József Attila 1932
Source: Originally published in Hungarian in "Korunk", May 1932.
Translated by: László Molnárfi, 2025.
Béla Totis writes about the relationship between the “natural sciences and Marxism” in the March edition of this year’s Korunk. Based on the title, we would expect that its author affirms the validity of the Marxist method within the historical progression of the natural sciences and its valid present-day propositions. Béla Totis, however, does not try to show the truth of Marxism by examining the natural sciences. Rather, he reasons that within the natural sciences, and its worldview, the emotional and ethical aspects stand missing, hence they are in conflict with Marxism. From his article, I glean a defense of idealism.
Above all, let us state that there is no human activity devoid of emotion, since it is precisely emotion which forms the energic motor of activity. Emotion can be conscious, and it can be unconscious, but solely works as a driving force, with no relation to the correctness or incorrectness of a worldview. Emotion merely impulses towards action, and prompts us to ask which ends that action is directed towards. Thus, emotion does not pose the question, it merely encourages its posing, and still less provides an answer to the question. As such - aside from the question of correctness - it leaves room for countless answers. There are countless judgements of an action’s ethics, despite all of them arising from an ethical philosophy. Marxism, however, uses the scientific method, the objective science for the liberation of the proletariat, judges from the standpoint of Marxism, and hence its judgement’s ethical form and content disappears. According to this system, an action is Marxist, because its actuality carries within it the historical aspects of scientific socialism, while another, which does not do so, is not Marxist. He who is not with us, is against us. The Marxist must not hold dear to heart the bomb-carrying anarchist, who in self-sacrifice fights determinedly, but with incorrect methods, for the liberation of the proletariat. Marxism’s defining streak is not its collective nature, but its collective nature without ethics, arising from its scientific approach which permits it to be ethical only insofar as its scientific nature is ethical. Would it not be ridiculous to imagine that we judge the actions of the capitalists from the standpoint of whether those actions are moral, no matter from a revolutionary, counter-revolutionary or any other generalised aspect? No, the Marxist does not judge from an ethical standpoint whatsoever the actions of the capitalists, but takes them into account as facts, because facts, the analysis of reality, is the first precondition of science.
Totis writes: “It is not the worldview of the natural sciences which is ethical, but the Marxist. The ethical worldview looks at the world from the standpoint of ethics.” Well, Marxism does not look at the world from an ethical standpoint, but flips it on its head, in which ethical values, morality’s ethos-ideal and its ever-shifting nature is put into relation with the material world of production, and advancements in technology. Totis seeks to justify his worldview by stating that “The ethical worldview not only explains the world, but for the individual lost at sea, provides once and for all the goal and the path which they must follow once understanding has been attained”. As opposed to this, while it is true that the ethical worldview provides a goal and a path, it does not explain the world; however, Marxism precisely explains the “world”, which at the same time unfolds the path and methods of the proletariat’s actions in a determined fashion. There is another error in his writing, which is the artificial opposition of Marxism and the natural sciences. Scientific socialism is a natural science, because society is nature, rather than an abstracted idea. I quote the words of Marx: “Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.” (Capital Vol I., Preface to the first German edition). It is the natural sciences which concern themselves with the laws of nature. (Nota bene, a plethora of Marxist writing speaks of dialectical materialism, historical materialism, Marxian economics, but scientific socialism is rarely talked about in literature.)
By examining the question from this perspective, it becomes clear that Totis equates the natural sciences with the worldview of the natural sciences, despite there being no logical link between them. The natural sciences justify dialectical materialism, , without knowing it, meaning that as per logical sequence, it is the natural sciences which rest on the validity of dialectical materialism, despite the scientific study of nature preceding, by necessity, the discovery of dialectical materialism as a principle, categorized into theses. As opposed to this, the worldview of natural science understands as its own logical foundation the natural sciences, and thus bears the error of its adherent taking science as a defining principle, whereas it is precisely principle that is the basis of science. In this way, its principle is speculative, despite the correct principle being practical, because it is no other than the becoming-aware of practice from which science arises. This is why scientific socialism is a natural science, but dialectical materialism excludes the correctness of the natural scientific worldview, despite it being materialist, which Totis nevertheless recognizes as being of a non-ethical nature. Materialist, but not dialectical - speculation, and not the recognition of practice.
Dialectical materialism has its own critique of knowledge, which does not intersect with the understanding which Totis expresses. Totis quotes the words of Nietzsche, according to which the new worldview “stayed true to the earth”. Totis adds that: “In this worldview, the empirical was said to be the explanation for all that was prior the domain of the human soul, its imagination and illusions.”. This is a mistake. In the case of this world-view, in fact only a specific tendency thereof, which really is the general theory of the natural sciences, the requirement is included that the object of scientific study could only be an empirical phenomenon. However, empiricism was not and will not be said to be enough for the explanation of things, because empirical knowledge is no other than the cognition of sensory objects, the result of which is merely the knowledge of the object’s existence, its perceptual representation. The empirical sciences are not called empirical sciences because they seek to explain their objects through empirical study, but because the objects of their study can be cognized through sense-experience. The physical sciences are empirical, and teach that the earth revolves around the sun, despite humans, including the physicist, experiencing only that the sun rises and sets. Totis crafts a different conception of sense-experience, shown in the fact that he not only changed its content, but its scope, speaking of social experience. Before he wields his concept, he would do well to justify and publish it, so that we can know what he means. Especially, if he posits that Marx introduced this new, social experience. For instance, it is undoubtedly through a social route (press, etc.) that I cognize e.g. that the British king has a beard, despite me not experiencing it, and those who have experienced, have done so only in an individual way. These individuals proceed to share their experiences with me, through societal technology, with which they create sensory, physical objects (sound, printing press, etc.), and I cognize the presence of these sensory, physical objects. From this, we can see that there is no such thing as social experience, but the result of individual sense-experience, that is to say the knowledge of the presence of some sensory (in the case of internal experience, psychological) object does not posit the existence of empirical experience within all those who are aware of the object. In this way - discounting individual experience - the individual knowledge of the preconditions of a mode of production, through technological means, is of a social nature. It is social. It is only because of this that we can speak of ideology. Of course, societal production produces newer and newer sensory objects, (such as e.g. the newspaper printing press), which we then experienced on an individual basis, but that no individual could experience if societal production would not create it, because in that case the sensory-object would not exist in the first place. Following all this, what Totis posits sounds odd, according to which “In the system of Marx, it is the empirical method, which lays the groundwork for a new worldview”. Sense-experience is an act of recognition, not a method, and in any case, even with a method it is not possible to “lay the groundwork for a new worldview” - the method only shows the mode, the “how” and not the “with what” the new socialist societal order can be built. The basis of the new “world-order” is material production, and this is not a method, albeit methodical.
I repeat, Totis is an adherent of a hard-to-parse ethical worldview, which he calls Marxism, but which in reality stands far apart from Marxism. It was necessary for me to at least comment in this fashion on his article, lest the readership of Korunk believe that Hungarian Marxist accept the theses of Dr. Totis without debate, according to which the Marxist worldview is “truly” (Cf. Der wahre Socialismus) ethical, the reason for which he stated as “the ethical worldview looks at the world from the standpoint of ethics.”