Somerville, J. (1967) Chapter 1: "The Nature of Reality: Dialectical Materialism" (pp. 3-39). In The Philosophy of Marxism: An Exposition. Minneapolis: Marxist Educational Press.
The Nature of Reality: Dialectical Materialism
Let us begin with the question: What sort of totality are we a part of? In human experience, this is not an avoidable question. It may be a matter for controversy whether we shall ever arrive at an answer that is satisfactory to everyone. But it is hardly controversial that everyone has felt the impact of the question, and would dearly like to have an answer. One might say that its impact at the level of intellectual consciousness is as inevitable -and as varied in form- as the impact of sex at the level of physiological consciousness.
In other words, every human being, at quite an early age, begins to ask himself and others: Who made this world? What was it made for? What was it made out of? How big is the whole thing? When did it begin? When will it end? What happens to people after they die? Without at this point going into its various causes, the fact is clear enough that even a child, not to speak of an adult, feels it impossible simply to accept without explanation the set of surroundings and activities in which he finds himself. If a child were to wake up some morning in an extremely large house he had never seen before, with all sorts of people doing all sorts of things, he would feel compelled to ask: What kind of house is [p. 4] this? Whose house is it? How did it get here? What is being done here? The world is like such a house; and the child raises just such questions about it. He feels the need to come to terms with the thing as a whole. He may eventually settle for negative terms, such as, "one can't find out," which is also a judgment, an answer; but in that case he will always wish there were a better one.
All this is true of children in a simple sense, and of adults in a more complex sense. Such questions about the world as a whole, the universe, the totality of which man is a part, become the basis of that branch of philosophy which is traditionally called metaphysics or ontology. It is obvious that these questions, as questions, are very real, and that the acceptance of different answers makes a great difference in the lives of people -in their attitudes, their feelings, their relationships, their expectations, the quality of their hopes and fears, the whole tone of their lives.
Still, there is great debate about the meaning of such questions in the intellectual, the purely cognitive sense. We are all aware that many forms of nonsense can have great emotional significance for people, can strongly affect their feelings and their lives in all sorts of ways. The acceptance of the reality of witches and demons not only could, but once did, and for rather a long time, make a very real difference, which on occasion became the difference between life and death. Treatises were written on witchcraft and demonology by respected teachers with influence and authority in the highest circles. The laws of the state and the church agreed on the point; each took pains to punish, not those who taught that people could be transformed into "witches," but the "witches." Clearly, the mere fact that one believes [p. 5] in and lives by something is not of itself sufficient evidence that that something has real, as distinct from fictional, existence; that, intellectually, it makes sense, as distinct from nonsense.
Having said this, we must also bear in mind that, if someone asks a question that someone else answers in a nonsensical way, the answer does not necessarily make the questioner guilty of nonsense. If the cattle in some village are unaccountably dying, and all the established authorities are looking for the practitioners of witchcraft who brought this calamity down upon the community, that does not necessarily make the question, "Why did the cattle die?" a nonsensical question. It all depends on what the given questioner means by it. If in his mind it is in fact equivalent to "Who are the guilty witches?" then it is indeed nonsense. But the questioner, of course, may not be limiting himself to such a construction.
Marxism poses these questions about the totality only in a sense that permits an answer in terms of objective evidence -that is, evidence which goes back to observation, experiment, and logical analysis of the results of observation and experiment. Another way of saying the same thing is that Marxism seeks the answers to these questions about the totality by putting together -generalizing- the results of the various sciences. A negative way of putting the same point would be to say that Marxism rejects in principle, as illusory and fruitless, all mystical or supernaturalistic approaches.
Marxism classifies itself philosophically as materialism. [p. 6] One should note at once that, in using this term, its frame of emotional and valuational reference is not that of cynicism, bitterness, or depravity, but rather of confidence in the powers of human reason, as well as in the potentialities of nature and matter. The effort is clearly to get away from a faith or authority that claims to be above reason, from revelation, mystery, and miracle as ways of answering questions about the totality, and to stick to the methods of science.
This approach means, for one thing, that Marxist materialism holds no unalterable conception of matter. Its attitude is that it is willing to follow specific sciences in whatever further discoveries about matter are possible, and that many more are certainly to be expected. Thus Marxists are not exactly saying, "We hold that reality is matter, and that matter is limited to such and such properties." Rather, they are saying, "By reality we mean that which is objectively confirmable by evidence and reason. Matter is the general name given to the basic content of that existence which is confirmable by evidence and reason. The name does not settle its characteristics and properties. These can be settled only by further and further investigations, which may indeed be endless. But they must be scientific investigations, and the conclusions must be rationally demonstrable." Thus it would be an oversimplification of the meaning of materialism, as Marxism sees it, to say that its basic proposition is that nothing exists except matter. It is rather that nothing exists except matter and its functions, properties, and powers of development.
To say simply, "Reality is matter," may seem to suggest an intention to deny full reality to anything that is not directly physical or material, such as ideas and [p. 7] ideals. Marxism does not have this intention. It fully recognizes the real existence of ideas, ideals, moral and esthetic values, intellectual abstractions, and the like. What it insists upon is that the objective evidence shows all such levels and forms of reality to be genetically connected with, to grow out of, basic forms of matter that there is no evidence that they grow out of anything else, and no rational need to assume that they grow out of anything else. Matter itself, in its simplest forms, is active, dynamic, functional it is never really passive or inert. The evidence shows that it is capable of change, development, evolution. These facts are sufficient to account rationally for the genesis of differentiated structures, higher levels, complex functions.
Thus Marxism would reject the Platonic conception that pure abstract ideas are the basic reality, the primary and eternal reality, of which tangible and material things are merely passing shadows, imperfect and transitory copies. If such pure ideas had primary existence, how would they generate transitory material copies? Where is the explanation of such a process or any evidence that it takes place? The Marxist points out that if we begin with active matter, which in fact is universally evident and demonstrably characterized by capability of change and development, we can rationally account for the emergence of complex forms, for the evolution of one form out of another, of the organic out of the inorganic, for the appearance of animals with nervous systems, memory, and learning capacity. Then we can account for the formation of ideas in terms of the traceable functioning of a physiological nervous system and an observable brain structure.
Platonic idealism, like Cartesian rationalism, puts the [p. 8] cart before the horse. As Plato argued for the primacy of ideas, so Descartes did for the primacy of the thinking process, of mind. Both neglected the evidence (some of which was available to them, but most of which has been brought forth since) that ideas and thought processes are not primary, but are the results of the functioning of physiological and neurological organs and powers, ultimately traceable to their bodily sources. The concept of an immaterial mind, not dependent in any way on body or matter -the premise and starting point of Cartesian rationalism- has receded with the progress of science. To Plato's contention that the senses lead us astray, that we would be better off without the body, with pure mind in contact with pure ideas, the Marxist replies: Without the senses and the body, there would not be pure mind and pure ideas. There would be no mind and no ideas.
But then the question immediately arises: Granted that we can account for the rise of the simplest forms of living matter by evolution (further evolution) of the most complex forms of inorganic matter, and for the rise of nervous systems and brain structures in the same way, how can we account for matter itself, in its simplest forms? The Marxist's answer to this question is in no way original. Most materialist philosophy (which has had a long history, going back to pre-Socratic "physicalism" and earlier traditions) gives essentially the same answer: As there never could have been just nothing, the most rational conclusion we can come to is that matter, in some form, was always existent.
Why is this conclusion regarded as the most rational? First, because if we wish to use reason, we cannot claim or assume that we can get something from nothing. We [p. 9] obviously do have something now -a totality of some kind. Even the solipsist, who is sure only of himself or his own consciousness, says that there is something, i.e., himself. If the something we have now did not come from nothing, it must have come from something else. As the same applies to this something else, the only rational conclusion is that existence in its totality must be an eternal, interconnected system, which had no absolute starting point, since such a starting point would mean getting something from nothing.
If existence goes through processes of change and evolution, as it obviously does, it is clear that the same forms of existence that we now see need not always have existed. Yet at any particular time something must have existed. By the same reasoning, we reach the conclusion that there always will be something. That is, just as we cannot get something from nothing, so also we cannot get nothing from something, though it may sometimes seem that we do. When we speak of destroying something, it cannot be in an absolute sense, into nothingness. What we do is break up the form, arrangement, structure; another form, arrangement, structure is thereby produced. This whole situation has been summed up in the principle of conservation of matter or energy [E=mc2]; none can be either created or destroyed, in the absolute sense.
This line of reasoning is often confronted with the objection of those who claim they are unable to imagine, to conceive rationally, anything without a beginning. The Marxist philosopher answers as many other philosophers do: This is because these people have in mind only particular, finite things. While their conclusion is perfectly true for each particular and finite thing, [p. 10] they are failing to observe that, precisely because it is true that each particular thing must have a beginning from something else, the total series of particular things could not have a beginning, for if the series as a whole had a beginning, the first unit would not have come from something else.
In other words, a series, each unit of which must come from a preceding unit, must be an infinite series, without a starting point. In no other way could the condition be fulfilled of each unit coming from a preceding unit. Actually, everyone is quite familiar with such a series, for example, in arithmetic. Anyone who has heard of negative numbers understands that minus three is less than minus two, so that there is no "lowest number" in the series of numbers, just as there is no "highest number." The series is obviously beginningless or endless in either direction. Yet that fact does not make the series either inconceivable or unusable. The most that can be said is that the whole series is physically unimaginable, in the sense of a single perceptual image taking it all in at once. But such an image is not logically necessary. Nor is it necessary for the concept of the totality of existence.
It is significant to notice that many schools of thought opposed to materialism also feel the logical need to maintain that something must have existed eternally. But the materialist holds that, for one reason or another, they do not carry through the logic of their positions consistently. Various theological philosophers, for example, hold that God is the eternal guarantor of existence, the something that always was and always will be. But this God is conceived of as an incomprehensible, purely spiritual Being, who created the tangible, understandable [p. 11] universe out of nothing in a way human reason could never grasp. The materialist maintains that such assumptions needlessly abandon logic. If logic tells us that whatever was earlier must have given rise to whatever came later, how are we helped by construing the earlier phase as supernatural and incomprehensible -especially when we have sciences, constantly improving, that explain rationally how things are brought into existence by other things?
In this regard, the materialist finds especially vulnerable the famous "Argument from Design," which points out that so complex a thing as the entire natural universe could not have come into existence accidentally. Logically, so the argument goes, we must assume a supernatural Designer capable of creating all that complexity. But then, by the same logic, we would have to assume a super-supernatural Designer to account for the supernatural Designer, a super-super-supernatural Designer to account for the super-supernatural Designer, and so on. What we here are really saying (again) is that reason tells us there is a sequence of existences, that later existences must have come from earlier ones, and thus existence must always have existed. The materialist concludes that, if there is no beginning, there is no need for a Beginner.
We have already, in speaking of Plato, noted the kind of criticism that the materialist directs against idealism. That is, to say that ideas are primary and eternal makes it impossible to account rationally for matter. We have no evidence to explain how ideas could generate tangible things; but we do have adequate evidence, in physics, chemistry, and biology, to explain how tangible things come to generate ideas. In this connection, the materialist [p. 12] emphasizes the close relation that exists between idealism and supernatural theology, a relation that is reflected also in the remark by Bertrand Russell (himself no materialist) that "Christianity is the poor man's Platonism." That is, pure mind, or pure idea, which is supposed to give rise, inexplicably, to material things, becomes personified in the conception of God the Father, who, by an act of omnipotent will, miraculously creates the universe out of nothing.
We have so far dealt with the Marxist view of the totality of existence in regard to its possible origin, duration, extent, and basic composition. What about purpose? The answer to this question might be deduced from what has been said concerning the other issues. The purpose of anything is by definition a relationship to something further. Since there can be nothing beyond the totality of existence, the totality as a totality can no more have a purpose than it can have an origin. But there can be all sorts of purposes within the totality -purposes of parts in relation to other parts. A person, an institution, a state, an object -each of these can have a purpose, because there is something else for each of them to relate to.
This line of thought calls forth in some the objection that it presents a kind of negative or empty picture of the totality, a picture that deprives the human being of something precious. To the Marxist, this objection represents a feeling more than a logical argument, a feeling which is relative to the way people are brought up and taught. If they are conditioned from an early age to believe in the existence of certain things, to which they then become attached, but which do no accord with facts that later emerge, they will feel that to recognize [p. 13] such facts, and their implications, would be to take something away from themselves.
In any case, the Marxist denies that his materialist conception of the universe is a negative or empty one. He feels it is a conception that actually gives man a much greater role, much more dignity and stature than the theological or idealistic conception gives him. Man is not the creature of an omnipotent Creator, whose ways he is unable to understand, but whose commands he must nevertheless obey. Man is a being who can gain more and more objective knowledge of the totality of which he is part, of the forces that have produced him; since objective knowledge is also power, he can gain by his knowledge more and more power in relation to those forces. All this puts man in a closer, more responsible, and more creative position in relation to the totality of which he is a part. It makes him to a greater extent the architect and master of his own fate. In an infinite, eternal universe, operating in terms of natural sequences and forces, he has the greatest scope for his powers, the greatest range for his efforts, and the greatest potential of interest, adventure, and emotional richness for his life.
In such a universe can there be any place for ideals, moral values, moral obligation? The Marxist philosopher points out that such questions as these arise largely because people have grown so accustomed to associating moral obligations and values with the commands of an all-powerful God who threatens punishment for disobedience, that they assume moral values and obligations to be capable of having no other source or, if they do have another source, then they must, for that reason alone, be less than genuine, not really binding. Dostoevsky, [p. 14] through a number of his characters, expressed this view in the formulation: If there is no God, everything is possible. There would be no binding standards.
The materialist, by contrast, takes the view that the ultimate source of values, obligations, and ideals is man's needs and man's ability to create. He further holds that this fact does not degrade values and obligations, but rather elevates man. The appeal to follow moral standards then becomes an appeal to man's own self-respect, to his own intelligence and creativity. One might call this "self-government" in the sphere not only of politics, but of morality in life as a whole. In the supernatural approach to morals, Marxism detects a fundamental attitude of paternalism or autocracy rather than of self-government.
Must "ideals" be thought of as if they stood, inherently and by definition, in opposition to matter and body? The materialist rejects the view that matter, body, physical, and the like are "dirty words." That is too superficial a view; among those who profess to hold it, the result is often hypocrisy. To the materialist, ideals and values are concepts that point to the best uses of, the most fruitful ways of dealing with, that which enters man's life. Matter is not in principle regrettable; it is a source of value.
Perhaps every world view is an attitude, as well as a doctrine. As an attitude toward the totality, materialism is compounded of at least three elements: (a) a desire to understand, rather than just to accept, adjust to, have faith in, or esthetically feel, the totality; (b) the premise that the best way to gain responsible understanding (and thus to improve our practice in relation to the parts we deal with) is to use the methods of science; and [p. 15] (c) the conclusion that science does not mix with supernaturalism, revelation, or mysticism. This attitude does not mean that acceptance, adjustment, faith, or esthetic feeling are to be ruled out of life, but rather that they are not to be taken as the basis, the determining factor, of a world view. The aim of a world view is to gain truth which benefits man; and truth, first and foremost, must be objective -which means scientific [veridical to objects]. Agnosticism is ruled out as a hopeless attempt to avoid an unavoidable problem, while eclecticism is ruled out as an unprincipled attempt to profess allegiance to both sides of a contest.
Let us try to illustrate some aspects of this basic attitude which characterizes materialism. Take, for example, such a phenomenon as love. The materialist's attitude is not that it should be belittled or discouraged as an activity, emotion, or feeling, unless, of course, it is being pursued in some destructive way. Neither is his attitude the cynical one that "love does not exist," or that it is not necessary to take seriously the question of standards, values, and ideals in relation to it. His attitude is that love is obviously a very important part of life, but that its importance is as an emotional fact, not as an explanation. More explanation does not mean less love; neither does more love mean less explanation. Man needs more of both.
To explain any fact, to understand its place in life, we must employ reason. Reason is not a substitute for feeling; it is the only means of explaining feeling. Such explanation not only need not destroy or diminish the feeling involved; on the contrary, it is clearly capable of contributing positively to it. Increasing knowledge of the facts of love, through physiology, psychology, and sociology, [p. 16] helps to avert unhappiness and tragedy, and to bring many factors under control, so that love can be more successfully consummated as a reality in people's lives.
The same thing holds true of man's entire emotional life, including his esthetic appreciation and artistic creativity, very important aspects of which are matters of emotion and feeling. Their value and significance as experiences, as phases of life, is one thing. The explanation of them -in terms of their basis, causes, and effects, their operation and impact- is quite another thing. The two categories are related, but they must not be confused.
It is interesting to note that, in this attitude, the materialist is at one with many classic thinkers, especially of the ancient Greek world, whom we do not usually think of as having anything in common with materialism. The approach of Aristotle, for instance, places human reason in the center of the stage, and leaves no room for supernaturalism, either in ontology or in morals. Not only is man capable of genuine understanding, but everything can be understood. It is only a question of time and discipline. The same attitude is found in Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Leucippus, Empedocles and many others, and in such modern thinkers as Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Mill.
Another way of putting this point is in terms of the role of faith as distinct from the role of reason. For example, a traditional and still widely influential theological position is that reason should be used for all questions and problems for which it is adequate, but that there are many questions -including some of the most important that man must ask- for which reason is not [p. 17] adequate. The truth about such questions, according to this view, is attainable only through something higher than reason -namely, faith. The truth that is yielded by this faith is usually considered to be revealed to man in certain sacred scriptures, or implanted in him in the form of intuitive feelings. Such a view is reflected in Pascal's claim that "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not understand," in Kant's concept of the supernaturally implanted categorical imperative, which allegedly gives us the basis of morality, and in the interpretation of conscience as a mysterious spiritual force.
The materialist attitude is that there is nothing that can properly be called truth, over and above that which is a product of logical analysis working upon the data that are supplied by the senses through careful observation and experiment. People do have strong intuitions, deep and powerful feelings about all sorts of things, including moral judgments. But there is no need to assume that these feelings are mystical or supernaturally derived, in the sense of being scientifically inexplicable. They can be rationally traced to their sources and their causes in man's psychological and social life. But the strength or depth with which one feels that something is true is, unfortunately, no necessary index of its actual truth. Its truth can be established only by rational methods and objective evidence.
If faith is defined broadly enough to include any sense of trust in the future reliability of something, its future success in operation and outcome, then it would be fair to say that the materialist has faith in man and in the power of his reason. But he would argue that this is an informed rather than an arbitrary faith, and has its basis in confirmable appraisal of past experience. In other [p. 18] words, there is a significant difference between a mystical faith and a rational faith.
There is also a significant difference between [1] the argument of a St. Thomas Aquinas, who holds there is a truth higher than that yielded by reason (not contradictory to reason, but supplementary to it), which truth we should accept as an explanation, and [2] the position of philosophers who, like Plato, remain committed in principle exclusively to reason, yet make what the materialist regards as cardinal errors, judged by rational criteria.
In any case, the materialist holds that the term "truth" should be reserved only for that which is demonstrable by objectively rational methods, and that the truth in that sense is man's best guide and explanation. Truth is regarded as having both an absolute and a relative dimension -absolute in the sense that at any given time there exists a definite and objective reality, a state of affairs which in principle could be fully known and exactly stated, yet relative in the sense that at any given time the truth we possess in the form of knowledge about that reality is not complete.
Practically all we have said so far represents aspects of the world view or ontology that Marxism inherited from preceding materialist philosophy. Before examining what it added to its inheritance, let us emphasize the significance of the historical setting. One must remember that philosophy is a very old term, which, until quite recently (up to the eighteenth century) was employed as a name for knowledge in its entirety. There was no distinction in principle between science and philosophy; the terms were used synonymously. In other words, what we now call the sciences, whether physical or social, were regarded as parts of philosophy; those who cultivated [p. 19] them were called philosophers. If the individual scholar was interested mainly in questions concerning the physical world or the phenomena of organic nature, he was called a natural philosopher; if he dealt with social questions, he was called a civil philosopher; if his specialty was theology, he was a divine philosopher, and so on.
We sometimes forget that many great figures whose work we now think of as science, and whom we therefore classify as scientists, themselves thought of their work as philosophy, and referred to themselves as philosophers. Isaac Newton, for example, published his great work under the title, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century in England, John Dalton, who is known as the father of the modern concept of the atom, entitled the results of his investigations New Principles of Chemical Philosophy. To none of the thinkers of the Renaissance, among whom we identify the pioneers and founders of what we call modern physical or natural science, did the word science (or scientia in the Latin which they mainly used) have any special meaning, as distinct from philosophy or knowledge in general.
We find a like situation if we look at the history of the social or behavioral sciences. The father of sociology, Auguste Comte, who coined the term, and was the first to present a large-scale systematic treatise dealing with the field specifically as a science, entitled his work Cours de philosophie positive less than a century and a half ago. In fact, Comte is still approached as much in his capacity of "philosopher" as in that of "sociologist." We see the same situation in the case of an even more recent figure such as William James, who is equally regarded as philosopher and as psychologists. [p. 20]
All this is neither a matter of arbitrary terminology nor simply of exceptional versatility. It is an indication of a profoundly significant historical fact: all the special sciences are outgrowths of philosophy, which has been like a tree, giving rise to branches as it develops. In other words, philosophy creates sciences. Put differently, what we have come to call scientific knowledge is one kind of philosophy, the product of one kind of method and approach.
This method or approach is, of course, that which relies on sense data, observation, experiment, and logical analysis. It necessarily had to reject any authority or tradition that claimed to possess "revealed" truth from a supernatural source, if such truth stood in contradiction to what was found by the method of natural reason. It is perhaps not necessary to emphasize that what we are here describing represents a gigantic social conflict: To challenge the claims of revelation and of supernatural authority was to challenge the existing social system at its foundations.
All through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the church assumed the responsibility and had the power to carry on and control education at all levels, and to do likewise with intellectual life generally. Responsibility and control (in Europe) were of course conceived and enforced in relation to the doctrines of the Christian religion, and therefore rested upon supernatural authority and revelation. The very powers of the state, the right of the king to rule in a certain way, the validity of civil and criminal law, were likewise considered to be based upon the revealed truths of supernatural religion. To challenge supernaturalistic revelation as a warrant of [p. 21] truth, in relation to any question on which it had taken a public stand, was therefore a most grave and dangerous matter.
Each instance of a challenge to what was taken to be revealed truth, or truth certified by established authority, became a pitched battle, in which the church-state combination had an immense superiority of weapons, including the power to imprison and put to death. Efforts to apply to the basic questions of astronomy and physics the methods we now call scientific, and to argue for acceptance of the results of such methods, required such a high degree of courage, in addition to extraordinary intellectual gifts, that undoubtedly most of those who might have made important contributions were inhibited even from trying. In the circumstances, some great thinkers -including Copernicus and Spinoza- adopted the expedient of concealing their major work until the end of their lives, hoping for posthumous publication, which could, of course, itself be delayed or defeated. Many men of the stature of Galileo, Bruno, Campanella, and Telesio were deprived of teaching posts, imprisoned, or put to death, because they were opposing sacred authorities.
Most of these courageous and talented thinkers fought their battle over some particular problem, such as the nature of motion, or in some particular field, such as the astronomy of the planetary system. Few of them tried to argue for the application of the method they were using to all matters in which truth was claimed. Even had they wished to do so, this might well have seemed too much to attempt, where to try so little was [p. 22] so dangerous. Materialism is the philosophic name for the doctrine and attitude that this general attempt should be made, and will be successful, in all fields.
Let us now examine what Marxism added to this tradition of materialist philosophy. In a general sense, of course, all the traditional materialist approaches and attitudes were expressed and implemented by Marx and Engels in terms of new situations, new problems, new content. But, in addition to this general reworking, there are certain specific doctrines -qualitatively new in relation to the materialist tradition- that Marx and Engels incorporated into it, with results which have exercised a tremendous influence.
The briefest way of expressing what they did is to say that they made materialism dialectical, whereas it had been predominantly mechanistic. What was involved in this? The effort of materialism had always been to "take nature without reservations," as Engels once put it -that is, to explain the totality in terms of the natural, humanly discoverable, and humanly understandable operation of causes, effects, and laws, without assuming anything mystical, or in principle incomprehensible, above it or behind it. Up to the time of Marx and Engels (who were contemporaries of Darwin) this approach had produced a general picture of the world that could be expressed as the universal operation of cause-effect and of law within a set of basic patterns that were static and eternal. In other words, the most basic aspects of reality were regarded as unchanging. History was not seen as central or primary in relation to matter.
Of course, change and motion were recognized, but they were considered to be on the surface rather than of the essence, to be relative to a framework that was fixed [p. 23] and fundamental. Heavenly bodies moved, but in constant orbits. Individual animals were born, grew, and died, but the animal species were fixed. Different objects were formed by different combinations of atoms, but the atoms themselves were impenetrable and impervious to change. Qualitative changes came about through the interaction of chemical elements, but the elements themselves were immutable. This was a rational universe, in the sense that things were accounted for in terms of the action of mechanisms; nevertheless, these mechanisms, in their basic aspects, and in the laws of their action, did not have any history. Qualitative changes were brought about, but that which brought them about did not undergo qualitative, but only quantitative, changes. Things died out and were replaced; but they did not evolve, nor did they grow into new types. In Marxist literature, this conception of the universe or totality is called "metaphysical," as well as "mechanistic" materialism because the term "metaphysics" has been traditionally identified with doctrines of an eternally changeless reality.
Marx and Engels held that the progress of science made it more and more clear that this view of the universe was oversimplified. It left out a dimension that was absolutely fundamental; or, at best, it relegated this utterly primary aspect of reality, an aspect that pervaded its very foundations, to a place of secondary, merely relative significance. We are referring, of course, to the dimension of change -not simply in the restricted, mechanical sense of quantitative changes, but in the evolutionary sense of pervasive, qualitative change at the roots.
This is clearly a conception of tremendous import [p. 24] -one that was, in its essence, by no means original with Marx and Engels. (What was original with them was its elaboration within the framework of modern materialism, at the level of modern science.) Since everything is in motion, and capable of going through a process of development involving qualitative changes, it follows that nothing is absolutely static. Insofar as we know the universe -that is, in accordance with all the evidence we possess- it is a process as much as a thing. Put differently, it is a thing that is constantly in process, or a process which manifests itself in the form of a series of things. The evidence shows that what seems changeless is slowly changing; what seems stationary is only so relative to a point of observation that is itself moving. Our totality is, through and through, a dynamic one.
The word "dialectical" is used to express this sort of continuous change, which is thorough and proceeds from one extreme to another. In philosophy, "dialectical" is an ancient term, employed to express the course of an argument that moves from one view to its opposite, from the upholding of an idea to the upholding of its denial through the establishing of a contradictory idea, to the upholding of a denial of that denial, and so on.
It is important to recognize that the contention of Marx and Engels that reality is dialectical is meant to apply to every level and aspect of reality, not only to the directly physical level dealt with by such sciences as astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. This pervasiveness and thoroughness of change and evolution is seen equally at the social level, the moral level, the esthetic level, and the intellectual level. We have grown accustomed to the fact that the cosmos is a scene of universal [p. 25] motion and change, that atoms are penetrable, elements mutable, and species evolvable. We must be prepared, says the dialectical materialist, to reorient ourselves in the same sense to the content and problems of such fields as sociology, psychology, esthetics, and logic.
This aspect of the Marxist's world view also manifests itself as an attitude -one that might be called, in his terms, the dialectical attitude. It comprises three factors: (a) an acceptance of basic qualitative changes as the natural results of processes that have pervaded the past history of the totality; (b) an expectation that such processes will continue into the future; and (c) a desire to adjust both theory and practice to these processes [see also dialectical logic].
The issue here involved, and the difference that it makes, can be seen and felt in the historical impact of such significant developments as Copernican astronomy and Darwinian biology. After Copernicus had completed his work, and its validity had become clear, man was forced to alter, in certain profound respects, his whole attitude toward his earthly world, an alteration that could not help bringing about significant changes in his attitude toward what he had been taught concerning the heavenly world. These changes of attitude in turn threatened the foundations of power exercised by the church and the state. When the earth was regarded as the unmoving center of the universe, not only were intellectual teachings worked out in accordance with this presumption; a whole psychological and emotional set went along with them, and was threatened when they were threatened. If one can imagine being suddenly told that the house in which he has lived since childhood, and which he has come to regard as a very symbol of what is stable and securely rooted, is really on wheels, [p. 26] moving into some unknown region, he might then feel, to a very slight degree, the kind of difference the Copernican theory made.
The difference between moving and not moving, between changing and not changing, is a very profound one; it is almost as great as the difference between life and death. In some ways it could even be greater, so far as adjustment to it is concerned. If the life in question is one whose course we are familiar with, as in the case of a puppy we thought was dead, yet which turns out to be alive, we can adjust to this reversal with relative ease. But if the motion or change we are suddenly made aware of is carrying us in an unknown direction, into regions of which no one has had previous experience, adjustment to the situation is not so easy. Psychologically and emotionally, there is first of all a tremendous resistance to accepting the new fact, a very strong willingness not only to deny it, but to treat even the most rational demonstrations of its validity as sins and crimes, worthy of opprobrium [infamy, disrepute] and severe punishment, and to suppress the new view. These are, of course, recognizable fear reactions -in this case, fear of the unknown, and of loss of accustomed power.
We have witness more recently the same pattern of events in connection with the work of Darwin. The idea, even when supported by adequate evidence, that species themselves, and not only the individual beings within them, were capable of change and development, and that the species man had thus evolved from lower and simpler species, could not be accepted without a tremendous struggle. Even as late as 1925 in the United States, a teacher of biology could be tried (and found [p. 27] guilty) of violating a state law by teaching Darwinian evolution.
Marxist philosophy makes two basic points in relation to these problems. First, it would have been better had the world view of the people involved recognized the pervasiveness of change and development, so that they could have made allowances for it. Second, it is better now to recognize that this pervasiveness is not restricted to the subject matter of such fields as astronomy and biology, but must be expected in all subject matter. The world view, the attitude of man to the totality, must be one that is prepared for basic changes all along the line.
For example, in respect to man's social life, the issue presents itself first of all as a question of man's underlying attitude toward the very possibility of changes in the basic institutions, laws, and patterns of power that make up human society. Is it the operative [i.e., most desirable, effective, or workable] attitude that social institutions and patterns can remain basically the same in the future, with changes restricted to details and to personnel? This issue must be faced first, apart from the subsequent issue of what possible basic changes are desirable or inevitable.
Another way of putting this primary issue is to ask whether or not human society is in process of evolution at all, whether there is any dialectic, materialist or otherwise, pervading it. Is the present condition of human society, in terms of the nature of its institutions, power patterns, and laws, a stage or phase of a general process? If it is, we should obviously be deeply concerned to gain knowledge about this process. That would be a precondition of successful development, perhaps even of survival. [p. 28]
Broadly speaking, one may point to three different attitudes in relation to the possibility of social evolution, as distinct from small-scale changes. One attitude is to deny that there is any such evolution. A second is that it is possible, but would make no difference to us; that is, there would be nothing in particular for us to do, since it would come about, anyway. The third is that there is in fact such an evolution, and that there is something valuable and important for us to do about it.
This third attitude is that of the Marxist. What evidence does he adduce to support it? He points first of all to the past. Society has already gone through stages of development that are tremendously different from one another in terms of institutions, power patterns, and basic laws. These changes represent qualitative transitions. The transitions from prehuman to cave man, from primitive communal groupings to a complex slave society, from slave society to feudalism, from feudalism to modern industrial society -these are not simply quantitative changes, larger amounts or aggregates of the same basic forms, institutions, and laws. They involve the emergence of qualitative differences, of radically new patterns and institutions. The Marxist attitude, in this regard [as] shared by a number of other schools of thought, is that this social evolution can be studied and understood. With greater understanding will come greater power to predict, to gain control of what is controllable, and to make fruitful adjustments to what is not. In varying degrees this conception was developed before Marx by such thinkers as Hegel, St. Simon, and Comte, and later by many others, such as John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and John Dewey.
The Marxist sees the same dynamic, evolutionary patters [p. 29] at the level of moral and esthetic values, and at the intellectual level of concepts and ideas. It is important to note here something that will be brought out more fully in the following chapter. That is, the processes of motion and change, development and evolution which are found at every level of existence, operate not only between things, by impact of one thing upon another, or as an external force, impinging upon the properties of a thing from some outside source, but within things, as an integral property of the most basic content of things. In other words, motion is an inalienable property of matter, and of all that matter produces. There is no matter without the motion and development proper to its level of existence.
Here again one sees the difference between the picture of the world drawn by mechanistic materialism and that drawn by materialism which is dialectical. In the former, the role attributed to motion has sometimes been expressed by saying it presented a "billiard ball" conception of the universe. That is, the atoms composing all things were like billiard balls, each of which is motionless until pushed by another. The contrasting dialectical conception is expressed by saying that motion is, in the last analysis, self-motion. That is, it is a built-in property of matter, a necessary form of existence of matter in all its ramifications. If one were somehow able to imagine that one could touch successively each part or aspect of the totality, including feelings, values, and ideas, to the innermost reaches of reality, one would find everything stirring and growing, in every iota of its being.
As we have seen, the problem of ontology, in some ways that broadest and most basic part of philosophy, has [p. 30] often been epitomized in the question, "What is reality?" If we put this question to the dialectical materialist for a brief answer or summation, he will first have to point out the sense in which he construes the question. The necessity for this procedure arises from the fact that this question is sometimes asked with the implication, frequently met with in "classical" philosophy, that what is presented to us in ordinary experience is not reality, but only "appearance," behind which there is a "reality" that is incapable of being explained in terms of human experience [i.e., Objective Idealism; Indirect realism, Representationalism]. Such was Plato's doctrine of reality as a system of pure ideas, existing independently of material things and of human experience. These latter, as he saw it, constitute only appearance, and yield only opinion, as distinct from true knowledge. Such also was Kant's doctrine of "Things-in-Themselves," true knowledge of which could never be gained by human reason, as distinct from things as they appear to human experience and scientific reason.
This approach, which is called [ontological] "dualism" because it makes the claim that the philosopher, in seeking to know reality, must deal with two incommensurable realms, is associated in philosophical literature with systems traditionally described as "metaphysical." In this fact we may note another reason why the Marxist rejects the term "metaphysics" as a proper designation of his world view or ontology, which, by contrast, is profoundly monistic. That is, as we have seen, the Marxist insists that there is no evidence of a realm unknowable by experience and reason, and that there is no rational need to assume the existence of any such realm. To him, a valid ontology must be exclusively composed [p. 31] of those most general truths about existence that can be gained from human experience and human reason [i.e., his Non-Reductive materialist ontology relies on a Direct realist epistemology too].
Understanding that the Marxist takes the question "What is reality?" in that [ontologically monist, dialectical materialist] sense, his answer to it might be summed up briefly as follows: Reality is all that is within us and outside of us, as apprehended through the processes of natural experience and comprehended through the methods of human reason and science. Reason tells us that this reality must be infinite and eternal, thus could have neither a "first cause" nor a single, overall "purpose." The various sciences tell us, on the basis of [objective] investigations pursued at every level, that this reality is pervasively characterized by motion, change, development, and evolution. It is obviously impossible for us to describe reality completely. But it is possible to define the conditions and methods in terms which the process of description is carried further and further; and it is possible to state the confirmable results that have been attained so far....
If this is the nature of the totality of which man is a part, what could be the "meaning" of his life? Again, the answer to the question depends on what is intended by its language. If one is seeking mystical (logically inexplicable) meanings from "higher" (supernatural) sources, the materialist -dialectical or other- will say bluntly, as we have seen, that it is impossible rationally to believe in any such meanings, since we have no rationally convincing evidence that they exist.
However, in a humanly understandable sense, man gives meaning to his own life by creating his goals and ideals. Of course, he does not create these out of nothing, [p. 32] but in relation, first, to the kind of creature he is, the kind of needs he has, and second, in relation to the given conditions that he faces in the particular surrounding environment. While man did not create the natural forces that produced him, and the total environment surrounding him, it is none the less true that within this framework he is a tremendous creator. He can make plans, and fulfill them. If the materialist says that nature creates life, and man creates values, he does not mean this in a dualistic or mystical sense, for he holds that these values are created on the basis of the conditions of life, and that life is created on the basis of the conditions of what we call matter.