Diamond Marx's 'First Thesis' on Feuerbach

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Marx's "First Thesis" on FeuerbachAuthor(s): S. Diamond and D. J. StruikReviewed work(s):Source: Science & Society, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1937), pp. 539-550Published by: Guilford PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40399116 .

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MARX'S "FIRST THESIS" ON FEUERBACH

Marx's "First Thesis" on Feuerbach has generally been read as a statement on the theory of knowledge, and as indicating Marx's view that the process of cognition is active, not passive. Without questioning the fact that this is, indeed, the Marxian view of the process of cognition, one may still ask if that is the meaning of the rather ambiguous "First Thesis." We shall try to show that its real meaning has been obscured by this misinterpretation, and that the Thesis is not concerned, except in a negative and secondary way, with the theory of knowledge.

The full text of the Thesis appears as follows in a recent translation, which retains the ambiguity of the original:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism - that of Feuerbach included - is that the object, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Thus it happened that the active side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism - but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really differentiated from the thought-objects,* but he does not conceive human activity itself as activity through objects. Consequently, in the Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-Jewish form of

appearance. Hence he does not grasp the significance of "revolutionary," of practical- critical, activity. 2

The first problem arising in interpretation of the Thesis is the meaning to be attached to the word Sinnlichkeit, translated above as "sensuousness." According to the Muret-Sanders German-English dictionary it may mean either "sensitive faculty" or "material existence" - that which is sensed. We shall show that it is used by Marx in the latter sense, so that what the Thesis really affirms is, in effect, that reality is human activity.

The first sentence of the Thesis is translated by Sidney Hook in a somewhat different way:

The chief defect of all previous materialism - including Feuerbach's - is that the

object, reality, sensibility, is conceived only in the form of the object or as conception, but not as human sensory activity, practice, not subjectively. 3

i "Only through the senses is an object given in the true sense- not through thought for itself. The object identical with or given by thinking is only a thought." Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Zürich und Winterthur, 1843), p. 58.

2 Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach (New York, 1934), p. 73. 3 Hook, From Hegel to Marx (New York, 193b), p. 273 1. in tne preceding paragraph

Hook writes: "The real significance of Marx's criticism of Feuerbach has not been

adequately grasped by the overwhelming majority of his zealous and 'orthodox' disciples. 539



54° SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

He declares that the passage "raises the question to what extent the mind - or, since Marx, like Feuerbach, does not separate the mind from the body - to what extent man, is active in knowing." 4

Undoubtedly, the passage has usually been interpreted in harmony with this translation. Plekhanov, who made a correct translation into the Russian, nevertheless took a very similar view when he explained the passage as follows:

Feuerbach emphasizes the view that our ego cognizes an object solely by exposing itself to the action of that object; but Marx says that our ego cognizes an object by reacting upon it. ... For him, what was at issue was, not the undeniable fact that sensation precedes thought, but the fact that man is led to thought mainly by sensations which he experiences in the course of his own action on the outer world.s

In almost the same year when Plekhanov wrote this, Mondolfo translated Sinnlichkeit into Italian as sensibilità (Hook's "sensibility") and discussed the "First Thesis" as being entirely concerned with the theory of knowledge.6

Jackson points out that "sensuousness" must be read as meaning "that which is apprehended by the senses" 7 but seems obviously to be referring to the first sentence of the Thesis when he declares that Marx recognizes "that the process of cognition is an activity - a subjective practice" 8

We are, therefore, not confronted with a matter of translation, but with a fundamental problem of interpretation. Hook's faulty translation is merely consistent with the traditional misinterpretation.

One result of this reading of the "First Thesis" has been that the fact has apparently gone unnoticed that this Thesis actually did receive a good deal of elaboration at Marx's hands. It will be recalled that the "Theses on Feuerbach" were written by Marx in the Spring of 1845, in preparation for the writing, together with Engels, of Die Deutsche Ideologie. Even though the section of that work dealing with Feuerbach was never com- pleted, it is obvious that Marx's fragmentary notes should never be studied except in connection with it. There is, in fact, a rather lengthy passage They have failed to understand Marx because to most of them the philosophy of Feuer- bach has been a sealed book. Here as well as in other important works of Marx the very language used will mislead the reader unacquainted with the technical jargon of those whom Marx criticized."

Later, discussing the "Ninth Thesis," Hook again speaks with scorn of "orthodox Marxists" who have not perceived that bürgerliche Gesellschaft should there be translated "civil society" and not "bourgeois society" - but he neglects to mention that he himself made this error in his earlier book, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, and that the correct translation had been published in the interim - in Moscow.

4 Ibid.. p. 274- 5 Plekhanov, Osnovnye Voprosy Marksizma (1908), p. 14, translated as Fundamental

Problems of Marxism (New York, 1929), p. 12. « Mondolfo, R., "La filosofia del Feuerbach e le critiche del Marx," Cultura Filosófica,

March -June, 1909. (Printed separately, Prato, 1909, pp. 56.) 7 Jackson, T. A., Dialectics (New York, 1936), p. 29. s Ibid., p. 627.



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in Die Deutsche Ideologie in which the principal point of the "First Thesis" is presented, with illustrations that make its meaning unmistakable. Since this passage is not (to our knowledge) available in English, we repro- duce it here at length. We ask the reader to follow our footnotes care- fully.

Feuerbach's "understanding" of the sensuous world» is limited on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other hand to mere sensation; he says "Man" instead of "real historical men." "Man" is really "the German." 10 in the first case, in the contemplation of the sensuous world,n he necessarily strikes against things that contradict his consciousness and his feelings, that disturb the harmony he has assumed to exist among all the parts of the sensuous world, and especially between man and nature.* In order to get these out of the way, he must then take refuge in a double contemplation, a profane contemplation that sees only "what lies directly at hand," i3 and a higher contemplation that sees the "true essence" of things. He does not see that the sensuous world surrounding him is not something given from all eternity, always the same, but the product of industry and of the status of society, and this in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole series of gen- erations, each of which stood on the shoulders of that which preceded it, developed its industry and its commerce further, and modified its social organization in accordance with the changed requirements. Even the objects of the simplest "sensuous certainty" are provided for him only by social development, by industry and commerce. The cherry tree, like almost all fruit trees, was transplanted to our part of the world by commerce only a few centuries ago, and therefore it is only through this action of a given society at a given time that it was provided for Feuerbach's "sensuous certainty." Furthermore, when things are understood in this way, as they really are and have really happened, then, as will be shown, even more clearly below, every profound philosophical problem resolves itself quite simply into a matter of empirical fact.** For example, that important

* Feuerbach's error is not that he subordinates what lies directly at hand, the sensuous appearance, to the sensuous reality that is determined by more exact investigation of the sensuous fact, but that in the last analysis he cannot square himself with the sensuous world 12 except by viewing it with the "eyes," that is through the "spectacles," of the philosopherez [Note in original text.]

9 At this point the word "Sinnlichkeit" was written, then crossed out, and replaced by "sinnliche Welt"

io The manuscript as a whole, including most corrections, is in Engels* handwriting. The passage from "he says" to "the German" was written in by Marx.

ii At this point the word "Natur" was written, then crossed out, and replaced by "sinnliche Welt."

i2 Here "sensuous world" is our translation for the word "Sinnlichkeit"; for justifica- tion of this translation, see notes io and 12.

is "What lies directly at hand" is translated for "das auf platter Hand liegende" The occurrence of this phrase with quotation marks in the text permits us to determine the exact passage in Feuerbach which Marx and Engels had in mind. It occurs in the Philosophie der Zukunft, p. 69: "The sensuous is not immediate in the sense that it is the profane, that which lies directly at hand, the thoughtless, that which is understood of itself. Immediate, sensuous contemplation (Anschauung) follows rather after ideation (Vorstellung) and phantasy. Man's first contemplation is itself only the contemplation of his ideas and phantasy. The task of philosophy, of science in general, is therefore not to get away from the sensuous, i.e., the real things, but to come to them, - not to change the objects and thoughts into ideas, but to make visible, that is objective, that which is invisible to the common eye."

14 Cf. the "Second Thesis": "The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice, is a purely scholastic question."



542 SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

question about the relation of man to nature . . . out of which all the "unfathomably lofty works" about "substance" and "self-consciousness" have taken rise, falls apart by itself with the insight that the famous "unity of man and nature" has always existed in industry, and in every period has existed in a different form according to the lesser or greater development of industry, just the same as man's "struggle" with nature, until the development of his productive forces on a corresponding basis. Industry and trade, production and the exchange of the necessities of life, themselves determine the distri- bution, the articulation of the various social classes, and are in turn determined by these as to the form in which they are carried on - and thus it happens that, for example, Feuerbach sees in Manchester only factories, and machines, where a hundred years ago only spinning-wheels and weaving-looms were to be seen, or he discovers in the Roman

campagna nothing but cattle pastures and swamps, where at the time of Augustus he would have found nothing but vineyards and the villas of the Roman capitalists. Feuer- bach talks particularly about the perceptions of the natural sciences, mentioning secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and the chemist; but where would science be without industry and commerce? Even this "pure" science receives its purpose, as well as its material, only through industry and trade, through the sensuous activity of men. To such an extent is this activity, this constant sensuous working and creating, this production, the foundation of the entire sensuous world, as it exists today, that, if it were interrupted even for a single year, Feuerbach would not only discover an enormous change in the natural world, but he would also miss all humanity and his own

capacity for contemplation, indeed, he would very soon be missing his very existence. . . . To be sure, Feuerbach has the great advantage over the "pure" materialists that he

understands that man also is a "sensuous object"; is but (apart from the fact that he sees him only as a "sensuous object" and not as "sensuous activity"), because he confines himself here also to theory, and does not take men in their given social relationships, under their actual living conditions, which have made them what they are, he never arrives at the really existing, active men, but remains with the abstraction "Man"; thus he manages to recognize "the real, individual, bodily men" only in sensation, i.e., he knows no other "human relation" "of man to man" than love and friendship, and these in idealized form. He gives no criticism of present living conditions. He never reaches an understanding of the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the indi- viduals that compose it, and therefore, when, for example, he sees a lot of scrofulous, overworked, consumptive sufferers from hunger in place of healthy men, he is forced to take refuge in "the loftier contemplation" and the ideal "equivalence in the species," thus falling back into idealism at just the point where the communist materialist sees the necessity and at the same time the conditions for a reorganization of industry as well as of the social structure.1«. "

is "Not only 'external* things are objects of the senses. Man knows himself only through the senses - he is an object for himself as a sensory object." Philosophie der

Zukunft, p. 66 f. 16 Marx -Engels Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung i, Bd. 5, p. 32-34. An appendix in this

volume gives the variata, on which we have drawn for notes 10 and 12. 17 The connection between the last sentence of this passage and the last sentence of

the "First Thesis" has already been pointed out in a German edition of Ludwig Feuer- bach, edited by Hermann Duncker (Berlin, 1927; republished in Moscow, 1932). Cf. Engels' note to Marx, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. i, Bd. 5, p. 540. Engels quotes the passage in which Feuerbach says: "Whatever my nature is, that is my existence. . . . Only in human life, and then only in abnormal, unfortunate cases, do existence and nature

(Sein and Wesen) fall apart." (Philosophie der Zukunft, p. 47.) He then comments: "A fine eulogy on the status quo. Unnatural cases, a few abnormal cases excepted, you are

quite content to be a doorkeeper in a coal mine at seven years of age, to stay fourteen hours alone in the dark, and since that is your existence, it is also your nature. . . ."



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Throughout this passage there recurs the principal point of the "First Thesis": The sensuous world is human activity. One would have to stretch a good deal to consider this primarily a discussion of cognition. The point at issue is not whether cognition is active or passive, but that those who consider the problem of man's relation to the real external world (Sinnlich- keit) solely from the standpoint of the theory of knowledge are overlooking its more important aspect, that this world is itself the product of man's activity.

The real meaning and importance of the central idea of the "First Thesis" can best be appreciated by tracing its development. In a manuscript written in 1844, Marx wrote:

The object which is produced by work, its product, then faces it as an alien being, as a power which is independent of the producer. The product of work is the work which has fixated itself, concretized itself in an object; it is the concretization of the work.i8

Using the terminology of the later discussion, this may be put into the form that "human sensuous activity" becomes a part of the external world.

In another manuscript written during the same year, Marx writes this appraisal of Hegel's achievement and limitation:

Hegel "understands that work - in abstraction - is the self-reproduction of man, his behavior toward himself as to an alien being. ... In Hegel, however, the act is only formal, because the human being is appreciated only as an abstractly thinking being, as self-consciousness.i»

This is the thought which recurs in the second sentence of the Thesis - that Hegel has recognized man's activity, but not the real activity.

Early the next year, probably two months before writing the "Theses on Feuerbach," Marx wrote on a page of the same notebook a few brief sen- tences dealing again with this problem. The last point entered was the following:

Your negation of the imagined object, of the object as an object of consciousness, identified with the real objective negation, with the sensuous action, practice, and real activity differentiated from thinking. (Still to be developed.) 20

What Marx points out as "still to be developed" corresponds of course to "the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism." The materialists had recognized the existence of an external reality independent of men, and they had studied the sensory process of cognition whereby men came to know about that world, but they overlooked the fact that this external reality, as real men find it under real historical conditions, was in large part the product of man's own activity. It is his own "alienated work." It is a world of streets, houses, trees, factories, fields, mines, all of which

iß Gesamtausgabe, Abt. i, Bd. 3, p. 83. 19 Ibid., p. 167. 20 Gesamtausgabe, Abt. i, Bd. 5, p. 531.



544 SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

represent the concretization of human work. Man's doing is infinitely more important than his knowing. And, therefore, the chief defect of Feuer- bach's philosophy is that he remains so much wrapped up in the problem of cognition: Feuerbach, like the other theoreticians, only wants to evoke a correct consciousness about an existing fact, while for the real Communists the important thing is to overturn the existing situation.2i

We can say in summary that if the "First Thesis" does not contain Marx's views on cognition, it does contain the very heart and core of dialectic materialism. It does not assert that man is active in learning about the world, but it identifies man's physical activity with the process of historical change. The relation of man's thinking to his action is another problem, raised by Marx in the "Second Thesis."

I wish to add a note about the fourth sentence of the "First Thesis," which has often been regarded as evidence of anti-Semitism on Marx's part, and has troubled many readers. In this sentence Marx states that ". . . in the Essence of Christianity . . . practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance." This mention of the Essence of Christianity, together with Engels' statement that this work had a great influence on Marx,22 has misled many authors into the erroneous belief that the "Theses" are based primarily upon it. The reader will have noticed that, in fact, Marx has chiefly in mind passages from Feuerbach's then most recent work, the Philosophie der Zukunft. However, to understand the meaning of this sentence we must of course turn to the work men- tioned in it, bearing in mind the fact that throughout the "Theses," and indeed throughout Die Deutsche Ideologie, there are frequent plays upon phrases borrowed from the authors under fire. There we find the following statements, made by Feuerbach:

Utility, profit, is the supreme principle of Judaism. 23 The Jews have maintained their peculiar character until the present day. Their prin-

ciple, their God, is the practical principle of the world - egoism, and egoism precisely in the form of religion.24

The practical viewpoint is a dirty viewpoint, stained by egoism, because in it my attitude toward a thing is only for my own sake.25

Thus, Marx's phrase is only a very concise notation describing Feuerbach's attitude toward practice, as something inferior to theory.

s. diamond 21 Ibid., p. 31. 22 Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 28. Mehring has pointed out that Engels erred by ascribing

to the Essence of Christianity any great influence over Marx. Mehring: Karl Marx (New York, 1935), p. 80.

23 Feuerbach, Sämmtliche Werke, vi, Das Wesen des Christentums (Stuttgart, 1903), P- 135-

z±Ibid., p. 137. 25 Ibid., p. 237.



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A REPLY TO PROFESSOR HOGBEN

In a recent article,1 Professor Lancelot Hogben includes some criticisms of my article, "Concerning Mathematics," which appeared in the first issue of this journal. He states three objections:

(1) My article reveals "obsessional Germanophilia." (2) It states that "the materialism typical of the seventeenth, eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries is characterized by the contention that real explanations are always of a quantitative character."

(3) It states that "Hegel was the first great philosopher to recognize the relative character of quantity fetishism."

Let me begin by saying that Hogben's third objection is not without foundation. English empiricism has never gone to the extremes reached by continental rationalism. Bacon, for example, protested against the claims to certainty advanced by mathematics and logic, "which ought to be but handmaids." 2 But English philosophy, so far as I know, never discussed the problem as thoroughly as Hegel did. Hegel consciously bridged the gap between quality and quantity, showed their relative character, and developed the category of quantity in such a way that the exaggerated rôle it played in the old materialist systems and the notable weaknesses of these systems were seen to be logically connected.3

But Hogben is wrong in regard to the other points. In accusing me of "obsessional Germanophilia," Hogben should remem-

ber that Marxism originated in the works of two Germans. It was based, as we know, on German philosophy, French socialism and English eco- nomics. In a paper dealing with philosophical subjects, we may therefore reasonably expect some reference to German authors. In due time and place we may as well expect obsessional Gallophilia and Anglophilia, not to speak of the dreaded Russophilia which the circumstances of Lenin's nationality necessarily invoke.

This does not mean that Hogben is wrong when he writes that we must seriously deal with the psychological problem in national cultures. The very existence of science and society shows how deeply American Marxists appreciate the need of rooting Marxism in American soil. But we emphatically deny that the great classics of art, literature, science and philosophy essentially belong to one national culture. Tolstoy, Hegel, Dar-

1 "Our Social Heritage," science and society, i, No. 2, pp. 137-152. 2 F. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Book 111, Ch. VI. a "On closer inspection we find that this purely mathematical point of view, in which

Quantity, this definite step in the development of the logical Idea, is identified with the Idea itself, is no other than that of materialism. . . ." {Encyclopadie, 1, 99). Hegel has special reference to French materialism of the eighteenth century.



54^ SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

win, Franklin, Confucius, Rembrandt and Euclid are the property of all nations, despite the fact that their work has peculiarities indicative of a particular culture. Hogben knows this, of course, but he seems to forget it because of an "obsessional Hegelophobia."

To show the absurdity of my claim that "the materialism typical of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is characterized by the contention that real explanations are always of a quantitative character," Hogben refers to Diderot, Lamettrie, Hobbes, Bacon, Mill, Joule, James, Lyell, the Webbs, Darwin and Haeckel. He might have added the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope, who are about as materialistic as James was. Most of the scientists in this list are not "materialist philosophers," and all those who are, with the exception of Lamettrie, are guilty of unduly stressing quantity. Hobbes, of course, is an especially clear example. I still maintain that for materialist philosophy from Kepler to Marx, my statement is, broadly speaking, true, and it has changed only through the evolution of mechanical materialism into dialectical materialism.

My contention that the old non-dialectical schools of materialism stress too much the importance of the category of quantity is a well-known thesis in Marxist literature, which essentially goes back, as we have seen, to Hegel, who tried to make materialism ridiculous by identifying "mechanism" and "materialism." * In its simplest form, "quantity-fetishism" is the belief that mathematics is the sole scientific instrument. From this naive starting point, it proceeds to strip matter of its different qualities and to consider only those properties as fundamental which can be treated mathematically. In their mathematical approach to materialism the old philosophers went further along the same road and reduced even physics, chemistry, biology, medicine and psychology to numbers and space. In my article in science and society, I argued that, in contrast to all this, a materialist approach to mathematics has to return to the old definition of mathematics as the science of number and space.

Quantity, however, does not alone consist of number and space, which are only its most prominent characteristics. When we examine things from the point of view of quantity, we ignore qualitative differences, and seek crude external relationships which eventually can be reduced to number and space. Thus both brains and stones are matter; color and sounds, waves; lightning and radio, electricity; steamers and autos, machines; carbon and iron, elements; shoes and guns, commodities. Natural science finds an important task in performing exactly this work of developing quantitative insight, and quantity therefore is an important element in natural science, and in the more abstract sciences its importance increases. Materialism of the old school used to stop at this, thinking it had explained the world

*F. Engels, Dialektik und Natur. Note zum Anti-Dühring, p. 473 of the 1935 edition.



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by reducing it to such abstractions. As long as mathematics was the only mature science, materialism saw as its task the reduction of the world to mathematics. With the growth of natural science, materialism had to use more qualitative elements in its quantitative explanations, such as those in physics, chemistry and physiology. It considered the analysis com- plete, however, only if physiology was explained as chemistry, chemistry as physics, physics as mechanics, and mechanics as mathematics. In the seventeenth century a body was extension; in the eighteenth century, tem- per, a function of the stomach; in the nineteenth century, thought, a motion in the brain. Let us briefly touch upon the forms and develop- ments of these ideas.

Emphasis on quantity as the most essential characteristic of nature had its origin at the beginnings of capitalism, in the philosophies of fifteenth and sixteenth century humanism, and as I pointed out in my article (p. 93), originally took the form of a struggle of Platonism against the traditional Aristotelianism. The philosophy of quantity then blossoms forth in full and youthful vigor and in great simplicity in the works of Kepler and Galileo. "Just as the eye was made to see colors, and the ear to hear sounds, so was the human mind made to understand, not whatever you please, but quantity," says Kepler.5 Galileo makes a sharp distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the first being absolutely objective, immutable and mathematical, the second, relative, subjective, fluctuating and variable. The real world was for him the world of bodies in mathematically reducible motions; tastes, odors, colors were "nothing else than mere names, holding their residence solely in the sensitive body." 6

This way of thinking influenced all creative thought of that century; no philosopher, either materialist or idealist, fully escaped its consequences. Materialism adopted it wholesale. The principle passed into French rationalism. For Descartes, exact scientific knowledge was mathematical knowledge, the only attribute of matter was extension. Hobbes defined a body as "that which having no dependence upon our thought, is coincident or coextended with some part of space," 7 thus taking the geometrical aspect of matter into its definition, and employed a mathematical, physical reduction of sensations. Spinoza, whose system has many ideas in common with rnaterialism, even modern materialism, chose not only an external mathematical form for his Ethics, but also saw in extension the nature of a body.

This was not due to "mathematical arrogance" but was the necessary outcome of the technical development of these days, a fact which nobody

5 Kepler, Opera, 1, p. 21. Ed. Frisch. e Cf. E. R. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1932),

PP. 75-83- 7 Works, 1, p. 102.



54^ SCIENCE AND SOCIETY has better explained than Hogben himself, in his recent admirable book.8 It is not an accident that so many philosophers of those days were mathe- maticians; you had to be a good mathematician to be a good philosopher. The clock was perhaps the most characteristic instrument of the period: a simple mechanical mechanism, which not only inspired good mathematics, but became the symbol of the supposed mechanistic character of the world. Descartes, Boyle, Locke, Leibnitz - materialists, empiricists, idealists - compared their world to a clock. I remember how even in my own religious instruction the dominie produced this parable of the clock, an example of mechanical materialism taken over by religion.

There was a reaction in the new theory of the period itself, and it came from sensualism and empiricism (where Hogben points this out, he is right). Gassendi told Descartes that anatomy, chemistry, different arts, senti- ments and experiences better manifest the nature of bodies than extension. When knowledge is reached through the senses, it comes primarily in qualitative form. The materialist, however, interprets this knowledge in terms of properties of matter, and the condition of natural science drove him into a mechanical interpretation, either directly, in the seventeenth century or via physiology, physics or chemistry in the eighteenth century. We witnessé it also in Boyle and other authors, such as Hartley, who meet materialism more than half way. Idealism protested, either by endowing matter with "force," as Leibnitz did, or by attacking the foundations of mathematics, as did Berkeley. But the most powerful and relentless criticism came from the development of the science itself, the growth of physics, of chemistry, of physiology, of biology, and also from the internal development of mathematics. Materialism, through its best representatives, therefore, began to emancipate itself from its old schemes, without losing its tendency to reduce all reality, if only ultimately, to mechanics. The interest in social and political matters also gave new material for thought. There the process goes along the path of a reduction of social and ethical behavior to laws of nature, which eventually turn out to be laws of mechanics.

Lamettrie compares man to a watch, and his materialism, which is that of a physician, looks for the changes and differences of man's thought in the physics of the body. The snobbery of the Briton, he explains, is due to his diet of rare and bloody meat. D'Holbach finds the reason for man's intellectual faculties in an internal, hidden motion inside his body. Diderot, in his masterful way, overcame, so far as the eighteenth century allowed, all remains of mechanical materialism. Together with Spinoza, he belongs to the direct philosophical ancestors of modern materialism. His philosophy of society had, however, the many weaknesses of contemporary doctrines, and his belief that no one could be a good moralist

s Mathematics for the Million (New York, 1937).



COMMUNICATIONS 549 without being a naturalist 9 was a concession to mechanical materialism. Many examples could be given to show how the idea of quantity dominated the leading minds of the time. For example, Condorcet, D'Alembert and even Laplace liked to speculate on the use of mathematical probabilities in determining the outcome of judgments in a tribunal.

With science growing in size and content, materialism could achieve a more balanced understanding of the relations of quantity and quality, especially in the philosophy of nature. Feuerbach, a materialist and a young Hegelian, represents a last link in the chain that leads to the dialectics of Marx and Engels. Essentially, he never surpassed Diderot, and in his occasional concessions to the vulgar materialism of the nineteenth century, even went a step backward. In this brand of materialism, which flourishes principally in Germany, we find that quantity-fetishism has returned, bringing its entire retinue of deductions. Moleschott constructed a kind of physiological materialism, in which thoughts are motions of matter.

This, however, sounded the death knell of the old materialism. Science had gone too far. Reduction of quality to quantity seemed to many of the best minds of the period to be a kind of hocus-pocus. The physiologist Emil du Bois Reymond, who proclaimed (1872) that "there are in reality no qualities," was led (1880) to his seven "world riddles." Agnosticism resulted from this type of materialism. Materialism became "old-fashioned," and the contradiction of quantity worship turned it into a ghost haunting the speculative dreams of the natural scientists.10

Mechanical materialism, indeed, was never fully able to cope with the criticism of the idealists, who used the weak points of mechanism, especially in questions relating to matter and mind, to attack materialism itself. In self-defense, mechanical materialism and ethics regularly made concessions to idealism, especially in the fields of social science and ethics, but also in the philosophy of nature. At present the boundary lines between mechanical materialism and idealism are vaguer than ever. We now find quantity-fetishism, even of the crudest kind, in some modern schools of an idealistic flavor. This is exemplified by the use of mathematics as a basis

9 Oeuvres, 11, p. 322. Cf. I. K. Luppol, Diderot (Paris, 1936), p. 307. 10 This ghost still walks. A most extreme expression ot this quantity-tetishism is to be

found in an article by W. Heisenberg, Sitz, der Akad., Leipzig, 85 (1933), pp. 29-40. The

physicist here shows how natural science has more and more abandoned the task of bringing life into sense-phenomena. It only extracts from it in increasing degree, its formal mathematical side. From modern optics no man, born blind, would ever be able to find out what light is. In modern atomic theory the atoms lose their last property, their geometrical qualities. All qualities of bodies now appear as deduced, every visual image of an atom is necessarily wrong. Heisenberg confines himself to the expression of his dismay concerning this divorce of natural science from nature. To us it means the final exposure of quantity worship as a fetish, that is, as an overemphasis on one aspect of nature.



55° SCIENCE AND SOCIETY for logical positivism. Witness statements like those of M. Schlick, which sound as if he has ignored the development of thought since the time of Kepler and Galileo: "The process of eliminating the qualities is the nucleus of all progress toward understanding the explaining sciences. Final understanding of qualities is only posible through the quantitative method." There is very little science in history: "Historical judgments lack inner connection in a high degree, they lack common elements. These disciplines are very rich in material, but very poor in Erkenntnisse. Historical facts are never understood with such perfection that they can be fully deduced from the circumstances.11 The logic of this reasoning leads Schlick into idealism, in particular, into that same empiri o-cri ti cism of Avenarius and Mach against, which Lenin warned in 1908.

Thus, the contention that all real explanations are always of a quantitative character, which Hogben regards as sheer "rubbish/* lives on in the most important movement of liberal philosophy of the present day. But Hogben is right when he refers to it as "rubbish." It is through Hegel and the dialectical materialists that we have learned to transcend this stage of materialist theory.

D. J. STRUIK

LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND THE UNITY OF SCIENCE

Otto Neurath, one of the leading logical positivists, has recently an- nounced x that the "International Unity of Science Movement" is well under way and that an Encyclopaedia of the Sciences, which has so long been an ideal of the Vienna Circle, is about to be realized. The first two volumes, in fact, are to appear in time for the Fifth International Congress for the Unity of Science at Harvard University in 1939, and the co- operation of distinguished scientists in different countries has already been enlisted. The unity of the sciences, which this movement envisages, is to be effected mainly by a unification of the language of the sciences. It is thought that the construction of a common language would enable scientists of various departments - physicists, biologists and psychologists - to exclude metaphysical problems and cooperate in the solution of the real problems, that is, those which permit of solution. So far, so good. A common language is still a revolutionary idea, though its achievement may involve the cultivation at certain stages of quite the opposite - many new nomen-

11 Allgemeine Erkenntnisslehre, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1925), pp. 258, 263, 72, resp. 1 Unified Science and its Encyclopaedia, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 4, No. 2, April,

1937-



Diamond Marx's 'First Thesis' on Feuerbach

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