10-19-07, 9:07 am

1. The Uses of Philosophy


A philosophy may be defined as the most general statement the philosopher can make regarding the nature of the universe and humanity’s position in it. It is therefore always a result of society’s experience and observations in a particular place and period. It represents the level of understanding arrived at by the section of society to which the philosopher belongs. It is his best effort to generalize in such a way as to offer a reliable guide for future activity–no matter how strange anyone’s philosophy may seem to the followers of another one.

Since any philosophy is meant to be a statement regarding what is common to everything in the universe, and to all phenomena of any kind that may be encountered, philosophy cannot be used by itself to predict anything. That is a function reserved to science. Scientific statements by definition are concrete, refer to particular, defined phenomena, and are based in practical experiments and observations, for which there can be no substitute. Scientific statements are meant to be predictive or explanatory; they say or imply what will or did happen under certain specified conditions.

Philosophy’s role is that of a guide to practice in life, science and art. Since it makes general statements about the nature of the universe as a whole and the behavior of its parts, it requires that scientific statements be formulated in terms that are consistent with it. One use of a philosophy, then, should be as a test of the validity of scientific theories, which are interpretations of the events that scientists observe and measure. Science and general observations of real events are the original sources of philosophic ideas, which are then use to guide and evaluate the theories that grow out of further practice, observations, and experiments.

The philosophic premises of any scientist are the basis on which he decides what to investigate, how to investigate it, and above all, how to interpret and organize his observations; how he will construct his hypotheses, how he will test them, and how he will relate them to existing scientific knowledge. A philosophy therefore is the necessary condition for any effective theoretical work in any area of human knowledge. If one could conceive of thinking devoid of implicit philosophical premises, it would quite likely make no sense.

Many scientists, and thinkers in other fields, are quite unaware of that fact, and believe they are working only from experiments or observations, without any general assumption regarding the ways in which successful work must be carried on. In such cases, their philosophical premises are unconscious, and likely to be unreliable, though in simple matters their findings may be correct enough. Their premises will tend to relate only to the thinker’s own narrow area of study, and may be inconsistent even with his own notions about such matters as society, culture, politics or religion.



2. Materialism and Idealism

The most general division in the history of philosophical thinking is that between materialism and idealism. Materialism, most briefly characterized, is the assumption that throughout the universe matter is primary, having existed prior to and independent of any idea in any mind; that there are no ideas other than human ideas; that those are reflections in the minds of humans of the movements of matter in nature, the mind itself being a function of the most recently-developed and most highly-organized form of evolving matter, the human brain.

Idealism, summarized with equal brevity, is the assumption that ideas everywhere or somewhere, always or at some time, have priority over matter, which is thought to be either a creature or a servant of thought, to one or another degree. In some idealist systems the sovereign ideas are thought to be in the mind of a deity or other non-human entity; in others they are in the minds of men. Every religion, by definition, is based in idealist premises. Some varieties of idealism, overt or implicitly, are secular.

Neither materialism nor idealism, of course, denies the decisive role of thought and ideas in history. But idealism holds that the decisive ideas (whether ascribed to a deity or a human) are in some way independent of natural law, while materialism holds that all ideas, being reflections of material activity by material organisms, do obey natural laws. Materialism holds that man’s power over parts of nature comes from his understanding of and obedience to the laws of nature, not from any independence from them, or superiority over them.

3. Simple Materialism

As soon as that often unconscious material premise is consciously examined, certain further conclusions seem to follow.

The first is that the universe is a unity. The argument for that is as follows: if any part of the universe is subject to natural law, then every other part must all be; otherwise the regular behavior of the “lawful” part must be interfered with unaccountably by the irregular “ideal” part, and could not be regular or lawful.

A second, which flows from the first, is that everything in the universe is necessarily interconnected. We cannot say we know of the existence of anything if it has no influence whatever on anything else we know about, since our very knowledge of its existence is a form of its influence.

A third conclusion–really a restatement of the second-- is that there can be nothing completely unknowable in the universe: only the known and the not-yet-known.

A fourth conclusion is that any theory or explanation which assumes any force at work which cannot be accounted for ultimately as a form of the motion of matter cannot correspond usefully to the realities it is intended to account for, and mut be misleading and ultimately sterile.

A naive materialism current in some parts of early Greece and Italy is the only recorded materialism in the West, at least prior to the Renaissance and the beginnings of the industrial era. Everywhere, apparently, from the most primitive tribes about which we know anything to the most highly-developed civilizations, idealism, most often in the form of obligatory religious observance, was the ideological support of the prevailing social and political establishments.

Those idealists beliefs appeared to be quite natural since, from very early times, the mind that planned the work was able to have it carried out by hands other than its own. The mind thus seemed to be the source of all social power. The material realities of human needs and of the natural forces that might be used to satisfy them, which were reflected in the human mind and formed the basis of the work to be done, remained in the background, disregarded or despised.

4. Mechanical Materialism

It took the development of industrial technology at the beginning of the modern era, which stimulated the rise of the bourgeoisie in the Seventeenth Century, to revive materialist speculations, both as a reflection of the growth of science and its application to commerce and industry, and as a weapon against feudalism and its clerical support. That bourgeois attempt at materialism, which prevails to this day in much Western scientific thinking, takes the machine as its model. In fact, many contemporary Western scientists, if they philosophize at all about their work, seem to prefer to call themselves mechanists rather than materialists. The analogy of the machine needed to be examined.

A machine is the most isolated assemblage of material parts possible. It is designed to be as nearly free as may be from every influence except the selected forces applied to it by the user. It is intended to accomplish nothing but the particular operation for which was designed. It is set in motion by an outside force that can be applied or withdrawn at will, and it has no motion that has not been applied from outside itself. It can be started, stopped, taken apart, modified, reassembled. If it should do anything other than what its owner designs (such as stopping, slipping, rusting), it is a bad machine, more a piece of nature than a work of man.

Unlike any machine, nature, life in particular, and especially the social life and history of humans, do not start, stop or respond predictably to arbitrary control. They are too complex, too open to all the other forms with which they are interconnected, to much in constant process of development and change, to be understood as if they were machines. They can neither be stopped for examination without being radically changed or even destroyed, nor isolated from innumerable varied and never entirely predictable influences without a radically different effect from what the machine would predict.

Moreover, any process continuing uniformly over time will be found to result not in a mere multiplication of effects, as might be true of a machine for its useful life. A little reflection shows that any activity continuing in a straight line in a natural social world in motion will end up being something quite different from what it was when it started on that course. The end result will not be multiplication of what went before, but a transformation, the emergence of something new and different from the old. A child after years of growth is not a larger child–-it is something new: an adult.

5. Dialectics

It appears from what has been said that “simple” materialism, (mechanical materialism) needs further study and development before it can serve as a guide to scientific theory capable of dealing with the richness and variety and movement that are to be seen in any but the briefest and simplest aspects of real life or other aspects of nature.

The outstanding fact about the real world we live in is that is it is constant movement and change. Nothing remains completely unchanged over time, and some things change rapidly. Now if the universe is material, and a unity, as was argued above, then there can be no outside force applied to it, since by definition the universe is all there is. Matter must therefore be self-moving, a conclusion that is fundamental in modern physics. The constant relative motion of all parts of the universe, each in its own way and all interacting, must give rise to an infinity of opposed and contradictory movements, to tensions and explosions large and small, which in turn must constantly give rise the an infinity of new and changing forms and relations. This unending, infinitely varied development proceeds at many different rates, from sub-atomic movements at the speed of light to cosmic changes that may take eons to complete a single cycle. Between the two extremes, in the matter of speed, are the organic and social movements of humans, in which change and development goes on from moment to moment, hour to hour, week to week, year to year, era to era.

A thing in motion cannot be fully specified with a mere name. A name is an abstraction, a symbol, removed from its reference, which has a life of its own the word may no longer reflect. It is in motion relative to other things, which themselves can be said to be in manifold opposite motion to it. For example, the life-activity of any living thing can be understood only if we consider that all organisms are constantly undergoing breakdown which is constantly being offset by intake of nourishment and elimination of wastes, with all the constant complex activity that metabolism entails. Here as everywhere the new is in constant struggle with the old. Movement can only be seen in relation to opposed movement. This developing self-movement of all matter is properly called a unity of opposites, for nothing in motion and change can be understood except as relative movement, the relative motion and struggle of opposites.

As we examine nature and society we see that this movement is never merely haphazard. It always turns out to give birth to form and organization. Science gives a partial account of the evolution of galaxies, stars, planets, and of the recent rise on our planet of organic life and lately of humans who, with the use of language and social labor, have evolved social structures complete with gigantic instruments of production and elaborate cultures in process of grown and decay and change.

These processes are not haphazard. They are invariably well-ordered, as all natural and social history demonstrates. The infinity of new forms coming into being at all those levels, therefore, are not casual happenings. They are developments upon what went before, transformations in which the mark and matter of the old can be discovered in the new. Things do not vanish–they change. New qualities, once formed, can be traced back to their quantitative antecedents, in accordance with discoverable natural laws. That has been given the name of transformation of quantity into quality, and vice-versa.

Indeed, in some connection, every slightest change in quantity (e.g. a quantum) entails the emergence of a new quality. The emergence of new qualities at every level great or small, can be seen to constitute a sudden break. It varies from the infinitely slight to the catastrophic. Carefully considered, any such change is seen to result from the tensions described above as the unity of opposites.

The new form, whatever it may be, whether a phenomenon of nature or one of society, is but a phase in the constant movement, tension and development of all matter. Having replaced that which preceded it–having “negated”it–it will be its own movement, its inner and outer contradictions (the unity of opposites) sooner or later reach the conditions for its own negation and replacement in its turn. Whatever displaces the old will in its turn grow old and be displaced. That is called the “negation of negation,” in Georg Hegel’s term.

Those three necessary aspects of all movement – the unity and struggle of opposites, the transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of negation (“laws” first formulated by the German philosopher Georg Hegel in an idealist way, applied to thought alone and not to matter, and later given their proper materialist content by Karl Marx) are the minimum supplements to the strict definition of materialism necessary to apply materialism consistently in natural and social science in such as way that knowledge will tend to correspond to the complex dynamics of reality, and be a reliable guide to dealing with it.

They constitute the most general laws of motion to be seen in the motions of matter anywhere at any time–or they are the most general necessary ways in which phenomena must be seen in order to be dealt with effectively. The basic approach of science can only be materialistic, whatever the scientist may think. To be consistently applicable, materialism must be understood dialectically. Formal logic applies to relations considered as static, or abstracted from its reference (A is always A; A is not B.) Indeed, formal logic is a set of rules for dealing with verbal statements rather than with things in their interrelations and transformations. Dialectics is the logic of dynamic processes.

If one examines any part of today’s science in its actual application to nature, it will be seen that all the laws of materialism and dialectics have been obeyed by the scientists, though in almost all cases that was done without conscious recognition of those laws, just anyone may act logically without knowing the rules of formal logic.

6. What is Marxism?

Karl Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels, who had been “young Hegelians,” formulated dialectical materialism in the first half of the Nineteenth Century. They took the idealist dialectics of Hegel, which, in Marx’s words stood on its head, and turned it to stand on materialist feet. Hegel understood the shortcomings of formal logic, and saw that phenomena in process of development can only be understood dialectically. But, with the bias of thousands of years in which “the word” was thought to be primary, he considered only the processes of thought (the “absolute idea” toward which ideas and therefore action tend), ignoring as derivative the processes of nature and those of labor. It took Marx to show that historically and logically those came first, and only through them did humans learn to speak and think.

The application of materialist dialectics to scientific problems is called Marxism, though Marx disclaimed being a “Marxist” himself. Marx and Engels particularly applied them to history, political economy, law, politics, and to some degree to natural science, literature, and other cultural questions. V. I. Lenin, who followed them, brought those applications up to date for the era of imperialism and national and proletarian revolutions, and also applied them to many social questions as well as to some crucial issues of materialism in relation to physics. It should be added that now as earlier not all who call themselves Marxists deserve the appellation

Though an exposition of Marxism is not an aim of the present short paper, one example may help to clarify what has been said above. First of all the many thinkers who for millennia have considered the human condition, Marx made the simple materialist observation that “before a man can think he must eat.” On that premise he considered the necessary conditions for any human activity or organization. His conclusions are expressed in a famous statement, part of which is quoted here: “In the social production of their means of life, human beings into definite and necessary relations which are independent of their will: production relations which correspond to a definite stage in the development of their productive forces. The totality of these production relations constitute the economic structures of society, the real basis upon which a legal and political superstructure arises, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond.

“The mode of production of the material means of life determine, in general, the social, political, and intellectual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of human beings which determines their existence; it is their social existence which determines their consciousness.” (From Karl Marx, Introduction, The Critique of Political Economy.)

Since the conditions of human existence are constantly evolving, with great advances in technology and great political and military struggles again and again transforming great parts of the world since the days of Marx and Lenin, Marxism as a political and scientific guide must constantly evolve to take account of changing circumstances and forces. Marxism therefore cannot be used as a dogma; it must be applied to all aspects of each immediate problem, and serve as a guide to action.

The first demand of Marxism is a thorough knowledge of the situation to be studied, in its history, its present state, its interconnections with all other movements that can influence it, and an analysis of the major and minor forces involved. That generally calls for participation in action, since only practice is the test of theory. Materialist dialectics, then, like logic or mathematics, is never the solution to a problem: it is the scientific method by which a solution my be worked out.

By use of this instrument Marx and Engels formulated for the first time general laws of social development, in historical materialism, and showed why the struggle of classes is the basic contraction underlying all other historical events, and Marx formulated the general and particular laws of motion of capitalism in the three volumes ofCapital. Lenin, after them, made the definitive study of imperialism and showed it to be the highest and final stage of capitalism. Lenin also formulated the first general plan for the building of socialism, which his successors have been developing ever since in ever larger areas of the globe.

This brief paper is not meant to be an exposition of Marxism–a lifetime job–but only an invitation to the study of it–an unending, highly rewarding task made possible by proper use of the theoretical tools that Marx, Engels and Lenin have given us. It is important to study the material dialectics of small and even trivial matters, and of science and art along with major issues of politics and history, until all life experience is grasped and dealt with in a material and dialectical way. Like all intellectual tools, Marxism-Leninism cannot be properly used until, in a sense, it has become so familiar a habit that it is taken from granted, just as one cannot speak correctly until one needs no longer stop to think of syntax.

Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., October 1974.