The events of his life in part account for this complexity. He was born in 1818, at Trèves, like Saint Ambrose. Trèves had been profoundly influenced by the French during the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, and was much more cosmopolitan in outlook than most parts of Germany. His ancestors had been rabbis, but his parents became Christian when he was a child. He married a gentile aristocrat,
-782-
to whom he remained devoted throughout his life. At the university he was influenced by the still prevalent Hegelianism, as also by Feuerbach’s revolt against Hegel towards materialism. He tried journalism, but the Rheinische Zeitung, which he edited, was suppressed by the authorities for its radicalism. After this, in 1843, he went to France to study Socialism. There he met Engels, who was the manager of a factory in Manchester. Through him he came to know English labour conditions and English economics. He thus acquired, before the revolutions of 1848, an unusually international culture. So far as Western Europe was concerned, he showed no national bias. This cannot be said of Eastern Europe, for he always despised the Slavs.
He took part in both the French and the German revolutions of 1848, but the reaction compelled him to seek refuge in England in 1849. He spent the rest of his life, with a few brief intervals, in London, troubled by poverty, illness, and the deaths of children, but nevertheless indefatigably writing and amassing knowledge. The stimulus to his work was always the hope of the social revolution, if not in his lifetime, then in some not very distant future.
Marx, like Bentham and James Mill, will have nothing to do with romanticism; it is always his intention to be scientific. His economics is an outcome of British classical economics, changing only the motive force. Classical economists, consciously or unconsciously, aimed at the welfare of the capitalist, as opposed both to the landowner and to the wage-earner; Marx, on the contrary, set to work to represent the interest of the wage-earner. He had in youth–as appears in the Communist Manifesto of 1848–the fire and passion appropriate to a new revolutionary movement, as liberalism had had in the time of Milton. But he was always anxious to appeal to evidence, and never relied upon any extra-scientific intuition.
He called himself a materialist, but not of the eighteenth-century sort. His sort, which, under Hegelian influence, he called “dialectical,” differed in an important way from traditional materialism, and was more akin to what is now called instrumentalism. The older materialism, he said, mistakenly regarded sensation as passive, and thus attributed activity primarily to the object. In Marx’s view, all sensation or perception is an interaction between subject and object; the bare object, apart from the activity of the percipient, is a mere raw material, which is transformed in the process of becoming known.
-783-
Knowledge in the old sense of passive contemplation is an unreal abstraction; the process that really takes place is one of handling things. “The question whether objective truth belongs to human thinking is not a question of theory, but a practical question,” he says. “The truth, i.e., the reality and power, of thought must be demonstrated in practice. The contest as to the reality or non-reality of a thought which is isolated from practice, is a purely scholastic question. . . .
Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but the real task is to alter it.” *
I think we may interpret Marx as meaning that the process which philosophers have called the pursuit of knowledge is not, as has been thought, one in which the object is constant while all the adaptation is on the part of the knower. On the contrary, both subject and object, both the knower and the thing known, are in a continual process of mutual adaptation. He calls the process “dialectical” because it is never fully completed.
It is essential to this theory to deny the reality of “sensation” as conceived by British empiricists. What happens, when it is most nearly what they mean by “sensation,” would be better called “noticing,” which implies activity. In fact–so Marx would contend–we only notice things as part of the process of acting with reference to them, and any theory which leaves out action is a misleading abstraction.
So far as I know, Marx was the first philosopher who criticized the notion of “truth” from this activist point of view. In him this criticism was not much emphasized, and I shall therefore say no more about it here, leaving the examination of the theory to a later chapter.
Marx’s philosophy of history is a blend of Hegel and British economics. Like Hegel, he thinks that the world develops according to a dialectical formula, but he totally disagrees with Hegel as to the motive force of this development. Hegel believed in a mystical entity called “Spirit,” which causes human history to develop according to the stages of the dialectic as set forth in Hegel’s Logic. Why Spirit has to go through these stages is not clear. One is tempted to suppose that Spirit is trying to understand Hegel, and at each stage rashly objectifies what it has been reading. Marx’s dialectic has none of this quality except a certain inevitableness. For Marx, matter, not spirit,
____________________
* Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, 1845.
-784-
is the driving force. But it is matter in the peculiar sense that we have been considering, not the wholly dehumanized matter of the atomists. This means that, for Marx, the driving force is really man’s relation to matter, of which the most important part is his mode of production. In this way Marx’s materialism, in practice, becomes economics.
The politics, religion, philosophy, and art of any epoch in human history are, according to Marx, an outcome of its methods of production, and, to a lesser extent, of distribution. I think he would not maintain that this applies to all the niceties of culture, but only to its broad outlines. The doctrine is called the “materialist conception of history.” This is a very important thesis; in particular, it concerns the historian of philosophy. I do not myself accept the thesis as it stands, but I think that it contains very important elements of truth, and I am aware that it has influenced my own views of philosophical development as set forth in the present work. Let us, to begin with, consider the history of philosophy in relation to Marx’s doctrine.
Subjectively, every philosopher appears to himself to be engaged in the pursuit of something which may be called “truth.” Philosophers may differ as to the definition of “truth,” but at any rate it is something objective, something which, in some sense, everybody ought to accept. No man would engage in the pursuit of philosophy if he thought that all philosophy is merely an expression of irrational bias. But every philosopher will agree that many other philosophers have been actuated by bias, and have had extra-rational reasons, of which they were usually unconscious, for many of their opinions. Marx, like the rest, believes in the truth of his own doctrines; he does not regard them as nothing but an expression of the feelings natural to a rebellious middle-class German Jew in the middle of the nineteenth century. What can be said about this conflict between the subjective and objective views of a philosophy?
We may say, in a broad way, that Greek philosophy down to Aristotle expresses the mentality appropriate to the City State; that Stoicism is appropriate to a cosmopolitan despotism; that scholastic philosophy is an intellectual expression of the Church as an organization; that philosophy since Descartes, or at any rate since Locke, tends to embody the prejudices of the commercial middle class; and that Marxism and Fascism are philosophies appropriate to the modern in-
-785-
dustrial State. This, I think, is both true and important. I think, however, that Marx is wrong in two respects. First, the social circumstances of which account must be taken are quite as much political as economic; they have to do with power, of which wealth is only one form. Second, social causation largely ceases to apply as soon as a problem becomes detailed and technical. The first of these objections I have set forth in my book Power, and I shall therefore say no more about it. The second more intimately concerns the history of philosophy, and I will give some examples of its scope.
Take, first, the problem of universals. This problem was first discussed by Plato, then by Aristotle, by the Schoolmen, by the
