p The question of the relation of consciousness to being, of the spiritual to the material (is the spiritual a property of matter, a product of its development? or, on the contrary, is the material a derivative of the spiritual?) has not constituted a problem for a long time, strictly speaking, if, granted, one calls unresolved matters, subject to investigation, problems. The materialists of antiquity had already posed this question correctly, though only on the basis of everyday observations. The materialism of modern times, anticipating special inquiries and their results, showed that the spiritual does not exist without matter organised in a certain way. Natural science has not only confirmed the materialist answer to the basic philosophical question, but also successfully investigates the mechanism of the formation, functioning, and development of the psychic. Only a few idealists are now so bold as to claim unreservedly that the psychic is independent of its physiological substratum. While rejecting the materialist answer to the basic philosophical question, contemporary idealism is also forced to re-examine its own traditional idealist answer.^^1^^ This explains the characteristic striving to eliminate this question as not, allegedly, correctly posed.

p A resolved philosophical problem is not, of course, consigned to the archives because of its ideological significance.

p New scientific discoveries (cybernetic devices, say, that model the thinking brain) undoubtedly enrich the materialist answer. And idealists’ attempts to discredit the basic materialist position evoke a necessity again and again to explain its content and meaning, basing oneself on the aggregate of the facts of science and practice. But that cannot, of course, be grounds for revising the materialist answer to the basic philosophical 20 question. To convert it again into a problem means to drag philosophy back, which incidentally is what contemporary idealists are engaged in. In philosophy, as in any science, the researcher is dealing with problems. As for resolved matters, they find their rightful place in textbooks.

p All these considerations anent the proposition that can be called an axiom of all materialism enable one to conclude that there are no grounds for the notion common in Marxist literature about the coincidence of the subject-matter of philosophy (including the subject-matter of the philosophy of Marxism) and the basic philosophical question. The subject-matter of philosophy, and of any science, must be defined, indicating the class of objects that it studies. This subject-matter can, of course, be described as the aggregate of the historically established, logically interconnected problems whose origin is due to socioeconomic processes, the development of knowledge, and the discovery of new objects of philosophical inquiry or new interpretations of already known facts. But it is quite obvious that this set of problems cannot be reduced to one question, however important.

p The character-of the posing of the problems that philosophy is concerned with is theoretically determined, of course, by one answer or the other to the basic philosophical question. That enables one to understand in what sense this question is really basic. The identification of the subject-matter of philosophy with the basic philosophical question is apparently linked with the extremely general interpretation of the content of the latter. That interpretation is not legitimate, because it deprives the basic philosophical question of the place it occupies by right by distinctly formulating a definite dilemma.

p The epistemology of dialectical materialism also cannot be reduced to its necessary, initial premiss, viz., the materialist answer to the second aspect of the basic philosophical question. The psychophysical problem differs essentially in its content from the basic philosophical question, since it presupposes investigation of the whole diversity of forms of the psychological in its relation to the diversity of the properties of the physiological. One must therefore not confuse the basic philosophical question with the whole problematic of the objectively existing ‘spiritual-material’ relation, the various forms of which are studied by several sciences. The basic philosophical question is one of the priority of one aspect of this relation. Its classical formulation, given by Engels, speaks only of ’which is primary: spirit or nature’ (52:346).

p Lenin stressed that the scientific meaning of Engels’ formulation of the basic philosophical question was that it singled out from the whole diversity of the content of both materialism and idealism just that which theoretically predetermines their mutually exclusive opposition.

p Engels was right when he said that the essential thing is not which of the numerous schools of materialism or idealism a particular philosopher belongs to, but whether he takes nature, the external world, matter in motion, or spirit, reason, consciousness, etc., as primary (142:149).

p In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism he constantly stressed the need to delimit the basic philosophical question distinctly in order to formulate the alternative that no philosophical doctrine could avoid. In view of the importance in principle of delimiting the basic philosophical question and the whole domain of philosophical inquiry, I would cite another wellknown statement of Lenin’s:

p Whether nature, matter, the physical, the external world should be taken as primary, and consciousness, mind, sensation (experience—as the widespread terminology of our time has it), the psychical, etc.," should be regarded as secondary—that is the root question which ._/« fact continues to divide the philosophers into two great camps (142:315).

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p ideas. Its identification with the subject-matteF oTphilosophy is asTmsound as all attempts to extend Lenin’s philosophical definition of matter, the immense heuristic significance of which is, in particular, that it excludes all the attributes of matter from its philosophical definition, except one, which epistemologically constitutes its differentia specifica, so disclosing its opposition to consciousness and the dependence of the latter on it. Is it worth while demonstrating that any attempt to extend the philosophical definition of matter by including its physical, chemical and other attributes in it, only reveals incomprehension of the real sense of this definition?^^2^^

p If the subject-matter of philosophy and the basic philosophical question were one and the same, then the former has not altered historically, in spite of radical socio-economic changes and great scientific discoveries. In that case either philosophy does not pose any new questions or their posing goes beyond its subject-matter. It would turn out that the subject-matter of philosophical inquiry had lost contact with the historical conditions that determine the development of philosophy and knowledge in general. The idealist illusion would be created 22 that philosophy exists independent of the events of its epoch, rises above them, and so on. A philosophy that occupied itself with one and the same question would ve wholly the prisoner of tradition, while its development in fact presupposes revision, and not just inheritance of tradition. Identification of the subject-matter of philosophy with the basic philosophical question indirectly, if not directly, rejects the development of philosophy, which is reduced in that case simply to various modifications of the basic philosophical question and various answers to it. But the development of philosophy presupposes the rise of new problems, research tasks, and fields of inquiry.

p Identification of the subject-matter of philosophy with the basic philosophical question glossed over the qualitative difference between the philosophy of Marxism and preceding philosophy. The subject-matter of the former is the most general laws of the motion, change, and development of nature, society, and knowledge. The universal laws of men’s changing both of the external world and of their social being also constitute the subject-matter of dialectical and historical materialism. The materialist answer to the basic question of philosophy theoretically predetermines the corresponding understanding of the most general laws of development. But to identify the two is to make a gross error.^^3^^

I have dwelt on what the basic philosophical question is not at such length that it may, perhaps, cause perplexity. Why do we call this question basic? And if it is not the subject-matter of philosophy, what is the sense of the adjective ‘basic’? Will drawing a line between the subject-matter of philosophy and the basic philosophical question not lead to a belittling of the significance of the latter? These fears all merit close attention, and I shall try to show why it is the basic philosophical question that forms the most important philosophical dilemma, and why the materialist answer to it is one of the outstanding gains of philosophical thought. The task consists in getting clear about the specific nature of this question and its epistemological necessity, and finally, too, about the sense in which it nevertheless forms a problem, a problem of the history of philosophy.