436

p As we have seen in the previous chapter, philosophy’s ideological function does not comprise its whole content, just as it does not express the difference between philosophy and other forms of social consciousness. Hence the need to examine the theoretical roots of philosophical debate. Such debate is inevitable because of the existence of conflicting philosophical trends, systems and conceptions. But this divergence of philosophical doctrines is a product of the development of a society divided into antagonistic classes and cannot be regarded as a specific, everlasting peculiarity of the philosophical form of cognition. Viewed from this standpoint, the struggle between materialism and idealism is not, of course, an eternal law of philosophical development. So to define the epistemological nature of philosophical debate there is no need to consider its extreme forms, that is to say, the struggle between the main trends in philosophy. Philosophical debate may take place within the framework of one and the same school, between its different adherents. Theoretically it would be quite appropriate to abstract the question not only from the conflict between schools but also from the contradictions within these schools in order to narrow down our examination of the epistemological roots of philosophical controversy to its most elementary and consequently inevitable form, a form independent of any basic social contrasts. Only this approach if, of course, it is workable, will show to what extent polemics is related to the essence of philosophy itself and constitutes an inherent mode of its existence. Thus, we return to our 437 examination of the specific form of philosophical knowledge.

p The special nature of philosophical problems, as we have seen, shows itself primarily in the infinite range of philosophical categories, these being qualitatively different from concepts, which the philosopher consciously creates by generalising empirical data. This special feature of philosophical categories, which Kant interpreted as evidence of their a priori nature, shows that the subject of philosophical inquiry is the specific optimum (nature, society, man, cognition, morality, etc.). It is the study of such unlimited, infinitely rich and varied complexes of phenomena that makes it necessary to apply philosophical categories as a special kind of concept whose definition is not based, directly at any rate, on the generalisation of the empirical data available to the scientist.  [437•1  This is what gives rise to such 438 questions as: Is there any other necessity besides logical necessity? Is there unity in all that exists? Does the category of possibility relate to anything that really exists, or does it express only the relationship of the human consciousness to some processes? We have taken only a few philosophical questions to illustrate our point, questions which arise in connection with the definition and application of philosophical categories, many of which were known in ancient times, that is, were used by philosophers in the days when they obviously could not have given a scientific analysis of their content or provided sound reasons for their application.

p The study of specific forms of universality, which presumes a notion of the world as a whole or a conception of what in the world constitutes a special kind of wholeness, naturally gives rise to questions regarding the objective reality of what the categories denote. The old argument between the nominalists and realists is still going on in a modified form in present-day philosophy, inasmuch as the problem of the general, the particular and the unique is constantly regenerated both by the development of science and by that of social life, in which every individual considers the unique, the particular and the universal not so much a logical as a human problem.

439

p The dispute regarding universals is only one of the aspects of the problem that arises when we consider any specific optimum. Other aspects of this problem are related to the knowability of this optimal but specific universality, the premises for such knowledge being formulated in different ways by the advocates of empiricism, of a priori reasoning, of conventionalism, by the metaphysicists, who believe it possible to go beyond the bounds of all conceivable experience, by the advocates of phenomenalism, philosophical scepticism, and so on. Thus, philosophical debate has not only epistemological roots, like any other scientific discipline, but also its own special epistemological sources. This is also obvious in cases when philosophy has to deal with questions that extend into the field of other, specialised sciences, the questions of infinity, for example.

p A specialised science, thanks to the restriction of its field of inquiry, a restriction incompatible with the philosophical form of cognition, may investigate this or any other problem in accordance with its specialised goal. Philosophy by its very nature cannot confine itself to such a rewarding and “modest” task. However, it is just because infinity is infinity that it can be known only through the finite, which, though not infinite, implies the infinite and is consequently in a certain respect infinite itself.

p By knowing the finite we know the infinite, but always in a limited, finite form. "Infinity is a contradiction,” Engels wrote, "and is full of contradictions. From the outset it is a contradiction that an infinity is composed of nothing but finites, and yet this is the case. The limitedness of the material world leads no less to contradictions than its unlimitedness, and every attempt to get over 440 these contradictions leads, as we have seen, to new and worse contradictions. It is just because infinity is a contradiction that it is an infinite process, unrolling endlessly in time and in space. The removal of the contradiction would be the end of infinity.”  [440•1  But does not what Engels has to say about infinity apply in some measure (hard to say what) to any philosophical problem, to the subject of philosophy in general?

p The contradiction of infinity constitutes the objective source of the contradictions inherent in the specific form of cognition which takes the multiformity of the infinite or infinite multiformity as its subject of inquiry. Kant, who was well aware of this, associated the analysis of the problem of infinity with the antinomies of pure reason, i.e., what he considered to be the insoluble contradictions into which philosophy, considered as "pure reason”, was bound to fall. Lenin in his notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic stressed the narrowness of Kant’s standpoint, particularly in the sense that Kant had unjustifiably limited the sphere of antinomy: "Kant has four ‘antinomies’. In fact every concept, every category is similarly antinomous.”  [440•2  Dialectical materialism, in contrast to Kant’s agnosticism, does not recognise any antinomies as insoluble in principle. Contradictions are resolved both in objective reality itself (in the process of development and the struggle of opposites) and in theoretical cognition, which dialectically reflects this process. But the theoretical resolution of contradictions presupposes a certain level of knowledge of the given process, which is not, of course, always available. 441 Consequently, both the objective dialectics of reality and the subjective dialectics of the process of cognition contain the epistemological source of philosophical debate.

p The epistemological sources of philosophical debate, inasmuch as they are inseparable from the nature of any cognition (therefore, not only the philosophical), are intransient in character. But it would be wrong to confine ourselves to drawing a distinction between the transient and intransient sources of philosophical debate. Obviously, the epistemological possibilities of such controversy, implied in the very nature of philosophical abstractions, are substantially modified by historical conditions and the development of philosophy itself.

p For thousands of years philosophy was unable to find itself, that is to say, unable to define its subject-matter and become a specific, philosophical science. It acquired a real possibility of self-determination when the numerous specialised sciences had shared out among themselves nature and also many spheres of human life. Thanks to the segregation that has taken place between philosophy and the specialised sciences, philosophy’s status in the system of scientific knowledge has changed. Although the speculative idealist doctrines still strive, independently of the specialised sciences, to establish the basic tenets of all scientific knowledge, they have been unable to ignore their discoveries and the methods by which they were achieved. While still claiming the position of the science of sciences, which draws its principles from pure reason, idealist natural philosophy (this is particularly obvious in the case of Schelling) is, in fact, inspired by the outstanding discoveries of natural science and despite the 442 philosopher’s own subjective belief is in some way dependent on them.

p Hegel, who declared that the philosophy of nature should not be based on natural science, because the "mode of exposition employed in physics does not satisfy the demands of the concept”,  [442•1  which develops out of itself the definitions of external nature, at the same time opposed the arbitrary constructions of natural philosophy, of which, as we know, there were a good many in his own philosophical system. "The philosophical mode of exposition,” he wrote, "is not a matter of whim, a capricious desire to walk on one’s head for a change alter walking for so long on one’s feet. . . .”  [442•2  What Hegel considered to be arbitrary natural philosophical constructions were theoretical propositions that did not agree with the philosophical principles of his system. And yet if we analyse from the standpoint of these not quite consistent statements of Hegel’s his own natural philosophical errors, it turns out that some of them (the majority, in fact) spring from his speculative idealist system, while the others—surprising though it may seem—arise from the limited natural scientific notions of his time, which had been uncritically accepted by this profound critic of empiricism.  [442•3 

443

p Philosophy’s change of status in the system of scientific knowledge offers, on the one hand, the possibility of doing away with arbitrary speculation and taking a firm stand on the data of the specialised sciences, but, on the other hand, philosophy runs the risk of absorbing the errors that the specialised sciences themselves are unable to avoid. The mechanistic narrowness of the materialism of the 17th and 18th centuries undoubtedly resulted from the achievements of classical mechanics and its own limitations, which are manifest, for instance, in Newton’s understanding of space and time, Laplas’s conception of determinism, etc. And because philosophy does not simply borrow from the specialised sciences individual general propositions, but interprets them on the wider plane of the world view, this too leaves room for errors that natural science avoids because it does not engage in the philosophical interpretation of these propositions. The same mechanistic materialism in its teaching on nature and society inevitably goes farther than classical mechanics, which virtually stops at the investigation of mechanical processes.

Thus, the segregation of philosophy from the specialised sciences, while creating a firm basis for the development of scientific philosophical theory, does not rule out errors conditioned by philosophy’s change of status in the system of scientific knowledge. Although these errors are rooted in the specific nature of philosophical knowledge, in the universal character of philosophical generalisations, they are by no means

444 insuperable. Materialist dialectics, employed as the method of philosophical generalisation of the discoveries of the specialised sciences, makes it possible to avoid absolutising these discoveries by revealing their true philosophical significance.

p Engels’s philosophical generalisation of the discoveries of natural science in the mid-19th century and Lenin’s analysis of the crisis in physics at the turn of the century are classical examples of scientific development of philosophical concepts on the basis of the achievements of natural science. One must, of course, have a profound knowledge of the natural sciences and be able to apply materialist dialectics creatively in order to produce a philosophical generalisation of their achievements. The mistakes made by some Marxist philosophers in their philosophical appraisal of the discoveries of biology, physics and other sciences bear out this view.

p The outstanding exponents of pre-Marxist philosophy did not as a rule appreciate the positive significance of philosophical debate. Nearly all of them contrasted philosophical study to polemics, which they regarded as an utterly fruitless occupation.

p Although he himself carried on a polemic against the natural scientific understanding of causality, Hume maintained that all polemics are fruitless. This paradoxical attitude can scarcely be attributed to Hume’s scepticism. More likely it was nurtured by what he knew of the medieval disputes of the schoolmen, who parried one another’s arguments with quotations from the Scriptures, Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. Observing that there were no questions that could not become the subject of dispute and be contested by opposing sides, Hume drew the conclusion that, the 445 nature of polemics being what it is, eloquence, not reason, was bound to emerge victorious. "The victory is not gained by the men at arms, who manage the pike and the sword; but by the trumpeters, drummers and musicians of the army.”  [445•1 

p Hume evidently assumed that he himself was not polemicising with anyone but merely disposing of worthless arguments while expounding a view that coincided with experience and common sense. Naturally, this belief was an illusion, which had its source, however, in the difference (characteristic of all scientific activity as well as philosophy) between the process of research, which is critical and essentially polemical, and the setting forth of results, which need not necessarily be polemical, at any rate in form. This distinction, which often builds up into a contradiction, was justified by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. Inveighing against “uncritical” dogmatism and contrasting it to "critical philosophy”, he nevertheless maintained that its expositions must of necessity be to a certain extent dogmatic in character.

p Like Hume, Kant disapproved of polemics, believing that at best the contestants would defend equally unprovable theories. Some, for instance, would maintain there is no God, others that He exists. But since theoretical reason is not capable of deciding questions that go beyond the limits of possible experience, "there is no such thing as real polemics in the sphere of pure reason. Both sides mill the air and fight their own shadows, because they have gone beyond the bounds of nature, 446 where there is nothing for their dogmatic devices to grasp and hold on to.”  [446•1  But while condemning the polemical application of pure reason to questions that can be solved only by "practical reason”, that is to say, by the a priori moral consciousness, Kant tirelessly polemicises with his predecessors, the creators of the rationalist metaphysical systems of the 17th century, the materialist sensualists, the scepticism of Hume, and so on. Even when Kant does not actually name his opponents, in arguing his conception of space and time, the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements, the specific nature of categorial synthesis, etc., he constantly crosses swords with various philosophical doctrines which have arrived at different conclusions.

p This failure to appreciate the positive role of polemics in the development of philosophy seems to have been due to the fact that even the most outstanding exponents of pre-Marxist philosophy made no distinction between historically transient causes and the epistemological, intransient sources of philosophical controversy. They all saw the fact of philosophical controversy as the Achilles’s heel of philosophy, and each of them (unlike the 447 sceptics) hoped to put an end to the dispute by creating a philosophical system that would be universally accepted, like Euclid’s geometry. The ideal of mathematical knowledge, as a form of knowledge allegedly ruling out all disagreement, was the ideal not only of the rationalists. It must also have been shared by the empirical philosophers, although they were not aware of it. It was on the assumption that there must be some kind of knowledge immune to controversy that they sought out the causes of error.

p In his teaching on idols Bacon poses the question of the anthropological causes of error, which in his view are inseparable from human nature. Knowledge of these causes, he believed, would in some measure help us to avoid the snares of misapprehension. He never gave up hope that with the help of scientifically elaborated empiricism he would put an end not only to the phrase-spinning of the schoolmen, but to all serious disagreement in general, because practical successes (“ inventions”) would always help to distinguish truth from error. Philosophical debate struck him as the futile occupation of learned ignoramuses and such indeed were the philosophical debates that Bacon rebelled against. A zealous advocate of "natural philosophy”, which he imagined was constantly scorned because people preferred castles in the air to something of real use, Bacon was of course far from realising that empiricism, if it kept strictly to its own rules of inductive reasoning, suffered from its own illusions and some extremely wild notions connected with them.

p The rationalism of the 17th century was free of the illusions of philosophical and natural scientific empiricism. But it was subject to other illusions, which arose out of its one-sided 448 interpretation of mathematics and abstract notion of reason and the logical process in general. Rationalism tried to find a special kind of intellectual sphere the very nature of which would be incompatible with error. But there is no such sphere of unconditional truth and any human ability is liable to err. Nor is practical activity free of error, including experimental work and scientific research in general. This does not mean, of course, that error is something that cannot be overcome. In principle any error can be overcome, but the ability to err is inseparable from the ability to know, and as such it cannot be got rid of.

p The advance of knowledge undoubtedly tends to eradicate systemic error (of idealism or religion, for example), but even this is possible only in certain historical conditions which do not depend on cognition and consciousness. But even if the advance of knowledge were able to overcome any error, it still would not eliminate its epistemological source. And expansion of the sphere of cognition also entails a widening of the sphere of possible error regarding things that have not yet been investigated.

p The rationalists took as their absolute criterion of truth such clarity as would leave no room for doubt. But what is the criterion of such clarity? They did not even pose this question. The fetish of intellectual intuition and its allegedly inherent infallibility engendered the belief that one could always end a philosophical dispute once and for all if, following the example of mathematics, one proceeded from self-evident truths and developed the inferences from them according to strict logic. The attempt to apply the mathematical method in philosophy led the rationalists to identify 449 empirical grounds with logical grounds, and causality with logical necessity. In other words, the rationalist interpretation of mathematical method gave rise to a kind of mistake that is basically impossible in mathematics, where logical inference is not in itself regarded as description of objective reality and becomes such only in so far as it is empirically interpreted.  [449•1 

p Thomas Hobbes, who like the rationalists saw the way of finally overcoming philosophical error and dispute in the formulation of precise and strict definitions, asserted, as had Bacon before him, that one of the chief sources of all error is the polysemy of words and verbal expressions. "Wherefore, as men owe all their true ratiocination to the right understanding of speech; so also they owe their errors to the misunderstanding of the same.”  [449•2  There are words that mean nothing, although they may appear to signify things that really exist. Words and their combinations possess certain qualities that are always being taken 450 as the qualities of things themselves. It is this, according to Hobbes, that creates the problem of universals. And finally, even things possess certain qualities that are sometimes attributed to words and verbal expressions. Having discussed the various forms of incorrect usage, Hobbes draws a conclusion which makes him in a sense the forerunner of the present-day philosophy of linguistic analysis: "To conclude, the light of human minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; reason is the pace; increase of science, the way, and the benefit of mankind, the end. And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering among innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention and sedition, or contempt.”  [450•1 

p Hobbes’s analysis of the causes of error develops both the rationalist and the empirical criticism of scholastic quibbling over words. This is its historical significance, a significance that outlives the age in which it was written. The speculative idealist systems of later times, different though they are from the doctrines of the schoolmen, also created concepts concerning things that had no existence in reality or attributed to these things (and the world in general) qualities possessed only by the human mind. But the weak spot in Hobbes’s conception is his nominalist interpretation of concepts, which is historically connected with the empiricism of the new age. The reform of usage that he proposes is obviously Utopian, since scientific concepts are not merely collective nouns 451 without any real meaning. They reflect the objectively existing general and universal, the actual unity within diversity; essence, law, necessity, and so on. Consequently, even the difficulties that we encounter in quest of knowledge lie not only in words, notions, concepts and ideas of things, but in the things themselves, in their real diversity, contradictoriness and changeability. The fact that the knower may err should not be allowed to overshadow the objective foundations of error.

p Whereas the great pre-Marxist philosophers tried to put an end to philosophical controversy by establishing certain fundamental and unconditional truths and evolving a scientific method of inquiry, the bourgeois philosophy of the late 19th century and the 20th century, realising that the metaphysical pretensions of their predecessors to absolute knowledge were illusory, at the same time rejected even the historically tested path towards objective truth that the positive sciences are following. The philosophical analysis of the achievements of natural science made by positivism was based on an agnostic, subjectivist interpretation of the fact of knowledge.

p Denial of the rationalist conception of knowledge above experience was transformed into a subjectivist revision of the concept of truth. This was particularly striking in pragmatism, which proclaimed its goal as the final overcoming of philosophical controversy. "The pragmatic method,” wrote William James, "is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable.”  [451•1  The essence of this method, as we know, may be reduced to the dictum 452 that "truth is one species of good"  [452•1 , in view of which any idea is true that helps the individual to coordinate his new experience with his store of old beliefs and thus makes it easier for him to attain his chosen goal, by "linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labour".  [452•2 

p Whereas the opponents of orthodox scholastics advanced the principle of the duality of truth, that is, the independence of knowledge from religious faith, James declared all ideas to be true if they could "get us along, so to speak”, satisfy our needs. Even the argument concerning utility, since it was made the criterion of truth, was declared meaningless because only the individual could make up his own mind about what was good for him.

p James, admittedly, tried to give the principle of utility, which he believed would overcome the scholastic conception of truth in itself, an intersubjective meaning, and argued that some ideas actually “work” for everybody. These were primarily religious notions, after which came ideas that had a minimal effect in changing habitual and established beliefs. In short, the pragmatic conception of truth was extremely conservative both in its scientific and socio-political aspects. This epistemological conservatism was proclaimed the sole means of abolishing all fundamental disagreement in philosophy. The real purpose of it all was to establish a definite religious and politically coloured form of idealism as a universal philosophical convention.

p In Russia the claim to end all philosophical dispute was made by N. Lossky, who wrote that only 453 intuitionism, radically renovating opposed philosophical trends and liberating them from their exclusive claims, could hope to bring about their complete reconciliation. "It is a fact,” Lossky wrote, "that intuitionism, by removing the premise that makes the old trends one-sided, while not exactly solving important controversial issues in favour of one or another of the opposing sides, goes even deeper and actually removes the very ground for dispute, showing that it comes from misunderstanding, and that the disputing parties in their one-sidedness were partly right and partly wrong.”  [453•1 

p Lenin, noting the characteristic tendency in modern bourgeois philosophy to “elevate” itself above the opposition between materialism and idealism, science and religion, characterised this tendency as a modernised form of the struggle of idealism against materialism. Revealing the profound social roots of this reactionary philosophical movement masquerading under the flag of philosophical neutrality, Lenin proved that the struggle between materialism and idealism, between science and religion, could not become obsolete while the idealist and religious interpretation of the world continued to exist.

p But idealism and religion are not eternal. The materialist understanding of history has laid bare the social and economic roots of these alienated forms of social consciousness and proved their historically transient nature. But does this mean that at a certain stage in socio-historical development philosophical controversy will come to an end? Of course, not. The history of philosophy 454 shows that the forms and character of philosophical (and scientific) controversy change historically, a fact that is conditioned both by socio– economic causes and by the development of knowledge.

p The abstract study of the nature of philosophical controversy is profoundly anti-historical, because it ignores the ideological function of philosophy, the change of its status in the system of scientific knowledge, the development of philosophy and of philosophical argumentation. We have only to compare the philosophical disputes of various historical epochs (ancient times, the Middle Ages, the New Age, the present day) to see that even in conditions of antagonistic class society the theoretical substantiation of philosophical propositions is steadily developing and that views which are not even indirectly confirmed by the specialised sciences, practice or historical experience, are gradually overcome. Of course, in antagonistic class society this tendency usually assumes a hidden form, but it can be revealed by scientific analysis of even the most reactionary philosophical doctrines. What is it, for instance, that makes most of today’s idealist philosophers assert that their philosophy does not contradict natural science? Evidently the fact that even idealists are today obliged to reckon with the rules of theoretical discussion that have been evolved by modern science.

p Edmund Husserl, whose philosophy is obviously aimed against what he regards as “naive” natural science, had to admit that the creation of "rigorous science" is the ideal of philosophical inquiry. "It may be,” he wrote, "that in the whole life of modern times there is no idea more powerful, more irrestrainable, more all-conquering 455 than the idea of science. Nothing will halt its victorious march.”  [455•1 

p Lenin showed how idealism may change its form in ways unsuspected by the layman. Idealism, he said, is “disowning” idealism. Today there is scarcely a single influential idealist doctrine that has not come out “against” idealism. The history of the “realist” doctrines of the 20th century ( neorealism, critical realism, N. Hartmann’s "new ontology”, etc.) are particularly indicative in this respect. Scientific analysis of this notable historical symptom shows that what is called idealism in contemporary bourgeois philosophy is mainly the rationalist type of idealism or openly subjective idealist philosophising. But why in that case does present-day idealism “disown” all idealism? Why is this change in the form of idealism presented as its final defeat? The point is that idealism has been discredited by modern natural science and socio-historical experience. But it continues to exist not only as a result of its theoretical errors, but because the socio-economic base and corresponding ideological atmosphere that feeds it still exist.

p Today there are real historical prospects of a fundamental change in the character of philosophical debate which in a world that has put an 456 end to the domination of the spontaneous forces of social development over man becomes scientific philosophical discussion, whose real basis is the creative development of the dialectical– materialist world view. In this form philosophical debate is no longer an ideological struggle, because its necessary foundation will be the ideological unity of all mankind, consciously creating its own history on the basis of communistically transformed social relations. Such controversy is analogous to the scientific discussion necessitated by the development of science. I say analogous because the subject-matter of scientific philosophy and its method of inquiry rule out the possibility of the exact and often complete solution that is the peculiar advantage of the specialised sciences.

In becoming scientific, philosophy rejects on principle what can only be regarded in our day as the simple-minded claim to be a system of absolute truths for all time. But scientific philosophy rejects equally strongly the relativist conception that no truth is an absolute truth in the final instance. Such an assertion is just as dogmatic as its opposite, since it attributes to itself the same absolute truth that it so vehemently denies. The creative, dialectical-materialist character of Marxist philosophy, its organic unity with scientific knowledge and social practice, opens up boundless prospects for fruitful scientific discussion between people of like mind. Its major goals are to develop philosophical knowledge, to elaborate the methodological problems of science, the theoretical foundation of men’s conscious, free practical activity, and to enrich their spiritual life, which is, of course, not merely a means but the goal of humanity, when it has forever abolished social inequality and its manifold consequences.