Materialism Doctrine and The Origin of Language Varinder Khurana 1 / Materialism, Doctrine and The Origin of Language Materialism, Doctrine and the Origin of Language Varinder Khurana Patiala (Punjab) - 147002 Mobile – 94782-58283 E-mail: [email protected] © Author ISBN: 978-81-954779-2-0 Price – INR 250/- First Edition: 2021 Published by: Progress International Publishers Patran, Patiala, Mob. 87278-35066, 99147-45739 Email: [email protected] Printed & Bound at Twentyfirst Century Printing Press, Patiala All Rights Reserved This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The copyright of paintings, illustrations rests solely with the copyright-holding artists. 2 / Materialism, Doctrine and The Origin of Language To The Founders of Materialism 3 / Materialism, Doctrine and The Origin of Language 4 / Materialism, Doctrine and The Origin of Language As a Preface The Key to Historical Materialism When the question of the origin of language arises in our minds, it is essential to go to the correct source for correct interpretation. Materialism is omnipotent because it is the interpretation of objective reality. Thus, we have to travel through dialectical and historical materialism; the outlook of Materialism (Dialectical) to reach the destination of truth. Here we want to assert that the present work is nothing in itself, but an elaborated description of the objective reality. We consider Materialism as the foundation for this work, and the founders of Materialism, our sages, and we are just following their bequest. Here, as a preface, we will discuss an article by Engels; “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Men”. This article presents the fundamental consideration for the origin of language. * * * This article was written in June of 1876, “…[it] was written as an introduction to his larger work The Three Basic Forms of Slavery. He later changed the title of this work to The Enslavement of the Workers: Introduction. This was the reason that this brief work touches so many topics; the laws governing the biological and social emergence of mankind, the interaction of society and nature, the possible social consequences of productive activity, the development of the private property, the transitory nature of capitalism, the numerous others” (Andreyev). But this work could not get completed and he included this article in ‘Dialectics of Nature’ by entitling it as‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’, so it is now a part of 5 / Materialism, Doctrine and The Origin of Language the mentioned work. Dialectics of Nature was written in 1883 and got published in 1927; in USSRposthumously (d. 1895). This article also remained unpublished during the lifetime of Engels; it was the journal of German social-democrats in which this article was published in 1896 for the first time. This Great work of Engels is a firm means to understand the materialist outlook, i.e. the Dialectical Materialism; the outlook of Marxism in real means. This work firmly explains the transformation of man from ape by discussing the part played by labour in this developmental process. Three transformations in apes i.e. the erect movement (walking), the evolution of the hand, and the evolution of the brain, were instrumental in its transformation into humans. Origin of labour, construction of tools, hunting strategies, and the use of fire were the stages of this evolution as well as the instruments for further development. The origin of language took place as the need of human society, for which the appropriate structure of the human body (which was the outcome of the evolution), played a conducive role. This chapter of human evolution is discussed in the above- mentioned work briefly. The material developed in this work can be traced tremendously in another great work of Engels; ‘Family, Private Property and the Origin of the State’. In the introduction of “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Men”; Engels writes; “Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert”(Engels). But Engels, in addition to this opinion of political economists, writes; “And it really is the source – next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself” (Engels). Engels suggested the answer to the biggest question of history by this sole statement i.e. ‘the question of the origin ofhumans’. This pamphlet answer that humans are neither the creation of any 6 / Materialism, Doctrine and The Origin of Language almighty nor an alien species that evolved differently from the other species on Earth (as it is unscientifically propagated in the name of science, that the humans came or were sent from some alien planets and the other unscientific doctrines of the same kind are also being propagated). Rather, man also evolved through the law of change and development – as all the living beings and matter are bound to change through – from a type of monkeys; called the apes. It is the labour of human hands that created and evolved man superiorly in comparison to other living-world. Engels presented a strong basis to the fact that living organisms follow the ‘Law of the co-relational growth’ and the species which evolved as humans erected their posture to walk with freeing their hands from this function by following this law. He referred to Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, “This law states that the specialised forms of separate parts of an organic being are always bound up with certain forms of other parts that apparently have no connection with them” (Engels). He also presented an example from Darwin’s work related to this law. It was because of the ‘Law of the co-relational growth’, the development of the brain started, and which was triggered by the free hands of the ape and the origin of labour that transformed the ape into man. Engels writes; “First, owing to their way of living which meant that the hands had different functions than the feet when climbing, these apes began to lose the habit of using their hands to walk and adopted a more and more erect posture. This was the decisive step in the transition from ape to man” (ibid). According to Engels, the probable period of that ape which transformed into man was the tertiary period and it was “many hundreds of thousands of years ago” and their living place was “a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean”. As the initial stream toward the transformation in man had been crossed by our ancestors with the change in diet and the change in the structure and the use of hand as well as feet. But the actual transformation took place with the origin 7 / Materialism, Doctrine and The Origin of Language of labour. Before this, they use tools to gather food, to make roofs, for their defence from the predatory animals, but this was not labour in the exact words. About the origin of labour Engels writes; “Food became more and more varied, as did also the substances entering the body with it, substances that were the chemical premises for the transition to man. But all that was not yet labour in the proper sense of the word. Labour begins with the making of tools” (ibid.). Early humans, who lived as herds, experienced the profound effect of the development of hands, by the origin of labour humans found a way to dominate nature. Humans kept discovering new qualities of natural things and at the same time, the increased joint activity due to the development of the hand caused social relations to be more firm. The need to talk within these firm social relations originated the speech. Karl Marx writes about the origin of language in ‘The German Ideology’, “Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men” (Marx and Engels). Consciousness is a human characteristic. To understand language and consciousness it is essential to keep the following statement in the mind; “Consciousness: is the highest stage of material motion (of the dual-fold effect of matter adaptation and reflection). It is a phenomenon of appearance from spiritual and again spiritual from appearance. It is a complex phenomenon of the transformation of the abstract from concrete and then concrete from the abstract. There is an activity of mind during abstract phenomena and it is human, social activity during concrete phenomena” (Jagrup Singh). 8 / Materialism, Doctrine and The Origin of Language It means consciousness is the characteristic that arises in man because of the social system and it is the higher stage of the characteristics of adaptation and reflection. This characteristic of adaptation and reflection appears as the characteristic of “spirit” and “soul” in living matter but in man, this characteristic achieves a higher form of “Mind” and “consciousness”. This consciousness becomes “language” in humans, let us see another reference to lustre this concept more, “Consciousness is the gesture to hold the group together; the voice and the language gesture to attract attention, to the achievement of the human collective activity. It is a complex process of the accumulation of the concrete experiences of practice into abstract concepts and of reproducing them. It gets enriched during the social practice of human development” (Jagrup Singh). The whole of this process now can be understood based on Engels pamphlet, because of the specific way of living of the ancestral man, there must be a gradual but significant different development taken place in the structure of their hand than feet and this difference was proven conducive for the erect walking posture of man. When they started to walk erectly, they used their hands to gather food which has further been instrumental for the use of tools and ultimately for the making of tools that is known as the origin of labour. Here the importance of diet arises and the tendency of migration in animals in the search of new food areas after digesting all the reachable vegetation in one place;‘Predatory Economy’ as it is mentioned in this pamphlet, is an important feature. Different diets from different places enriched with different (and new) chemical features, enhanced new qualitative in body structure. These were the characteristics that differentiated man from the rest of the living world. Our ancestors while living in herds must have been using similar means of communication like other animals. But the speech produced by the human voicebox is a human-characteristic. That undoubtedly is the biggest contribution added by the labour in the evolution of man. 9 / Materialism, Doctrine and The Origin of Language