Social development is henceforward not a question of the validity and limits of knowledge, but one of how we must live: "to each according to their needs, from each according to their ability" - a period of the essential development of ethics.
Already, in the 15th and 16th centuries huge battles had been fought under the banner of Religion itself, to weaken the stranglehold and terror of the Church, and grant the citizen their own "godliness".
The bourgeois citizen perceived the opportunity for social wealth and power in the world around him, and whether or not admission to the Nobility and the Church was on offer, it was this secular, common estate that beckoned him.
In the earlier period, the struggle was fought out in Relgious terms, now (from c. 1600) it was to be fought out in terms of secular religion, in philosophy, and in particular in terms of knowledge. The bourgeois regarded the knowledge of feudalism as worthless superstition, at least insofar as it related to "practical affairs". While it is true that the bourgeoisie required as a vital necessity a knowledge of nature for the expansion of the productivity of labour, it would not be until the middle of the 18th century that knowledge of Nature comes to be turned to the making of profits. The dispute over knowledge is not that "conscious".
The thinkers of this time glorify with the name of Nature, the common people, with the name of experience, human labour, with the name of sensation, human needs, with the name of Reason, production. These bourgeois gentlemen do not know Nature as such, but only such as is given to them by the level of development of society at the time. The labouring masses are to them synomymous with Nature.
The conception of knowledge in this period goes through an essential development which corresponds to the earliest problems facing the bourgeoisie in the accumulation of value, beginning with the very right itself and culminating in a vision of civil society which is self-created.
The bourgeoisie really did develop an objectively true knowledge of nature, demonstrated in the expansion of industry and technique; but beginning from the day the bourgeoisie take political power in a given country, a counter-tendency arises. On the one hand, the need for the techniques of social control, and on the other to maintain control over knowledge. Political economy, for instance, began as a genuine enquiry into the origin of the wealth of nations, but from the mid-19th century it was required as one of the means of maintaining and justifying the status quo. It is a fact however, that while the bourgeoisie was a class excluded form political power, the promotion of natural science had a definite political value, and was a part of its formation; subsequently the bourgeoisie stands in a contradictory, ambivalent relation to science.
The first period in the development of epistemology is the "Classical" period from the Copernican Revolution up to Hegel and, with important quialifications, Karl Marx. This is the period in which the bourgeoisie is an historically progressive class involved in breaking down the dogma of feudalism and the great religions. I refer to it as the period of "essential" development, because we see in it successive periods of struggle between opposite tendencies each supplanted in turn by deeper and deeper contradictions. During this period, the advocates of bourgeois epistemology are conducting a struggle, initially against the terror of the Inquisition, later the theological reasoning of Bishop Berkeley and eventually at the head of Bonaparte's armies. During this first period particularly we see the emergence of the specific national lines of development and the a considerable extent the opposite tendencies fought out at each stage in the formation of epistemology are marked out along national lines.
See "Classical Epistemology" and "1841".
Nietzsche lies squarely in the camp of Irrationalism. In pointing out that Truth is only useful for survival, Nietzsche also says: "In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, ... it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, ...". And Schopenhauer, Nietzsche's teacher, who harboured a pathological hatred for Hegel, wanted to erect a system of the classical German kind, built around Will rather than Rationality. Likewise, Kierkegaard wrote not only in revulsion at the hypocrisy and corruption of the church and the establishment of his day, but also against what he sees as the "rationalism" of Hegel.
It is during this period that Pragmatism appears, via the American logician Charles Sanders Peirce and later the mysticWilliam James. Pragmatism comes on to the scene as a tendency towards Irrationalism: "What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle." [William James, What Pragmatism Means, 1906] Now there is, in this rejection of the concept of theoretical truth, the insistence upon practice as the critierion of truth which is undoubtedly progressive and rational, but this emerges only later, in the Operationalism of Percy Bridgman. In a sense pragmatism shares the conception of practice as the criterion of truth with Hegel: for Hegel, practice is only the criterion of truth, for pragmatism, practice is the only criterion of truth.
The task posed by the development of knowledgein this period is the extension of the methods established in the natural sciences to the human sciences - psychology and sociology, and these sciences become an arena in which the various solutions to the problem of knowledge are tested out. The dominant expression of bourgeois culture is positivism, in which sociology has first place and emphasis is given to logical analysis of the data of perception.
The beginning and end of this period is not a question of dates and is marked differently not only country by country, but in the manifestation and influence of epistemology in the various bracnhes of enquiry.
The development of science reaches a critical period at the turn of the century just as finance capital overtakes the domination of industrial capital and capitalism finds that it has exhausted the possibility for the further expansion of colonies and moves into the epoch of imperialism. Capitalism moves into a period of violent crisis just as the sciences also move into a series of sharp crises. As Freud and Pavlov revolutionise psychology and the Great War and the Russian Revolution shake nineteenth century social theory to its foundations, Einstein and others turn fundamental conceptions of space and time, object and subject inside-out, naive, atomistic empiricist prejudices begin to be eclipsed by structuralist conceptions which mirror the emergence of imperialism. British empiricism, the philosophy of the first industrial power, continues to compete with the more rationalist epistemologies of Europe and now American pragmatism merges from the New World where only those ideas are valid which find useful application in the expanding American capitalism. Undoubtedly, there is a play of "pessimism and optimism" also throughout this period of crisis and revolution, fascism and war.
It is very difficult to characterise the whole period from the turn of the century up to the end of World War Two because the tendencies which are to characterise the postWWII period emerge very early in certain areas, but there is no integral overall picture discernible till after the War.
Structuralist conceptions predominate as the world market becomes an integral pervasive reality, and with the role of interventionist governments guaranteeing profitability and increasingly dominated by a single world power. The post-war period also gives us the rising anti-imperialist movements and the Civil Rights and Women's Movements each of which are obliged to go to the foundations of knowledge in order to find the way to their liberation, and these forces bring onto the scene new critical elements of epistemology.
In escaping the crisis arising from the end of the boom, the bourgeoisie institutes fundamental changes in the word economy; the centralised character of economic planning and the world dominance of the US gives way to economic rationalism and a world market in which the USA must fight against a number of emerging threats. At the same time, the crisis is overcome by the creation of a whole range of sources of fictitious capital which successively paper over emergent collapses with accelerated generation of credit.
The fall of the USSR brings about a world in which opposition is invisible, individuality totally dispersed and value apparently unrelated to work. The eclectic lines of development of bourgeois philosophy now confront a situation in which creative intellectual labour is no longer possible, just as industrial labour is now part of the "rust industries", left to the masses of the newly industrialising countries while an elite in the metropolitan countries grow rich on the production of symbols.
The Greeks and mediaeval thinkers are not considered here at all, since my object is the history of ideas associated with the rise and fall of capitalism. With the publication of The Prince in 1469, Machiavelli became the first social theorist of our times. Political Economy does not become an object of scientific research until Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776. Although we cannot say that human society was not a subject of science, prior to the Enlightenment no connection was made in theory between social relations and perception of Nature. Before then, attention is focussed on Nature and the possibility of knowledge of Nature. We begin with the Copernican Revolution, an event which was recognised at the time and since as an act of Revolution in the broadest sense of the word. None of the actors in this history seek authority prior to Copernicus. All the writers we consider from the early 17th century are clear themselves that they are making a beginning.
It was in Italy that capitalist production developed earliest and the dissolution of serfdom also took place earliest. At the end of the 15th century, the loss by Italy of its commercial supremacy forced the mass of labourers freed by the abolition of serfdom back into the countryside where there was a flourishing of small scale agriculture based on wage-labour.
Marx resolves the idealism of Hegel by retaining his dialectics but placing it upon a basis of materialism, thus putting an end to the role of any system of philosophy. This terminates the progressive development of epistemology, leaving it to the development of the positive sciences to "work out the details". The task is now to work out how we must live.
This is to be understood in the broad historical sense and in the essential sense. Also, the "positive sciences", include the practical struggle to overthrow capitalism. So long as we live under capitalism, surrounded and formed by generalised relations of commodity exchange, there will be a struggle to overcome the mystification of bourgeois society. Just because we are Marxists, does not give us a magic key to unlock alienated consciousness. I believe that with Marx, all the essential elements of epistemology are already present, and further clarification can only come through the actual development of knowledge, rather than through the invention of yet more "systems of philosophy". Of course, if you are a fan of Heidegger, Husserl, George Morris or whomever, then you couldn't agree, for these people have gone on inventing new "systems" long after the death of Hegel.
By "Bourgeois Epistemology" I mean the whole organic development of Epistemology from the Copernican Revolution till today. The product of a particular author must be assessed in relation to that organic whole. In it I include the Royalist Hobbes, the Cleric Berkeley though perversely, Feuerbach and with qualifications Marx, in so far as he was concerned with that subject. I use the word "bourgeois" in the sense that we say that "trade unionism is bourgeois ideology", even though it is clearly the ideology of proletarians. Bourgeois epistemology will only complete its development when the market is well and truly buried. It is nonsense to think that we can invent "proletarian epistemology" in the same sense that Trotsky opposed "proletarian culture":
[Marxism] "was formed entirely on the basis of bourgeois culture, both scientific and political, though it declared a fight to the finish upon that culture. Under the pressure of capitalistic contradictions, the universalising thought of the bourgeois democracy, of its boldest, most honest, and most far-sighted representatives, rises to the heights of a marvellous renunciation, armed with all the critical weapons of bourgeois science. Such is the origin of Marxism. [What Is Proletarian Culture, and Is It Possible?, Trotsky 1923]
In the latter half of the 19th century the development of epistemology begins with the address by Schelling in Berlin in December 1841 at the invitation of the newly appointed Minister for Culture of the Prussian Monarchy. Schelling's denunciation of Hegel is witnessed by the young Friedrich Engels and Soren Kierkegaard. Also waiting in the wings is Hegel's life-long enemy Arthur Schopenhauer while Ludwig Feuerbach has already published his materialist denunciation of Hegel, The Essence of Christianity. In France Auguste Comte is publishing his Course in Positive Philosophy.
At the same time, natural science which is sweeping the world before it comes under sustained reactionary attack from the Christian Church and turns attention to investigating the human body and the material basis for life and in detail the physiology of sensation.
The needs of the bourgeois for a social science which will enable it to rule and organise society on a scientific basis encourage the development of social science. In England John Stuart Mill is already propounding a view totally foreign to the achievements of Classical German Philosophy and this is continued by the sociology of Herbert Spencer who marks his British positivist trend off from Comte continental variety.
During this period, epistemology develops in the course of the "working out of the detail" in the various branches of positive science, rather than through the perfection of any philosophical system. This is in line with the prognosis of Engels in "Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy", though perversely.
Bourgeois Epistemology thus develops along three lines of development:
Friedrich Schelling's Philosophy of Revelation is consigned to the archives of the history of religion, but Soren Kierkegaard (Christian Existentialism) and Arthur Schopenhauer (Voluntarism or Intentional Psychology) lead the assault against Hegelianism. Their advocacy of irrationalism calls for the further development of philosophy to be informed by the study of the human condition, seen in psychological terms: for Existentialism, "the answer lies in psychology" (Existential Psychology).
At the same time Brentano (Empirical Psychology) and Wundt (Experimental Psychology) attempt to found the science of psychology; Dilthey's approach is broader in seeing the human condition as essentially social (Social Psychology) and retains to some extent the legacy of Hegel; Nietzsche continues the line of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard but place it on an explicitly atheistic foundation while William James initiates the American version of irrationalist psychologism (Spiritualistic Psychology).
Within the natural sciences, already fighting against clerical reaction, a struggle unfolds between naturalistic materialism on the one hand and idealistic positivism on the other. This struggle takes place under the pressure of the requirement to develop a critical approach to the handling of concepts where sciences required more and more to deal with entities beyond sensation and beyond everyday consciousness. No progress can be made without revolutionising concepts and categories themselves. Hegel's legacy is unknown to this line of development which is largely moving within the domain of Kant. Despite the progress of materialism, the influence of idealistic positivism steadily increases.
At the beginning of this period Positivism rules supreme in sociology. However, in the course of time, the beginnings of a new development appear in Durkheim's critique of pragmatism and in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Otherwise, the individualistic, positivist sociology is reflective of the gradual spread of the domination of bourgeois society and it relative stability.
Up until some time after World War Two, the value of paper money and other forms of credit could exist only to the extent that it was redeemable in the form of commodities embodying abstract socially-necessary human labour. Such redemption could only be guaranteed by an institution of sufficient social authority. While during periods of boom, there would tend to mushroom up a mass of value inflated by various forms of credit; as the business cycle (usually about ten years long) declined, the value of this fictitious capital would collapse to its "real value".
The 25 years after the War saw an extended and extreme period of this expansion of fictitious capital without an explicit breach in the gold-dollar exchange rate which underpinned the fiction. The following 25 years has been characterised by the severing of this link without the collapse of that value, except in an episodic manner while the mass of that fictitious capital has actually accelerated in its rate of expansion.
There thus arises in a new way the question of the "reality" of value.
The development of science reaches a critical period at the turn of the century just as finance capital topples the domination of industrial capital and capitalism finds that it has exhausted the possibility for the further expansion of colonies and moves into the epoch of imperialism. capitalism moves into a period of violent crisis just as the sciences also move into a series of sharp crises. As Freud and Pavlov revolutionise psychology and the Great War and the Russian Revolution shake nineteenth century social theory to its foundations, Einstein and others turn fundamental conceptions of space and time, object and subject inside-out, naive, atomistic empiricist prejudices are eclipsed by structuralist conceptions which mirror the emergence of imperialism. British empiricism, the philosophy of the first industrial power, continues to compete with the more rationalist epistemologies of Europe and now American pragmatism merges from the New World where only those ideas are valid which find useful application in the expanding American capitalism. Undoubtedly, there is a play of "pessimism and optimism" also throughout this period.
The epoch-making discoveries in physics mainly associated with Einstein - general relativity, wave particle-duality and quantum mechanics - throw natural scientific epistemology into crisis. Even the great materialist Einstein has been heavily influenced by positivism, but in the discussions and struggles which ensue in the course of trying to comprehend what has taken place, enormous developments in epistemology will take place. A period of time must pass however before any positive contribution will emerge from this melee. In the meantime, the revolutionary developments in physics focus attention on the foundations of mathematics, and for the moment it is there that epistemology becomes an area for struggle and development.
At the same time, Sigmund Freud and Pavlov revolutionise psychology from opposite directions, both by radically departing from the suggestions of positivist, empiricist and pragmatic epistemology. Psychological epistemology enters a prolonged crisis during which a multiplicity of trends emerge and side by side with the various schools of psychology, as the world slides into Fascism in Europe and the world economy is smashed up by the Great Depression, new trends of philosophical irrationalism move forward.
Bourgeois sociology is going fine up till the world is shattered on the one hand by the Great War and the Depression, and on the other by the successful socialist revolution in Russia, and is more or less terminated for a whole period.
Logicism (Russell and Frege), Positivism (Schlick), Formalism (Hilbert), Intuitionism (Brouwer) and finally Kantianism (Godel) and Turing. Are mathematical symbols things-in-themselves like the phonemes of pre-Saussure linguistics or is mathematics an extension of logic and do they reflect anything in the external world at all, and if so, how do we know? This struggle is put on ice by Godel's famous theorem which shoots logicism out of the water. Godel brings Kant up-to-date.
Pavlov and Freud's discoveries are products of 19th century science, but they are to provide the basis for an upsurge in efforts to bury materialism. Husserl wants to be remembered for drawing a boundary between philosophy and psychology but his introspective Phenomenology massively imports bad psychology into philosophy; Jung declares a century of idealism, Adler focuses on the bourgeois individual Koffka is the first to mix Freud with Marx and Wittgenstein leads the way to utilise the controversy in the foundations of mathematics to find a formal solution to the problem of language and the human condition.
In escaping the crisis arising from the end of the boom, the bourgeoisie institutes fundamental changes in the word economy; the centralised character of economic planning and the world dominance of the US gives way to economic rationalism and a world market in which the USA must fight against a number of emerging threats. At the same time, the crisis is overcome by the creation of a whole range of sources of fictitious capital which successively paper over emergent collapses with accelerated generation of credit.
Structuralist conceptions predominate as the world market becomes an integral over-pervasive reality, and with the role of interventionist governments guaranteeing profitability and increasingly dominated by a single world power . The post-war period also gives us the rising anti-imperialist movements and the Civil Rights and Women's Movements each of which are obliged to go to the foundations of knowledge in order to find the way to their liberation, and these forces bring onto the scene new critical elements of epistemology.
Parsons, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss
A new tendency in bourgeois epistemology comes forward and predominates in the post-war period. It has its beginnings in the linguistics of Saussure and the political economy of John Maynard Keynes - this is what becomes know as "Structuralism", which displaces positivism as the dominant bourgeois trend. Still the social-historical character of human cognition is unknown to these tendencies.
Later on, bourgeois social theory receives the basis for a further development through the contributions of ex-Marxists in Althusser and Foucault.
Side by side with this, the debates of the 1920s and 1930s over the significance of the developments of modern physics are beginning to produce outcomes and a fairly sophisticated natural scientific epistemology emerges which to some extent overcomes the idealism of early positivism. The total absence of any alternative to formal logic continues to hamper this line of development however.
Percy Bridgman belong to the pre-War period, but is an early outcome of this process, making a fairly materialist interpretation of American pragmatism. Bohr, Heisenberg and Einstein remain with differences, but the result is now fairly much materialist. Idealistic tendencies continue with the Empiricist Quine and the positivist Carnap. Kuhn and Feyerabend develop fairly sophisticated theories of the social development of knowledge. (Popper)
A number of important lines of development in epistemology arise from a focus in psychology on cognition and these are in struggle against irrationalist tendencies.
Each of the above lines of development contribute representatives to the domain of philosophy of postmodernism. In addition, they are joined by an entirely new line of development which arises from the various liberation movements which have grown up in the post-war period: national liberation, the civil rights movement and women's liberation.
Also, the failure of the 1960s rebellions has projected a number of disappointed former Marxists into the general arena of bourgeois philosophy, while the decline in modern political perspectives have forced a further development in the form of a "return to Marx".
The currents in postmodern philosophy draw on "post-structuralism", psychoanalysis and other currents of irrationalism, liberation epistemology, modern physics and the foundations of mathematics and "Western Marxism".
The fall of the USSR brings about a world in which opposition is invisible, individuality totally dispersed and value apparently unrelated to work. The eclectic lines of development of bourgeois philosophy now confront a situation in which creative intellectual labour is no longer possible, just as industrial labour is now part of the "rust industries", left to the masses of the newly industrialising countries while an elite in the metropolitan countries grow rich on the production of symbols.
By "Post-modern philosophy" I will understand the philosophy of those authors who appear to best characterise the nature of the current juncture, as opposed to those who consistently promote views originating in earlier periods of development or give adequate expression to the negation of the capitalist ethic. Inevitably, there will be both aspects present in every consideration to some degree or other.
Whereas Marxists of earlier periods mostly found themselves berating the representatives of bourgeois philosophy with ignorance of dialectical Logic, post-modern philosophy is most sharply characterised by a flagrant disregard for the most basic tenets of Epistemology. It is the conviction of the author, yet to be substantiated, that this epistemological blindness has its ground in the severing of money from its connection with labour-time, with a period in which fictitious value predominates absolutely, not only over industrial capital, but even over finance capital in the previously understood meaning of the term.
It is further to be investigated whether these very conditions bring into being the possibility for the negation and transcendence of the domination of the value relation over the life of society. Consequently, we may find a line of attack on this epistemological blindness which differs from the reflex action of Marxists. The bourgeoisie's epistemology is now as barren as its ethics. But the actual validity and limits of knowledge have been pushed to infinity; value is still the means of the domination of a tiny few over the vast majority most of whom are reduced to barbarism, but its existence has become less and less a material thing and more and more voluntaristic. More and more the conditions may be maturing when it can be abolished.
The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training of minds, or even of individuals, is becoming obsolete and will become ever more so. The relationships of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume - that is, the form of value. Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.
Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its "use-value."
It is widely accepted that knowledge has become the principle force of production over the last few decades, this has already had a noticeable effect on the composition of the work force of the most highly developed countries and constitutes the major bottleneck for the developing countries.
Generalises the results of Liberation Epistemology and dissolves structuralism. The most challenging of all. tbc
There is a succession in the dominant tendencies in bourgeois epistemology:
(a) mid-nineteenth century (First) positivism: idealistic positivism, a development of empiricism and precursor of the related pragmatism. Primacy to sociology and rtational analysis of the data of perception.
Comte, Mill, Spencer, Say
(b) Late nineteenth century early twentieth century: Second Positivism: It is characterised by the rejection of "metaphysics", by which is meant concepts which are not immediately given in experience, but form part of the means of comprehending what is given in experience, being accepted as having an objective existence;
Psychology: Wilhelm Wundt
Physics: Ernst Mach, Henri Poincare
Sociology: Max Weber,
Economics: Walras, Pareto
The Pragmatists being:
Psychology & Sociology: James, Dewey
Physics: Peirce, Bridgman
Alongside these and opposing them was Dilthey (human sciences), Brentano and also the irrationalists Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, who look to "inner experience" for a foundation, not given by the "factual" basis of positivism, as well as reactionary clerical tendencies.
Also, opposing these tendencies is natural scientific materialism: Helmholtz standing out from the pack.
(c) first half of the twentieth century: "structuralism". First arises with Saussure who cannot take a step with the positivistic nonsense in linguistics and allows objective status to "structure" instead of the immediately given thing, which is ephemeral and arbitrary. This working hypothesis which is OK for advancing linguistics in at least one direction is then extended to absurdity.
Jakobson, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss carry this over to sociology and thus to science generally.
Parsons regards Durkheim as a positivist, but possibly because he favours a pragmatist slant in sociology. Parsons also emphasises the "functional", i.e. equilibrium aspect as against the dynamic developmental side of analysis.
In psychology, Freud has introduced "metaphysics" with great effect and Pavlov has done over the spiritualists and advocates of "inner experience". Husserl begins a new "phenomenological" trend which leads to renewal of existentialism and a whole range of schools of irrationalists.
(d) Then there is post-structuralism.
Alongside this positive study of psychology has brought about cognitive psychology in competition with behaviourism, side-by-side with the various schools and off-shoots from Freud and Jung and admixtures with Stalinism and Western Marxism.
A bit messy, but I think one has to allow four "periods" here.
This term "Positivism" is a difficult one. Richard Rorty uses it in the form of categorising all bourgeois philosophy from Galileo to Quine, etc., into two trends: Positivism and Platonism. I don't yet have a fixed position on this, but I believe a correct understanding of how to "periodise", analyse and synthesise the various trends is crucial, and the problem of "defining" positivism is central to this. So, I am happy to leave this open for the moment.