But the determination of behaviour and creative activity, if understood dialectically, does not for a moment rule out individuality, originality or freedom of choice because the individual actually creates circumstances as well as being determined by them. The very influence of circumstances on human activity should not be understood as the exclusion of a wide range of possibilities and ways of realising them, because these possibilities exist in the circumstances themselves and are brought to light by the influence which man exerts upon them.

p The same applies to the interwoven activities of human beings the product of which is society. Here it is even more obvious that the activity of a single individual cannot be treated merely as the consequence of the determining influence upon him of another person or mass of people. Dialectical interaction rules out one-sided determination of human activity, and the latter, as 359 the main force determining man, is a unity of objective and subjective determination, that is to say, self-determination, the boundaries of which vary in different circumstances and depend to a great extent on the level—social and individual—of development of the personality. The existentialists are wrong in seeing determinism as a mechanistic one-sided conception and insisting that the principle of determinism cannot be applied to the subject-object relationship. Existentialism consequently ignores the dialectical character of actual determination, which manifests itself to the full precisely in the subject-object relationship. Both sides of this relationship influence one another and the character of the mutual relationship between them is determined both by the subject and the object. The most essential thing about this relationship is the fact that the subject itself, within certain limits, creates the conditions, the circumstances, the factors which determine its activity.

p The "philosophy of the history of philosophy" completely ignores the dialectics of the subjective and the objective, of the individual and the social, of freedom and necessity. It cannot see how the objective enriches the subjective, the social the individual, and necessity freedom. So the possibility of creative activity is allowed only if the subject achieves optimal internal independence of the external conditions of his activity. The subject must overcome the "pressure of reality”, rise above it and cut it out of the game. Hence the actual historical conditions in which the outstanding philosopher works are regarded as having no positive meaning or impulse that could inspire him: philosophy can be motivated only by their denial. This one-sided approach to the 360 analysis of the actual conditions shaping the great philosophical doctrines is the result of the subjectivist interpretation of the entirely obvious fact of human subjectivity.

p Revealing the epistemological roots of idealism, Lenin spoke of one-sidedness, rigidity, subjectivism and subjective blindness. Of course, this narrowness, which is formally present in any theoretical thinking, since it is abstract by its very nature, also characterises the personality of the idealist philosopher. The idealist worship of philosophical individuality reflects and at the same time obscures certain specific features of the development of idealist philosophy, particularly that variety of it which tries to put objective reality and its scientific reflection out of the picture altogether. But these features of idealist philosophy, which are wrongly attributed to philosophy in general, are rooted not merely in the philosopher’s individuality, but in the social conditions, interests and needs of certain classes and social groups, which, owing to their historical narrowness, cannot find adequate scientific expression.

p The individuality of the philosopher, as a social personality theoretically evolving a certain system of views, is brought about by development—social as well as individual. This is not to say, of course, that individuality is something of secondary importance. Man differs from a tree, a rock and other things in that his individuality belongs to his essence.

p The very fact that the individual philosopher expresses a certain social need to a far greater extent than anyone else testifies to his originality, that is, his ability to express more than what has a bearing on his own individual existence. Francis 361 Bacon’s battle against the schoolmen, against the worship of long-established authority and authority in general, his conviction that the sciences have only one system and that system has always been and remains democracy, his remaik that an author may not be both worshipped and excelled, interpret and substantiate the needs of the age of emergent capitalism and characterise his creative originality in the most direct way. The fact that Bacon convincingly expressed, and philosophically developed (this must be stressed because a great philosopher cannot be considered merely the mouthpiece of his time) ideas that many of his contemporaries were only vaguely aware of, points directly to the social content of his creative individuality. To draw any other conclusion, that is, to attribute Bacon’s ideas simply to his individuality, instead of regarding this individuality as a social phenomenon of the age, would be to act like those pseudo-rationalist scholastics who, as the philosopher himself aptly put it, are like spiders that draw the mental thread of their reasoning out of themselves. It must have required exceptional individuality to be able to oppose the prejudices not only of everyday consciousness but of the dominant ideology and learning of those days.

p The great historical personality is to a large extent represented by his historical achievements. The great thing about him is that to which he devotes his exceptional abilities, energy and zeal. Freud’s biggest mistake, which even his most devoted followers have been compelled to deprecate, was his attempt to deduce from the subconscious psychological complexes that he believed to be inherent in the human personality the content of its creativity, including its social content. The 362 failure of this attempt has obviously not been understood by the advocates of the subjective interpretation of the history of philosophy, who have tried to explain Freud’s one-sidedness as "psychological depth”, as the psycho-analytical interpretation of the subconscious, and so on. But the fundamental methodological failure of the Freudian interpretation of poetry, philosophy and sociology lay not simply in its one-sidedness, but in its denial of the specific nature of the social, in its idealist, irrationalist reduction of the social to the individual, and the individual to the subconscious, to the impersonal. Neo-Freudianism, which supplements Freud’s doctrine with a psychological analysis of the cultural environment, has not overcome this weak spot in Freudianism, nor the metaphysical opposition of the individual to the social, since it interprets the social mainly as a factor that deforms the human personality.

p The difference between the individual and social consciousness is an empirically obvious fact, which can, however, be correctly understood only by means of scientific investigation of the following dialectical unity: the individual consciousness is social in character, and the social consciousness exists in the minds of human individuals and, like all that is social, is a product of the interaction of these individuals. The advocates of the historico-philosophical varieties of the theory of the hero and the crowd usually agree that the consciousness of the ordinary “average” individual has a social or, as Western sociologists now put it, a “mass” character, but they maintain that the consciousness of the outstanding personality differs from that of the "impersonal masses" precisely because it is radically opposed to the social consciousness. The essential characteristic of the 363 social consciousness, however, is not its mass character or its impersonality, but the manifold wealth of its spiritual content which is to be found in science, philosophy, art and so on. The confusion of the social consciousness with everyday consciousness, which indeed has a mass but by no means an impersonal character is a glaring mistake on the part of today’s exponents of “elitist” theory, a mistake that inevitably leads to the sterile opposition of the great historical personality to the cultural heritage and the age that he expresses and enriches by his activity.

p Historico-philosophical subjectivism despite its own direct intentions detracts from the significance of the brilliant philosophers because it excludes from their creative individuality the accumulated historical experience and intellectual attainments of their predecessors and contemporaries. The idealist “elevation” of the great thinker to a position above his time is based on a completely indiscriminate notion of the historical epoch, failure to perceive its inherent internal contradictions, the class struggle, and the lawgoverned tendencies of social development. This idealist conception, which today flies the flag of non-conformism (with the outstanding thinker supposedly as its spokesman), is quite unexpectedly transformed into traditional philosophical conformism, which makes a show of its fictitious uncommittedness.

p Jean-Paul Sartre, while admitting that historical materialism is "the only acceptable interpretation of history”,  [363•1  nevertheless reproaches Marxists for 364 not explaining why one particular individual and not another became an outstanding historical personality. "Valery is an intellectual petitbourgeois, there is no doubt about that. But not every intellectual petit-bourgeois is a Valery. The heuristic deficiency of contemporary Marxism is contained in those two phrases. Marxism lacks the series of intermediate links that are needed to grasp the process that produces a personality and its product in a given class and a given society at a given moment in history. By qualifying Valery as a petit-bourgeois and his work as idealist, Marxism fails to discover in either of them anything but what it has put there. Because of this deficiency Marxism ends up by discarding the particular, which it defines as merely the effect of chance.”  [364•1 

p It seems to me that Sartre completely misapprehends the subject and tasks of the materialist interpretation of history and the limits of theoretical sociology in general. Historical materialism studies the most general laws of development of social formations, the totality of social relations, that is to say, society as a historically defined social organism, the relationship of social consciousness to social being, of the economic basis to the superstructure and so on. Such investigation fully explains the appearance of outstanding figures on the historical scene, but it does not, of course, set out to explain why a particular individual becomes a great poet, philosopher, scientist or anything else. This is a specialised task and to deal with it one must apply the principles of historical materialism to a special historical, 365 biographical and psychological study which, if sufficient historical data are available, will solve that particular problem.

p Contrary to Sartre’s assertions, historical materialism does not need to be supplemented in a way that would turn it into a theoretical investigation of the biographies of separate individuals. When Marx studies the causes of Louis Bonaparte’s counter-revolutionary coup d’etat, he applies historical materialism in analysing the particular circumstances that gave rise to the coup and scientifically explains why Louis Bonaparte in consequence of his social position, personal qualities, historical tradition and the specific features of the class struggle in France between 1848 and 1851 emerged as the leading historical figure in these events. Sartre himself refers to Marx’s ’The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as a brilliant example of the materialist investigation of the fate of certain historical personages, but his own proposal that historical materialism should be supplemented with Freudian psychoanalysis, empirical bourgeois sociology and the like does not make sense because this very work, like other works of Marx and Engels, provides ample evidence that historical materialism supplies not only a global characterisation of the socio-historical process, but also, when applied as a method in specialised historical, biographical and socio-psychological research, furnishes a genuinely scientific explanation of particular and unique social phenomena.

p Nor does the scientific history of philosophy seek to explain precisely why a given individual, for example, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the son of a German peasant, became a great philosopher. It studies his doctrine as a definite stage in the 366 development of philosophical knowledge, as a social phenomenon. This, of course, does not preclude the possibility and necessity of special biographical research, a special biographical study of Fichte, which would presumably give us a better understanding of his views and some of the peculiarities of his doctrine and the form in which it is delivered, although this Could not in principle make any essential difference to the scientific understanding of his teaching.

Thus, only historical materialism, MarxistLeninist historico-philosophical science, correctly propounds and solves the problem of the historical personality, which is obscured by idealism, and the problem of the great philosophers, one of the aspects of this more general problem.