Marxism and the Open Mind

John Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351506731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In Marxism and the Open Mind, John Lewis seeks to explain Marxism as a system of thought. In doing so, he addresses the studied neglect or grotesque misrepresentation that he feels characterizes Western attitudes toward Marxism. Lewis also aims to stimulate what he believes to be a long overdue re-evaluation of Marxism in the light of what was contemporary thought in 1957, the year of the book's original publication and the height of the Cold War era.

The essays include chapters on human rights and a discussion on Marxism and liberty. Marxist ethics, a much-neglected theme, is the subject of an essay that deals with some of the most deeply felt criticisms of Marxism in the 1950s. The ethical aspects of Marxism are examined once again in a contribution to the debate on Marxism and religion. The volume concludes with essays on Berdyaev and Sartre, which strike a note on the Marxist estimation of these thinkers, and with an essay on Marxist humanism.

The essays cover a wide field of thought, uniting a close and sympathetic study of Marxism with a critical judgment rooted in academic training at three universities and experience in the Christian ministry.

1

Idealism and Ideologies

[The basis of this essay appeared under the title Marxism and Modern Idealism in the Marxism Today Series edited by Professor Benjamin Farrington. A section has been added criticizing Zhdanov’s views on Partisanship in Philosophy.]

I. Does it Matter What a Man Believes?

Philosophy has been conceived to be a purely academic pursuit of no possible interest to the man of action, the speculative activity of curious minds with nothing better to do. Its subject matter is supposed by many to be that which lies beyond everyday experience and is therefore in its very nature either unknowable or non-existent.

But as a matter of fact the man in the street has more philosophical notions in his head than he knows and they affect both his thinking and his actions. It has been well said that ‘we have no choice whether we shall form philosophies for ourselves, only the choice whether we shall do so consciously and in accord with some intelligible principle or unconsciously and at random’. The man who is contemptuous of philosophy may be merely a man with an unexamined philosophy, whose assumptions are uncritically held and many of whose judgments are prejudices. ‘The unexamined life’, said Socrates, ‘is not worth living,’ and an unexamined philosophy may prove to be equally unsatisfactory.

A moment’s reflection reveals the extent to which modern thinking is saturated with unexamined philosophical notions and it is not difficult to trace their origin back to modes of thought which were the consciously held and taught philosophies of yesterday or to the writers, journalists, broadcasters, lecturers, preachers and teachers of our own day, some of them philosophers, others popularizers of other men’s philosophies, but all of them reflecting in one way or another the current philosophical notions of the time. Eventually discussion and conversation spread these ideas more widely still until the man in the railway train is heard declaring that science no longer believes in matter, the wife by the fireside argues that instinct is more to be trusted than reason, or someone on the Brains Trust informs a credulous world that there is a lot to be said for spiritualism.

At first glance these common beliefs may seem to be quite unimportant, but their significance is greater than appears. An immense increase in superstition characterized the decline of ancient Rome and now accompanies the disintegration of our own civilization.

The cult of unreason has been one of the diseases of the fascist mind in Germany and Italy and reflects a deliberate turning back to barbarism, the repudiation of the rational and scientific approach to the world.

The renewed belief in mentalism—the theory that mind is the fundamental stuff of the universe and that matter is secondary or even unreal, is closely related to many reactionary attitudes and much social pessimism.

A considerable number of these loosely held views are closely bound up with certain philosophical doctrines, chiefly those of what is known as idealism.

From the standpoint of academic philosophy these theories do not engage much attention today. Interest has shifted in the past twenty years to quite other problems. But at the same time the gulf between serious philosophical thinking and popular ideas on the problems of life has widened. Philosophy has become more academic, more remote, more technical; it has ceased to concern itself with the meaning of life and now busies itself mainly with the logical significance of sentences. Now the consequence of this is not at all that ordinary men cease to think about the more traditional type of philosophical problem, but that they do so in almost complete isolation from rigorous philosophical thought. There is therefore today a vast amount of loose, out-of-date, highly speculative philosophizing which moves on quite a different level from academic philosophy and is completely ignored by it.

This philosophizing invades every field. It is the basis of all religious teaching, and we must remember that although church-going has fallen off the B.B.C. pours out a continuous stream of religious propaganda both directly in its religious broadcasts and indirectly in many of its discussions and talks. Our literary men are great philosophers—Charles Morgan and Aldous Huxley are much esteemed, and whether their theories are taken seriously or not by trained thinkers matters not a jot to the wide circle of their by no means unintelligent readers. Then as we know there is a growing cult of mysticism, such as the system of Ouspensky, which is taken very seriously by an increasing number of thoughtful people.

Basic to most of these views is the widely held belief that the world consists of two ultimate realities, mind and matter, and that mind or spirit can exist independently of matter, so that thinking is not dependent on the brain but can go on as an activity of pure mind. This is known as dualism.

Underlying the view that mind can exist independently of matter is a particular theory of the relation of thinking and being. One of the most fundamental problems of philosophy is whether matter gives rise to mind or mind to matter, and all forms of supernaturalism derive support from the theory of the primacy of spirit. If spirit exists prior to matter and can create it, then spiritual beings can exist apart from bodies.

A more philosophical doctrine, which however also derives from the belief in the independence of thought from its material basis, is the theory that the ideals towards which we should strive belong to the world of mind and lie farthest from the physical realm. In contemplation of such spiritual realities the soul finds a perfection which does not belong to the lower world of sensual experience.

Other philosophers go farther and assert that since the world as we experience it is imperfect and irrational it must be less than real, for reality, which is pure spirit, is perfectly rational and good. If this is so, our attitude to the world’s evil will not be to grapple with it or to attempt to remove it but to alter our attitude towards it until we perceive its illusory character and discover the Reality behind it which is already perfect, and in that deeper knowledge rest content,

Once dualism is accepted it is almost inevitable that some form of supernaturalism will result and men will come to believe that spiritual beings can interfere with human lives, can control material events and even influence history. Finally we reach the belief that a creator spirit brought the world into existence and guides its destiny. From this men frequently draw the conclusion that they should leave the control of affairs to providence and not presumptuously attempt to take responsibility for shaping human history.

Now whether these beliefs turn our attention to spiritual beings which are supposed to affect earthly events, or to a Providence upon whom rests all responsibility for our destinies, or whether on the other hand they turn our attention from the realities of experience to transcendental abstractions, the result is the same. It turns us away from our real responsibilities and from any effective grappling with the problems of the actual world, whether social or scientific.

Without casting the least doubt upon the sincerity of those who hold such theories it is clear that the attitude to life which follows from them would discourage any activity designed to interfere with the world as it is, an outcome not unwelcome to those who dread the consequences of social change.

II. The Delusion of Dualism

One of the most powerful philosophical influences which for the past 300 years has fostered the belief in the independent existence of spirit is the philosophy of Descartes. Descartes was a dualist, that is to say he believed that there were two completely independent and distinct forms of reality—matter, which occupies space and is only capable of motion, and mind, which does not occupy space and whose sole property is to think.

This rigid dualism has not always been held by philosophers and its origin is of considerable interest from the standpoint of the history of science. It arose in the early days of mechanical science as a theory which set science free from supernaturalism, while accommodating itself to religious beliefs by creating a special world of pure mind entirely separate from the world of matter.

Science could make no progress so long as it was imagined that mind, or mysterious principles and essences, or other non-material forces, played a part in the physical world. Galileo, and later Newton, were at this time formulating the basic laws of mechanics, which accounted for all the movements of material things from falling stones to planets. This raised a philosophical problem. Could one, without rejecting religion, consider the world as a closed mechanical system subject to mathematical law? Descartes proceeded to answer this question. He argued that the whole of reality as it is extended in space is subject to rigid mathematical law and excludes mind and the influence of mind altogether. “Give me extension and motion,’ he said, ‘and I will construct the universe.’ Descartes was of course well aware that he was unable to account for mind in these physical terms, but he proceeded to assert that there was a second form of reality, which did not occupy space and whose sole property it was to think. Clearly mind or thinking substance cannot possibly interact with matter or extended substance. Thus arose that strange philosophical division of the universe into two distinct realities, body and mind, which has not been overcome down to our own day. It had two opposite consequences. On the one hand science went ahead and by the immense success of its purely mathematical approach and because it ruled out the supernatural, achieved considerable victories. Many of its followers dropped Descartes’ belief in the existence of a world of pure mind, which seemed to them entirely superfluous, and became materialists. On the other hand, those who based their thinking on Descartes’ proofs of the existence of pure spirit, soon found they had no need for matter. They became mentalists, that is to say, they regarded all supposedly physical things as in reality consisting of ideas in the mind.

Those who discarded the existence of mind, however, could not so easily get rid of it. It proved to be, if not the skeleton, then at any rate the ghost in the cupboard, and it never ceased to plague them.

If the physical universe is without mind but nevertheless men obviously think and feel and hope and are conscious of the difference between right and wrong, then mind must exist as a thing in itself. To that conclusion men will continue to come, in spite of science, as certainly as water will come in through the holes of a sieve. They are wrong, of course, but they are forced to be wrong in order somehow to justify the indisputable evidence for the mental and spiritual elements in human life.

In their efforts to win back the mind which is separate from matter they will be compelled to follow one of two courses. The first solution is to go back to dualism and stand these utterly incompatible entities side by side, invoking the super natural to explain their interaction. This position is known as interactionism and it is widely held today outside scientific and philosophical circles. A second view, known as psycho physical parallelism, holds that for every physical event in the brain there is a mental event in the mind, but makes no attempt to account for this state of affairs. However, those who believe that mind can exist independently of matter, but who also believe that material things exist, are really basing their belief on the assumption that matter is only capable of motion and cannot, in any form, manifest the properties of life or of thinking being. This is a materialist assumption.

But there is another solution, natural to those convinced of the independent reality of mind, and this is to deny the existence of matter, except as a construct or projection or creation of mind, and thus we slide rapidly down into mentalism.

Both positions are false. Thought is real enough, but it never takes place except in brains. Brains are material, but they think.

Now this is a dialectical solution and Marxism is a dialectical philosophy. Descartes splits the unity of thinking matter and creates the thesis and antithesis, the opposites, body and mind. This is an historical necessity and a phase in the development of science and thought. But it is not a final phase. It creates insoluble contradictions. They are resolved, not eclectically by tying up mind and matter side by side, but dialectically, by a return to the original unity on a higher level. ‘The identity of opposites,’ said Lenin, ‘more accurately perhaps their unity, is the recognition of the mutually exclusive and opposed tendencies in all the phenomena and processes of nature.’¹ ‘The existence of two mutually contradictory aspects, their conflict and their flowing together into a new category,’ wrote Marx, ‘comprises the essence of the dialectical movement.’

In the new synthesis we enrich that unity and we resolve the contradictions. That is the Marxist as it is the biological and philosophical solution of the Body-Mind problem.

Marxism maintains the unity and interpenetration of opposites which we find in the concrete world. In a thinking man mind and matter are united and interdependent. To consider a living body as pure matter is an abstraction, and while it may be useful enough to abstract the physical or mathematical properties of such an organism for practical purposes, yet we must ultimately put back into the whole what we have abstracted from it.

III. What Do I Know?

The materialist successors of Descartes ceased to bother themselves with the dualism of mind and matter, either ignoring it or regarding thought as a function of matter when organized in brains. Very soon, however, another problem arose which had considerable social significance. If the mind is an activity of the brain, it can derive its knowledge only from the sense organs, and that knowledge, however much it may later be developed by the brain, will, in the first instance, be of material objects. This excludes all knowledge obtained by intuition, whether of God, or other supernatural beings, of divine truths, or of eternal principles, and all knowledge based on authority. This undermined, of course, the non-rational, authoritarian foundations of existing institutions and prepared the way for the over throw of Stuart despotism and the beginnings of constitutionalism.

This simple doctrine of human knowledge, though, has grave limitations. Knowledge is more than the imprint of sense impressions on the clean sheet of the mind. There is in all thinking an active function of the mind, selecting and organizing sense experience.

Now it was idealism, especially the idealism of Kant, which first drew attention to the activity of the mind itself in the acquirement of knowledge. Subsequently psychology was able to do justice to this approach without accepting Kant’s idealistic standpoint, and we were able to pass from a theory of knowledge which regarded it as a merely passive reflection of the external world to one which took into account man’s interaction with his environment.

Kant showed that we were constrained to select what we saw and to classify it and organize it according to what he called the categories but we should call the presuppositions, the historically changing points of view, of the thinking man. This is what Lenin called the dialectical element in knowledge, the recognition that what we see depends upon what we are looking for, upon our vital interests, our previous mental equipment, on the stage we have reached in the development of science and production. Now if this is so, all knowledge is relative. But however conditioned and relative our knowledge at any stage may be, it still reflects objective reality, and is an approximation to absolute truth. The fact that we can and do know truth, however imperfectly, that we are really in touch with objective material nature, is proved to us by our practice, which remakes and changes the material world.

We conclude that what we know depends on a multitude of particular circumstances. This is the truth behind the fact that we perceive only through sense data. We perceive objects, but the qualities of objects are conditioned in all manner of ways, Qualities do not merely inhere in substance but are given in the relationship of the observer to the object. In the object is ‘the permanent possibility of sensation’. That possibility is only realized under conditions, and not only the object but the conditions under which it is perceived, determine what the qualities are. This contradicts the purely sceptical view that because our knowledge is relative we know nothing of reality at all, but only the fictions and distortions of our own minds. But however relative our knowledge to the conditions under which we know, whatever properties and laws we discover are really there under those conditions, and are as accurately recorded as the circumstances allow, the results are true, as far as they go. This is less than naïve realism claims when it ass...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Idealism and Ideologies
• 2 Historical Inevitability
• 3 On Human Rights
• 4 Marxism and Liberty
• 5 Marxism and Ethics
• 6 The Marxist Answer to the Challenge of Our Time
• 7 Marxist Humanism
• 8 Sartre and Society
• 9 Berdyaev, Socialist and Heretic
• 10 Communism the Heir to the Christian Tradition
• Index of Proper Names