Philosophy

Philosophy (Gr., Philosophia—the love of wisdom) is the name for the whole body of thought, in its historical development, concerning the kind of world we live in, the kind of beings we are, and our relation to the world. In this sense everyone has a philosophy but as a logically thought-out and organized conception of nature and man, most such “philosophy” remains eclectic and loose. Philosophy is traditionally expressed in terms of fundamental attitudes towards such basic questions as the general nature of existence or being (ontology); of the nature, limits, and extent of knowledge (epistemology, logic); the problems of human values or the good life (ethics); of social organization (political or social philosophy); and of art and beauty (esthetics). One of the most fundamental problems of philosophy concerns the relation of thinking to being, or in technical terms, of epistemology to ontology. In accordance with the way in which this problem is handled, philosophical tendencies divide themselves into two chief camps—materialism and idealism. The history of philosophy, in fact, has consisted primarily of the struggle of mankind towards a materialist or scientific world view against all forms of idealism, mysticism, and obscurantism—in short, against religious attitudes in all their forms. Philosophy arose in China and India with the beginnings of civilization. It began in Europe in the sixth century B.C. in ancient Greece, where it attained a brilliant development and succeeded in outlining the main types of world view, such as those of materialism and idealism, and in defining the major problems that have concerned philosophy ever since. In the Middle Ages, philosophy scarcely existed as an independent discipline, but was generally regarded as the “handmaiden of theology.” Together with the development of modern science by the bourgeoisie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, classic bourgeois or modern philosophy grew up. This philosophy achieved its highest development in the materialism of the eighteenth-century French philosophers of the Enlightenment and in the development of dialectics by Hegel in Germany in the first decades of the nineteenth century. After this, bourgeois philosophy began to degenerate and to assume the form of reactionary idealistic or completely agnostic systems devoid of any scientific significance. Marx and Engels developed in dialectical materialism the only philosophy that could be called genuinely scientific and progressive in relation to the basic problems of the modern period. For a long time, as a consequence of the relative backwardness of the special sciences, philosophy was regarded as a kind of “science of sciences,” including within itself all branches of human knowledge and giving guidance to them all in virtue of its possession of a monopoly on “first principles.” But by the middle of the nineteenth century, the natural and social sciences achieved a development that put an end to this situation, inasmuch as they no longer required a philosophy standing over and above them. The Marxist dialectical method, itself generalized from all human experience and especially the sciences, provides the means for the study of nature and society in a scientific way. Marxist philosophical materialism, also derived from the whole of human experience and especially from that involved in the labor necessary to maintain our life, combats all tendencies towards idealism and teaches that what science learns in every field is the laws of motion of matter in one or another form. Dialectical materialism, in short, is derived from the knowledge acquired by all experience and science and in turn helps to direct behavior and the sciences in a progressive direction. Historical materialism represents an application of the basic principles of dialectical materialism to the study of human society. These theoretical principles constitute the foundations of scientific communism.