² Doubts have sometimes been raised as to whether Marx should properly be called a philosophical materialist. His own view on the matter is sufficiently clear, if not from this first Thesis on Feuerbach, then from the ninth and tenth Theses, where he contrasts the ‘old’ (‘contemplative’) materialism with a ‘new’ materialism which must surely be his own.

³ See for example Binns, Peter, ‘The Marxist Theory of Truth’, in Radical Philosophy 4.Google Scholar

⁴ Marx, and Engels, , Selected Works, II (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1951), 92f. and 335f. respectively.Google Scholar

⁵ Capital, I, Part VI, ch. XIX.Google Scholar

⁶ The essay is in Kolakowski, Leszek, Marxism and Beyond (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969)Google Scholar, to which page references are given. The same collection of essays has also been published under the title Towards a Marxist Humanism (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1969)Google Scholar. Similar interpretations of Marx's epistemology can be found in, for example, Avineri, Shlomo, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: CUP, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 3, and Schmidt, Alfred, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: New Left Books, 1971)Google Scholar, ch. 3 B-C. It will be apparent that the ideas to be considered are not confined to Marx or his interpreters. Similar ideas have, since 1845, been developed in various ways by other philosophers. One might mention, for example, Nietzsche's perspectivism, Dewey's instrumentalism, Merleau-Ponty's work in The Phenomenology of Perception, and the work of contemporary philosophers such as Stuart Hampshire (in his Thought and Action). For an interesting survey of some of this material, see Bernstein, Richard, Praxis and Action (London: Duckworth, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ ‘For the doctrinaire professor, man's relation to nature is from the beginning not practical, i.e. based on action, but theoretical. … But men do not begin by standing “in this theoretical relation with the objects of the external world”. Like all animals they begin by eating, drinking, etc., i.e. they do not “stand” in any relation but are engaged in activity, appropriate certain objects of the external world by means of their actions, and in this way satisfy their needs (i.e. they begin with production). As a result of the repetition of this process it is imprinted in their minds that objects are capable of “satisfying” the “needs” of men. Men and animals also learn to distinguish “theoretically” the external objects which serve to satisfy their needs from all other objects. At a certain level of later development, with the growth and multiplication of men's needs and the types of action required to satisfy these needs, they gave names to whole classes of these objects, already distinguished from other objects on the basis of experience. That was a necessary process, since in the process of production, i.e. the process of the appropriation of objects, men are in a continuous working relationship with each other and with individual objects, and also immediately become involved in conflict with other men over these objects. Yet this denomination is only the conceptual expression of something which repeated action has converted into experience, namely the fact that for men, who already live in certain social bonds (this assumption follows necessarily from the existence of language), certain external objects serve to satisfy their needs.’ (Quoted in Schmidt, Alfred, op. cit, 110f.Google Scholar Cf. Marx, Karl, Texts on Method, trans, and ed. Carver, T. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 190.)Google Scholar

⁸ ‘This vision of the world does not in the least derive from a Kantian position’ (Kolakowski, , op. cit., 69).Google Scholar

⁹ Both the acknowledged debt and the complaint are in Marx's ‘Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and General Philosophy’, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

¹⁰ In connection with the primacy of touch over the other senses, Yukio Kachi has pointed out to me that something of this idea is to be found in Aristotle, who states that touch is the one sense which all animals possess, and explains this from the fact that ‘touch is the sense for food’ (De Anima II.3). Berkeley also maintains the primacy of touch in his New Theory of Vision, and this might seem to invalidate my remarks about the empiricists' diminished conception of touch. It is to be noted, however, that Berkeley subsequently regards his position in the Principles as the more consistent one, for if experience consists simply in the having of sensations, touch can be no more privileged than any of the other senses.

¹¹ Lucretius, for example, argues for the corporeality of air by pointing to the fact that, though we cannot see it (nor indeed manipulate it in any obvious sense), we are aware of the way in which it acts as a destructive force, like a stream in flood. In the same passage he defends the existence of invisible corporeal particles by referring to such phenomena as the wearing away of a ring or a plough or a pavement and asserting that this must be produced by the same process of rubbing and breaking which is more grossly experienceable in other cases. See De Rerutn Natura I, 265–328.Google Scholar

¹² The primacy of touch and manipulability can be linked with the idea that primary qualities are more centrally constitutive of a thing than are its secondary qualities. Especially interesting here is Jonathan Bennett's article ‘Substance, Reality, and Primary Qualities’, in which he points out that the reality and objectivity of primary qualities can be shown by innumerable manipulative tests; we can demonstrate that one cup is bigger than another by pouring water from the bigger into the smaller until the latter overflows, by passing a hand across the top of the smaller and bringing it up against the side of the bigger cup, and so on. There are very few comparable manipulative tests for demonstrating the existence of colours, etc.; in general, either we see them or we don't. Bennett adds, without pursuing it further, the suggestion that ‘this difference between primary and secondary qualities is closely connected with the fact that the former alone involve the sense of touch’. See op. cit., 105–117, in Martin, C. B. and Armstrong, D. M. (eds), Locke and Berkeley (London: Macmillan, 1908)Google Scholar. The article originally appeared in American Philosophical Quarterly (1965).Google Scholar

¹³ Engels, F., Dialectics of Nature (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 230Google Scholar. Engels' example is, as it stands, unsatisfactory, and would have been less so if he had said that by focusing the rays so as to produce heat we prove that the heat comes from the light-rays.

¹⁴ Hume, , Treatise of Human Nature, I (Everyman Edition), 159.Google Scholar

¹⁵ I have said that this does not dispose of Hume. In particular, it leaves as yet untouched the problem of induction.

¹⁶ Gasking, D., ‘Causation and Recipes’, Mind LXIV (1955), 483.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Collier, Andrew, ‘Truth and Practice’, in Radical Philosophy 5 (Summer 1973)Google Scholar. I should like to emphasize the extent to which I have been impressed by this article, and been forced by it to think out my own view on these issues. A position similar to Collier's is advocated by Ruben, David-Hillel in his book Marxism and Materialism (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977)Google Scholar—another impressive piece of Marxist philosophy. Unfortunately I did not read the book until I had written most of this paper, but I think that what I say in response to Collier is largely applicable to Ruben also.

¹⁹ ‘To this reality [i.e. the reality common to all human beings in virtue of the constancy of basic human needs] one can also apply the Aristotelian concept of truth’; but it ‘applies to [a] world upon which man has already imposed “substantial forms”’ (Kolakowski, , op. cit., 77).Google Scholar

²⁰ Kolakowski finds similar formulations in Marx's own early writings. He quotes him as saying that

Nature, considered abstractly, in and of itself, perpetuated in its separation from man, is nothing to him (op. cit., 63; cf. Marx, K., Early Writings, trans. Bottomore, T. B. (London: Watts, 1963), 217)Google Scholar.

More indicative, perhaps, is the following sentence, in a passage where Marx envisages the eventual unification of the natural and human sciences:

Nature, as it develops in human history, is the act of genesis of human society, is the actual nature of man; thus nature, as it develops through industry, though in an alienated form, is truly anthropological nature (Early Writings, 164)Google Scholar.

Envisaging the future realization of this in a non-alienated form, he says:

… it is only when objective reality everywhere becomes for man in society the reality of human faculties, human reality, and thus the reality of his own faculties, that all objects become for him the objectification of himself. The objects then confirm and realize his individuality, they are his own objects, i.e. man himself becomes the object (ibid., 160f.).

In the same vein, Marx seems to argue that we will cease to look for a divine creator when we come to see nature, including man himself, as a human creation:

Since … for socialist man, the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labour, and the emergence of nature for man, he therefore has the evident and irrefutable proof of his self-creation, of his own origins. Once the essence of man and of nature, man as a natural being and nature as a human reality, has become evident in practical life, in sense experience, the quest for an alien being, a being above man and nature (a quest which is an avowal of the unreality of man and nature) becomes impossible in practice (ibid., 156f.).

But it has to be admitted that none of these passages lends itself unequivocally to a strong epistemological interpretation. For a caution against reading too much into the 1844 Manuscripts, see Ruben, , op. cit., ch. 3.Google Scholar

²¹ Bambrough, Renford; ‘Universals and Family Resemblances’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LXI (1960–1961), 220–222Google Scholar. Also in Pitcher, G. (ed.), Wittgenstein—the Philosophical Investigations (London: Macmillan, 1968), 202–204.Google Scholar

²² Whorf, Benjamin Lee, Language, Thought, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956), 216.Google Scholar

²³ The same goes for conflicting scientific theories, and the way in which observation statements may be relative to a specific theory. Hanson, , in Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: CUP, 1958)Google Scholar, says:

Let us consider Johannes Kepler: imagine him on a hill watching the dawn. With him is Tycho Brahe. Kepler regarded the sun as fixed: it was the earth that moved. But Tycho followed Ptolemy and Aristotle in this much at least: the earth was fixed and all other celestial bodies moved around it. Do Kepler and Tycho see the same thing in the east at dawn? (p. 5).

Although, as Hanson argues, in an important sense they do not see the same thing, the fact remains that, as with the previous examples, there does exist a wider framework, neutral as between the different scientific theories, in terms of which we can say what it is that the alternative theories lead one to see differently. As Hanson says, there is some sense in which Tycho and Kepler see the same thing. And this is because neither's conceptual framework is confined to the conceptual framework of the particular scientific theory he holds. There is a wider frame of reference. I mention this kind of case because there are affinities between Hanson's position and Marx's view of the creative character of scientific theorizing which I mentioned above (p. 2f.). We can perhaps now see how that Marxist view is both linked with, and distinct from, the stronger thesis I have been examining.

²⁴ I am making rather free use of the label ‘phenomenalism’, which in its orthodox form does not assert that objects cease to exist when unperceived, but simply offers an analysis (in terms of hypothetical perception-statements) of what is meant by saying that they continue to exist.

²⁵ In this respect it may be that there are historical instances of world-views closer than typical animism to the personalist extreme. R. R. Marett, for example, in his criticism of Tylor's ‘animism’ theory, coined the term ‘animatism’ and explained it as follows:

… when a thunderstorm is seen approaching in South Africa, a Kaffir village, led by its medicine-man, will rush to the nearest hill and yell at the hurricane to divert it from its course. Here we have awe finding vent in what on the face of it may be no more than a simple straightforward act of personification. It is animism in the loose sense of some writers, or, as I propose to call it, animatism: but it is not animism in the strict scientific sense that implies the attribution, not merely of personality and will, but of ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, to the storm (Marett, R. R., The Threshold of Religion (London: Methuen, 1929), 14)Google Scholar.

There appear to be comparable elements in Shinto:

The woodlands, the flowers of the field, crops in their seasons, the dust of the road and the water that lays the dust and the germs of disease in the dust, animal life and humanity, beneficial or harmful, are all divine spirit. Fire, mountains, seas, every material as well as every living form of the universe is Kami or divine spirit, for to Shinto there are not two entities, divine spirit and Nature. Nature is divine spirit come forth from subjectivity as the objective universe. Mountains and seas do not have spirits dwelling in them. Everything is divine spirit… (J. W. T. Mason, The Meaning of Shinto (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1935), 62).

For guidance in connection with the empirical material relevant to these questions, I am grateful to Lewis M. Rogers and Peter Appleby. Even if I had the space to do so, I would be incompetent to deal at all usefully with the issues in the fields of comparative anthropology and comparative religion which are raised by my remarks here. I would, however, like to make two suggestions:

(a) In the following paragraphs I allude favourably to an evolutionary approach to religion, and especially to primitive religions, of the kind which held the stage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but appears now to be out of fashion (see E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), especially chapter V). Of course it is important to recognize the dangers of forcing a genetic interpretation on cross-cultural comparisons, and of oversimplifying a complex process. Nevertheless I would have thought it difficult to deny that just as increasing technological mastery of nature brings with it a change from a predominantly religious to a predominantly secular view of nature, so also at an earlier stage it goes along with a development from something like animism to some kind of monotheism. Here I am assuming that the thesis of the relatively primitive character of animism can be defended against the counter-theses of primitive monotheism (see e.g. the criticisms in Robert H. Lowie, Primitive Religion (New York: Liverlight, 1948), 124–133), and of the ‘mana’-doctrine as a pre-animistic belief in an impersonal divine or magical force (see e.g. Evans-Pritchard, op. cit, 110, and Raymond Firth, ‘The Analysis of Mana: An Empirical Approach’, in The Journal of the Polynesian Society 49 (1940), for criticism of excessive claims made for the ‘mana’-concept).

(b) Tylor and others tended to look at animism from the standpoint of a modern scientific outlook, as some kind of false inference (e.g. a mistaken generalization from the experience of the ‘separation’ of the soul from the body in dreams; see Tylor, E. B., Religion in Primitive Culture (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958Google Scholar; a reprint of chs. XI–XIX of Primitive Culture, originally published 1871), esp. 12f., 194f., 270f.)Google Scholar. The trouble with this approach is that it then seems implausible that such a mistaken theory should have been formulated in the first place and perpetuated thereafter. I suggest that it may be more helpful and more plausible to understand an animistic ontology not as a ‘theory’ at all but as a basic way of categorizing experience; and not as an aberration from a scientific outlook, but as a qualified version of the hypothetical ontology which I have called ‘personalism’.

²⁶ Such a perspective is suggested by the following passage:

Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing selfconscious. At the same time it is consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men's relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural religion) just because nature is as yet hardly modified historically. (We see here immediately: this natural religion or this particular relation of men to nature is determined by the form of society and vice versa. Here as everywhere, the identity of nature and man appears in such a way that the restricted relation of men to nature determines their restricted relation to one another, and their restricted relation to one another determines men's restricted relation to nature.)… This sheeplike or tribal consciousness receives its further development and extension through increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the increase of population (Marx, and Engels, , The German Ideology Part One, Arthur, C. J. (ed.) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), 51).Google Scholar

²⁷ I should like to thank the members of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Utah, to whom I read a first draft of this paper, and from whom I received valuable help. I am also grateful for comments from Chris Cherry, Andrew Collier, David-Hillel Ruben, Sean Sayers, and Godfrey Vesey.