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p Explanation of the world from itself—such is the principle of materialist philosophy that even the first, ‘naive’ materialist doctrines started from. And it would be a clear misunderstanding of the historical shaping of philosophy if we began to evaluate this ‘direct’ relation between thinking man and the world that oppresses him by its unlimited power as something that took shape of itself. The intellectual need to explain the world from itself is indubitable evidence that mankind is beginning to overcome its spontaneously formed delusions and fallacies and to recognise them as fallacies that are by no means those of separate individuals. In order to ascend even to the ‘naive’, ‘direct’ view of primitive spontaneous materialism, it was necessary to get rid of the monstrous spectres that mythology and religion had enveloped human life in, the reflection in fantasy of man’s dejection by the domination of elemental forces of nature and social development. A spontaneously formed supranatural view of the world historically preceded philosophy. Primitive materialism was the first intelligent intellectual protest against supranaturalism; it was both a critique and a denial of it. The strength and weakness of primitive materialism comes out particularly 75 obviously in its naturalistic theogony by which the gods (whose existence was not yet doubted) arose now from water, now from fire, now from some other ‘substantial’ matter. The supernatural was thus interpreted as natural, i.e. ‘explained’ from nature and so converted into a natural phenomenon. As for idealism, which took shape later, it endeavoured to defend the supranaturalist world outlook by re-interpreting it. While not discarding explanation of nature by assuming beings above nature (i.e. supernatural ones) idealism developed theoretical conceptions that gradually wiped out the antithesis between the supernatural and the natural.^^6^^ While materialism is a denial of religion, idealism is an attempt to transform it into an intellectual outlook on the world. Idealism consequently is an ally of religion even when it reforms its traditional notions. It is in that case, moreover, that it really performs its social function, in spite of the desperate protests of conservative zealots of religion, who often see in idealism refined heresy. The young Marx probably had that in mind when he wrote:

p all the philosophies of the past without exception have been accused by the theologians of abandoning the Christian religion, even those oif the pious Malebranche and the divinely inspired Jakob Bohme (171:190).

p The idealist doctrines of Greece and Rome differed essentially from the religious outlook then prevalent. It is sufficient to compare the Platonic transcendental ideas with the Olympian gods of the Homeric epic. This evolution of idealist philosophy, incidentally, also expresses the evolution of religion to some extent.

p Mediaeval Christian philosophy, which took shape in an age when religion more or less directly dominated the everyday consciousness of people, put the concept of an absolutely immaterial, supernatural essence in the place of the idealist notion of antiquity of the immateriality and impersonal basis of the univermm.^^1^^ This return to mythology was made, however, on a new basis, since the scholastic assimilation of Plato’s doctrine, and then of Aristotle’s, encouraged the forming of a speculative-idealist interpretation of God as world reason. Essentially this was the forerunner of the idealist philosophy of modern times, in spite of the fact that the rising bourgeois philosophy was a repudiation in other respects of scholasticism.

p It the age of the assertion of capitalism the idealist answer to the basic philosophical question was gradually more and more secularised, so acquiring a mode of expression formally 76 independent of theology. And while scholasticism had carried divine reason beyond the limits of finite, allegedly created nature, which it interpreted as contingent being, the idealist philosophy of modern times, while rejecting the theological disparagement of the earthly, finite, and transient, has striven to overcome the ‘split’ between the world and God. This philosophy developed on the background of the outstanding progress of natural science; it was often linked with the latter’s advances, assimilating and interpreting them in its own way; what scholasticism had deemed supernatural, also gradually began to be interpreted as immanent to nature. The supernatural was eliminated to some extent, since divine law, according to the rationalist idealists, was essentially natural law.

p While materialism had previously condemned idealist philosophy for an unsubstantiated assumption of the supernatural, idealists were now already accusing materialists of believing in miracles, for example, in the rise of consciousness from matter. Leibniz wrote: ’It is enough that we cannot maintain that matter thinks unless we attribute to it an imperishable soul, or rather a miracle’ (136:166). That was not simply a polemical trick, but a natural turn in the history of idealism, since science was developing criteria of scientific character and idealism could not help allowing for them. Leibniz proclaimed it one of the urgent tasks of philosophy to draw a distinct line between the natural and the supernatural, i.e. what contradicted the laws of nature, and so reason. But, remaining an idealist, he claimed that ’it is not natural to matter to have sensation and to think’ (136:165), and if they were inherent in it, then it was necessary to admit the existence of an immaterial substance within matter. It would be supernatural, he argued further, if people were mortal as spiritual beings, i.e. shared the fate of their mortal transitory body. So ’souls are naturally immortal’ and ’... it would be a miracle if they were not’ (136:166).

p In Leibniz’s doctrine the material was active only through its immaterial essence, a monad, which was undoubtedly created.

p Thus, in the order of nature (miracles apart) God does not arbitrarily give to substances such and such qualities indifferently, and He never gives them any but those which are natural to them, that is to say, qualities which can be derived from their nature as explicable modifications (136:164).

p So, although the supernatural still formally occupied its appointed place, all the properties observed in natural phenomena were treated as necessarily inherent in them. They must 77 therefore be derived from nature and not from a supernatural being, which meant that the materialist principle of explaining the world from itself was no longer discarded right away but was interpreted idealistically as a mode of ascending from experiential to the superexperiential. It was necessary, Leibniz said, ’to lead men little by little by the senses to what is outside the senses’ (135:70). From that angle the supersensory had to be revealed through investigation of the senseperceived world, and the super-experiential found in experience.

p Speculative idealism, which pursued the goal of going beyond any possible experience, sought points of contact with the empirical investigation of nature. In that connection it was not only interested in the results, but also in the cognitive process itself, investigation of which threw light on the nature of the objects studied.

p Condillac, a thinker who wavered between materialism and idealist empiricism, formulated a principle by which the philosopher differed indeed from other people in giving everything a natural explanation:

p It is not enough for a philosopher to say that a thing has been done by extraordinary ways; it is his duty to explain how it would have been done by natural means (cited after 19:209).

p Idealism also needed to accept that naturalistic principle, though not by any means without reservations, and very inconsistently. Such is the regular trend of the evolution of the idealist answer to the basic philosophical question conditioned by the development of bourgeois society. This trend comes out quite markedly even in such an unswerving theist as Bishop Berkeley.

p Berkeley was an empiricist, but an idealist one. The very development of that variety of idealism was evidence of a developing need for a naturalist interpretation of this philosophy, including its theological conclusions that were in reality its hidden basic principles.

p The reduction of sense-perceived reality to a variety of combinations of sensations was the central point of Berkeley’s doctrine. To be was to be perceived. But then where did God come from, to whom Berkeley in the final analysis led his readers? For the idea of God, as Berkeley’s predecessors had shown, could not be drawn from experience; His existence was comprehended through our innate ideas and by a priori principles, and by means of intellectual intuition or inferences. Berkeley categorically disagreed with these rationalist notions, which he qualified, not without grounds, as 78 unconvincing. According to his doctrine we comprehended the existence of God empirically; our sensations were not perceptions of mythological things but perceptions, though not direct, of God himself.

p The course of the Irish bishop’s thought is interesting. He did not evade the question of the external source of the diversity of the sense data at the disposal of the human individual. He strove simply to show that the causes of sensations could not be things, because what we called things, and considered without grounds to be something different from our sensations, were built up wholly from sensations. There must consequently be some other external source of the inexhaustible diversity of sensations (such is the logic of the subjective idealist), since man himself (in whom these sensations are revealed, discovered, and realised in a quite involuntary way) could not be it. The source of our sensations, Berkeley concluded, could only be God^He gave them to man, who had to see in them signs and symbols that carried God’s word.

p Berkeley’s mystic idealism (as Kant aptly christened it) claimed that nothing separated man and God (except materialist misconceptions, of course), since nature or matter did not exist as a reality independent of consciousness. The revelation of God was directly accessible to man, according to this doctrine; it was the sense-perceived world, the world of man’s sensations, which came to him from on high for him to decipher and so grasp the divine purpose.

p The God of Berkeleian philosophy differed notably from the All-Highest of traditional Christian dogma; He permanently revealed himself to man and, so to say, existed in everything, or rather in every combination of sensations. Man saw, heard, and perceived or felt the divine presence, as it were, and it only remained for him to be aware of that fact, correspondingly comprehending his sensations.

p It is specially obvious from the example of Berkeley that the difference between subjective and objective idealism should not be exaggerated. Subjective idealism does not, as a rule, go beyond an epistemological interpretation of the facts of knowledge or experiences. If it leaves the question of the ontological premisses of cognition and emotional life open, that is agnosticism of a Humean hue. If, on the contrary, however, it goes beyond a purely epistemological analysis, it is inevitably combined with objective idealism, as happened not only with Berkeley but also with Fichte. Kosing correctly notes:

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p The boundaries between subjective and objective idealism are fluid, because subjective idealists generally, in order to avoid the conclusions of solipsism, aim mainly at broadening individual consciousness into a general one (for instance, Rickert’s consciousness in general or epistemological subject) (124:72).

p Research workers of a positivist turn usually try to show that subjective idealism is free of the supernaturalist assumptions proper to objective idealism. In fact both versions of the idealist answer to the basic philosophical question make contact in their main trends.

p Berkeley’s transition to a stance of a kind of Platonism with a clearly expressed pantheistic colouring was not accidental; his subjective idealism was meant from the start to substantiate the religious outlook. Nevertheless Western workers appraise Berkeleianism as a system of ’natural realism’, a philosophy of common sense, and so on.

p Idealist philosophy thus acquired its own interpretation of the spiritual first principle during the development of bourgeois society; without, in essence, breaking with religious belief in a supernatural being, it eliminated the personal characteristics attributed to this being by theology, and tended more and more to a pantheistic denial of the theological antithesis of God and nature, God and humanity. While materialist philosophy gradually overcame pantheism, objective idealism found in it the sought-for bourgeois secularisation of the religious outlook.

p Pantheistic tendencies were most fully represented in classical German idealism in the philosophy of Hegel; he transformed Spinoza’s materialist pantheism into an idealist panlogism. His ’absolute idea’, which he frequently directly called God, was an impersonal logical process, superhuman but not supernatural, because ’Mind has for its presupposition Nature’ (87:163), although, of course, ’it is Spirit itself which gives itself a presupposition in Nature, (my italics—T.O.) (86:295). Nature was the other-being of absolute reason, which, however, did not exist outside its own self-alienation and, consequently, outside natural and human being. The latter were not simply involved in the absolute (as Neoplatonism asserts) but constituted an attributive form of its existence and selfconsciousness.^^8^^

p Feuerbach defined pantheism as a doctrine that did not distinguish the essence of God from the essence of nature and man, i.e. a doctrine that secularised theological notions but did not fully break with them. In his studies in the history 80 of philosophy he showed that idealist philosophy came to pantheism by virtue of the inner logic of its development. Its primary premisses had a theistic character, but theism, too, in so far as it acquired a speculative form, became pantheism. What then was the attitude of pantheism to the radical antithesis between materialism and idealism? Feuerbach said: ’ Pantheism therefore unites atheism with theism, i.e. the negation of God with God... It is theological atheism, theological materialism, the negation of theology, but all this from the standpoint of theology (57:297). Elsewhere, however, he asserted with no less grounds that ’idealism is the truth of pantheism’ (57:302). These different appraisals of pantheism express a real contradiction inherent in the pantheistic outlook, within which the radical antithesis between materialism and idealism is not only smoothed over, but even continues to be deepened.

p The idealist answer to the basic philosophical question retains its content of principle in spite of the change of form, and seemingly precisely because of this change, since it otherwise could not resist the facts refuting it that the sciences of nature, society, and man are discovering and materialistically interpreting.

p The idealistic notion of the spirit arose from prescientific introspection, the impelling motives of which, at least for a long time, were not so much connected with intellectual curiosity as linked with fear and man’s actual helplessness in face of the elemental forces of nature that dominated him. Idealism mystified these forces, which it interpreted as supernatural beings. Mystification of the human psyche gave rise to the idealist notion of a superhuman spirit. But these speculations also retained a certain link with reality, i.e. with nature and the human psyche, which played the role of a springboard from which idealism broke into the absolute intellectual vacuum in which, as Goethe said:

p Naught, in the everlasting void afar,
Wilt see, nor hear thy footfall’s sound,
Nor fore thy tread find solid ground! (76:11, 218)

p The history of idealism indicates that it, while despairing of the possibility of a positive, profound description of the supernatural and superhuman, and rejecting fruitless attempts to demonstrate the existence of the transcendental absolute logically, did not renounce the goal that inspired it. It began to concern itself with a scrupulous analysis of empirically established, scientifically proven facts which it no longer, 81 at least directly, rejected but interpreted contrary to their actual, materialist sense. In other words, while idealism flourished in the past in those domains that scientific research did not touch, now, partly conscious of the groundlessness of its former speculative constructs and partly finding itself ‘surrounded’ as a consequence of the increasing expansion of science, it is trying to root itself in science’s own soil, so as to live parasitically on its often intransient achievements rather than on its ephemeral flaws. This tendency, born in the seventeenth century, became particularly influential in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and has won a dominating position in our day.^^9^^

p Schopenhauer was perhaps the first idealist philosopher to treat reason and consciousness as physiologically conditioned. He identified himself with natural science on this question, while nevertheless taking an idealist stance.^^10^^ The idealist answer to the basic philosophical question does not necessarily consist in the primary being directly interpreted as consciousness, thought, or reason. That understanding of the primary is characteristic of rationalist idealism. Its antithesis within the idealist trend is irrationalism. The latter rejects the thesis of the primacy of reason, thought, and consciousness, arguing that these intellectual forms of the spirit are secondary; only will, the unconscious, the irrational ’vital impulse’, etc., are primary. It would therefore be an oversimplification or a dogmatic ignoring of the real tendencies of development of idealism to reduce its interpretation of the ‘spiritual-material’ relation to a monolinear stereotype: consciousness (thought) is primary, matter (being) secondary. The irrationalist interpretation of the primary principle is often counterposed both to the materialist and to the idealist (rationalist) answer to the basic philosophical question. That was characteristic of the ’philosophy of life’ that interpreted life (its initial concept) as something nonspiritual but at the same time immaterial.

p A peculiar feature of this idealist interpretation of life was that life itself was declared to be primary and substantial. In that connection, however, life was regarded as unconscious, psychic activity manifesting itself in instincts, inclinations, etc. So we see that analysis of the diversity of idealist answers to the basic philosophical question is a vital task of the history of philosophy, because only a special inquiry into this diversity can bring out the inherent internal unity of the answers. Where there is no understanding of this 82 unity, the various versions of idealism are often taken as philosophical trends independent of it.

p A paradoxical form of the idealist answer is denial of the existence of consciousness and the spiritual in general. This position is usually associated with vulgar materialism, but there is also an idealist denial of the reality of consciousness, which should be called vulgar idealism.

p If Hegel claimed that ’all content, everything objective, is only in relation to consciousness’ (85:1, 374), Nietzsche, rejecting rationalist idealism, proclaimed a thesis at first glance quite alien to idealism: ’there is no intelligible world’ (196:326). This denial of spirituousness was associated with a spiritualistic interpretation of life and human corporeality, i.e. had nothing in common with the materialist understanding of the spiritual as a specific property of the material. Nietzsche did not, in essence, deny the spiritual; he was opposed only to its rationalist-idealist interpretation, the central point of which was recognition of the substantiality of reason and of rational reality.

p In contrast to Nietzsche, William James attempted to show, from a stance of idealist empiricism (not alien, incidentally, to irrationalism), that the existence of consciousness was no more than an illusion stemming from the fact that things not only existed but are also differentiated and cognised by man. There were thus things and witnesses of the fact; what was called consciousness, say, of a colour did not include anything except this colour. Consciousness was consequently something illusory.

p That entity [consciousness] is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are (110:183).

p What was this ‘stuff’ from which things and thoughts were formed? It was not, of course, matter, though James called it ’ material’ and even ’primal stuff’. But listen to James himself:

p if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ’pure experience’, then knowing can easily .be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its ‘terms’ becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower (110:170).”

p It will readily be understood that this denial of the reality of consciousness (and the spiritual in general) has an illusory character: ’pure experience’, in spite of James’ 83 convictions, is something spiritual that includes consciousness. But it was that which James denied just as the empiriocritics denied the subjectivity of sensations (treating them as neutral, i.e. neither material nor spiritual, elements of both the physical and the psychic). James argued more simply, perhaps: he declared the spiritual (’pure experience’) to be the material. So the idealist answer to the basic philosophical question acquired a materialist appearance that deceived certain behaviourists as well, who based themselves on James’ doctrine. Roback, for instance, argued that ’behaviorism ... is merely a philosophical attitude as applied to the subjectmatter of psychology. This attitude will be recognised as that of materialism’ (222:32-22). James’ point of view has been taken in our day by certain influential idealist scholars who are orientated on behaviourist psychology and interpret the cybernetic modelling of mental actions subjectively. Adherents of the philosophy of linguistic analysis, for instance, suggest rejecting such concepts as ‘consciousness’, ‘thought’, ‘sensation’, and ‘subjective’, replacing all these (as they suggest) unscientific, ordinary notions or ‘pseudoconcepts’ by a description of the corresponding actions and processes performed in the nervous system. That point of view has been systematically set out in Ryle’s Concept of Mind (1949). Flew, a follower of Ryle’s, claims that this book, and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) must be acknowledged "as major contributions to materialist philosophy’ (63:110).

p How can denial of the reality of consciousness (and the spiritual in general) be combined with idealism? The kernel of this idealism, which undoubtedly differs from the traditional doctrine of the dependence of the material on the spiritual, consists in reducing all our knowledge about objective reality to reactions of various kind to external stimulation, i.e. in denial of an objective content of our notions. The purposiveness of human behaviour, which presupposes adequate response reactions to effects from outside, is characterised as activity that does not include any sort of knowledge about the external world. The images of objects of the external world that exist in man’s consciousness are treated as physiological states, and not a reflection of reality.^^12^^ Linguistic or ordinary language philosophy, basing itself on behaviourist psychology, which identifies mind and behaviour (i.e. the aggregate of actions), in the end concludes that the concept of objective reality has sense only when there is consciousness. Denial of consciousness thus proves to be a means of denying objective reality.

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p Analytical philosophers reduce thought to an aggregate of operations that can also be performed by a machine. The process of cognition is interpreted in roughly the same way; knowing is treated as a proper combining (corresponding to the purpose of the machine) of signs and elements of ordinary language, or an artificial one. In the last analysis man’s emotional life, too, is reduced to movements of various kind, and combinations of same, which form what are called, in common speech, joy, grief, anger, compassion, love, etc. An automatic machine is put in the place of man who perceives the reality around him ( including other people) and cognises, understands, feels, experiences, and acts accordingly, though far from always rationally. The automaton, of course, does not feel, does not experience, does not think but it performs all the actions inherent in the ‘feeling’, ‘experiencing’, ‘thinking’ being. So it is said to be proved that no feelings or emotions, no experiences, no thoughts exist; all are a special kind of illusion that will sooner or later be reduced to machine acts. Such are some of the extremely subjectivist and agnostic conclusions of the ’philosophy of linguistic analysis’. In several respects they border on vulgar materialism, which is not surprising, for the vulgar materialists of the nineteenth century often came to extravagant subjectivist and agnostic conclusions.

p Idealism’s denial of the reality of the spiritual is not the sole metamorphosed form of the idealist answer to the basic philosophical question. An even commoner version consists in interpreting the material as essentially immaterial, this creates an appearance as if idealism, like its antipode, accepts something material as primary, for example a law, energy, time, nature, etc. But the idealist deprives this material of its real properties, citing modern physics in that connection, which is claimed to have proven that the material is essentially immaterial.

p The idealist philosopher Ostwald employed the concept of energy as substantial essence as a fundamental principle, which he declared to be neutral in relation to the material and the spiritual, forming the essence of both. In counterposing energy to matter he argued that it was immaterial. The antithesis of energy, and the spiritual served to substantiate the thesis that energy was not a spiritual essence. On closer examination, however, it turned out that Ostwald was trying, by distinguishing energy from substance (which he identified with matter) and from human consciousness (the subjective), to create an objective-idealist natural-philosophical system related to Schelling’s philosophy of identity.

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p Bergson’s undisguised idealist philosophy started from the concept of duration (duree), which was essentially time, i.e. something material. He considered duration to be something different from physical time. He counterposed duration (time) to matter and reason as some supernatural creative force (eternal becoming, elan vital) the products of whose decay were, on the one hand, matter, and on the other, intellect associated with it. The material, so idealistically interpreted, became the point of departure of an irrationalist system. It was probably this kind of idealism that Lenin had in mind when he said: ’time outside temporal things=God’ (144:70). We see that the essence of the idealist answer to the basic philosophical question is not directly revealed in what is called primary. One has to clarify what content the concept of the primary is invested with. Only then does it become obvious what is the character of an answer to the basic question that is considered non-idealist.

p The modernisation of the idealist answer, the idealist interpretation of the materialist answer, the ‘acknowledgement’ of the material fobbed off as immaterial—all these latest methods of substantiating idealism and reconciling it with science (materialist at bottom) show that it remains idealism even when it formally rejects the traditional idealist answer to the basic question of philosophy. The nub of this idealist revision of idealism, which must be treated as a transformation of its form, was profoundly revealed by Lenin in his critique of the Russian Social-Democratic epigones of Machism. In his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism he showed that even the subjective idealist is sometimes ready to declare nature primary, but only on condition that it is understood as an aggregate of the data of experience, as something that posits a subject perceiving it. That is how the subjective idealist Bogdanov interpreted nature, when affirming that his initial propositions ’fully accord with the sacramental formula of the primacy of nature over mind’ (cited from 142:207). Criticising this sophisticated mystification of the materialist answer to the basic philosophical question, Lenin wrote:

The physical world is called the experience of men and it is declared that physical experience is ’higher’ in the chain of development than psychical... It is simply farcical for Bogdanov to class this ‘system’ as materialism. With me, too, he says, nature is primary and mind is secondary.... Not a single idealist will deny the primacy of nature taken in this sense, for it is not a genuine primacy, since in fact nature is not taken as the immediately given, as the starting point of epistemology (142:208).

86 The whole significance of a remark Lenin made later, viz., ’nature outside, independent of matter=God’ (144:69), becomes understandable in the light of his critique of one of the varieties of idealist empiricism. That remark disclosed the objective tendency of the naturalistic metamorphosis of idealism; the formal renunciation of both fideism and spiritual substance, and similarly the formal agreement with the materialist requirement to take nature as the starting point, proved to be one of the latest versions of idealism, resignedly gravitating to the same sophisticated fideism. It is not enough, however, to state this appearance of a negation of idealism; it is necessary to disclose the objective logic of the historical metamorphosis of idealist philosophy. It then becomes evident that it really is a denial, but a denial of discredited modes of idealist philosophising, while preserving its basic content. It is a denial such as turns out in fact to be a reconstruction of idealism through a renewal of its tradition and an idealist assimilation of the materialist answer to the basic philosophical question. It is thus clear that the crisis of idealist philosophy is so impressive a fact that even idealists themselves have noted it. In the second part of my book I shall give a description of this crisis in detail in connection with analysis of the struggle of the main philosophical trends. Just now I shall limit myself to pointing out that an undisputed symptom of this crisis is the critique of the idealist hypostasising of mind and reason, and irrationalist scepticism about philosophical intellectualism.

p Nietzsche saw in the Miletians, Heraklitos, and other natural philosophers of antiquity a higher degree of philosophical understanding of the world than in Sokrates and his followers. It was not the materialism or dialectics of these doctrines that enraptured him; it was the cosmic frame of mind that attracted him, which he counterposed to the human, ’too human’ contemplation of the world, locked in its own subjectivity. But this admirer of majestic cosmological objectivism was a clear, though inconsistent subjectivist. The same has to be said of Heidegger who, following Nietzsche, extolled the Presocratians above the later philosophers, although his own philosophy was a quite quaint mixture of extreme subjectivism and an objective-idealist postulating of an unfathomable absolute being. Contemporary idealist philosophy fully combines a leaning toward cosmic objectivism with subjectivism, which, however, has been subjected to limited criticism as a provincial view of the universe from an earthly gateway.

p One of the main papers at the 14th International Congress 87 of Philosophy (Vienna, 1968) ’Postulates of the History of Philosophy’ was read by the French philosopher Martial Gueroult (80). In it he criticised the subjective-idealist world outlook as naive anthropocentrism, incapable of taking in the infinity of cosmos and the contingent character of human life and human reason (whose abode is an insignificant planet in an insignificant solar system, dwarfed to insignificance in one of the countless galaxies). Gueroult exclaimed fervently:

p For shouldn’t a philosophy worthy of the name try to elevate itself above any finite point of view to the infinitely infinite infinity of the universe and consequently wouldn’t it want to rid itself of what aspires to enclose it in the circle of man? ... Won’t a philosophy that counts itself authentically philosophy want to be authentically cosmic? So, in the infinitely infinite immensity of astronomical spaces and times, it will restore the human race living cramped on a star of the lowest magnitude over a stretch of time infinitely short compared with the billions of centuries during which billions of stars have flared up -and been extinguished, and it will hold it derisory to shut the sense of all philosophy, a fortiori the sense of everything, up in the few centuries of human history, even if one does not go so far as to see in it realisation of the Absolute and the profound basis of the universal system of Nature (80:10).

p Gueroult did not define what he called cosmic philosophy more concretely: he simply made the claim. But in this claim for a new understanding of the superhuman and the Absolute (with a capital) there are distinct attempts to formulate a new idealist credo, the point of departure of which would be a counterposing of the supernatural, superhuman, superrational to the natural, human, and rational, a credo that (starting from cosmological ideas) would save idealism from the inferiority complex organically inherent in it.^^14^^

Idealism seeks an empirical basis for its notions formed by emasculating the real content of the theoretical reflection of objective reality. That largely explains its metamorphoses and the diverse versions of the idealist answer to the basic philosophical question.