p Inquiry into the historical process of the genesis of philosophy entails examination of the relationship between emergent philosophical knowledge and the fairly copious information about everyday experience that man already possessed in the ancient world. From the very first this relationship becomes a juxtaposition of philosophising, the search for truth alone, to both mythology and the pursuit of purely practical aims. I see the reason for this juxtaposition in the disappearance of the original immediate unity between knowledge and practical activity, i.e., the emergence of theoretical knowledge, which by its very nature is relatively independent of practical activity.

p The emergence of theoretical knowledge both in the past and the present comes about only to the extent that knowledge can be relatively independent of practice. Geometry, judging by the etymology of the word, began as land surveying and became theoretical knowledge only after it 83 began to acquire a relative independence from its practical function.

p Today theory’s relative independence of practice has grown considerably in comparison with the past. Indeed this is what enables modern natural science to launch new branches of industrial production, whose foundations have been laid by research not devoted to any practical goal, and by discoveries with no immediate applied significance. The unity of scientific theoretical knowledge and practice is a mediate unity, implying the existence of numerous intermediate links both in the sphere of scientific research and in practical activity. It is the absence of immediate unity (identity) between theoretical knowledge and practical activity that creates the need to implement the achievements of theoretical knowledge in production and social practice in general.  [83•1 

p Ancient Greece possessed no narrowly specialised scientists. The philosophers were the sole representatives of theoretical knowledge, and this knowledge was at a historical stage that ruled out any possibility of its being systematically applied in production or any other sphere of practical activity. The effective linking of theory and practice, and particularly their complex and, of course, contradictory unity are the product of the historical development of both theory and practice, and their interaction. This to some extent explains why the first philosophers regarded the cognitive function of philosophy as something totally unrelated to practical ( including social) activity, why they regarded philosophy as a quest for knowledge for knowledge’s sake. It is quite obvious that peoples’ various practical (not only production but also political) activities in those days could not, of course, be based on theoretical knowledge. And philosophy —the most abstract of all forms of theoretical knowledge—plainly demonstrated these objective features of the historical process of the development of theoretical knowledge.

p In Plato’s Theaetetus Socrates explains that knowledge of separate objects and arts is not yet knowledge in itself. He even suggests that he who does not know what knowledge is in general can have no notion either of the craft of bootmaking or any other craft. Hence one can be a craftsman without having any notion of craft, i.e., possessing only manual skill. The philosopher on the other hand, according to Socrates, is interested in knowledge for its own sake, knowledge as such, regardless of its possible application. From this standpoint then philosophy has its roots in pure curiosity; it begins from wonder, 85 from questioning, from reasoning, the goal of which is truth, and not what is of practical utility.

p Socrates, through whom Plato expresses his beliefs, is not exactly contemptuous of the knowledge of the craftsman and the farmer or of the knowledge and skill that are required for participation in public life. He simply maintains that this has nothing whatever to offer philosophy. In contrast to the Sophists, who taught philosophy as the ability to think, speak and persuade that is needed in intercourse with other people, Socrates declares that those who have a true calling for philosophy ”. . .have never, from their youth upwards, known their way to the Agora, or the discastery, or the council, or any other political assembly; they neither see nor hear the laws or decrees, as they are called, of the state written or recited; the eagerness of political society in the attainment of offices—clubs, and banquets, and revels in the company of flute-girls—do not enter even into their dreams. Whether someone in the city is of good or base birth, what disgrace may have descended to any one from his ancestors, male or female, are matters of which the philosopher no more knows than can tell, as they say, how many pints are contained in the ocean. Neither is he conscious of his ignorance. For he does not hold aloof in order that he may gain a reputation; but the truth is that the outer form of him only is in the city; his mind, regarding all these things with disdain as of slight or no worth, soars—to use the expression of Pindar— everywhere ’beneath the earth, and again beyond the sky’, measuring the land, surveying the heavens, and exploring the whole nature of the world and of every thing in its entirety, but 86 not condescending to anything which is within reach.”  [86•1 

p Plato’s philosopher, who in this case is expounding a belief that had already largely taken shape in the Ionic period of materialist philosophy, is so remote from all the daily cares and anxieties of man that his ignorance of what is known to all gives him the reputation of being a foolish person, and his helplessness in practical matters makes him an object of ridicule. "When he is reviled, he has nothing personal to say in answer to the incivilities of his adversaries, for he knows no scandals of anyone, and they do not interest him; and therefore he is laughed at for his sheepishness. . . . Hearing of enormous landed proprietors of ten thousand acres and more, our philosopher deems this to be a trifle, because he has been accustomed to think of the whole earth.”  [86•2 

p One could cite similar passages from other 87 philosophers of Ancient Greece but this is hardly necessary to prove the obvious truth that in ancient times theoretical knowledge in the form in which it then existed could not be the foundation for practical activity, limited though that activity was in those days. It is generally known, however, that the ancient conception of philosophy was largely shared by the philosophers of subsequent historical epochs, when the theoretical knowledge provided by mathematics and mechanics was already being applied in industry. Francis Bacon himself provides us with a striking example. He advocates all-round development and practical application of "natural philosophy" (natural science), which he virtually counterposes to metaphysics, i.e., philosophy in the traditional sense of the term. This for him remains lofty knowledge of the mind, which teaches us that ”. . .it is a very plague of the understanding for vanity to become the object of veneration".  [87•1  And Bacon is right in his way. Although philosophy always performed a definite social function, it was not and could not be the kind of theoretical knowledge that would provide a scientific basis for man’s practical activity. In other words, the juxtaposition of philosophy to practice, which coincided with the emergence of philosophy, like the juxtaposition of philosophy to the positive sciences (which fully revealed itself. in modern times, when these sciences broke away from philosophy), was connected with the objective logic of development of theoretical knowledge.

The point, of course, is not that philosophers did not want to solve practical problems, 88 particularly in the field of politics. The example of Plato, and especially his theory of the ideal state, as well as his practical political activity, indicates quite the opposite. The crux of the matter lies in the fact that philosophy was not and could not yet be a specific scientific form of theoretical knowledge. This was what Marx and Engels had in mind when they wrote: "For philosophers, one of the most difficult tasks is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world.”  [88•1  This helplessness of philosophy comes out especially clearly in the German classical idealists, whose teaching nevertheless suggested ways of converting philosophy into a specific science—- philosophical science that was brought into being by Marxism.