FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF
PHILOSOPHY
p Ethical doctrines have been in existence since antiquity. Ethnography, and the history of culture, religion and 159 philosophy have uncovered a multiplicity of ethical doctrines and systems both practical, determining the forms of human intercourse and education in a given society, collective or social group, and theoretical, making claims to an explanation of one or another form of ethical consciousness.
p The problem of ethics (conscience, duty, etc.) in philosophy is one of the most complex. The ethical consciousness turns out to be contradictory and when attempts are made at analyzing it on a formal demonstrative-logical level it splinters into an endlessly diverging series of antitheses. Therefore we find in the history of philosophy numerous attempts to present ethics in a contradictory and splintered form (to wit, Kant in the form of an inner dialogue between intelligible and empirical characters).
p In the present article we have set ourselves a modest task: to present in its most general framework a possible scheme for discussing the ethical consciousness in the context of Marx’s theory.
p It must be mentioned from the outset that ethical relations were not a direct subject of research for Marx. Nevertheless his fundamental ideas on man, society, and history, as well as isolated statements encountered in his writings give us a basis for a general discussion of the ethical consciousness in the framework of his theoretical conception.
p We recall that the historical dialectical conception set forth by Marx had its origin in the process of the critical reworking and “inversion” of the corresponding conception advanced by Hegel. We shall try to briefly delineate Hegel’s position in the sphere of ethics. Hegel attached a historico-dialectical meaning to the splintered and anti-nomical nature of the ethical consciousness (exposed and presented in theology and philosophy) and distinguished ethics from morality, presenting the epochs of the development of self-consciousness of the Absolute Spirit as differing, in particular, either in the dominance of ethics or of morality. Further, according to Hegel, these forms coexist—given the dominance of one or the other—in each historical epoch in complex dialectical interrelationships. As distinct from many philosophers and in particular from Kant, for Hegel ethical forms are not only forms of individual consciousness, but also objective characteristics of actually existing social structures ana relations (the state, law, the family, etc.).
p According to Hegel, the meaning of the terms “ethics” and “morality” in their historical modifications correspond to the general scheme of development of the Absolute Spirit, passing 160 through, in particular, the stages of subjective and objective spirit and being elevated to the ever greater fullness and concreteness of self-consciousness.
p Correspondingly Hegel first considers the state which may be signified as the existence of the objective spirit "in itself”, and calls this the state of ethics. In history this corresponds to the absorption of the individual, his (dissolution) in the tribe, and the absence in him of an individual consciousness as opposed to the collective.
p The next stage was signified by Hegel as the moral: it consists in the development of the subjective, individual (and therefore accidental) spirit. Here the individual isolates himself from the collective, apprehends himself as personality and, on the one hand, finds within himself conscience, duty and other ethical motives underlying his behaviour and relations to people, and on the other, detaches these motives from himself, ascribing to them the general .form of necessity which he, although he found it within himself, now must submit to. This universal self-apprehending form, serving now as a criterion for the evaluation of intentions and behaviour (both one’s own and that of others) is in fact morality. Here the spirit is fragmented and dispersed in the mass of individuals comprising civil—bourgeois—society.
p But, apprehending himself as a free moral subject, a personality, the individual must make the further step, viz., he must recognize the higher (viz-a-viz his subjectivity) necessity of the objective spirit in its universal form and must submit to it. Now the spirit becomes integral once again, subsuming individualities, absorbing the personalities, and thus bearing within itself morality as its form. It once again becomes ethical, but, in comparison with the primitive unreflected (and therefore internally undifferentiated) form of ethics richer and internally differentiated. The objectified form of primitive ethics turns out to be, according to Hegel, the family, the tribe, the objectified form of morality—the civil society; and the supreme universal objectified form of the moral spirit—the state with its institutions (law, the bureaucratic apparatus, the police, courts, etc.).
p Since the morally free personality must now freely and consciously submit himself to a supreme necessity, the Hegelian formula emerges that "freedom is cognized necessity”. The new and higher moral state is regarded to be the objective spirit, which having passed through the stage of morality has apprehended its own ethical content (and now exists not only "in itself" but also "for itself”) and 161 implemented it in the form of the state. Thus "the fact of the matter in no way depends on the wishes of separate persons, on whether or not they want for law and justice to be effectuated ... law and justice derive their force not through this agreement of the individuals. The universal does not need the approval of separate persons and when its laws are violated it shows its power in punishment.” [161•1
p The individual is offered as a sacrifice to the universal which appears in the form of necessity and external expediency. There exists one superpersonality (iibermensch)—the Absolute Spirit. The individuals form its tools and material and can never become a "whole in itself" that is, personalities. The awareness by the individual of the necessity of submitting to this universal force is declared freedom and ethical consciousness.
p Ludwig Feuerbach’s proclamation of humanism in the form of an anthropological principle was a direct reaction against this anti-humanist concept of Hegel’s. Here the centre of attention and the sole value is declared to be the human individual as a natural, sensuous being. His free strivings to self-fulfilment and happiness become the foundation of ethics. However, having rejected the Hegelian absorption of the individual in the universal, Feuerbach overlooked the complex dialectical relationship between the individual and the collective, a relationship which ensures the reproduction of human generations and thereby ensures the historical being and development of the individuals as such. For Feuerbach man is an abstract natural individual, and for this reason his humanism and ethics remain abstract. Analysing the Feuerbachian position, Engels remarked that his theory of morals is "...designed to suit all periods, all peoples and all conditions, and precisely for that reason it is never and nowhere applicable". [161•2
p In opposition to Hegel and Feuerbach, Marx believed that the problem consisted in explaining whether and how it is possible for the individual to develop into a free and universal personality. As distinct from Hegel, Marx regarded man as a whole within itself, as a potentially universal and free being, developing into a personality. As distinct from Feuerbach, for Marx the individual can become a personality only in society and 162 only in the process of the historical development of this society.
p The dominance over man by an external abstract universality is connected with the existence of the social division of labour, social groups and, in the final analysis, with the definite, historically limited level of the productive forces. This must be overcome through historical development. (One of the most important means for this overcoming, as we saw above, is scientific and technological progress.)
p In the opinion of Marx the existence of certain universal interests, submission to which is demanded from the individual by morals, is an illusion. Under the mask of general interests there always operate the interests of real single individuals, making up social groups, classes, etc. "Communist theoreticians,” wrote Marx and Engels, "the only ones who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely because they alone have discovered that throughout history the general interest is created by individuals who are defined as private persons.” [162•1
p In affirming the social being of man Marx has in mind not the subordination of the individual to the universal interest, which is a historically transient and limited form of his being, but rather the circumstance that society is the natural environment for man, where in comprehensive contact with other individuals he is formed as a human and can stand apart as personality. "The man is not only a social animal, but an animal which can isolate himself only in society.” [162•2 However, as a result of the historical development of the social division of labour, human activity as the sphere for the self-molding of the individual turns out to be divided up among social groups—estates, classes, professional and other amalgamations, the tie between which assumes a material form. Consequently activity (becoming the abstract labour of the abstract individual) and its aims also take on a material and abstract form. To the extent that any social group bears a definite (and thereby a partial, limited) function of social being, to this extent does the formation of the individual as a member of a social group signify, in Marx’s phrase, the molding of a partial man rather than of a universal and harmonious personality. In submitting himself to material goals, man becomes dependent upon the system of material 163 relations. He becomes a thing among other things, labour power. Therefore, according to Marx, the task consists in overcoming any forms of group community which are an obstacle in the development of universality and subordinate the individual to forms of "external expediency”; man must turn away from religion, the family and the state to proper human, viz., social being.
p Therefore Marx and Engels speak of distinguishing the individual as a personality from the class individual. Communism is that form of collectivism in which "the transformation of labour into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the earlier limited intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as such" [and not as members of the socium—the Author] [163•1 . Communism is individuals in unity. Its basic principle is the full and free development of each individual, the absence of social boundaries limiting his formation as a personality. Communism is regarded as an "association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all". [163•2
p Turning to Marx’s writings on morality, we note that he (as well as Engels) emphasizes its class character and the possibility of its utilization for the selfish aims of dominance over men. In particular morality, as a rule, ideally expresses the conditions for the existence of the ruling class, which the ideologues of this class transform theoretically into something self-contained. These conditions are advanced by the dominant class against the oppressed class in the capacity of vital norms, as the recognition of its dominance on the one hand, and as a moral means to this dominance, on the other. Giving expression to group interests, morality is a form of external expediency, limiting the freedom in the formation of the universal personality. But, "the mortal danger for every being lies in losing itself. Hence lack of freedom is the real mortal danger for mankind.” [163•3 Engels wrote that "in reality every class, even every profession, has its own morality, and even this it violates whenever it can do with impunity.” [163•4
p We must now consider the individual in contemporary bourgeois society with its division of labour, classes, etc. This society begins to indoctrinate him from the moment of birth. 164 Morality and its standards represent one of the means used for this channeling and for behavioral regulation. The individual perceives these standards and demands as an external factor, acting upon his “ego”. The problem arises as to what are the origins of this “ego” which society endeavours with varying results to transform into the moral individual, a “useful” member of society (the relationship of usefulness is in fact the material relationship)? Can it be that this “ego” is not a product of society, of the social environment? So why is it that this product turns out to be such that it must be infused with the social principles and moral standards while it sees them as external and often limiting its freedom and suppressing its individuality?
p To add to this, sometimes moral standards and principles contradict the individual’s inner convictions of what is just and humane. For example, the situation often arises in which to act according to the dictates of morality means to act unconscionably and inhumanely. But this very evaluation (“unconscionably and inhumanely”) is an ethical judgement and pertains to ethical consciousness. It only remains to admit that the ethical consciousness of our individual is contradictory, that the demands of morality and the conscience often do not coincide, and that the notion of duty turns out to have disintegrated into contradictory notions.
p This contradiction may be explained by reference to the contradictory nature of the socium. But such an explanation is limited: beyond its confines we may locate a certain ethical content which cannot be explained by actual social conditions. For example, it is impossible to derive from social conditions of the past or present the unconditional commandment "thou shall not kill’ (below we shall attempt to demonstrate that an acceptance of this unconditionality can be derived, but by other means).
p We may outline the path leading to a resolution of this problem if we turn to the Marxist conception of man. Man is a potentially universal and therefore a free being, but he realizes his potentiality only in the infinite historical process of his development. "The universally developed individuals whose social relations are their own collective relations and are therefore also subordinate to their own collective control, are the product of history and not of nature.” [164•1 The universal character of his activity determines future man as universal 165 and free. Historically, however, he is determined by the social conditions of this activity in the present, and is limited as “private” and unfree.
p The actual social system of which the individual is inescapably a member determines his activity (and consequently, nis consciousness and psyche as a whole) objectively as cause, as external expediency, objectified activity, completed and snuffed out in the actual structure of being (including the activity of preceding generations). In the temporal context this is determined by the past. On the other hand, this activity is simultaneously determined by the subjective will, by the goal, that is, by the future. Man "not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to wnich he must subordinate his will". [165•1 Moreover, all material goals, consistently subtracted by historical motion, turn out to be converted forms of the solely true goal, which is man as a “tribal” (directly collective) creature.
p This potential universality, existing in the form of the goal, leads to the formation of a value system in agreement with conceptions of the infinite perfectibility of man (and mankind as the medium of his universal intercourse and likewise of the formation of his "generic essence”). It does not depend upon the actual form of the socium, and what is more, is tne negation of this limited form, being in this sense absolute.
p On the other hand, the determination of activity by the conditions of actual being (causa/ determination) requires of man the formation of a different system of values, connected with the structure of a given concrete socium. The individual is included within it as a member of a social group, class, as labour power, in a word, as a private individual. The norms and requirements put before the individual by the socium are connected with an unconditional value system, but only in the manner displaying its converted, partial, finite form, adapted to the limited conditions of the given socium. Therefore, they contradict this unconditional system as a universal and general one.
p The first of these value systems says to man: "Be free and universal, for you are a personality, a citizen of the world.” The second recommends: "Subordinate your will and interests to interests which lie without you (the church, socium, social group, etc.), for you are a member (of the church, socium, 166 social group, nation, state, etc.).” To be sure, the second, as a rule, does not say: "You are a partial human" and often also asserts: "You are a personality it you submit...”, and often tries to pass itself as the only true, just, universal and pan-human system of values. The individual nevertheless perceives it as external expediency, as a limitation upon his freedom, although as long as, under the sway of certain situations, there does not arise within him an acute inner conflict he may not note this and may even regard this expediency to be the only just path. There exist individuals who do not notice this under any circumstances and also those who notice, but do not act in the corresponding manner.
p Marx gave the name “morality” to this conditional, concretehistorical system of rules of behaviour and requirements laid before the individual on behalf of society in the conditions of its alienated social being. Now we may understand his negative stance towards morality which may have provoked puzzlement at first glance. Morality is for Marx above all one of the forms of external expediency, making the individual an unfree, partial man. We refer the reader to a few of the limited statements Marx and Engels made concerning this question. "The Communists do not preach morality at all,” [166•1 they affirmed. Speaking of the emergence of communist and socialist attitudes they note: "That shattered the bases of all morality....” [166•2 In The Holy Family and The German Ideology the attempts to argue from morality in the investigation of social relations are mocked. In Capital Marx, considering the economists’ views notes that all and sundry considerations are irrelevant.
p For Marx and Engels the intensification of moral preaching and the insistence upon the holiness of universal interests is an indicator of a deep split between the productive forces and the ideology of a society, between various social groups, when traditional notions cease to .correspond to the form of intercourse in practice. Such conceptions, "in which actual private interests, etc., etc., are expressed as universal interests, descend to the level of mere idealising phrases, conscious illusion, deliberate hypocrisy. But the more their falsity is exposed by life, and the less meaning they have for consciousness itself, the more firmly are they asserted, the more 167 hypocritical, moral and holy becomes the language of this normal society.” [167•1
p There exist historical and historico-philosophical considerations that the general and unconditional value system which stands in opposition to morality should be called ethical or ethics in the strict sense of the word, regarding morality as its own opposite and as a form adapted to the being of the partial man and historically limited socium. We are concerned here not with a term but with the fact that ethical consciousness is contradictory and its contradictory forms must be different. In the given instance this distinction is important if only because the interrelations between these forms of the modern man’s ethical consciousness on the one hand, and science, on the other, differ widely, and this makes his own relation to science extremely complex and ambiguous. As we see, in the Marxist philosophical system this differentiation is carried out according to the principles opposed to those in the Hegelian system, and the results achieved are also opposite.
p The internal cleavage of the moral consciousness had been depicted in the prose as well as the religious, philosophical and scientific literature of the world. We could, for example, characterize the conflict depicted in Tolstoy’s play The Living Corpse as the collision between morality and law on the one hand, and ethics on the other. Boris Pasternak in Safe Conduct Pass employed what is in our opinion a very precise phrase: "unethical morality" (beznravstvennaya moral).
p The commandment "thou shalt not kill" considered in ethical terms is an unconditional injunction because it implies the man whose value is unconditional and self-contained, the man as a personality, as an aim in itself. If we recall that according to Marx such a personality can be given shape only through the universal creativity of forms of intercourse and in the process of this intercourse itself, then the nature of this commandment connected with the universal development of man as aim in itself becomes clear. In killing another human one not only kills that which is human within oneself, but also takes a stance against mankind in general (against freedom, against the very principle of intercourse in which the personality as such is molded and developed as the highest and absolute value).
p Therefore, murder can only be perceived as the gravest of crimes, graver even than suicide. In the future, to all 168 appearances any coercive restriction imposed upon the freedom of human intercourse will be assessed as a grave ethical crime.
p The very same "thou shall not kill" considered on the level of a moral injunction is hemmed in by a cluster of conditions, reservations and exclusions and lives quite comfortably with the bonfires of the inquisition wars and the death penalty.
p Morality presupposes award or retribution not only in the ideal but often in the material form.
p Ethics on the other hand, excludes awards or retributions in the material form. Its only award or censure lies in the self-awareness of the individual. It is justified not by the immediate goal implemented in actual being, but only historically as a form of movement into the infinite future. Therefore it does not “reckon” the consequences of the individual’s deeds either for himself or for the actual social conditions. The individual often finds himself in a situation in which he is compelled to choose whether he ought to act in accordance with existing morality (which, as a rule, more or less agrees with common sense and allows a given action to be rationally justified in one way or another), to win approval and praise or ought he to commit an “incomprehensible” or “unreasonable” deed, even, perhaps, to the extreme of perishing and of drawing upon himself the curses and disdain of his contemporaries, but in so doing, to realize himself as the personality, that is to say, act truly ethically.
p We must caution against drawing the conclusion from our brief discussion that ethics is “good” and morality is “bad” or vice versa.
p In the first place we must take into account that our consideration of these aspects of ethical consciousness in isolation is in fact a method of theoretical analysis, rendering possible an exposition of the complex and contradictory structure of the ethical consciousness unfolded in space and time, and thereby marking out one of the possible paths of approaching ethical phenomena. So far as the real individual, our contemporary is concerned, a clear-cut awareness of the mutual opposition of these aspects arises only, as a rule, in acute conflict situations, and even then not always and not for all people. Ordinarily the conflict is not rationally apprehended. Rather it takes the form of the remorseful conscience, of the vague awareness that "something is not as it should be”, of conflicts in the emotional sphere and so forth. Practically speaking morality and ethics are indistinguishable in the mind of contemporary man, forcing him to agonize over 169 internal contradictions, to reflect, choose, etc. Movement within the framework of these contradictions is the only possible avenue for personality formation under the dominance of material relations and the social division of labour.
p In the second place the actual life of the individual within any given, historically limited socium cannot be governed by pure ethics, since by virtue of their unconditionally universal nature ethical principles will always conflict with actual and historicallv limited conditions, and the individual, guided by these principles, will always be out of place. When such individuals appear, as for instance, Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, who are variously called by society “holy”, “prophets”, Don Quixotes or “idiots”, they turn out to be, to paraphrase Ludwig Feuerbach, more likely candidates for the other world than active participants in this world.
p In the third place, if we approach the question historically we can demonstrate that in the tribal collective there was no cleavage of the ethical consciousness into ethics as such and morality. This is explained by the fact that the individual was entirely absorbed in the collective and did not isolate himself as a personality. The cleavage in the ethical consciousness at a later date is a testimony to its higher form of development. The syncretic, integral ethical consciousness of the primitive world was the “tribal” consciousness of a given collective; it determined the substance of man’s actions and did not foresee the possibility of the separating out and development of the individual into a personality. In this syncretic state the individual’s ethical consciousness does not suffer cleavages. The social system of education making him a member of the tribal collective directly creates his self-awareness so that for him to be human means to be a member of precisely this given collective (the kin, tribe or tribal community). Such an individual is fuller and more harmonious than contemporary man, who is marked by multiple cleavages in his inner world and is agonizing over endless problems. But according to Marx, the isolated individual at the early stages of development functions more fully because he has yet not worked out the fullness of his relations and has not juxtaposed these relations to himself as social forces and relationships independent of him. Morality operates as the first and therefore an abstract form of reflection of the ethical consciousness in its alienation from itself (this is clearly expressed, for example, in Kant’s categorical imperative with its principle of formalism).
p In the form of morality the ethical consciousness operates as a certain impersonal force, to which the individual must 170 subordinate his “ego”. But at the same time, because of this formal abstractness the substantial resolution of this ethical task remains in the hands of the individual himself, forcing him to agonize over this resolution. This is the torments of creation, the birth pangs of the personality.
p The formalism of morality turns out to be substantially interpreted by the actual sociality (that is, by social groups). At the same time in its abstract universality morality is a limited, converted, but nevertheless universal form of pan-human ethics overcome by historical development.
p The extent and the means by which the morality of one or another social group carries the content of pan-human morality, to all appearances, depends upon the concrete historical role played by this group (class) in the given socium. It is possible that this is in some way connected with the ability to transcend this socium, that is, to transform society into a new form. These are very complex problems the analysis of which depends upon one’s notion of historical progress (we leave aside this problem). In any case, proceeding from the conception of the revolutionary role of the proletariat in bourgeois society Engels wrote of the forms of morality and coinciding themes of ethics existing in this society: "Which, then, is the true one? Not one of them, in the sense of absolute finality; but certainly that morality contains the maximum elements promising permanence which, in the present, represents the overthrow ’of the present, represents the future, and that is proletarian morality.” [170•1
p We argue in this circumspect and non-categorical way concerning the character of correlations between me morality of definite social group and pan-human ethics because even so far as the revolutionary class is concerned the dialectical contradiction is retained between its apprehension of itself as the final social group and the expression in this form of the infinity of human development. Therefore Marx and Engels regarded revolution as that change of people in the course of which the class carrying out the revolution is also fundamentally transformed. It is always a process of self-change.
p With the abolition of the social division of labour and of the dominance of the world of material relations the ethical consciousness must overcome its cleavage. It will leave no room for morality as a form of external expediency subordinating the individual to itself. This consciousness will express a form 171 of activity the direct aim of which will be not the production of things but the development of the human faculties as an end in itself.
p So far as the problem pertaining to the formation of the dual nature of the individual ethical consciousness is concerned, in the present article we may only briefly point to that sphere in which in our opinion is located the possibility of providing a substantial analysis of this problem, since we have arrived at the extremely complex question of human knowledge—and one which goes beyond the range of this article—directly connected with the question of anthropogenesis: "What is time? What is history?”
p The object active intercourse of the individual by means of which he assimilates his human essence is determined by two different spheres of social being or, in other words, by two superimposed fields of force: that of actual being, unfolded in space and in its contemporary configuration represented by the social structure; and the field of historical being, unfolded in time and represented by culture. In the field of the socium the individual feels attached to a given social group as its part, and his activity is carried out jointly with other individuals as synchronous labour discrete in space. In the field of culture he feels himself to be the heir of the past and the creator of the future. He perceives the past as his own, as living within him, acting through his hands, looking through his eyes, and the future as his future, created by him, for which he is directly and personally responsible before himself, his contemporaries and his descendants. The individual carries out his activity in the field of culture as "general spiritual" labour, connected not only with his contemporaries but with the spiritual labour of past and future generations—that is to say, unfolded in time. To the extent that by the instrumental nature of his activity man is “projected” as a universal being, to that extent his unfolding in time turns out to be infinite and his universality is embodied as his incompleteness. Therefore man appears as a being living in the future, realizing himself in goal-positing and goal-implementing as an uncompleted process.
p As a cultural-historical subject man today can assimilate his generic essence only in a disjointed form, corresponding to the cleavages marking his social being. He can do so (a) in the complete and limited form of actual being as such, of sociality, to which at the level of activity correspond joint labour, alienation and material relations, and at the level of ethics—its socially conditioned and converted form, morality; or (b) in the incomplete, general, historical-cultural potential form, 172 connected with spiritual labour, the development of personal relations, and at the level of ethics, with its unconditional pan-human form, which we indicated to be ethics in the proper sense of the word.
p According to Marx, a form of sociality is the historically transient form of the dominance of material relations where man as a "generic being" feels himself disjoined and partial. But at the same time this form is the first, still abstract form of universality, and is thereby counterposed to the concrete individual, regarding him as an abstract entity, for example, as a subject of law, as labour power. It is a step in the direction of that form of universality in which the relations of man as a generic being will include all of mankind as a genus. For this reason the form of sociality must be preferred to the narrowly limited tribal relations of the earlier period in human history.
p In this way man as a being living in time, as an historical subject is from the outset determined in two different ways. As a product of the past history he is conditioned by the activity of preceding generations, and is determined by the past causally. Such determinacy makes the man an actually limited being and is perceived by him as necessity. But as the creator of history he is conditioned by his future, his goal. This determination is the negation of the now existing as the limited, which is connected with transgressing the boundaries of the self and of actual reality—transcendence into the sphere of the infinite. This transcendence makes him a potentially universal being, and is perceived by him as freedom. (In connection with this man could be defined as a transcending being.)
p Man cannot bring this freedom into existence in a single act, for the real transformation of the object-world (natural and social) compels him to tailor his goals to existing reality. This is perceived by him as a limitation imposed upon his freedom, his personality. From here also stems the above-mentioned reaction of the individual to the demands put to him in the capacity of moral rules and standards—his inner protest. The lower the cultural level of the individual the less conscious and controllable are the forms taken by his protest, including actions which violate juridical norms. These actions may appear strange and unmotivated to his neighbours, since the common sense of contemporary man, fortified with a dose of “scientific” logic, will look for an explanation of sorts in the individual’s conditions of life, in the causal-object and psychological “situation” of his action, while this situation, as we have seen, may well not be confined to the sphere of causality.
173The cleavage of ethical consciousness into ethics and morality, as we have presented it in our discussion, is a rather crude and schematized distinction, merely an abstract reference point for the analysis of the highly complex interweaving of sentiments and ideas making up the content of the man’s ethical world. These aspects may be regarded as coordinate axes of a sort, as general tendencies determining the nature of concrete disjunctures, engendering the necessity of further fragmentation and synthesis, since a final and complete disintegration along these axes would indicate the disintegration of the personality (not in the psychiatric sense, but rather as an ethical phenomenon). At the same time the clash of these tendencies can be externally embodied in conflicts between individuals, between the individual and the social group or social environment, etc. (in this instance an inner or total rupture between the individual and his social group or environment is possible).
Notes
[161•1] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Asthetik, Bd. I, Berlin and Weimar, 1965, S. 182.
[161•2] K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. Ill, Moscow, 1972, pp. 359-60.
[162•1] K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, p. 267.
[162•2] K. Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Rohentwurf), 1857-1858, Berlin, 1953, S. 79.
[163•1] K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, p. 84.
[163•2] K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1973, p. 127.
[163•3] K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. Ill, p. 30.
[163•4] K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1974, p. 164.
[164•1] K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 178.
[165•1] Ibid.
[166•1] K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, p. 267.
[166•2] Ibid., p. 460.
[167•1] Ibid., p. 317.
[170•1] F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, Moscow, 1969, pp. 113-14.