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p After our earlier exposition passage to examination of the very important problem of the social character of consciousness may evoke quite understandable objections that this problem should have been given first place then, in view of its key significance, widely recognised in Marxist-Leninist philosophical literature, for exaplaining the origin and evolution of consciousness. Nevertheless our order of developing the theme has been deliberate, and this has solid grounds. The methodological principle of the rise from the abstract to the concrete underlying our study would simply not have allowed us to pass to concretisation of the problems of consciousness connected with its social character without breach of the logical consistency of the exposition. We would note that attempts to deduce consciousness from social relations (though it cannot help having a social character) without preliminary, more or less detailed analysis of man’s relation to the external world by the scheme we have adopted of [S -*- M -> N] (man—humanised nature—nature) would have led in our view to a one-sidedness bordering on incorrect understanding of the basic thesis of historical materialism about the primary nature of social being and the secondary nature of social consciousness. The objectivity of the truth contained in our knowledge of the world consists, of course, in its having a content that does not depend on a person or on mankind as a whole.

p On the other hand, the counterposing of relations of the two types depicted by the schemes [S =<=fc N] and [S -»- M -»• ->• N], though it makes it possible to bring out certain 165 specific features of man’s rational reflection of reality in contrast to animals’ sensory reflection of it, yield nothing as regards explanation of the features of each separate individual in his relations with other members of human society. People are as like as two peas in them, and the concept of man still has a very abstract, undifferentiated character.

p In fact there are no such abstract people in society, any society consists of quite concrete individuals living in certain social conditions; they are either working people or exploiters (in a class society), men or women, representatives of mental or physical labour, children or the elderly, whitefaced or black-skinned, snub-nosed or long-nosed, etc., etc., in short, particular persons and not someone else.

p Human history is possible, as well, because there are concrete living people each of whom is like someone else but at the same time different from the others. Would not attempts to try and disclose the essence of man as a rational being be mistaken in this connection if they took an abstract concept of man as their initial moment? The question has such methodological significance that we must dwell on it specially.

p Attempts to resolve the problem of man that start from denial of the primacy of the individual’s corporeal organisation and recognition of the divine immortality of the soul or mind as the basis of human existence are incompatible with a materialist outlook on the world. From ancient times spokesmen of the materialist trend in philosophy have begun their studies of human history from an examination of society as an aggregate of concrete human individuals, and have tried on that basis to deduce certain general principles of the development of society as a whole. Their method of investigation was one of an ascent from the concrete to the abstract; the further they went in their arguments, however, from the living, concrete man taken as the initial moment of the understanding of man in generel, the more one-sided were the results they obtained. Definitions of human essence were getting more and more abstract as a result of these inquiries, and human society itself was depicted, in the last analysis, as a kind of mechanical aggregate of abstract individuals as immutable ‘atoms’ of a natural human community. The shortcoming of that method was its metaphysical nature. The weak spot in pre-Marxian materialism was not materialism as a system but metaphysics as a method.^^1^^ The development of the method of materialist dialectics by the founders of scientific communism meant surmounting of methaphysical 166 one-sidedness in the science of human society and man.

p Methaphysical materialists, by taking a concrete phenomenon as the initial moment of their studies, could not bring out the general patterns of development of the phenomena considered in their interconnected wholeness. It was necessary to begin from the opposite position, by basing oneself on previously won knowledge, and allowing for newly discovered concrete facts, to re-examine the old theories critically, create new abstractions and new generalisations that would alter the content of the previously developed concepts of concrete phenomena, and then to test the correctness of the conclusions drawn by concretising the generalisation made in relation to subjectively existing concrete reality. That movement of thought from the abstract to the concrete presents a possibility of mental reproduction of phenomena as a certain internally interconnected whole, and not as a metaphysical aggregate of parts built up into a whole lacking inner sources of motion.

p Absence of such an approach to study of objective phenomena led even outstanding materialists before Marx to essential mistakes. It is useful here to go into the methodological aspect in rather more detail of one of the direct predecessors of historical materialism, namely Ludwig Feuerbach, because the attitude of Marx and Engels to him, expressed in several of their works, helps bring out more clearly the shortcomings of the metaphysical approach to the problem of man from the standpoint of the old materialism and the radical difference between the dialectical method and the metaphysical.

p Feuerbach began his investigation, in his The Essence of Christianity, with the ‘concrete’ essence of man, as he put it. He wanted to deal with the sense object in the form in which it appears in sense perception rather than from a rational understanding of it. He himself said that his philosophy

p has for its principle, not the Substance of Spinoza, not the ego of Kant and Fichte, not the Absolute Identity of Schelling, not the Absolute Mind of Hegel, in short no abstract, merely conceptional being, but a real being, the true Ens realissimum— man; its principle, therefore, is in the highest degree positive and real. It generates thought from the opposite of thought, from Matter, from existence, from the senses; it has relation to its object first through the senses, i.e., passively, before defining it in thought. Hence my work, as a specimen of this philosophy, so far from being a production to be placed in the 167 category of Speculation,—although in another point of view it is the true, the incarnate result of prior philosophical systems,— is the direct opposite of speculations, nay, puts an end to it by explaining it.^^2^^

p While correctly answering the main question of philosophy and subjecting Hegel’s idealist system to resolute criticism, Feuerbach at the same time did not make use of the achievements of earlier philosophical thought in developing the dialectical method. The old philosophy, critically reworked by him, was to appear not as the result, but on the contrary as the starting point of his own philosophy.

p By beginning his study of society from concrete individuals, Feuerbach was forced, in the last analysis, to reduce men’s relations with one another to their natural ones as species relations and so to limit the concept of the essence of man to one of an abstract subject lacking social content. In Feuerbach, Karl Marx said, human essence ’can be regarded only as “species”, as an inner, mute, general character which unites the many individuals in a natural way\^^3^^

p Feuerbach could not rise to discovery of the objective laws of the origin and evolution of human society, and remained at an anthropological materialism. Nevertheless this mistaken approach to man on the methological plane was much higher in many respects than idealist conceptions, insofar as it was based on the principle of materialist monism. Feuerbach’s materialist positions enabled him to expose the mistaken character of the main premiss in the idealist system of Hegelian philosophy, and to submit the religious, in particular Christian, outlook on the world to well-founded criticism. When analysing religious myths Feuerbach the materialist saw that they had an earthly basis, that features of the real life of men shone through the prism of the fantasy of religious legends, and that the religious world outlook was the result of man’s spiritual self-alienation or self- estrangement and of people’s notion of their own essence as a spiritual essence separate from their natural bodies.

p Feuerbach’s attempts to reduce religious myths to an earthly basis, however, could not lead to success. By taking man’s ’natural essence’ as his starting point, he quite logically, in fact, came to a conclusion about the unnaturalness of man’s religious self-estrangement, but did not see why this self-alienation had necessarily come about. Since the causes were not clear to him, his critique of the religious outlook remained passive and contemplative. Not being able to disclose 168 the objective sources of any social phenomena, the critique could graphically demonstrate its unnaturalness (and that was already an undoubted achievement), but could not show how to eliminate it. The point was, consequently, to disclose the patterns of development of religious self- alienation as the result of social development at a certain stage of history, and then to reconstruct society in such a way that the objective conditions for the rise of an unscientific world outlook, including a religious one, would disappear.

p The anthropological principle in his explanation of human essence did not let Feuerbach appreciate, as was necessary, the fact that the material, objective patterns operating in society are reflected in people’s consciousness in the form of certain ideas and moral standards, religious ones included. He therefore did not think of men’s natural intercourse as intercourse of individuals united as well, incidentally, by a community of ideas reflecting their material position in their society. The essence of man for the individual, according to Feuerbach, was neither the moral creature in him nor the thinking one. It was simply in intercourse or communion, the unity of man and man, a unity that rested simply on the difference between You and Me.

p Having brought out the unsoundness of Christian morality’s claims to be the sole expresser of the real essence of man, and having criticised idealist attempts to represent human community as intercourse with a religious basis, Feuerbach felt it necessary at the same time to find another basis, for truly human intercourse. But he could not see that it was rooted in the contradictions of men’s material life itself, and in their mode of material production. Marx and Engels, when speaking of the essence of man pointed out that

p this sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of ^intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real hasis of what the philosophers have conceived as ‘substance’ and ’essence of man’, and what they have deified and attacked.^^4^^

p Being unable to discover the objective basis of human intercource, and conscious at the same time that the essence of the single individual could not be fully revealed outside his relations with other people, Feuerbach came to the conclusion in the end that a new, truly human religion was needed, one of love, and saw the practical trend of the new philosophy in its including the essence of religion in itself when 169 taking the place of the religion in its being indeed the true religion.

p Marx and Engels, noting the mistaken character of Feuerbach’s conception of man, wrote as follows, in particular, in The German Ideology:

p Feuerbach’s whole deduction with regard to the relation of men to one another is only aimed at proving that men need and always have needed each other. He wants to establish consciousness of this fact, that is to say, like the other theorists, he merely wants to produce a correct consciousness about an existing fact; whereas for the real Communist it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things.^^6^^

p In fact, in actually existing exploiter society, divided into opposing classes, in which the dominant minority lived by appropriating the results of the labour of the overwhelming majority of the masses of the people, preaching of a ’natural essence’ of man consisting in the unity of man and man, and in people’s naturally always needing each other, then and now, and proclamation of the reasonableness of people’s universal, mutual love for one another, could be interpreted as claiming that the worker needed the capitalist no less than the capitalist needed the worker. Such a conclusion fully suits the ideologists of modern capitalism and they often employ it to substantiate the ‘justice’ of the capitalist system, the need for which is claimed to stem from the eternal, immutable nature of man himself.

p Marxism disclosed the objective patterns of the development of capitalist society, in which preaching of ’universal love’ is only a hypocritical cover for the existing fact of the exploitation of man by man. Communists do not deny the thesis of people’s mutual need for one another, or of their mutual dependence, but scientific communism does not limit itself just to stating that fact. It demonstrates with scientific rigour that it is not the good intentions of mutual love but the struggle of the working class and all working people, based on understanding of the laws of social development, to eliminate capitalist society that opens up real prospects of building a society in which mankind’s age-old dream of social equality, and conscious dependence of men on one another, and, if you wish, their mutual love as free members of the rational part of the Universe, become a fact realised in practice.

p Attempts to disclose the nature of man as a sensual and rational creature (when the starting point for that is taken 170 to be some quite concrete human individual, and a ‘general’ concept of man is then developed by abstraction), thus prove to be quite useless methodologically.

p When Marx was working on his main work Capital he specially examined the methodological problems of the study, in particular the question of the mode of ascent both from the concrete to the abstract, and from the abstract to the concrete. When comparing the two, he did not come down in favour of the first.

p It would seem to be the proper thing to start with the real and concrete elements, with the actual pre-conditions, e.g., to start in the sphere of political economy with population, which forms the basis and the subject of the whole social process of production. Closer consideration shows, however, that this is wrong.^^6^^

p Consequently, he concluded, it was necessary in science to start, not from the concrete in order to ascend to the abstract but on the contrary, beginning with the abstract to pass to the concrete.

p The latter is obviously the correct scientific method. The concrete concept is concrete because it is a synthesis of many definitions, thus representing the unity of diverse aspects. It appears therefore in reasoning as a summing-up, a result, and not as the starting point, although it is the real point of origin, and thus also the point of origin of perception and imagination. The first procedure attenuates meaningful images to abstract definitions, the second leads from abstract definitions by way of reasoning to the reproduction of the concrete situation.^^7^^

p Recognition of the mode of ascent from the abstract to the concrete as the scientifically correct method of investigation did not mean that Marx in any way recognised abstraction as the starting point of the objective world’s development. He criticised Hegel, according to whom the ascent of thought from the abstract to the concrete was the forming of the concrete in actual reality itself, and wrote:

p the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is simply the way in which thinking assimilates the concrete and reproduces it as a concrete mental category. This is, however, by no means the process of evolution of the concrete world itself.^^8^^

p The material world existed in all its concreteness before the origin of consciousness and has continued to exist since the latter’s origin, independent of it and outside it. The sole initial source of our knowledge of the world, moreover, is sense reflection of it. Logical thought assimilates the concrete, 171 however, not as the starting point but as a synthesis, as the result of uniting many definitions of the concrete. Lenin’s following thesis fully agrees with that conclusion of Marx’s:

p From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice,—such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality.^^9^^

p Sensory reflection is the precondition of abstract thought both in the general, natural historical aspect of the emergence of man from the animal kingdom, and from the standpoint of the moulding of a child’s thinking during its intercourse with adults and the many objects and phenomena that it perceived in the world. Living awareness of concrete reality precedes abstract thinking as well, in the sense that in science the gathering and mental processing of empirical facts often precede the creation of theoretical concepts in time, being a preliminary condition of the passage from one theory to another with a higher degree of abstraction. On the other hand, however, in order to operate mentally with sensually perceived facts according to certain logical rules, it is already necessary to have a faculty for conceptual thought and for abstract reflection of reality. Since we have in mind an already formed man capable of operating with concepts, his cognitive relation to sense data depends on the level of knowledge he has reached during his preceding activity (about which we have already spoken).

p Mankind’s history takes place in conditions of a natural succession of generations. The knowledge accumulated by one generation is passed on to the next. In order to develop understanding people must first have knowledge of the objective laws gathered by other people before them. The assembled knowledge is embodied in conceptual form. Every concept is already an abstraction separated from the concrete. In that sense the abstract becomes the starting point in thought, and the concrete is the result of the process of further development of knowledge along the path of mental reproduction of the concrete achieved through development of man’s material sense activity. In that we leave out, as it were, the circumstance that abstract reflection of reality, in turn, is the result of man’s differentiation from the animal kingdom, and the result of men’s subsequent joint practical activity, and that of the individual social subject, in understanding and applying the objective laws of reality in all its variety and diversity.

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p At the same time men are not contented simply with the facts gathered by their predecessors. They turn again to the objective world as an inexhaustible source of new facts. As these facts become accessible to their sense perception, they include them into the existing system of knowledge, ’ grafting’ the new empirical data (I. S. Narsky) onto previously created abstractions or, if that proves impossible, creating new mediating representations, new abstract concepts and theoretical conceptions, deepening knowledge, and passing the accumulated knowledge on to the next generation. As to the means of passing to the new content of knowledge and the process of synthesising many definitions of the concrete into a whole scientific theory, we have already said enough about it not to have to go into it again.

p The accumulating and passing on of knowledge from generation to generation has a socio-historical character; attempts to explain the mechanism of the passage from direct sense reflection to rational reflection by counterposing the two-member scheme S +± N to the three-member one S -> M ->• N in our view not only does not contradict the thesis of the determinant role of social relations in the moulding of the human personality, but on the contrary is in complete agreement with it, in spite of the fact that the concept of rational man developed at the start of this path was a still extremely abstract one in seeming abstraction from the concept of an aggregate of social relations.

p The dialectical materialist conception of society starts from the point that social development is a process of natural history based on objective laws, independent of consciousness. The features of any one socio-economic formation are determined by the aggregate of relations of production constituting the economic structure and real basis of society. Singling out of the relations of production as the basis on which the complex variety of ideological relations arises, and by which it is determined, made it possible for the first time to develop a fully objective criterion for scientific understanding of the historical development of society, put sociology on a scientific basis, and put an end

p to the view of society being a mechanical aggregation of individuals which allows of all sorts of modification at the will of the authorities (or, if you like, at the will of society and the government) and which emerges and changes casually.^^10^^

p But, having established the basic character of relations of production, historical materialism does not limit itself to a 173 simple statement of the relation between basis and superstructure. It points out, moreover, that the basis itself is subject to the effect of the forces of production, and that the productive forces and relations of production, being two different aspects of social life, have a certain dependence on one another.

p The productive forces, very generally defined, materialise the interaction between man arid nature as a perpetual and natural condition of human life. They include (1) people who transform nature through their labour in order to adapt natural objects to their wants, and the instruments of labour, above all tools, that they use to produce vitally necessary material goods.

p The interaction of the productive forces and the relations of production as two aspects of material production, which constitutes the basis of social development, is governed by the general sociological law of correspondence of the relations of production to the character and level of development of the productive forces. The relations of production, which constitute the economic basis of the whole aggregate of social relations, are the social form of the development of the productive forces and play an active role in the latter’s development only to the extent that they correspond to the objective needs of growth of the productivity of social labour. Otherwise they become fetters holding back further growth of the productive forces, and the interaction of the two aspects of material production sooner or later, but with socio-historical inevitability, leads to a social revolution, and to replacement of the old relations of production by new ones under the pressure of the more mobile, revolutionary side of material production, viz., the productive forces. After that there is also a revolution in all spheres of the forms of social consciousness.

p We have recalled these truths of historical materialism, well known to every educated person who is acquainted with the fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist sociology, simply in order once more to bring into relief the methodological expediency of using, as one of the initial premisses for disclosing the theme of our book, the analysis of the relation ’man—humanised nature—nature’, in which the determinant member is taken to be the tool.^^11^^ Our opposing of the three-member scheme, symbolically expressed by S -*- M ->• ->• N, to the dyad S *± N, had the aim, in particular, of abstracting the productive forces as far as possible from the 174 relations of production as a special aspect of material production consisting in man’s relation to his physical environment mediated by tools, i.e. as an aspect that, while inseparable from the relations of production, is not reducible to them. To some extent, this abstracting also embraces the relations of production conceived as the aggregate of men’s material relations with one another independent of consciousness and formed, of socio-historicaJ necessity, in the course of the production and distribution of material wealth. But the concept of the relations of production enters the threemember scheme in a still undeveloped, undifferentiated form.

p Indeed, by the first term of the triad S -> M -> N we understand not some concrete, individual, but an aggregate man in the sense that the concept ‘man’ is a species concept on the logical plane here, and not a specific one. By man’s activity mediated by tools, therefore, we have essentially understood the joint labour of socially producing men. That use of the concept ‘man’ is justified, in particular, when describing men’s relations with one another in primitive society, in respect of which it is still impossible to speak either of the formation of a definite personality as a social phenomenon or even more of the division of people into classes.

p Frederick Engels, when pointing that out, gave the following description of man in the tribal system:

p The tribe remained the boundary for man, in relation to himself as well as to outsiders: the tribe, the gens and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a superior power, instituted by nature, to which the individual remained absolutely subject in feeling, thought and deed. Impressive as the people of this epoch may appear to us, they differ in no way one from another, they are still bound, as Marx says, to the umbilical cord of the primordial community.^^12^^

p We may also recall here the following statement by Marx: ’man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being’.^^13^^

p It will readily be noted that the concept of man adopted as the starting point of our study, as a species one from both the logical and the historical aspect, is diametrically opposite methodologically to the premisses of metaphysical materialists who, by beginning their studies from an examination of concrete individuals, finished them by developing an abstract, species definition of man as the ’inward, dumb genenerality which naturally unites the many individuals’.^^14^^

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p In following Marx’s method of investigation, which consisted in advancing from the abstract to the concrete so as thereby to reproduce the concrete through reasoning, we must obviously concretise the initial species concept of man, and come to him as a member of a certain social organisation as part of a system of men’s relations with one another in the course of their life activity.

p The business of concretising the concept which we have represented symbolically by S in the scheme S—>- M -> N, brings us back as well to the need to concretise the concept represented by the same symbol in S +± N. Human society, as a certain whole characterised by the aggregate of men’s relations with one another, could not have arisen from nothing. The specifically human forms of intercourse must obviously have been built up as man became differentiated from the animal kingdom, and have had their natural, historical preconditions in forms of intercourse that already existed among our unreasoning ancestors.

p The transition from direct sense reflection of reality to its rational reflection, which we have already examined, required preliminary acquaintance with certain general features of the sensory world of animals, since it would have been impossible to ’build a bridge’ from the former to the latter without characterising them when we approached the problem of the origin of consciousness from the angle of natural history. So we disengaged ourselves from the very important circumstance that by S in the interaction S =?± N must be understood not a specimen of some species of animal taken separately, but a certain aggregate of the individuals making up that species, and finding themselves in vitally necessary intraspecific relations. Having, for brevity’s sake, designated the host of the animals of this species entering into interactions with one another by S: (s₁, s₂, ...s_n+1), we can say that the dyad £ ^t N in fact contains the relation S: (s_lt s₂, ... s_n+i) +* N, which includes the intraspecific relations of the individuals included in S.

p That means that we must make a very substantial amendment to what we said earlier about the sense reflection proper to animals, an amendment, moreover, that relates to the deepest sources of this reflection. It is a matter, first of all, of the instinct for self-preservation as an expression of a striving to preserve its integrity built into the animal organism. The absence of such a striving in them would lead to their life being impossible. But any one specimen taken 176 separately is unable permanently to resist operation of the law of entropy: sooner or later it will die, so that, if the instinct of self-preservation (for all its ‘blindness’) were reduced simply to the individual’s striving to maintain its own life, the species would simply die out. Continuation of the species’ life is achieved by the succession of generations, which calls for the reproduction of progeny. The instinct of self- preservation, consequently (while an expression of the integrity of the separate individual) must of necessity include a striving to continue its kind, to reproduce offspring, i.e. the sex instinct.

p The evolution of life led to a bifurcation of the single tree of life, and to its greater and greater ramification, including differentation of branches of highly organised species with a division of the sexes within them. But the dialectic of life is such that without the intercourse of individuals of opposite sex belonging to a species, without their meeting each other as their other, this branch of the tree of life would not yield fruit and would be doomed to die out. That fatal doom is very abstract and improbable, of course, if it is intraspecific relations, that are meant, provided we abstract the conditions of the species’ environment and habitat or, rather, provided that the state of the environment is presumed to be wholly conducive to continued reproduction of the species’ life.

p Given that condition there is no fatal dooming of life in practice even at the level of its preconscious form, because (1) life has preserved a possibility of asexual reproduction of species in some of its branches, and (2) the individuals of species with division into sexes are not represented simply by a single pair. In that case the life of individuals that have no offspring will be continued in other individuals of the species without danger of its extinction. The origin and evolution of human society led to a transformation of the relations of the individuals forming the species Homo sapiens, to a change in the external natural conditions themselves, and so on. We shall not touch here on the ecological problems that agitate those of the scientific public who think about the future of humankind in our age of scientific and technical revolution. For the purposes of our theme we would simply note that, with the development of rational reflection, the sex instinct could not help undergoing qualitative transformations, providing the basis for the gradual establishment of an elevated feeling of the love of men and women, a feeling 177 thai, is one of the generally recognised sources of creative inspiration.^^15^^

p The important fact for us here is thai Lho link between individuals of different sex of the species S: (s_l =»=* s₂) must, as a necessary condition of continuation of its existence, have been the ‘initial’ cellule of iulraspeciiic intercourse for species or organisms with division into sexes, a link dictated by the instinct of self-preservation (which includes the sex instinct). In highly organised animals the instinct to continue life is not simply reducible to the sex instinct, but also consists in care for the growing offspring and its training for independent life. In the course of the struggle for existence evolution also led to the rise of more or less permanent communities of individuals belonging to a species, in which a necessary condition for prolonging life was gregarious living (which increased chances in the struggle with dangerous enemies, in protecting the life of progeny, and so on). Among animals living a gregarious or herd way of life, the instinct to preserve life is manifested in an instinctive sense of gregariousness.

p The instinctive sense of self-preservation thus got a more or less differentiated form among highly developed animals in the course of evolution. The animal’s programme of instinctive behaviour is also supplemented and corrected by experience gathered during its life and developed on the principle of the formation of conditioned reflexes. But for all that, the instinct of self-preservation retains its wholeness, reflecting the inner wholeness of the individual organism as a self-regulating system. The herd made up of individuals has no other material substratum of the reflection of reality than the bodily organs of each of the individuals belonging to it, with their sensory apparatus, nervous system, etc.^^16^^ Differentiation of the wholeness (unity) of the instinct of selfpreservation, connected with the animal’s conditioned behaviour, therefore does not abrogate the thesis that the direct source of the wholeness of the animal’s perception of external phenomena is the wholeness of its organism.

p The herd is a more or less stable entity, a system in which each separate individual can be regarded as an element of the whole. Observations of the way of life of gregarious animals indicate that the herd is a system with a more or less strictly observed structural organisation that includes a certain division of functions among the members of the community, a hierarchy of subordination, and so on. The relation 178 of each separate individual to the environment, while remaining to some extent direct, is already mediated now by the relations within the herd of the individuals constituting it.

p The joint activity of the herd (as a certain whole of the individuals forming it), evoked by living necessity, gets the form, at the level of sense reflection, of an information link between its individuals. This link is realised through gestures, postures, secretion of odorous substances, sounds, etc., that have the character of signs or signals. As the structural organisation of the herd, and the relations both of the herd as a whole and each of its members with the environment became more complicated, so, too, must the system of information signals.

p In the scheme S. (s_u s₂ ...s_n+1) =<=*= -iV information signals can be divided into at least the following groups: (1) signals that carry information about relations between the individuals forming S, and (2) signals inform ng about events in the h3rd’s environment. The first group in ludes signals about the feelings of inner needs experienced by individuals (e.g. the male’s call intended for the female, the hunger cry of the young, and so on), and signals connected with preservation of the herd’s structure as an integral system (e.g. the leader’s threatening posture on the appearance of a rival making claims to a higher status in the herd hierarchy). The second group includes signals about an external danger threatening the members of the herd, about finding food, and so on. Analysis of the intraherd information link leads to conclusions that are interesting in many respects (a few of which we shall touch on here).

p The division of functions among the herd’s members leads, in particular, for example, to one or more members of the herd being on the look out for the external situations dangerous for it, while the other members are freed of this need and get the chance to go quietly ’about their business’, which can be interrupted by a danger signal from the sentinel, who functions in relation to each separate member as an intermediate link between it and the environment. The role of intermediate link between the young and the environment belongs to the parents, in particular, in the herd mode of life, and to the older generation in general. Until the members of the new generation achieve independence, the parents (older generation) are their direct source of obtaining the external material and energy resources needed to support 179 life (e.g. food), and at the same time the source of vitally necessary information about events in the external world, which is passed on from generation to generation.

p Allowing for that, let us return to examination of the relationship S -> M ->• N characteristic of rational beings (men). There are grounds for supposing that man’s ancestors led a joint, group form of life. The anthropoid apes of the end of the Tertiary Period that were his direct ancestors, like most modern primates, jointly exercised such vitally important functions as the gathering of food, defence against predators, etc.^^17^^ Man’s labour had a collective character from its very genesis, so that the definition of social animal is quite applicable to primitive man.

p Our simplified scheme S ->- M—> N can now be depicted in differentiated form as follows: S: (s_1; s₂, ... s_n)^-M: (TO!, m₂, ... m_n) ->- N. The relation of each separate individual to the environment is mediated here both by its relations with other individuals forming the society and with humanised nature. That qualitatively alters the information link between the members of the society. While with the connection S *±. N, information signals carried information about a direct sensually perceived fact, expressed the emotional state of the animal uttering the signal, or were signals for the action of the individuals constituting S, with S ->• ->• M -> N a signal carries information in addition about actuating the inner forces latent in mediator M. A sound signal, or some other, bearing information about the guess about the self-movement of M arising in the brains of hominids, became printed in a new, second signalling system, the first act in the origin of human speech. The signal became a word, signifying a concept.

p Having mentally ‘penetrated’ into an external thing M, man (as said above) also ‘penetrated’ mentally into his own inner world. Through naive spiritualising of objects of the environment he identified the environment with himself, on the one hand, but on the other, differentiated himself from the environment as a special, active, ‘spiritual’ force. The transfer of his own activity S to the self-movement of M was accompanied with a reverse transfer of the self- movement of M to the self-action of S. The force actuating mediator M is not a mediator but the first subsystem in the system S -> M -> N.

p With transfer of the relation S -> M -> TV to the field of men’s relations with one another other mediations became 180 possible, viz. S, =P± (S_z -»- M) -> A*, (S₂ -»- A/) =F* Sj -» TV, 5_X =F± S₂ -»- M -H- A, S₂ ->- Sj_ ->- TV, etc. The character of the information signals controlling men’s interaction was correspondingly altered. Just as their physical efforts which produced result R_a actuated tool M, and R_a was only an intermediate result on the way to R_b, the information signals of men’s joint activity, divided in separate functions, performed the role of trigger for performance of an intermediate operation by part of the group, or by its separate individuals, while at the same time carrying information about the expected end result of the whole group’s activity.^^18^^ It is much to the point to recall here what Engels said:

p First labour, after it and then with it speech—these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man.^^19^^

p Without a transition to use of mediator-tools’ in the conditions of the joint activity of forming men, a ’need to say something to one another’ could not have arisen in them. The origin and development of language are inseparable from the genesis and development of human society.

p The division of functions between the parts of a group in the course of joint activity led to men’s becoming each other’s mediators in the sphere of their relations with one another in their common interaction with the environment, playing the role of a kind of ‘tool’. When, for instance, some of the primitive community performed the function of beaters during a hunt, the result of their operations did not in itself coincide directly with the aim of the hunt; on the contrary it was directly opposed to it. The beaters, instead of catching the object of the hunt, frightened it away. They achieved only an intermediate result; the final result, coinciding with the aim of the hunt, fell to the other part of the community lying in ambush. The condition of successful organisation of the hunt was that the hunters had already ‘grasped’ in their heads the unity of the opposition of R_a and R_n as a unity and difference of means and ends.

p The possibility of extending mediated relations to the field of men’s relations with one another, i.e. social relations, signified an abstract possibility of converting one part of society into a tool to achieve the purposes of its other part. That this possibility became reality in time is demonstrated by the facts of the passage of society through the slave-owning socio-economic formation. Slaves, as is well known, were put on the same social footing as other tools, and were simply a 181 means for satisfying tho needs of the class ot slaveowners. The conversion of this possibility into reality, however, was not due to biological laws, but to the qualitatively different laws of the development of human society.

p We would also draw attention, within the context of this chapter, to the following aspect of our problem. Since the role of mediator M may not only belong to objects of animate and inanimate nature differentiated from S but may also be performed to some extent by the individuals constituting S in relation to one another, does it not follow that there are forms in the anima] kingdom of our planet in which a mediated relation to the environment like S_t—>—>- S₂—»- N arose in the course of evolution?

p If that is so, we could suggest the hypothesis that these animals have a faculty of reflecting reality not only at the direct sensory level but also at a level approaching man’s reflection of it. In fact relations of the type S—>- M ->• N and Si-^-S.} ->N, in spite of their difference, have a common aspect along with it that can be the basis in certain conditions for passage to a more complex level of psychic reflection of reality.

p This hypothesis, of course, requires the support of facts, which may be discovered in the course of further study of the way of life of highly organised animals. As regards dolphins, for example, there is evidence that they have a herd mode of life, and a division of certain functions within the school, with a lively exchange of information between the individuals in a ‘language’ still not comprehensible to people, and that the dolphin brain is highly developed, etc. But can dolphins act according to the scheme ^ -> S.₂—>- N in just the same way as is characteristic of the mechanism of interaction S—>- M—»- N considered above? We still do not have enough scientific evidence for a comprehensive answer.

p The main difficulty, apparently, as follows from our exposition, is to clarify whether a faculty could be formed in dolphins (or other animals) of ‘using’ one another mutually as a mediating link in relations with the environment in such a way that psychic ‘objectification’ of space/time relations in their brains would become possible, and on that basis an ideal reflection of the unity of the various results formed along the lines of ’If A, then B (through mediator M)’. We can limit ourselves here again simply to the hypothetical supposition that relations connected with the 182 peculiarities of the reproduction and training of progeny as a necessary element of continuation of the species’ life in the specific conditions of a herd (‘social’) way of life could have played a substantial role in establishing such a faculty.

p But, however it was, the practical power of human intellect, in spite of the supposed community of principles of the formation of thinking beings, cannot be compared in any way with the psychic capabilities of other highly developed animals, if only because man uses a very broad range of objects and forces of the environment as the mediating factor, including inanimate nature, which is inaccessible to the other living creatures inhabiting the earth.

p Along with development of man’s practical and cognitive activity, the real causes of the inner forces of interaction latent in nature were disclosed; primitive man’s naive spiritualising of natural objects gave way to a scientific explanation of the operation of objective laws, and myths yielded place to science. The working man was and is the primary productive force, because it is he who creates, by his labour, and brings into operation, the whole aggregate power of the instruments of labour that society disposes of at any stage of its development. But whether it is a matter of a simple spade or of a striding excavator, man does not affect the object of labour directly, but through a tool. It is the tool, as the material embodiment of the knowledge gained by him of the operation of objective laws, that performs the role of the direct force acting on the object of labour.

p The transition to labour with tools that determined the transition from ape to man, laid the basis at the same time for the rise of human society. As Engels wrote:

p a new element ... came into play with the appearance of fullyfledged man, namely society—And what do we find once more as the characteristic difference between the troupe of monkeys and human society? Labour.^^20^^

p The rise of human society was the factor without which, and outside which, the specifically human forms of passing on and accumulating experience of man’s cognitive and transforming activity from generation to generation, would have been impossible, and without which, in turn, the development of the separate human individual, too, as a rational creature capable of reflecting reality in ideas, would have been impossible,

p We shall pass to an examination of the problems of the social character of human experience in the next chapter.

183

p Notes to Chapter 7

p  ^^1^^ As to the different meanings given to the term ’ metaphysics’, see note 4 to Chapter 1.

p  ^^2^^ Ludwig Feuerbach. The Essence of Christianity. Translated by George Eliot (Harper & Row, New York, 1957), p. XXXV.

p  ^^3^^ Karl Marx. Theses on Feuerbach. In Karl Marx and Frederick^j Engels. Collected Works, Vol. 5 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976), p. 4.

p  ^^4^^ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964), p. 50.

p  ^^5^^ Ibid., pp. 57-58.

p  ^^6^^ Karl Marx. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977), p. 205.

p  ^^7^^ Ibid., p. 206.

p  ^^8^^ Ibid.

p  ^^9^^ See Lenin’s conspectus of Hegel’s The Science of Logic in his Philosophical Notebooks (Collected Works, Vol. 38), p. 171.

p ^lu V. I. Lenin. What the ’Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats. Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977), p. 142.

p  ^^11^^ The material form of fixed capital does not consist solely of tools, but also of other implements of labour ( production buildings, canals, roads, etc.). But since tools have a definite role in the means of labour, we have referred exclusively to them for sake of brevity. This is all the more justified, because Marx, when speaking of other means of the labour process, stressed that ’these do not enter directly into the process’ (Capital, Vol. 1. Translated by Samuel. Moore and Edward Aveling. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974, p. 176).

p  ^^12^^ F. Engels. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1968), p. 98.

p  ^^13^^ Karl Marx. Economic Manuscripts of 1844. Collected Works. Vol. 3 (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1975), p. 276.

p  ^^14^^ Karl Marx. Theses on Feuerbach. Translated by Roy Pascal. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. Op. cit. p. 199.

p  ^^15^^ The formation and development of relations between the sexes in human society has been the subject of many disputes from ancient times to our own day. Engels paid 184 much attention to it in his The Origin of the b amily, Private Property and the State. In spite of the fact that this question goes far beyond the limits of our theme, I would like to draw attention to some elements that have a direct bearing on it. It has been found that one of the most important attributes of the primordial clan was the custom of exogamy, i.e. a ban on marital relations within the clan. The reasons for the commonness of this custom among primitive tribes are far from clear, but several different hypotheses have been advanced (see A. I. Perschitz, A. L. Mongait, and V. P. Alexeev. Istoriya pervobytnogo obshchestva (History of Primitive Society), Vysshaya shkola, Moscow, 1974, pp. 74-79). When this matter is examined as an aspect of the initial logical scheme ’If A, then B (through mediator M)’, we can suggest that the custom grew up in the common channel of the features of reflection of reality in mythological thought. The transition to mediated conceptual reasoning required the involvement of a certain mediator to unite the different sides of reality, laying a ban on their direct, unmediated union. Since the differences between the sexes had already found reflection in primitive consciousness, the rules for the ‘joining’ of the opposite sexes in a marital union were not, it would seem, an exception. In any case the origin of notions of a dual organisation consisting of a combination of only two exogamous groups fits fully into the rules for creating mediating representations in general. The notion of the marital union of two exogamous groups A and B comes close to fulfilling the role of imaginary mediator M in relations between the sexes. The union, by performing the role of intermediate link M, provided the opportunity to establish an interconnection between each woman of group A and each man of group B in full correspondence with the rules of logic of the primitive way of thought, even when the notion of marital union related to notions about fantastic mediators. The retention of imaginary fantastic mediators for the mental establishment of a connection between phenomena that in fact have no mediating character continues to serve as a source, albeit in transformed form, of the persistence of superstitions down to our own time.

p  ^^16^^ It must be noted that there was nothing supernatural about the evolution of life leading to the formation of certain entity of individuals that had in addition to individual 185 organs for perceiving, storing, arid processing information, another special ‘collective’ organ of a similar kind, whose material substratum is the whole aggregate of the individuals themselves operating as individual, specialised cells of a single organism. Such views have been expressed, for example, about the bee family. There would have to be some sort of material substratum as well in any form of such ‘telepathic’ connections, however, if such actually existed, as their vehicle, uniting the aggregate of the separate individuals into a single whole.

p  ^^17^^ See A. I. Perschitz, A. L. Mongait, V. P. Alexeev. Op.

p at., p. 39.

p  ^^18^^ Use of the second signaling system to regulate the joint activities of the members of a primitive collective group went hand in hand with mental transfer of the triggering action that the word had on people as well to objects of the environment. That also followed from people’s naive animistic identification of external objects as ‘inspired’ beings. It is possible that the roots of the origin of every kind of magical incantation, and primitive belief in the supernatural force of the word, capable of ’moving mountains’, are hidden in that circumstance.

 ^^19^^ Frederick Engels. Dialectics of Nature (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976), p. 174.

20 

Ibid., p. 175.

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