Not very long ago it was extremely fashionable among official men of learning to say that Marx had really produced nothing new in the philosophical sphere. Such a well-known philosopher as Wilhelm Wundt in his Introduction to Philosophy wrote "This lack of clarity in its metaphysical premises (i.e. of Marxism. N.B.) has a comprehensible basis in the fact that practical questions alone interest sociological materialism. Therefore the system does not even possess the necessary theoretical foundation, which it openly leaves to physiological materialism to work out."1)
It would be hard to find an argument so utterly ignorant and untrue as the above-quoted argument of Wundt. However, the course of the social struggle and of vast ideological changes which, like the overwhelming movement of geological formations, express the depth of the conflict within the perishing world of capitalism, has compelled consideration of the question of Marx the philosopher. Since the publication of new works by Marx and Engels (above all the German Ideology and Engels' Dialectic of Nature) it has become quite clear how right were the orthodox Marxians when they considered that in the philosophical field also Marx fills the place due to him.
Indeed Marx is the creator of a great philosophical synthesis with which none of the latest and most fashionable philosophical systems can be compared. Marx, as we know, reached dialectical materialism from Hegel through Feuerbach, including all the rational elements of the preceding thousand years of philosophical development in his system. He had a splendid knowledge of the history of philosophy and there are no more brilliant historical and philosophical characterisations (both from the point of view of the social conditioning of doctrines and that of their "immanent" logic) than certain of Marx's characterisations.2)
In order to show the full originality of Marx's philosophical creation it is right to begin our analysis with the question of the relation of subject and object in which it at once becomes apparent that Marx has started an absolutely new epoch in the historical development of philosophy.
Marx started from the premise of the objective reality of the outer world independent of the subject (in opposition to the subjective, idealist philosophical tradition of the Berkeley-Hume school, the consistent development of which leads to solipsism). Marx was the adversary of objective idealism and philosophical identity when he stood the Hegelian philosophical conception on its feet. Hence Marx was a materialist. But his materialism differs sharply in its starting-point from the mechanistic materialism of the great encyclopædists, from the "vulgar materialism" of Büchner and Moleschott and from Ludwig Feuerbach's anthropological doctrine.
In Marx's philosophy the object is treated in an absolutely exceptional manner.
1. It is an historically developing "quantity". The world, the cosmos, has its history. Nature is not an unchanging "datum". On the contrary, it changes dialectically, its laws are also historical.
2. It is not abstract, qualityless, grey matter, as it appeared to mechanistic materialism. It includes a variety of qualitative definitions with different forms of movements passing one into the other.3)
3. The object, as object, is historical in another sense also, and that is: it grows in accordance as the penetration of man into nature expands. "Even objects of the simplest 'sensual authenticity' are only given it (the subject. N.B.) thanks to social development, thanks to industry and commercial relations. It is well known that the cherry tree...only appeared in our zone a few centuries ago thanks to commerce...."4)
4. The object is historical since it is to a certain degree itself the product of the historical activity of the historical subject. Feuerbach, for example, "does not discern that the sensual world about him is not something directly given from eternity, a thing always equal to itself, but the product of industry and a social state, the product in the sense that in each historical epoch it is the result of the activity of a whole number of generations, each of which stands on the shoulders of the preceding generations...." 5) "Of course," Marx adds, having in mind the clever people who may absolutise these arguments, inflate them and convert the process of the "humanising" of nature into a proof of the absence of the objective world, "at the same time the priority of external nature is preserved, and, of course, this has no relation to the primal men born by means of generatio æquivoca." 6)
1. It is not the abstraction of the intellectual side of human activity brought into independent existence. In fact, the subject of bourgeois philosophy is a castrated subject, deprived of the completeness of its vital functions. The subject of Marxist philosophy is a complete subject. The dull and intellectual abstraction of the merely intellectual side of man is a reflection of the division of social labour in which the functions of thought congeal into definite social groups, when the so-called "spiritual production" is separated from the material, i.e. from "the direct production of life", when the relative cleavage in social life evokes a cleavage and absolutising of the category of thought and creates the illusion of a separate intellect.
2. Subject is not an isolated human atom but "socialised" man. "We" is already contained in the pores of the philosophical "I". Philosophical Robinsonades are just as impermisisible as Robinsonades in the social sciences.7) "The individual is a social being. Therefore his manifestation of life (even if not expressed directly in the form of a collective expression of life taking place simultaneously with others) is a manifestation and expression of social life." 8) It is, as expressed above, a whole. But this is a whole of a socialised, social man. The Feuerbachian position starts from anthropology, whereas the real basis is here not the biological species (homo sapiens), but a new form of being, a specific, qualitatively different form, the form of human society. "Therefore," Marx defines brilliantly, "although man is to a certain extent a separate individual, and it is precisely separation which makes him an individual and a real individual social being-he is also a whole...the subjective being of a society thought and felt for itself, just as he exists in reality, on the one hand, as contemplation and the real spirit of social being, and on the other as the completion of the human manifestation of life. Thus, though being and thinking differ from one another, they are at the same time in unity with one another." 9)
3. But the subject is not merely social subject, but also socialhistorical subject. Society is concrete historical society, it passes through different phases of its historical development. Feuerbach "examines 'man in general', instead of 'real historical man'".10) The peculiarities of social structure, of the historical mode of production, have also peculiarities of the adequate "mode of presentation", the special forms of thinking, in dependence on the historical phase of social development, of the class dominants in life, etc. Thus the subject is not an abstraction of man, not a personified "species" or "kind" and not even social man in general. The subject is social-historical man.
4. It also follows from the above that the subject is an active subject, and above all practically active, producing the direct conditions for its own existence. The deepest cleavage in society is the division between mental and physical labour.
The division of labour becomes a real division of labour only when the division between material and spiritual labour begins. From this moment consciousness can really imagine itself to be nothing but the consciousness of existing practice. From the moment consciousness really begins to represent something which represents nothing real, from that moment it is in the condition where it emancipates itself from the world and passes on to the formation of "pure theory", of theology, philosophy, morality, etc.11)
Before Marx, it was just this separated theoretical consciousness of the crippled and dissociated individual whose very dissociation is a social-historical fact, which congealed into the philosophical subject. The thinking and contemplative functions, torn away from the active and practical, thinking about the world which had relatively got away from the practice of changing the world, evoked the illusion of an independent and sovereign "movement of the soul", with its independent "immanent" logic for this movement.
From the above there follows also Marx's special position in the question of the relationship between subject and object. It is particularly necessary to dwell on this question because the problem of the reality (i.e. unreality) of the external world is connected with it, as well as the problem of the knowledge of the latter and the question of the criteria of knowledge, i.e. almost all the main questions of philosophy.
The fact is that in pre-Marxian philosophy the relations between object and subject were only looked upon as relations between the abstraction of the intellect and the object of knowledge. This relationship it was which made the starting-point for all further analysis. Here Marx fundamentally changed the whole approach to the question. Particularly striking is the point of view he formulates in the following criticism of A. Wagner's methodological approach.12) Marx writes
...In this doctrinaire professor the relations of man to nature appear from the very beginning not as practical relations, i.e. founded on actions, but as theoretical ones.... But men in no wise begin by "standing in theoretical relation to the objects of the external world". Like other animals, they "begin" by eating, drinking, etc., i.e. they do not "stand" in any relation but act vigorously, and with the aid of action they master certain objects of the external world and in this way satisfy their needs (consequently they begin with production).
So with Marx both the historical and the logical prius is practice. This is far from implying that theoretical questions did not interest Marx (a hyper-foolish statement which academic philosophy expressed through Wilhelm Wundt). This means that profound theory advances the theoretical argument which exposes the main, real, actual connections. The prius is practice, practical activity, the practical changing of the world as the chief function of living, social, historical man. "Consciousness (bewusstes Sein)", as Marx with genius points out, "can never be anything else but conscious being, and the being of men is the real process of their life." Consequently the social-historical consciousness of social, historical man grows on the basis of practice.
These arguments completely upset the usual starting-points of school philosophers. In fact the primary datum to "me" of "my" "sensations" is considered logically irrefutable. If this is the starting-point, the material, etc., of the process of knowledge, then it is impossible to extricate oneself from the circle of this "datum",just as it is impossible to extricate oneself by the hair from a bog.
But this "starting-point", which is actually the product of a complicated analysis, is not the real starting-point, the subject has no unmixed "pure sensations", unless he is some mythical primitive Adam. Along with sensations, in connection with them, and so on, conceptions are present which are a social product. Behind every conception stands the whole path of social-historical development (just because the subject is a socialised subject; behind "I", "we" is already concealed). Not the passive reception of sensations but active, practical doing 13) is the primal and initial. So in the usual so-called irrefutable proof of the subjectivity of the primal "datum" we are "given" extremely important logical gaps which refute the whole line of this proof. A Robinsonade with a passively contemplative character is the "starting-point" of the dissected "starting-point" of academic philosophy.
But the further theses of Marxism arise from this and are in their turn connected with it.
The external world (the object) and the social-historical subject are placed in a relationship of reciprocity, while the main feature of this reciprocity is the active changing of the world. Hence the question of the gnoseological importance of practice in general and of technics in particular. With Marx the question of the possibility of knowledge is connected with the question of the possibility of changing the world. The praxiological moment is directly interwoven into gnoseology. Goethe's Faust is right when he says in his philosophical monologue:
Tis written: In the beginning was the Word.
Already I stick, and who shall help afford?
The word at such high rate I may not tender;
The passage must I elsewise render.
If rightly by the Spirit I am taught,
Tis written: In the beginning was the Thought.
By the first line a moment tarry,
Let not thine eager pen itself o'er hurry!
Does thought work all and fashion all outright?
It should stand: In the beginning was the Might.
Yet even as my pen the sentence traces,
A warning hint the half-writ word effaces.
The Spirit helps me-from all doubting freed,
Thus write I: In the beginning was the Deed.
The question may be put in this way. The problem of the relationship between subject and object is the problem of the process of mastering the object. But mastery may be either practical 'or theoretical. Practical mastery (the starting-point) engenders theoretical mastery, which is also checked by practice, which enriches practice and, in its turn, receives from practice supplementary impulses on a new basis. Practice and theory are activity. They are, while practice remains primary, mutually connected; they "reciprocate", they pass into one another, here there is no identity but there is unity. If, therefore, the theory a is connected with the practice a, which produces a given change in the external world x, then that is the checking of practice by the truth of theory. The "accursed" question of "things in themselves" which Kant declared to lie on the other side of knowledge, was discredited by Hegel as being objectless, for "the thing in itself" is an abstraction from any relationship to another, i.e. is something, "wahrheitslose leere Abstraktion".14) Marx 15) formulates this problem from the point of view of his theory of knowledge as being: "The question if objective truth is possible to human thought is not a theoretical but a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is the reality and force of his actual thoughts. The dispute as to the reality or non-reality of thought separated from practice, is a purely scholastic question." This is not naïveté, as certain naïve (or make-believe naïve?) critics of Marx pretend. It is the profoundest form in which the problem can be put, the placing of it on a new, unusual basis.16) In the circle (practice-theory-enriched practice), theory is the aspect of this, figuratively speaking, enlarged reproduction of life, this enlarged process of mastering nature. There cannot be such mastery (i.e. an expedient "changing of the world") unless an adequate practice corresponds to it. There can be no successful practice unless its theoretical expression ("conscious practice") is "true", i.e. adequate to reality. This by no means excludes contradictions between the links of the process of mastering nature taken as a whole. But this does not immediately make clear the question of the criteria of truth, for the criterion of correspondence with reality and the so-called "practical criterion of truth" (if it is a matter of the practice of real change of the real world) coincide, while the "power of thought", its truth, its adequacy are proved by the process of real mastery of the world, by the process of its change.
Marx in this way lifted materialism to unparalleled heights. The limitation of old-fashioned materialism, its purely quantitative theorems, its mechanistic character, the qualityless character of its matter, the absence of understanding of the specific forms of movement and specific laws, its anti-historical nature, its passively-contemplative nature, etc., were all overcome by Marx. He succeeded in doing this because he made a synthesis of materialism and dialectics. He raised the dialectical method to its highest degree, refashioned it critically, turned upside down the vastness of the Hegelian philosophical conception and finished for ever with Hegelian panology with its "drunken" philosophical speculation. The movement of conceptions which formed the essence of the historical process with Hegel has been transformed by Marx into the ideological reflex of the history of real human life, the dialectic of thought into the reflex of the dialectic of material social development. But the dialectical forms of movement, embracing nature, society and thought itself, have become with Marx the main element of his splendid philosophical system.
The deepest revolutionary historicism which penetrates all Marx's teaching from its most generalised heights down to the immediate practical conclusions, is genetically connected with a critically refashioned Hegelian dialectic. The compressed description of dialectic which Marx makes in the preface to Volume I of Capital is well known:
My own dialectical method is not only fundamentally different from the Hegelian dialectical method, but is its direct opposite. For Hegel, the thought process (which he actually transforms into an independent subject, giving to it the name of "idea ") is the demiurge (creator) of the real; and for him the real is only the outward manifestation of the idea. In my view, on the other hand, the ideal is nothing other than the material when it has been transposed and translated inside the human head.
Nearly thirty years ago, when Hegelianism was still fashionable, I criticised the mystifying aspect of the Hegelian dialectic. But at the very time when I was working at the first volume of Das Kapital, the peevish and arrogant mediocrities who nowadays have the ear of the educated public in Germany, were fond of treating Hegel much as in Lessing's day the world of Moses Mendelssohn used to treat Spinoza, namely as a "dead dog". That was why I frankly proclaimed myself a disciple of that great thinker, and even, in Das Kapital, toyed with the use of Hegelian terminology when discussing the theory of value. Although in Hegel's hands dialectic underwent a mystification, this does not obviate the fact that he was the first to expound the general forms of its movement in a comprehensive and fully conscious way. In Hegel's writings, dialectic stands on its head. You must turn it right way up again if you want to discover the rational kernel that is hidden away within the wrappings of mystification.
In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany because it seemed to elucidate the existing state o£ affairs. In its rational form it is a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because, while supplying a positive understanding of the existing state of things, it at the same time furnishes an understanding of the negation of that state of things, and enables us to recognise that that state of things will inevitably break up; it is an abomination to them because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, as transient; because it lets nothing overawe it, but is in its very nature critical and revolutionary.17)
The main lines of the synthesis are compressed into this little extract, but the synthesis is anything but a mechanical juxtaposing of materialism and dialectic. Matter is primary. Consciousness is a new property, a new quality of a special form of matter. The material is "expressed" in consciousness. Therefore knowledge is adequate to reality. But this "expression"18) is not a passive expression. Knowledge is active and effective. It is far from being the statement of sensations received from the external world and the formation of "complexes" of these sensations, on the basis of which, as the "mere empiricists" of to-day affirm, nothing but tautologies are erected. On the one hand, insofar as human practice develops, the very material of knowledge is enlarged, its "raw material", and the radius of knowledge increases in length. On the other hand, knowledge actively refashions this material, thought gnaws into it (the problem of "inferred knowledge"), and the results of this process, its products, much more truly "express" objective reality (and therefore theoretical and really scientific knowledge is higher, truer, deeper than superficial empiricism). Never absolutely, always more or less one-sidedly, asymptotically, it approaches the "whole" truth-in this is the process of historical development. But the richer and more many-sided it is, the "truer" it is, the more successful, the wider is the practice on the basis of which it grows and which it fertilises in its turn. The "ideal" is consequently "the material transposed and translated inside the human head". Dialectic becomes materialist. It examines from this point of view "every historically developed form in movement", that is "from its transient aspect".
The importance attributed to dialectic by Marx and Engels is also evident from another side. If in the extract quoted above Marx emphasised the necessity of making dialectic materialist, then Engels with no less force emphasises the necessity of making materialism dialectic. In criticising the so-called "naturalscientific" materialism he makes the remark that it is essential "to go over to dialectic. There are two philosophical tendencies, the metaphysical with unchanging categories and the dialectic (Aristotle and particularly Hegel) with' fluid 'ones." 19) "Hegel, whose synthesis and rational grouping of natural science are a greater affair than all the metaphysical nonsense taken together." 20) There is no contradiction here. On the contrary, such an approach shows that it is a question of the organic synthesis made by Marx's creative genius.
The transitory character of every form, its arising, its development and destruction; the absence of absolute limits and at the same time the zig-zag character of development, the passing of quantity into quality; quantitative continuity and qualitative interruption; the division of the one, the inner contradictoriness of each whole; the development of this contradiction, the struggle of opposites as the immanent law of movement; the passing of one opposite into another, the negation of the old form and its co-presence in the new in "sublated form", the contradiction between form and content; the relation of each thing to others, the many-sidedness of connections, the universality of connections; the different types of connections (not only of causal order but also of coexisting connections) and other general laws of being and becoming make up the distinctive peculiarities of dialectic which fixes and formulates these laws theoretically. 21)
"Briefly dialectic may be defined as the teaching of the unity of opposites. The kernel of dialectic is grasped in this," Lenin remarks.22) And this is absolutely just. It is precisely for this reason that dialectic, dialectical historicism and the dialectical teaching on development are fundamentally different from the bourgeois "theory of evolution" as it flourishes in the natural and social sciences of the bourgeoisie. It is just because of this that dialectic is the "algebra of revolution" if we strip it of its mystical skin of specific Hegelianism ("Hegelei", as Marx called it). Bourgeois historicism and evolutionism arose to a certain degree as a reaction against the theory of catastrophes and revolutionary rationalism of the encyclopædists. Gradualness, continuity, "organology" were brought forward as heavy artillery against the "leaps" in social history. The very idea of historicism stands far above abstract rationalism. But it had an inner weakness and even with Hegel the Prussian state held up the current of history, while the contradiction between the essentially revolutionary method and the conservative system was the inner cause of the decay and doom of this astonishing philosophical conception. Marx abolished these contradictions. In his materialist doctrine dialectic became an organic component part, the basis of the whole conception. We have seen above how, in distinction from all preceding philosophers, Marxism sharply emphasises the historical nature of the object, which itself develops dialectically, and the historical nature of the subject which also goes through the phases of its own dialectical development. The main laws of dialectic appear in the very relation between object and subject. Object and subject are a unity, for society is not a supernatural quantity. But this unity is not an identity; object and subject are opposed. The struggle of these opposites drives on history, while these opposites interpenetrate one another (the process of the influence of nature on society, the process of the "humanising" of nature): society has in the last resort grown out of nature but it is not dead matter and not a biological species. It is matter with a specific quality in that its relation to nature is an active relationship, practical and theoretical. Theory and practice are a unity but a contradictory unity. Society itself is a unity, but again a contradictory one. The contradiction between its form and content (productive forces and productive relations) expressed in the opposition of classes (in class society) is the motive force of historical development, and so on. In this way materialist dialectic formulates the general connections and laws of nature, society and thought itself. Materialist dialectic is the basis of the whole doctrine of Marx and at the same time a general method of investigation. It stands in the same relation to formal logic, with its shamefaced, statistical categories, as higher mathematics to lower. It is the logic of contradictory processes and universal connections in which abstractions are concrete, analysis and synthesis indivisible, boundaries conditioned and conceptions flexible to the maximum degree.
Thus dialectic, when it became materialist dialectic, entered a new stage in its development.
"In its really logical sense", even Tröltsch has to write, "dialectic has been preserved and further developed in a considerable and fruitful manner, beyond Hegel's limits of the knowable, only by Marxism." 23) In this respect the dialectic of Marx and, Engels has appeared "astonishing, their statement of the problem is one of the most revealing which the century has produced." Thus "the new conception of dialectic" has above all a protracted value.24)
Marxism's theory of knowledge, as appears from what has gone before, has its own absolutely exceptional peculiarities, since its starting-points are not like those of other philosophical systems, even including the materialist: there is another object, another subject, and a different relationship between them. Marxism's theory of knowledge is sociological. Its abstractions are abstractions of a logical order completely different from the usual abstractions of philosophy. In connection with this Marxism is confronted with the special problem of the forms of knowledge which are produced from the forms of material life. In other words, if a definite "mode of presentation" corresponds to a definite "mode of production", then this problem of the "mode of presentation" in its connection with an historical class subject, the agent of this or that "mode of presentation", is a problem sui generis. The relation between a socially-conditioned mode of presentation and the degree of adequacy of knowledge consists, on the whole, in the fact that the class which is the agent of a higher mode of production (i.e. of a mode of production in which the productive forces are more powerful, in which the process of mastering nature is going on more intensively and the productivity of labour is higher) is also the agent of a higher "mode of presentation" (i.e. of such a mode of presentation as permits of more rapidly and adequately knowing the objective world).
Marxist philosophy as the most perfect of philosophical systems owes this in the first place to materialist dialectic, with its wide horizons, its historicism and variability in past, present and future, whereas the bourgeoisie is drawn to "eternal categories", with its bold statement of the problem of interruption and continuity, whereas the bourgeoisie dreads "leaps", with its strict determinism which infinitely broadens the field of science, as opposed to the indeterminism of bourgeois-idealist doctrines, with the doctrine of the infinite possibilities of knowledge as opposed to the different forms of agnosticism and the Kantian teaching of the unknowability of the thing in itself, etc. This dual nature of the forms of consciousness of our age is the reflection of the antagonistic mode of production and of the opposition between the bourgeoisie, whose modes of thought have become fetters on its future development, just as the forms of capitalist society have become fetters on the development of productive forces, and the proletariat, which advances new forms of thought, a new "mode of presentation", formulated theoretically as dialectical materialism.
There are grains of reason in every system. The bourgeoisie could not exist if its theory was only nonsense in all its parts, from beginning to end. Only rationalists and metaphysicians can argue in this way. But this does not prevent it from being reactionary in relation to the theory of the proletariat. Therefore, whenever the ideologues of the bourgeoisie advance a "fashionable" doctrine, in our age, the age of intense strains, of crises, of decay of capitalism, it is usually a reactionary, mystical doctrine and its rational grains are already contained in rational form in the Marxist conception. Here are a few examples to clarify our thought.
1. At present so-called axiology, "the philosophy of values" (Rickert and others) 25), has a certain importance in official bourgeois science. Growing out of the problems of the "philosophy of history" and the methodology of the social sciences, it has become a whole metaphysical system. As is well known Rickert stands for a general demarcation from the natural sciences in the methodology of history. The natural sciences are generalising in method, while the social sciences are historical. Their object is non-repetitive and individual. This individual choice must go along the line of correspondence with values, i.e. "cultural values". Hence a refined doctrine of values as a result of which all philosophy is transformed into a doctrine of values. Logically the whole of this theory cannot stand criticism. Nature has its history, just as society does, although the history of nature is not the same as the history of society. Therefore the whole justification for two methods, different in principle, is fundamentally untrue. The introduction of the teleological value aspect is in principle quite impermissible. Its concrete expression is simply impossible, since the criteria of values (which with these ideologues all tend towards one or another variation of Kantian morality) are quite undefined. The whole doctrine degenerates into the moralising metaphysic and metaphysical morality of "axiology". Here, however, there is concealed in mystical form a real problem, the problem of the social and cultural function of knowledge (both of the natural and social sciences). But Marxism solves this problem splendidly with its teaching of the relations of theory and practice, of the social and vital functions of knowledge, while at the same time it shows the door to any kind of teleology.
2. Not very long ago in the general aggregate of bourgeois ideology pragmatism played a very important part (W. James in the first place).26) Pragmatism emphasised with energy the practical criterion of truth, the "instrumental" point of view. The "truth" of any premise is measured by its practical benefit. James examines religious-sit venia verbo-"truths" from this point of view. They comfort and are therefore true, because beneficial. In experience, including religious experience, in mystical illumination, in ecstasy, in any "experience", these truths are shown to be valuable and beneficial 27) just as much as in the rough empiricism of daily life. This doctrine is logically unsustainable. It expands the conception of experience to include any kind of individual experience, a point of view which makes, for example, the existence of hallucinations equivalent to the existence of any material object, God the same kind of reality as the President of the United States and the practice of prayer, the commerce of stocks and shares, ore mining, in no way different from one another in principle. The chief mistake in pragmatism is the fundamentally incorrect conception of practice as a theoretically-knowable factor. In reality only such a practice may here have meaning as changes the material world (Marx's "revolutionary Praxis"). Only in such a case is the criterion of practice not separated from the criterion of correspondence with reality. Only in such conditions can the problem of the adequacy of knowledge be correctly stated and correctly solved (and this, after all, is the decisive gnoseological question). A grain of reason was concealed in the mystical formulations of pragmatism, that fashionable reactionary doctrine of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. But this factor already exists in Marx in its real meaning and is fully worked out as one of the most important main parts of his philosophical synthesis.
3. Recently a great re-orientation from quantitative to qualitative analysis has been taking place along the whole front of philosophy and the higher sciences. The idea of "totality", "the whole", "the all" (Totalität, das Ganze, Ganzheit, etc.), the idea of a qualitatively special complete form (Gestalt), is at present the most fashionable idea. This is expressed philosophically in the resurrection of Fichteanism and Hegelianism ("Neo-Hegelianism"), in the transition from the causal method to the so-called "organic" and teleological, and so on.
The "Whole" frequently assumes the form of a super-sensitive substance, unapproachable by rational knowledge and only approachable by "intuition", "sensitiveness", by mystical forms of direct "vision". It is on this foundation that Driesch's biological metaphysics has arisen, with its doctrine of the organic whole, its doctrine of entelechy which gives "aim and direction" to development. It is on this foundation that such systems as O. Spann's "Universalism" arise in the economic sciences. Thus the anti-mechanistic idea of a qualitatively specific whole assumes an idealist, teleological and even theological character. Quality is here absolutely separated from quantity, the whole is absolutely separated from its parts and is hypostasised as a supernatural category lying outside the objects of rational knowledge. All such constructions are ultra-reactionary and a merciless war is necessary against them. But, rationally understood, the idea of the whole, that is taken in its relative opposition to its parts, in its materialist characteristic, is correct. It is, however, in such an interpretation found completely in Marx's dialectical materialism. The real dialectic of the whole and the parts, of quantity and quality, of form and content, is given in Marx, and what is more, given on a materialist basis. This synthesis is infinitely higher than the modern pitiful efforts at deep thought whose only "deep thought" consists in serving the practice of the most reactionary classes of our time and of the vilest obscurantism.
4. Finally, it is worth while mentioning the philosophical problems connected with the crisis of modern mathematics and physics. Carnap 28) writes in this connection: "Even more insistent has become the necessity for a new logical system as soon as the definite contradictions ('antinomies') became noticeable first of all in the mathematical sphere, and which then rapidly revealed themselves as contradictions of a general logical significance. They could only be overcome by a fundamental reorganisation of logic." Like ideas are developed also by a whole number of outstanding physicists who similarly issue the call for a "new logic".
The development of mechanics (the quantum theory) has put before us the problem of the relation between interruption and continuity, which, since they are contradictory, go beyond the limits of formal academic logic ("dualism " of the wave-particle). Outside the bounds of formal logic there also pass the problems of dynamic and static law, of the whole and its parts, of matter and energy, of time and space, of mass on the one hand and time and space on the other, etc. All this vast series of problems recently brought forward by the development of the exact sciences can no longer be contained within the one-sided, immobile, rational categories of the old logic, the laws of which are only significant in definite and limited conditions. The "antinomies" of modern natural science made a powerful call for a methodological approach corresponding to the new, more complex, manysided, objectively dialectical forms of the real connections and laws of being and becoming.29) Hence on the basis of bourgeois forms of thought, with all the sociological premises of to-day, there takes place a transition to an a-logical, super-rational, irrational and even religious treatment of the object. But this transition itself conceals, as we have seen, a real scientific treatment of the series of problems by covering it with the heavy clouds of the new mysticism. A real solution of the problem can however be given here also on the basis of the positive application of the method of dialectical materialism worked out by Marx.
Thus, Marxian philosophy appears before us as a grand philosophical synthesis, as a mighty theoretical system which has included all that is really of value that has been produced by the development of human culture and human thought. This immense synthesis could only arise as the system of ideas of a class which is practically compelled in its work and its struggle to overcome, first of all from within and then throughout society, the cleavage of the capitalist social order, and, in consequence, the cleavage and absolutising of its mental categories and their metaphysical static character. Subject and object, theory and practice, thought and action, presentation and will, are all taken not only in their opposition, but also in their unity. Philosophy for the first time reaches its sociological self-knowledge. It becomes at the same time a powerful weapon of proletarian struggle; it is critical and revolutionary to the highest degree; it overthrows all the idols and fetishes of the old world; it is anti-theological, anti-teleological, anti-idealist; it is active; it is full of the optimism of knowledge and contemptuously rejects any principle of "Ignorabimus". On the background of the present collapse of bourgeois ideology in general and of bourgeois philosophy in particular it grows as the only theoretical generalisation which embodies the whole future of humanity.
Bourgeois society by continually developing its inner contradictions has reached such a critical point that its latent division has become open and is tearing the whole capitalist covering. The proletariat, the child of capitalism, is really becoming its gravedigger. Bourgeois society reached the highest form of its selfknowledge in Hegel's universal system. In developing its contradictions this system gave birth to Marxism which became the system of ideas of the proletariat. To-day the bourgeoisie is again seizing on the conservative side of the once mighty system of its greatest philosopher and, purging it of any really valuable elements, is coming out under the flag of neo-Hegelianism. But it is not Chronos who devours his own children. This is only an old myth. The proletariat strikes a mortal blow at capitalism. Marxism liquidates the outworn mental categories of the capitalist world.
1) W, Wundt, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 7, Aufl., Verl. Alfred Kröner in Leipzig, 1918, p. 346. The very term "dialectical materialism" is absent in Wundt, though it can be found in Windelband (W. Windelband, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 2. Aufl., Tübingen, 1920, pp. 122-4), who uses it in regard to Feuerbach's teaching.
2) Marx's first intellectual love was philosophy. His doctor's dissertation was a work, still idealist, on Democritus and Epicurus. Particularly important are the Holy Family, a critique of critical critique. Against Bruno Bauer & Co., the German Ideology and Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy.
3) In this connection it is worth citing Marx's characterisation of materialism after Bacon. "In its further development materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is a systematiser of Baconian materialism. Sensuality loses its sharp colours and becomes the abstract sensuality of the geometrician. Physical movement is made a victim to mechanical or mathematical movement, geometry is proclaimed the chief science "(Marx and Engels, The Holy Family).
4) Marx and Engels on Feuerbach, from the German Ideology, p. 217.
5) Ibid.
6) Ibid., p. 218.
7) See Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 12.
8) Marx, Preparatory works for The Holy Family; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 624.
9) Ibid., p. 625.
10) Marx and Engels on Feuerbach (German Ideology). Marx-Engels Archiv., Vol. I, p. 217.
11) Ibid., p. 221.
12) Karl Marx. On the book of A. Wagner, Archiv., Vol. V, 1930, PP. 387-8.
13) This point we have dealt with in more detail in our report at the International Congress on the History of Science in London. See Science at the Cross Roads.
14) G. W. Fr. Hegels, Werke, Berlin, 1833, Bd. III, "Wissenschaft der Logik.", p. 127.
15) Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Second Thesis.
16) We shall speak of the latest "pragmatism" further on.
17) Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 873-4.
18) For "reflection" see Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
19) F. Engels, Dialectic of Nature, p. 5.
20) Ibid., p. 7.
21) Lenin gives the most complete and all-round materialist exposition and formulation of these laws. See, Lenin Miscellany, IX, p. 274 et seq.
22) Ibid.
23) E. Tröltsch, Der Historismus and Seine Probleme, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. III, Tübingen, Verl. Mohr, 1922, pp. 315, 317 and 318.
24) See Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 327, for a splendid development of this point.
25) H. Rickert, System der Philosophie, 1921, Münsterberg, Philosophie der Werte, 1908; E. Tröltsch, Der Historismus, p. 201 et seq.
26) W. James, Pragmatism, New York, 1908; The Varieties of Religious Experience, London, 1909.
27) Pragmatism, pp. 72 and 80.
28) R. Carnap, Die alte und die neue Logik, Bd. I, Heft I, p. 15.
29)See A. Deborin, Lenin and the Crisis of Modern Physics, Leningrad, Academy of Science, 1930.