INTRODUCTION 6

Chapter I WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

   1. The Subject Matter and Nature of Philosophical Knowledge
   2. Philosophy as the Theoretical Basis of Worldview
   3. Philosophy as General Methodology
Chapter II AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
   1. A History of Pre-Marxian Philosophy
   2. The Emergence and Development of the Philosophy of Marxism
 
BEING AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Chapter III MATTER: THE UNITY AND DIVERSITY OF THE FORMS OF ITS MANIFESTATION
   1. The General Concept of Matter
   2. Motion as the Mode of Existence of Matter
   3. Space and Time
Chapter IV CONSCIOUSNESS: ESSENCE AND ORIGIN
   1. The General Concept of Consciousness
   2. The Path from Animal Psyche to Man’s Consciousness
   3. Consciousness. Language. Communication
 
AN OUTLINE THEORY OF DIALECTICS
Chapter V CONNECTION AND DEVELOPMENT AS THE MAIN PRINCIPLES OF DIALECTICS
   1. On the Universal Connections and Interactions
   2. The Idea of Development and the Principle of Historism
   3. The Principle of Causality and Objective Goal-Directedness
   4. The Systems Principle
   5. Law and Regularity
Chapter VI THE BASIC CATEGORIES AND LAWS OF DIALECTICS
   1. On the Unity of and Differences Between the Categories and Laws of Dialectics
   2. Essence and Phenomenon
   3. The Individual, the Particular and the General
   4. Necessity and Chance
   5. Possibility, Reality and Probability
   6. Part and Whole. System
   7. Content and Form
   8. Quality, Quantity and Measure
   9. Contradiction and Harmony
   10. Negation, Continuity and Innovations
 
KNOWLEDGE AND CREATIVITY
Chapter VII ON THE ESSENCE AND MEANING OF KNOWLEDGE
   1. What Does It Mean to Know?
   2. Practice as the Basis and Purpose of Cognition
   3. What Is Truth?
Chapter VIII THE PHILOSOPHY OF THOUGHT
   1. Intellectual-Sensuous Contemplation
   2. Thought: Essence, Levels and Forms
   3. The Creative Power of Human Reason
   4. The Operations and Modes of Thought
   5. The Empirical and Theoretical Levels of Scientific Cognition
 
QUESTIONS OF SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
Chapter IX SOCIETY AND NATURE
   1. A Historico-Materialist Conception of Society
   2. Interaction between Society and Nature
   3. Demography: Socio-Philosophical Problems
Chapter X THE ECONOMIC SPHERE OF SOCIETY’S LIFE: THE SOCIO-PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECT
Material Production: The Concept and the Main Elements
Chapter XI THE SOCIAL SPHERE OF SOCIETY’S LIFE
   1. Classes and Class Relations
   2. Nations and National Relations
   3. Family and Everyday Life
Chapter XII THE POLITICAL SPHERE OF SOCIETY’S LIFE
Politics, the State, and Law
Chapter XIII SOCIAL CONTROL
   1. Social Information and Control
   2. Types of Control and Their Impact on Social Development
Chapter XIV A PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTION OF MAN
   1. Man. Personality. Society
   2. Man in the Flow of History
Chapter XV THE SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL SPHERE OF SOCIETY’S LIFE
   1. Social Consciousness: Essence and Levels
   2. Political Consciousness
   3. Legal Consciousness
   4. Moral Consciousness
   5. Aesthetic Consciousness
   6. Religious Consciousness
   7. The Scientific Perception of the Universe and the World of Science
   8. The Philosophy of Culture
Chapter XVI HISTORICAL PROGRESS AND THE GLOBAL PROBLEMS OF OUR TIMES
   1. Progress as a Historically Necessary Direction of Society’s Development
   2. The Dialectics of World Development in the Present Epoch

Chapter I WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

1. The Subject Matter and Nature of Philosophical Knowledge

On the etymology of the term “philosophy”.

Etymologically, the word “philosophy” means “love for sophia”, which is often translated, very approximately, as “love for wisdom”. In actual fact the Old Greek concept of sophia is much more complex and comprehensive than just “wisdom”. The fact is that Plato, who made the term “philosophy” part and parcel of the European terminology, did not see sophia as an acquired subjective human property but a great objective quality, “becoming only to a deity”, inherent in a reasonably ordered and harmonious world. Because of his innate mortality and cognitive inadequacy, man could not, in Plato’s view, really merge with sophia; he could only “love” it, respectfully and at distance. That was the precise meaning that Plato attached to the word “philosophy”, and that is why it would be more correct to translate it as “love for the truth”, although this is not quite exact either.

Thus at its very inception philosophy was not conceived of as a mere collection of truths but as a desire for the truth, as an ideal attitude of man’s soul and mind that can lead to a harmonious equilibrium between both his inner psychical life and his complex relationships with the world. Philosophy is, as it were, a guardian and indicator of the truth, one that is embedded in the soul of man himself and does not permit him to bow down before some partial or subjectively attractive knowledge, constantly reminding man of the need to correlate his actions and opinions with some deeper truth about himself and the world. Taking a bit of metaphorical liberty, philosophy can be said to personify a collective expression of man’s faith in the meaningfulness of his existence, in the existence of a higher truth, and at the same time in man’s exceptional predestination revealed in his craving for this truth, for reasonable and purposive activity.

It was precisely the emergence of philosophy, as distinct from the mythological world perception, that asserted in mankind’s spiritual culture a reflective (fr. L. reflecto “I turn back”, “I reflect”) rather than immediate empirical attitude to the environment, to man himself, and to man’s thought; it was philosophy that created the intellectual background and style of thought which asserted, as it were, man’s special position in the world and his consequent responsibility to himself and the world.

The great semantic diversity and spiritual wealth brought by the history of culture in the past two and a half millennia, have largely changed the inner content of philosophy and the outer forms of its expression. At the same time it has remained a special type of thought which does not strive for a utilitarian pragmatic or purely rational knowledge, which does not identify itself with usefulness, truth or wisdom, but ensures the tenor of man’s soul and mind which underlies what is known as the “philosophical attitude to life”.

Now, wherein lies the specificity of the subject matter of philosophy as distinct from all the other forms of social consciousness?

The subject matter of philosophy.

Before attempting to clarify the relationship between philosophy and other forms of social consciousness, science in particular, we should try to define, if only tentatively, the subject matter of philosophy as such, outside any reference to the other aspects of man’s intellectual activity. After all, we do not begin the study of, say, physics with its relationship with philosophy; first, we try to define the specificity of the subject matter and method of physical knowledge, and only after this is done is it natural to study the connections between this knowledge and philosophical problems.

Philosophy is an area of intellectual activity which is based both on a special type of thought (which underlies philosophical knowledge—which we have already discussed in part), and on the autonomy of its subject matter. Interestingly, the specificity of the philosophical type of thought has practically never been doubted (even the opponents of philosophy recognize that it is based on a type of thought all its own — of which they are intensely critical, but that is another question), though the existence of an object of cognition characteristic only of philosophy has been, and still is, questioned by many researchers, especially those who raise concrete scientific knowledge to an absolute.

Of course, philosophy does not have the same kind of subject matter as, say, the natural sciences, not being localized within a concrete domain of knowledge and reality, as it is in biology, geography, etc. But philosophy does have its own subject matter, and the fundamental impossibility of such localization is part of its specificity.

This is the area of intellectual activity underlying which is reflexion on that activity itself and thus on its meaning, purpose and forms; ultimately, reflexion on the essence of man himself as the subject of culture, i.e. on his essential relations to the world.

Unlike mythology, philosophy as a form of man’s intellectual activity emerged together with the appearance of a new subject matter and a new type of thought, when the focus was transferred from the idea of God to the idea of man in his relation to the world, i.e. to man who studies, implements or questions the idea of divinity. In the course of history, ever new semantic nuances were introduced into the concept of the subject matter of philosophy, but deep within, philosophical knowledge has always been oriented towards clarifying the links between man and the world, towards the inherently human inner goals, causes and modes of cognizing and transforming the world.

Thus philosophy is not just a specific scientific discipline: it is also a specific type of thought and even a special kind of emotional attitude, a system of worldview emotions; immersed in this state of the spirit, man cogitates on the universe, on good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, on social justice, truth and lie, and on the meaning and purpose of human history.

Philosophical creativity answers man’s deep need for a rational explanation of his place in the flow of being, of his historical destiny, personal freedom and the essence of the surrounding world.

A truly scientific philosophy offers man a chance to find his place in the limitless ocean of events, to gain a deep understanding not only of the external world but also of his own spiritual world. In varying degree, we all need such a philosophy, for it primarily deals with humanly relevant problems. It is not only a reflective theoretical system expressing a most general vision of the world but also a system of principles which teaches the art of living rationally.

Permeated with the moral element, philosophy, just as literature, perceives in its own way everything that ails an epoch. No concrete science can solve the problems with which philosophy is concerned; it has a mission of its own. Its study offers not only intellectual but also aesthetic and moral delight, and, most importantly, it inculcates (this is, of course, true only of progressive humanist philosophy) the civic attitude in man.

Are there any internal divisions within philosophical problem areas which are on the whole aimed at defining man’s relation to the world? Such a division was outlined already in antiquity; it does not, of course, fully coincide with the present-day structure of philosophical knowledge, primarily because in the remote past philosophy comprized a great deal that was later relegated to the natural sciences.

Still, even in antiquity philosophers spoke of ontology, or the study of being (fr. Gk. on, gen. case ontos “that which exists” and logos “theory”); of gnoseology or epistemology, or the theory of knowledge (fr. Gk. episteme “knowledge”); and of logic, or the theory of the forms of thought. Characteristic of classical culture was deep mutual interpenetration not only of philosophy and theories of nature but also of those areas of spiritual and intellectual activity which came to be termed the human sciences in the modern times, and which now fall into several separate disciplines. Ethics as a separate science of morality, and aesthetics as a science of the harmonious structure of the world and man’s corresponding attitude towards it, were just coming into being, and social philosophy and the history of philosophy had a more subordinate status than now. Besides, philosophy comprized fundamentals of linguistics, rhetoric, poetics, and musical harmony.

All these areas of knowledge had yet to find a place for themselves, and to finally assert themselves in their mutual relations with philosophy, which subordinated them all to its specific tasks. Moreover, the question of the relationship between various forms of spiritual and intellectual activity and philosophy cannot be completely solved even now, and the separation of philosophical knowledge proper from the specialist knowledge embodied in the sciences is still the focus of researchers’ attention.

On the nature of philosophical knowledge.

At this point, it is not so much the subject matter of philosophy that emerges in the foreground as its relationship with other forms of social consciousness. An interesting point here is that, while in the Middle Ages it was the relationship between philosophy and religion, and thus between philosophy and the domain of the human sciences, that was the stumbling block, the subject of deliberations in the modern times has mostly been the relationship between philosophy and, first, politics, and second, science (that is, natural science); at the same time the interest for philosophy’s interaction with art and the humanities is still intensely alive.

Now, what is the problem here? Why does a state of things that would appear quite obvious at first sight (don’t we all know the difference between the philosopher and the politician or physicist!) give rise to endless argument? The explanation lies in the fact that philosophy occupies a special place in culture, being simultaneously the focus in which the rays from all the other areas of man’s cognitive and practical activity (political, emotional, aesthetic, and so on) meet, and a kind of general energy impulse for all these forms of his intellectual activity.

The exact manner in which philosophy, with its own subject matter, provides at the same time generalizations of and stimuli for the various forms of creativity, has remained one of the most debatable issues.

The history of culture has known practically all possible versions of the answer to the question of the place philosophy occupies or should occupy in the general system of human knowledge; and of the role it plays in political life and in the process of cognition. These variant approaches range from the panphilosophical position that philosophy absorbs the wealth of all the sciences, being their concentrated synthesis and recognized leader, to total rejection of philosophy, seen as a historical relic which has outlived its semantic usefulness and was only necessary in the periods of, first, spontaneous, uncontrolled development of social life, and second, of insufficient level of development of concrete sciences. The adherents of panphilosophical notions are justly reproached for scholastic dogmatism, while people intent on driving philosophy out of the domain of human knowledge are forced to ward off the reproaches, just as deserved, of being too eclectic and empirically minded.

Now, why these paradoxical and polar positions? Why do some scholars insist on the abolition of philosophy, while others, on the need for its absolute supremacy?

Does it all really come down to one side wanting to expand the boundaries of the philosophical sphere to absorb all human knowledge while the other wants to exclude the very concept of philosophy from cultural experiences? No, the thing is much more complicated than that. Underlying these arguments are the three above-mentioned mutually connected issues which cause so much conflict of opinion and ideas: the nature of philosophical knowledge in general, the subject matter of philosophy, and the relation of philosophy to politics, to the specialist sciences, and other creative manifestations.

Question: is philosophy a natural outcome of the development of the needs of the human life (in other words, does it have objective causes for its existence), or is it merely a form of political ideology or abstruse speculation on problems not yet solved by science?

He who sees philosophy merely as a temporary self-consolation of a disgruntled mind would probably offer this answer. In the past, philosophy could, and did, have the status of a separate science, a special form of cognition; thus in antiquity philosophy was in fact identical with the entire culture of the times. In the 20th century, though, in this age of unprecedented separation of the sciences, with each problem being treated in a specialist science (logic, linguistics, physics, etc.), philosophy no longer has its own territory, and has thus lost its former magic power—especially in view of the fact, an opponent of philosophy would add, that it has openly stated its political or social foundations and interests, retaining merely its ideological function—but is it worth it, then, to apply the term “philosophy”, say, to some political doctrine? From this point of view, the word “philosophy” should be solemnly deposited in the archives of history, while the cause of philosophy should be carried on by the specialist sciences on the one hand and by politics and ideology on the other.

This is an extreme position, of course. Opposed to it is the other extreme—the view that philosophy, far from being “put out to pasture”, has assumed an absolute synthesizing function almost as great as in antiquity. What are the arguments in favour of this? An adherent of this position would say that, for the first time in history, philosophy has realized its true position as the queen of the sciences, replacing religion that has reigned for so long. For the first time it has come close enough to social life to make not only an indirect but also a direct impact on it. For the first time, too, philosophy has gained the right to evaluate and even solve conflicts not only in social and political life but also in the economy and in academic life. If we do not openly recognize this leading role of philosophical thought, if we admit that the once splendid building of philosophical knowledge has disintegrated, its bricks pilfered by the specialist sciences, we shall thereby give up the unity of our spiritual world, which is alone capable of sustaining us in our practical activities.

These two opposing stands on the interpretation of the place of philosophy are so rigid not just because they express the concern about the possibility of philosophy’s hegemony (including political and ideological hegemony): the other underlying reason is the acutely polemical attitude to the relationship between philosophy and science.

As for the relationship between philosophy and politics, it is fairly obvious on the one hand and extremely complex in terms of detail, on the other. Of course, philosophy cannot replace political consciousness; still less can the latter become philosophy. These are two fundamentally diverse forms of social consciousness differing in their subject matter, methods of thought, and, most importantly, their goals. At the same time, of course, there are meaningful, emotional and functional contacts between them, these mutual links being most fully manifested in the 20th century. However, these unquestioned and generally recognized close ties between philosophical and political thought must in no way give rise to the conclusion that “philosophy is finished”. (Below, we shall dwell on the relationship between philosophical and political thought in greater detail.)

Those who reject the need for philosophy in our times deny its political claims on the grounds that it is not a science. For those who see it as a form of social consciousness called upon to generalize and control all the other forms, it is, above all, a science. In the first case, the role of philosophy is belittled through putting it outside science, in the second, it is elevated as being “more scientific than all the sciences” and even capable of affecting the social evolution.

In both instances, the view is manifested, in one way or another, that the only true form of knowledge is rational knowledge, and that only in the interpretation it is given in the natural sciences. This methodological orientation, which belittles the importance of all knowledge that does not have a strictly rational form, has come to be known as “scientism”. The positions of scientism are so influential that the question of the relationship between philosophy and science must be considered in greater detail.

The problem of the scientific nature of philosophy and the limitations of scientism.

A little history first. Before the 19th century, science occupied a special, and quite respectable, place in European culture; still, it came third or even fourth after religion, philosophy and art. The crisis of the religious world perception which gave way to philosophy, on the one hand, and the triumph of rational thought over the intuitive methods of art, on the other, led in the past century to science moving up to occupy the second rung, the one below philosophy, in this conventional hierarchy of values. In the 20th century, despite the fairly serious decline of rationalism in the first two or three decades, the prestige of scientific knowledge later rose so high that science actually found itself in the vanguard. The dilemma itself of the “end” or “efflorescence” of philosophy, referred to above, was provoked precisely by the type of thought characteristic of scientism, which expressed this dilemma in the following way: if philosophy is not a science, it must cede its positions; if it does not cede them, that will mean that it is a science.

This position cannot, of course, be justified. The question of whether philosophy is a science or not cannot be given an unambiguous solution since, on the one hand, if it is a science, it is not a science in the same sense as the natural disciplines; if, on the other hand, it is not a science, this does not mean that it loses all the attributes of scientific knowledge. Let us deal with this point more thoroughly.

What precisely is so “anti-scientific” about philosophical knowledge, from the standpoint of scientism?

In the first place, an adherent of scientism will reproach philosophy for the undemonstrability and fundamental unverifiability of its truths, for the ......................

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