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p One can say, without fear of exaggeration, that there is no trend in the history of philosophy in any way significant that raises problems of the relation between the sensory and rational elements in knowledge, which has not linked their solution with unfolding of the concept of experience. As our book is devoted to just those problems, we are justified in attempting a special examination of the character of the content embodied in the concept of experience.^^1^^

p Despite the diversity of definitions in the literature (the aggregate of sensations and perceptions fixed in memory; direct contemplation of the object of knowledge; an aggregate of abilities, habits, and skills; exploratory experimental activity; the ways and means of practical or cognitive activity; the functional invariant of a self-regulating system, etc.), we may note that most writers who make a special examination of the problems of experience their business, or who just touch on them in some connection or other, are agreed at least in one respect, namely, in defining the place they give to experience. This place is the field of man’s relations with the world around him or, when it is limited to the epistemological aspect, to the relation between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge. The very fact of his relating experience to that field puts us right in the middle of the acute struggle that has been waged for centuries between the two opposing camps in philosophy, i.e. between materialists and idealists. ’We know from the history of philosophy,’ Lenin wrote, ’that the interpretation of the concept “experience” divided the classical materialists from the 187 idealists.’ ^^2^^ Since this concept relates to the description of relations between the understanding and the understood aspects, exposure of its content depends on a correct position when answering the basic question of philosophy.

p When materialists consistently defend the monist principle of the primacy of matter and the secondary character of consciousness, they conclude that man understands and employs objective laws, independent of consciousness, in his practical interaction with the environment, and that the experience accumulated during this interaction not only has a subjective character but also includes an objective content independent of consciousness. Advocates of idealistic monism, in spite of the many, often substantial divergences between them, consider that some ideal substance underlies the universe and that the aim of knowledge (when it is at all accessible to any extent to people) is understanding of the spiritual basis. The position is not altered in principle in that respect whether the basis is personified, or is thought of as an impersonal absolute idea, or is represented as some undefinable subject that ‘constructs’ all the rest of the world from its Ego.

p The repeated attempts to reconcile these two opposing philosophical views that have been made with the best intentions, and have made claims to impartial scientific analysis, have inevitably ended in failure, and will continue to do so. We know from the history of philosophy that they have been undertaken, in particular, in the form of a counterposing another starting point to the monist outlook of both materialists and idealists, that recognises the existence of two principles rather than one at the basis of the universe, namely, material and ideal. But the dualist (or pluralist) philosophical conceptions have not stood up to criticism, revealing an inherent, inner lack of co-ordination and a logical inconsistency when explaining phenomena of nature, society, and thought.

p Materialist monism has been attacked from other positions as well. The offensive acquired a particularly broad scale at the turn of the century, and has continued down to our day, regardless of the defeats suffered. Its adherents are united by views that have both class and epistemological roots. A characteristic feature of it is an attempt to replace the philosophical categories of matter and consciousness by a category of experience, advancing it epistemologically to the foreground.

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p As the sphere of the subject of understanding’s relations to the object experience is often made an absolute to the extent that not only is the opistemological opposition of the categories of matter and consciousness explained as superfluous, but the parties of the cognitive process, subject and object, are often merged and disappear from the field of view. Spokesmen of this trend examine only the sphere in which subject and object are directly in contact. They claim, moreover, that this opens up a possibility of constructing philosophical systems that are superior to materialism and idealism, and that the monist views of materialists (and for sake of ‘objectivity’ those of frank idealists) are replaced by a ’philosophy of experience’, or some more perfected ’ neutral’ monism. Employing Bertrand Russell’s graphic comparison, we can say that experience in this sense is like a razor that has been honed so much that nothing is left of it.

p Lenin gave a brilliantly penetrating and theoretically deep criticism, in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, of attempts to replace the category of matter by that of experience in its Machian sense, and showed that the interpretation of experience as ’a set of sensations’, in spite of the use of new words, was only a rehash of old subjective idealist themes and that claims to have created a ‘median’ line in philosophy meant to take over from materialism and idealism were in fact attempts to confirm the dominance of philosophical idealism under a ‘neutral’ flag.

p What Lenin said about Machists is still of incontestable value in the struggle against the latest forms of idealism that disguise themselves under various fashionable labels. Along with frank, undisguised anti-communism (the main weapon of imperialist propaganda), philosophical works still have a leading place in our ideological opponents’ arsenal that develop the idea, in the guise of overcoming the onesidedness of both materialism and idealism, that the basic theses of dialectical materialism are either outmoded or in any case dubious. There are now not so very many open adherents of ‘pure’ idealism among modern Western philosophers who want to be taken seriously. On the contrary, most of those who are recognised authorities in the development of present-day Western philosophical thought, very likely consider it too superficial or simplified to class their philosophical systems as idealist, though many of them do not object to classing them as realist, and themselves moreover count their conceptions as realist. Western philosophers do 189 hot, as a rule, accept the principle of dialectical materialism that the main grounds for classing any thinker in a certain philosophical trend is primarily his attitude to the basic problem of philosophy.

p Lenin drew attention to the fact that the word ‘realism’ was soiled by positivists and other muddleheads who wavered between the materialists and idealists. In order to be counted an adherent of certain ‘realist’ theories, it was considered sufficient to recognise the existence of any ideas, concepts, experiences, etc., as independent substances. Since any fallacy, illusion, dream, or statement is given to us in our consciousness, it can be interpreted from that standpoint as no different in principle from objects and processes of the objective world that exist outside and independent of consciousness. The very unwillingness of many Western philosophers to be classed as idealists is quite symptomatic, and is indirect confirmation of the influence of the ideas of dialectical and historical materialism on the development of society. In the age of mankind’s passage from capitalism to socialism, and in the period of rapid development of science and engineering, frank idealism is losing its effectiveness in many respects in the struggle against a scientific,^ materialist world outlook.

p When we have the epistemological aspect of the matter in mind, the concept of experience used to be treated in the Soviet philosophical literature mainly in studies aimed at criticising the idealist employment of it. The number of works devoted to the special problem of experience was very small. That was due, to some extent, to the concept of experience (and of realism as well) having been discredited by philosophical schools hostile to Marxism-Leninism. That, however, did not mean that little attention was paid in the Soviet literature to phenomena related to the sphere of experience. Its problems were examined, for example, and still are, on the plane of bringing out the content of the category of practice.

p There are certain grounds for this approach. In MarxistLeninist philosophy practice, of course, is given a decisive place as a criterion of truth, and as the basis, source, and aim of knowledge. Practice, like experience, belongs to the sphere of man’s interaction with the world around him. But the close intermingling of the concepts of practice and experience that stem from that still does not mean that they are identical. The view that they reflect different though 190 interconnected aspects of man’s transforming and cognitive activity, is more correct. Further study of the problems of experience in the general theory of knowledge still presents interest because it can lead to a deepening of views of the category of practice in its dialectical materialist understanding.

p We do not operate with the concept of experience simply in the theory of knowledge, of course. It has a significant place in sociology and other sciences. The experience of the socialist revolution in Russia, which laid the basis for practical realisation of the ideal of a truly just society, and the experience of building communism in the USSR and other countries of the socialist community have enormous significance for the nations of the whole world.

p Further study of the problems of experience in connection with its role in understanding the laws of the evolution of nature, society, and thought, and refining of the concept ‘experience’ of the idealist distortions compromising it, so that it would occupy its place in the strict system of dialectical materialist epistemology, are of the greatest theoretical importance, in our view, the more so because Western ideologists are employing this concept today to give their philosophical conceptions an appearance of objectivity and impartiality.

p On the historical and philosophical plane problems of experience have usually been treated together with those of the interconnection of the sensory and rational aspects of knowledge. That frees us from any need to make a further digression into its history, because all the antinomies of empiricism and rationalism, which seemed insurmountable for metaphysical materialism and various forms of idealism, can be fully extended to solution of the problems of experience when we tackle the question of the interconnection of the sensory and rational aspects of knowledge.

p We must remember, however, that idealist absolutising of the sensory aspect of knowledge led to conceptions of subjective idealism that reduced the whole material world to elements of sense experience (Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius, pragmatists, and some contemporary neopositivists). In his definition of experience John Dewey, for example, in spite of his attempts to dissociate himself from extreme forms of subjective idealism, came essentially to conclusions that coincided completely with Avenarius’ thesis about the ’principled co-ordination of the Ego and non-Ego’. Dewey invested the 191 concept of expurieuco with a content that blurred the difference between malter arid consciousness. He wrote that there was no need to oppose experience and nature, sense data and things, subject and object, consciousness and matter, the psychic and the physical, and that experience

p denotes both the field, the sun and clouds and rain, seeds, and harvest, and the man who labors, who plans, invents, uses, suffers and enjoys. Experience denotes what is experienced, the world of events and persons; and it denotes the world caught up into experiencing, the career and destiny of mankind.^^3^^

p His final conclusion thus contained a tautology: experience was defined through experience. One can fully apply the words Lenin addressed to Avenarius to such a definition: ’Experience is experience. And there are people who take this quasi-erudite rigmarole for true wisdom!’^^4^^

p Making the sensory aspect of knowledge an absolute does not save one from subjective idealist errors in interpretation of the concept of experience, even when collective, socially organised experience is taken as the starting point for it, rather than the experience of the single subject taken separately. A. A. Bogdanov made such an attempt, considering the concept ’socially organised experience’ a fundamental one of philosophy.^^6^^ He continued to develop that point of view with certain inessential reservations even after the appearance of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in which the conception was subjected to sharp criticism as subjective idealism.

p What was ’socially organised experience’ in distinction from individual experience? Bogdanov replied as follows. When a single subject identified objective reality with what he saw and heard in a given case, he might be mistaken. But if other people said to him: ’Yes, we see and hear what you do’, i.e. if his experience and theirs agreed, were socially organised, then he was dealing with real objects and objective physical phenomena. If, on the contrary, they said that what he asked about did not exist for them, then it was clear that his experience was only ‘subjective’ in that case, only psychic, an illusion or hallucination.^^6^^

p The fallaciousness of Bogdanov’s initial positions, which was rooted in an idealist solution of the main question of philosophy, put its stamp on his subsequent development of the conception of ’universal organised science’, which he called ‘tectology’. His subjectivism showed itself, in particular, in attempts to put the ’universal organised 192 science’ (whose founder he considered himself to be) above philosophy in general and Marxist-Leninist philosophy in particular.

p The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, guided by the theory of scientific communism, attaches enormous significance, we know, to the scientific organisation of labour arid scientific organisation of the national economy. The very possibility, moreover, of scientific guidance of social development, according to Marxist-Leninist theory, can only be realised insofar as it is based on understanding of the objective laws of social development, which are independent of consciousness, and on the practical replacing of capitalist social relations by socialist ones that open the road to planned, proportional development of the economy free from the spontaneous upheavals inherent in the economy of monopoly capitalism. ’Socially organised experience’ in Bogdanov’s sense, had nothing in common with the position of historical materialism about the objective character of the operation of the laws of social development. History provides many examples of views shared by an absolute majority of people that ultimately turned out to be false, and not to correspond with objective reality. Suffice it to mention the views of the earth accepted at one time as an immobile flat surface.

p Interpretation of the concept of experience from the standpoint of idealist rationalism has proved no less mistaken. In that connection we would dwell in rather more detail on Hegel’s approach to the definition of experience, because it was the first attempt to unfold this concept from the standpoint of the dialectical method. Hegel’s views on experience were most fully expressed in his The Phenomenology of Mind, which Karl Marx called ’the true point of origin and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy’.^^7^^ Hegel himself called the phenomenology of mind the science of experience of consciousness.^^8^^

p The objectively idealist point of view that Hegel based his system on, and both the weak and the strong sides of his method, also completely affected his development of the concept of experience, which he deduced from the movement of consciousness. Consciousness set itself an aim that it strove to attain (viz., knowledge). In the course of realising its aim it discovered that the result achieved did not coincide with the proposed aim, and that knowledge of the object differed from the object of knowledge. From that there followed a need to compare the desired results with 193 those obtained, to correlate knowledge as the set aim with the result of the knowledge attained. According to Hegel, this process, inherent in consciousness, took place without any outside interference, without training, instruction, or other help.

p From each such comparison consciousness emerged different than it was initially, and altered its subject matter; it moreover believed that the object of knowledge existed outside consciousness and independently of it, but this belief did not correspond to the truth because, in fact (as Hegel thought), the understood object was consciousness’s own object. But since consciousness did not know about that, the comparison was made unconsciously, consequently the change in its point of view, and the rise of its new subject matter, also proceeded unconsciously. That continued until consciousness finally discovered that the object of knowledge was its own knowledge of the object. This transformation of views about the object as a process of comparing the desired with the attained also constituted what Hegel called experience.

p This dialectic process which consciousness executes on itself— on its knowledge as well as on its object—in the sense that out of it the new and true object arises, is precisely what is termed Experienced

p Instead of seeing the subjective reflection of objectively existing objects in this category, Hegel himself converted them into moments of consciousness. He regarded man’s real, practical, transforming activity as spiritually abstract, and took the development of concepts for the development of objective reality itself. He therefore, in spite of a number of profound remarks, came on the whole to an incorrect definition of experience methodologically, as well as regards content.

p Attempts to reduce human experience exclusively to direct sense experience, or to the experience of consciousness, contradict the materialist outlook on the world. But, right down to the rise of Marxism, the materialism that preceded it could not bring out the essence of human activity, and at the same time of human experience. Francis Bacon, the great English materialist, for example, employed the concept of experience to fight scholastics in order to develop the inductive method of knowledge. He compared dogmatists who denied sense experience, and arrived at their systems by speculation, figuratively to spiders, and their systems 194 to spiders’ webs. At the same time he saw the unsatisfactory nature of reducing experience simply to sense perception of facts. He called advocates of pure empiricism ants, and the results of their studies anthills, in which various facts were piled up higgledy-piggledy. For him the real scientist was like a bee, who not only gathered nectar from flowers but also converted it into honey. At the same time, he himself understood experience even more narrowly as experiment, observation, a ‘trying’ of nature.

p When the eighteenth century French materialists analysed man’s relation with the external world, they assigned a great role to experience. Diderot, for example, wrote:

p We have three principal means: observation of nature, reflection, and experience. Observation gathers the facts, reflection combines them, experience verities the result of the combination.^^10^^

p Although he stressed its practical direction in this definition of experience, he understood it even more narrowly as experiment. The French materialist enlighteners could not bring out the social, historical character of practice.

p Feuerbach’s approach to the description of experience was also not wholly consistent. While exposing speculative philosophy, which separat.d consciousness from the sensory, material basis, he at the same time did not understand the transforming role of man’s practical activity, and exaggerated the significance of direct sensory activity as genuine truth in a one-sided manner.

p N. G. Chernyshevsky came very close to a dialectical materialist conception of the practical side of activity and its connection with the sensory and intellectual sides.

p Practice (he wrote) is the great exposer of deception and selfdeception not only in practical matters but also in matters of feeling and thought.^^11^^

p Karl Marx, speaking of the difference between his own theory and the views of preceding materialists, wrote:

p The chief defect of all materialism up to now (including Feuerbach’s) is, that the object, reality, what we apprehend through our senses, is understood only in the form of the object or contemplation’, but nol as sensuous human activity, as practice; not subjectively. Hence in opposition to materialism the ac• live side was developed abstractly by idealism—which of course does not know real sensuous activity as such.^^12^^

p Men are not passive contemplators of the world around them. Without their subjective real activity, directed to 195 mastering material and energy resources of the environment so as to maintain and prolong the life of the human species, mankind could not exist. Underlying human activity is labour, mediated activity in the course of which men come to an understanding and application of the objective regularities and patterns of the environment. The individual, moreover, is not an isolated subject but a social being who belongs to a certain socio-economic formation.

p Since man’s subjective activity has an objective content, his subjective experience must also have such. Experience is possible because it is objective laws, independent of consciousness, that man knows arid applies. Lenin criticised Plekhanov’s mistake, which took the form of an uncritical attitude to the definition of experience given by the empiriocritic Carstanjen as an object of investigation and not a means of knowledge, since the object of knowledge could not have an objective content.^^13^^

p The thesis of the objective content of experience is generally accepted in the Soviet literature. But since the task of drawing a distinct line between the concepts of experience and activity has not been posed, the term ‘experience’ is used in various senses, signifying one aspect or another of activity or characterising socio-historical practice as a whole. In fact, however, people distinguish the following three moments of experience, in spite of all the variety of its aspects: (1) it is sensuous activity, because man is part of the animate world; (2) it functions as practical activity, labour, mediated by objects; (3) it is the activity of man as a being capable (in contrast to animals) of conceptual thought, as a subject possessing a certain stock of knpwledge. It is used, respectively, in three senses in the main, in accordance with the aspects of activity mentioned above: (1) sense experience; (2) practical experience; (3) experience expressed in the aggregate of accumulated knowledge (which can be arbitrarily called theoretical knowledge). Other senses of the term (observation, experiment, skill or practical knowledge, everyday experience, etc.) are only derivatives of these main meanings.

p The use of ‘experience’ in various meanings is quite justified, since it refers to the really different properties and relations of the object of investigation signified by the word. The subject of a statement may have various predicates, but when we are talking about the different properties and relations of one arid the same object (in this case experience), 196 then the broader definition, embracing all the previously expressed partial definitions in a general form, is just as justified. If there is sense experience, practical experience, theoretical experience, we can speak of experience in general, experience ’taken out of the brackets’, experience in the broad sense of the word. In that case the term will describe man’s attitude to the objective world as that of a sensuous subject capable of practical activity and possessing consciousness. In order to signify the unity of the sensuous, practical, and theoretical moments of experience, of course, we could introduce some other term, but the word ’ experience’ quite successfully reflects all these moments taken together.^^14^^

p Since human activity has a mediated character, this character must be carried into human experience. We said above, that the passage to labour meant the development of the tool as a mediator between man and the environment, which is an objective determinant governing the rise of a subjective faculty for creating mediating representations, and so the transition from direct sense reflection of reality to rational reflection of it. The mediating link is an inner contradiction containing a unity of opposites.

p The contradictoriness of human activity, incidentally, is that man himself, on the one hand, makes changes in the environment by his physical efforts and the operations of his organs, and on the other hand actuates mediator objects that are not natural organs of the human organism and that affect natural objects in accordance with their characteristics reflected in the human brain in ideal, conceptual form. People perform mental operations in addition to bodily ones. The former consist in the formation of concepts, and in operating with them according to certain rules. Man’s activity is thus a certain unity of bodily, physical, and mental actions. In other words, subjective human activity is, on the one hand, sensuous, material activity, practical activity directed to external objects as ones opposing the subjective Ego; on the other hand, it is mental, cognitive activity without an ounce of matter in it (in the sense, for example, that there is really not an atom of matter in the concept ‘food’ capable of satisfying the natural need for food).

p The unity of the sensuous and rational aspects of human activity thus functions here as a unity of its practical and cognitive sides. While the practical aspect of activity as 197 a process of the subject’s interaction with the environment finds outward expression mainly in the transformation of external objects, the mental, cognitive aspect is outwardly objectified in language. Accordingly specifically human experience is outwardly objectified in two main, opposite forms that can be called concrete and abstract.

p The concrete form in regard to productive activity is ‘humanised’ nature, i.e. all the objects, forces, and processes that are transformed by labour and put to man’s use. Man cannot thereby abolish or alter the objective character of the laws of nature, but he can only create conditions whereby these laws, which exist independently of consciousness, operate in a direction needed by him and lead to desired results. This can also be called the object form. In the whole variety of the world of objects that man has surrounded himself with, tools, the principal ‘humanised’ object mediating his relations with external nature, occupy the main place.

p The concrete form has a qualitative determinacy. The quantitative difference functions here as a quantity of a certain quality. We can make 100 standard lathes, for example, or 1000 more or less identical microscopes, and so on. But any lathe will differ from any microscope precisely in its qualitative definiteness, even when both are made of the same materials; a microscope will not cut metal parts, and you cannot see very small objects invisible to the naked eye through a lathe. Qualitative determinacy consists in an endless number of concrete forms, each possessing only its inherent quality, and incapable of being commensurated from that aspect with any other.

p The abstract form of the objectifying of experience is a sign system, language. In contradistinction to the concrete form the abstract one is characterised by its quantitative determinacy; the qualitative difference functions here as the quality of a definite quantity. Knowledge of the laws of the creation and operation of various machines, instruments, etc., can be expressed in the sign system in spite of the fact that they have a host of concrete forms.

p As the abstract form of the objectification of experience, language is not only the means of people’s living intercourse but is also the storehouse of accumulated knowledge, the concentration of information. Language, considered from the angle of the form of expression of experience, has a universality as regards the concrete means of its manifestation, 198 and is treated here as language in general. From that aspect, it is a matter of indifference, as regards a certain piece of knowledge, whether it is formulated, at the moment it is expressed, in Russian words, or English, or those of some other specific language, in the language of figures, or of blueprints, or of the coded tapes used in computers. Language, as an abstract or universal form of expression of experience, consequently has only one property, which Marx and Engels called the direct reality of thought, practical, real consciousness.

p We would also note that language is treated here not from the standpoint of the national form of culture (which is also very important), but precisely as the abstract, universal form of expression of experience. If different languages did not contain this moment of universality, it would be impossible to translate from one into another. We would be unable, moreover, to decode the writing found in excavations, of ancient, extinct nations whose language disappeared long ago. This property of the universality of language contains an objective possibility of forming a single universal language of world communist society in the more or less distant future.

p By being objectified in concrete and abstract forms experience acquires an independence in relation to each person but, having become real for other people, it also becomes real for the individual subject and is manifested as an inner property of the individual. Experience must therefore be regarded not only in the forms of the object but also subjectively.

p While the concrete form of experience is displayed outwardly in objects made by man, it is expressed subjectively in the human organism’s capacity to perform certain bodily operations so as to transform objects of external nature into objects made by man.

p As man became differentiated from the animal kingdom through labour, his physical organisation itself was perfected, in particular his hands as specifically human organs for the performance of these operations. This faculty can be called mastery or skill.

p The subject’s capacity to retain concepts expressed in language in his memory, and to perform mental operations, corresponds to the external, abstract form of experience, i.e. language. In contrast to the concrete form of his experience, which can be put into the words ’he knows how’, 199 the universal form will correspond to the words ’he knows’, and his capacity itself, in this respect, can be called knowledge. From the subjective aspect experience is defined as a unity of both these elements, i.e. a unity of ab lity or skill and knowledge.

p While the concrete and the abstract forms of experience are outwardly a unity of opposites, from the internal, subjective aspect they are an interpenetrating identity of opposites: viz., ability (skill) is denned through knowledge and knowledge through ability.

p Ability (skill) is practical knowledge of things, isolated knowledge of how to perform a concrete operation, knowledge limited by the bounds only of the object. Being limited by the object, ability (isolated knowledge) logically negates itself as knowledge in its development, because it ha? nothing more to know than the object it already knows. Knowledge of the concrete logically appears in this moment as ability from which knowledge has been dialectically sublated.

p But in negating itself as knowledge only of a concrete object, knowledge is thus liberated from the shackles of the object binding it. Here we have the negation of the negation, the transition of knowledge or a concrete object to knowledge of another concrete object.

p As a result knowledge of the concrete now appears as the possibility of concrete knowledge of a host of objects each of which differs qualitatively from the others. This logic of the dialectical development of ability is only the subjective reflection of the real relation of the subject to the object, a relation that really exists in every person’s everyday life.

p Since ability as isolated knowledge is limited to the context only of a given concrete operation, the process of the activity in which it is realised is a constant repetition of this operation. Ability functions here as a definite skill, as the art of performing this operation acquired in the course of the repeated activity. During its perfection knowledge of the concrete is more and more dissolved, and the skill is transformed into a habit.

p Habit, as a properly of the subject, is an ability from which knowledge of the concrete is dialectically sublated. Acting by habit a person performs a certain operation automatically, as if consciousness were asleep, switched off as regards the habitual course of the action. Consciousness awakes here when the habitual course of the action is 200 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1985/EMT239/20090802/239.tx" disturbed, but is switched on then precisely because the habitual has ceased for some reason to be habitual. Everyone knows that feature of habit from his own experience.

p For a worker, stationed, for example, at a conveyor belt, to be able to screw on a required part, he must know how to do so in practice. Constantly screwing on one and the same part during the movement of the conveyor he becomes skilled in performing the operation, which develops into a habitual action. He begins to screw the part on automatically, without making any mental effort.

p The concept of habit is contradictory. It contains in itself, on the one hand, the sublation of consciousness, the possibility of converting a person into an automatic appendage of a machine, and on the other hand, the possibility of freeing consciousness from the confines of a given operation shackling it, and of passing from knowledge of one object to knowledge of others.

p The habit of performing a certain operation frees the worker’s consciousness of the need to control each movement of his hands. While working at the necessary speed he can listen to music, think about things that have no direct relation to his operation, and so on. He is thus mentally freed from the oppressive monotony of his activity without harm to its results, but that liberation is only an illusory freeing of consciousness from the narrow confines of the given concrete operation. It contains the possibility in itself of passing from knowledge of how to perform the concrete operation to new knowledge of the concrete, but in an abstract form.

p The fact that such a liberation of consciousness can take place in man himself has very important, practical significance in life. If man were unable, through habit, to divert his attention from conscious control of each of his purposive aets during his activity, his mental capacities would be almost wholly expended on performance of those movements. A pianist, for example, would have to give all his attention to knowing how, at each moment, to place one finger and not another on a certain key. Such a player would never rise to inspired mastery of execution, and would always remain at the level of a beginner.

p Ability (know-how) is thus determined as an aspect of experience, from the subjective standpoint, through knowledge of a concrete object. The object is treated subjectively as the activity of an individual limited by the context of 201 a definite concatenation of movements, while knowledge appears as the subject’s capacity for a given concrete activity, for performing a certain range of bodily, physical operations. The liberation of consciousness through habit from the narrow confines of a concrete operation contains in itself a transition from know-how as individual knowledge of a given concrete object to another isolated knowledge, to knowledge of a multiplicity of specificities, each qualitatively different from the other. This transition contains a possibility of inferring general knowledge inductively from isolated knowledge, and determining knowledge through know-how. Knowledge is ‘abstract’ know-how, ability to operate with concepts, the aggregate and content of which have been given to man by his preceding phylogenetic and ontogenetic development.

p In the process of reasoning the subject establishes a link between concepts as his own concepts, and comes to conclusions that he considers true. At that point know-how negates itself in general as ability, because it knows how to do everything that it knows and there is nothing more for it to know how to do. The truth achieved at that stage of rational subjective activity is formal, final truth. Knowledge is then manifested as dogma, is closed in on itself, and rejects any new phenomena going beyond the confines of the abstract truth achieved.

p But since truth is final truth here, further development cannot help leading to its negation qua truth. Knowledge— ‘abstract’ know-how—is emancipated from formal truthfulness in that negation. It passes into concrete know-how, which no longer contains the truth as formal truth, but as actual truth. This dialectical, logical transition contains a subjective reflection of the real fact of the transition from abstract thinking to practice in the course of which new knowledge is obtained that is employed in turn for the further development of practice, and so on.

p Take, for example, the architect. When designing a building he creates his mentally visualised image of it. By making the necessary calculations he satisfies himself about the correctness of one of the variants, and the future building is given expression in symbolic form, in blueprints, specifications, etc., as a completely finished structure. But this structure is only completed verbally. Any number of such buildings can be built mentally, but actually erected buildings will not be got thereby, and the correctness of the 202 calculations made will not be confirmed in practice. The architect’s confidence in the correctness of his calculations must be embodied in practical erection of the designed building. When it is built, people will be convinced of the validity of the project, and get practical experience of erecting such a structure, on which they will be able to rely when designing a new, better building.

p The unity of skill or know-how and knowledge with the former reduced to habit and the latter to formal truth can be called everyday experience or ordinary common sense. Some writers are inclined to reduce the whole concept of experience to just this one moment of it. Such an interpretation is given, for example, in the book of the American positivist Philipp Frank, Philosophy of Science.^^1^^**

p The level of knowledge and mastery attained by society at a given level of its development is socially consolidated in everyday experience. It is that which constitutes both its great strength and its weakness. It bears the stamp of conservatism; taken by itself it means the end of development, and endless marking time in one place. What seems habitual and true from the angle of everyday experience reveals its incompleteness in the course of further understanding and practical use of objective laws, and is a deceptive appearance that does not correspond with the facts of new experience. Karl Marx aptly said of this, in connection with the description of the laws of economic life that he had discovered:

p This seems paradox and contrary to everyday observation. It is also paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.^^16^^

p In the course of the development of knowledge we discover not only the incompleteness of earlier established notions but also their erroneousness. The contradiction of everyday experience lies in its reflection in concepts of positive and negative experience. The latter is not reducible to mistakenness as such, or to ignorance. In this case experience is not a mistake or ignorance but knowledge of the mistake and ability to avoid it.

p While the abstract form of the expression of experience outwardly functions in the form of language, it is subjectively expressed in man’s capability of creating concepts and operating with them. Just as the organs of man’s body were 203 perfected in the course of his historical becoming (in particular his hands as a specifically human organ for performing physical acts), so the nervous system, too, was perfected, in particular the brain as a specifically human organ for performing mental actions.

p In the same way as know-how leads in its development to new knowledge, so the development of knowledge leads to new know-how. Truly human activity is that in which experience is realised in a unity of ability and knowledge, i.e. in a unity of the concrete and abstract aspects. This is as much object activity as rational activity. If all the people composing a society concentrated exclusively on the object side of activity, the society would lose its human property. The people would be turned into robots, into an ant-like crowd of unthinking creatures producing and reproducing one and the same set of objects with an automatic rhythm. On the other hand, a society could not exist, all members of which concerned themselves exclusively with mental activity, because they would produce nothing except their own thoughts in that case.

p In society, regarded as a single whole, there are always the object and mental sides of activity in their unity. The activity in which the concrete aspect of experience is realised appears as material or physical labour. The external object of such labour is the production of material things, and the subjective object, perfection of the organs of the body, mainly the hands, and of certain operations to alter the external object. The activity in which the abstract aspect of experience is realised is spiritual, or mental labour. The external object of this labour is the word, language as the direct activity of thought, while the subjective object is the creation of concepts and operating with them.

p When society is regarded as a whole, and only one sphere of its activity is taken (true, the main one, viz., the production of material wealth), the objective laws present themselves as laws of nature external to man, while man’s relations with nature in the process of understanding and practically employing those laws are part of the definition of the productive forces of society. Experience is manifested here as a unity of a certain sum of knowledge and a certain level of know-how realised through the joint labour of people. Experience finds its expression in this activity in the workers’ degree of mastery and their skills in performing the labour operations, on Llie one hand, and on the other, in 204 corresponding knowledge of the process of labour activity that they perform.

p Specifically human qualities acquired as a result of centuries of development are concentrated and preserved in experience. The material wealth produced by man for consumption in fact ends its life together with consumption. Food is eaten, clothing wears out, coal is burned, raw materials are converted into a finished product that, in turn, is also consumed in one way or another. Even machine tools, structures, housing become useless with time and drop out of further use. This whole ’world of commodities’ is constantly arising and disappearing, and will, endlessly, while mankind exists. The individual, too, is not eternal; time passes and he dies. The old generation gives way to a new one. But human experience lives eternally and is developed in the human world.

p In his Theories of Surplus-Value Karl Marx summarised as follows the view of Ricardo’s follower, the English economist and publicist, Thomas Hodgskin, who defended the interests of the proletariat and criticised capitalism from a standpoint of Utopian socialism:

p ... the accumulation of the skill and knowledge (scientific power) of the workers themselves is the chief form of accumulation, and infinitely more important than the accumulation— which goes hand in hand with it and merely represents it— of the existing objective conditions of this accumulated activity. These objective conditions are ... nominally accumulated and must be constantly produced anew and consumed anew__

p He then commented:

p The whole objective world, the ’world of commodities’ vanishes here as a mere aspect, as the merely passing activity, constantly performed anew, of socially producing men. Compare this ‘idealism’ with the crude, material fetishism into which the Ricardian theory develops in the writings ’of this incredible cobbler’, McCulloch, where not only the difference between man and animal disappears but even the difference between a living organism and an inanimate object. And then let them say that as against the lofty idealism of bourgeois political economy, the proletarian opposition has been preaching a crude materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse appetites.^^17^^

p That was written more than a century ago, but Western ideologists still continue to ascribe a fetishisation of things to Marxist theory foreign to its spirit.

p The satisfaction of material wants is the first condition, without which human life itself is impossible. But what 205 liberation of man can there be if he is not emancipated from the daily threat of being left without food, clothing, shelter, and other vitally necessary material goods. The creation of a surplus of commodities, however, is not an end in itself, but the real foundation for building a society in which the all-round development of each becomes the condition for the development of all. Communist society is not a ’ consumer’ capitalist society, the vices of which have become the subject of special sociological research in recent years.

p The accumulation of experience must also be regarded from the angle of the succession of generations, since mankind’s social and historical development proceeds through their natural replacement. If the experience accumulated by each generation died with it, and were not passed on to the next, mankind could never have become differentiated from the animal kingdom, since each new generation would have been forced to begin all over again. The moment of the passing of accumulated experience is of definite significance for describing the historical continuity in the development of society.

p On the other hand, the following generations, inheriting the experience accumulated before them, make their own contribution to the further development and accumulation of experience. The process is an essential moment of social progress. One can imagine that further accumulation of experience might cease for one reason or another, in some stretch of history, other conditions being equal, but the established forms of passing on already amassed experience were preserved. In that case society’s development would also stop at that point, although the continuation of life as the natural succession of generations would go on with its former rhythm. Mankind would be forced, in that event, to revolve in a closed circle, and the natural replacement of generations would lead at best to numerical growth of the population and a corresponding increase of tools in their old types.

p The facts of history, however, indicate otherwise. Each new generation begins with what has been acquired by its forerunners. It takes over their experience and then, on the basis of the experience passed on to it, develops experience further, now very slowly, now with increasing speed, and accumulates it, broadening and deepening knowledge of objective laws, and organising and perfecting their practical application, and discarding one way or another all the old 206 ideas that have proved incompatible with the objective content of the new experience.

p Mankind’s movement along the road of knowledge and practical use of objective laws can be compared figuratively with the ascent of a steep mountain peak. Persistent people cut step after step in the hard granite, climbing higher and higher. Each new step is the support for making another, higher one. New people and new generations, following on one another, climb the prepared steps cut in the granite to their highest point, so as to continue the ascent, cutting new steps.

p Specifically human experience is not passed on biologically from parents to children. That is quite convincingly shown by the facts known to science, when small children grew up through tragic circumstances without communion with other people. At the end of the eighteenth century the great naturalist Carl Linnaeus, basing himself on the information then available, had differentiated a special suborder of ’wild men’ in the order of primates, to which he assigned children abandoned in early childhood and who had grown up in solitude in the forest or had been fostered by animals.

p More than 30 cases of the finding of ’wild children’ are now known, of which more than 20 were raised by animals (wolves, bears, and even a she-leopard). All the children found among carnivores ran on all fours only, ate raw meat, did not display any habits of work, did not make use of even the simplest tools and did not make them, did not know how to talk, and did not possess human reason. The same state has been observed in children who have grown up in solitude in the forest.

p Here is an attested example from the literature. In 1920 two girls aged three and eight were found in a wolf’s lair near the town of Midnapore in India. The younger was baptised Amala, the elder Kamala. Amala died, not surviving life among people for a year, Kamala lived another eight years.

p For around nine years the Indian Anglican priest, the Rev. Singh, kept a daily account of Kamala’s behaviour. In the first days of their stay in the orphanage, the girls howled wolflike at regular intervals and made attempts to return to the jungle. Their eyes shone in the dark, like a wolf’s. They ate raw meat without using their hands, seizing bits with their mouths, crunching bones, and lapping 207 water. After Amala’s death her older friend refused food and water for two days. It took several years to teach Kamala to walk upright. Almost no results were achieved in developing speech. After the first four years she had learned only six words; gradually her vocabulary increased to around 100 words. She died at 17 years of age, having achieved the mental development of a four-year-old infant.^^18^^

p The character of Mowgli, created by Rudyard Kipling, in spite of the entertainment of the narration of Mowgli’s adventures, has nothing in common with science. In order to master work skills, and to know how to talk and think, in other words, in order to possess all the qualities that distinguish man as a thinking creature from the rest of the animal kingdom, it is not enough, though necessary, to be born in the physical image of man. The human organism, it is true reveals an amazing adaptability in these cases to changes, and non-human conditions of the environment, and astonishing receptivity to the habits and whole way of life of their unthinking ‘teachers’. But, as will be seen from the example cited, this is achieved at a very dear price.

p At the same time this fact is evidence of the advantages of man’s biological structure, and its higher organisation, in which there are possibilities absent among animals. It is well known that the training of an animal in a human environment, although it yields palpable results, cannot raise the beast to the level of man’s rational activity.

p The branch of pedagogy concerned with the training and upbringing of blind and deaf-mute children has put very valuable scientific material at our disposal relating to the mechanism of the transfer of human experience from generation to generation.

p The first boarding school in the world for children deprived of sight, hearing, and speech (which was opened in Zagorsk, near Moscow, in 1963) has achieved results remarkable as regards their scientific and practical significance. Its pupils acquire the faculty, after the course of training, of conversing by touch, and of reading and writing in the Braille alphabet. The standard of mental development in the top classes is such that pupils master the volume of knowledge of secondary school and are ready to enter a college; some of them are even ahead of fellow students who studied in ordinary schools in depth of education in several fields of knowledge, and have successfully continued studies in higher educational institutions.^^19^^

208

p The Zagorsk school’s experience indicates that children who are fenced off from the outer world by a barrier through which neither light nor sound penetrates, and are cut off, it would seem, from the main sources of information about their environment (except the senses of smell and touch), are capable, unlike physically healthy children raised by animals of becoming fully fledged personalities. But that requires human experience to be passed on to them by other people through extremely meagre channels of communication with the world around them.

p The results of the education of blind deaf-mutes allow us to draw conclusions that substantially supplement the information known to science about the raising of children by animals. Exclusion from an environment of social factors consisting of specifically human forms of mutual intercourse leads to the impossibility of forming a human personality. On the other hand, limitation of the environment almost exclusively to the social factor makes it possible to obtain remarkable results in the development of specifically human capacities, and opens access to spheres of human activity and moral and aesthetic values even for children deprived from birth of the most important biological channels of communication with the environment.

p The essence of man thus necessarily includes in itself the experience accumulated and preserved by other people, going back into the depths of the history of successive generations, and transferred to him. The transfer and accumulation of experience cannot be directly explained by the laws of heredity and variability operating in living nature. Other means, unknown to the animal kingdom, are required for its transmission, and other ‘vectors’ of heredity are needed. And there are such specific carriers; they are a unity of the two opposing forms of experience that we have spoken about above.

p The presence of ‘vectors’ of this experience alone is not sufficient for the act of transmission to be effected. It is necessary for one generation to establish relations somehow with another, and in addition each succeeding generation must have a vital need to receive experience. Given these conditions, transfer of experience can take place as an inevitable process. As for the relations of the successive generations, the existence of a real ’fathers and sons’ link evokes no doubts as a natural fact of the reproduction of progeny. The living need for the progeny’s take-over of experience 209 accumulated before them also really exists as a necessary condition of continuation of the human species, though it has to be explained on another plane.

p Each new generation is forced to accept the tools passed on to it by its predecessors, and to ensure their operation, otherwise production of the material goods needed to maintain its life would stop. It is therefore also forced to adopt the experience accumulated by forerunners as regards practical activity, whether it wants to or not. But this means that each new generation must, at the same time, take over the stock of knowledge of objective laws, and of the conditions of their application, which is expressed in linguistic form.

p The process of the passing on of accumulated experience is thus realised with natural inevitability; it is inherent in human society and is an objective process of the continuation of society’s life. In that respect the answer to whether or not it is necessary to adopt accumulated experience does not depend on men’s consciousness, will, or desires, though it is reflected in their consciousness like many other objective processes.

p In real life a generation is not separated from the one following it either in time or in space. Since there are individuals in society of all ages at any moment who possess experience that differs in level and sphere of operation, the transfer of accumulated experience from generation to generation is not solely effected as a relation between contiguous generations, but also takes place in the form of the sum total of people’s relations with one another, the aggregate of social relations.

p In the same way the accumulation of experience in the future cannot be reduced to the independent activity of one subject taken separately. Each individual, be he scientist, inventor, or what have you, can therefore only function in the real role of scientist, inventor, etc., because the experience of his predecessors in this field of practical and intellectual activity has already been passed on to him, and because this experience is already present in him as the result of the activity of many people over many centuries as a certain sum total of knowledge and a certain ability to apply this knowledge to achieve a set aim. In the complete absence of experience accumulated by predecessors the individual, whatever natural inborn qualities he or she may possess, will not only be unable to function as a 210 discoverer, but will inevitably remain (as we have seen) at the level of an animal.

p The accumulation of experience is a social relation not only iu its origin but also in its ultimate point. One can imagine a Robinson Crusoe scientist who possesses experience passed on to him by society, and the means for its further accumulation. Working quite alone he may create some new object or discover a previously unknown objective law, i.e. he may build up experience. But this ’accumulation for oneself is not actual accumulation because ’experience accumulated for oneself inevitably dies along with its isolated possessor. For that not to happen the isolation must be overcome, and the accumulated experience must become the property of other people, i.e. it calls for the existence of relations of the individual with other people, or the existence of social relations. It is precisely in that respect that experience ’accumulated for oneself will not disappear but will function as actually accumulated experience. Only such experience can live on in the activity of other people after the death of its possessor which finds expression in material form, in the form of objects made by a man or of descriptions of laws discovered by him.That is only possible, however, when experience becomes the possession of other people through forms that express it.

p Karl Marx, commenting on the social conditionality of the scientific discoveries that find application in technology, wrote in a footnote:

p A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisations, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.^^20^^

p The definite link between the transfer of accumulated experience and the social organisation of upbringing and education stems from the fact that this transfer is a necessary social relation existing whether or not people are 211 aware of its character. Just as the relations of material production receive the juridical form of properly relations and are expressed in ideological legal relations, so relations in regard to the transfer of accumulated experience existing independently of consciousness appear in the form of ideological relations of upbringing and education, which have a class character in class society. Starting from the existing conditions people can adopt one system of education or another at their discretion, but the system, being only a reflection in their consciousness of the objective law of the transmission and accumulation of experience cannot abrogate or alter the operation of that objective law.

p The juridical and political superstructure, we know, can either retard development of the relations of production or promote their rapid development, but in either case the true source of the development is not in the superstructure itself, but consists in the objective patterns of development of the relations of production. In the same way any system of education consciously or spontaneously established by people may open up the field for operation of the objective law of the transmission and accumulation of experience or, on the contrary, may raise obstacles in the way of its operation.

p Experience is produced and reproduced only in the course of men’s joint activity. Outside activity experience is as majestic and as dead as the Egyptian pyramids. When we examine the history of mankind’s evolution as a whole, experience coincides with activity and merges into the aggregate of social practice. But the meaning that this concept of experience is invested with here allows us to draw a line, important in our view, between the concepts of practice and experience as concepts reflecting different aspects of the interaction of subject and object that are a unity. When speaking of practice we have in mind primarily man’s material, mediated activity as a whole, while by experience we mean the result, and at the same time the starting point, of that process.^^21^^ In other words, the concept of practice characterises the interaction of subject and object from the side of its continuity, and the concept of experience from the side of its intermittency, lack of continuity, and discreteness.

p Differentiation of these two sides of the interaction of subject and objoct (by whatever terms these aspects are designated) makes it possible to disclose certain essential 212 features of the social nature of the transmission and accumulation of experience in human society in contrast to the biological laws of the transmission of the ’relay of life’ from generation to generation. If the process of men’s direct life activity were not objecliiicd in material and linguistic form as ’its other’, yet differing from the process itself as its ‘quiescent’ result, the transmitting and accumulating of socio-historical experience (about which we spoke above) would in fact be impossible.

p Since mankind’s history occurs in conditions of a natural succession of generations, accumulated experience is the result, from the standpoint of each new generation, of the activity of preceding generations and at the same time the starting point of its own activity. The same can be said about the individual person.

p The fact that accumulated experience functions in relation to part of the whole as the result of preceding activity and the starting point of succeeding activity, and not as the process of activity itself, contains an abstract possibility of separating experience from the process of active, transforming activity. The result and the starting point may not coincide in time. The experienced turner, for example, will not cease to be an experienced turner when he leaves the lathe to rest. If activity and experience directly coincided, cessation of activity would mean slow disappearance of the experience that is realised in that activity; and since the individual deprived of human experience sinks to the level of the beast, even a temporary cessation of labour could turn man back to the ape-like state from which he emerged through labour.

p In fact, however, that does not happen. Experience and labour do not directly coincide, and that provides a possibility of isolating experience from the labour process, a possibility that becomes reality in certain social conditions for some people isolated in society who do not take part in the creative activity in which experience lives and is enriched, but only ‘consume’ the experience preserved and accumulated by others. Possession of this experience makes it impossible for them to revert to the animal state, although they are not involved in the labour that transforms ’the ape into man’. If there had been no possibility in the very nature of human experience of isolating it from the labour process, it would have been impossible for exploiter classes (or even separate subjects not involved for one reason or 213 another in social-productive labour) to have arisen at any stage of history.

p Allowing for that we can now define experience as a measure of the understanding and practical use of objective laws, i.e. experience is the measure of mastery of the object. In that definition experience is the result and starting point of practice, and practice functions as the process of mastery of the object, taken as a whole. In other words, the level of mastery of objective laws attained by human society at a certain stage of its historical development finds its reflection in experience.

p The constant accumulation of experience is an indicator of man’s ever increasing domination over external nature, the nature of his own relations, and over himself. From the standpoint of the productive side of human activity it marks the practical extension of his power over nature, and the creation of new, ever better machines, apparatus, structures, etc.; from the theoretical standpoint, the mental aspect, it marks the movement from ignorance to knowledge, from incomplete knowledge to fuller, the approximation of knowledge to absolute truth, or (as Marx put it) to theoretical taming of nature. These are the two inseparable, but different aspects of a single, sensuous human activity.

p The beginning of this process of applying the objective patterns of nature was begun when man’s ancestors,passing to use of tools as a mediator between themselves and the environment, in practice put the operation of objective laws into their service that yielded a substantial increase in the results of their own physical efforts, although our savage ancestors did not (as we have already said) have any scientific understanding of the operation of those laws.

p In altering nature and employing it for his own ends, man cannot bring any forces to life that do not exist as a possibility in nature herself. His whole ‘wizardry’ consists in his making objects and forces of nature that exist independently of his consciousness, and correspond to objective laws, affect each other to yield results he needs. The basis of his transforming, creative activity is that he can understand and utilise these objective laws to create conditions in wbich they inevitably begin to operate; and in the process of creating the conditions necessary for thai lie once more, moreover, relies on the operation of objective laws known by him but independent of his consciousness. Though he himself is a part of nature, man subordinates objects and 214 ferces of nature to himself, and prevails over them. But, as Frederick Engels said,

p all our mastery of it consists in the [act lhat we have the advantage over other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.^^22^^

p Man himself, by his labour, creates the material wealth needed to satisfy his wants; he was, is, and remains the primary productive force. But he is ceasing, to an increasing extent, to be a direct productive force.

p From the standpoint of class-determined relations man was wholly a direct productive force under slavery and partially so under feudalism. The slave and the serf ’ themselves form part and parcel of the means of production’, Marx said.^^23^^ In slave-owning society the slave was considered on a level with animals, not as a man but as an instrument of labour or, as Aristotle said, ’a speaking tool’. But, from the standpoint of the conditions of natural history, man has been ceasing to be exclusively a direct productive force ever since he was differentiated from the animal kingdom.

p As man accumulated knowledge he was emancipated more and more from the direct effect of his organs on objects given to him by nature that he processed in the course of making material goods. He laid this work onto instruments of production that he created. It was the latter, as the material embodiment of human knowledge of the objective laws of nature, that directly converted what was given by nature into objects and properties that were needed to satisfy human wants. As Marx wrote:

p The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, andjto what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.^^24^^

p At a certain level of development of the social productive power of labour the production process itself may be converted into a technological continuation of science.

p Western sociologists strain to find a contradiction in the fact that Marxists, when characterising the role of science as a direct productive force, recognise the productive forces as the determining moment in society’s historical development. In that connection they draw attention to the following circumstance: new scientific discoveries are new just because we do not know about them in advance, and so 215 consequently cannot be predicted; but if the other features of society depend on science and technology, whose future it is impossible to foresee, it is thus impossible as well to foresee the path of development of society itself. That is the line of argument, for example, of the English sociologist H. B. Acton.^^25^^

p Scientific and technical discoveries, though they are the result of man’s creative activity, are not something mysterious, not permitting of rational explanation. The general line of development of science can be foreseen to the extent that it is determined by the needs of production, the level of development attained by science and technology, and the tasks that this faces mankind with.^^26^^

p To what we have justifiably said here we can add the following: (1) the productive forces do not determine the form of society directly but through the aggregate of relations of production; (2) man cannot know about all the prospective discoveries in concrete spheres of science, but he does know that new advances of science, revealing hitherto unknown objective laws of nature, will thereby increase his opportunities to utilise natural forces.

p As to the technological application of science, its new advances are ultimately directed to increasing, and not diminishing, the social productive power of labour. People may, of course, reject practical utilisation of a new discovery of an applied character if it gives worse results in a given sphere of activity than the practical application of earlier discoveries, or if its introduction would lead to destruction of their life. But since new discoveries can actually be used for practical purposes with a greater degree of success than before, people make the appropriate improvements in the instruments of production or create new tools, which leads ultimately to growth of the productive forces independently of what they do or do not think about the social consequences of that growth. The growth itself leads to a requirement for appropriate social conditions of production determined by the economic structure of society.

p It is clear from Marx’s statement about science cited above that he considered science’s becoming a direct productive force as a process of the materialising of human knowledge in instruments of production and other means of labour. Science, by itself, understood simply as a certain sum total of knowledge contained in someone’s head or even set down on paper, is not yet a productive force and it cannot, of 216 course, have determinant social significance. It acquires that role only when the sum total of knowledge is manifested in labour and in human activity to create objects needed to satisfy human wants.

p The growing significance of second, or ‘humanised’, nature as a mediator between man and nature is not limited simply to the field of production activity. The introduction of mediators in the realm of science activity, for example, of instruments, has no less significance for extending the nature limits of the perceptive capacity of human sense organs than the application of tools to go beyond the limits of man’s physical powers. Instruments were a means enabling objective processes invisible to the naked eye to be perceived sensuously, and making it possible to peep into the ’black box’, so as to be convinced visually once more that there are no supernatural forces in it.

p Examination of the use of instruments as a mediator between man and nature has the same significance of principle for a proper understanding of the development of the cognitive, scientific side of activity as analysis of the consequences of the making and use of tools for a characterisation of the practical aspect of man’s sensory activity.

p Science, when taken into the armoury of workers, and materially embodied in the new machines, and technological processes, etc., is increasingly converted into a direct productive force of society. But only the socialist revolution, which eliminates all forms of exploitation of man by man, provides the conditions for use of science’s advances for the good of all members of society. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union regards organic union of the advances of the contemporary scientific and industrial revolution with the advantages of the socialist system as a most important task as concerns the further progress of developed socialist society.

p Notes to Chapter 8

p  ^^1^^ Translator’s note. The Russian word opyt, rendered here as experience, also contains the now obsolete sense of the English word ‘experience’ as test, trial, or experiment. This should be born in mind when considering the author’s definitions and exposition.

p  ^^2^^ V. I. Lenin. Materialism and Empirio-Critic ism (Progress 217 Publishers, Moscow, 1977), p. 133 (Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 149).

p  ^^3^^ John Dewey. Experience and Nature (Open Court Publishing Co., Chicago, 1926), p. 28.

p  ^^4^^ V. I. Lenin. Op. cit., p. 132 (Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 148).

p  ^^5^^ See A. A. Bogdanov. Empiriomonism, Book 1 (Moscow, 1899), pp. 25, 36.

p  ^^6^^ See A. A. Bogdanov. Filosofiya zhivogo opyta (The Philosophy of Living Experience), Moscow, 1913, p. 221.

p  ^^7^^ Karl Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975), p. 329.

p  ^^8^^ See G. W. F. Hegel. The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by .T. B. Baillie (Harper Colophon Books, New York, 1967), p. 144.

p  ^^9^^ Ibid., p. 142 (Translator’s note: Hegel’s italics in German).

p  ^^10^^ Denis Diderot. Textes choisis, Vol. 2 (Editions Sociales,
Paris, 1953), p. 49.

p ^u N. G. Chernyshevsky. ’The Aesthetic Relation of Art to
Reality’ (St. Petersburg, 1855), reviewed by the Author.

p Selected Philosophical Essays (FLPH, Moscow, 1953),

p p. 383.

p  ^^12^^ Karl Marx. Theses on Feuerbach. Op. cit., p. 197.

p  ^^13^^ See V. I. Lenin. Op. cit., pp. 135-137 (Collected Works, Vol. 14, pp. 151-153).

p  ^^14^^ The Russian word ‘opyt’ employed by the author is broader in meaning than the Greek empeiria, praktikos, pragma, or the English ‘experience’.

p  ^^15^^ Philipp Frank. Philosophy of Science (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.Y., 1957).

p  ^^16^^ Karl Marx, Wages, Price and Profit (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976), pp. 31-32.

p  ^^17^^ Karl Marx. Theories of Surplus-Value, Part III (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975), pp. 266-267.

p  ^^18^^ The eminent French anthropologist Prof. Henri Vallois discussed the most typical cases of this kind recorded by science in his article ’Les Enfanls-Loups’ in the journal La Nature (1955, 3237: 11-14).

p  ^^19^^ For information on the experience of the Zagorsk school and an evaluation of its results, see A. Meshcheryakov, Aimkening to Life. Forming Hehariotir and tlte Mind in Deal-Blind Children, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1979. In February 1975 an extended session of the Learned 218 Council of the Psychology Faculty of Moscow University heard some of the general results of a unique experiment in a group of blind deaf-mutes obtaining higher education (Sergei Sirotkin, Yuri Lerner, Alexandra Suvorova, and Natalia Korneeva). See ’An Outstanding Achievement of Soviet Science’ in Voprosy filosofii, 1975, 6: 63- 84.

p  ^^20^^ Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. I. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978), p. 352.

p  ^^21^^ The Russian term opyt (experience) is often used in a narrow sense to designate scientific observations and experiments, and research devoted to some problem. Clearly, these forms of activity (like others), understood as a process, do not embrace the concept of experience (opyt) in the sense we have adopted, hut their results are part of this concept’s totality.

p  ^^22^^ Frederick Engels. Dialectics of Nature (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1940), p. 180.

p  ^^23^^ Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. I, p. 668.

p  ^^24^^ Karl Marx. Grundrisse (Economic Manuscripts 1857-1861) Translated by Martin Nicolaus (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 706.

p  ^^35^^ See H. B. Acton. The Illusion of the Epoch ( MarxismLeninism as a Philosophical reed), Cohen & West, London, 1955, p. 171.

 ^^26^^ See G. E. Glezerman. 0 zakonakh obshchestvennogo razvitiya (On the Laws of Social Development), Politizdat, Moscow, 1960, pp. 74-76.