p The reader who has followed the general argument of this book attentively will have noticed, of course, that its central idea is that the pluralism of philosophical doctrines is historically transient. The empirically observable multiplicity of incompatible philosophies has always been the point of departure for the sceptical denial of philosophy’s ability to arrive at any objective truth. This, too, is the basis of the modern positivist denial of the scientific philosophical world view.

p The 20th-century philosopher, says Hans Reichenbach, should have the courage to acknowledge the obvious fact that "philosophy has been unable to develop a common doctrine that could be taught to students with the general consent of all those who teach philosophy. Those among us who have taught one of the sciences will know what it means to teach on a common ground. The sciences have developed a general body of knowledge, carried by universal recognition, and he who teaches a science does so with the proud feeling of introducing his students into a realm of well– 458 established truth. Why must the philosopher renounce the teaching of established truth?”  [458•1 

p Reichenbach’s point would be understandable if he were attacking the idealist speculations so characteristic of bourgeois philosophy from the positions of science. But he is speaking of philosophy in general. Any philosophy, in his view, ignores the truths that science has firmly established. Without making any distinction between materialism and idealism, without distinguishing the present-day form of materialism from previous materialist doctrines, Reichenbach asserts that philosophers, unlike scientists, merely state their own or other people’s opinions. "Imagine a scientist who were to teach electronics in the form of a report on views of different physicists, never telling his students what are the laws governing electrons. The idea appears ridiculous.”  [458•2  So philosophy is either irresponsible argument about matters concerning which there are firmly established truths, or else it is meaningless pontification about something that cannot bet the subject of knowledge. This is the standpoint from which Reichenbach appraises the historico-philosophical process and its characteristic divergence of philosophical doctrines, which he sees as immanently inherent in philosophy: "If philosophers have produced a great many contradicting systems, all except one must be wrong; and it is even probable that all are wrong. The history of philosophy should therefore include a history of the errors of philosophers; in uncovering the sources of error historical research will contribute to truth.”  [458•3 

p It goes without saying that historico– philosophical science is impossible without criticism of philosophical errors, the overcoming of which will help to establish the truth. But it is not this truism that Reichenbach has in mind. His idea is that the only knowledge we may gain from historicophilosophical science is knowledge of the mistakes that philosophers have constantly made. In other words, the only truth we can derive from the history of philosophy is that error is error. When we have seen plenty of errors and recognised them as such, we shall know an equivalent amount of truth. Here we have the opinion of a noted neopositivist, one of the founders of the subjective agnostic "philosophy of science”, which is proclaimed scientific mainly because it claims to have divorced itself from all previous philosophical ideas, although in fact it revives the conception of Hume.

p Reichenbach’s statements are essentially no different from those of his predecessors—the positivists of the 19th century. John Lewis was writing very much the same kind of thing at the beginning of the century. Philosophers not only made mistakes, but repeated the mistakes of their predecessors of which they were already aware, and even their new point of departure could not save them from philosophical misadventure. Such was the sad fate of philosophy, according to Lewis, who evidently failed to see that the fatalism he had rejected as a speculative religious notion should not be applied either to the historicophilosophical process.

p H. G. Wells was neither a philosopher nor a historian of philosophy, but the question that interests us appeared so clear to him that he declared without more ado: "The student of 460 philosophy doing ‘greats’ or whatever pompous name is given to this stale resurrection pie, is introduced to a jumble of incompatible ideas, a mixture of bits from different jig-saw puzzles; incoherence as wisdom.”  [460•1  The judgement appears somewhat hasty, but various other fragments from his book You Can’t Be Too Careful suggest that besides his traditional English empiricism this outstanding humanist writer had uncritically accepted the neopositivist doctrine, which struck him as a simple final solution to unnecessarily confused and complicated philosophical problems.

p In the late fifties Jean-Francois Revel brought out a book called What Are Philosophers for? Its pretentious opinions seem to aim expressly at destroying philosophy. Here is one taken almost at random: "The greatest piece of hypocrisy of the people who make philosophy their profession today is to pretend that philosophy exists.”  [460•2  Such exaggerated views scarcely need refuting. Essentially they have already been dealt with in this book and we recall them here only to stress once more in conclusion the utmost importance of the problem of a scientific philosophy, a problem that Marxism has solved because it has evolved such a philosophy and is creatively developing it.

p In recent years some philosophers who consider themselves Marxists (an opinion not shared by us) have proposed that there should be various philosophies of Marxism. At the recent XIV International Philosophical Congress P. Vranitsky devoted his speech to this subject. In his published 461 paper on The Need for Different Versions in Marxist Philosophy he maintains that the diversity and multiformity of mankind’s historical practical experience finds its expression in philosophical theory. This goes without saying. But it is incomprehensible why one should conclude from this statement that there is a need for different, i.e., presumably contradictory, versions of the philosophy of Marxism. Vranitsky writes: "In the present, too, historical situations change radically, resulting in important shifts in the posing of historical problems and tasks. If philosophy (in this case Marxist philosophy) cannot react like a sensitive barometer to these shifts, it becomes historically insignificant.”  [461•1  This, too, is beyond dispute. But why does it follow from this fact, which is well worth remembering, that alongside dialectical and historical materialism there should exist other Marxist (or rather, quasi-Marxist) philosophies? To this question Vranitsky’s theses give absolutely no answer.

p It is quite clear (not only from the theses, but from other works of Vranitsky’s) that the theoretical premise for the idea that different versions of Marxist philosophy are needed lies in the belief that Marxism (like all philosophy in general) cannot and should not be scientific. Thus, the historically transient opposition of philosophy to the specialised sciences is exalted as an eternal law of the development of philosophical thinking. The specific nature of philosophy is absolutised, despite the fact (which I hope I have proved) that there is not a single peculiarity of the philosophical form of cognition that is not to some extent 462 inherent in scientific thought in general. There cannot be different (scientific) versions of the scientific philosophical world view, just as there cannot be different versions of any scientific theory, if, of course, the word “version” refers to the result of the inquiry and not merely to the form in which it is stated. Our opponents cannot agree with this. But what in that case should Marxism be? Art? No, they reply, it must be simply philosophy and nothing else. But in the present age the only adequate form of theoretical truth is science and scientific research. The implication, then, is that philosophy should not seek objective truth, that is to say, truth which is independent of the investigator’s own consciousness? But in that case philosophy is not theoretical knowledge. It can be nothing but consciousness, consciousness without knowledge.

p We see that the existentialists and other exponents of contemporary idealist philosophy are far more consistent than P. Vranitsky, because they do not try to present their unscientific conception of the pluralism of philosophical doctrines as the theoretical premise for the creative development of Marxism.

p The need for the creative development of Marxist philosophy is absolutely obvious. But it is equally obvious that this development cannot take place along the well-worn paths of contemporary idealist philosophy.

p Contemporary bourgeois sociologists, seeking to discredit the Marxist teaching on the inevitability of the communist transformation of social relations, argue that no such thing as objective historical necessity exists in general. Contemporary bourgeois philosophers fight dialectical and historical materialism with the thesis that there can 463 be no such thing as philosophical science. While political revisionism tries to blurr the difference between the socialist and capitalist systems, philosophical revisionism argues the notion that there is no valid distinction between Marxist and bourgeois philosophy; even the term "bourgeois philosophy" is quite often ruled out of order. Such is the logic of ideological struggle. In the Central Committee’s report to the 24th Congress of the CPSU, Leonid Brezhnev said: "The struggle between the forces of capitalism and socialism on the world scene and the attempts of revisionists of all hues to emasculate the revolutionary teaching and distort the practice of socialist and communist construction require that we continue to pay undivided attention to the problems and creative development of theory.”  [463•1 

Historico-philosophical science by theoretical research into the facts reconstructs the complex and contradictory process of the formation of scientific philosophical knowledge, to the attainment of which the most outstanding thinkers of the past devoted unremitting intellectual effort. This reconstruction of the actual road travelled by philosophy is an essential condition for its further development.