Marxism a Virile “Ghost.” (Continued)

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently,” says Marx, “but the point is to change it.”

It is well-known that in his early life Marx had taken a degree in Philosophy at one of the leading German universities. The Marx critic, whom we are now considering, attempts to find consolation for his declaration that “Marxism is dead,” by an allusion to Marx’s early training in Philosophy. Thus he classifies Adam Smith and Karl Marx as having been “philosophers rather than scientists,” “deductive rather than inductive thinkers,” “metaphysicians before they were economists.” Strangely enough he finds a use for the materialist method, in that he traces all this to environmental influences. He says, Smith and Marx came from the two great homes of metaphysical thought, “Scotland and Germany.” We could prove, of course, that these countries have had no more than a “fair” share of metaphysicians, but we will pass this with the lament that he ought to know better.

Volumes might easily be written to supply an adequate examination and reply to the observations set out above, but here only a brief analysis can be given in the limited space at our disposal.

In our last issue we outlined what constitutes the essence of modern materialist thought, for the present we propose to strike a somewhat retrospective note, thus to bring into bolder relief the materialism of Marx. We readily plead guilty to the assertion that Marx was a philosopher, but this fact must be booked on the credit side of the account, as a few references to what forms of thought have been embodied in philosophy will reveal. We make no apology for this, as our task is to try and arm our fellows against the attacks made upon Socialism by the hired “intelligentsia” of capitalism. And now about this philosopher business, since philosophy is in the picture.

Frederick Engels, with his usual keen insight into the core of any problem undertaken for consideration by him, has reminded us that the foundation of all philosophies is concerned with the relation between thinking and being. Tracing the roots of the question to lie, like religion, in the social status of savagery where ignorance of natural forces was predominant, then pursuing its development through the scholasticism of the Middle Ages when the question took the form—”What is at the beginning, spirit or nature?” until it resolved itself into the question—”Has God made the world or is the world from eternity?” Engels classifies the disputants to the question as forming two totally different schools of thought. Those who have placed the origin of spirit before that of nature are the idealists, whilst those who have taken nature as the source have formed the various schools of materialism. Here we must emphasise the point that the term idealism as expressed in philosophy bears no logical connection with moral or ethical concepts or theories concerning human conduct. Technically speaking, idealism represents the view of all natural phenomena which postulates “mind” as being primary to “matter.” Opponents of the materialist view seldom hesitate to import a moral signification into the controversy, but such is, of course, a complete evasion of the position. Materialism can no more be disproved by this method than the falsity of Bishop Berkeley’s idealism was proved by Dr. Samuel Johnson kicking the stone to confute Berkeley’s insistence upon the non-reality of “matter.” Both idealism and materialism have to be considered from the point of view of their respective modes of interpreting natural phenomena, since both theories must necessarily be concerned therewith.

In the historical controversy between idealism and materialism, probably the ablest representative of the former school of thought, from the eighteenth century until today, was Bishop Berkeley. Anyhow, as far as this country is concerned. Berkeley set out in the early eighteenth century to combat the materialist tendencies as they were expressed in the leading thought of his age. He took his stand in postulating an idealist philosophy by an attempt to controvert the views of his philosophic predecessors, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the earlier materialists. Hobbes had maintained that the source of human knowledge is based upon our sense perceptions of the outer world. Whilst Locke, in a more thoroughgoing manner, after vigorously disputing the alleged existence of “innate ideas,” i.e., ideas being in the human mind independent of and antecedent to experience, accepted the sensory origin of knowledge as formulated by Hobbes, but added a secondary factor to the process by which knowledge is ultimately acquired, namely, reflection. The idea that the real source of human knowledge comes from our sensations and reflections was a deadly blow to the conventional thought of the time. If positive knowledge originated in this way, what was to become of the “God”-planted “tree of knowledge.” However, despite Hobbes’ and Locke’s contribution to the science of understanding, they themselves were still hampered in thought by their acceptance of the theistic conception of a supreme power. Moreover, they regarded as beyond question the existence of “mind” and “matter” as ultimate tangible realities in the most limited sense of the terms. And this paved the way for the later idealistic philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bishop Berkeley challenged the reality of “matter” by attacking Locke’s position. Locke had maintained that material bodies have two qualities—primary and secondary. The primary are those of weight, shape, extension in space, etc. The secondary are those of colour, temperature, taste, and so forth. The former are known by their actual existence in the external world. We think of them as being in themselves extended, resisting and mobile, but not in themselves as coloured, hot or cold, or having taste. These latter belong to our special sensations. We perceive both primary and secondary qualities in objects because there is a “substance” in which they inhere.

But, said Berkeley, I agree that material bodies exist in the outside world, and our knowledge of them is based upon sensation and reflection, but the distinction between primary and secondary qualities is wholly illusory. The primary qualities are equally as mental or sensuous as the secondary—temperature, taste, and so forth, and he attempted to prove this position by the contention that when we try to think of any material body apart from its attributes or properties, we have nothing left but an empty abstraction. Put into plain language, this means that the desk upon which I write can only be known by its colour, hardness, shape, extension in space, etc. Divested of these there is no “material substratum” left, such as Locke had intimated. “All the choir of heaven and the furniture of earth have not any substance outside the mind.” Thus ran the trend of thought in Berkeley’s theory. When confronted with the problem as to what became of things when they were not being perceived, his philosophy is amazingly consistent to the end. Since the reality of things lay in their being perceived, when they are not so by us, they subsist in the mind of some “Eternal Spirit.” The real world is therefore one of “mind” and its contents. “Matter” was reflected by Berkeley as an unintelligible figment devoid of any sensuous or imaginative content. After this remarkable exhibition of skill in philosophical meandering, David Hume, the Scotch sceptic, subjected Berkeley’s postulate of “mind” as the sole reality, to an analysis, and provided an equally devastating attack upon its alleged reality when considered apart from perception. Hence for the time being at least philosophy was in the state that nothing could be known for certain; scepticism reigned supreme. Even after the famous philosopher-scientist, Immanuel Kant, had tackled the problem from a different standpoint, though making a valuable contribution in clarifying the problem, he got no further than declaring our knowledge of things to be strictly limited to their appearances alone, but what these “things in themselves” really are, we cannot know. To the mystical type of mind this “unknowability” must almost have amounted to something worth worshipping.

Anyhow, the thinker who, to a great extent, lifted the cloud of mysticism from speculative philosophy, was the German philosopher, Hegel. And admittedly it was his work within the realms of philosophy and history which had a profound influence upon the minds of the founders of modern Socialist thought, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. But in stating this we must make certain important reservations. Presumably our present Marx critic has this fact in mind when he describes Marx as a philosopher rather than a scientist, and as a “metaphysician.” But Hegel was far from being a metaphysician in the technical sense. He was an idealist whose system and method differed profoundly from the subjective idealism of Berkeley and the “phenomenal” idealism of Kant. He dismissed the Kantian postulate concerning the unknowability of the “thing in itself,” and declared “the universe is penetrable to thought.” The world of reality is made known to us by our practical correspondence with it. As the entities of the outer world answer to our mode of apprehending them and to our use of them, their existence apart from us is proven. Hegel’s idealism consisted of a conception of an “absolute idea” or “mind” through which the universe was created with a view to the attainment of ultimate “good” and “freedom” at the “final” stage of the evolutionary process. Hegel comprehended the principle of evolution in nature and history, and although his idealistic system of thought considerably marred a thorough grasp of the inner workings of natural and historical development, his revival of the “dialectic” method of enquiry and understanding furnished a method by which the evolutionary process in nature and history could be scientifically understood. He “freed history,” says Engels, “from metaphysics—he had made it dialectic.”

“For the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development.” The contradictory feature of Hegelianism lay in his fixing, quite arbitrarily, a finality to the evolutionary process which was opposed to his dialectical method that ruled out “finality” in actual evolutionary processes. But this may be largely explained by the limited knowledge of his time. Nevertheless, his revival of the dialectical system of thought, as first enunciated by the thinkers of Ancient Greece (Heraclitus had said, “Nothing is, everything is becoming”) proved a weapon in the hands of Marx, not merely in the establishment of his philosophical and historical standpoint, but also to mark his departure from Hegel’s idealism.

“My dialectic method,” says Marx, “is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the idea’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external phenomenal form of ‘the idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and transformed into forms of thought.” Thus have we an outline of the fundamental distinction between Hegel and Marx in philosophy. But the application of the dialectic to human society and its history shows an even more striking contrast between these two thinkers. With Hegel the modes of being and becoming in human history are to be explained by their “rationality.” “The real is rational, and the rational is real,’’ declared Hegel. But they are only real and rational in turn so long as they are necessary. Every past phase in human history had at one time been rational and therefore real, but had become irrational and therefore unreal, and consequently, had been swept aside to give place to still higher “rational” forms of human society. The ultimate development of all this “reality” and “rationality” Hegel saw in the “full development” of the Prussian State of his age. Here was to be found the final working out of “the idea”; its self-realisation having been immanent from the “inception” of the world’s life history. Thus Hegel. But with Marx, however, all the self-imposed “rationality and reality” merely meant the material conditions of human society in their manifold operations being interpreted by an ideal abstraction made apart from their actual content. And an examination of those material conditions was, to Marx, an essential condition before “rationality” or “reality” could be understood. Our critic says Marx was a “deductive thinker.” Was he? A deductive thinker is one who takes something as proven before examination. A man takes the Bible, for instance, as true and then attempts to trace everything to harmonise with Biblical teachings; this man is a deductive thinker. Another man sets out by first enquiring as to whether the Bible is itself actually true; this man is an inductive thinker. Our critic’s assumption is that Marx set out with the conviction that capitalism was wrong before he had made an analysis, hence the entire criticism of capitalist society and the conclusions drawn therefrom are nothing more than Marx’s pre-conceived thought, the wish father to the thought, so to speak. But an analysis of Marx’s writings simply annihilates the suggestion.

Before ever Marx had formulated his material conception of history, and therefore before he had made an analysis of the economy of capitalist society, he had proved in actual practice what an inductive thinker he really was.

In 1842-3, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, he tells us how he was embarrassed at first when he had to discuss so-called material interests. Further, how on certain specific questions he was unable at the time to “hazard an independent judgment.” Therefore he gladly welcomed the opportunity, for reasons we need not now dwell upon, “to retire to the study room” from public life. There are few thinkers to be found ready to make such a candid confession, and fewer still with minds so inductively inclined, as the nature of this confession indicates.

Within the confines of the study room Marx’s first task consisted of a study and analysis of Hegel’s work on the Philosophy of Law. After this he formulated his materialist conception of history. From a totally different standpoint, Marx was therefore able to explain man’s “knowing” by his “being,” instead of, as heretofore, his “being” by his “knowing.”

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,” says Marx, “but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.”

This contains the kernel of Marxian thought. Human consciousness can only be related, in the final analysis, to its practical correspondence with the outer world in all its phases.

Philosophers may interpret the world differently, but “by acting upon nature outside himself and changing it, man simultaneously changes his own nature.” We await the first real attack on that position.

ROBERTUS.