366

In the previous section of this chapter we showed the insolvency of the subjectivist interpretation of the historico-philosophical process. It should be noted that some bourgeois philosophers and historians of philosophy also object to this interpretation, since they realise that to present philosophy as the intellectual self-expression of an outstanding individuality robs it of much of its social meaning and significance. As modern times have clearly demonstrated, philosophy is an active participant in the ideological and political struggle. The researches of bourgeois sociologists confirm this fact and it is not surprising that many researchers who are far from accepting the materialist view of history recognise to a greater or lesser degree the need to study philosophy in the

367 context of the actual historical process.  [367•1  But this “contextual” or “cultural-historical” approach to the history of philosophy is usually one of the variants of the well-known (and utterly bankrupt) "theory of factors”. Realising that the study of philosophy in isolation from other cultural phenomena does not work and trying to trace the interaction between them, bourgeois scholars nevertheless continue to ignore the socio-economic content of social development. They talk of the "intellectual climate" and the "historical situation" giving rise to certain philosophical views, thus interpreting historical conditions as states of mind, spiritual needs, a sense of dissatisfaction, and so on. But to treat philosophy as part of the practical life of society, as part of the socioeconomic process, to investigate the connection between philosophical ideas and the development of social production and its social consequences, the prevailing social relations and the class struggle—all this appears to the bourgeois scholar to be a vulgarisation of the scientific understanding of philosophy, because in the alienated, idealist form of philosophising with which he is 368 chiefly concerned he fails to see any real social content. "To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves in some degree become philosophers. There is here a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men’s lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances.”  [368•1 

p Russell prefers to judge a historical epoch by its consciousness, which in his opinion partly determines the epoch and is partly determined by it. But what is there in a historical epoch that is determined by philosophy? What is there in philosophy that is determined by the historical epoch? The concept of reciprocal causation that Russell suggests fails to answer these questions for the simple reason that the interacting sides are themselves to a considerable extent the products of interaction. Consequently, what we have to do is to study the basis of this interaction, which cannot be reduced to the circumstances directly influencing philosophy.

p The weakness of this descriptive approach to the development of philosophy lies not in the zeal with which it emphasises the influence of philosophy on social life. Philosophy is a form of man’s spiritual life and as such undoubtedly has an effect on social being. But the contemporary bourgeois scholar lacks the scientific concept of social being that Marxism has evolved, and consequently fails to understand that philosophy’s influence on social life is conditioned by what it has to say about society, by its social content. Hegel’s definition of philosophy as the age 369 comprehended in thought, as the consciousness of the age, is far more profound than Russell’s “realistic” conception, because it rules out in principle any ambivalent idea of partial determination.

p Because Hegel is an idealist he refuses to see in philosophy any particular reflection of the historically determined social reality. But as a historian of philosophy, who attaches primary importance to facts, he constantly tries to discover the unity between philosophical doctrines and historical conditions, although from the standpoint of absolute idealism philosophy is the substantial content of the historical age, that is to say, it ranks first in importance, if not in time. This contradictory combination of historicism and idealism, or the idealist interpretation of the historical process, its reduction to an immanently developing logico-ontological concept, was inevitable in the system of Hegelian panlogism, which takes as its point of departure the identity of being and thinking.

p Even so, Hegel’s dialectics constantly compelled him to reckon with the historical facts and to consider philosophical systems not simply as the result of the self-motion of pure absolute thought, but as the necessary intellectual expression of radical changes in social life. These changes, incidentally, are attributed to changes in the spirit of the time, or the "spirit of the peoples”. It is I from these positions that Hegel considered, for example, the Sophists, Socrates, and the philosophy of Enlightenment.

p Regarding the historical sources of stoicism and Epicureanism, and Roman scepticism, Hegel notes that, despite their differences, all these doctrines express one and the same tendency—the striving "to make the spirit in itself indifferent to 370 everything presented in reality".  [370•1  But where does this tendency come from? Is it rooted in the selfdevelopment of philosophy or in changes in the structure of society? Hegel, as we know, is inclined to accept the latter conclusion. He points to the decline of the Roman Empire, comparing it to the decay of the living body: "The state organism had disintegrated into the atoms of private individuals. Roman life had come to such a pass that, on the one hand, there was fate and the abstract universality of supreme power, and, on the other, individual abstraction, the personality, which implies that the individual in himself amounts to something not because of his vitality, not because of his fulfilled individuality, but as an abstract individual.”  [370•2  Some people gave themselves up entirely to sensual pleasures, others by violence, insidiousness and cunning sought to obtain wealth and sinecures, and still others withdrew from practical activity to the sphere of philosophical speculation. But even they, for all the loftiness of their intellectual aspirations, still expressed the same social phenomenon—the break-up of this particular society, because "thought which, as pure thought, became the subject of its own inquiries, reconciled itself to itself and became completely abstract.. .”  [370•3 

p Here, as in many other parts of his lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel not only passes judgement on the philosophy of classical individualism, which saw its chief goal not in mental knowledge of reality but in the attainment of ataraxia; he also points out the insolvency of the 371 kind of speculative thought which makes thought itself the subject-matter of thought. But such in a sense was Hegel’s own philosophy, with the one, admittedly important, difference that he transformed thought, the logical process, into absolute being and, by following up this purely speculative identity, perceived the laws of development immanent in both thinking and being.

p Hegel asserts: "The particular form of philosophy is, therefore, contemporaneous with a particular form of peoples among whom it emerges, with their state system and form of government, with their morality, with their social life, with their abilities, habits and conveniences of life, with their aspirations and works in the sphere of art and science, with their religions, with their military destinies and external relations, with the collapse of states in which this particular principle has manifested its power, and with the rise and activity of new states in which a higher principle is born and develops.”  [371•1  It is highly significant that Hegel speaks of the contemporaneity of the existence of a certain philosophy with such definite peculiarities of a given historical epoch. He seems to have been aware that the specific content of the historical epoch to which a given philosophy belongs cannot be inferred from the latter. But to an even greater extent was he convinced that philosophy, being substantial by nature, could not be determined by any "civil society”, which appeared to him to be the alienated sphere of the "Absolute Spirit" whose creative activity is again speculative thought. Contemporaneous existence is a kind of historical parallelism, the basis of which Hegel seeks in the "spirit of the time”, the 372 “spirit of the peoples”, and ultimately in the "Absolute Spirit”, whose highest expression is once again philosophy. The development of philosophy is an immanent process of the self-cognition of the "Absolute Spirit" and Hegel, as Marx aptly remarked, was inconsistent in that, while regarding his philosophy as the ultimate perfection of absolute self-cognition, he did not regard himself as the subject of this process, that is to say, the "Absolute Spirit" itself.  [372•1 

p Hegel is equally inconsistent in his estimation of the role of philosophy in the development of society. Assuming that thought, particularly in its philosophical (authentic) form, is all-powerful, Hegel nevertheless treats philosophy as a peculiar epiphenomenon of the contemporaneous historical epoch, since this epoch is a definite stage of alienation of the "Absolute Spirit”, and only to the extent that it overcomes this alienation can it find its adequate expression in philosophy. But in this case philosophy, naturally, cannot be one of the spiritual potentialities that form the epoch, since it always appears later. "When philosophy,” Hegel says, "begins to trace its grey paint upon the grey, this shows that a certain form of life has grown old and with its grey upon grey philosophy cannot rejuvenate it but only understand it; the owl of Minerva does not take wing until the twilight."  [372•2  This conclusion, which follows inevitably from Hegel’s whole system, is quite often disproved by his own historico-philosophical researches, which show philosophy blazing the trail to a new social structure and taking a direct part in its development. But Hegel does not formulate the 373 conclusions he draws from concrete historico– philosophical research as theoretical principles. This was also because, as a bourgeois thinker of the early 19th century, Hegel placed his whole faith on the spontaneous development of society, which was drawing Germany into the capitalist process of production regardless of and even, as it seemed to Hegel, despite the conscious attempts at social reform, most of which struck him as subjectivist interference in a process, objectively reasonable (whatever its appearance), of social development that was realising the substantial aim of world history.

p Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegel’s philosophy already implies an awareness of the fact that the speculative idealist understanding of the development of philosophy as the self-generation and self-motion of pure thought inevitably comes into conflict with the historical view that philosophy specifically expresses the real demands of its time. Rejecting Hegel’s panlogism, Feuerbach insists that philosophy is rooted not in thought but in feeling, and that the philosopher as an actual human being thinks only because he feels and experiences along with other people like himself, people of a definite historical epoch.

p The narrowness of Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism precluded any possibility of understanding human essence as a historically determined totality of social relations. Nevertheless Feuerbach, bourgeois democrat that he was, fully realised that the changes occurring in philosophy reflect the demands of the time, and that these demands, particularly in periods of crisis, are profoundly contradictory. He noted that "some see the need to retain the old and drive out the new, while for others the need is to realise the new. 374 Only the desire to realise the new adequately expresses the real demands of social progress”. As for attempts to retain the old, they appear to Feuerbach, who regards history from the standpoint of abstract humanism, merely artificial and strained, although he cannot fail to see that these attempts are made by certain, quite definite classes of society. Admittedly, at the time of the 1848 revolution Feuerbach tries to obtain a more concrete idea of the origins of the opposing social forces. "Where,” he asks, "does a new epoch begin in history? Wherever the oppressed mass or majority advances its entirely legitimate egoism against the exclusive egoism of a nation or caste, wherever classes of people or whole nations, having vanquished the overweening arrogance of the patrician minority, emerge from the wretched condition of the proletariat into the light of historical renown. So, too, the egoism of the presently oppressed majority of humanity must and will assert its right and launch a new epoch of history.”  [374•1 

p These seeds of the materialist understanding of history remain undeveloped in Feuerbach’s teaching. He regarded his philosophy as the ideological expression of the “egoism” of the oppressed majority of humanity among whom he, incidentally, as an ideologist of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, also included the bourgeoisie, since it was fighting the ruling feudal forces. Bourgeoisdemocratic illusions, the idealist explanation of history, and the inspiration of the anti-feudal struggle against religion, which he imagined to be almost the chief enemy of freedom—all this 375 made it impossible for Feuerbach to understand the unity of philosophy with the historically concrete, socio-economic, political content of the epoch, the class struggle and the development of the capitalist formation, the contradictions of which he was beginning to comprehend.

p The doctrine of the development of the productive forces as transformation of external nature and human nature itself, the analysis of the antagonistic contradictions of social progress in class society, the theory of socio-economic formations, the class struggle and social revolutions, the investigation of production relations, of the political, legal, and ideological superstructure, the scientific understanding of the necessary connection between material and spiritual production and of the specific laws of the social process in general—such is the true theoretical foundation of the scientific conception of the social role of philosophy. Thus, only historical materialism does away with the naive notion of the autogenesis of philosophical knowledge, includes the development of philosophy in the law-governed process of development of society and shows that "the philosophers”, as Engels said, "were by no means impelled, as they thought they were, solely by the force of pure reason. On the contrary, what really pushed them forward most was the powerful and ever more rapidly onrushing progress of natural science and industry.”  [375•1 

p Not a single philosophy can be understood purely out of itself, purely on the basis of what the philosopher himself writes. Historico– philosophical inquiry must first of all understand 376 philosophy as epochal consciousness, the consciousness of the age, disclose its social ethos, its specific problems which in the course of subsequent social development break away from the historical conditions that generated them and become an element of the philosophical tradition and the property of new philosophical doctrines. These problems thus acquire a new interpretation independent of the epoch that gave birth to them. Philosophy (like art and the cultural heritage in general) retains a certain significance and influence beyond the bounds of the epoch that engendered it and this creates the idealistic illusion of its being independent of the historical epoch. But this illusion is dispelled as soon as we begin to analyse the social content, the cognitive significance of philosophy, and also the historical continuity of epochs in the progressive development of society.

p The theories of natural law propounded by Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke and Rousseau, the rule of reason proclaimed by the Enlighteners, the idea of enlightened self-interest, Kant’s "good will”, the doctrine of freedom as the essence of man, the philosophico-anthropological conception of the unity of the human race, the materialist systems of nature, the concept of the self-motion of matter, deism and atheism, mechanicism, rationalism, the sensualist doctrine of cognition and affects, the idea of the law-governed nature of everything that exists, the doctrine of the universality of development, the idea of social progress—all these diverse philosophical problems of the new age can be correctly understood only as the epochal expression of the tremendously accelerated progress of the productive forces, science and culture, which came about with the 377 emergence and development of the capitalist mode of production.

p Even while his own views were still taking shape, Marx said: "... philosophers do not grow out of the soil like mushrooms, they are the product of their time and of their people, whose most subtle, precious and invisible sap circulates in philosophical ideas. The same spirit that builds railways by the hands of the workers builds philosophical systems in the brain of the philosophers. Philosophy does not stand outside the world any more than man’s brain is outside of him because it is not in his stomach... .”  [377•1  Marx emphasised the unity of philosophy with the whole ensemble of social relations. The social division of labour, as a result of which some build railways, others create philosophical systems, while others discover the laws of nature, and so on, should not be allowed to overshadow the dialectical unity of the socio-historical process, which acquires its fullest expression in the philosophical doctrines of the progressive classes. For this reason Marx also said that philosophy "is the spiritual quintessence of its time”, that "it is the living soul of culture".  [377•2 

p The great philosophies are epochal events in world history. And not only because they are epochs in mankind’s intellectual development. Each of them is a powerful spiritual force contributing to the emergence and development of the new epoch. These doctrines reveal, explain 378 and substantiate the needs of the historical epoch, its struggle with the forces of past and present that are opposing it, its intellectual, moral and social ideal. The law-governed connection between the various historical epochs, forming the necessary stages of development of humanity, is reproduced on the spiritual plane by the development of philosophy. The gains of each historical epoch in the sphere of material and spiritual production and socio-political progress are inherited by subsequent historical epochs not only thanks to the continuity of economic development but also through the spiritual development of society, in which philosophy plays a tremendous part.

p The historically transient social problems of every epoch imply intransient aspirations. And a great philosophical doctrine, inasmuch as it expresses these aspirations, advances beyond the boundaries of its time and becomes part of mankind’s spiritual heritage. In the history of philosophy, in which for every new generation all the stages of the previous philosophical development are presented simultaneously, we have the only intellectual plane in which the thinkers of various epochs meet as though they were contemporaries. We can put questions to our predecessors and, although we have to answer these questions ourselves, the philosophical doctrines of the past help us to solve contemporary problems. The understanding of philosophy as epochal consciousness, which is “removed”, i. e., negated, but at the same time preserved in a new form by subsequent development, was enunciated in idealistically obscure terms by Hegel. In the teaching of Marx and Engels it acquired a scientific, materialist substantiation thanks to the concrete historical investigation of the development of the different 379 historical types of society (socio-economic formations), the laws of social progress and spiritual continuity, the class nature of social relations in the capitalist and other antagonistic formations preceding it, and also thanks to investigation of the struggle of the philosophical trends, a struggle that precludes any possibility of the harmonious continuity of philosophical ideas of which Hegel wrote.

p The Marxist-Leninist conception of philosophy as epochal consciousness, while tracing the origin and social content of the outstanding philosophies, makes no attempt to limit the significance and influence of these philosophies to the framework of one particular epoch. It is, consequently, radically opposed to the idealist-relativist interpretation of the historicity of philosophy, which was extravagantly expressed in Oswald Spengler’s philosophy of culture. "Every philosophy,” Spengler wrote, "is the expression of its own and only its own time.. .. The difference is not between perishable and imperishable doctrines but between doctrines which live their day and doctrines which never live at all. The immortality of thoughts is an illusion—the essential is, what kind of man comes to expression in them. The greater the man, the truer the philosophy, with the inward truth that in a great work of art transcends all proof of its several elements or even of their compatibility with one another.”  [379•1  In this proposition, which is a very thorough mixture of correct and incorrect ideas, historicism is converted into its opposite, because every epoch is interpreted as a unique complex of cultural phenomena and is 380 thus separated from the preceding and subsequent development of society.

p To substantiate his irrationalist mythology of culture, Spengler relies mainly on the subjective idealist argument. Nature is only a culturalhistorical image, the unity of man’s immediate perceptions of a certain epoch. History is an equally subjective, but—unlike nature-^a “poetic” construction, which realises the desire to bring the "living being of the world" into a certain harmony with human life. No wonder, then, that philosophical doctrines lose their specific nature, because they are regarded as works of art. The social content of philosophy is interpreted in the spirit of the irrationalist approach to life, from positions that deny the existence of objective truth not only in philosophy, but in mathematics and the natural science as well. Every epoch, according to Spengler, creates its own mathematics, its own natural science, which have no cognitive value beyond the bounds of their own epoch, because they are not cognition of objective reality but historically transient forms of spiritual life. Everything that happens in history is for once only, unrepeatable, because of the irreversibility of “time”. The quotation marks drive home the point that for Spengler even time is not an objective reality. It is surely obvious that given such an interpretation of the historical epoch and its culture the assertion that philosophy is the expression of its own time (and, as he stresses, "only its own time,”) amounts to a complete denial of the cognitive significance of philosophy. This conception, which lays claim to a historical vision of the phenomena of culture and reality, denies philosophy’s development and in no way explains the empirically established fact of the significance 381 of scientific and philosophical knowledge (and also works of art) of the past for the present.

p Thus the theories that attribute the significance of eternal truth to philosophical systems are as invalid as those that deny any element of perennial significance in the great philosophical doctrines of the past. Philosophical doctrines (like any knowledge in general) retain their significance only to the extent that they are confirmed, adjusted, developed and enriched by new propositions, and this of course depends not simply on the zeal of their proponents, but primarily on how well they express new historical needs, how they reflect objective reality and assist in its further cognition and transformation. Thus the definition of philosophy as the consciousness of the epoch may be interpreted both dialectically and metaphysically. Spengler’s interpretation of the epochal consciousness is not only idealist but metaphysical.

p In his letters of 1880–1890 Engels wrote against the vulgarisation of the materialist conception of history as practised by the notorious "economic materialism”. Lenin and Plekhanov were severely critical of V. Shulyatikov, who in a book that appeared in 1908, The Justification of Capitalism in West European Philosophy, interpreted the philosophies of modern times as a disguised representation of the development of the capitalist economy. Shulyatikov wrote, for example: "Every single one of the philosophical terms and formulae with which it (philosophy—T.O.) operates . . . serve to indicate social classes, groups, subgroups and their interrelationships.” The philosophical doctrine of antithesis of the spiritual and the material expresses, in Shulyatikov’s view, nothing but the opposition between the organising "upper strata" and the operative "lower 382 strata”. Spinoza’s doctrine was described by Shulyatikov as the "song of triumphant capital, absorbing everything and centralising everything”. Citing these and other statements of Shulyatikov’s, Lenin wrote: "The entire book is an example of extreme vulgarisation of materialism. ... A caricature of materialism in history.”  [382•1 

p If we ignore Shulyatikov’s pretentious claims and seek out the theoretical roots of his conceptions, we discover an obvious failure to understand the basic proposition of materialism that the social consciousness is conditioned by social being. Agreeing with this proposition but misinterpreting it, Shulyatikov maintains that philosophy expresses only the economic structure of society and has nothing to do with cognition of nature and society. This emasculation of the objective content of philosophy led to an idealist error in the spirit of Spengler. But the content of philosophy (like any other form of knowledge in general) is to a great extent determined by the subject of its inquiry, whose modification only indirectly reflects socio-economic advances.  [382•2 

p Theoretical natural science, whose subject of inquiry is independent not only of social consciousness but also of social being, nevertheless also reflects the socio-economic processes because science expresses certain social needs and is stimulated by the development of production and the technical means of research for which it provides the basis. The vigorous advance of 383 natural science in the 17th and 18th centuries reflected the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production. The very need for scientific research arises not merely out of the existence of nature but out of social historical development. And yet the link between society and the natural sciences gives no grounds for ignoring the specific nature of the phenomena they study. Scientific analysis always makes it possible to separate what, for example, in the teaching of Galileo reflects natural processes, and what reflects the anti-feudal social movement. The concept of epochal consciousness is applicable, of course, not only to outstanding philosophical doctrines but also to natural science, art, and so on. The definition of philosophy as the epochal consciousness does not claim to indicate its specific attribute, it seeks to reveal its historical content, its significance, as conditioned by major socio-economic advances and the achievements of scientific knowledge.

p The Marxist-Leninist periodisation of the history of philosophy according to the succession of the socio-economic formations and the basic stages in their development provides the sociological foundation for the scientific understanding of philosophy as epochal consciousness: ancient, feudal, bourgeois, and so on.

p Engels characterised the French Enlightenment of the 18th century as a philosophical revolution in France, as the ideological preparation for 1789.  [383•1  384 Engels called German classical philosophy the philosophical revolution in Germany. These are classical characterisations of philosophy as epochal consciousness. Lenin’s definition of the revolutionary-democratic essence of the teaching of the outstanding Russian materialists of 1840–1860 has the same profound significance. This definition, as we know, is connected with the fundamental division of the basic stages of the liberation movement in Russia.

p The more significant a philosophical doctrine becomes, the more profoundly does it reflect the history of a given people, and the more powerfully does it express the basic interests of social progress, sum up historical experience, the development of philosophical thought and other forms of social consciousness. A mere historical notation indicating the epoch that engendered a given philosophy cannot reveal its full meaning, first, because philosophy is not just a specific expression of the historical epoch, but also one of the powerful spiritual forces that contribute to its formation and development. Second, because philosophy does not merely reflect the epoch; it also expresses the constantly operative, basic tendencies of its development, that is to say, the historical processes that take place over very long periods.

p The historical epoch cannot be reduced to the history of one people, or one state, because it is 385 an essential stage in world history. It is a different matter that every stage in world history achieves its culmination in the history of certain peoples and countries, where the new epochal consciousness is formed. Marxist doctrine arose in Germany, but it summed up world historical experience and the advances of social thought in the most progressive countries of Europe. Leninism—the Marxism of the modern age—was born in Russia, it summed up the new experience of the world historical development and for this reason acquired international significance.

Thus, the investigation of philosophy as the epochal consciousness presupposes all-round analysis of the social development and the specific nature of its philosophical reflection in the various historical epochs. In this respect the Marxist historians of philosophy are confronted with a formidable task, which cannot be performed without completely overcoming oversimplified sociologising or empirical description of the historical conditions of the existence and development of philosophy, without special research into the cognitive significance, content and meaning of philosophical doctrines, a significance which as a rule goes beyond the bounds of the historically defined epoch that engendered them. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that the sociological analysis of philosophical doctrines reveals their social content and significance and cannot, therefore, answer the question, why, for example, the rationalists recognised the existence of a priori knowledge, and the sensualists maintained that all knowledge was ultimately rooted in sensory perceptions. To answer such questions there must be special epistemological analysis of philosophical doctrine, study of the history of science 386 and philosophy which fully takes into account the results of socio-economic research and also the relative independence of philosophy.