An outline of philosophy
Source: Victorian Labor College lecture, circa 1970
First published: Labor College Review, 1990-94
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
Education in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was dogmatic due to a shortage in books, which forced reliance on scholasticism. The unique nature of our earth formed one of the cornerstones of orthodox Christianity, so that anyone who ventured even to conjecture the existence of other worlds similar to our own was liable to incur very special displeasure from the church.
Nevertheless, we find a cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, by virtue of his position a pillar of the church, writing in 1440: “I have long considered that this earth is not fixed, but moves as do the other stars … To my mind, the earth turns upon its axis once every day and night.” That he escaped conflict with the church was probably because it did not yet realise the full implications of this proposition, but it was soon to show its antagonism to others who began to expound this heresy.
Copernicus (1473-1543), founder of modern astronomy, answered Aristotle&rsquo’s argument that because heavy bodies tended to move towards the centre of the earth and to come to rest there, the earth itself could have no tendency to move in any direction. Copernicus asserted that gravity was a universal force that could be attributed to all bodies, consequently there was no longer any reason to prefer the earth as the centre. He supposed, therefore, that the earth was a planet moving like the other planets round the sun, and showed in this way the stations, retrogressions and progressions of the planets could be accounted for in a simple way.
By withholding the publication of his great work until after his death Copernicus slipped beyond the reach of the church, which was now thoroughly alive to the threat both to orthodoxy and to its authority in any promulgation of Copernican doctrines. The outcry was not limited to the church of Rome, but Luther and Calvin joined in the denunciation of the “upstart astrologer who had dared to set his authority above that of Holy Scripture”. Thus, the two main factions of the church were at one in their desire to stamp out inquiry after the truth. Yet the terrors of religion, while they may have delayed the progress of science, certainly failed to arrest it.
The religious terror continued right through the sixteenth century. Tens of thousands suffered agonising tortures and death with assurance of everlasting damnation for an offence of which not only were they innocent, but of which it is impossible that anyone could ever be guilty. The records of the sixteenth century are ghastly in their revelation of the triumph of bloody superstition. In a single year four hundred persons were burned for sorcery at Toulouse; in another year, five hundred at Geneva, six hundred at Bamberg and more in many other centres. The city of Treves alone is said to have been the site, in the course of the century, of no less than seven thousand executions for witchcraft and sorcery.
Despite the terror, spectacular triumphs were made in science by the seventeenth century. So much so that this is considered the period in which the modern world begins. Copernicus in the sixteenth century made the discovery that the sun was the centre of the universe: that the earth has a daily rotation and an annual revolution around the sun. In this, he was the first to show that the beliefs of ancient times were demonstrably false.
He was followed by Kepler (1571-1630), who proved the motion of the planets to be elliptical, thus forcing the abandonment of the aesthetic bias believed from the time of Plato that the movement of heavenly bodies could not be anything else than that of a circle, this being more natural to their spiritual quality than an ellipse. Then Galileo (1564-1642), whose construction of the telescope substantiated the theory of Copernicus, brought down on his head the concentrated fury of the church. He was condemned by the Inquisition, privately in 1616 and then publicly in 1623, on the occasion of which he recanted, promising never again to maintain that the earth rotates or revolves.
The Inquisition triumphed in Italy for centuries. It failed, however, to stop the progress of science; instead, it did considerable damage to the church by its stupidity. Protestant churches were just as eager to retard science, but as they were unable to gain control of the state, their attacks were weaker.
The Renaissance accelerated the decline of medieval scholasticism and paved the way for the beginning of modern philosophy from the seventeenth century onward. Two Englishmen, Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, inaugurated modern materialism.
“England,” said Karl Marx, “is the original home of modern materialism, from the seventeenth century onwards.” (Quoted by Engels in the introduction to Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.) Marx continued: “The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon. To him, natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics, based upon the experiences of the senses, is the chief part of natural philosophy … According to him, the senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge. All science is based upon experience, and consists in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment, are the principal forms of such a rational method.”
Not only was Bacon the founder of materialism, he also inspired empiricism. The primary principle of empiricism is that all knowledge is founded on experience of the senses. But it is only in the sense of Marx’s quotation given above that Bacon can be classified as an empiricist.
Empiricism that merely concerned itself as knowledge furnished through the senses was described by Plato and other ancients as unscientific, and based on rule-of-thumb methods, accumulating unconnected devices. Francis Bacon himself likened empiricists to ants that merely amass and use:
While the dogmatists, like spiders, spin webs out of themselves. But the course of the bee lies midway — she gathers materials from the flowers and then by her own powers changes and digests them. Nor is the true labour of philosophy unlike hers. It does not depend entirely, or even chiefly, on the strength of the mind, nor does it store up in the memory unaltered the materials provided by natural history and mechanical experiments — but changes and digests them by the intellect.
Opponents of modern philosophical empiricism make the charge of scepticism against those who would push empirical analysis in philosophy to its most radical extremes. Contemporary empiricists of this type, had they lived in the sixteenth century, would have been the first to scoff at the new philosophy of the universe.
By divorcing philosophy from theology and reason from faith, Bacon joined the new philosophy to natural science in the form of a materialist physics. He directed thought away from the barren scholastic learning of the universities towards outdoor study and direct observation of natural phenomena. Proceeding from a materialist conception of nature that viewed matter as indestructible, self-moving, ever active and constantly changing, Bacon projected a new logical method that cautioned against the “vicious habit” of jumping to unverified general propositions and deducing consequences from them. He replaced that with the procedure of making narrow general propositions from observed data and then, step by step, moving from these restricted rules to broader generalisations and checking them at every stage by reference to the results of experiment.
In http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5500The Advancement of Learning Bacon says:
God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass, capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof, as the eye joyeth to receive light; and not only delighted in beholding the variety of things and the vicissitude of times, but raised also to find out and discern the ordinances and decrees, which through all those changes are infallibly observed.
Briefly summarised, Bacon’s doctrine asserted:
1. That science is the highway of knowledge.
2. That scientific knowledge is based on observation. On the basis of observation scientific theories are worked out, which must be tested by experiment.
3. That scientific knowledge is objectively true, and that no other means of attaining objective truth exists.
Bacon contrasted the method of science, not only to the unscientific amassing of “undigested” facts, but to the method of “dogmatism”, by which he meant propounding theories a priori, that is, not based on observation nor tested by it, but derived from principles that are supposed to be given in some way without reference to experience.
Bacon switched the function of philosophy from religion to serving the practical needs of humankind. The increased knowledge of nature acquired by Bacon’s innovation in scientific method was intended to promote useful works and to stimulate inventions such as printing, gunpowder and the magnetic compass. Such mechanical advances increased the efficiency and power of the instruments of production, augmented wealth and helped to satisfy human needs and comforts. These aims corresponded to basic requirements of the emerging bourgeois order. His theorising heralded the coming industrial revolution.
For Bacon, experience based upon what is learnt through the senses, and aids to the senses such as the telescope, was the sole valid source of useful knowledge. Unlike most of his empirical successors, he did not interpret sensuous experience as primarily passive. He was one of the first to emphasise that the acquisition of knowledge had its active side in manipulating and shaping objects, as is done by a craftsman. It was through such practical activity that the senses disclosed the essential features of nature to us.
Bacon’s materialism, as Marx observed, “pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology”. Nevertheless, such a materialist doctrine, which attacked and destroyed the old scholastic philosophy, was no less destructive of the theology of which that scholasticism was the philosophic foundation.
Hobbes stated that sensation was “the principle of the knowledge of principles” themselves and all science was derived from that source. He wrote in Leviathan: “There is no conception in a man’s mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original.”
Hobbes took as his starting point Bacon’s principle that all knowledge is furnished by the senses. The action of external objects upon the sense organs produced in the mind what Hobbes called ’seemings’ or ’apparitions’ or ’fancies’, the sensations of light, colour, sound, odour, hardness, softness, etc.
All which qualities called sensible are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter by which it presseth our organs diversely. Neither in us that are pressed are they anything else but diverse motions, for motion produceth nothing but motion. But their appearance to us is fancy, the same waking as dreaming. (Hobbes, Human Nature)
We see by this that what really exists for Hobbes is nothing else but matter-body. He defined matter, or body, as the property of existing objectively in space, external to and independent of consciousness. Of consciousness, Hobbes said it was only an “appearance” or “apparition” arising from the interaction of bodies. “The word body,” he wrote in Leviathan, “signifieth that which filleth or occupieth some certain room or … place; and dependeth not on the imagination, but is a real part of that we call the universe. For the universe being the aggregate of all bodies, there is no real part thereof that is not also body; nor anything properly a body, that is not also part of that aggregate of all bodies, the universe.”
The mechanical nature of Hobbes’s materialism is shown in his equation of matter with body. Modern dialectical materialism defines matter as the objective reality given to humanity by sensations, and “the sole property of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside our mind”. (Lenin: Materialism and empiro-criticism)
“The mode of existence of matter is motion, and space and time are the essential forms of the existence of matter.”. (Engels Anti-Duhring).
Equating matter with body, Hobbes regarded particular properties of material objects — hardness, impenetrability, etc — as the essential properties of matter, of all reality existing outside the mind. He separated space from matter, although he regarded the whole of space as being filled with bodies. He separated matter from motion.
Hobbes regarded bodies as always in motion, but a motion external, consisting of collisions and interactions of separate bodies one with another. Matter was devoid of self-motion; body was changeless, and always remained exactly the same.
Thought was impossible without a body that had sensations and thoughts, and it consisted in a train of ideas derived from sense impressions. Thought consisted in the conjunction of words. We attach different words to the different bodies and properties of bodies that we perceive, and so by joining words together in sentences and strings of sentences we signify various facts about the motions and properties of bodies.
From this follow important consequences about the significance and insignificance of thoughts, or sentences. For when we join words in a way that contradicts the nature of the things signified, the result is not untrue thoughts, but insignificant thoughts, or nonsense — such as round quadrangle, immaterial substance, or free will. (Hobbes, Leviathan).
For instance, to make assertions about immaterial substance or free will is not to speak untruth, but rather to speak insignificant nonsense —just as it is obviously nonsense to speak of a round quadrangle. Hobbes here developed a powerful weapon of criticism against all previous dogmatic, spiritualist or idealist philosophy. “Substance and body,” he wrote, “signify the same thing; and therefore substance incorporeal are words which, when they are jointed together, destroy one another, as if a man should say an incorporeal body.” (Leviathan).
From this immediately follows the openly anti-religious and atheistic character of Hobbes’s materialism. Religion was explained as the mechanical product of human ignorance and fear; and God — a being incorporeal, infinite, omnipotent, etc — as absolutely incomprehensible.
Paradoxically, it was Hobbes, the champion of absolutism in government, who led the way in undermining the old supports religion gave to absolutism and transferring it to a different foundation. Hobbes deprived religion of its halo of sancity by characterising it as a product of human ignorance and fears. Like others we have mentioned, he considered religion most useful in curbing seditious inclinations in the “multitude” and enhancing their loyalty to the established regime. Clerics and scholars pounced upon these anti-supernatural aspects of Hobbes’s teaching and assailed him for perverting morals and religion as well as polluting politics. The outcries of these watchdogs against his “atheism” alerted the ruling class to the subversive implications of the mechanical conception for religion, morality and the security of the state.
The victorious bourgeoisie needed institutions of the Christian faith to uphold their regime, just as they had to foster natural science to promote their material interests. But they could not maintain the same sort of religion as the absolute monarchy. They sought a religion tailored to their special requirements, a utilitarian Protestantism that blessed the union of church and state, tolerated a certain degree of non-conformism, and reconciled the new findings of physical science with the religious viewpoint.