Progress Publishers
Moscow
[4] __TRANSL__ Translated from the Russian by Stanislav Ponomarenko • and Alexander Timofeyev __EDITOR__ Edited by Jane SayerA. n. UlenryjiHH
$HJ10C00Hfl MAPKCH3MA-J1EHHHH3MA
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__COPYRIGHT__ First printing 197810501---947 f
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0302020000~ [5]CONTENTS
Foreword
Page 15
Chapter I. The Role of Philosophy in Society . . 17
1. Philosophy as a World Outlook ....
a) The Concept of a World Outlook . . 17
b) The Fundamental Question of Philosophy. Materialism and Idealism ... 18
c) Dualism in Philosophy......20
d) Searching for a Third Line in Philosophy............. 21
e) The Social and Epistemological Roots
of Idealism.......... 23
2. Philosophy as Methodology...... 26
3. Philosophy and Man's Practical Activities 28
4. The Subject-Matter of Philosophy ... 29
5. Philosophy and Special Sciences .... 29
6. The Partisanship of Philosophy..... 31
Chapter II. The Struggle of Materialism Against Idealism in the Pre-Marxian Philosophy .... 33
1. The Emergence of Philosophy.....33
2. The Struggle Between Materialism and Idealism in Slave-Owning Society .... 35
3'. The Struggle of Materialism Against Idealism in Medieval Philosophy......42
4. The Materialism of the 17th and 18th
6
__RUNNING_HEADER__
CONTENTS
Centuries and Its Struggle Against Religion
and Idealism..........46
5. Classical German Philosophy at the End of the 18th and in the First Half of the 19th Centuries............59
6. The Philosophy of 19th-century Russian Revolutionary Democrats.......70
Chapter III. The Revolutionary Upheaval in Philosophy Made by Marxism..........75
1. The Conditions for the Emergence of Marxist Philosophy . . ........75
a) Socio-Economic Conditions.....75
b) Natural-Scientific Conditions .... 76
c) Theoretical Conditions......78
2. The Substance of the Revolutionary Upheaval Made by Marx and Engels in Philo-
77. Space and Time.........
a) The Concept of Space and Time . . 108
b) A Critique of Idealist and Metaphysical Concepts of Space and Time . . . 109
c) The Basic Characteristics of Space and Time............ 110
8. Reflection as a Universal Property of Matter ............... 114
9. Development of the Forms of Reflection . 115
10. Peculiarities of the Psychological Form of Reflection............ 117
11. Consciousness---the Highest Form of the Psychic Reflection of Reality...... 119
a) The Emergence of Consciousness . . 119
b) The Essence of Consciousness .... 122
c) The Correlation of Consciousness and Matter........... 125
d) The Material and the Ideal..... 125
e) The Subjectivity of Consciousness . . 126
Chapter V. Knowledge ..........
129
1. The Essence of Knowledge...... 129
2. Practice as the Basis of Knowledge . . 131
3. The Dialectical Way of Knowledge . . 134
a) Live Contemplation....... 134
b) Abstract Thinking....... 137
c) The Interconnection Between Sense and Rational Knowledge...... 140
d) Empirical and Theoretical Knowledge 142
e) Practice as the Criterion of Truth . 143
f) Objective Truth. The Interconnection Between Absolute and Relative Truths . 145
4. Forms and Methods of Scientific Knowledge (Cognition)........... 151
a) Observation.......... 151
b) Experiment....... 152
c) Comparison.......... 153
d) Hypothesis.......... 153
e) Analogy...........
J56
79sophy.............
3. The Development of Marxist Philosophy by Lenin..............
85DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
93Chapter IV. Matter and Consciousness . ....
1. A Critique of the Idealist and Metaphysical Views of Matter.......... 93
2. Lenin's Definition of Matter.....95
3. Material Entity. Types of Matter ... 96
4. Matter and the Material......98
5. Matter as Substance........98
6. Motion---a Universal Form of the Existence
of Matter.............100
a) Narrow Metaphysical Concepts of Motion. The Marxist Concept of Motion . 100
b) Basic Forms of the Motion of Matter . 102
c) The Inherent Connection Between Mo
tion and Matter........
d) Motion and Rest........
103 104 106
e) Motion and Development.....
8f) Model-Building......... 157
g) Induction and Deduction..... 159
h) The Method of Ascension from the
Abstract to the Concrete . . . . .
161 i) The Historical and the Logical in Knowledge ............ 163
j) Analysis and Synthesis...... 164
Chapter VI. Categories of Materialist Dialectics . 169
1. The Concept of Category......169
2. The Interconnection of Categories . . . 171
3. The Interconnection of Phenomena . . . 179
a) Connection and Relation as Concepts . 179
b) A Critique of Idealist and Metaphysical Views of Connection.......181
c) The Universality of the Interconnection Between Phenomena.......183
4. The Individual, the Particular and the Universal ............ .184
a) The Concept of the Individual and the General..........184
b) A Critique of Metaphysical and Idealist Views of the Individual and the General 186
c) Interconnection Between the Individual
and the General........187
d) The General and the Particular ... 189
5. Cause and Effect.........192
a) The Concept of Cause and Effect . . 192
b) A Critique of Idealist and Metaphysical Views of Causality....... 193
c) The Interconnection Between Cause and Effect........... 198
6. Necessity and Accident .(Chance) . . . 200
a) The Concept of Necessity and Accident (Chance)..........200
b) A Critique of Idealist and Metaphysical Views of Necessity and Accident (Chance)...........202
9 c) The Interconnection Between Necessity
and Accident (Chance)...... 205
7. Law............. 207
a) The Concept of Law....... 207
b) Dynamic and Statistical Laws .... 209
c) General and Particular Laws . . . . 211
d) The Interconnection Between General
and Particular Laws....... 212
8. Content and Form........ 215
a) The Concept of Content and Form . . 215
b) A Critique of Idealist and Metaphysical Views of Content and Form . . . . 216
c) The Interconnection Between Content
and Form........... 217
d) Part and Whole, Element and Structure 219
9. Essence and Phenomenon...... 223
a) The Concept of Essence and Phenomenon ............. 223
b) A Critique of Idealist and Metaphysical Views of Essence and Phenomenon . 224
c) The Interconnection Between Essence and
Phenomenon .
..... 226
10. Possibility and Reality....... 229
a) The Concept of Possibility and Reality 229
b) A Critique of Idealist and Metaphysical Views of Possibility and Reality . . . 230
c) The Interconnection Between Possibility
and Reality. Types of Possibility ... 232
Chapter VII. The Basic Laws of Dialectics
238 1. The Law of the Transition of Quantitative
to Qualitative Changes .......239
a) The Concept of Quality and Quantity . 239
b) The Essence of the Law of the Transition of Quantitative to Qualitative Changes .............242
c) A Critique of Metaphysical Views of the Interconnection Between Quantity and Quality............244
10d) A Leap as a Universal Form of Transition from One Quality Into Another
e) Evolution and Revolution.....
2. The Law of the Unity and ``Struggle'' of Opposites...........
a) The Concepts of Opposite and Contradiction .............
b) The Unity of Opposites......
246 248
251251 251
277Sciences
3. The Limitations of Pre-Marxian Sociological Views . J...........278
4. The Development of Sociology into a Science............287
5. Historical Necessity and People's Conscious Activity............290
11Chapter IX. Society and Nature.......295
1. On the Unity of Society and Nature . . 295
2. On Nature's Impact on Society ... 298
3. Society's Influence on Nature..... 303
4. The Role of Population Growth in the Life
of Society...........304
Chapter X. Material Production as the Basis of Society's Existence and Development......308
1. The Concept of Production.....308
2. The Productive Forces of Society . . . 311
a) The Essence of Productive Forces . . 311
b) The Productive Forces of Society and Science........... 313
3. Relations of Production...... 316
4. Dialectics of the Development of Productive Forces and Relations of Production . 322
a) The Dependence of Production Relations on the Level of Development of the Productive Forces........322
b) The Law of the Correspondence of Production Relations to the Level of Development of the Productive Forces . . 325
c) The Influence of Production Relations on the Development of the Productive Forces .............331
c)
The Relativity of the Unity and the
Absoluteness of the ``Struggle'' of
Opposites
254 255 256
258 259
262 264 264
d) Contradiction and Difference ....
e) The Universality of Contradictions
f) Contradiction---the Source of the Motion
and Development of Reality ....
g) Types of Contradiction......
h) Antagonistic and Non-antagonistic Contradictions ..........
3. The Law of the Negation of Negation . .
a) The Concept of Dialectical Negation .
b) The Correlation of Concepts "Dialectical Negation", ``Leap'' and "Resolution of
266 268
Contradictions".........
c) The Essence of the Law of the Negation
of Negation.........
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
Chapter VIII, The Subject-Matter of Historical Materialism ................275
1. Historical Materialism as a Part of Marxist Philosophy...........275
2. Historical Materialism and the Other Social
Chapter XI. The Basis and Superstructure ....
334
1. Specific Features of the Basis and Superstructure ............ 334
2. The Patterns of Development and Replacement of the Basis and Superstructure . . 339
3. Specific Features of the Basis and Superstructure under Socialism........ 341
Chapter XII. Classes and Class Relations ....
344
1. Lenin's Definition of Classes..... 346
2. The Origin of Classes........ 349
12a) A Critique of Idealistic Theories . . . 349
b) The Marxist Theory of the Origin of Classes............ 351
3. A Critique of the Theory of Stratification
and Social Mobility......... 353
4. Society's Class Structure....... 356
`` a) Basic and Non-Basic Classes..... 356
b) The Intelligentsia........ 358
c) The Estates........... 358
d) The So-Called Middle Classes .... 360
5. The Class Struggle as a Motive Force in the Development of Antagonistic Society . . . 363
6. The Objective Conditions for the Abolition
of Classes............ 369
Chapter XIII. The Political Organisation of Society 373
1. The Political Organisation of Society as a Concept............ 373
2. The Origin and Essence of the State: A Critique of Non-Marxist Theories..... 373
3. The Origin and Essence of the State . . 378
4. Types and Forms of the State..... 381
5. Specific Features of the Socialist State . . 383
6. Objective Conditions for the Withering Away of the State......... 391
Chapter XIV. Social Revolution........392
1. Social Revolution as a Form of Transition from One Socio-Economic Class System to Another ..............392
2. The Objective and Subjective Preconditions
for a Social Revolution........394
3. The Character and Driving Forces of a Social Revolution..........396
4. A Socialist Revolution........397
a) The Essence and Specific Features of
a Socialist Revolution.......397
13b) The Theory of Socialist Revolution as Developed by Lenin........400
c) The Multiple Forms of the Socialist Revolution...........404
Chapter XV. Social Consciousness and Its Forms .
408
1. The Essence of Social Being and Social Consciousness........... 408
2. The Relative Independence of Social Consciousness ............ 413
3. The Influence of Social Consciousness on Social Being........... 415
4. The Structure of Social Consciousness . .
41"6
a) Social and Individual Consciousness . . 416
b) Social Psychology and Ideology . . . . 417
c) Forms of Social Consciousness .... 420
5. Political Ideology.......... 420
6. Legal Consciousness......... 424
7. Morality............. 428
a) The Essence of Morality ....... 428
b) The Origins of Morality...... 429
c) The Class Nature of Morality..... 431
d) Elements of the Universal in Morality . .
435 e) The Criterion of the Truth in Morality . 437
8. The Arts............
a) The Specifics of Art as a Form of Social Consciousness........ 440
b) The Social Functions of Art .... 443
9. Religion............ 448
a) Origins and Essence of Religion .... 448
b) The Class Nature of Religion .... 449
c) The Abolition of the Social Base of Religion Under Socialism....... 451
10. Science............. 452
a) The Essence of Science...... 452
b) The Connection Between Science and Production........... 454
c) The Interrelationships Between Science,
the Basis and the Superstructure . . . 456
Chapter XVI. The Role of the Masses and the Individual in History. Society and the Individual . .
1. The Masses as a Decisive Force of Social Progress.............
2. The Role of the Personality in History .
3. Society and the Individual......
a) The Individual as a Product of Social Development..........
b) The Dialectics of the Interrelationship Between Society and the Individual .
Chapter XVII. Social Progress........
1. The Concept of Social Progress.....
2. The Objective Criterion of Social Progress .
3. Socio-Economic Systems as Stages of Society's Progress............
4. The Specific Features of Progress in Exploiting Society............
5. The Specific Features of Progress Under Socialism .............
459459 465 469
469 470
475475 481
484 490 492
[15] __ALPHA_LVL1__ FOREWORDMarxist-Leninist philosophy is a coherent scientific theory that examines the interrelationship between objective reality and consciousness, the universal laws of nature, society and human thought, as well as the laws governing the functioning and development of man's practical and cognitive activities. It is the world outlook of the working class, whose historical mission is to eliminate the exploitation of man by man and to build a classless communist society, thus ensuring the all-round development of every individual and the complete satisfaction of his material and cultural requirements. It is also a general method for the cognition and revolutionary remaking of reality.
Thus to study Marxist-Leninist philosophy and master its laws and principles is a task of primary importance for the working people seeking to eliminate exploitation and to build a new classless society. The Soviet Union and other socialist countries focus particular attention on educating people in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism. The Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the 25th Party 16 Congress noted: "Marxism-Leninism is the only reliable basis for formulating the right strategy and tactics. It gives us an understanding of the historical perspective, helps us to determine the lines of our socio-economic and political development for years ahead, and correctly to find our orientation in international developments.''^^1^^
The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism. It is a translation from the Russian of A. D. llIenTyJIHH.
0HJ10CO(j)H5I MapKCH3Ma-J16HHHH3Ma. M., IlOJlHT-
HSflaT, 1970. The author has revised and supplemented the Russian edition.
_-_-_~^^1^^ L. I. Brezhnev, Report of the CPSU Central Committee and the Immediate Tasks of the Party in Home and Foreign Policy. XXVth Congress of the CPSU, Moscow, 1976, p. 86.
[17] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ Chapter I __ALPHA_LVL1__ THE ROLE OF PHILOSOPHYBefore expounding Marxist-Leninist philosophy we must establish what philosophy means in general, how it differs from other forms of social consciousness, and what functions it performs.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ 1. Philosophy as a World OutlookPhilosophy is the sum total of views on the world, but this definition does not specify its distinguishing feature. The fact is that other views exist in society apart from philosophical ones. So how do philosophical views differ from non-philosophical, such as natural-scientific views?
Special natural and social sciences study the laws inherent in certain areas of reality, or in certain processes. Physics, for example, studies phenomena related to bodies travelling in space, the movement of molecules, ``elementary'' particles, and so forth; biology deals with problems related to __PRINTERS_P_17_COMMENT__ 2---1940 18 living nature; economic sciences cover the social relations that take shape during the production, distribution and consumption of material values; pedagogy deals with upbringing and teaching, and so on. Philosophy, on the other hand, embraces the entire world and all its processes, rather than confining itself to a certain area of reality or a certain part of the world.
Thus, philosophy develops a system of views on the world as a whole and gives a general interpretation of processes occurring within it, i.e. it is the people's world outlook.
Philosophy studies the relationship of matter and consciousness, nature and spirit, and determines what is primary and what is secondary. The question of the relation of matter to consciousness is fundamental to philosophy. The answer to it influences the solution of all other philosophical . problems.
This is where the major difference lies between philosophy and the other sciences, which do not analyse the relationship of matter and consciousness. They confine themselves to studying only the objective properties of phenomena. Even sciences concerned with psychic phenomena do not contrast the material and the ideal, i
Philosophers are divided in two major camps--- materialists and idealists---depending on how they answer the fundamental question of philosophy.
19 __RUNNING_HEADER__ THE ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY IN SOCIETYMaterialists maintain that matter is primary in relation to consciousness and underlies all being. Consciousness is secondary, being a property of matter that manifests itself under certain conditions. Materialists include, among many others, the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus, who held that atoms formed the basis of the world; the 17 thcentury Dutch philosopher Spinoza who regarded the human mind as an integral property or attribute of matter; and the 18th-century French philosopher Diderot, who maintained that nature existed independently of the mind.
In contrast to materialist philosophers, idealists maintain that it is the spiritual, i.e. consciousness, thought, or idea, that is primary or basic. Matter, they say, is a derivative of spirit or consciousness, being just a form of the latter's existence.
Though the idealists all agree that spirit forms the basis of the world, they give different interpretations to this postulate. Some of them insist that spirit, which underlies all phenomena in the world, exists in the form of human consciousness, sensations, perceptions, notions or ideas, i.e. in the form of subjective human activity. These are called subjective idealists. There are others, the so-called objective idealists, who maintain that the spiritual exists as the so-called Absolute Idea, pure consciousness, and the like.
The 18th-century German philosopher Fichte, for example, was a subjective idealist. He maintained that the surrounding world was derived from the activity of the subject, from the self-- consciousness of an ``Ego'' or ``I''. The ancient Greek 20 philosopher Plato, on the other hand, represented objective idealism. In his view, the real world around us consisted of ideal substances, while sensuous things were but imperfect copies of the latter that emerged as a result of the blending of an idea with amorphous matter existing merely as a possibility.
Materialism, which explains all phenomena on the basis of matter, and idealism, which derives the existing world from spirit or consciousness, are both monistic (from the Greek monos, meaning one) philosophies. They are based on one philosophical principle and proceed from one premise.
Yet there are philosophers who seek to prove that the world has two primary bases---material and ideal. These, they say, are independent of each other. One of them underlies the existence of material things, the physical world, while the other underlies the spiritual world. This doctrine is known as dualism (from the Latin duo, meaning two).
The 17th-century French philosopher Descartes, a dualist, held that reality was based on two substances---material, with extension as its attribute, and ideal, with thought as its attribute. Independent of each other, these two substances merged in man and assumed the form of body and soul. Though they existed side by side in man, Descartes maintained, they still remained quite independent and equal.
.,_-w»w*i~;j
Dualists claim to follow their own, independent 21 line in philosophy, distinct from materialism and idealism. They fail, however, to uphold this line consistently. With respect to specific problems they are compelled to take either a materialist or an idealist stand, thus, making their position inconsistent, contradictory and mechanistic, insomuch as they try to reconcile incompatible premises and principles.
Other philosophers, too, who ultimately prove to be idealists, seek to place themselves above both materialism and idealism and find a third line in philosophy.
Such attempts were especially frequent in the period of developed capitalism, when the victorious bourgeoisie came to realise the danger of the materialist world outlook with its inherent atheistic and revolutionary conclusions.
At the turn of the 20th century, Ernst Mach, the Austrian physicist and philosopher, made an attempt to define the ``third'' line in philosophy. He lashed out against both materialist and idealist views, branding them ``one-sided''. Mach affirmed that neither matter nor consciousness formed the basis of the world, but rather the "neutral elements of the universe", which could be both material and ideal. Intertwining, they make up the material or physical world, while in relationship with man's nervous system they produce the ideal or psychic world. According to Mach, the physical and psychic worlds are intrinsically interconnected. The physical 22 world can thus be constructed from psychic phenomena, but the possibility of constructing the psychic world out of physical phenomena is excluded.
In actual fact, however, these assertions do not constitute any ``third'' line in philosophy. If the theory of "neutral elements" is reason to affirm that the physical world can be constructed out of psychic phenomena, but not vice versa, then this line of reasoning fully conforms with idealism, since the psychic or the consciousness are primary in this case.
Karl Jaspers, a prominent existentialist likewise tries to find a ``third'' line in philosophy. He agrees with Mach that neither matter nor consciousness form the basis of the world, but rather something else which includes both of these. According to Jaspers, this ``else'', or this third, is the ``universal'' which manifests itself either as pure ``existence'', or ``supernatural'', or ``consciousness'', or the ``universe'', and so forth. If, however, the ``universal'' proves able to manifest itself as the universe, consciousness, the natural and the supernatural, it in no way differs from the God declared by theologians to be the source of all being. Thus, Jaspers' views coincide with those shared by objective idealists, who believe that consciousness is the maker of all that exists.
Apart from those philosophers who place themselves above both materialism and idealism by ignoring matter and consciousness and searching for a ``third'' way, there are thinkers, and even schools of thought, that strive for the same goal by 23 neglecting the fundamental question of philosophy and declaring it a pseudo-problem devoid of any meaning. This view is upheld by the neo-positivists Bertrand Russel, Rudolf Garnap, and others.
The neo-positivists argue that philosophy is unable to determine what is primary---matter or consciousness---and so should ignore the problem. It should confine itself exclusively to logical analysis of scientific data, semantic analysis of words and propositions. A meaningful analysis of scientific data, of the semantics of words and propositions, however, is inconceivable without first determining what is primary---matter or consciousness---in so far as such an analysis makes it necessary to establish whether scientific data reflect definite aspects and relations in the existing world or are products of the creative activity of consciousness, thought. The neo-positivists opt for the latter view. They derive the essence of sensuous data and the meaning of words and propositions from the creative activity of consciousness or thought, rather than from the outside world, and thus objectively assume an idealist position.
Thus all attempts to find a ``third'' line in philosophy can only lead to idealism.
There are many reasons for the appearance of the idealist view of the environment. Some of them stem from the economic system of society, the social position of its classes and their requirements, while 24 others take root in knowledge, in the cognitive activity of man.
The factors of social life that are conducive to the emergence and spread of the idealist view of man's environment constitute the social roots of idealism. They include, primarily, the separation of mental from physical labour and their transformation int<a» opposites. Marx and Engels wrote: "Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals and, above all, from the relationships which result from a given stage of the mode of production, and in this way the conclusion has been reached that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas 'the idea', the thought, etc., as the dominant force in history, and thus to consider all these separate ideas and concepts as 'forms of selfdetermination' of the Concept developing in history.''^^1^^
The social roots of idealism also include the strivings of the exploiting classes to provide an idealist answer to the fundamental question of philosophy and to spread idealist views which provide a theoretical justification of religion, and thus are conducive to the spiritual enslavement of the working people and divert them from the revolutionary struggle to transform the existing situation in the world.
As for the epistemological roots of idealism, they are to be found in the realm of knowledge.
_-_-_~^^1^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow 1976, p. 69.
25Knowledge or cognition is a complex and contradictory process by which reality is reflected in the consciousness of man. Exaggerating any aspect of knowledge, depriving it of bonds with its other aspects and with matter, and absolutising it inevitably lead to idealism. The epistemological roots of idealism lie therefore in making an absolute of some aspect or peculiarity of the process of cognition, which leads to one-sided interpretation and distortion of it. "Rectilinearity and one-sidedness," Lenin wrote, "woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness---voila the epistemological roots of idealism.''^^1^^
Sensations and perceptions are the forms of sense knowledge that depend on man, his nervous system, psychic state, experience, and the like. If, however, we exaggerate this dependence, forget that sensations and perceptions depend not only on man, but also on the objects influencing his sense organs, that they reflect the corresponding aspects of these objects, we come inevitably to subjectivism, i.e. we shall' affirm that the content of sensations and perceptions is determined by the subject (man), by his emotions, which will bring us to idealism---the recognition of sensations and perceptions as the basis of all being. This was how idealists, such as Berkeley, Mach, Avenarius, reasoned.
By cognising the surrounding world, people pinpoint the general qualities of the objects and phenomena they encounter in everyday life. On this basis, they develop general notions and then _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 363.
26 concepts of such qualities. These notions and concepts pass from one generation to the next, while the objects reflected by them are constantly changing. This creates the impression that concepts are stable, constant, eternal, while objects, on the contrary, are unstable, transient, temporary. The concept ``man'', for example, emerged in ancient times, but since the process of its formation has long been forgotten one is inclined to believe it eternal. Individuals, however, are not eternal---they are born and they die. So, .exaggerating the relative stability of concepts, depriving them of their bonds with the external objects which they emerged to reflect and turning them into something independent and basic, necessarily leads to idealism. __ALPHA_LVL2__ 2. Philosophy as MethodologyPhilosophy forms man's world outlook and enables him to develop an integral idea of world phenomena, thus helping him to pattern his everyday behaviour and practical activity. But this is not the only role philosophy plays in society. It also performs methodological functions by developing a general method of cognition which is the totality of interrelated principles or demands advanced on the basis of general laws discovered in the surrounding world and in knowledge, and constituting a conclusion drawn on the basis of the historical development of social knowledge.
The history of philosophy knows two opposing philosophical methods of cognition---the metaphysical and the dialectical.
27The metaphysical method took shape in the natural sciences in the 16th-17th centuries. At that time natural scientists, in view of the requirements of developing production, set themselves the task of studying specific aspects and properties of the surrounding world, the concrete forms of being. They broke down the objects of their studies into separate parts, snatched them out of their natural or historical context, and studied "each one separately, its nature, special causes, effects, etc.".^^1^^ This resulted in a tendency to consider the objects and phenomena of the external world in isolation from their relationship and interdependence, in isolation from their motion and development, which in turn resulted in a general metaphysical method of cognition. According to this method, the objects and phenomena of the external world are isolated, independent of each other, devoid of contradictions and the capacity toi develop, with always the same qualitative features i.e. unchanged.
Characteristically, modern metaphysicists absolutise separate aspects and forms of the motion of matter and reduce the higher to the lower.
The principles of the dialectical method of cognition began to emerge as natural science started to investigate the processes inherent in objects rather than the objects and their properties themselves. This method postulates that, in reality, all objects and phenomena are intrinsically interconnected and interdependent, that all of them are inherently contradictory and that due to the struggle of opposites they _-_-_
~^^1^^ F. Engels, Anti-Diihring, Moscow, 1969, p. 30.
28 undergo constant changes and pass to a higher qualitative state.The dialectical method is drawn from the general laws of reality and knowledge. It is, therefore, the only consistent scientific (philosophical) method helping scientists in their cognitive activity.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ 3. Philosophy and Man's Practical ActivitiesBy studying the general laws of reality and knowledge and developing 'man's world outlook and general method of cognition on their basis, philosophy influences human life substantially. People's behaviour and the guiding principles behind their practical activities depend, to a large extent on their general views, on their philosophical ideas.
Thus, people who are inclined to the idealist world outlook often give prominence in their personal lives to God, or some other supernatural forces. They are prone to rely on fate, rather than on knowledge of the laws governing changes in their environment. In contrast, people with a Marxist world outlook rely in their activities on knowledge of the objective laws of reality. Their main objective is continuous transformation and improvement of the conditions of life, rather than adaptation to them, as is the goal of people sharing a religious, idealistic world outlook.
Besides, philosophy, dialectical materialism in particular, is linked with practical experience through implementing the methodological function of dialectical materialism. The latter studies the general laws of reality and, on this basis, formulates certain 29 principles or demands and requirements that must be observed in solving a particular problem. In other words, dialectical materialism develops the method of action, of revolutionary transformation of reality.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ 4. The Subject-Matter of PhilosophyHaving discussed the specific features of philosophy and its functions, we may proceed to a definition of its subject-matter.
Philosophy is a world outlook and a method of cognition developed on the basis of a specific solution to the problem of the relationship between matter and consciousness.
This definition applies to any philosophy, to any philosophical view---materialist or idealist, dialectical or metaphysical. But here we do not intend to define the subject-matter of every philosophical school, and will confine ourselves to that of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy.
The Marxist-Leninist philosophy is a science studying regularities in the relationship between matter and consciousness, the universal laws of nature, society, and thought, and developing a world outlook and a method of cognising and transforming reality.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ 5. Philosophy and Special SciencesSome view philosophy as the "science of sciences" that should incorporate all other sciences and allot each one of them its place and the principles underlying its scope and development. This view was widespread in pre-Marxian philosophy. Some 30 hourgeois philosophers, however, continued to support this view even after the emergence of dialectical materialism.
Positivists hold the opposite opinion. They maintain that special sciences have no need of philosophy. Moreover, they argue that philosophy should be abolished, since it only harms and hampers scientific cognition; nothing in reality corresponds to its principles; it studies nothing and cannot study anything; it does not and cannot possibly have a scientific method of cognition.
This is true, to a certain extent, of idealist philosophy, which substitutes the construction of various principles on the basis of pure thought for the study of objective reality. Dialectical materialism is a totally different matter, for it has its own subject-- matter for study and its own method of cognition.
As distinct from special sciences, which study the . specific laws characteristic of a certain field of reality, dialectical materialism studies general laws covering all fields of the objective world and all phenomena. General laws, however, do not manifest themselves independently of or alongside specific laws---they do so through the latter. So in order to discover a philosophical law, one has to refer to special sciences, to analyse their specific laws and single out that which recurs in all fields of real life, and is thus universal. By this token philosophy is inseparable from the special sciences and the scientific data obtained by them; it draws on such data and can develop successfully only through generalising scientific information.
Special sciences, in their turn, are inseparable from 31 philosophy and the results of its studies. Indeed, philosophy studies the general laws of reality and the regularities governing the relationship between matter and consciousness and on this basis develops a theory of knowledge and logic, i.e. laws and forms of thinking, and together with all this a general method of cognition. Special sciences, on the other hand, cannot exist and develop without using logical forms and laws of thinking. Neither can they do without a general method of cognition. They are unable to evolve all this by themselves, insofar as they do not study the general laws of reality governing the thinking process and underlying the logical laws and principles of the dialectical method of cognition.
Dialectical materialism and special sciences, though they have their own fields of study, are closely interconnected, interdependent, and cannot develop one without the other.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ 6. The Partisanship of PhilosophyIn any class society philosophy is always partisan. It evolves a system of views of the world as a whole, of surrounding reality, and at the same time expresses and defends the interests of certain classes or social groups. Through philosophical views, classes and social groups theoretically comprehend their position in society and their relationship with the surrounding world and the processes taking place within it. Philosophy is the basis of the world view of a definite class, and as such it moulds the way of thought and behaviour of this class, shaping its requirements and ideals. "Recent philosophy," Lenin wrote, "is as 32 partisan as was philosophy two thousand years ago. The contending parties are essentially---although this is concealed by a pseudo-erudite quackery of new terms or by a weak-minded non-partisanship---materialism and idealism.''^^1^^
As a rule, materialism is associated with progressive classes and social groups interested in historical advance, whereas idealism is associated with reactionary classes struggling to perpetuate the existing order. Materialism relies on science and makes use of scientific data; idealism, in contrast, is often bound up with religion and, basing itself on its dogmas, seeks to substantiate the need for it. Lenin stressed the partisanship of bourgeois philosophy and its ties with theology when he wrote: ".. .Not a single one of these [bourgeois---Author] professors, who are capable of making very valuable contributions in the special fields of chemistry, history or physics, can be trusted one iota when it comes to philosophy. Why? For the same reason that not a single professor of political economy, who may be capable of very valuable contributions in the field of factual and specialised investigations, can be trusted one iota when it comes to the general theory of political economy. For in modern society the latter is as much a partisan science as is epistemology.''^^2^^
_-_-_~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 358.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 342.
__ALPHA_LVL0__ The End. [END] [33] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ Chapter II __ALPHA_LVL1__ THE STRUGGLEPhilosophy, as a system of man's views of the world, as a world outlook, has not been always in existence. It emerged at a certain stage in the development of society, when human thought had attained a high level and there were favourable social conditions for it to emerge. In the initial stages of society's existence and development, man's productive forces were extremely underdeveloped, while man himself was totally dependent on nature and the elements. Since man was unaware of the real causes of various phenomena, he was naturally inclined to animate them and consider them to be wrought by supernatural forces and creatures. This is how belief in the existence of God, religion and religious views emerged.
Thus, a religious world outlook engendered by the savage's impotence vis-a-vis nature and his fear of the mysterious elements affecting his life was the first, initial form of a general view of the world.
When society was divided into classes---slaves and slave-owners---religious views came to be engendered by still another cause, namely, the dependence of man on spontaneous social forces that were just_as __PRINTERS_P_32_COMMENT__ 3---1940 34 __RUNNING_HEADER__ MATERIALISM VS IDEALISM harmful to him as were nature's elemental forces. Besides, for the slave-owners reilgion in slave-owning society becomes a moral means for justifying and perpetuating the exploitation of slaves. The emergence of classes led to the emergence of the class struggle, which was inevitably reflected in people's spiritual life and in the struggle of different world outlooks corresponding to the different positions of classes and other social groups in society. In slaveowning society, mental work separated from manual labour and became the monopoly of slave-owners. The ideological or philosophical struggle was therefore waged mainly between separate groups of slaveowners occupying different places in society, such as progressive artisan and merchant strata of the slaveowning class and conservative aristocratic groups of tribal origin. The artisan and merchant section of slave-owners sought to develop the productive forces and trade, and to bring about democratic reforms within the slave-owning state. The aristocratic strata, on the other hand, opposed such reforms. The struggle waged by the progressive social groups against the reactionary aristocracy led to the emergence and development of a materialist world outlook opposed to the latter group's religious views of the world.
While opposing materialism, representatives of the reactionary section of slave-owners began to develop idealistic conceptions to substantiate religion and to combat the materialist view of various phenomena. This was how idealism took shape. It was a reaction to the emerging materialist world outlook. Once having taken shape, idealism and materialism began to wage a constant, unremitting struggle. The entire 35 subsequent history of philosophy is nothing but the struggle between the two trends in philosophy---- materialism and idealism.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ 2. The StruggleThe materialist view of the world is rooted in the distant past. It began to emerge in Egypt and Babylonia at the end of the 3rd and the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C. It was at that time that the idea was recorded that water was the prime source of the world, giving birth to all things and living creatures.
Only in the 1st millennium B.C., however, did materialism become a more or less integral system of views. This was particularly true of India and China. In India, for instance, the philosophical trend Lokayata (literally, the views of those who recognise only this world---loka) gained currency as a fully developed materialist system of world views. The school was founded by Brihaspati.
Adherents of Lokayata harshly critisised the religious beliefs that were then popular in India and were contained in the Vedas (scriptures of Hinduism). They resolutely opposed all forms of magic and superstition and exposed as false the priests' dogmas, about the immortality of the soul, which allegedly remained alive in the other world after death. According to their doctrine, there was not nor could there possibly be any other life, except in this world, so man's soul died together with his body.
At about the same time a materialist view of the 36 world took shape in China. A school opposing religion and asserting that the world was eternal and consisted of fire, water, wood, soil and metal, was widespread in China between the 9th and the 7th centuries B.C. All things, the first Chinese materialists maintained, were various combinations of the above five elements.
The materialist world outlook was developed in the philosophical system of Taoism that emerged in the 6th century B.C. and was ascribed to Lao-tze. His followers considered that the world was eternal and in a constant state of motion and change. Taoists maintained that motion was directed and governed by Tao---the path taken by natural events (tao means path, law).
The materialist systems that emerged in India and China in the 1st millennium B.C. at first fought against religious beliefs and later against idealism--- the theoretical basis of religion. These systems developed and matured in the course of this contention. From the 6th century B.C. onwards, philosophy began to develop spectacularly in ancient Greece. There too, the materialist view of the world was the outcome of the struggle against religion and reflected the interests of the progressive strata of the slaveowning class. Materialist philosophy in ancient Greece was founded by the so-called Milesian (Ionic) School: Thales (c. 624-547 B.C.), Anaximander (c,,610-546 B.C.), and Anaximenes (c. 585- 525 B.C.).
Thales considered water the basic element of all things. Everything originated from water and everything eventually turned into water.
37Anaximander thought that the primary source of all things was the ``apeuron'' (the unlimited, boundless), an inchoate mass, separated out to make the physical world by rotary motion and educing the opposites, such as ``moist'' and .``dry'', ``cold'' and ``warm''. Things and entire worlds that had emerged and lasted for a certain time, disintegrated for the same reasons (motion and eduction of opposites), disappeared and then turned into the ``boundless'' again. Thus, Anaximander held, the world was in a constant state of motion, rotation, which caused some things and phenomena to emerge from the `` boundless'' and others to disappear back into it. Holding a materialist view, Anaximander clearly attempted to present the world dialectically, in motion, attended, to a certain extent, by the process of divarication of the whole (the ``boundless'') into opposites (eduction of opposite things and phenomena).
Anaximenes held a similar view of the origin of sensuous things. He taught that air was the basic universal substance and that the motion of air caused some things to emerge and others to disappear. Air, being in a constant state of motion, either rarefied or condensed, thus turning from one substance into another. When air rarefied, for example, it turned into fire, whereas when it condensed it became wind. Further condensation turned air into clouds, and still further into soil and eventually rock. All other things, God included, emerged from the above states of matter.
The first Greek materialists who expressed and defended the interests of the progressive groups of slave-owners were initially confronted by religious
38dogmas concerning the origin and essence of the surrounding world, and then with idealist philosophy developed by reactionary aristocratic groups of slaveowners.
Pythagoreanism, founded by the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras (c. 580-500 B.C.), was the first form of idealism in ancient Greece. The Pythagoreans believed that number was the essence of all things and that all relations could be expressed numerically. The whole world depended on numbers and was, they maintained, but a harmony of numbers.
The Pythagoreans developed their philosophy and assailed the materialist views of the Milesian School. Materialism, however, was rapidly gaining popularity.
An appreciable contribution to the development of the materialist world outlook was made by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 530- 470 B.C.). He held that fire was the underlying substance, the first principle of the world, and that it caused things to emerge and disappear. Heraclitus believed that everything came from fire and eventually turned into fire. Fire, he said, was like gold, which could be exchanged for everything, just like everything could be exchanged for gold. Heraclitus maintained that the world was not created by anybody, but existed eternally and irrespective of any supernatural forces. The world, he wrote, was one whole created by neither God nor man. It was and would always be a living fire bound to blaze up and
die away.
Heraclitus reiterated the idea of the continuous
motion and change of the surrounding world, of contradiction as a source of that motion, of the possibility of one opposite transforming into another. He thus formulated a number of dialectical principles which to some extent reflected reality, though they were not based on scientific data. Heraclitus affirmed: "Upon those who step into the same river different and ever different waters flow down" (because when we step into water the second time it will certainly change); "There is one and the same in us---• alive and dead, awake and sleeping, young and old. Indeed, this, when changed, is that, and conversely, that, when changed, is this"; "What is cold turns warm, while what is warm turns cold; what is moist dries up, while what is dry gets moist.''
The further progress of materialism in Greek philosophy is associated with the works of Dernocritus (5th century B.C.) who advanced an atomic theory of matter. According to this theory, the world was made up of an infinite number of atoms and of the vacuum in which they moved. Moving in the vacuum, atoms met and formed various bodies. All that existed was made up of atoms. Even man's soul was nothing more than a combination of particular atoms. Dernocritus turned his ideas of the soul against the Pythagoreans, who maintained that the soul was immortal. Dernocritus believed that the soul died together with the body. The body's death signified the disintegration of the atoms making it up, which meant that the atoms making up the soul disintegrated as well.
The atomic theory was later developed by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (4th-3rd century B.C.)
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41and the Roman philosopher Titus Lucretius Cams (1st century B. C..)
The Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C.), who expressed the interests of the reactionary slave-owning aristocracy, came out against the atomic theory of Democritus and the materialist views shared by other philosophers, Heraclitus in particular.
Platonism is based on the division of all that exists into the real world, consisting of general ideas ("ideal essences"), and the unreal world, made up of assorted sensuous things, being just a reflection or a shadow of the real world (the world of ideas). To illustrate the correlation between the world of sensuous things (the unreal world) and the world of ideas (the real world), Plato gives the following example. Imagine a man chained to a pole in a dark cave, his back always to the entrance from where the sunlight comes, so that he cannot see what is going on outside the cave. When people pass the cave entrance their shadows and the shadows of things they carry would appear on the wall facing the entrance. The man would see these shadows and take them for real, though they are but imperfect imprints of the real world. Sensuous things, the world of the senses, are similar imprints or, to be more precise, shadows of the world of ideas. According to Plato, we are just like that prisoner in the cave---we take this world of things as real, though it is nothing but a shadow of the real world, the world of ideas concealed from
and temporary. They emerge from the amorphous and vague being (matter) as a result of combining with a certain idea, but as soon as the idea abandons the thing it has created, the latter ceases to exist. It follows then that real things and phenomena are created by ideas, which ultimately take their beginning in God.
Plato's theory of ideas was severely criticised by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), whose teaching is the pinnacle of ancient Greek philosophy. Aristotle summed up and further developed all the philosophical systems advanced by his predecessors. His works encompass all aspects of reality---nature, human society and knowledge. Assailing Plato's philosophy, particularly his belief that ideas were primary to sensuous things and that they existed independently, Aristotle proved that no general ideas existed outside and independently of things. All that is real manifests itself through separate things. As for general ideas, they emerge in man's consciousness in the process of cognition as he is confronted with repetition and becomes aware of it.
Aristotle vacillated between materialism and ideal-
ism.
He held that all things originated from primordial matter characterised by vagueness and a lack of form, i.e., in fact it was just the possibility of existence. This possibility turned into a real sensuous thing only when matter combined with a form (Aristotle's term), which gave it definiteness.
Although Aristotle's world view was basically materialist, it also had idealistic overtones. First, he divorced primordial matter from motion, presenting the
us.
Plato believes that the world of ideas is integral thanks to the Idea of the Good, and is eternal, whereas separate things and phenomena are transient
42former as a vague and amorphous mass. Motion was introduced into it from outside, by form. Second, the active element that caused changes in matter and its transformation from an uncertain into a certain state, and then from one state into another---i.e. form--- originated, in the final analysis, from God as the prime mover. All this reveals the inconsistency of Aristotle's teaching. There are metaphysical and idealist elements in his views, alongside elements of dialectics and materialism.
The crisis of slave-owning society caused a decline in ancient Greek philosophy after Aristotle. A trend emerged towards transition from materialism to idealism and mysticism. The revival and propagation of idealist views was especially manifest during the fall of the Roman Empire, when idealism became linked to religion, particularly to emerging Christianity, which became the dominant ideology in the period of European feudalism.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ 3. The StruggleThe Middle Ages, when religious ideology reigned supreme, and permeated and subdued all spheres of society's spiritual life, left an imprint on the development of philosophy as well. During that time philosophy served religion objectively and officially. It was called upon to justify and substantiate religious dogmas, and to prove their validity and stability. All philosophical problems, therefore, were inevitably tinged with religious connotations.
43The problem of the correlation between general ideas---the so-called universals---and separate things of the sensuous world--the particulars--was of great concern to medieval philosophers. It had been fiercely debated throughout the Middle Ages. The solution of the fundamental question of philosophy and the struggle between materialism and idealism at that time was intrinsically linked to the solution of the problem of the correlation between the individual and the general or universal, between general ideas and isolated things or occurrences.
Idealists maintained that the universal existed independently of particular things and prior to them; it was associated with God. Moreover, God himself was the universal essence of all that existed. As regards particular things, they were eventually created by God. The exponents of this theory were called realists,, insofar as they acknowledged and substantiated the real existence of the universals.
Materialists held the opposite view. They believed that the universal could not exist in reality, let alone prior to the particular. Only particular things really existed. The universal, they reasoned, was but a name reflecting nothing and therefore non-existent in reality. The supporters of this view were called nominalists, because they rejected the real existence of the universal and declared it but a name.
The teaching of the medieval philosopher Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) may serve as an example of the idealist school. He believed in an eternal, single and immutable God who acted as a universal substance existing in and for himself. All that existed outside God was rooted in God. The di-
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45vine origin was eternal and immutable. The emergence of things was linked with their creation by God. At the moment of creation, God first conceived of things, his thoughts being the first images of things that were later created according to those images. Here God acted as an artist, creating his works according to his intention. The ideal being of things in God's mind was eternal, whereas their real being (being outside of God) was temporary, transient. On the basis of this system of being, Saint Anselm maintained that general ideas (universals) should exist prior to particular things. Particular material things were secondary, insofar as they were begotten by ideas, and eventually God.
The medieval philosopher-nominalist Roscelinus (c. 1050-1112) vigorously opposed this view. He insisted that the universal was not prior to sensuous things, did not underlie them. Moreover, it did not exist at all. General ideas, said Roscelinus, were nothing but words, names given by man to particular things. Only particular things existed in reality.
Rejecting the existence of the general, of universal ideas, Roscelinus tried to refute religious beliefs in a single God and the Trinity. He believed that God and the Trinity (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost), through which the former allegedly expressed himself, could not possibly exist. If those three persons existed, then there should be three independent gods, rather than one. This declaration angered the Church and was condemned as contrary to the ecclesiastical doctrine.
Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the Italian theologian and philosopher, attempted to reconcile
the extreme judgements made by realists and nominalists concerning the correlation between the universal and the particular. He believed that the prime cause of all that existed was God---the absolute and perfect spiritual being. God contained in himself, as general ideas, all that existed in the world, and created material things according to these ideas. Thus, Thomas Aquinas agreed with the realists who maintained that general ideas existed in God's mind prior to particular things. At the same time, he tried to prove the nominalists right too, when he said that, if we took general ideas that existed in the human, rather than God's mind, we could affirm that these ideas could not exist prior to particular things, they could not engender them, they were created by man himself in the process of cognising the outside world.
Thomas Aquinas tried to substantiate theoretically the subservient role of philosophy in relation to theology. In his view, philosophy served the same purpose as theology, i.e., to substantiate religious dogmas, though by other means. Theology came to these dogmas directly from God, whereas philosophy did so from God's creations---material things.
Thomas' teaching is being revived and propagated in many Western countries now as neothomism. Its main objective is to reconcile philosophy and the special sciences with religion, with theology and to make them serve the latter.
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474. The Materialism
of the 17th and 18th Centuries
and Its Struggle Against Religion and Idealism
A new age---the age of Renaissance---came to replace the Middle Ages, which were overwhelmingly dominated by sterile scholasticism confined to narrow religious dogmas. The emergence and development of capitalist relations of production stimulated the development of industry and commerce. This required concrete knowledge of the laws governing the development and functioning of the phenomena of the surrounding world. A 'need arose for studying and understanding the laws of nature. The human mind began taking an interest in nature, in man's material activities. This tendency naturally affected the development of philosophy which was declared a science called upon to establish truths that would help in practical activities and direct the efforts to create material values.
The general propositions used by medieval philosophy and its method were judged false and misleading. New ways of investigation and new methods of cognising the truth were advanced. Francis Bacon (1561-1625) was the founder of this trend.
First and foremost, Bacon severely criticised idealist philosophy---from ancient times to the Middle Ages. He attacked it on two fronts. First, he blamed the idealists for confusing the holy and the human, and for going as far as to base their philosophical doctrines on the Holy Writ. Bacon held that sciences and philosophy should use a specific method in the experiments and base themselves on experience, where-
as theology was based exclusively on belief. Hence the conclusion: theology and philosophy should not be confused, they should not interfere with each other.
Second, he criticised the idealists, especially the scholastics, for their speculative arguments, for the emptiness and sterility of their propositions and for the fruitlessness of their teaching.
Bacon considered experiment to be the foundation of knowledge. He set himself the task of relieving men and their consciousness of the prejudice that misled and confused men and obstructed the road to the knowledge of the truth.
All things, according to Bacon, were based on simple ``nature'' deduced from forms. The forms were limited in number, but their numerous combinations engendered the diverse phenomena occurring in the world. The material world, Bacon said, had neither a beginning nor an end, it had existed and would exist for ever. "Nothing is produced from nothing," he wrote. "Nothing is reduced to nothing. . . ." All the quantity of matter or its sum remains constant and neither increases, nor decreases.^^1^^
Bacon considered motion to be one of the basic properties of eternally existing matter, although he confined motion to 19 forms. This was undoubtedly a defect in his teaching.
Bacon's method of cognition is also tinged with metaphysics. He thought that, in the process of ac-
~^^1^^ See Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book II, London, n.d., Ch. I, p. 150, Ch. V, p. 156, Gh. IV, p. 153, Ch. XI, p. 262.
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•49
quiring knowledge, it was necessary to split an object into separate aspects, qualities (natures) and to further break each quality down into still simpler qualities (natures), proceeding in this manner until the simplest natures are singled out. Then we should discover the laws or forms that determine the essence of these simplest natures, and see how these natures combine into a specific thing. As a result, Bacon believed, we can cognise any thing in the surrounding world.
Bacon did not understand that objects are not just mechanical combinations of certain permanent qualities, but are integral wholes, in which qualities or aspects are interconnected and change into one another. Therefore an object cannot be cognised through a mechanical combination of knowledge about its separate aspects.
Notwithstanding the shortcomings inherent in Bacon's philosophy, it was an appreciable step forward in the development of philosophy, it was an appreciable step forward in the development of philosophical thought and marked the emergence of a new form of philosophical materialism.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the English bourgeois philosopher, developed Bacon's materialist teaching. As Marx put it, Hobbes was the systematiser of Bacon's philosophy. He lent Bacon's views an explicit mechanistic shading. He stripped nature (matter) of the variety of qualities (ascribed to it by Bacon). Hobbes believed it to be a totality of bodies possessing only two main properties---- extension and figure. He held the same view of motion, reducing its multiformity to one form---mechanical.
By motion he understood only the travel of bodies in space.
In Hobbes' view, knowledge was an addition and subtraction of separate thoughts. He believed that a mathematical method based on addition and subtraction could be the sole scientific method of acquiring knowledge.
Hobbes developed his materialist world outlook fighting against religion and drawing atheistic conclusions from his philosophy. He held that religion was the outcome of people's ignorance and their fear of the unknown future. It had nothing to do with science, though he maintained that it was needed because it helped to keep people in order.
Just like Bacon and Hobbes, representatives of the 17th-century bourgeoisie in England, so Rene Descartes (1596-1650) in France came out with a substantiation of new methods of cognising reality. He drew a materialist picture of the world. Nature, he said, consisted of small material particles of different sizes, forms and directions of motion. The entire necessary variety of objects emerged without God's interference in a natural manner from the three different types of primary elements that initially made up the boundless Universe---the fire-like, the air-like, and the soil-like. All these elements were in motion and formed whirlwinds. The whirlwind motion of the first type of element caused the emergence of the Sun and the stars; of the second type--- the sky; and of the third type---the Earth and the other planets.
This naive, but basically materialist view of the origin of the solar, system was directed against the
4---1940
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51religious dogma about the creation of the world by God in six days, and was thus progressive for its time.
In developing his view of the world, Descartes, in contrast to medieval scholasticism, attempted to rely on science. But at that time only mechanics and mathematics had been developed appreciably. This inevitably left an imprint on Descartes' teaching, making it rather mechanistic. Like Hobbes, Descartes deprived matter of its qualitative variety and, in fact, reduced it to bare numbers. Specifically, he did not see the qualitative difference between living organisms and inanimate objects. Animals, in his view, were simple machines, and man was a similar machine, though more complex. Like Hobbes, Descartes reduced all the variety of the forms of matter's motion to one---the travel of bodies in space.
Descartes was not a consistent materialist. He only held materialist views on matters relating to certain natural phenomena. But as soon as he passed on to the basic principles of being and knowledge, he turned away from materialism and approached philosophical problems from the premise that God was the only basis of being. He said, for instance, that "God . .. has in principle created matter together with motion and rest"^^1^^ and that there were two independent substances in the world---spiritual
and material. All this made the philosophy of Descartes dualist, as distinct from those of Bacon and Hobbes which were monistic.
Contrary to the 17th-century English materialists, who developed the theory and method of cognition on the basis of experience and sense perceptions, Descartes always proceeded from pure reason. He did not believe that experience had an important part to play in the process of cognition, and thought that, in cognising the world, one should rely exclusively on one's mind and be guided by its principles and ideas, which were innate.
The Dutch materialist philosopher Spinoza (1632- 1677) overcame some of the drawbacks inherent in the Cartesian teachings, such as dualism. Spinoza believed that the world was one by nature and that this nature was substance. As regards thinking, it was only an attribute (intrinsic quality) of matter, alongside its other attributes, such as extension. Nature was eternal, it had never been created by anybody. The reason for its eternal and infinite existence was concealed in Nature itself. Being eternal, Nature (substance) manifested itself through its modi (qualities or states) which were innumerable. One of those modi was motion which, as distinct from the other modi, was infinite, rather than finite, i.e. characteristic of all the states of substance (Nature).;
By declaring the world the cause of itself (causa sui), Spinoza removed God as its creator and dissolved him in Nature.
Spinoza held that people's ignorance and fear of the future had given rise to religion which, he
~^^1^^ "Et generalem quod attinet, manifestum, mihi videtur iliam non iliam esse, quam Deum ipsum, qui materiam simul cum motu et quiete in principio creavit. . ." ( Descartes, Principia philosophiae, Paris, 1905, Part II, p. 61).
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53wrote, was nothing "but the fantasy and ravings of a timid soul".^^1^^
Like the materialist views advanced by his predecessors, Spinoza's theory had some weak points typical of metaphysical materialism. Spinoza reduced all forms of motion to one---the travel of. bodies in space---and even thought motion to be a property of matter's finite states, rather than an intrinsic attribute of it. Moreover, he was unable to give a satisfactory answer to the question of the correlation between sense and rational knowledge, being unaware of the significance of experience or practice. Lastly, he was a hylozoist---he believed consciousness to be a universal property of Nature, i.e. he thought that animals and even inanimate objects also possessed consciousness, just as men did.
The materialist theories outlined above expressed the interests of the historically progressive 17th-- century bourgeoisie. 17th-century materialism was the world outlook of the bourgeoisie, which fought feudalism for political power. But as soon as the bourgeoisie came to power and established its dictatorship, it began to abandon materialism and lean towards idealism---the theoretical basis of religion. The bourgeoisie began to resort to religion as a means of ideologically suppressing the working people and justifying its own rule.
The bourgeoisie took power in England at the end of the 17th century. It was not by mere chance, therefore, that idealist systems spearheaded against
materialism and defending religion began to emerge in England at the beginning of the 18th century. One of the first and most important was the philosophy of subjective idealism developed by Bishop George Berkeley (1684-1753).
Berkeley believed that man dealt only with particular things and phenomena perceived by him as different totalities of various sensations---:of a certain form, colour, taste, smell, etc. If we discard these sensations, Berkeley reasoned, the object would disappear together with them. It followed therefore, he concluded, that only sensations existed in reality. There was not nor could there be anything apart from or above them. He wrote: "I see this cherry, I feel it, I taste it: and I am sure nothing cannot be seen, or felt, or tasted: it is therefore real. Take away the, sensations of softness, moisture, redness, tartness, and you take away the cherry. Since it is not a being distinct from sensations; a cherry, I say, is nothing but a congeries of sensible impressions, or ideas perceived by various senses: which ideas are united into one thing (or have one name given them) by the mind; because they are observed to attend each other.''^^1^^ If this is so, if only particular things exist, the things which are the totalities of man's sensations, then, Berkeley continues, matter is nothing but a pure invention of the materialists. It does not exist in reality. It was invented, Berkeley argues, by materialists to enable them to construct various atheistic systems and to oppose
~^^1^^ Spinoza, Oeuvres, Vol. II, Paris, 1861, p. 5 (Preface au Traite theologico-politique).
:
~^^1^^ George Berkeley, The Works, Vol. I, London, 1908, p. 383.
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55religion. But if matter does not exist, if it is an empty word, a pure invention, then materialism is refuted since matter is the basic principle of the materialist teaching and plays a major role in it.
This was how Berkeley tried to refute materialism and substantiate the idealist system of the world proceeding exclusively from the reality of sensations.
If, however, only man's sensations exist, and all that surrounds him is nothing but various complexes of his sensations, then other people are also mere complexes of sensations rather then real beings, and the whole world is bound to disappear when the subject dies. Yet no sensible person will question the real existence of the people around him or believe that the whole world disappears after one man's death. Berkeley's reasoning contradicts the common sense on which he tried to rely. If Berkeley had been consistent in his arguments, he would inevitably have arrived at the above conclusion and contradiction. But he himself betrayed his own principle by saying that when there was no one to perceive a particular thing, the latter did not disappear because it was perceived by God. Generally, he said, all sensations experienced by men were caused by God, by His action on man's soul. Thus, Berkeley shifts from subjective to objective idealism and comes out in an open defence of religion and the existence of God whom he regards---as did the earlier medieval idealists---as the creator of the world.
The attempts made by Berkeley and other idealists to check the development and propagation of materialist views were not really successful. Mate-
rialism was advancing further, while its struggle against idealism and religion was becoming ever more acute. It was especially intense in France, where materialism was still a spiritual weapon in the hands of the ideologists of the revolutionary bourgeoisie fighting against feudal relations and the church.
The French materialists criticised religion and the clergy more harshly, vehemently and consistently than their predecessors did. Their brilliant atheistic works are still relevant today.
Materialism in France was represented by Paul Holbach, Denis Diderot, Claude Helvetius, Julien La Mettrie, and others.
The French materialist philosophers advanced the 17th-century mechanistic materialism of Bacon, Descarters, Hobbes, Locke, etc.
The French materialists gave a more consistent and profound answer to the fundamental question of philosophy and overcame the theological deviations typical in varying degrees of their predecessors. Specifically, there was no room in their philosophical systems for God either as creator (even if He gave only the first impetus) or as observer. They declared openly and clearly that nature existed objectively and eternally and did not need God at all. Nature, said the French materialists, is the sum-total of various combinations of tiny particles of matter---atoms and molecules---which possess extension, weight, figure, motion and other properties.
The interconnection between matter and motion was studied by the French materialists more thor-
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57oughly than by the 17th-century materialists. Although by motion they understood, primarily, the travel of bodies in space, they considered it ( motion) an attribute (fundamental property) of matter stemming from its inner nature. Holbach, for instance, wrote: ". . .matter moves by its own forces and does not need any external impulse to set it in motion. . . .'n He continued: ".. .without motion we cannot conceive of nature. .. .''^^2^^
Though they were quite correct in assuming that motion was related to the inherent nature of matter, the French materialists were still unable to establish the source and cause of motion. Neither did they see the multiplicity of the forms of motion nor the development of nature as a transition from lower to higher stages, and did not believe in the existence of leaps.
As regards the theory of knowledge, the French materialists came out resolutely against the theory of innate ideas and principles, advanced by Descartes. They believed that all men's ideas and notions formed in the process of cognition, on the basis of experience. In contrast to Spinoza, they attached priority to sense knowledge, sensations, which they regarded as the only source of knowledge. The French materialists were right in that respect, but they assigned an inadequate role to thought, though they held it necessary for cognising truth. In a word, the French materialists had
not yet overcome the one-sided approach to the correlation between sense knowledge and thinking that had been characteristic of their predecessors' views.
A sizable contribution to the development of 18th-century materialist philosophy was made by the Russian thinkers, notably Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765) and Alexander Radishchev (1749-1802).
Lomonosov approached the fundamental question of philosophy from a materialist point of view and thought all bodies and phenomena to be material in their essence. Matter is composed of atoms which combine into molecules (``corpuscles''), the latter making up all "sensuous things". Lomonosov was the first to prove in a. natural-scientific way the eternity and indestructibility of matter and motion, when he discovered the law of the conservation of matter and motion. He formulated it as follows: ". . .all changes in nature occur in such a way that whatever is added to something is at the same time subtracted from something else. . . . This law of nature is universal to such an extent that it covers the rules of motion as well.''^^1^^
Lomonosov stressed that matter and motion were inseparable and that matter was in a constant state of motion. Like all the other representatives of mechanistic materialism, he reduced motion to the travel of bodies in space and divided motion into types---external, when a body changes its position in relation to another body, and internal, when the
~^^1^^ P. H. Holbach, Systems de la nature, Londres, 1793, Premiere Partie, p. 23.
' Ibid,, Seconde Partie, p. 156.
~^^1^^ M. V. Lomonosov, Selected Philosophical Works, Moscow, 1950, p. 160 (in Russian).
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59particles making up a particular body change their position.
Lomonosov believed that matter possessed an infinite multitude of properties.
According to Lomonosov, the world is knowable through the direct perception of objects and phenomena by the sense organs and the subsequent treatment of the sense data in the course of theoretical thinking. Lomonosov attached equal importance both to experiment and to theoretical thinking, insisting that truth could be cognised only if the two were closely interconnected. He wrote: "To establish a theory from observations and to correct the observations through the theory is the best way of all to establish the truth.''^^1^^
Lomonosov's materialist views have another major merit---his philosophical propositions were always closely linked with the evidence of natural science and research into specific fields of nature.
Radishchev followed Lomonosov's materialist line in Russian philosophy at the end of the 18th century. He also proved that the world was material and considered matter to be a totality of all substances. Radishchev singled out motion among other properties of eternally existing matter (such as extension, for example) as one of its basic attributes. True, in this respect Radishchev did not go farther than his contemporaries---the French materialist philosophers.
Like Lomonosov, he believed that the world was knowable and thought sensuous experience to be
the source of knowledge. At the same time, he considered thought activity very important in cognising the surrounding world and maintained that genuine knowledge was possible only when sense perception and thinking were combined.
Radishchev was a revolutionary nobleman who actively opposed serfdom and autocracy and supported the revolutionary emancipation of the serfs.
Summing up the materialist views of the 17 th18th-century philosophers, it is easy to see that they were all to some extent metaphysical, i.e. they rejected development, qualitaive distinctions, and contradiction in nature, and supported mechanism by reducing the variety of the forms of motion to a mechanical form (the travel of bodies in space) and by explaining the multitude of qualitative distinctions by the laws of mechanics. Naturally, this was largely the result of the level of development of the natural sciences. At that time only astronomy and physics (mainly mechanics) were fairly well developed.
5. Classical German Philosophy at the End of the 18th and in the First Half of the 19th Centuries
In contrast to England, France and other countries where bourgeois revolutions destroyed or greatly undermined feudal relations and paved the way for the development of capitalism, in Germany feudal relations were still predominant in the period under discussion. Germany was a backward country broken up into numerous separate principalities. The bourgeoisie had not yet emerged as a class and was
~^^1^^ M. V. Lomonosov, Selected Philosophical Works, p. 330.
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61weak economically and dependent politically. Unable to wage an independent struggle for power, it was afraid of revolution and willingly made compromises with feudal lords.
This uncertain and dependent position of the German bourgeoisie inevitably influenced the philosophical systems developed and propagated by its ideologists. They concentrated mainly on various abstract problems, rather than on seeking ways to solve practical matters, in which the bourgeoisie was helpless. True, these philosophical systems were to a certain degree influenced by the French bourgeois revolution and by the advances of the natural sciences. As a result, a living and fertile dialectics---a major achievement of the classical German idealist philosophy---could be discerned through abstract, artificial and contradictory systems.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was the founder of the classical German philosophy. Initially Kant studied natural science and sought solutions to its problems from a materialist standpoint. For instance, he developed a hypothesis that solar system had emerged from a gas nebula as a result of the action of its inner natural forces.
This Kantian hypothesis was prominent in the struggle against the metaphysical way of thinking, . which held sway at that time. As Engels put. it, it made the first breach in the building of metaphysics.
In subsequent years, however, when Kant engaged in purely philosophical problems, such as the theory of knowledge, he switched from spontaneous materialism to idealism, though he was not a
thoroughly consistent idealist. The essence of Kant's philosophy was as follows.
Kant did not reject the objective existence of matter, but considered it unknowable by nature, calling it a ``thing-in-itself''. Alongside matter ( objective reality), there exists, Kant believed, a world of phenomena, which he called nature---the world we perceive, in which we live and act. The world of phenomena, or nature, does not exist independently of human consciousness, it emerges as a result of the ``thing-in-itself'' acting upon the sense organs and is nothing but the totality of men's notions. "All bodies," Kant wrote, "together with the space they occupy should be considered as simple notions in ourselves and do not exist anywhere except in our thought.''^^1^^
The world of phenomena created by man in no way resembles, according to Kant, the world of ``things-in-themselves''. Yet man deals only with the world of phenomena. If this is so, the world of ``things-in-themselves'' is absolutely inaccessible for him. Man does not and cannot know anything about this world, because it is unknowable. All that man knows, Kant concluded, is related to the world of phenomena., i.e. to his own notions.
The world of phenomena, Kant maintained, is orderless and chaotic; it is not regulated by any law or necessity; it exists outside of space and time. It is man who introduces, in the process of cognition, a certain measure of order into this chaos---he places all phenomena within space. and time limitations,
~^^1^^ Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena, 1888, S. 67.
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63lends them necessity, regularity, and a cause-- andeffect relationship. It follows then that man creates both the world of phenomena (since the latter, Kant said, is only a totality of man's sensations or notions) and the laws acting in this world. This is a clearly idealistic solution to the problem of the relationship between man's consciousness and nature. Kant, however, is not consistent in this view. By admitting that the objective reality (``thing-in-itself'') exists independently of consciousness, he tries to combine materialist and idealist principles into one system and to reconcile materialism with idealism. Lenin pinpointed this inconsistency in Kant's philosophy. He wrote: "The principal feature of Kant's philosophy is the reconciliation of materialism with idealism, a compromise between the two, the combination within one system of heterogeneous and contrary philosophical trends. When Kant assumes that something outside us, a thing-in-itself, corresponds to our ideas, he is a materialist. When he declares this thing-in-itself to be unknowable, transcendental, other-sided, he is an idealist.''^^1^^
In Kant's dualistic philosophy, however, the materialist and idealist trends do not hold an equal place, with idealism gaining the upper hand. It is not a mere coincidence, therefore, that Kant's teaching was subordinated to a rather limited and reactionary objective---to justify religion. It was for this reason, Kant conceded, that he had to narrow the field of knowledge.
Indeed, according to Kant, man deals exclusively with the world of phenomena and is unable to
^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 198.
grasp the world of ``things-in-themselves''. The latter, as Kant saw it, is the realm of God, soul, free will, etc. So science is unable and has no right to judge of God, soul, etc. (to prove, for instance, that God does not exist, or that the soul is mortal), since all this is inaccessible for it. It is only religion, Kant insists, that can penetrate the world of "things-- inthemselves", break away from the observed world of phenomena and take a look at the other world, since religion unites man with God, grants him free will in the other world, and liberates him from all the hardships he constantly suffers in the sensuous world.
The idealist philosophy was further advanced by Hegel (1770-1831), the great German idealist philosopher, the founder of idealist dialectics.
According to Hegel, all that exists originated from pure thought or the Absolute Idea. Initially, it is "pure being", i.e. devoid of any content and equivalent to ``nothing'' or non-being. Then, "pure being" and ``nothing'' (non-being) engage in a struggle with one another and produce a new concept--- ``becoming''. The latter leads to the emergence of yet another concept---"being there", and the process goes on. The Absolute Idea is inherently contradictory, so it constantly develops, giving rise to ever new concepts, which are fuller in content. This will continue until the Absolute Idea exhausts itself, revealing all its content. Having revealed and fully expressed its content in various concepts, the Absolute Idea begets nature, assumes a material shell and henceforth exists as material objects and phenomena, i.e. Nature.
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65Here, the Absolute Idea initially takes the form of mechanical forces, then of chemical compounds, and, finally, begets life and then man and human society. With the emergence of man, the Idea breaks through the material shell which is ``alien'' to it, and begins to exist in its own form, the form of men's consciousness or thought. As human consciousness develops, the Idea liberates itself increasingly from the fetters of matter. Finally, having realised all its past experience, the Idea ends its development in Hegelian philosophy and returns, as it were, to itself, to its original state, but now not as pure being, but as the being which has revealed and apprehended its content to the full.
As regards knowledge, the full content of the Absolute Idea---or the Absolute Spirit, as Hegel calls his Absolute Idea---should be represented at this final stage of its development by the Hegelian philosophical system. The process of cognition ends with the formulation of this system, because there remains nothing that is not cognised. Hegelian philosophy, according to Hegel, expresses the absolute knowledge, knowledge consummated once and for all, the absolute truth.
In practice, the Absolute Spirit should have been represented by the Prussian limited monarchy which, as Engels put it, Frederick William III so vehemently and vainly promised his subjects.
All this shows Hegelian philosophy as a vivid example of objective idealism arguing that consciousness or spirit is primary, while nature is secondary, being a derivative of consciousness. Besides, this philosophy overtly justifies and theoretically substan-
tiates the eternity of the existing order, monarchy, nobility, and the regime that suppresses the working people.
Yet, there is another aspect to Hegelian philosophy---the dialectical method, the fundamental principles of which were set forth by Hegel within his rather conservative and artificial system.
By developing his system and showing how the Absolute Idea engenders its content, and then the material world---nature and society---Hegel, first, gave a picture of the developing world and, second, offered a universal description of the content of the fundamental laws of dialectics. He showed, among other things, that the world developed through the struggle of opposites and that, in the course of that development, some concepts were negated by others and repeated on a higher level.
In the dialectic of concepts and their interconnection and mutual transitions, Hegel guessed at and expressed the real dialectic---the dialectic of things. True, as often as not Hegel was inconsistent in pursuing a particular dialectical principle, especially when dealing with reality, which he had to justify because of his class affiliation. The inconsistency of the Hegelian dialectic stemmed, to a considerable extent, from the fact that it was developed within the framework of an idealist system and was tailored to its needs, which were incompatible with the revolutionary spirit of genuine dialectics and contrary to its principles. Seeking to satisfy the needs of his system, Hegel was therefore compelled to go against his own dialectical method.
Let us consider some deviations from the prin-
5-1940
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67ciples of dialectics, caused by the contradiction between the method and the system in Hegelian philosophy.
1. The dialectical method sees nature, society, and knowledge in a constant state of motion and development. The system, on the other hand, calls for a limit in development. Hegel yields to the system and says that development ceases as soon as the Idea reaches its highest stage.
2. The dialectical method recognises that contradictions are universal. The system requires that all contradictions should be settled and an ideal, conflict-free state be established. Hegel finds himself on the side of the system and gives up his method when he declares that as soon as the Idea reaches its highest stage (the Prussian limited monarchy, on the one hand, and the Hegelian idealist philosophy, on the other) all contradictions are resolved and the absolutely true situation is established.
3. The method requires that thought should develop in conformity with real processes. The system, on the other hand, assumes that relations are constructed in the head if the existing relations and connections do not correspond to some provision of the system. Here, too, Hegel gives preference to the system and constructs various artificial connections instead of coordinating his philosophy with reality.
4. The method requires continuous changes in reality and shows how and in what direction they are to be made, whereas the system demands that the existing order should be perpetuated. Hegel falls victim to his own system and deprives his method of any practical value by relating it only
to the past, and by making it a method of cognition of past things and phenomena.
Only materialism based on science and requiring the world to be taken as it is, without any outside additions, could serve as a spring-board for overcoming the above deficiences in the Hegelian method and for developing it further. The subsequent development of philosophy objectively demanded, therefore, a shift to materialism and a critical materialist reassessment of the Hegelian idealist philosophy.
The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) accomplished, though only partially, this historic mission. True, he did not re-examine Hegel's dialectical principles from the materialist standpoint. He confined his mission to revolting against Hegel's idealism, rejecting it, and reinstating materialism. It was Marx and Engels who peeled the husk of Hegelian idealism off the rational grain---dialectics---and developed it on the basis of materialism.
Feuerbach showed that the Hegelian Absolute Idea was but the human mind, separated from its bearer---man---and transformed into an independent being that created the world out of itself. He said that the role played by the Absolute Idea in Hegelian philosophy was played by God in theology. So the Absolute Idea in no way differed from God, while Hegelianism was but a variety of theology. "He who does not reject the Hegelian philosophy," Feuerbach wrote, "neither rejects theology. The Hegelian teaching that nature, reality is posited by the idea is merely a rational expression of the theo-
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logical precept that nature has been created by God.. . .'!1
According to Feuerbach, thinking cannot exist outside or independently of man, being a property of man's brain and its function that inherently links the spiritual and the material. Hence thinking (the ideal, spiritual) is not primary, as Hegel believed, but secondary to matter, to nature.
In contrast to Hegel, who made abstract spirit the subject of his philosophy, Feuerbach bases his system on man and nature, regarding man as an integral part of the nature that produced him. He makes anthropology (from the Greek anthropos--- man) a guiding, basic principle in developing his materialist views. "The new philosophy," he wrote referring to his philosophical system, "makes man, including nature as the basis of man, the only, universal and supreme subject of philosophy.''^^2^^
While being guided by his anthropological principle and correctly stressing (in contrast to Hegel) that man is part of nature, while his consciousness (thinking) is an attribute of it, Feuerbach overlooked one important point. He did not realise that man, being part of nature, was at the same time a product of social life, and that his consciousness was shaped not only by the physiological processes occurring in his body, particularly in his brain, but also by the social environment within which man lived and acted, and by the material condi-
tions of his life. So no matter how vigorously Feuerbach insisted on man being ``alive'' and ``sensuous'', and inherently linked with nature, that man was abstract and isolated from the concrete conditions of life, and deprived of his social (human) essence.
Giving the materialist answer to the question of what is primary---matter or consciousness---Feuerbach also correctly treated the other aspect of the fundamental question of philosophy. He supported the view that the world is knowable and castigated Kant's agnosticism.
Feuerbach believed sensations to be the point of departure in the process of cognition, providing man with all the data related to objective reality. Yet man feels and thinks simultaneously. Thinking supplements man's sensations, and is always present at the stage of sense knowledge, making coherent that which senses perceive separately.
This proves that Feuerbach realised the inherent interconnection between sensations and thinking, between the sensuous a^d the rational.
It is to Feuerbach's credit that he unflaggingly opposed religion and comprehensively criticised it. He showed that God had nothing supernatural about him and had been invented by men in their own image. According to Feuerbach, men, who are able to think and imagine in abstract terms, separated themselves from their own essence ' hich they began to imagine as a special independent and supernatural being---God.
By demonstrating that all the features ascribed to God are human and belong to individuals or the
~^^1^^ Ludwig Feuerbach, Philosophische Kritiken und Grundsatze (1839-1846), Leipzig, 1969, S. 185.
~^^2^^ Ibid., S. 269.
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71human race as a whole, Feuerbach revealed the earthly roots of religion and brought God from heaven down to earth.
Although Feuerbach tore the supernatural mask from God, he did not realise the class essence of religion and did not expose the social causes of the belief in God and life after death. It is not fortuitous, therefore, that he was unable to point out any effective way of combatting religion. Moreover, he was not against all religion. He opposed only the traditional religion that regarded God as a supernatural creature. At the same time, he laboriously proved the need for a new, earthly religion in which man himself would take God's place and man's love of man would be the guiding principle.
Irrespective of the many drawbacks inherent in Feuerbach's philosophy, it undoubtedly deserves praise for reinstating the principles of materialism (though on the old metaphysical basis and without dialectics, which he rejected together with Hegelian idealism) and for having greatly influenced the subsequent development of philosophy. The fact that Feuerbach's materialist teaching was one of the theoretical sources of Marxism is in itself a graphic illustration of the role it played in the advancement of philosophical thought.
Many shortcomings of the metaphysical materialism were surmounted by the Russian revolutionary democrats, who set forth their philosophical views in the early 1840s and developed them for several decades.
This was the time when a peasant, bourgeois-- democratic revolution spearheaded against serfdom and tsarism was maturing in Russia. The revolutionary democrats Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848), Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), Nikolai Ghernyshevsky (1828- 1889), Nikolai Dobrolyubov (1836-1861), and others were the ideologists of the forthcoming revolution.
Having realised the necessity of changing the existing social order and the righteousness of the demands put forward by the people, especially the peasants, the Russian revolutionary democrats sided decisively with the peasants, the common people, and began to substantiate in their philosophical theories the imperative need to liberate the peasants from serfdom.
In developing their philosophical views, the Russian revolutionary democrats proceeded both from materialist philosophy of their predecessors in Russia (Lomonosov and Radishchev) and from Hegel's dialectic and Feuerbach's materialism. At the same time, they generalised to a certain extent the advances made by natural sciences at the time.
In contrast to Feuerbach, the Russian revolutionary democrats did not discard Hegel's dialectic--- though they did criticise Hegelianism---but tried to combine it with materialism and give it a materialist interpretation.
Herzen was one of the first Russian revolutionary
6. The Philosophy
of 19th-century
Russian Revolutionary Democrats
As shown above, Feuerbach reinstated materialism, but his was a metaphysical materialism.
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73democrats who attacked Hegel's philosophy. Though Herzen highly appraised Hegel's dialectic, which gave a general description of the laws governing the motion and development of nature and thought, he criticised Hegel for abstracting himself from reality, and for his idealism. Hegel, Herzen wrote, " sacrifices all the temporary, all the existing for the thought and the spirit; the idealism which brought him up and which he imbibed with his mother's milk carries him away to one-sidedness.. ., he tries to suppress nature by spirit, logic; he is ready to consider any particular manifestation of it a ghost. . . ." The Hegelian "pure being is an abyss which has engulfed all the definitions of real being. .. . One should not think, however, that real being emerges indeed from pure being---does the existing individual arise from the concept of genus?''^^1^^
Herzen believed that the material things that together make up nature existed in reality, not pure being. As regards spirit and thought, Herzen wrote, they are the result of the development of nature, a property of material entities that have reached a certain stage in their development.
The Russian revolutionary democrats held that reality possessed an infinite multitude of properties and was in a state of constant and ceaseless motion and development. Herzeri wrote: "The life of nature is a ceaseless development. . . .''^^2^^ Belinsky wrote in the same vein: "There is no limit to the develop-
ment of humanity.. .. Mankind will never say to itself: 'Stop, enough, there is nowhere to go.`J''^^1^^
The struggle of opposites and the transformation of opposities into each other, the Russian revolutionary democrats maintained, is the source of development. This is the essence of life and truth, they said. "All the living," Herzen wrote, "is alive and true only as one whole, as the internal and external, as the general and the individual, i.e. the co-existing. Life binds these elements together; life is a process of their eternal transformation into each other."2 Belinsky expressed the same idea: "... Living truth consists in the unity of opposites.''^^3^^
The Russian revolutionary democrats also realised that, in the course of the motion and development of nature, quantity turns intoi quality engendering something new, which differs from that which existed before. To illustrate how this law operates, Ghernyshevsky, for instance, wrote: "...the combination of a known proportion of oxygen and hydrogen makes water, which possesses a multitude of qualities that are not discernible either in oxygen or in hydrogen."*
Finally, the Russian revolutionary democrats, Chernyshevsky in particular, gave a thorough descrip-
~^^1^^ V. G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1948, p. 146 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ A. I. Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. 1, p. 61.
~^^3^^ V. G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. I, p. 468.
~^^4^^ N. G. Chernyshevsky, Selected Philosophical Works, Vol III, Moscow, 1951, p. 190 (in Russian),
~^^1^^ A. I. Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1948, pp. 120, 150 (in Russian).
^^2^^ Ibid; p. 127,
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tion of the operation in nature and society of the law of the negation of negation, ensuring continuous change, a rejection of some forms by others and repetition of old forms on a higher level.
Thus, the Russian revolutionary democrats largely got rid of mechanism and metaphysics, and made a step forward in combining dialectics and materialism and in giving a materialist interpretation and substantiation to dialectics.
It was also to the credit of the Russian revolutionary democrats that they vigorously opposed agnosticism, which sought to raise an insurmountable wall between consciousness and reality and declared reality to be unknowable.
Referring to the life of man and to his experience, Ghernyshevsky refuted agnosticism and proved that the world was knowable and that our sense perceptions correctly reflected reality.
In comparison with Feuerbach and his predecessors, the Russian revolutionary democrats were a step closer to overcoming the conteinplativeness of philosophical theories. They aspired to the transformation of the world. Herzen, for instance, considered dialectics to be, as Lenin put it, "the algebra of revolution''.
As regards their /views of society, the Russian revolutionary democrats were idealists, just like their West-European predecessors and contemporaries, although they did make some materialist pronouncements on the subject.
1. The Conditions for the Emergence of Marxist Philosophy
a) Socio-Economic Conditions
The emergence of Marxist philosophy was a necessary outcome of the development of society and science. The philosophy of Marxism expresses the interests of the proletariat, and therefore arises at a stage in social development when the working people become an independent social force struggling to change the conditions of life.
Initially, the proletariat's class struggle was spontaneous, taking the form of isolated actions against individual capitalists. Later, however, it became more conscious and purposeful. As the struggle gained momentum, the proletariat began to organise and unite, to realise its general class interests, and to take action against the bourgeoisie as a class, against capitalism as a social system, rather than against individual members of the bourgeoisie. The 1830s and 1840s witnessed the first mass actions by the working class, such as the revolt of the Lyons weavers in France (1831), the revolutionary actions of the Parisian workers (1832), the uprising of Silesian weavers in Germany (1844), and the Chartist movement in England (1830-1840).
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77As the class struggle against the bourgeoisie intensified, the need arose to substantiate theoretically the necessity and possibility of overthrowing the existing social and political system and to develop a theory indicating the social relations and institutions to replace the existing ones. This historical need was behind the emergence of Marxist philosophy---a unique world outlook guiding the proletariat in its struggle for a new society and constituting for it a method for the revolutionary remaking of reality.
and to develop a scientific dialectico-materialist world view. By that time natural scientists began to study the inner processes of phenomena instead of merely describing and classifying them. They not only recorded the properties observed, but singled out the laws governing changes in these properties. New sciences developed, such as physiology studying processes in living organisms; embryology studying embryonic development; geology dealing with changes in the earth's crust; and others. A number of outstanding discoveries were made, which showed that natural processes were dialectical in character. The most important were: the discovery of the cellular structure of organisms (1838-1839), the substantiation of the law of conservation and transformation of energy (1842-1847), and Darwin's evolutionary theory of organisms (1859).
The discovery of the cell as the basic structural unit of the organism pointed to the unity of the organic world and to the general laws of development inherent in it. The law of conservation and transformation of energy revealed the inter-connection and mutual transformation of the various forms of the motion of matter. Darwin's evolutionary theory showed that the organic world constantly changes and develops and that existing species of animals and plants are the result of a long evolution.
The strides made by the natural sciences at the beginning and especially in the middle of the 19th century made it possible to formulate and substantiate the most important principles of dialectics and to develop a consistent scientific world outlook, for
b) Natural-Scientific Conditions
Although the proletariat's need for dialectical and historical materialism was a prerequisite for its emergence, this alone could hardly provide a sufficiently sound foundation for developing the Marxist philosophy. The Utopian views advanced before Marxism and substantiating the necessity of passing to a new, ideal society had also been a response to the oppressed classes' need for changing their conditions of life. Yet they did not help those classes to evolve a correct understanding of the surrounding world and to find the ways of transforming reality, but rather obstructed this. The emergence of dialectical and historical materialism required a certain level of scientific knowledge, insofar as its content was a generalisation of scientific advances.
By the early 19th century, scientific knowledge had reached a level making it possible to substantiate the basic principles of dialectics theoretically
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79the proletariat to use as a weapon for transforming existing reality.
tical method introduced and at the same time mystified by him. Feuerbach did not rectify Hegel's mistakes, "he simply threw him aside as useless. .. .'!1
What Feuerbach was unable to do was done by the founders of dialectical and historical materialism. Proceeding from the materialist principles reinstated by Feuerbach, Marx and Engels comprehensively criticised Hegelian idealist philosophy. In the process, they singled out the major contribution of German classical philosophy---dialectics, separated it from mysticism and numerous artificial schemes and constructions, and developed it on a scientific materialist basis into dialectical and historical materialism, which is a consistently scientific world outlook and a general method for cognising and transforming the surrounding world.
c) Theoretical Conditions
The emergence of the Marxist philosophy was conditioned not only by social factors and the development of natural sciences, but also by the entire history of philosophical thought. Marxism absorbed and developed the progressive ideas put forward by earlier philosophers. This means that, besides the social and natural-scientific conditions for the development of Marxism, there were also theoretical conditions. Primarily, these relate to 19th-century German philosophy, the philosophical views advanced by Hegel and Feuerbach.
Hegel formulated the fundamental principles of dialectics and elaborated the dialectical method of cognition. Being an idealist, however, he visualised dialectics as the laws of the self-development of the pure idea existing outside and prior to the material world. As for the development of the material world--- nature and society---it was for him "only a copy [Abklatsch] of the self-movement of the concept going on from eternity, no one knows where, but at all events independently of any thinking human brain. This ideological perversion had to be done away with.''^^1^^
While criticising Hegel, Feuerbach did not notice the rational grain in Hegel's philosophy---the dialec-
2. The Substance
of the Revolutionary Upheaval
Made by Marx and Engels in Philosophy
Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Frederick Engels (1820-1895) were the founders of the new, consistently scientific philosophy---dialectical and historical materialism.
Initially, Marx and Engels were the followers of Hegel's idealist philosophy. But later, yielding to the pressure of social practice, particularly that of the class struggle of the working people against their exploiters (which they both witnessed when Marx worked as editor of Rheinische Zeitung and Engels
~^^1^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1973, p. 362.
^^1^^ Ibid., p. 361.
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81as an employee in the enterprise of which his father was a shareholder), they abandoned their idealist views and took a materialist position. Engels, for instance, wrote at this time: "While I was in Manchester, it was tangibly brought home to me that the economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that they form the basis of the origination of the present-day class antagonisms... .'I:L
Marx began to lean towards materialism in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law (1843). It was here that he drew the conclusion that the key to understanding the process of mankind's historical development should be sought in "civil society", i.e. in the material, economic relations between people, rather than in a political field, or the state, as Hegel thought.
This tendency is especially explicit in The Holy Family, a work written jointly by Marx and Engels in 1845. It contains a thorough criticism of Hegel's idealism and the views of the Young Hegelians. The latter scorned the common people, regarding them as an "inert mass" incapable of creativeness and obstructing progress. They advanced critically-thinking personalities as the decisive creative force in history. Marx and Engels refuted these ideas and showed that the working people who create material wealth ensuring thereby the existence and development of society, are the decisive force behind historical pro-
gress. They stressed especially that the proletariat could and had to liberate itself by abolishing private ownership of the means of production and its corollary, the exploitation of man by man.
Marx and Engels developed the fundamental principles of dialectical materialism still further in another of their joint works, The German Ideology, written in 1845 and 1846, and Marx in his work, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). A comprehensive account of the world outlook developed by Marx and Engels is given in the Manifesto of the Communist Party written by them on the instructions of the Communist League and published in 1848. As Lenin put it, this work with the clarity and brilliance of genius outlines consistent materialism which embraces nature, society and dialectics, as the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development.^^1^^
After 1848, too, Marx and Engels continued their work on the philosophical aspects of the scientific world outlook and the method of cognising and transforming the existing reality. Most relevant in this respect are Capital and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by Marx, and Anti-- Duhring, Dialectics of Nature, and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy by Engels.
By developing dialectical and historical materialism, Marx and Engels made a revolutionary upheaval in philosophy. Their teaching differs fundamentally from all the philosophy that existed before them.
~^^1^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 178.
~^^1^^ See V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 21, p. 48. 6---1940
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83Indeed, the pre-Marxian materialist doctrines were predominantly mechanical. This was not fortuitous, since in the 18th century mechanics was the best developed of all the natural sciences. Chemistry, as Engels put it, existed only in its infantile form---the phlogiston theory still reigned supreme. Biology was also still in its infancy---the functioning of organisms was believed to be the result of purely mechanical causes. Man himself was seen through the prism of mechanical laws and considered to be a complex machine.^^1^^ As the most advanced field of knowledge, mechanics left an imprint not only on other sciences, but on philosophy, too. The materialist philosophers of the time tried to explain the world, the reality surrounding them, exclusively on the basis of mechanical laws.
As distinct from pre-Marxian materialism, dialectical materialism is free from mechanism. In explaining the various phenomena taking place in reality, it does not proceed from the laws of mechanics only, but rather from the totality of laws, holding that mechanical laws make it possible to understand only the mechanical form of the motion of matter. As regards the other forms of motion, their essence is determined by specific laws inherent in each of them, rather than by the laws of mechanics.
Pre-Marxian materialism was metaphysical. It was unable to conceive of the world as a process, as developing historically. True, the philosophers of the day did recognise motion in the surrounding world, but
they believed motion to proceed within a closed circle, repeating the same states. In contrast, dialectical materialism views the world as being in constant motion and development.
Pre-Marxian materialism was not consistent and comprehensive. The materialist philosophers of that time explained only natural phenomena materialistically. As regards social phenomena, they treated them idealistically and believed them to be dependent upon a certain ideal basis---political or legal consciousness, public opinion, ethics, science, and so forth. The founders of dialectical and historical materialism were the first to apply materialist principles to society and to draw the conclusion that the material conditions of life were primary and decisive in society. Ideal or spiritual phenomena, public consciousness, various views, theories, and the like were secondary, and stemmed from the material conditions of people's life, from their social being.
Another major feature of the pre-Marxian materialists was contemplativeness and ~ isolation from people's revolutionary practical activities. They merely explained the world, whereas it had to be changed. Marxist philosophy is tied up with practice and its task is not merely to explain existing reality, but also to transform it. It is, therefore, not only a method of cognition, but also a method of action, a method for the revolutionary transformation of reality.
Moreover, as distinct from pre-Marxian materialist and idealist doctrines which in varying degrees distorted the real state of affairs, dialectical and historical materialism is deeply rooted in reality, in
6*
~^^1^^ See K. MJarx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 349.
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MARXIST UPHEAVAL IN PHILOSOPHY
85the laws governing its functioning and development. The partisanship of Marxist philosoply includes the scientific approach as an indispensable element.
At a certain stage in history, the interests of any exploiting class inevitably clash with the requirements of social progress, and correspondingly with the operation of particular objective laws. This makes it impossible consistently and scientifically to substantiate the interests of such classes and necessitates the rejection of scientific principles that contradict them and the advancement of principles corresponding to and expressing the interests of the exploiting class, though these principles may not reflect reality and objective laws. The interests of the proletariat, on the other hand, are always in line with the objective trends in history, so the working class has a stake in knowing reality and the laws governing the objective process of development. Without this, the proletariat will be unable to interfere actively in the objective process and purposefully transform the surrounding world. It follows, then, that dialectical and historical materialism can serve as the proletariat's world outlook and method for the revolutionary remaking of reality only if it is founded on knowledge of the objective laws of motion and development and if its principles are scientific.
All this proves that dialectical and historical materialism constitutes a fundamentally new philosophy radically different from all the preceding philosophical systems, and that its emergence was a true revolution in philosophy.
3. The Development of Marxist Philosophy by Lenin
Being a creative science, Marxist philosophy does not stand still---it is continually developing and improving. Every new major step in the development of science and social practice makes an inevitable impact on philosophy, causing a change (enrichment, specification, or addition) in its particular principles or tenets. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) made an incalculable contribution to the development of dialectical and historical materialism after the death of Marx and Engels.
Lenin thoroughly developed the Marxist theory of matter and consciousness as the reflection of objective reality. He substantiated the decisive role of practice in cognising reality and revealed, on that basis, the actively creative character of consciousness, stressing that "man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it".^^1^^ ^Moreover, he defined the major stages of cognition and its dialectical development towards the truth.
Elaborating on dialectics as a teaching of development, Lenin revealed the essence of the dialectical understanding of development as a repetition of the past stages, but on a higher basis, as a leap-like revolutionary changing of reality caused by inner contradictions, by the clash between different and opposite forces and tendencies.^^2^^
Lenin analysed on a scientific and materialist basis Hegel's dialectic and its development by Marx in
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 212.
~^^2^^ Ibid,, Vol. 21, pp. 54-55.
- -
A. P. SHEPTULIN
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87Capital and formulated the principle of the identity of dialectics, logic, and the theory of knowledge. He studied the general aspects and connections of reality and universal dialectical laws in the light of this principle and showed, first, that philosophical categories were not only the forms in which the general aspects and connections of reality were reflected but also stages or nodal points in the development of social consciousness and practice, and, second, that the laws of dialectics were not only the universal laws of reality, but also the laws of thinking---the methodological principles guiding people in their practical and cognitive activities. In other words, following Marx and Engels, Lenin developed dialectical materialism not only as a world outlook, but also as a theory of knowledge, a method of thinking and of the practical transformation of reality. "Lenin's further elaboration of materialistic dialectics, his study of the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge . . . are of everlasting importance. Lenin was the first thinker of our century who saw in the achievements of natural science of his time the beginning of a tremendous scientific revolution, who was able to disclose and generalise philosophically the revolutionary meaning of the fundamental discoveries made by the great explorers of nature. He gave a brilliant philosophical interpretation of new scientific data in the period of the drastic 'breaking of principles' in the leading fields of natural science. His idea of the inexhaustibility of matter has become the general principle of natural science.''^^1^^
Lenin laid special emphasis on the development of the theory of historical materialism. He gave a comprehensive analysis of the laws governing the interconnection between social being and social consciousness, material and ideological relations, objective and subjective factors, the spontaneous and the conscious. Lenin underlined the decisive importance of the objective circumstances under which people live, and showed the immense role played by revolutionary theory, the revolutionary party guided by this theory, by the revolutionary class, and by historical personalities in transforming the life of society, in replacing historically obsolete social forms by new ones corresponding to the current level of development of the productive forces.
Lenin demonstrated the importance of revolutionary ideas in orientating the spontaneous movement of the masses to one objective---the revolutionary transformation of the existing social and political system. Lenin emphasised that the development of a socialist ideology and its dissemination among the working people, the proletariat, was a task of paramount importance for a proletarian party.
His studies of the imperialist stage of capitalism enabled Lenin to conclude that it was the last stage, that it represented the eve of the socialist revolution, that it was a stage from which society can pass only to socialism. Lenin discovered the law of the uneven economic and political development of capitalist countries under imperialism. This gave him grounds
~^^1^^ On the Centenary of the Birth of V. I, Lenin,
Theses of the Central Committee, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Moscow, 1970,
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MARXIST UPHEAVAL IN PHILOSOPHY
89to conclude that the socialist revolution could triumph first in several, or even in one country.
Moreover, Lenin developed the Marxist teaching on the character and motive forces of the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution and its connection with the socialist revolution, enriching this teaching with important conclusions. He proved that the proletariat, not the bourgeoisie, should lead the bourgeois-- democratic revolution at a time when capitalism in the advanced countries had entered its imperialist stage. He also established that the peasantry was an ally of the proletariat and that a victorious bourgeoisdemocratic revolution should establish the dictatorship of the revolutionary people, of the workers and peasants, not the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The establishment of the dictatorship of the workers and peasants does not complete such a revolution. Gradually, it develops into a socialist revolution, in the course of which the proletariat in alliance with the poorest peasants and all the exploited classes transforms the life of society along socialist lines. Developing the theory of socialist revolution, Lenin advanced the idea that the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and for socialism should be tied up with the national-liberation struggle of the oppressed peoples.
It was also Lenin who proved that some countries and peoples might embark on a non-capitalist path of development and advance to socialism by-passing the capitalist stage of development. He believed that victory of the socialist revolution in the advanced countries and their all-out assistance to backward nations was a major condition for such a transition.
The theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat occupies a prominent place in Lenin's theoretical legacy. Drawing on the experience of the three Russian revolutions, he developed the idea of the proletarian dictatorship, set forth by Marx and Engels, and demonstrated the necessity of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism; he revealed its essence and specific features as constituting a fundamentally new democracy, laid down the tasks confronting it, described its mechanism and mapped out its ways of development. Lenin's discovery of Soviets as a form of proletarian dictatorship that emerged in Russia as a result of the creative activities of the revolutionary masses, and his substantiation of their role in ensuring the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, were of great significance.
After the triumph of the October Revolution, Lenin concentrated his attention on developing the theory of building socialism in Russia and on evaluating the prospects for a world-wide revolution. Lenin proved scientifically that socialism could be built under conditions of capitalist encirclement. He showed that Russia had everything necessary for building socialism and indicated concrete ways for transforming the various aspects of the life of society along socialist lines.
Lenin regarded the conversion of capitalist enterprises into socialist property belonging to the whole people as a way of remaking large-scale capitalist into socialist production. As regards the socialist transformation of small-commodity production, Lenin recommended that the various forms of co-ope-
90A. P. SHEPTULIN
ration be used to turn small-scale private ownership of the means of production into co-operative public ownership.
Lenin advanced the idea that socialism and communism can only be built under the guidance of a Marxist party, which enjoys the support and confidence of the working people in all its undertakings and which maps out practical ways for developing society along socialist and communist lines, basing itself on the knowledge of the laws governing the functioning and development of society. This idea has been borne out by the experience of building socialism in the Soviet Union and other countries.
Guided by Lenin's theoretical legacy and developing it by generalising the advances of modern science and social experience, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the communist and workers' parties of other socialist countries, and Communists all over the world resolutely oppose today's bourgeois ideology, and right and ``left'' revisionism, which distort Lenin's revolutionary teaching.
Dialectical Materialism
Chapter IV
MATTER AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Insofar as the fundamental question of any philosophy is essentially the correlation between matter and consciousness, a presentation of dialectical materialism should start with a description of matter and the basic forms of its existence, the laws governing the emergence of consciousness and its relation to matter. Then we should proceed to an analysis of the laws governing the functioning and development of knowledge as the reflection of reality in man's consciousness. This will be followed by a study of the categories and laws of dialectics as the forms of reflection of the universal aspects and connections of objective reality and knowledge. The order in which categories and laws are discussed is determined by the order in which the universal properties and laws of reality reflected in them are cognised.
1. A Critique
of the Idealist and Metaphysical Views
of Matter
As a rule, idealists reject the objective existence of matter. Some hold that it does not exist at all, but was invented by materialists to prove their atheistic conclusions (Berkeley). Others declare it to be a totality of sensations (Mach). Still others represent it as a result of the development of consciousness, as something dependent on or derived from it (Hegel).
All the materialists, however, recognise the real, objective existence of matter. In the course of history, materialist views on the substance of matter have differed considerably. Ancient philosophers were inclined to identify matter with the most widely spread substances or phenomena, such as water (Thales), air (Anaximenes), or fire ( Heraclitus). Later, matter was believed to be an infinite multitude of various invariable elements, such, for instance, as the so-called "seeds of things" ( Anaxagoras), or atoms (Dernocritus). The 18th-century French materialists, Feuerbach, and other thinkers considered matter to be the totality of immutable
94A. P. SHEPTULIN
MATTER AND CONSCIOUSNESS
95atoms that made up all objects existing in the world.
To view matter as a totality of atoms or substances is both narrow and false. This way of thinking is associated with definite forms of the existence of matter, and raises their inherent properties and states to an absolute. It is unable, therefore, to embrace the entire totality of phenomena occurring in the world and the endless variety of the forms of being.
The inadequacy of the above conception of matter was revealed strikingly during the crisis that gripped natural science at the turn of the 20th century, following the discovery of the electron and radioactivity. The discovery of the electron showed, in particular, that the atom is not immutable and eternal as previously believed, but consists of smaller particles---electrons. Moreover, it was discovered that the mass of an electron is not invariable, but is a direct function of its velocity. Yet it had been believed that the mass of an atom was constant. This notion gave rise to the idea that atoms, and consequently matter, were eternal and indestructible.
The collapse of the notions that atoms were indivisible and eternal and that the mass of bodies was constant and indestructible evoked doubts as regards the objective existence of matter and led to the conclusion that it was disappearing. The logic was as follows: if an atom is divisible, if it disintegrates into electrons whose mass depends on motion, then matter, as something basic underlying all being, disappears and turns into motion. Similar conclusions followed from the discovery of radioac-
tivity. The radioactive decay of uranium, and later of radium, was taken to mean the transformation of matter into motion, or pure energy. Idealists were quick to take this up. They began to assert that the latest advances of natural science refuted materialism, having shown that matter did not exist and had been invented by materialists.
It was necessary to generalise the above scientific discoveries, to bring them in line with dialectical materialism and refute those idealists who caught at these discoveries. Lenin undertook to solve this problem.
2. Lenin's Definition of Matter
Lenin analysed the above crisis in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism and showed that it had arisen because natural scientists shared the views of the metaphysical materialists and explained the newest discoveries in physics accordingly. Indeed, the notion of matter as a totality of immutable atoms was upheld by metaphysical, not dialectical, materialism. The latter has never reduced matter to atoms, and never considered nor could consider them invariable and eternal. According to dialectical materialism, no concrete form of the existence of matter---atom, molecule or electron---is eternal and invariable. On the contrary, it is constantly in motion and change, under certain conditions turning into other concrete forms, which themselves turn into others, and so on ad infinitum. Engels wrote: "For it [dialectical philosophy] noth-
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MATTER AND CONSCIOUSNESS
97ing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away. .. .'!1
The discovery of the disintegration of the atom into other, smaller particles, as well as the transformation of matter into light, does not, therefore, refute dialectical materialism. On the contrary, it reaffirms the truth of its principles, such as that stating that everything existing in the world is in constant motion and changes from one thing into another.
What, then, is matter as seen by dialectical materialism? The concept of matter is tied up with all that exists outside and independently of the human mind, with the whole of objective reality. So, matter includes not only atoms, but also the ``elementary'' particles into which they disintegrate; not only substances, but also the light waves they emit under relevant conditions.
``Matter," Lenin wrote, "is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.''^^2^^
3. Material Entity. Types of Matter
Matter exists as a multitude of various bodies, or material formations, existencies or entities connected
~^^1^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 339.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 130.
with one another in a certain way. "The whole of nature accessible to us," Engels wrote, "forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies, and by bodies we understand here all material existences extending from stars to atoms... .''^^1^^
A material entity or body is only a part of matter, so it does not possess all the properties inherent in matter. Specifically, it is not eternal and infinite, it emerges only under absolutely definite conditions, it occupies a limited place in space, it exists for a certain period and then disappears, turning into other material entities. All the same, matter is eternal and spatially boundless. This testifies to:the fact that the concept of matter is associated with the universe in general and with the entire totality of its constituent material entities.
Material entities make up corresponding groups which form certain levels or stages in the develop-^ ment of matter. These stages have their specific qualitative characteristics, Engels wrote that "the discrete parts at various stages (ether atoms, chemical atoms, masses, heavenly bodies) are various nodal points which determine the various qualitative modes of existence of matter in general. .. .''^^2^^
Material entities that have a common origin and represent a stage in the development of matter from a lower to a higher level, make up a type of matter. These are, for instance, electromagnetic
~^^1^^ F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Moscow, 1974, p. 70.
~^^2^^ Ibid., pp. 293-94.
7---1940
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MATTER AND CONSCIOUSNESS
and gravitational fields, electrons, protons, neutrons, atoms, molecules, living organisms, and human society.
4. Matter and the Material
As already noted, the concept of matter in the strict sense of the word is applicable to the world in general, to the totality of material entities. As regards particular material entities, each of them is but a part of matter, a certain stage in its development. However, material entities have one thing in common---they all exist outside and independently of consciousness. The concept of the material was developed to reflect this common trait inherent in material entities. It can be applied both to the world in general and to the material entities making up this world, to types of matter, to objective properties and relations that exist outside and independently of the human mind. Thus, the material embraces everything that relates to matter and characterises it as distinct from consciousness.
terial nature, the various forms of its existence, its various states and properties. In this respect consciousness as a specific property of matter does not oppose matter's other properties, but occupies an equal place among them. Like any other property of matter, it has a reason for its existence in matter, in its certain organisation.
As distinct from metaphysical materialism, which sees matter's substantiality in its unchangeability, dialectical materialism ties up the substantiality of matter with its continuous motion and change, during which matter transforms from one qualitative state into another and "remains eternally the same in all its transformations".^^1^^ This is expressed, above all, in the constancy of its quantity, which remains the same under any change. As regards the qualitative aspect of matter, its substantiality is expressed in the preservation of its basic properties or attributes. ".. . None of its [matter's---Author} attributes can ever be lost. . . .''^^2^^ If it is lost in one place, in one material entity, it will inevitably manifest itself elsewhere, in another material entity.
Moreover, the substantiality of matter is also expressed in the ability of each of its entities to be transformed under certain conditions intoi any other entity. Any ``elementary'' particle, for example, can change under certain conditions into another `` elementary'' particle. This means that every material entity possesses in itself, in its nature, all the properties of matter.
5. Matter as Substance
When we defined matter we contrasted it to consciousness. Yet, as already pointed out, it differs not only from consciousness, but also from its own entities, states and properties. In this sense matter is what underlies all its manifestations---specific states and properties. As substance, matter is the basis of all that exists. The various phenomena observed in the world are but manifestations of the single ma-
~^^1^^ F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 39.
^^2^^ Ibid.
1*-