p Philosophical analysis of any theoretical proposition calls for elucidation of its epistemological premisses. Kant correctly 23 called it dogmatism to reject an epistemological investigation of principles on the grounds that they were obvious. Hegel, who demonstrated that sensory reliability if sublated by theoretical analysis, by virtue of which philosophy should recognise only that as true which is obtained through the logical movement of a concept. The fact that both Kant and Hegel employed this epistemological imperative to criticise materialism and substantiate idealism does not discredit the principle itself; for Hegel employed dialectics to the same end.

p Lenin called categories stages in the development of knowledge. Did he mean that cause and effect, essence and phenomenon, space and time did not exist independent of the process of knowing? Such a conclusion would be a subjective-idealist interpretation of the epistemological significance of categories.

p The philosophy of Marxism rejects the metaphysical notion of unchangeable forms of knowledge, given once and for all, which prompted Kant to convert categories into a priori forms of sense contemplation and rational thought. Our concepts of causality, essence, space, etc., develop historically, and are enriched by a new content that not only supplements their old, accustomed content but also subjects it to dialectical negation. One should not, therefore, identify the concept of causality with the objectively existing relation of causality; the concept only reflects objective reality approximately. A change in the content of concepts and categories does not give grounds for denying the objective existence of what they reflect; Lenin criticised that mistake of subjective relativism in detail in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

p In the first three chapters of that work, devoted to the epistemology of dialectical materialism, Lenin examined not only the process of knowing but also the categories usually called ontological. It was an epistemological analysis of causality, necessity, space, etc., that served as the basis for the conclusion about their objective content: the,..forms of thinking do not. oLgourse, coincide with the forms of being, but they do reflect %yH- That: conclusion" iLJcUv Hie uiUauhysical opposing oFithe epistemological and the ontological, and substantiates their unity. Analysis of the objective ‘spiritual-material’ relation must be approached from that angle, since it is it that forms the content of the basic philosophical question. What is its epistemological necessity? What is its origin? Why is it really a basic question and not a derivative one?

p In my view, a most necessary condition of all conscious and purposive human activity, i.e. distinguishing between the 24 subjective and the objective, forms the factual basis of the question of the relation of the spiritual and the material. Everyone (the idealist included) distinguishes himself from all others, and through that is conscious of himself as /, a human personality, an individuality. Perception of the surrounding world is impossible without consciousness of one’s difference from the objects being perceived. Majols_oiascie«s««s» (if one abstracts from its elementary manifestations) is-at-tfae-saaie-tiHie_sd|p. awareness, since no one would take it into his head to consider himself a tree, river, ass, or anything else that he perceives. And it follows from this that self-awareness is impossible simnlv asLconsciousness of one’s Ego;7t isTrealised’Through reflection of a reality independent of it. Descartes, incidentally, ^did not know ihdl when In- liied 10 "prove that only the doubting, thinking consciousness, or thought, was absolutely reliable, i.e. wholly excluded any doubts about its existence. He was mistaken, since he could not in principle assume that a condition of the self-obvious existence of self-awareness was a far from obvious link between doubt and the object of doubt, between thinking and being. He assumed that one could separate oneself from everything sensually perceivable, and throw doubt on its existence, but that it was impossible to doubt the reality of the intellectual operation itself that was effected in that way. He did not, however, ask: but is this intellectual operation possible irrespective of the external world? For denial of the external world presupposes some content known to thought, some thinkable fact that is declared in this case to be an illusion. That is why the line of demarcation between subject and object (irrespective of how the one and the other are understood) comes into any elementary act of human knowing and behaviour, insofar as it is performed consciously.

p Unlike Descartes, Kant came to the conclusion that the selfevidence of consciousness of one’s existence (albeit independent of perception of the external world) was essentially an illusion refuted by its latent (and denied) premiss, i.e. the fact of perception of the external world.

p Kant added a short section ’Refutation of Idealism’ to the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason—a reply to those of his critics who likened his system, not without grounds, to Berkeleianism and Humism. In this section he demonstrated that self-awareness was impossible without sense perception of the external world: ’The simple but empirically determined consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of external objects in space’ (116:170). He affirmed that inner 25 experience was only possible through external experience, so refuting the Cartesian thesis of the absolute reliability of selfawareness alone. The external world is also reliable, according to Kant, because ’the consciousness of my own existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things without me’ (116:171).

p The idealist philosopher, of course, while demonstrating the need to demarcate the subjective from the objective, may then declare the difference between them to exist only for human consciousness or only in it. In that case, too, recognition of the external world is interpreted idealistically, i.e. is reduced to denial of the independence of reality from consciousness. That is what happened essentially with Kant, since, according to his doctrine, the sense-perceived world of phenomena posits an external, a priori form of sensory contemplation, which he denned as space. From that angle the external world (in contrast to the supersensory ‘things-in-itself’) is not formed without the involvement of human senses and a categorial synthesis performed by reason. Still, Kant could not get along without demarcating the subjective from the objective, and without asking what was the relation of consciousness to what was not consciousness.

p Idealism often reduces the objective to the subjective, makes a gulf between them or, on the contrary, identifies them. But it cannot ignore this difference, and likewise deny the existence of consciousness (and self-awareness), even when it interprets it as a simple appearance not unlike an ineradicable illusion about the independence of will from motives. Whatever the idealist’s ideas about the essence of the subjective and the objective, and about the relation between them, he has to recognise their difference if only as directly given to consciousness or as established by it.

p Neokantians have tried to reduce all sense-perceived, cognised, thinkable reality to constructs of logical thought, and products of scientific-theoretical or artistic creation. In other words they have made an attempt to eliminate being and objective reality, and to interpret them as special modes of the existence of consciousness. Rickert claimed that the objects of knowing ’are then my ideas, perceptions, sensations, and expressions of my will’, i.e. the content of consciousness, while the subject of knowing ’is that which is aware of what this content is’ (221:13). But in order to distinguish the content of consciousness from awareness of it, he in fact restored the difference between consciousness and being, declaring that 26 consciousness, the content of which generates objects, is a universal, supraindividual consciousness, although it also only exists in human individuals. That forced him to establish a difference of principle between the empirical subject and its direct, subjective consciousness, and the epistemological subject, whose consciousness is impersonal and in that sense objective. The theoretical source of this conception was the doctrines of Kant and Fichte.

p The concepts of the subjective and - objective, whatever content is ascribed to them, form a dichotomy such as makes it possible to mentally grasp everything that exists, everything possible, and everything conceivable, and also, consequently, what does not exist anywhere except in fantasy. One can always attribute any one phenomenon to the objective or the subjective. It is another matter that people can disagree with one another about what to consider objective and what subjective. They may take the objective for the subjective and vice versa. This is done by some idealists, in particular, who interpret the objective as some sort of relation between phenomena of consciousness, i.e. as an immanent characteristic of the subjective. But in that case the dividing line between the subjective and the objective is maintained, in spite of the subjectivist interpretation.

p Neopositivists declare the concept ’objective reality’ a term without scientific sense. But they, too, call for a strict demarcation between the subjective and ‘intersubjective’ or, as Bertrand Russell expressed it, between the personal and the ‘social’. While disregarding objective reality the neopositivist nevertheless strives to retain the counterposing of the objective to the subjective, since denial of this fundamental difference makes it impossible to draw a line between knowledge and ignorance, truth and error.

p One must note, incidentally, that there are also those among philosophers who dispute the epistemological significance in principle of the dichotomy of the subjective and objective, who try to set some third thing, differing from subject and object, from consciousness and being, above them both, this something forming the original essence as it were, in which nothing is yet divided or differentiated. Thus, according to Schelling’s doctrine, the supreme first principle is neither subjective nor objective, since it is absolute identity free of all differences, the unconscious state of the world spirit. Nevertheless, with Schelling, too, this absolute indifferentiation was divided into subjective and objective as a consequence of the self- differentiation caused by an unconscious inclination and blind will. And 27 these concepts became universal characteristics of everything that existed in nature and society.

p In the latest idealist philosophy a tendency predominates to demarcate the subject and object; this is particularly characteristic of both existentialism and Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl thought it necessary to ’factor out’ the external world, i.e. nature and society, on the one hand, and on the other consciousness, at least in the form in which it is registered not only by everyday observation but also by psychology. Next he set about describing the genuine reality, to be called ideal being or (what is the same thing) pure consciousness. Ideal being was neither subjective nor objective because it was absolute. But in contrast to the Platonic realm of transcendental archetypes, Husserl’s ideal being was not to be found beyond human life but in human consciousness itself, though independent of the latter. Where Plato ascribed a timeless, other-world existence to ideas, Husserl’s ’eide’ or intuitively comprehended phenomenological essences, have no existence in general, at least not a necessary one. Existence, according to Husserl’s doctrine, is an empirical determinacy, which cannot be inherent in the absolute, and in particular in truth, the good, and beauty. Sense, meaning, and value are inherent in the absolute. Husserl’s ideal being is thus quite similar to the Neokantian world of absolute values, which do not exist but have meaning as criteria of any empirical existence.

p Husserl’s doctrine about the intensionality of consciousness was also aimed at overcoming the ‘dualism’ of subjective and objective, which, in his opinion, was to be achieved by bringing out the immanence of the object in consciousness. Since pure consciousness is meant here, consciousness was independent of the external object; it had it, in fact, not as empirical reality, but as an inner intension inherent in itself. The object was therefore not something that was outside consciousness; consciousness ‘intensioned’ the object, i.e. discovered it (recalled it, recognised it, as it were, if one appealed to Plato) within itself. Consciousness and the object—the subjective and the objective—prove in the end to be one and the same, because consciousness is objective as a consequence of intensionality and so free of subjectivity, while the object, through its ’ideative character’, i.e. its intensional givenness, is free of objectivity.

p It may seem that Husserl in fact succeeded (though through idealist mystification) in eliminating the epistemological necessity of separating the subjective and the objective, since he treated phenomenological ideal being as outside both. But that 28 impression is deceptive, since the earlier rejected opposition of the subjective and the objective was imperceptibly restored in Husserl’s counterposing of the ideal and the empirical. The empirical (both being and consciousness) is denned as purely subjective, illusory, imaginary, and ideal being (or pure consciousness) as absolutely objective with no relation whatsoever with the being and consciousness with which human existence, natural science, and practice are connected.

p Husserl thus repeated the mistake of those idealists who declare the real imaginary and the imaginary the only existent, and who, confusing subjective and objective idealism, assume that they have done away with all the extremes of subjectivism and objectivism.

p Existentialism made Husserl’s phenomenology the basis of its ontology of human existence. Since rational, conceptual thought (from the standpoint of the existentialist) cannot be the authentic (existential) mode of human existence, existentialism condemns the counterposing of consciousness to being and of the subject to the object as a superficial and essentially false orientation that excludes man from being and so distorts both being and human existence. Existentialism calls for the inclusion of man in- being. That does not, in general, mean that the existentialist protests against treating the human individual outside his relation to nature and social being. Neither the one nor the other interests him much in essence; following Husserl he factors out the empirical being about which everyday observations and the sciences speak. To include man in being means to treat human existence as the key to solving the puzzle of being. While stressing that being, at least for man, manifests itself only in human existence, the existentialist at the same time fences man off from being, declaring that the latter is never comprehended as being but always only as what exists, as material. Consciousness, by constantly going outside itself (transcending, in the existentialist’s terminology), therefore does not penetrate being, and remains alienated from it; it can never become being just as being cannot become consciousness.

p This counterposing of consciousness as ’being for itself to ’being in itself is particularly clearly expressed in the doctrine of Jean-Paul Sartre. The counterposing of the two is absolute. ’Being in itself does not know temporality, destruction, suffering; all these categories characterise only ’human reality’, whose nature consists in limitless subjectivity and mortality. ’It is we who will destroy ourselves, and the earth will remain in its lethargy until another consciousness arrives to awaken 29 it’ (236:90). True, in his Critique de la raison dialeetique, Sartre stresses the relativity of the opposition between the subjective and the objective: the subject is constantly being externalised, i.e. passes from the inside to the outside, but the object is continuously being internalised, i.e. being assimilated by the subject. The dialectic of the subject and object does not, however (according to Sartre), eliminate the mutual alienation of ’being for itself and ’being in itself; it is constantly revived and reinforced because the objective, since it is objective, is absolutely outside consciousness, which is essentially only ’consciousness of consciousness’ and, moreover, ‘nothing’, since it does not contain anything in itself that is inherent in ’being in itself.

p Existentialism, which set itself the task of overcoming the ‘split’ between subject and object, thus deepens the opposition of subjective and objective in fact, since it interprets it subjectively and anti-dialectically. But the conclusion already drawn above follows from that, viz., that it is impossible in principle to eliminate the question of the relation of consciousness to being, and of the subjective to the objective. The whole disagreement about the nature of the relation between them presupposes this demarcation and, to some extent, the counterposing.

p Consciousness of the necessity of this demarcation (and even counterposing) does not, of course, coincide with recognition of the existence of the spiritual and the material. Vulgar materialists did not recognise the existence of the spiritual, i.e. wholely reduced it to the material. Subjective idealists on the contrary denied the existence of matter, calling it simply a bundle of sensations. Some idealists claimed that consciousness and the spiritual did not exist at all, and reduced the objective content of consciousness to physiological reactions. None of these views, however, affected the epistemological basis of the question that Engels called the supreme one of all philosophy; they referred only to interpretation of this basis.

p The divergences in the interpretation of the ’ spiritualmaterial’ relation give rise to different ways of posing the basic philosophical question, and also to denial of its real significance. These differences and the converted forms of the basic philosophical question connected with them merit special study, without which our view of the course of the history of philosophy will be schematic. But it is necessary first of all to recognise that the difference between consciousness and being, and subjective and objective, ,is an objective one, existing 30 independently of consciousness. Consciousness is a function of the brain, but both the brain and consciousness only exist insofar as they relate to the external world with which man interacts. Experimental research has shown that when a person is put in a situation that maximally excludes the effect of countless stimuli on him (most of them not even realised) he suffers emotional and psychic disturbances to the point of hallucinations and paranoid symptoms. The cause of these disturbances of consciousness is the limitation of the number of sensory stimuli or sensory hunger (see 74). Thus the sensualist principle: Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (nothing is in the mind that was not in the senses) is supported in both the epistemological and anthropological aspects. One must not, of course, take that old dictum literally; sense data are not simply perceived or reproduced by consciousness. Consciousness is founded on sense perceptions of the external world, and on all practical sensual activity; and there is no consciousness (and knowledge) without sense reflection of objective reality. It is that (but not only that alone, as I shall show later) which makes the question of the relation of consciousness and being, and of the spiritual and the material, the basic philosophical question.

p Thus, since man possesses consciousness, he is aware of the world around him and distinguishes himself from the things he is conscious of, he finds himself in a situation that is fixed and formulated by the basic philosophical question. Philosophers have not invented this question; it has grown from all human practice, and the history of knowledge, but it does not follow from this that we are aware of it precisely as a question, let alone as a philosophical one and, moreover, the basic one.

p Marx and Engels wrote: ’Consciousness (das Bewusstsein) can never be anything else than conscious being (das bewusste Sein), and the being of men is their actual life-process’ (176:36). This is not only a definite posing of (and answer to) the basic philosophical question but is also a direct indication of the main facts from which this question stems.

p The idealist, or jdealistically thinking physiologist and psychologist, do not, of course, agree, with such a materialist interpretation of the relation of consciousness and being, of the psychic and the material. They try to counter it with an idealist answer to the basic philosophical question. But in this case, too, they cannot eliminate the direct or indirect demarcation of consciousness and what is cognised, i.e. being, the actual process of human life, about which the founders of Marxism spoke of 31 in the quotation above. And it is impossible to refrain here from a question that has already suggested itself earlier, viz., why can’t philosophy start immediately and directly with investigation of the reality that constitutes the basis of human life, i.e. with man himself, who is undoubtedly the most interesting and important object of inquiry for himself? Why cannot theoretical analysis of the most important vital relations of man and the world of things (relations that cannot, of course, be reduced just to awareness of being) be treated as the main, really most important philosophical question as philosophers suggest who hold that the relation of thinking and being, of the spiritual and material, is too abstract a question to be considered the main one? For the spiritual, insofar as it is thought of in the most general, undifferentiated form, is an abstraction, existing only in thought. And matter, too, as a concept that integrates an infinite aggregate of phenomena, is also an abstraction. Berkeley, interpreting it from a subjective-idealist and nominalist position, declared it an empty abstraction, as the name of an object that did not in fact exist. A similar, but much more sophisticated attempt at discrediting not only matter but also the basic philosophical question has been made in our time by Bertrand Russell, who wrote that matter and consciousness were essentially conventional concepts, and that it was as senseless to defend the primacy of matter or consciousness in face of the latest scientific data as to dispute about which hangs above and which below, the Sun or Earth (see 230). By ’the latest scientific data’, he meant the theory of behaviourism, which endeavoured to eliminate consciousness. We now see the epistemological source of the arguments that the basic question of philosophy is not, actually, the basic one because its content is formed by abstractions and not by actual (human and natural) reality. A clearly oversimplified understanding of the concrete as the subject-matter of philosophic inquiry is characteristic of all these arguments. In that regard Konstantinov has correctly noted:

p An understanding of the concrete as empirical datum has become quite common among us. ...But it should not be forgotten that in Marxism there is another, deeper understanding of the concrete, which is reproduceable in theory and is the result of knowledge (121:17)

p But, in order to understand the epistemological essence of the basic philosophical question precisely in this ‘abstract’ form of it, it is necessary to take full account of the pattern of the ascent from the abstract to the concrete in the course of theoretical inquiry.

p One cannot begin to investigate any concrete, complex phenomenon from its theoretical reproduction in concepts. If that were possible science would have been able to solve its tasks by the shortest route, i.e. from the concrete in reality to the concrete in thought. But the concrete in reality can only be the object of contemplation and not of scientific understanding, and any attempt to express the contemplated directly in concepts generates only empty abstractions. The concrete in science is built up from scientific abstractions. It is a unity of various definitions, each of which inevitably has an abstract, one-sided character. Science therefore begins investigation ot the concrete by breaking it down into separate parts, aspects, forms, and relations. Science creates abstractions that reflect these essential factors of the concrete, and analyses the relations between these abstractions, because the real complexity, and many-sidedness of the concrete, and the contradictions, changes, and development proper to it, are reflected in them.

p Whoever begins an inquiry from a survey of the concrete whole, the component parts, aspects, and premisses of which are still unknown to him, in essence begins with an empty abstraction. The concrete in theoretical thought, Marx pointed out,

p appears ... 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 (166:206)

p We employ this conclusion—the result of a materialist reworking of the Hegelian idealist conception—not just in political economy but also in other sciences, though not, obviously, in all. The Aristotelian notion of the velocity of free-falling bodies (according to their shape, weight, etc.) is a naive (historically naive, i.e. inevitable) attempt to comprehend a complex process. Galileo took another route, when formulating the law of fall of bodies. He was aware of the necessity of abstraction and rejected the weight and shape of the falling body, for which he had naturally to assume (also an abstraction!) that bodies fall in a vacuum. Aristotle could not, with his ‘concrete’ approach to the problem, formulate a law of fall of bodies. Galileo, taking the route of scientific abstraction, discovered this law (abstract, it is true) which, however, reflected the real process of the uniformly accelerated motion of falling bodies fairly correctly, i.e. within certain limits. Aerodynamics cannot, of course, be restricted to application of Galileo’s law; in it a need arises to synthesise scientific abstractions that by no means reflect the process of falling in an airless medium, and that 33 allow for the weight and shape of the falling body; the task of this concrete knowledge of the process is resolved within the context of these scientific disciplines. In this connection, however, Galileo’s law retains its significance within certain empirically fixed limits, the more so that at great altitudes the rarefaction of the atmosphere corresponds approximately to the abstraction of an. airless medium introduced by Galileo, which consequently reveals its objective content.

Thus, when examining the basic philosophical question from the angle of the development of scientific, theoretical knowledge, we come to the conclusion that it forms the starting point of philosophical inquiry. I shall try to confirm this conclusion in the following sections of this chapter.