148

p The discovery of hitherto unknown phenomena, of processes and properties, and the laws that govern them, and of the ways and means of practically applying these laws—such are the main tasks of science, which are performed by direct and instrumental observation, by description, experiment, theoretical analysis of facts, by generalisations, special methods of research and testing, etc. Philosophy is armed with no techniques of experimentation, no instruments of observation, no chemical reagents; these and all its other deficiencies have to be replaced by the power of abstraction.

p The philosopher has at his disposal facts obtained by his personal observation or facts established by special scientific research. Whereas the chemist is immediately concerned with things, most of the philosopher’s material is knowledge of things gathered from the sciences and other sources. Thus philosophy, at any rate as it exists in the present age of ramified and developed specialised sciences, is concerned with more or less prepared and tested factual data supplied by science and practice, with certain definite phenomena in the material and spiritual life of society, which it seeks to comprehend, generalise and interpret as a whole and integrated view of the 149 world. Does this mean that discoveries are, in fact, impossible in philosophy? No, this is certainly not the case. The essence of the matter is that philosophical discoveries are based on knowledge that is already available, on knowledge that is analysed, appraised or, to put it briefly, interpreted by philosophy.

p Interpretation plays a major part in all theoretical inquiries and in any field of knowledge. Engels called Leverrier’s discovery of the planet Neptune a great scientific achievement. By analysing the facts recorded by other astronomers, Leverrier inferred the existence of a hitherto unknown planet and calculated the point at which it would become visible. This discovery was based on interpretation of facts already known to astronomers. But in order to interpret them as Leverrier had done, it was necessary to be convinced of the possible existence of yet another planet in our Solar system.

p Today, thanks to the development of theoretical research, application of mathematical methods and so on, interpretation as a method of inquiry figures far more prominently in natural science than it did in the past. Modern science has given the concept of interpretation various special meanings. V. A. Shtoff writes: "One may observe three types of interpretation that are employed in scientific cognition: (1) interpretation of formal symbol logico-mathematical systems; (2) interpretation of the controls of mathematical science, and (3) interpretation of observation, experimental data and established scientific facts.”  [149•1  This classification of the types 150 of interpretation makes no claim to be exhaustive since the author is mainly concerned with mathematics, logic and natural science. Nevertheless it confirms the idea of the growing role of interpretation in science. But why do we raise the question of the special role of interpretation in philosophy? The reason is simply that in any specialised science interpretation is only one of the methods of inquiry, whereas for philosophy, which does not go in for fact-gathering and processing of raw materials, so to speak, it is of decisive importance.

p In the past, philosophers often enriched the natural sciences with great discoveries. This was possible because the gap between philosophy and the specialised sciences was relatively narrow. Descartes and Leibnitz were not only philosophers but also mathematicians and natural scientists in their own right. Natural science was largely empirical in character and its theoretical problems were dealt with by philosophy (natural philosophy), which anticipated or even formulated in speculative terms some outstanding scientific discoveries. Lorenz Oken, the German naturalist, provides a vivid example. "By the path of thought, Oken discovers protoplasm and the cell, but it does not occur to anyone to follow up the matter along the lines of natural-scientific investigation.”  [150•1  The later development of theoretical natural science deprived natural philosophy of its previous significance, since it could no longer anticipate the discoveries of science, which had travelled far beyond the bounds accessible to the philosophy of everyday experience. Natural philosophy, although it 151 continues to exist to this day, has long since become a historical anachronism.

p Thus the development of the specialised sciences and of specific methods of scientific research has progressively reduced the role of philosophy in disclosing new phenomena and laws of nature, but at the same time it has enhanced the significance of the philosophical interpretation of natural scientific discoveries, as something that is essential both to natural science and to philosophy itself. Such interpretation steadily sheds its ontological character and becomes increasingly related to the theory of knowledge. Far from being merely a philosophical compendium of natural scientific discoveries, it offers a critical, epistemological explanation of their significance. Lenin’s analysis of the crisis in physics at the close of the 19th century is a striking example of the scientificophilosophical interpretation of the achievements of natural science.

p Any interpretation proceeds from facts or from what is considered to be a fact. Its key function is to explain these facts (or what are considered to be facts), to reveal their relation to other facts, to assess the notions connected with these facts, to revise them if necessary and to draw new conclusions. Philosophies are distinguished by what facts (or assumptions) they .take as their point of departure, and also by the significance or interpretation which they place upon these facts.

p Thomas Aquinas and Hegel proceed from the notion of the existence of an absolute, divine reason. The "prince of scholastics" believes divine reason to be outside the world, infinitely superior to the world, and to have created it out of 152 nothing. Hegel, on the other hand, maintains that divine reason does not exist outside the world, because it comprises its essence, just as it is also the essence of human reason. Hence the divine and the human are not so far distant from one another. These opposed conceptions (within the framework of idealist thinking) show how important the role of interpretation is in philosophy. The example given is the more significant because the initial propositions of both thinkers are not facts but assumptions, which in themselves amount to a definite, theological interpretation of the world, which in Hegel becomes so filled with real content that it ultimately comes into conflict with its inappropriate form.

p Any definition of a concept if, of course, it is not the only possible one, and in most cases this is precluded because the concrete in science is a unity of different definitions, is an interpretation which is supplemented by another interpretation, i.e., another definition. So different interpretations may supplement as well as preclude one another, although in the former case they are as a rule not simply summed up but taken into account in the theoretical conclusion that synthesises them.  [152•1 

153

p Interpretation is inseparable from theoretical inquiry in any form, since the latter can never be merely a statement of facts, i.e., it always uses certain assumptions, theoretical premises, deductions and so on. The neo-positivists, in working out the principle of verification, attempted to distinguish "protocol statements" as pure statements of what is observed, which as such could be taken as criteria of the truth of empirical propositions. This attempt, as we know, failed to produce the desired results and in the end the neo-positivists came to the conclusion that any statement is an interpretation, since it presupposes singling out that which is stated and placing it in relation to other facts. Bertrand Russell maintained that the theory of relativity reduced the difference between heliocentric and geocentric systems to different types of interpretation of one and the same fact: "If space is purely relative, the difference between the statements ’the earth rotates’ and ’the heavens revolve’ is purely verbal: both must be ways of describing 154 the same phenomena.”  [154•1  One cannot agree, of course, with the conversion of statement into interpretation, but it is also quite clear that this cognitive procedure does not preclude explicit or implicit assumptions and hence various interpretations.

p Any interpretation entails the application of the knowledge we possess to the facts that we wish to study. We speak of the application of knowledge and not of truths, because these are not one and the same thing. Ptolemy’s system was not true but it summarised certain observations and contained some true notions and, for its own time, was scientific and made it possible to explain and predict certain phenomena. In philosophy it is particularly important to avoid confusing knowledge with truth. The most thorough knowledge of the mistaken propositions which have at various times been put forward by scientists or philosophers and have been accepted as true does not necessarily give us knowledge of the truth, although it must be admitted that knowledge of error does help us to learn the truth.

p Knowledge as the theoretical basis of interpretation may be knowledge only of that which has been asserted by certain men of learning and that has been confirmed, will be confirmed or, on the contrary, rejected, in the future. Democritus’ conception of absolutely solid, indivisible atoms and absolute vacuum, which provided the theoretical basis for an interpretation of the world precisely because it contained elements of truth, actually limited the possibility of explaining the qualitative diversity of phenomena. In the 155 time of Democritus, however, neither explanation nor even description of the infinite qualitative diversity of natural phenomena were as yet possible.

p Interpretation depends not only on the character of knowledge (primarily the objective truth contained in it) but also on its volume. The ancient Greek philosophers, though they possessed an extremely limited fund of theoretical knowledge (much of which contained only elements of truth), tried to provide an integrated, i.e., philosophical interpretation of reality. This obvious discrepancy between the theoretical basis of interpretation and the interpretation itself inevitably led them to naive, erroneous and sometimes fantastic conclusions.

p The development of science constantly increases the volume of knowledge, and scientific methods of inquiry and testing tend to bring that knowledge increasingly nearer to objective truth. Nonetheless the possibilities of interpretation are always limited by the availability of knowledge, and any further increase in its volume changes the substance and form of interpretation according to a recognisable pattern. This is true of any science but most of all of philosophy, which seeks to interpret not separate phenomena but their multiform totalities, the basic forms of existence and the knowledge of it. No wonder then that in philosophy there have always been different and even mutually exclusive interpretations of nature, matter, consciousness and so on. From this point of view the errors of philosophers may be regarded as incorrect interpretations of actual facts, and it quite often turns out that their initial propositions are not statements but interpretations of facts. This, however, is no reason 156 for distrusting the possibility of the achievement of truth in philosophy, since philosophical interpretation, like any other form of knowledge, is ultimately confirmed or denied by the whole mass of evidence provided by science and practice.

p In natural science the attempt to interpret certain facts from the positions of a definite theory periodically makes it necessary to build new theories or substantially amend the old ones. In philosophy, many of whose propositions cannot be directly proved or disproved by experiment, by facts, no such necessity exists. However, the accumulation of facts, the multiplication of scientific discoveries and outstanding historical events, compel philosophy to alter its interpretation of reality. Whereas the development of classical mechanics brought into being mechanistic materialism, successful research into nonmechanical forms of the motion of matter revealed the untenability of the mechanistic interpretation of nature. Advancing scientific knowledge of the nature of the psyche has forced most idealists to renounce their former naive view of the relationship between body and soul.

p Inquiry into the historical process of change, into the development of the philosophical interpretation of nature, of society, of man and his ability to acquire knowledge, is one of the major tasks of historico-philosophical science. Thanks to this kind of research we overcome the impression that philosophy has drifted from one mistake to another, and are able to trace the unique progressive development of philosophical knowledge, the development of philosophical argumentation, and the fruitful influence of the specialised sciences on philosophy.

157

p In the bourgeois philosophy of the last century, in connection with attempts to restore, to find new ground for the juxtaposition of philosophy to the positive sciences, one finds an increasing tendency to discredit the cognitive significance of interpretation. According to Wilhelm Dilthey, interpretation is a specifically natural scientific mode of inquiry, which yields only probable knowledge. Dilthey attacks "explanatory psychology”, which in his view merely extrapolates scientific methods (research into causal relations, advancing of hypotheses) into the mental sphere, whereas the life of the intellect, unlike that of external nature, is something that is directly given to us and must therefore be known intuitively. "Nature,” Dilthey wrote, "we can explain; the life of the soul we must understand.”  [157•1  In contrast to interpretation and explanation Dilthey proposed description of the content of consciousness in a way that could be directly understood: "The methodical advantage of psychology lies in the fact that it has a direct and living spiritual connection in the form of the emotional experiences of reality.”  [157•2 

p Dilthey believed the principle of intuitionist descriptive psychology, precluding all interpretation, to be the basis of a new "philosophy of life”, in which he saw the summing up of the whole historical development of philosophy and its conversion into the main science of human spirit. According to Dilthey, direct description of a psychological condition, as distinct from interpretation, which allegedly takes us back from the known to the unknown, is understanding. Dilthey called what was basically an irrational conception 158 of philosophical knowledge “hermeneutics”, giving a new sense to a term employed in classical philology and to some extent in philosophy ( Schleiermacher), for describing a special type of interpretation (myths, ancient literature, art and so on).  [158•1 

p Martin Heidegger’s existentialist hermeneutics is a further development of Dilthey’s conception and its treatment in the spirit of Husserl’s phenomenology, which broke away from psychologism and juxtaposed to explanation of the phenomena of the consciousness their “eidetic” essential perception. Interpretation, Heidegger believes, is subjective by nature, because the interpreting subject provides the yardstick of judgement. On the other hand “understanding”, according to Heidegger, corresponds to being and therefore from the very beginning, i.e., in its pre-reflex form, is "existential understanding”. However, Heidegger did not succeed in disclosing the objective content of "existential understanding”, the doctrine of which turns out to be ultimately an irrationalist and obviously subjective interpretation of the cognitive process and its object.  [158•2 

159

p Thus irrationalist criticism of interpretation boils down to denial of the cognitive significance of natural science, which is treated as a basic inability to understand existence. But since existentialism limits philosophy to the investigation of "human reality”, through which it tries to reach the allegedly unattainable being in itself, existentialism cultivates to an even greater extent than other idealist doctrines the subjectivist interpretation of existence.

p To recapitulate, philosophy does not renounce interpretation even when it declares war upon it. The nature of philosophy is such that it cannot fail to express its attitude to the fundamental realities that are of essential importance to man: to the phenomena of nature, of personal and social life, to science, art, religion and so on. And this attitude, since it is theoretical in character, inevitably becomes an interpretation.

p The epistemological analysis of interpretation as a specific way of reflecting reality shows that its key feature is not expression of the subjective attitude of the thinker to certain definite facts, but a scientific quest for the connection between observed phenomena and for the connection of these phenomena with others whose existence is recognised or presumed on the basis of the available data. In this sense interpretation may be regarded as linking. It goes without saying that this “linking” may be subjective, 160 insufficiently grounded or, on the contrary, objective and well grounded. But in both cases the interpretation of one fact (or knowledge of it) is possible only when there is another fact (and corresponding knowledge of it), when the whole is split up into parts and the relation between them is examined. And since the essence of phenomena is above all their internal interconnection, interpretation is also a mode of cognising the essence of phenomena.

p Re-interpretation of philosophical propositions, concepts and categories is a legitimate form of development of philosophy. Thus, for example, the evolution of the category of necessity may be historically presented as the origin and development of various definitions of necessity and the overcoming of this diversity of interpretations in the unity of the scientific definition of the category. The objective basis of this cognitive process is provided by social practice, by accumulation of knowledge of the unity and interdependence of phenomena, and by the multiplication of data on nature and society.

p The philosophy of ancient times, strictly speaking, has as yet no concept of objective necessity; its notions on this score are obviously not free of mythological images and are to a considerable extent metaphorical in character. The medieval conception of necessity is mainly a theological interpretation, and not so much of empirically stated processes as of the corresponding Christian dogmas. Only in modern times, first in astronomy and then in other sciences of nature has a concept of necessity been formulated to which philosophy (mainly materialist philosophy) attaches universal significance.

p In the middle of the 19th century, i.e., in a 161 period when the mechanistic interpretation of the necessary connection between phenomena reigned supreme in all fields, Marx and Engels evolved the concept of historical necessity as the specific form of essential connection not only of simultaneously existing phenomena but also of social phenomena that replace one another in time. In doing so they broke through the narrow horizon of the metaphysical interpretation of necessity, confronting it with the dialecticalmaterialist interpretation of this objective relationship of phenomena, an interpretation which natural science, in its own way, of course, and on the basis of its own data, also subsequently achieved.

p The history of philosophy shows convincingly how the selfsame propositions, differently interpreted, acquire clearly opposite meanings and significance. Take, for example, the fundamental proposition on the irreconcilable opposition between scientific knowledge and religious faith. This principle is substantiated, on the one hand, by the materialists, and on the other—surprisingly enough—by mystics, irrationalists, philosophical theologians of Protestantism, and particularly the neo-orthodox.

p There is no need to explain why the materialist argues that science and religion are irreconcilable. But why does the religious irrationalist agree with him? Because, from his point of view, the great truths of religious revelation are absolutely inaccessible to science. Therefore between religion and science there really is an absolute contradiction, which expresses the infinity that divides man from God. Thus two irreconcilably hostile world views substantiate with equal consistency the thesis that knowledge and faith are 162 fundamentally opposed, interpreting both knowledge and faith in opposite ways, juxtaposing faith to knowledge in the one case, and knowledge to faith in the other.

p The neo-orthodox Protestant theologians, who take this juxtaposition to an extreme, reach the point of asserting that we do not know whether God exists and we do not know what we believe in; we only believe in the existence of a deity, in His absolute justice, etc. Unlike the materialists, on the one hand, and these Protestant theologians, on the other, the Catholic theologians and philosophers of the Thomist school argue that science and religion do not essentially contradict each other and so natural science can and should substantiate Christian dogmas, which are above reason in that they take their source from God, but not against reason since God is absolute reason. The neo-positivists, despite their hostility to the Thomist approach, accept the thesis that knowledge and faith are only relatively opposed since they reduce scientific knowledge and truth itself to a form of faith. Some neo-positivists, it is true, maintain that there is common ground between science and religion, the latter being part of the emotional life, and infer from this that religion is irrefutable, since only scientific theories can be refuted. So the indisputable fact of the fundamental opposition between science and religion is interpreted in a great variety of ways and this constitutes much of the substance of some philosophical doctrines.

p The content of philosophical concepts, as we have already pointed out, changes historically with the result that things which have nothing whatever in common are quite often designated by the same term in the history of philosophy. 163 When the existentialist declares that houses, trees, and mountains possess no existence, we cannot contest this statement by merely referring to the dictionary meaning of the word “existence”. We must analyse the particular meaning that existentialism has given this word, show the untenability of the subjectivist interpretation of existence and reveal the connection between "human reality" and the reality that exists independently of it, and so on.

p Philosophical propositions, considered outside their real historical and theoretical context (which is always implied when they are expressed by philosophers), are mere banalities. Take the statement, for instance, that people themselves make their history. Today this proposition may be regarded as tautological. To appreciate its real scientific significance, however, one has only to recall that it was first put forward to counter the theological conception of providentialism, which was replaced by the naturalist conception of predetermination, upheld by the pre-Marxian materialists, who nevertheless maintained that people themselves make their own history. But how is this possible if external nature, the nature of man himself, the results of the activity of previous generations of people are independent of the generations at present living?

p The philosophy of Marxism has proved that neither external nature nor the nature of man are the determining force of social development. In the process of social production, of providing for themselves and others, people transform external nature and, in so doing, transform their own nature as well. The development of the productive forces ultimately determines the character of social relations and people’s mode of 164 life. But the productive forces are people themselves and the instruments of production they have themselves created. It follows, therefore, that people themselves do create their own history, but create it not according to their whim but in accordance with the current level of the productive forces which every succeeding generation inherits from its predecessor. The more each new generation takes part in the development of the productive forces, that is to say, the more significant its contribution to the material basis of the life of society, the more does that generation create conditions that determine its social being, the more freely does it create its own present and future.

p So the proposition "people themselves create their own history" becomes genuinely scientific only thanks to the materialist understanding of history, which fills it with concrete and multiform historical content. A great distance has been travelled between the Marxist interpretation of this proposition and the way it was interpreted by the pre-Marxian materialists who remained on positions of a naturalist-idealist understanding of history.

p Marx said that philosophers had only interpreted the world in various ways, but the task was to change it. This famous proposition states, on the one hand, that interpretation had been the basic form of the development of philosophical knowledge and, on the other, condemns philosophy that limits its task to mere interpretation of what exists.

p The critics of Marxism wrongly interpret Marx’s proposition as a demand that we should renounce all interpretation of reality and, in so doing, abolish philosophy and replace it with 165 revolutionary action.  [165•1  This is an obvious misunderstanding of Marx, who by his whole teaching sought to prove the necessity for unity of revolutionary practice with revolutionary theory, i.e., with an explanation of the social reality that substantiates ways and means for its revolutionary transformation.

p Of course, this proposition of Marx’s is a thesis which can be correctly understood only in the whole context of Marx’s teaching. Marx was counterposing the revolutionary interpretation of reality to the conservative interpretation. In condemning the philosophers who only interpreted the world as it is, Marx was condemning a definite, committed position in philosophy.

p G. V. Plekhanov called historical materialism a materialist explanation of history. The essence of this explanation is that it reveals the laws of change and development of society, the negation of the old by the new.

The revolution in philosophy brought about by Marx and Engels implies not the denial of interpretation as philosophy’s characteristic form of inquiry, but denial of its idealist and metaphysical varieties to which the founders of Marxism counterposed the dialectical-materialist conception of interpretation.