54

p The question of the relation of the spiritual and the material is above all one of the essence, of the nature of what exists. When one asks ’What is the world?’, ’What is it that exists?’, the answers are necessarily concretised as follows: ’What is matter?’, ’What is spirit?’. The relation ‘spiritual-material’ is an objective one, existing independently of our consciousness of it. That is the ontological aspect of the basic philosophical question. When the psychic reaches the level of consciousness in its development, and knowledge of the reality around it begins, an epistemological, subject-object relation arises.

p The notion that something is primary and something else secondary is based on the assumption that both exist. The secondary posits the primary, which, however, is primary in the context of the ‘spiritual-material’ relation. But this relation does not have a correlative character, since only one aspect of it depends on the other, which, on the contrary, is independent, primordial, substantial. The Greek materialists started from the concept of a primary matter (materia prima), a primary substance, treating everything different from it as transformed forms of it. Despite the naivete of that posing of the question, which did not rule out the primary in time (and so the beginning of the world), its principled ideological significance is obvious; it is a matter of the material unity of the world. Is that not why the idea of primary , matter retains a significance of principle also for contemporary physics? This idea contradicts the metaphysical notion that everything cognised will always be an infinitely small part of the unknown. Markov has remarked, apropos of that:

p The drive to understand ‘something’ as constituted of ‘something’ ’ simpler’ and fundamental has always been progressive and led, as history witnesses, to quite substantial positive results. The idea of primary matter 55 as the basis and driving motive of a definite approach to analysis of the material world has always been and remains productive (165:66-67).

p The ‘spiritual-material’ relation is not a substantial or absolute ontological one in the sense in which the motion, change, and development of matter are absolute. It arises of objective necessity, but only in certain conditions. It also disappears, consequently, of objective necessity, because of a corresponding change in the conditions. One must not, therefore, as Svidersky remarks,

p confuse the basic question of philosophy with the basic relationship of reality itself. The relationship of matter and consciousness is not always universal and in that sense the basic relation of reality itself (252:45).

p There is evidently an endless number of heavenly bodies lacking the most elementary phenomena of life.

p Idealism has often, since Schopenhauer’s time, depicted human reason as an anomaly, doomed to disappear without trace. That view suits not only irrationalists but also theologians, who suggest that the advent of rational beings was an indubitable miracle.

p From the angle of materialism reason is not something foreign to matter. The spiritual is a natural consequence of matter’s continually occurring transformations. The first materialists, the hylozoists, who identified life with the motion of matter, made a profound, though naive guess about the essence of the living. The hypothesis that there was a time when there was no life in the infinite Universe cannot be scientifically substantiated, just like the assumption that life exists only on our planet. Engels seemingly had that in mind when he said:

p We have the certainty that ... none of (matter’s) attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it (51:39).

p Pre-Marxian materialists sometimes expressed an idea of the co-eternity of spiritual and material, while at the same time stressing the former’s dependence on the latter. Spinoza called thought an attribute of substance-nature. Diderot considered sensitivity, the elementary form of the psychic, to be inherent in molecules. In the language of contemporary logic this ‘rooting’ of the spiritual in the material can be expressed as follows, in Narsky’s view: ’In the dispositional sense consciousness is always inherent in matter as an inalienable property of it’ (190:68). That posing of the question rules out the assumption of a chance origin of consciousness. But a clarification is seemingly 56 necessary here. It should not be supposed that everything that is not chance is necessary or inevitable. Definite possibilities (including that of the origin of life in certain conditions), for instance, are not something haphazard or chance. But the concept of necessity is inapplicable to possibilities of that kind precisely because any possibility is necessarily contradicted by its negation. Any possibility posits the existence of another one as a condition of its existence as a possibility. In that connection Shklovsky remarked with reason:

p One cannot, of course, exclude the possibility in principle that in the contemporary age Earth is the sole focus of intelligent life in the Galaxy and, who knows, perhaps also in considerably greater spacetime regions of the Universe. It is worth philosophers’ while to ponder seriously about that possibility. Problems of a quite non-trivial character arise here, it would seem, especially when one allows for the circumstance that the length of the ‘psychozoic’ era on Earth may be limited (246:62).

p The question of the primary thus has nothing in common, in its materialist (and even more dialectical-materialist) posing, with the mythological notion of a primaeval chaos that is often ascribed to materialism by its critics. The counterposing of the material to the spiritual means only that the existence of matter does not presuppose a necessity for consciousness to exist. The spiritual on the contrary, however, does not exist without matter. The counterposing of spiritual and material consequently

p has absolute significance only within the bounds of a very limited fieldin this case exclusively within the bounds of the fundamental epistemological problem of what is to be regarded as primary and what as secondary. Beyond these bounds the relative character of this antithesis is indubitable (142:131).

p This proposition of Lenin’s indicates that an absolute counterposing of spiritual and material is incompatible with materialism; it constitutes the essence of philosophical dualism, which substantialises the antithesis of spiritual and material. Idealism, too, often starts from a thesis of the absolute antithesis of the psychic and the physical, assuming at the same time that this relation of absolute incompatibility is removed by the supernatural spirit.

p From the standpoint of dialectical materialism the spiritual is an immaterial property of the material, its immateriality, moreover, not consisting in anything transphysical; the nature of this immateriality is expressed by the epistemological concept of reflection.

p The difference of principle of the philosophy of Marxism from the preceding materialism finds direct expression not only 57 in a materialist answer, but also in a dialectical one, to the basic philosophical question. This answer comes, in the first place, from a scientifically realised, epistemologically investigated, distinctly formulated basic philosophical question, while preMarxian materialists had no clear idea of its structure, place, and significance. Secondly, dialectical materialism excludes in principle any identifying or confusing of the spiritual and material. Lenin noted Dietzgen’s mistake in calling everything that exists matter. That seemingly consistent materialist view proved in fact to be a concession to idealism. And Lenin warned: ’to say that thought is material is to make a false step, a step towards confusing materialism and idealism’ (142:225). For it is objective idealism that interprets the spiritual as a reality existing outside and independent of human consciousness.

p The dialectical-materialist understanding of the immateriality of consciousness is organically connected with the epistemological definition of matter developed by Lenin, according to which the concept of matter ’epistemologically implies nothing but objective reality existing independently of the human mind and reflected by if (142:242). The epistemological understanding of the spiritual as immaterial corresponds to this philosophical definition of the concept of the material.

p A third feature of the dialectical-materialist answer to the basic philosophical question consists in historism. The pre- Marxian materialists often said that the spiritual, like matter, did not originate. That point of view limited the materialist understanding of the ‘spiritual-material’ relation to recognition solely of a dependence of the former on the latter. The theory of evolution, confirmed in biology in the second half of the nineteenth century, rejected this limited view. Natural science brought out the error of another metaphysical materialist notion as well, namely that certain combinations of elementary particles caused the appearance of consciousness. The unsoundness of that notion was revealed by dialectical materialism, which counterposed a concept of development to it that is characterised by continuity, succession, direction, irreversibility, preservation of achieved results, etc. Unfortunately this difference has not yet been adequately studied philosophically, which provides grounds for certain critics of materialism to deny the materialist understanding of the origin of consciousness, since (as they claim) no combination of elementary particles can lead to the formation of a thinking brain.

p One of the most important characteristics of the dialecticalmaterialist answer to the basic philosophical question is its 58 sociological aspect. The pre-Marxian materialists defined matter as substance or body, and this characteristic of objective reality, drawn from mechanistic natural science, provided no notion of the peculiarities of material social relations and of the spiritual processes caused by them. It became possible to overcome that historical limitation of pre-Marxian materialism through the discovery and investigation of the specific material basis of social life.

p The history of philosophy thus brings out various types of materialist answer to the basic philosophical question, corresponding to the main stages in the development and to the most important forms of materialist philosophy. The dialectical- materialist answer sums up the centuries-long history of this question, which deserves special investigation. Such an inquiry, of course, is beyond the scope of my book, yet a brief excursus into history is necessary for a proper understanding of the content and significance of the materialist answer to the basic philosophical question.

p The materialist natural philosophy of the ancients—the first historical form of philosophical thought—did not yet single out the concept of the psychic as something different from the material, although the term ‘spirit’ was employed, with which, it seems, concepts were associated that were derived both from everyday experience and from mythology. Thales supposed that a magnet had a soul, i.e. tried to explain the phenomenon of magnetism in that way; the concept of soul served him to explain a far from spiritual phenomenon.

p The fact that Thales, incidentally, drew on the notion of a spirit to explain such a mysterious phenomenon for his time as magnetism indicates that special properties were still ascribed to the soul. According to Herakleitos it was not simply a flame, but the most perfect state of fire, free of moisture. Democritos considered it composed of very smooth, round atoms. The spiritual was then still not counterposed to matter as something qualitatively different, though derived from it. This undeveloped character of the notion of the spiritual was a main reason why the materialist philosophy of antiquity, as Engels stressed, ’was incapable of clearing up the relation between mind and matter’ (50:159). This philosophy treated qualitative differences as significant only from the standpoint of everyday consciousness (‘opinion’). Philosophical consciousness, having fixed the identity of the aggregate states of water, judged all other observed states by analogy with it. The original natural materialism, Engels pointed out,

59

p regards the unity of the infinite diversity of natural phenomena as a matter of course, and seeks it in something definitely corporeal, a particular thing, as Thales does in water (51:186).

p It was that conception of the material unity of nature that constituted the central point of Greek natural philosophy, since it had not yet singled out the psychophysical problem, let alone the basic philosophical question.

p The idea of the substantial identity of the psychic and the physical was not specially substantiated or proved, partly because there was as yet no notion of the significance of the difference between them, and partly as a consequence of the predominance of naturally formed hylozoist views. The theoretical roots of that conception of the unity of the world lay in the mode of regarding the world inherent in the first materialist doctrines. As Engels stressed,

p Among the Greeks—just because they were not yet advanced enough to dissect, analyse nature—nature is still viewed as a whole, in general. The universal connection of natural phenomena is not proved in regard to particulars; to the Greeks it is the result of direct contemplation. Herein lies the inadequacy of Greek philosophy, on account of which it had to yield later to other modes of outlook on the world. But herein also lies its superiority over all its subsequent metaphysical opponents (51:45,46).

p The metaphysically thinking philosophers of modern times, by rejecting the naive dialectical views of the world, blocked their own progress ’from an understanding of the part to an understanding of the whole, to an insight into the general interconnection of things’ (51:45).

p Engels thus considered that philosophy (and incidentally knowledge in general) ascended in its development from understanding of the particular to understanding of the whole. The problem of the world as a whole is among the root problems of philosophy. Demarcation of philosophy from the special sciences does not in the least eliminate this problem from philosophy. The fact that certain scientific disciplines are concerned with this problem does not in the least diminish its significance for philosophy, but on the contrary increases it.

p The world as a whole (it is, of course, not simply the aggregate of everything that exists) is boundless and inexhaustible. It is a matter, above all, of the universal and, in a certain sense, absolute interconnection and interdependence of phenomena, of the unity of the world. It seemed something quite obvious to the Greek materialists, constantly confirmed by everyday experience. But when there became an awareness in philosophy of the real antithesis between the spiritual and material, this 60 unity became problematic. Subsequently it was more and more often called in question, with the consequence that the qualitatively heterogeneous phenomena of nature were systematically and specially investigated by isolating them from one another. The primitive naive notion of the universal interdependence and interconversion of natural phenomena, which was based on a proposition of their substantial identity, gave way to a metaphysical view that interpreted the qualitative differences between things as evidence of their essential independence of one another. Yet the idea of the unity of the world did not get consigned to oblivion. It was constantly revived by natural science and philosophy in the course of their development. Both materialism and idealism, and both metaphysically thinking philosophers and dialecticians, defended and substantiated the idea of the unity of the world, each, of course, in his own key.

p The moulding of the materialism of modern times was closely linked with the revival of Greek cosmological doctrines that preceded-this historical process in the natural-philosophy systems of the Renaissance. The natural philosophers of the beginning of the seventeenth century developed the view of the atomistic materialism of antiquity about the infinite universum, which received a natural-science substantiation for the first time through Copernicus’ system and the corrections introduced into it by Giordano Bruno.

p The idea of the space-time infinity of the universe smashed the scholastic notion of the radical antithesis of heavenly ’ matter’ to base earthly substance. The dualism of matter and form was also shattered along with that of the earthly and the heavenly, i.e. the Aristotelian-scholastic hylomorphism that interpreted matter only as material for the creative activity of a supernatural spirit. The infinity of the universum was comprehended as an unlimited diversity of the potentials contained in matter, and as evidence that matter was not confined to any limits; it was universal reality, a unique and single world.

p The hylozoism of the ancients was reborn in the organicist conceptions of natural philosophers who ascribed vegetable and animal functions to metals and minerals. Those views undermined the theological, scholastic dogmas about the supernatural character of the spiritual, and denied the theological division of the world into this one and the other.’ The pantheistic identification, typical of mediaeval ideology, also provided substantiation of the principle of material unity, since it led to denial of God.

p The materialists of modern times, unlike their predecessors, 61 had already singled out the question of the relation of spiritual and material, attaching ever greater importance to it. The antifeudal struggle against religious-scholastic mystification of the spiritual as something transcendental and out of this world which was the primary essence and other-world principle of human life in this world, brought this question to the foreground. Materialism demystified the spiritual, seeing in it a natural phenomenon governed by the laws of nature. Toland, who ascribed life to everything that existed, linked its highest manifestations with a special, material basis, the brain. In that connection he criticised Spinoza’s conception of thought as an attribute of matter, but of matter in general. ’Whatever be the Principle of Thinking in Animals,’ he wrote, ’yet it cannot be performed but by the means of the Brain’ (256:139). Citing Hippokrates and Demokritos, Toland claimed that all emotional and psychic disorders had their cause in a disturbance of the normal state of the brain. That was the point of view, too, of Lamettrie, Holbach, Diderot, and others. If the existence of reason presupposed the existence of a specific, material substratum, Holbach argued,

p likewise to say that nature is governed by an intelligence, is to claim that it is governed by a being provided with organs, seeing that it could not, without organs, have either perceptions, ideas, intentions, thoughts, desires, plan, or actions (103:72).

p Thus, in modern times, too, just as in antiquity, denial of the supernatural and recognition of the material unity of the world were inseparable. But whereas the natural philosophers of antiquity and the Renaissance substantiated the principle of the material unity of the world by reducing the supernatural to the natural, sensually perceived, the materialists of modern times enriched this principle of the explanation of the world, while developing it from itself, by a developed materialist answer to the basic philosophical question. This was a new stage in the development of materialist philosophy; substantiation of the material unity of the world coincided with materialist monism.

p Both monism and recognition of the unity of the world, as Plekhanov stressed, were of course compatible with idealism. But only materialist monism ruled out the spiritualist, absolute counterposing of the psychic to the physical, of the mentally comprehended to sensually perceived reality. Only materialist monism, consequently, consistently followed the principle of the unity of the world. According to this tenet nature in ’its broadest sense’ as Holbach said, was the sole reality, or ’the great whole that results from the assemblage of different substances, from their different combinations, and from the different 62 motions that we see in the universe’ (103:11). In opposition to materialism the idealist conception of the unity of the world inevitably includes a latent dualism of spiritual and material. I must stress, incidentally, that recognition of the unity of the world and the concept ’the world as a whole’ do not fully cover one another. Idealist philosophers, who counterpose a dualist or pluralist interpretation to the principle of the unity of the world, in no way eliminate the concept of the world as a whole even when they deny it. They only interpret the whole world dualistically or pluralistically. Even irrationalists, for whom the world and the universe are something like chaos, ruling out order of any kind, interpret the world as a whole in their own way. But only materialism indissolubly links the concepts of the world as a whole and of the unity of the world as the essential content of its materiality.

p Any attempts to picture matters as if the questions of the world as a whole and of the unity of the world were essentially different ones are therefore in principle unsound. For the materialist the concept of the unity of the world is a concretisation of the more general one of ’the world as a whole’, since to recognise the unity of the world and at the same time to deny the legitimacy of the philosophical concept of the world as a whole (as some Marxists unfortunately do) means to admit quite incompatible statements.

p The principle of the material unity of the world does not simply precede the comprehensive materialist posing of the basic philosophical question historically. In that case it could seem to be the natural-philosophy past of modern materialism. But this principle is one of the most important aspects of the materialist answer to the basic philosophical question, from which it follows that the concept of the world as a whole, too, continues to be developed and enriched by new content disclosing the unity of an endless diversity of phenomena.

p Pre-Marxian materialists spoke of the great whole of nature. In our day the expression often provokes an indulgent smile, since the world as a whole cannot directly be the object of knowing. Neopositivists especially make fun of this kind of ‘archaic’, ’natural philosophy’ turn of phrase. ’To be real in the scientific sense’, Carnap, for example, declares, ’means to be an element of the system; hence this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the system itself (30:207). In other words, one system or another can only be the object of inquiry when it itself is a subsystem, i.e. an element of another system. The world as a whole cannot be singled out as a subsystem, and so is unreal in the 63 scientific sense. Carnap’s idea seems at first glance to be indisputable; one cannot shift the Earth if there is no fulcrum outside it. But if the unity of the world, to use Engels’ words, cannot be shown by a pair of juggler’s phrases, then denial of this unity cannot be substantiated by the same means. It is worth looking into this matter in more detail, if only because Carnap’s point of view justifies epistemological subjectivism and agnosticism. The subjectivist denies the reality of the world as a whole, since this whole is not a directly given, sensually perceived object of existing or possible experience. He represents the term ‘whole’ in application to the whole aggregate of phenomena as devoid of any sense. The agnostic argues differently. By claiming that sciences (and philosophy) do not recognise the world as a whole either directly or indirectly, or in any degree whatever ( corresponding to their level of development), the agnostic thus somehow recognises the Kantian unknowable ’thing in itself, i.e. a reality beyond the limit of quite knowable phenomena. The metaphysical gulf between phenomena and ’things in themselves’ is revived as an absolute incompatibility of knowledge of the world of phenomena and of the world as a whole. Carnap, too, is consistent in his own way when he declares that objective reality (or the world of things) is not an object of scientific knowledge:

p those who raise the question of the reality of the thing world itself have perhaps in mind not a theoretical question as their formulation seems to suggest, but rather a practical question, a matter of a practical decision concerning the structure of our language (30:207).

p It turns out that we only have the right to speak of the reality of those things or events that we include in a certain system by means of our language. But to recognise the existence of the world as a whole, and likewise the unity of the world, means to ernploy ordinary ’thing language’ (which has an unscientific character) unconsciously.

p Such is the position of the neopositivist; it differs from that of objective idealism in denying the real existence of the world as a whole. That is a pseudoconcept, Carnap explains, and from his position objective reality is just such a pseudoconcept. Both recognition and denial of objective reality should therefore be rejected as pseudopropositions, which means that one should adhere to philosophical scepticism on the question of objective reality, i.e. reserve judgment on it.

p It is not enough, in order to refute a false point of view, of course, just to point out the untenable conclusions that follow from it. The erroneous proposition must be refuted in essence. 64 It is necessary, consequently, to return to the thesis that the world as a whole cannot be the object of knowing. This is correct in the sense that investigation posits singling out of the object of inquiry, but a procedure of that kind is impracticable as regards the world as whole. There is no tower from which one could observe the whole world; that must not only be understood literally but also taken in the figurative sense.^^2^^ But it does not follow from this, as the contemporary West German idealist philosopher Leisegang claims, that

p the world as a whole, the universe, and nature are something outside experience. We see and experience always only this or that in the world, this or that which nature has produced, but never the world, or nature, as such and as a whole (137:72).

p It is very notable that Leisegang equates the world as a whole, the universe, and nature with one another. In fact, for one who denies the possibility of cognising the world as a whole, all objective reality proves to be unknowable.

p In stressing the unlimited qualitative diversity of the universe, we do not simply establish a methodological postulate that possibly comes into contradiction with the principle of the unity of the world, but we formulate a conclusion that sums up the whole history of knowledge. And that conclusion, like many other propositions of natural science (about which I shall speak below), refers to the world as a whole. When we say that there are no objective limits to knowing the world, we are once again arguing about the world as a whole. But how are judgments of that kind possible? They are possible primarily because there are no absolute antitheses in the ontological sense. Whatever ‘marvellous’ phenomena cosmology has discovered, we are quite justified in claiming that they will not be wholly incompatible with those already known to science. There are no grounds for assuming that cosmology or any other science will discover somewhere that which the theologists and scholastics of the Middle Ages tried to discover at distances incomparably closer to our planet. Natural science confirms the scientific, atheistic conviction that there is nothing absolutely opposite to what exists and what is already known. Difference posits identity and is inseparable from it. Diversity and unity do not exclude one another. Heterogeneity, like homogeneity, is not absolute. An ‘antiworld’ in the precise full sense of the term is impossible; it fixes antitheses, whose relativity is attested by their constantly being revealed unity. In the ‘antiworld’ the material does not become a product of the spiritual; any feature of the ‘antiworld’ exists in a certain natural relation with its antipode. These general propositions 65 acquire a non-trivial character as soon as they are applied in a concrete inquiry and in evaluating its results. As Gott justly remarks:

p The concept of impossibility not only reflects that certain possibilities do not exist, but also reflects what processes do not permit the existence of these possibilities, i.e. have a positive as well as a negative aspect (78:2201.

p The concept of the ontological is applied to the problem of the world as a whole, of course, in a dialectical-materialist sense, which presupposes an epistemological interpretation of any form of universality inherent in nature, society, and knowledge. Any description of objective reality and its scientific reflection is based on a definite level of development of knowledge. This description consequently changes, and is enriched by new content as knowledge develops. In that sense ontological definitions are also epistemological ones. And this unity of the epistemological and ontological in scientific and philosophical knowledge is of decisive importance in the dialectical-materialist posing of the problem of the world as a whole.

p The history of science enables one to say that the existence of absolute antitheses is epistemologically excluded, at least within the context of scientific knowledge; new scientific truths do not refute ‘old’ ones. They make them more precise, concretise and supplement them, taking them into a system of more profound scientific notions. As Kuznetsov correctly notes:

p Theories whose correctness has been established experimentally for any field of physical phenomena are not eliminated as something false when new, more general theories appear, but retain their significance for the former domain of phenomena, as a limiting form and partial case of the new theories (130:156).

p It follows from this that a scientific, theoretical reflection of the diversity and unity of the world is inseparable from the processes of inquiry.

p Being, beyond the limits of our knowledge, is an open question, precisely an open and not a closed one.^^3^^ That also applies to what is called ’the world as a whole’, since it recognises that such a whole exists (no matter how abstract this truth is relative to the world as a whole, it is by no means a tautology). The history of science has shown that the investigation of unobservable phenomena is a regular process of development of scientific knowledge. Many phenomena have become observable because they were first discovered theoretically.

p Observability was an absolute premiss of knowability only for the empiricists of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Today 66 empiricism takes up a more flexible epistemological position, since science successfully anticipates unobservable phenomena, establishes their existence, and in the final analysis makes them observable indirectly, if not directly. True, the unobservable object called ’the world as a whole’ cannot be recorded even negatively like, for example, a filtrable virus. While space probes have photographed the far side of the moon, unobservable from the earth (recognition of the existence of which was deemed scientifically senseless by neopositivists because of the unverifiability of the relevant statements), one will never fly around the world as a whole, of course, in a space probe. But one must not understand singling out of the object of inquiry in an oversimplified way. Science singles out not only the individual and the particular, but also the general, and even the universal, i.e. a definiteness of phenomena that it relates to all phenomena without exception, or in other words to the world as a whole. The universalisation of scientific propositions of that kind is far from always justified, of course, but even then science gets the chance to establish its frontiers, i.e. to concretise universality. The discovery of laws of nature is the singling out of the most general, necessary, and recurring relations that apply at least partially to the world as a whole, even if only because the part of a whole is not something foreign to it but includes the nature of the whole to some extent or other (and this has, of course, to be investigated).

p Necessity and universality are inseparable. But not every statement about universality applies to the world as a whole. And it is impossible to establish a priori that it does not apply to everything that exists; that, too, has to be proved. Limitation of the universality of laws and scientific propositions is just as difficult a research task in general as substantiation of their universality.

p The law of universal gravitation was discovered by Newton precisely as a law of the universum. And that constitutes the nub of the discovery, because terrestrial attraction was known before Newton; it had been recorded in the law of falling bodies discovered by Galileo. Newton’s genius in this case was that he extended the idea of attraction to the whole universe, which was incompatible with common sense since it called for the assumption of actio in distans and was fraught with paradoxes that Newton tried to avoid by means of theological assumptions. Yet the law he discovered was confirmed by subsequent research and experiments, and is still being confirmed today. That does not mean that its universality will never be limited. More 67 essentially, limitation of the universality of this law will be a further deepening of understanding of the world as a whole, since it cannot be a matter of its repudiation as non-existent, in fact inoperative, etc. But is the law of universal gravitation really an exception? Aren’t the conservation laws also really laws of the universum?

p Neopositivists, it turns out, clearly underestimate the possibilities of science. Despite Carnap’s protestations, natural science does not renounce study of the world as a whole at all. This seems a banal truth when it is grasped. But still, let me cite the naturalists themselves. Here, for example, is what Landau and Lifschitz wrote:

p the world as a whole in the general theory of relativity (my italics— T. O.) must not be regarded as a closed system, but as one that is in a variable gravitational field; in that connection application of the law of increasing entropy does not lead to a conclusion about the necessity of a statistical equilibrium (132:46).

p But what applies to the general theory of relativity is seemingly also applicable to other fundamental scientific theories.

p Zelmanov notes that the concept of the world as a whole and of the universe as a whole is treated in cosmology in at least three aspects. (1) The universe is regarded as a single object irrespective of its parts. (2) The universe as a whole is regarded in its relations to its parts, and the latter in relation to the world as a whole. (3) The concept of the universe as a whole is applied to all its regions irrespective of their relation to each other and to the whole universe. He concludes accordingly: ’cosmology is a physical doctrine of the Universe as a whole, including the theory of the whole world covered by astronomical observations as a part of the Universe’ (268:277). As for the views of those cosmologists who do not think it possible to speak of the knowability in principle of the world as a whole, Zelmanov justly remarks (in my view) in another of his works:

p Paradoxically, denial of the legitimacy of the doctrine of the Universe as a whole, based on any considerations of the Universe whatsoever, is logically contradictory, since these considerations themselves can be treated as elements of such a doctrine, while denial of its legitimacy also means denial of the legitimacy of the considerations adduced (267:321).

p So the world as a whole is not a speculative abstraction of natural philosophers but a special, I would say mediated, object of scientific inquiry. The world as a whole is not something transcendent, beyond all limitations in regard to any attained knowledge. Denial of its knowability in principle (and always historically limited)—at first glance a profound point of view— 68 proves on closer examination to be a superficial, empiricist one, for empiricists have always asserted that we know the finite, and that the infinite is unfathomable.

p The real problem is something else; how to study the world as a whole? How is this cognitive process performed? How far can scientific propositions regarded as referring to the whole universum be rigorously substantiated? Are they not destined to remain hypotheses for ever? Dialectical-materialist analysis of the process of cognition gives an answer to that in general form; in knowing the finite, individual, passing, and partial, we at the same time (within certain limits, of course) know the infinite, general, intransient, and whole. As Engels put it:

p In fact all real, exhaustive knowledge consists solely in raising the individual thing in thought from individuality into particularity and from this into universality, in seeking and establishing the infinite in the finite, the eternal in the transitory. The form of universality, however, is the form of self-completeness, hence of infinity; it is the comprehension of the many finites in the infinite.... All true knowledge of nature is knowledge of the eternal, the infinite, and hence essentially absolute (51:234).

p Comprehension of the world as a whole is thus the mediated result of scientific cognition in respect of a certain ‘section’ of the universum, and not simply of the whole conceivable aggregate of existing and possible phenomena. If everything consists of atoms, for example, and of the elementary particles that form them, then atomic physics studies the world as a whole, though it does not study psychic processes, social life, etc. If, say, the proposition of quantum mechanics that the dualism of waveparticles is absolutely general, applying to the whole physical world, is correct, then here, too, it is a matter of study of the world as a whole. Recognition of that has nothing in common with justification of the unscientific, metaphysical assumption of the possibility of absolute knowledge, which is incompatible with materialist dialectics.

p In saying that physics and certain other fundamental sciences study the world as a whole, we also start from the assumption that the unity of the world (the world as whole) is revealed in its parts, and so in special fields of scientific inquiry. The whole of the universum, then, must not be understood as an external aggregate of parts, but rather as something inner, i.e. as the nature of the whole, which incidentally is expressed by dialectical laws and categorial relations. It is also important to stress that recognition of the reality of definite (of course, limited) knowledge of the world as a whole not only has ideological and 69 methodological significance, but also constitutes a necessary element of concrete, historical research at a quite high level of theoretical generalisation. As Sergei Vavilov wrote:

p It seems to me that there is an undoubted grain of truth in the tendencies of the theory of relativity to explain the properties of elementary particles from the properties of the world as a whole. If the properties of particles really explain very much in the behaviour of the world as a whole, then, on the other hand, we can rightly expect, according to the general laws of dialectics, that the properties of elementary particles themselves are determined by those of the world as a whole (258:71 ).^^4^^

p Lenin constantly stressed, when characterising materialist philosophy, that it posits a definite understanding of the world as a whole. ’There is nothing in the world but matter in motion, and matter in motion cannot move otherwise than in space and time’ (142:158). Marxian authors who insist that the concept of the world as a whole is illegitimate should ponder whether their position is compatible with the basic propositions of materialism, for it is quite obvious that denial of this concept cannot be agreed with such a truth, formulated by Lenin, as ’the world is matter in motion’ (142:262). Natural scientists also undoubtedly agree with that statement about the world as a whole and in that sense it is not only a philosophical concept, but also a scientific one.

p Lenin remarked that the sciences elucidate the unity of the world in a specific way, by virtue of which a special epistemological investigation of these forms of scientific knowledge is needed. ’The unity of nature is revealed in the "astonishing analogy" between the differential equations of the various realms of phenomena’ (142:269). Contemporary natural science has given new, at times quite unexpected confirmations of Lenin’s idea. I have in mind the broad spread of mathematical methods of inquiry in sciences that developed for ages independent of mathematics, the peculiar ’welding together’ of several fundamental sciences such as physics and chemistry, the rise of a multitude of ‘butt’ disciplines, which witnesses to the unity of qualitatively different processes of nature, the progress of cybernetics and electronics in modelling several higher psychic functions. Epistemological comprehension of the historical process of the differentiation and integration of sciences also confirms the dialectical-materialist conception of the world as a whole. The unity of the world is recorded in the classification of the sciences, which brings out the link between them as having an objective ontological basis. As Fedoseev has written:

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p The interconnection of the sciences reflects the interconnection of phenomena in reality itself. The problem of the interconnection of the sciences is one of the unity of the world and a qualitative feature of its different fields (54:138).

p The expression ’to cognise the world as a whole’ is often understood quite wrongly, as if it were a matter of posing the task of cognising all and everything, summing up all knowledge, and so on, ignoring the historically formed division of labour in the scientific field. Authors who argue in that manner usually affirm that only all the sciences taken together study the world as a whole, while each separate science deals with some part or facet of the world. Views of that kind do not, in my view, touch the nub of the question posed here. Study of the world as a whole has nothing in common, of course, with claims to comprehend all and everything (everything that existed in the past, exists now, and what will be) or to substitute some sort of special science for the whole aggregate of existing scientific disciplines. From my point of view, the whole aggregate of presently existing sciences does not dispose of knowledge of the whole, since new branches of science will arise, and now unknown fields of research will be discovered that will essentially alter our notions of the universum.

p Engels remarked that Greek philosophy had already anticipated the correct notion that

p the whole of nature, from the smallest element to the greatest, from grains of sand to suns, from Protista to man, has its existence in eternal coming into being and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change (51:30-31).

p That understanding of the world as a whole, at which the Greek philosophers had only brilliantly guessed, has become one of the most vital theoretical propositions not only of the dialecticalmaterialist outlook on the world but also of concrete, scientific research.

p The unity of the world—it is constantly necessary to stress— is not demonstrated by speculative, logical arguments, but by the whole edifying history of science and material production. The scientific philosophical summing-up and comprehension of this world-historical process not only rejects the idealist notions of the immaterial essence of the material or the supernatural essence of the spiritual, but also helps bring out and describe the diverse forms of the material unity of the world. Philosophy, it goes without saying, studies the world as a whole and the unity of the world only in a certain aspect, since it wholly excludes the specific problematic of the special sciences. It does not require 71 great acumen to understand that investigation of the most general patterns of the motion, change, and development of nature, society, and knowledge is a limitation of the investigative task that corresponds to the subject-matter and competence of the philosophy of Marxism.

p The explanations adduced seemingly make it comprehensible in what sense one not only can but must recognise both the possibility and necessity of studying the world as a whole. As Melyukhin justly remarks, the problem should be formulated as follows:

p Can a scientific philosophy answer the questions whether ’the world as a whole’ was created by a God or whether it has existed eternally, infinite in space and time, whether the whole world is material, whether matter has certain universal properties and laws of being, type of motion, interaction, space, and time, conservation laws, law of causality, and so on? The answer can and must be quite unambiguous, because any deviation from it and any vacuum in the comprehended philosophical information provide an excuse to spokesmen of religious-idealist doctrines to fill that vacuum in accordance with the spirit of these doctrines. The fact that no science can provide complete understanding of the world as a whole by no means signifies that there cannot be reliable information in our notions about the properties of the whole material world, and that a meaningful outlook on the world is impossible (183:144).

p That is why one cannot agree with those Marxist researchers who suggest that the task of studying the world as a whole has sunk into oblivion along with natural philosophy.^^5^^

p It is hardly necessary to explain in detail that the unsoundness of natural philosophy was not at all that it studied the world as a whole; it drew mainly on surmises for lack of concrete scientific data. Natural philosophy, Engels pointed out, outlived its time because it was now possible to ’present in an approximately systematic form a comprehensive view of the interconnection in nature by means of the facts provided by empirical natural science itself (52:364). He consequently considered it possible, by rejecting the natural-philosophical systems, to give a general picture of nature as a connected whole on the basis of properly tested scientific facts. His Dialectics of Nature was an attempt of that kind to comprehend the material unity of the world philosophically. This new posing of the problem differed radically from the natural-philosophical one; the principle of natural philosophy was a complete ’system of nature’, a system of final truths in the last instance. Opposing the principle without which natural philosophy was inconceivable, Engels wrote:

p The world clearly constitutes a single system, i.e., a coherent whole, but the knowledge of this system presupposes a knowledge of all nature and history, which man will never attain. Hence he who makes systems 72 must fill in the countless gaps with figments of his own Imagination (50:386).

p Warning against the systematics of natural philosophy, which .squeezes the infinite whole into the Procrustean bed of always historically limited knowledge, Engels (we see) did not consider knowledge of the world as a whole an idle business. He simply pointed out the dialectical contradictoriness of this cognitive process:

p cognition of the infinite is therefore beset with double difficulty and from its very nature can only take place in an infinite asymptotic progress. And that fully suffices us in order to be able to say: the infinite is just as much knowable as unknowable, and that is all that we need (51:234-235).

p Engels thus fought against two metaphysical extremes; on the one hand, against denial of the knowability in principle of the world as a whole and, on the other, against the dogmatic understanding that made an absolute of the knowledge of the world as a whole that science already to some extent disposed of.

p The philosophy of Marxism bases itself in its statements about the universum on the results obtained by all the sciences of nature and society. But that is why its conclusions naturally do not coincide with those arrived at by each of these sciences. Both philosophical statements about the world as a whole and about particular sciences are absolutely ineradicable, necessary, and heuristically fruitful when they have (1) a materialist, and (2) a dialectical character. Let philosophers who think themselves spokesmen of a scientific outlook on the world, try to manage without ‘metaphysical’, ‘ontological’, and ‘natural-philosophical’ statements of such a kind. Materialism, of course, is a system of logically interconnected theoretical propositions. I shall list a few, apologising in advance to the reader to whom I am communicating nothing new in this case. The unity of the world consists in its materiality. Matter is uncreatable and indestructible. Consciousness is a product of the development of matter. Motion is the form of existence of matter. Matter exists in space and time. The world is knowable in principle. Do all these statements relate to the world as a whole or only to that part of it that has already been mastered by science and practice? Positivists and other spokesmen of the contemporary subjective-agnostic philosophy of science reject these propositions, declaring them to lack scientific sense, and come quite logically to an absolute relativism.

p Some of them, incidentally, have already begun to revise their former denial of the comprehensibility of the concept of the 73 world as a whole. Popper, for instance, wrote in the foreword to his Logic of Scientific Inquiry (1959):

p I, however, believe that there is at least one philosophical problem in which all thinking men are interested. It is the problem of cosmology: the problem of understanding the world—including ourselves, and our knowledge, as part of the world (211:15).

p His paper at the 14th International Congress of Philosophy was evidence that he was trying to treat the problem of the world as a whole from a stance of neorealist pluralism, some propositions of which are similar to the idealist postulates of Platonism (see: 213:24-25).

p Dialectical materialism rejects positivist scepticism as a subjective, anti-dialectical view, by investigating the real facts of scientific knowledge. Marxist materialism not only affirms the truths of pre-Marxian materialism but also goes incomparably further in philosophical generalisation. Development is universal and absolute. Contradictions, and the interconversion and struggle of opposites, constitute the inner content of the process of development. Development takes place through the conversion of quantitative changes into qualitative ones, through negation and negation of the negation. No special insight is needed in order to understand that these statements refer to the world as a whole, otherwise they simply lack scientific sense. When developing, elucidating, and enriching them we once again have the world as a whole in mind and not some part of it. That is why denial of the world as a whole (in whatever sense, epistemological or ontological) is a denial of the unity of the world, and of the universality of motion, space, time, etc. Natural science does not provide any grounds for conclusions of that kind; on the contrary it confirms the materialist proposition of the unity of the world on this point, as on other matters. Furthermore, as I showed above, natural science has passed of necessity, at the present time, to the notion of a diversity of links and interdependences between the world as a whole and its component parts, right down to elementary particles. One can agree with Kedrov:

p The problem of the unity of the world loses nothing from the fact that it is treated simultaneously as a philosophical and a scientific one, but on the contrary only gains through the creative union of advanced philosophy and natural science (118:36).

p But I do not share his conviction that the concept of the world as a whole and that of the unity of the world are essentially different from one another.

I have pointed out that the history of materialism begins 74 with the theoretical substantiation of spontaneously established convictions about the eternity of nature and matter. The development of those ideas signified a demystification of nature, and demolition of the religious-mythological interpretation of the world, for which nature was a product of the supernatural. Materialism has formulated and substantiated the principle of the material unity of the world from the very start; development of that principle led to a factual singling out of and materialist answer to the basic philosophical question. But that did not eliminate the problem of the world as a whole, which was taken further precisely on the basis of this answer, since the antithesis of mind and matter, consciousness and being, the subjective and the objective gave it the content and significance that natural philosophers had always had a very hazy notion about. That also witnesses to the many-sided content of the materialist answer to the basic philosophical question.