The History of Philosophy: A Marxist Perspective Alan Woods Copyright © Wellred Books All rights reserved UK distribution: Wellred Books, wellredbooks.net PO Box 50525 London, E14 6WG [email protected] USA distribution: Marxist Books, marxistbooks.com WR Books 250 44th Street #208 Brooklyn New York, NY 11232 [email protected] Cover design by Jesse Murray-Dean, based on ‘Untitled, 1919-1920’ by El Lissitzky (public domain) Ebook produced by Martin Swayne, published September 2021 Table of Contents Introduction 1. The Emergence of Philosophy 2. The First Dialecticians 3. Aristotle and the End of Classical Greek Philosophy 4. The Rise of Christianity 5. Islamic Philosophy 6. Philosophy in the Middle Ages 7. The Renaissance 8. Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz 9. The Dead End of Kantianism 10. Hegel’s Revolution in Philosophy 11. From Hegel to Marx Bibliography Introduction THE STARTING POINT I first started work on The History of Philosophy some twenty-seven years ago, when writing Reason in Revolt, a book that dealt with the relationship between Marxist philosophy and modern science. The book was a big success, but it turned out to be much longer than I had originally anticipated. Due to considerations of length, I was reluctantly obliged to omit the first part, which dealt with the history of philosophy, leading up to Marx’s great revolution, the theory of dialectical materialism. The intention had been to publish The History of Philosophy as a separate work sometime in the future. But for different reasons, that decision was delayed to make way for more pressing tasks. For more than two decades, the manuscript was put to one side, left to the gnawing criticism of the mice, as Marx once said, referring to the unpublished text of the German Ideology. It was eventually published on our website, and was favourably received, but the original intention of publishing it as a book remained unfulfilled until now. I owe it to the pressure of a number of comrades with a special interest in philosophy that I have been spurred into action to publish this work. It represents a contribution to the ongoing campaign of the International Marxist Tendency to combat bourgeois ideology and to defend and propagate the ideas of Marxism. This was a timely and necessary decision. At a time when the capitalist system finds itself in a terminal crisis, the bankruptcy of the existing order inevitably finds its expression in an evident decline of every aspect of intellectual life. This is particularly glaring in the field of philosophy, where bourgeois thought expresses its decay in a most scandalous manner. The struggle for socialism is not confined to politics and economics. It must be carried on at all levels, starting with the level of ideas. If the present work helps to arm the workers and youth in this necessary struggle, my aim will have been achieved. Those who have read the original manuscript will see that, in all essential points, it has been maintained. But I have revised the text thoroughly with the assistance of comrades, and have added new sections, notably in the chapter on the Middle Ages, and also added a final chapter, which explains why philosophy – at least in the old sense of the word – comes to an end with Marxism. You may also have noticed that the additional chapter on Indian philosophy that was included as an appendix has been omitted from the present edition, while the chapter on Islamic philosophy has been reduced, dealing mainly with the role it played in the Middle ages. This was neither accidental nor due to any lack of interest on my part. Quite the opposite, in fact. As you will appreciate, the presentation of two-and-a-half millennia of philosophy is a very daunting task, and for reasons of space I was compelled to omit many important aspects of the subject, which had to be stripped of all but the most basic essentials. The evolution of Oriental philosophy (which would have to encompass Chinese philosophy – a vast topic in itself) proceeded on quite different lines to that of philosophy in the West, which reached its peak in Hegel and culminated in the philosophical revolution brought about by Marx and Engels. To do justice to that subject would have required not merely a huge (and quite unwarranted) expansion of the present book, but would have demanded one or more additional volumes. Therefore, rather than publish an unsatisfactory résumé of quite a complicated subject, which would please nobody, least of all myself, I decided to set this subject to one side, with the intention of perhaps returning to it when the pressure of time and work allows. WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? Marxism began as a philosophy, and the philosophical method of Marxism is of fundamental importance in understanding the ideas of Marx and Engels. But what is philosophy? Philosophy is a way of thinking, different from the kind of thinking we are used to in ordinary life. It does not confine itself to the immediate questions of daily life but attempts to grapple with the big questions of life and death, the universe, the nature of ideas and matter, and what is good and what is bad. These are issues that ultimately are of great importance to every one of us. Yet they do not normally occupy a central place in the thoughts of most people. For the whole of history, at least up to the present time, the minds of most men and women have been mainly absorbed by the daily struggle for existence. They are fully occupied with such mundane questions as: will I have a job next week? Will I have enough money to last until the end of the month? Will I have a roof over my head, a school for my children, and so on and so forth. Yet human thought is capable of far greater things. The history of thought includes the history of art, beginning with the wonderful cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira; the history of science, which has enabled us to conquer nature and reach out our hands to the stars; and also the history of philosophy, with its many astonishing insights. Philosophy emerges as soon as men and women begin to try to explain the world without the intervention of supernatural agencies: gods and goddesses and all the rest of the superstitious paraphernalia of religion that have been carried over from the most primitive times. It marks the beginning of a scientific understanding of nature and of ourselves. A REVOLUTIONARY WORLD OUTLOOK Marxism is first and foremost a world outlook, or philosophy if you prefer. It has a vast scope. It is a theory of history and of economics, and also a guide to revolutionary action. But where did Marx get his ideas from? They did not drop from the clouds. Marx himself explained that there were three main sources to his ideas: there was English classical bourgeois economics (Adam Smith and David Ricardo), then there were the bold pioneers of utopian socialism: the Frenchmen Saint-Simon and Fourier, and my fellow Welshman Robert Owen. But the first and most important element in the formative stages of the ideas of Marx and Engels was without doubt German classical philosophy, particularly Hegel. And this, in turn, was the product of a lengthy period of the development of many different schools of philosophical thought. Now, it would be very easy to dismiss, for example, the ideas of the utopian socialists (as Dühring did). But surely it is more appropriate to pay tribute to their remarkable contribution to the history of socialism and to recognise the part their ideas played in the formative stage of Marxism? I recently re-read parts of Robert Owen and I can tell you that some of his ideas are still quite revolutionary today. Does that mean that, in paying tribute to Owen, we advocate going back to the ideas of utopian socialism? Of course not! But it is impossible to deny that these ideas played an important role in the development of scientific socialism. This is a simple fact. I have occasionally come across a rather childish prejudice that imagines that everything that came before Marx and Engels can be discarded as conservative and reactionary. It is quite true that not only Hegel but also Adam Smith and Ricardo were ‘upper class thinkers’. Some foolish people imagine that this fact alone would be sufficient to disqualify them as great revolutionary thinkers. It is also true that some of them (though by no means all) held political views that tended towards conservatism, or even reaction. Hegel himself was conservative in his political views, although in his younger years he sympathised with the French Revolution. But that does not alter the fact that his dialectical method contained a very revolutionary element – a fact that was recognised by the reactionary Prussian authorities, who regarded Hegel with suspicion, and even suspected him of atheism and subversive views. Marx explained long ago that the ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class. These men represented the most advanced thought of their day and Marx based himself on these ideas. The law of value that was discovered by Adam Smith and developed by Ricardo led directly to Marx’s theory of surplus value, and the idealist dialectic of Hegel led to dialectical materialism. The idea that Marxists can ignore the ideas of the past is as stupid as the prejudice held by some extreme anarchists that, in order to build a new classless society, it is necessary to destroy everything that has gone before and build it anew. This is the distilled essence of utopianism and, if we were to accept it, we would rule out the possibility of carrying out a socialist revolution in practice. A socialist revolution would not destroy the existing achievements of capitalism but, on the contrary, would build on them, filling them with an entirely different social and class content. The achievements of science and technology would no longer serve the interests of a tiny parasitic ruling class, but would be planned harmoniously in the interests of the whole of society. We will build the new society, using the bricks left over by the old, for the simple reason that no other ready-made bricks exist for the purpose. In the same way that we would make use of the existing productive forces – the land, the factories, science and technology – inherited from the old society, so we should base ourselves on the most advanced ideas developed in the past. Marxism negated Hegel’s idealism, while simultaneously preserving all that was progressive and revolutionary in his dialectical method. The founders of scientific socialism rescued the dialectic, which in the hands of Hegel was presented in a distorted, idealist guise, and placed it for the first time on a sound materialist foundation. In doing so, they created a powerful weapon for changing society along revolutionary lines. WHY STUDY THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY? All the writings of Marx and Engels are based on a definite philosophical method and cannot be understood without it, the method of dialectical materialism. The same is true of the works of Lenin and Trotsky, the most outstanding representatives of Marxist thought in the twentieth century. Dialectics was already known to the ancient Greeks and was later developed by Hegel. The basic ideas of dialectical materialism are not so difficult to grasp. Like all great ideas, they are essentially simple, and they are beautiful in their simplicity. But all too many who regard themselves as Marxists are content to repeat a few basic ideas without giving any thought to the deeper meaning of what they are saying. Such ‘Marxists’ resemble a young child who has learned to recite the multiplication tables by rote, or rather, a parrot that has learned by imitating human speech to repeat certain sentences, without having the vaguest understanding of their meaning. In order to arrive at a full understanding of dialectical materialism, a great deal of careful study will be necessary. At the moment, I am working on a further comprehensive work on Marxist philosophy, which I hope will help to clarify the more complicated questions involved. But there is a difficulty involved in the study of philosophy in general, and Marxist philosophy in particular, and one that lies at the heart of the present work. When Marx and Engels wrote about dialectical materialism, they could presuppose a basic knowledge of the history of philosophy on the part of at least the educated reading public of the day. Nowadays, it is impossible to make such an assumption.