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p The antithesis of principle between materialism and idealism is determined above all by the different answers to the first, ontological aspect of the basic philosophical question. But 88 this answer does not define the epistemological position of a philosophy directly; acknowledgement of the knowability or, on the contrary, unknowability of the world in itself (i.e. irrespective of understanding of the process of cognition) does not provide grounds for classing a philosophy in the materialist or idealist trends.

p Most materialists are consistent adherents of the principle of the knowability of the world. This principle is integrally linked in their doctrines with an explanation of the world from itself (and consequently with denial of a transcendental reality), with a high evaluation of sense experience and science, and with denial of religious humbling of the individual. But idealists, too, quite often acknowledge the knowability of the world. Most philosophers, as Engels remarked, answer this epistemological question in general in the affirmative (see 52:346). In Hegel, for instance, the principle of the knowability of the world follows directly from the fundamental proposition of his idealist system, i.e. from the identification of being and thought. Since being is the content of thought, consciousness of its own content in thought makes being knowable in principle. Nothing consequently divides mind and being except the empirical singleness of the human individual, which is overcome by his historically developing generic essence, humanity. Engels called Hegel’s arguments against the agnosticism of Hume and Kant decisive, in the context of the idealist system of views, of course. To counter agnosticism Hegel proclaimed that

p the closed essence of the Universum has no power in itself that could resist the daring of perception; it must be open to it and lay its riches and depths before its eyes and lead it to delight (84:1XXV).^^16^^

p How then is the absence of a direct link between one answer or the other to the ontological aspect of the basic philosophical question and the answer to the second, epistemological aspect to be explained? Apparently by the point that the polarisation of philosophy into materialist and idealist trends is theoretically predetermined by two alternative answers to the question of the relation of the spiritual and the material. As for the antithesis between philosophers who substantiate the principle of the knowability of the world and the sceptics (or agnostics), it is associated with two mutually exclusive interpretations of specifically human activity, which of course presupposes the existence of an external world but is not determined by the existence of the latter, because knowing is a social process which, like all social processes, is not determined by 89 natural conditions or objects. Does this mean that the epistemological and ontological aspects of the basic philosophical question exist unrelated to each other? Does it not follow from everything said above that inquiry into the epistemological aspect of this question does not even indirectly bring out the fundamental antithesis of materialism and idealism? Of course not. There is a mediated unity between the answer to the two aspects of the basic philosophical question, but a unity that is not an obviousness establishable without inquiry. One therefore cannot agree with those workers who claim that the epistemological antithesis between the main philosophical trends consists in the one’s substantiating the principle of the knowability of the world and the other’s substantiating epistemological scepticism. An example of this view, which clearly contradicts the facts of the history of philosophy, is to be found in Gaidukov’s article in the symposium On Dialectical Materialism, in which it is said:

p Whereas the spokesmen of materialism start (my italics—T.O.) from recognition of the knowability of the material world by man, the spokesmen of idealism deny the possibility of such knowledge and declare the surrounding world mysterious, inaccessible to human knowledge and science (70:357).

p But materialists start, of course, from recognition of the primacy of matter and the secondariness of mind. Materialists have one initial fundamental principle, by virtue of the monistic character of their philosophy, while two are ascribed to them in Gaidukov’s article; the principle of the primacy of matter and the principle of the knowability of the world. This augmenting of the initial fundamental principles comes from identifying the second aspect of the basic philosophical question with the first.

p Since the sole organising principle of idealism consists in recognition of the primacy of the spiritual, philosophical scepticism (which declares the psychophysical problem unsolvable in principle) does not, of course, stem of necessity from the idealist answer to the basic philosophical question. The sceptic is, actually a sceptic because he treats both the materialist and the idealist answer to this question slightingly as dogmatism. Lenin persistently stressed that ’the agnostic does not go on either to the materialist recognition of the reality of the outer world, or to the idealist recognition of the world as our sensation (142:96). In most cases, incidentally, this compromise position tends to an idealist answer to the ontological problems as well as to the 90 epistemological ones. But one must differentiate the final, quite often idealist conclusions and points of departure of scepticism (and agnosticism), and likewise its constant wavering between materialism and idealism, because all this constitutes the essential content of this doctrine.

p The mistaken preposition cited above was published in 1953, but was not criticised in subsequent years, and, moreover, it was repeated almost word for word in 1960 in another popular publication, A Reader in Marxist Philosophy (edited by M.M. Rosenthal) in which it was said:

p Denial of the knowability of the world is characteristic of idealist philosophy. True, there are also idealists who do not deny man’s capability of cognising the real properties of things, but they, too, claim that he does not know nature and matter, but some mysterious, invisible spirit that created nature and constitutes the basis of all things (227:202).

p It is quite incomprehensible why even those idealists who, in the words cited, ’do not deny man’s capability of cognising the real properties of things’ all the same claim that he does not know either nature or matter. But the idealist proposition about the secondariness of nature and matter, which represent only the external envelope of the soul, is evidence that idealism considers the essence of the material and natural to be wholly knowable.

p Recognition of the knowability or the unknowability in principle of the world thus does not in itself constitute grounds for singling out the main trends in philosophy. But it should not be concluded, however, that there is no epistemological antithesis between materialism and idealism. Such a conclusion seems to me to be superficial. There is a radical antithesis between the materialist and idealist understandings of the knowability of the world.

p An error of epistemological idealism (from Machism and neorealism to ordinary language philosophy) is, a dogmatic conviction that there is a purely epistemological solution of philosophical problems that excludes any ‘metaphysics’, i.e. any ontological premisses. In fact, any epistemological posing of a philosophical problem implicitly includes ontological premisses, and above all a definite understanding of the ’ spiritual-material’ relation. The expression ’epistemological idealism’ is therefore largely arbitrary; it is a matter of a version of idealist philosophy that poses and tries to answer only theoretical, cognitive problems, from which it does, not follow, however, that it succeeds in eliminating ‘metaphysics’.

p Thus I hold, in spite of epistemological idealism, that 91 both the materialist and idealist answers to the first aspect of the basic philosophical question form the initial fundamental principle of the corresponding (materialist or idealist) epistemological doctrine.

p Materialism, in setting out from acknowledgement of the primacy of the material and secondariness of the spiritual, treats the material as a reality different from and independent of mind that determines consciousness and so, too, its content. That is why the materialist answer to the second aspect of the basic philosophical question does not boil down to recognition of the knowability in principle of the world. Its essence is understanding of cognition as reflection of objective reality that exists irrespective of the process of knowing. It is the concept of reflection, the scientific interpretation of which posits recognition of the reflected, which exists independent of the reflection, that constitutes the point of departure of materialism in epistemology. As Lektorsky and Shvyrev write:

p The fundamental importance of the category of reflection for the whole system of dialectical materialism is precisely that its development makes it possible to throw a bridge from matter that feels to matter that does not, and to indicate the potential possibility of the development of matter that feels, and in the final count possesses consciousness, from matter that does not possess sensation, a psyche, and consciousness (138:27).

p Metaphysical materialism interpreted reflection one-sidedly as an adequate reproduction of the object of knowing, as a consequence of which false notions were considered not to reflect anything. Metaphysical materialists did not consistently follow the principle of reflection, since they denied the existence of reflection in human errors and did not see what these errors reflected. They interpreted religious consciousness as lacking any objective content. To consider religion a reflection of objective reality meant, for them, to justify a theistic world outlook.

p Pre-Marxian materialism had no idea of social consciousness reflecting social being. The metaphysically interpreted epistemological phenomenon of reflection played a limited role in general in its system of concepts. Only the philosophy of Marxism, thanks to the dialectical understanding of the process of reflection, and application of the concept of reflection to sociological investigation of cognition and mind, demonstrated that misconceptions (as distinct from logical mistakes) reflect objective reality. Mind (consciousness), whatever its 92 form, is a reflection of reality independent of the latter. This consistently materialist understanding of the nature of mind is a very important epistemological principle of materialism, systematically substantiated by Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

p The epistemological concept of reflection indicates that the content of consciousness (and of knowledge) is not generated by mind itself but is drawn from what is realised and cognised and forms the object of inquiry. Even when the object of cognition is knowledge itself, the concept of reflection retains its sense, since knowledge as the object of inquiry exists independently of the investigation. The fact that the object is a reflection of the external world alters nothing in principle, because the reflection of the external world in mind is a process governed by objective laws.

p One must stress, furthermore, that understanding of mind (consciousness) as a reflection of objective reality characterises its form as well as its content. Were there no sun there would also be no vision, this specific form of reflection of objective reality. Logical forms, as Lenin stressed, reflect the most general relations of things, established every day in experience. This feature of logical forms is also revealed by contemporary mathematical logic, since it treats them as relations between the signs by which objects are thought about.

p Cognition, knowing, is a specific form of reflection, because not all of a living creature’s (including man’s) reflection of the external world is knowledge. Man reflected quantum mechanical processes even when he did not have the slightest notion of them. Animals obviously also reflect the diversity of the laws of nature in their activity insofar as they adapt spontaneously to them. But there can be nothing here, of course, to do with cognition. Knowing does not embrace all the reflective activity peculiar to the animate.

p More than 70 years ago Lenin expressed the following hypothesis in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: ’it is logical to assert that all matter possesses a property which is essentially akin to sensation, the property of reflection’ (142:78). The latest research in the field of cybernetics, and in particular the concept of information as an objective process, indicates the legitimacy of the ontological interpretation of reflection as an attribute of certain forms of the interaction of material phenomena. From that angle reflection as a cognitive process is the highest level of development of 93 the property of reflection inherent in matter. With that understanding of the ‘spiritual-material’ relation, the organic unity between the materialist answer to both the first and second aspects of the basic philosophical question is brought out. A Social-Democratic review of Materialism and EmpirioCriticism called the materialist principle of reflection ’Platonism inside out’. That clearly erroneous statement, however, indirectly pointed out the radical epistemological antithesis of the main philosophical trends that Helvetius called the lines of Plato and of Demokritos. The latter formulated the first, naive version of the theory of reflection in his doctrine of eidola, according to which the reflections of things in men’s minds were the consequence of ‘contact’ of the sense organs with the images of objects that were moving in the air, separated from them. Demokritos considered errors a consequence of deformation of the eidola in the medium in which they moved, collided, and combined with one another. In opposition to him Plato affirmed that ideas (eide) did not reflect things but that things, on the contrary, reflected transcendental ideas. That, too, was also a denial of the epistemological theory of reflection that knowing is a reflection of reality independent of it. Platonism, however, as the Italian existentialist Castelli has remarked, is ’precisely the categorical affirmation of the impossibility of knowing exactly beyond remembrance, the possibility of reducing the unknown to the known’ (32:8). From that point of view one knows irrespective of the existence of an external world.

p Thus, despite the Social-Democratic critic’s assertion, .it is not the materialist theory of knowledge, but the idealist one that is a turning upside-down of the real relation existing between human consciousness and the material world. Therefore reflection was a static relation for Plato that jelled the structure of the world, while for Demokritos, in spite of his oversimplified understanding of reflection, the cognitive process appeared as continuous movement, in which the notions of things created by reason entered into a contradiction with their sensual images, and ‘opinions’, i.e. ordinary notions, were refuted by real knowledge of what actually existed.

p Plato’s epistemology was a theory of recollection, according to which one knew because the human soul turned away from the sense-perceived world and forgot its perishable earthly life so as, having concentrated, to immerse itself in itself and discover precisely in itself the knowledge that it was impossible to acquire in the world of things. He therefore called for a 94 stopping of the ears and a closing of the eyes; only by tearing loose from nature, did the soul get back to itself from the world of alienated existence. And then it was faced not with things, but with ideas of things, the transcendent primary essences that it had contemplated before its fall, i.e. its incarnation in the human body. Plato attributed a mystical sense to the ordinary notion (everyone knows what it means to remember); during remembrance the soul mentally returned to its transcendent primary source.

p The antithesis between Plato and Demokritos brings out the main epistemological alternative particularly sharply. What forms the source of our knowledge? Nature or the supernatural? Matter or spirit?

p Lenin, when criticising ‘physical’ idealism, which argued that the change in the scientific understanding of physical reality overthrew the materialist outlook on the world, made it clear that the development of scientific notions about matter had ’no relation to the epistemological distinction between materialism and idealism’ (142:240), since this distinction was not linked with any understanding of the structure and forms of existence of matter, elementary particles, etc. The epistemological antithesis of the main philosophical trends is determined by differences in understanding the source of knowledge.

p Materialism and idealism [he wrote] differ in their answers to the question of the source of our knowledge and of the relation of knowledge (and of the ‘mental’ in general) to the physical world (ibid).

p Materialism regards cognition as a specific reflection of the material world. The idealist denial of the material world is a denial of the real epistemological function of reflection, which means that the idealist can employ the concept of reflection only by mystifying its real content as a cognitive process, which was already to be found in Plato.

p In the idealist philosophy of modern times the concept of reflection has been employed by Leibniz, Hume, Hegel, and other philosophers. In Hegel it (reflexion) serves to describe such relations as ‘essence-being’, and ‘appearance-phenomenon’. He endeavoured to demonstrate that the antitheses inherent within objective reality were reflectively related and reflected each other. Essence, for example, is sublated being, which is retained in it as appearance or ’reflected being’ (see 86:162, and 89:15-22). Consequently

p reflection, or light thrown into itself, constitutes the distinction between Essence and immediate Being, and is the peculiar characteristic of Essence itself (86:162).

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p Hegel thus understood reflection as an ontological relation. On the one hand he mystified the real process of cognition, and on the other, revealed the basic elements of the actual essential relation. The correlativeness of the elements of essence (identity and difference, the positive and the negative, the ground and the consequence, etc.) were defined as Reflexion, i.e. a relation of mutual reflection. In that connection the term ‘reflection’ also meant contemplation, in accordance with traditional usage, but there was no thinking subject and object of thought independent of it in this contemplation, since it was a matter of an impersonal logical process which, according to Hegel, formed the essence of everything that existed. He analysed the dialectical nature of essence, i.e. the inner relationship, and interdependence of phenomena, but the concept of reflection as a human cognitive process, positing both mind and the realisable objective reality, remained alien to his philosophy.

p Cognition, according to Hegel, was the de-objectifying of nature, and overcoming of its objectivity by exposure of the ‘semblance’ of everything natural. While nature was external, ‘outside’ in relation to spirit (including the human mind), an alienated discovery of the Absolute Idea), cognition had to tear the material ‘envelope’ off nature, which it had already done (in Hegel’s view) at the stage of its development when science discovered laws of nature (which he interpreted as laws of objective thought, or the rational in the universum). Natural science, according to Hegel’s doctrine, confirmed the truth of idealism, since it proved that natural processes were governed by definite laws which, according to him, were rational, immaterial relations. The fault of science, however, in his view, was that it treated laws as relations between things, i.e. did not bring out the Ideological relation in them. Philosophical inquiry, in contrast to scientific research, stripped all the material covers from nature, penetrated to the interior of things, finding these the incorporeal, ideal, and supernatural. Truth, Hegel taught, was immaterial; it had no need of covers or cloaks; it was impossible to see, or hear, or smell, or feel; it was discoverable only by speculative thought, which knew itself in nature and outside nature. Cognition of nature was, according to him, a surmounting of the natural, an ascent from the antithesis of thought and being to their dialectical identity or, in other words, demonstration of the truth of idealism.^^16^^

p Recognition of the knowability of the world in principle, and agreement with the epistemological principle of reflection 96 are not quite the same thing. One cannot agree with Horn, a Marxist from the GDR, who treated the term ‘knowledge’ and ‘reflection’ as essentially synonymous. Such a point of view is acceptable for a materialist, but should not be ascribed to idealists. But Horn wrote:

p In the whole theory of knowledge the concept of reflection has a central place. It always used to be falsely attributed only to materialism; in reality it also underlies idealism, though often under another name (104:61).

p Horn tried to show that the problem of reflection was of such a fundamental character that no idealist doctrine could avoid it. That is correct, of course, but it does not follow from it at all that idealists agree with the epistemological principle of reflection. Idealism interprets the process of knowing as an autonomous activity independent of material reality. Some idealists describe cognition as a logical process of the self-movement of pure thought, independent of sense perceptions; Others consider it supersensory vision, a mystical dawning on one, and an intuitive merging with the world. Still others, being inclined toward idealist empiricism, see in cognitive activity an ordering of sense data, the establishing of connections between them, and the constructing of things from the material of sensations. The different interpretations often overlap, a denial of knowing as reflection of a world independent of it, moreover remaining inevitable for them. That, as Lenin stressed, determines the epistemological antithesis between materialism and idealism:

p The fundamental distinction between the materialist and the adherent of idealist philosophy consists in the fact that the materialist regards sensation, perception, idea, and the mind of man generally, as an image of objective reality (142:248).

p The materialist considers the sensually perceived world to be real irrespective of its being known by the existing world. That is one of the most important features of the principle of reflection, which presupposes reliance on the evidence of the sense organs. The objective necessity, justification, and legitimacy of this confidence is founded on practice, since it is by sense perceptions that man orientates himself in the material world around him, adapts himself to it, and alters it.

p Idealism scorns this allegedly uncritical confidence in the evidence of the sense organs, in spite of the fact that materialist epistemology has always been concerned with a critical analysis of the content of sensory reflection, and the philosophy of Marxism disclosed the dialectical contradiction 97 between rational and sense reflection of the external world. But contemporary science, which has developed very precise methods of investigating the reflective activity peculiar to the nervous system, has fully confirmed materialist confidence in sense data. As Anokhin has pointed out, investigation of information relations in the world of living creatures witnesses that ’the nervous system achieves striking precision of information of the brain about the original effects of external objects’ (6:116). And further:

p the theory of information indicates that any object reflected in the nervous system through a number of recodings of the original signal, in the final stage quite exactly reflects the chief, biologically most important parameters of the reflected object (6:118).

p This scientific evaluation of the epistemological principle of reflection is at the same time confirmation of the materialist answer to the first aspect of the basic philosophical question, since it indicates that the sense-perceived world around us is an actual and not illusory reality.

p In opposition to materialism, idealism interprets senseperceived reality now as a specifically ‘human’ reality, now as an external, inadequate expression of the suprasensitive, substantial essence of the world. The materialist does not, of course, deny that there are sensuously unperceivable phenomena that form causes, hidden components, and the essence of observed phenomena. But he rejects an antithesis in principle of the observable and imperceptible, because the latter is a sort of ’thing in itself that will become a ’thing for us’ in certain conditions and through the development of knowledge. The difference between a ’thing in itself and ’thing for us’ has an epistemological rather than an ontological character. In other words, there are no absolute, unconditional, insurmountable limits of possible experience; and consequently there is also no suprasensitive or transcendent reality.

p Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism not only demonstrated the incompatibility in principle of idealism and the theory of reflection; in it he gave a profound analysis of the main idealist arguments against the epistemology of materialism. I have in mind first and foremost his critique of the views of Bishop Berkeley against the materialist conception of sense perceptions.

p But say you [Berkeley wrote], tho the ideas themselves do not exist without the mind, yet there may be things like them whereof are copies or resemblances, which things exist without the mind, in an unthinking substance. I answer an idea can be like nothing but an idea,

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p a colour, or figure, can be like nothing but another colour or figure. If we look but never so little into our thoughts, we shall find it impossible for us to conceive a likeness except only between our ideas. Again I ask whether those suppos’d originals or external things, of which our ideas are the picture or representations, be themselves perceivable or no? If they are, then they are ideas and we have gained our point; but if you say they are not, I appeal to any one whether it be sense, to assert a colour is like something which is invisible; hard or soft, like something which is intangible and so of the rest (15:31).

p Berkeley claimed that the concept of reflection lacked sense. Contemporary idealist empiricism has not added anything essentially new to this argument. Berkeley counterposed idealism directly to materialism (he called the former immaterialism), while the latest positivism, in rejecting the epistemological principle of reflection, quite often is not aware of the idealist character of this stance. Contemporary positivists in fact resort in essence to the Berkeleian arguments: acknowledgement of external objects independent of sensuality (and reflected by it) is unprovable in principle. Berkeley was more consistent, declaring the assumption of the existence of sensual objects ’in themselves’ to be absurd, since sense data consisted of sensations only.

p Berkeley’s main argument deserves special attention, viz., that ideas (as he called both sensations and sense perceptions) cannot be like things precisely because they are ideas and not things. That consideration served him not in order to counterpose sensations and things, but in order to conclude that sensations were the sole reality directly accessible to us. Sensations, according to him, are not evidence of the existence of things; they were things. Therefore any attempt to draw some kind of distinction between sensations and things and divide them from one another was fruitless, scholastic philosophising. We had no right to assert that there was something distinct in things from what was in sensations, since this distinction did not exist in sensations. But if everything that was in things was also in sensations, what basis was there for thinking that something existed distinct from sensations? Such is the logic of subjective-idealist epistemology.

p There have never been materialists, of course, who would have claimed that sensations as such, i.e. as psychic phenomena, were like things. The principle of reflection registers the difference between the subjective image and the object, pointing at the same time to the content of the image, drawn from outside, from the object that is somehow reproduced in this image. Materialism does not ascribe any physical, 99 chemical, or other properties to the sensual image of the object (or the concept that sums up the attributes of a whole class of objects). The images of objects do not have the mass or colour inherent in the latter, although they do contain a notion or representation (knowledge) about all these properties. Todor Pavlov correctly remarks:

p colours, tones, smells, lines, geometrical figures, magnitudes, and various relations, when they ‘enter’ consciousness (or rather, the world of our ideas), do not cease to be colours, tones, smells, lines, etc., but have already lost their material being. No mind, of course, has ever smelled of rose, but every mind is, incidentally, consciousness of the fragrance of a rose or the smell of garlic, which really are properties of the things themselves (roses and garlic) but ideally enter the content of our idea-images as components, i.e., so enter our world of ideas (203:172).

p The reflection and the reflected are dialectical opposites whose unity has as its basis an object existing independently of the process of reflection. This antithesis of the ideal and the material is transformed through reflection into an antithesis between the subjective form and the objective content of the image. The objectivity of the content of images is an epistemological objectivity, since this content is not identical with the content of the objects; it only reproduces it, and of course, moreover, not fully, but approximately, and usually one-sidedly, etc. The objective content of images is the idealised content of the reflected objects, by virtue of which there is always an element of the subjective in it. The latter needs to be understood not only as an illusion or incomplete knowledge but also as the mode of mental assimilation of objective reality, which gets specific expression in the reflected content. As Mitin writes:

p the ideal and the material are characterised by a relation of dialectical antithesis. The image of an object is not extended, does not contain any grain of the substance of the object reflected by it, and cannot perform the functions that the object itself does. But the structure of the ideal image is determined by the material interaction of the knowing subject with the object, has an objective content, and adequately, approximately truly, ideally, and exactly expresses the essence of the structure of the object itself (184:76).

The epistemological principle of reflection in its contemporary form, i.e. as it is being developed by the philosophy of Marxism, thus presupposes not only a demarcation of the subjective and objective, but also one within the subjective and within the objective. The subjective in reflection is not only that which is not related to the object, which must therefore be