37

p It is necessary, in the history of philosophy, more than in any other discipline that studies the development of knowledge and performs a certain ideological function in the class struggle, to draw a line between the objective content of philosophical doctrines and their subjective, often even arbitrary form of 38 expression. This is a most important principle of inquiry in the history of philosophy, which is based directly on the initial proposition of historical materialism about the relation of social consciousness and social being. Because of that, consciousness as awareness of being is by no means an adequate reflection; knowledge, at any rate in its developed and systematic form, presupposes inquiry. In philosophy, insofar as it is, on the one hand, investigation, and on the other awareness of historically determined social being, there is constantly a contradiction between its objective content and subjective form of expression. This contradiction is only overcome by Marxism, which has created a scientific, philosophical world outlook that is at the same time a scientific ideology.^^8^^

p The drawing of a line between the objective content and subjective form of philosophical doctrines is thus a dialecticalmaterialist principle of scientific inquiry. Marx and Engels constantly applied and developed this principle they had formulated. Their attitude to Hegel is particularly indicative in this sense, since there is perhaps no other philosopher for whom they had such a high regard and whom they so sharply criticised. This attitude, at first glance inconsistent, was in fact a consistent drawing of a line between the objectively true in Hegel’s doctrine, and the subjective in it, often even inimical to his own outstanding philosophical discoveries. In reference to Hegel’s dialectic, for instance, Marx said: ’This dialectic is, to be sure, the ultimate word in philosophy and hence there is all the more need to divest it of the mystical aura given it by Hegel’ (173:316). Further on, in the same letter to Lassalle, Marx said, speaking of his own dissertation on Epicurus, that in it he had himself attempted

p the portrayal of a complete system from fragments, a system which I am convinced, by the by, was—as with Heraclitus—only implicitly present in (Epicurus’) work, not consciously as a system. Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him (ibid.).

p If one had said to Spinoza that the theoretical starting point of his system was a materialist answer to the question of the relation of the spiritual and material, he would not, judging from the inner structure and exposition of his system, have agreed with that characterisation of his doctrine. Neither matter (extent) nor the spiritual (thought) were in any causal relationship, according to his doctrine; they constituted attributes of a single (and sole) substance. Nature as a whole was 39 called God, contrary to Christian theology, which absolutely counterposed the divine to the earthly. Spinoza’s system was essentially an atheistic doctrine, a materialist pantheism, that differed in principle from the idealist pantheism developed by several Neoplatonists, and in modern times by the occasionalists (Malebranche, Geulincx), and to a certain extent also by Hegel. In delimiting the objective content and subjective mode of expression in Spinoza’s doctrine, Marx stressed the need to differentiate between ’what Spinoza considered the keystone of his system and what in fact constitutes if (181:506). The objective content of Spinoza’s doctrine is incomparably richer, more significant, and more original than what he consciously formulated as his basic conviction.

p I have dwelt in rather more detail than may seem necessary on setting out one of the most important principles of the Marxian analysis of the history of philosophy, since this helps explain why philosophers who have posed the basic philosophical question and given it a quite definite answer, were not conscious, as a rule, that it was in fact a matter of the basic philosophical question. They were not concerned with investigating its origin and its relation to its varied themata and problematic, so important for distinguishing philosophic doctrines from one another. Philosophers have often called quite other problems basic in general in their doctrines and in philosophy. That point has been noted by Lyakhovetsky and Tyukhtin in their entry ’The Basic Question of Philosophy’ in the Soviet , Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, where they say in particular:

p Helvetius considered the basic question of philosophy to be that of the essence of human happiness, Rousseau the question of social inequality and ways of overcoming it, Bacon the question of extension of man’s powti over nature by inventions, etc. (154:172).

p But it follows from a concrete analysis of those philosophers’ doctrines that what they called basic in their teaching did not form its chief, initial theoretical proposition or principle determining the direction of their philosophic inquiry; it was a matter rather of the sense and humanist purpose of the philosophy, and of the philosophic problems that each of them represented as the most important.^^9^^

p I do not see negations of the basic philosophical question in these philosophers, or attempts to counterpose some other one to it. But there is no epistemological analysis in them of the initial theoretical premisses of their own doctrines, and that prevents understanding of the sense in which the question I am concerned with is really basic. As soon as this 40 epistemological approach is outlined, the philosopher begins to formulate his real starting point more or less consciously.

p Kant’s proposition cited above, about the self-obviousness of the existence of self-awareness posited perception of the external world and so recognition of its existence. Having drawn that important conclusion, however, Kant rejected the materialist answer to the basic philosophical question and took up a dualist position akin to Cartesianism. Philosophy had to begin with the recognition of consciousness, on the one hand, and on the other of a reality (the ’thing in itself) independent of it. The question of the existence of a causal connection between them could not be decided, and therefore neither the subject nor the object, taken separately, could become the starting point of philosophy. Fichte’s basic statement against that solution of the problem of the fundamental position boiled down to affirming that philosophy had to deduce the necessity of facts from its adopted fundamental position rather than ascertaining them empirically. There were consequently only two routes: either to take the object as initial and deduce the subject from it or, taking the subject as initial, to deduce the object from it. Fichte said categorically:

p One of the two, spirit or nature, must be eliminated; the two are by no means unitable. Their seeming union is partly hypocrisy and lies, partly an inconsistency imposed through inner feeling (60:32).

p Consciousness of the necessity of the basic philosophical question, and an understanding of the inevitability of the dilemma and of its alternative answer, are to be seen in this categoricalness of Fichte’s. Since he answered it in a subjectively idealist way, he called for elimination of one of the opposites, namely, nature. The opposite approach (elimination of spirit), be called ’transcendental materialism’, suggesting that any materialism transformed reality into something suprasensory, because the whole, sensually perceivable world, in his conviction, presupposed the existence of a subject.

p Schelling criticised Fichte for his subjective-idealist, essentially negative interpretation of nature.

p For him nature is an abstract concept—denoting a mere barrier—of the not-I, the wholly void object in which nothing whatever is perceivable except just that it confronts the subject (240:110).

p The objective idealist Schelling, armed with the achievements of the natural science of his day, developed a dialectical philosophy of nature, well aware that the objective could not 41 be reduced to the subjective. The opposite view, i.e. the materialist, was also unacceptable to him. A return to the Kantian point of view was hopeless because it dismissed the problem. So Schelling modified the basic philosophical problem. It was no longer one of the relation of subject and object, since the difference between them was not primary. The rise of this difference witnessed to the birth of consciousness, but if consciousness had not always existed, did it not follow that materialism was true? Schelling rejected that conclusion, substantiating the fundamental idealist principle, viz., that consciousness was the product of the self-development and self-differentiation of the unconscious world spirit. But why did the unconscious divide into two, generating its opposite, consciousness? Schilling’s philosophy of nature could not answer that.

p Hegel, inheriting the most valuable ideas of his idealist predecessors, rejected both the Fichtean reduction of the object to the subject and Schilling’s conception of absolute identity without inner difference. The metaphysical abstraction of absolute identity essentially did not work, as Hegel showed; while there was this identity, in which every determinacy disappeared, there was no world, and as soon as the world manifested itself, absolute identity disappeared. In opposition to Schelling, Hegel showed that substantial identity was dialectical, and by virtue of that initially contained the difference between the subjective and the objective. Hegel formulated the initial proposition of philosophy as the relation of thought and being, whose unity was the ’absolute idea’. He came fully to a conscious formulation of the basic philosophical question when he wrote that ’spirit and nature, thought and being, are the two infinite sides of the Idea’ (85:111, 161), a unity of which all philosophical doctrines strove to achieve. Continuing his idea, he wrote:

p Philosophy hence falls into the two main forms in which the opposition is resolved, into a realistic and an idealistic system of philosophy, i.e. into one which makes the objectivity and the content of thought to arise from the perceptions, and one which proceeds to truth from the independence of thought (85:111, 162).

p Hegel consequently saw the necessary character of the opposition between materialism (realism, in his terminology) and idealism, and found its sources in reality itself, the main determinations of which, in his doctrine, were thought and being.^^10^^

p Feuerbach was more aware than other pre-Marxian materialists of the many-sided content of the struggle between 42 materialism and idealism. Anthropological materialism arose during the disintegration of German classical idealism and, for all its opposition to the doctrines of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, was their natural completion. Feuerbach fought against the most developed, significant, profound idealist doctrines that had ever existed in history. We find in him a thorough critical analysis of the speculative-idealist answer to the basic philosophical question. He traced how Hegel, converting thought into the subject and being into the predicate, stood the real relation on its head. The Hegelian deduction of nature from the ’absolute idea’, as Feuerbach explained, by no means proved that nature was implicitly contained in this idea; if there were no nature it would be impossible to ‘deduce’ it from the supernatural. It was necessary, consequently, to return from speculative constructs to the facts, whose existence was obvious to everyone; nature existed, man existed, human thought existed. And he who also discarded the notion of a supernatural spirit together with theological prejudices thus planted the question of the relation of the spiritual and material in real, human soil. Insofar as philosophy answered the question of the relation of thought and being, it must be anthropology, i.e. a doctrine of man, whose existence formed the actual resolution of this problem. ’The unity of thought and being,’ he wrote, ’has sense and truth only when man composes the basis, the subject of this unity’ (57:339).

p Feuerbach thus reduced the basic philosophical question to that of man, and the relation of the psychic and physical. This was a narrowing of the problem, but at the same time a concretisation of it, since it was in his time that natural science had provided adequate proof that thought was a function of the brain, i.e. of matter organised in a special way.

p The idealist who is compelled by physiology to recognise this fact does not, of course, reject his convictions thereby; he endeavours to find a spiritual first principle outside human existence, pleading that the dependence of the spiritual on the physical in the structure of human existence must itself have arisen from (and be explained by) something else, not only supernatural but also superhuman. Feuerbach, being conscious of the inevitability of such objections to materialism, argued that study of nature did not reveal the necessity for the existence of a supernatural and was not evidence, even indirectly, of its presence. Any supernaturalist explanation of the origin of the psychic was therefore quite without grounds.

43

p How can man arise from nature, i.e. the spirit from matter? [he wrote]. First of all, answer me this question: how can matter arise from spirit? If you do not find any, in the least reasonable answer to that question, you will apprehend that only the contrary question will lead you to the goal (56:179).

p Feuerbach was thus conscious of the difficulties standing in the way of a systematic proof of the materialist position on the essence and origin of the spiritual. But these difficulties were those of scientific study, while the contrary idealist thesis was not only unprovable but also incompatible in principle with a scientific posing of the problem. The idealist interpretation of the relation between the spiritual and material was, as Feuerbach showed, essentially theological:

p The question whether a God created the world, the question of the relation actually of God to the world, is one of the relation of the spirit to sensuality, of the general or abstract to the real, of the species to the individual; this question belongs to the most important and at the same time most difficult ones of human knowledge and philosophy, and, as has already become clear, the whole history of philosophy virtually turns on it (57:136).

p Lenin, citing this passage, compared it with Engels’s formulation of the basic philosophical question (144:70). We see that Feuerbach, to an even greater extent than Hegel, expressed a profound understanding of this question. Consequently, at this point, too, German classical philosophy was a direct forerunner of dialectical and historical materialism.

p Thus, over many centuries, philosophy proceeded, in its theoretical self-determination, from one answer or other to the basic philosophical question, without being aware of the fact, sometimes even coming close to a correct appreciation of it. The explanation of this contradiction is to be found, on the one hand, in nature, in the genesis of the basic philosophical question, and on the other hand in the general patterns of development of theoretical knowledge.

p Science always attains understanding of its theoretical foundations, and of the principles by which it is in fact guided, by very complicated paths. Contrary to the ordinary view scientific principles are not so much the starting point of the development of a science as a result of that development. In other words, before the principles become methodological directives they must be brought out through comprehension of the results of scientific development. As Mamardashvili has correctly noted:

p There is no unilinearity of development and continuity in the history of science and philosophy, identical to the logical course of thought in 44 a theoretical system. The development of knowledge proceeds in the form of a mass of lines that embrace the subject and go deep into it from various aspects. Philosophy (and science) develops on different ‘planes’, and singles out aspects of the subject of different complexity and depth simultaneously, and reflection of these aspects develops as a whole (160:180-181).

p The development of each science is built up from two main, qualitatively different, though ultimately interconnected processes, i.e. increase in knowledge about the objects that it studies, and investigation of its own theoretical foundations. Inquiries of the latter type are usually late, i.e. are only begun at that stage of a science’s development when contradictions in its fundamental theoretical principles come to light that had hitherto seemed incontrovertible.

p A person who is not engaged in scientific work usually imagines the development of science as harmoniously occurring process. He thinks that scientific problems arise and are resolved in a strict order of priority and corresponding sequence (to begin with, the simplest tasks are tackled, then more complicated ones, and a new matter is not taken up until the old one has been finished with). He pictures the proliferation of scientific knowledge as something like the erection of a multistoreyed building; first a solid foundation is laid, in the constructing of which it is already known in advance how many storeys are to be erected. Then the floors are added one after another (again in strict sequence), after which the interior finishing of the building is completed. Since science is probably the most planned, purposeful, theoretically comprehended form of human activity, the existence of spontaneity in its development seems, if not unnatural, at least irregular, improper, and undesirable, although many scientific discoveries have been made more or less by chance, while the results of research (in contrast to those of other labour processes) cannot be anticipated in advance; we cannot know today what we shall know tomorrow. Each researcher is aware of his own activity, and of the research techniques he employs, but there is an immense gulf between these notions (often, moreover, subjective and superficial) and understanding of the principles and theoretical foundations of the science. Only through the accumulation and development of knowledge, and the rise of incompatible conceptions, contradictions, and paradoxes within the context of a definite science is its real theoretical foundation brought out, and illusions dispersed about convictions uncritically adopted as axioms or even as facts that it was enough 45 simply to state, since they were obvious. As Karl Marx said:

p The historical progress of all sciences leads only through a multitude of contradictory moves to the real point of departure. Science, unlike other architects, builds not only castles in the air, but may construct separate habitable storeys of the building before laying the foundation stone (166:57).

p It is therefore not surprising that the basic philosophical question—which is really the theoretical point of departure of all more or less systematically developed philosophical doctrines—could be scientifically comprehended, formulated, and, if you please, even discovered only at that historical stage when the main trends in philosophy had been fully singled out, and when it had become more or less obvious that they were materialism and idealism.

p Scientific understanding of the nature of philosophic knowledge presupposes investigation of the genesis of the basic philosophical question and of its place in the development of philosophy. The contradiction between the objective content of philosophical systems and the subjective form of their construction and exposition must not only be explained but also resolved by way of a distinct, scientific demarcation of the point of theoretical departure (answer to the basic philosophical question) and the theoretical principle and initial thesis of the doctrine from which the most important propositions of the system are deduced. Until this important line is drawn, the real significance of the basic philosophical question remains in the dark, since the theoretical principle of philosophical systems always figures in the foreground. That is why philosophers attach paramount importance to it, and see in it, above all, the essence of their discoveries. And this theoretical principle, of course, has far from always coincided with the answer to the basic philosophical question. The first thesis of Descartes’ philosophy—’I think, therefore I am’—did not bring out, at least with sufficient definiteness, the dualist character of his system. The principle of Kant’s philosophy— the demarcation of empirical and a priori knowledge, and the problem formulated in connection with it, namely how a priori synthetic judgments are possible—undoubtedly included several idealist notions, though the demarcation of types of knowledge (which, moreover, did not lack < a rational kernel) did not follow directly from an idealist answer to the basic philosophical question.

p The basic question thus blends with the problems posed by a philosophical system, and with the initial theoretical premisses 46 that distinguish one philosophy from another. A philosopher usually starts the exposition of his system of views with a statement that leads in some cases to a definite answer to the basic philosophical question, and in others already includes this answer in essence, which only comes out, however, during the logical development of the initial statement, rather than starting from the question of which is primary, the spiritual or the material. Both the idealist and the materialist may adopt the concept of being as the theoretical principle of their system; while it bears a general form there is nothing in it, except the stating of existence, that is inherent in any objects of possible knowledge. A philosopher becomes a materialist or an idealist only when he passes from this ‘neutral’, but essentially empty, unpremissed, theoretical principle to the differences inherent in it.” Aristotle’s idealism, for instance, began when he stated (dividing being into matter and form) that form was a non-material principle determining matter.

p Analysis of contemporary idealist philosophy, in particular, confirms the need for a principled theoretical demarcation of the initial theoretical proposition (principle) and the real answer to the basic philosophical question, even in those cases when the two coincide in form. The latest Christian spiritualism, for instance, can easily mislead the unsophisticated reader, in putting forward, as its initial thesis, that being is primary, and consciousness secondary. Only a critical analysis of the concrete content that Christian spiritualists invest the concept of being with shows that this thesis formulates an idealist answer to the basic philosophical question.

p Sciacca, a spokesman of Italian Christian spiritualism, substantiates an idealist-theological system of views as follows, starting from’the thesis ,of the primacy of being:

p Being is primary; only being is the primary. It is not even exact to say that it is ‘first’, in so far as being is the beginning; It is presence, it is, it states itself from itself; there is nothing ‘before’ and ‘after’ being. We can imagine nothingness before and after, that is to say the absence of being, but such a supposition is only possible insofar as there is being. Nothingness does not annihilate being, for it is imaginable thanks to being... This absence, which is because of presence, we call non-being; it is a mistake to call it nothingness. All that exists is ‘dialectic’; it is a presence and an absence of being, but the absence is conditioned by the presence (243:15-16).

p Later he counterposes being on the one hand to the subject and on the other to the object. He takes up arms against the idealism (subjective) that reduces the object to the subject, and against materialism, which allegedly reduces the subject 47 to the object. Being prevails over all qualitative differences and ultimately over reality; ’the real is not being and being is not the real’ (243:19). The real is declared to be a derivative form of being, which is interpreted as a supra-empirical, trans-subjective and trans-objective reality, and ultimately as God.

p A line between the basic philosophical question and the theoretical principle of a philosophic system is essential not only for the critique of idealism but also for a correct understanding of materialist philosophy. Hobbes took as the initial concept (principle) of his materialist system, the concept of body, which he counterposed to the abstract, and sometimes ambiguous (as the history of scholasticism has shown), concept of being. For Hobbes philosophy was a doctrine of bodies, because nothing else existed at all.

p The subject of philosophy, or the matter it treats of, is every Body of which we can conceive any generation, and which we may by any consideration thereof compare with other Bodies; or which is capable of composition and resolution; that is to say, every Body, of whose Generation or Properties we can have any knowledge (101:7).

p The initial concept of Hobbes’ system, namely that of body, contains a materialist answer to the basic philosophical question, but the two must not be identified since he included a nominalist interpretation of the objects of knowledge in his answer, a denial of the objectivity of the general, identification of matter and substance, and a denial of immaterial phenomena. That understanding of the object of knowing is unacceptable to the philosophy of Marxism, despite the fact that it agrees with the materialist point of departure of Hobbes’ doctrine.

p Thus there are constantly different initial theoretical concepts or fundamental statements within the materialist or idealist answer to the basic philosophical question. These concepts and statements differ from one another in both form and content. Anaximander’s apeiron, Empedocles’ elements, the concept of a single nature of the eighteenth-century French materialists, and the conception of objective reality in the doctrine of dialectical materialism are initial materialist propositions that are as essentially different as the varieties of materialist philosophy connected with them. The importance of these differences comes out as soon as we analyse the premisses and conclusions associated with them more deeply.

p Idealism, probably to an even greater degree than materialism, is distinguished by a diversity of modes of formulating initial philosophical concepts and fundamental statements, 48 which is largely due to the fact that the development of natural science constantly discredits its initial propositions, forcing its adherents to transform them within the context of an idealist interpretation of reality. Some idealists take a concept of world reason as the theoretical principle of their system, others one of a world will, and still others one of the unconscious. These are all, of course, only variants of the concept of a spiritual first principle, but they have essential significance within the limits of the idealist system of views. If the absolute principle of everything that exists is reason, the world is depicted as an ordered, rationally organised hierarchical system. If the substantial essence of the world is considered to be an irrational world will, the world is likened to chaos, in which there is no direction whatsoever, no system, or consistency, or basis for purposive human activity.

p The different variants of the idealist answer to the basic philosophical question thus also, to some extent, determine the peculiarity of the content of philosophic systems. The difference between the initial concept (or statement) and the answer to the basic philosophical question must therefore also be treated positively, i.e. as a mode of developing philosophy, since the initial theoretical proposition does not play a formal role but is a profound statement that often marks a new historical stage in the development of philosophical knowledge. If that were not so, then the philosophers who attribute so much significance to the theoretical principle of a system could be reproached with superficiality. But as is readily to be seen from the example of the Cartesian cogito, the initial theoretical proposition is often the formulation of the most important idea of a philosophic system. The statement ’I think, therefore I am’ had epoch-making socio-historical and heuristic significance. It proclaimed the right of every human being to answer the question of the truth of any statement and gave Descartes’ doctrine (for all its inconsistencies and tendencies to compromise with theology) the character of a revolutionary challenge to mediaevalism. From that angle its theoretical principle was not only and not so much a mode of substantiating a certain system of views as a philosophical thesis whose profound sense was brought out by its theoretical development and methodological application.

p Spinoza’s system was constructed on the analogy of Euclid’s Principles which, in the conviction not only of the seventeenth century rationalists but also of naturalists (recall that Newton expounded his Principia mathematica philosophiae naturalis 49 according to Euclid’s method), was the standard of the connected, consistent, demonstrative exposition of a theory. Such a standard seemed particularly necessary in philosophy, in which unsubstantiated or insufficiently substantiated hypotheses competed with one another. The progressing divergence of doctrines, and the barren struggle (as it seemed at the time) between incompatible theories equally claiming to incontrovertible truth, and the crisis of scholasticism with all its carefully developed apparatus of discrimination and ‘proofs’, all inspired a conviction that only mathematics could rescue philosophy from permanent confusion.

p Spinoza began with a definition of the basic concepts of his system (substance, attributes, necessity, freedom, etc.); then followed axioms, and then theorems, corollaries, and scholia. There is no need to explain that this mode of exposition (and, as Spinoza imagined, proof) seemed to the author of the Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (and, of course, not just to him) to be probably his main achievement; the truths of philosophy were proved mathematically for the first time, which it was expected would wholly eliminate the grounds for disagreement. And it would be highly unhistorical to undervalue the method of exposition and proof worked out by Spinoza just because he did not allow for the specific nature of philosophical knowledge (i.e. simply borrowed the method of geometry), and because he did not pose the question of the reality of what constituted the content of his definitions when formulating those that preceded the axioms (and were therefore the real initial concepts of his system). The method of more geometrico employed in philosophy was a really philosophical achievement, and that is perhaps more obvious in our time than it was a hundred years ago.

p Spinoza said that the beginning was always most difficult and important. He obviously had in mind his own system, too. Stressing the importance in principle of the basic philosophical question does not diminish the significance of the initial theoretical propositions of doctrines; it is simply a matter of demarcating the one from the other, and then of investigating their relationship. And the main thing in this relationship is determined by the choice of alternative, i.e. by a definite answer to the dilemma formulated by the basic philosophical question.

p I must warn the reader against a formal interpretation of this choice. The opponents of materialism often argue as if it started from one postulate and idealism from another, opposite one. But the materialist answer to the basic philosophical 50 question is not a postulate or a hypothesis. As the GDR scientist Klaus has remarked:

p The correct answer to the basis of philosophy is a very broad abstraction from the whole development of human practice and human thought. Scientific hypotheses that propose a false answer to the basic question to us are therefore rejected because they contradict this practice of mankind (120:69).

p Philosophy was already endeavouring, at the dawn of its existence, to find a firm theoretical basis that could provide a reliable point of departure for the whole further development of philosophic thought. Mankind’s scientific and historical experience demonstrates that the materialist answer to the basic philosophical question is this sought-after foundation.

p Engels characterised materialism as ’a general world outlook resting upon a definite conception of the relation between matter and mind’ (52:349). What does the word ‘general’ mean in that context? It seemingly points to the difference between philosophy and those special forms of outlook on the world that have either only natural, or only social, reality, as their subject-matter. The natural-science, irreligious world outlook that took shape in direct connection with Copernicus’ great discovery did not come to be called heliocentric by chance. Engels characterised bourgeois ideology as a juridical one. Insofar as the subject-matter of philosophy is both natural and social reality, it is the most general of all possible types of world outlook.

p Engels’ statement cited above, in formulating the principled basis of the materialist world outlook, thus stressed the ideological importance of the materialist answer to the basic philosophical question. The idealist critique of materialism is evidence that the latter’s opponents are distinctly conscious of its ideological significance and growing influence. Contemporary idealists often criticise their predecessors for having derived being from thought and consciousness; that kind of idealist philosophising is now condemned as barren, unrealistic intellectualism, rationalism, panlogism, and so on.

p The one answer to the basic philosophical question or the other thus constitutes the basis of each of the systems of philosophical views, so theoretically determining the main trend or direction of inquiry. I stress the main trend, and not more, because it would be an obvious fallacy to suggest that the answer predetermines all the propositions and conclusions of a given philosophy. Within the context of a system, like any theoretical construct in general, logical necessity is not the sole 51 form of determination. One must also allow for the fact that the answer to the basic question gets theoretical expression in the results of inquiry only in so far as the philosopher is consistent. But a desire to follow consistently the principle adopted is not enough to attain that end. Berkeley’s principle esse ist percipi (to be is to be perceived) cannot be followed consistently in a system whose direct goal is to substantiate a theistic world outlook.

p The pre-Marxian materialists undoubtedly endeavoured to pursue the materialist principle in philosophic analysis both of nature and of social reality. But, without being aware of it, they remained idealists in their understanding of history. And even in natural philosophy they sometimes retreated from materialism, e.g. the mechanistic assumption of a first impulse, the subjectivist interpretation of so-called secondary qualities, and so on.

p The inconsistency of a materialist or an idealist not only has theoretical and epistemological roots, of course, but also socioeconomic ones. The metaphysical character of the materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not, of course, due to the materialist answer to the basic philosophical question, as has been claimed more than once by opponents of the materialist understanding of the world. The idealists of that time, too, were as a rule metaphysicists.

p Any philosophical system takes shape in the socio-economic conditions of a definite historical epoch, and it would be unscientific to deduce its concrete propositions directly from its principle, which at best can only be a guiding thread in the course of inquiry.

p This general consideration is necessary so as to avoid oversimplifying the idea of the place and role of the basic philosophical question, and at the same time to stress its principled ideological significance.

p NOTES

p ^^1^^ An example of how far this revision sometimes goes is the following claim of Max Sche’ler, the founder of philosophical anthropology: ’The physiological and psychic life .processes are ontologically strongly identical (238:74). 1 shall show, further on, that this proposition, and others like it, coincides fully with the idealist interpretation of objective reality and knowledge of it.

p  ^^2^^ It must be stressed that Lenin, when tackling the most important problems of the theory of Marxism, often employed definitions whose content "was 52 demarcated by a single attribute; this maximum limitation convincingly disclosed the main, decisive thing in the Marxian understanding of the problem. ’Only he is a Marxist,’ he wrote, for example, ’who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested’ (145:35). It seems to me that this example makes the sense of optimal demarcation of the content of a definition particularly obvious. By employing this analogy one can readily understand that a correct approach to the basic question of philosophy consists in fixing the really principal thing that distinguishes the main parties in philosophy, and not in extending its content.

p  ^^3^^ I have examined this point systematically in my article ’On the Change in the Subject-Matter of Philosophy’ published in M.T.Iovchuk, et at. (Eds.). Problemy istorii ftlosofskoi i sotsiologicheskoi mysli XIX veka (Nauka, Moscow, 1960).

p  ^^4^^ I am not referring here (since it is a matter only of the epistemological aspect, of the question interesting me) to the fact obvious from the angle of historical materialism, that self-awareness presupposes not only perception of the external world but also man’s attitude to man, the interaction between people, the result of which is society. Man, Marx said, is not born either with a mirror in his hands, or with a Fichtean self-awareness 7 am /’. ’Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind’ (167:1,59).

p  ^^5^^ One must agree with Plekhanov: ’There was a time when philosophers did not discuss such questions. This was in the initial period of the development of ancient Greek philosophy. For instance, Thales taught that water was the primary substance from which all things come and to which all things return. But he did not ask himself: what relation has consciousness to that primary substance? Nor did Anaximenes ask himself the same question when he averred that the primary substance was not water but air’ (210:577).

p  ^^6^^ I therefore cannot agree with Anisimov’s very categorical statement that primitive man ’was always above all a rationalist, and natural materialist’ (5:124). It by no means follows from the obvious fact that primitive men, insofar as they adapted themselves somehow to their environment and possessed certain correct ideas about it, that these ideas were philosophical or theoretical. Some workers, in trying to disclose the historical roots of materialist and rationalist views, seemingly go too far not only into history but also into the prehistory of₍ mankind.

p 7 Conversion of analogy into a principle for explaining reality is also characteristic of the most developed varieties of idealism. Shinkaruk notes this feature in Hegel’s philosophy: ’The idealistically interpreted purposive activity of man serves as an empirical model of the world. The initial premisses of this interpretation are as follows: thinking precedes material activity; the material, objective world is the product of purposeful activity and consequently of thought; the subject of purposive activity (man) is either reduced to consciousness or his consciousness is separated from this real subject and interpreted in the spirit -of theology as the self-existant demiurge of the world (245:127).

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p  ^^8^^ I have surveyed this question in greater detail in my monograph Problemy istoriko-filosofskoi nauki (Problems of the History of Philosophy), 2nd ed. (Mysl, Moscow, 1982). See Chap. 2, §5; Chap. 7, §3.

p  ^^9^^ This comes out with even greater obviousness in the doctrines of the Russian materialists, the revolutionary democrats. Pisarev, for instance, claimed that the final goal of philosophy and knowledge in general ’consisted in answering the always inevitable question of hungry and naked people; outside this question there is absolutely nothing that it is worth caring about, thinking about, and bustling about’ (206:125). Quite obviously, he had in mind here not an initial theoretical fundamental proposition, not a mode of solving philosophical problems, but a supreme task of philosophy from the angle of the interests of the oppressed and exploited masses.

p  ^^10^^ I therefore cannot agree with Lyakhovetsky and Tyukhtin when they say, in their entry cited above: ’Neither Hegel nor Feuerbach, however, distinguished the question of the relation of thought to being as the basic one of all philosophical questions’ (154:172). That is said too categorically. It is another matter that Hegel often smoothed over the alternative—being or thought—when proving that thought was being, and that the latter was an attribute of thought. That fault did not exist in Feuerbach, as we shall see later.

 ^^1^^’ That is why Engels stressed that ’as soon as we depart even a millimetre from the simple basic fact that being is common to all these things, the differences between these things begin to emerge—and whether these differences consist in the circumstance that some are white and others are black, that some are animate and others inanimate, that some may be of this world and others of the world beyond, cannot be decided by us from the fact that mere existence is in equal manner ascribed to them all’ (50:54-55).