The Problem of Social Consciousness in Our Time
The history of civilized society and the policy which shaped it has been
called by pessimists a sea of blood, dirt and baseness. And if one takes the
development of civilization purely according to the social results obtained so
far, then indeed Gustave Flaubert was right in greeting the much celebrated
“ascent of humanity” with the sarcastic remark: Hein, le progrès, quelle
blague! Et la politique, une belle saleté! [Progress, what a joke! And
politics, what filth!]
No epoch in history, however, seems to have deserved greater contempt than that in which we live today. In previous epochs, blood, dirt, baseness and the absence of a meaningful social result could, from a historio-philosophical point of view, be excused by the lack of knowledge, foresight, resources and distributable riches, interpreted as shortcomings which put society on the level of the blind or simply compulsory processes in nature. No such extenuating circumstances can be found for the present epoch. On the contrary, the problem which plagues mankind today arises precisely from the absurdity that, on one side, all that is needed for a senseful and secure social life is available yet, on the other side, social life remains what it was: a sea of blood, dirt, baseness, irrationality and misery. Or to present the same problem in the words of Max Horkheimer (like his close collaborator, T.W. Adorno, one of the ablest contemporary thinkers):
The present potentialities of social achievement surpass the expectations of all the philosophers and statesmen who have ever outlined in utopian programs the idea of a truly human society. Yet there is a universal feeling of fear and disillusionment. The hopes of mankind seem to be farther from fulfillment today than they were even in the groping epochs when they were first formulated by humanists. It seems that even as technical knowledge expands the horizon of man’s thought and activity, his autonomy as an individual, his ability to resist the growing apparatus of mass manipulation, his power of imagination, his independent judgment appear to be reduced. Advance in technical facilities for enlightenment is accompanied by a process of dehumanization. Thus progress threatens to nullify the very goal it is supposed to realize — the idea of man. Whether this situation is a necessary phase in the general ascent of society as a whole, or whether it will lead to a victorious re-emergence of the neo-barbarism recently defeated on the battlefields, depends at least in part on our ability to interpret accurately the profound changes now taking place in the public mind and in human nature. [M. Horkheimer: Eclipse of Reason, Oxford University Press.]
Similar formulations could be quoted by the dozen from the high level of Horkheimer-Adorno down to that of Eric Fromm and the daily press, all indicating that the decisive problem of our time is, in the last analysis, a problem of consciousness. Yet they reveal simultaneously that their authors themselves suffer more or less from the same problem and violate almost without exception the principle of simplicity of explanation: Principia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Not to speak of figures like Fromm who feel the need for a “psychological” explanation besides the economic one and, of course, produce a lot of conformist ideology — even Horkheimer-Adorno, though extremely critical of official notions and concepts, produce on related grounds no small amount of useless scholasticism and operate with such official, untenable and empty concepts as the “public mind” and “human nature.”[1] All attempts at giving a “double explanation” (more than is required by the nature of the case) are punished by sterility and stand in obvious parallel to the social process, overflowing with possibilities and delivering only unsolved problems. It is not difficult to see that the public mind and human nature are but two other problems and that nothing depends “on our ability to interpret accurately the profound changes” in them. The task is rather the opposite: to interpret accurately the, so to say, “behavior” of the mind by determining the factors on which this behavior depends. If there is any chance for a cure, one must find the causes of the evil and clearly recognize that public mind and human nature — as far as one can speak of them at all — are merely passive reflectors of processes taking place in the outside world quite independently of what the “public” thinks and a “human” is. To leave no room for ambiguities: The public mind simply does not exist, however much ideologists confound it with their own mind and that of those who make public opinion. Secondly: True social consciousness, under the conditions of developed capitalism, is obtainable only by individuals and constitutes therefore a minority-problem in the strictest sense of the word.
* * *
The highest manifestations of consciousness are to be found in general in the sciences and in philosophy, and in philosophy there is no other real choice than that between materialism and idealism. In contrast, then, to idealistic, “mixed” (agnostic) or “doubled” procedures, the method employed here consists in a pronounced return to the materialistic (not simply “economic”) point of view. Its hitherto best expression is the “well-known” but endlessly distorted thesis of Marx:
The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.
A hundred years of war against Marx have nearly completely obscured the fact that his work (above all Capital) contains the whole skeleton and all the necessary basic material for a social (political) psychology compared to which “sciences” like mass-psychology, Freudian sociology or Wissenssoziologie (Sociology of Knowledge) are but a heap of eclectic rubbish, regardless whether their representatives are Le Bon, Fromm, Mannheim, Reich or Freud himself.[2] Besides the thesis quoted above, the leading thoughts of Marx’s “Psychology” (including the behavior of the mind) can be briefly rendered as follows:
In capitalist society thinking becomes ideology because it is determined by the antagonistic production-relations of this society. The fetish character of commodities (to be dealt with later) veils and mystifies the essence of phenomena — the fundamental relations are not transparent and the particular form of the capitalist mode of production creates the permanent appearance which reflects our entire existence inverted and transposed. In consequence, being bound to the bourgeoisie or to the mere way of bourgeois thinking means to have a false consciousness (identical with ideology) and a perverted consciousness.
Yet out of this elemental sphere of ignorance and unconscious processes emerges also a conscious motive for keeping consciousness falsified and perverted. Capitalism is a historical, relative, transitory form of economy and must give way to a higher form or regress into a new barbarism, so long as the bourgeoisie insists on its “eternal” validity. The effect is that the ruling classes and their ideologists lose, in time, all interest in true cognition and, since such cognition is dangerous to their very existence, consciously strive to deny its possibility. The loss of interest in finding the truth (the same truth, by the way, which was formerly the strongest weapon of the bourgeoisie in its struggle with feudalism) — this loss of interest assumes, for its part, very early the form of a special law. It is the law of the dwindling force of cognition in bourgeois society, and it affects everybody who has not freed himself completely from official notions or thought-determinations.
How all these factors became directly manifest in Political Economy as a bourgeois science (after the crisis of 1830) has been described by Marx in Preface II of Capital:
It was thenceforth no longer a question whether this theorem or that was true [!], but whether it was useful or harmful to capital, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested enquirers, there were hired prize-fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic.
However, the crux of the matter is: What Marx states about Political Economy applies to a greater or lesser extent to all sciences, even to the most “abstract” ones. There is, on the one hand, the fact that the development of the sciences provides more and more reliable data of tremendous fertility (utilized with utmost confidence and accuracy in the most diverse fields, but especially in the field of warfare) — there is, on the other hand, the fact that the scientists themselves (physicists, mathematicians, chemists, biologists, sociologists, positivist philosophers, etc.) evade important conclusions and turn them into mysticism, metaphysics, idealism and agnosticism. Today, hardly a scientist can be named who does not suffer in one way or the other from defects of consciousness and the incapacity to generalize rationally the results of his research. Scientists expose themselves as ideologists until, at the end of a long chain of prize-fighting, eclecticism, syncretism, evil apologetic and so on, sham-science appears (prototypes: Keynesian economics and mass-psychology) and the scientific “ideal” is presented in the image of the stock-market, where gambling decides our fate:
We no longer regard induction as a method of finding true conclusions. We know that truth is inaccessible [!] to us; instead, we regard statements about the physical world as attempts to find the truth, as trials subject to later correction. . . . We regard scientific conclusions as posits, that is, statements with which we deal as if true although we have no proof for them. . . . Scientific inquiry resembles the method of the gambler: the scientific conclusion is the best bet the scientist can make. . . . The search for truth is to be replaced by the search for the best bet; the path of knowledge is trial and error, and all [!] the scientist can claim is that his method of foretelling represents the best he can do — there is no guarantee of success to his work. [Hans Reichenbach: Philosophy and Physics, University of California Press.]
Clear as is this ideological gambling and its negation of cognition against all practical evidence, one has nevertheless to avoid the mistake of vulgar materialists who always establish “direct” relations between the famous economic basis and its superstructure. Things are not that simple, and the opponent who replies to Mr. Vulgus that, as a case in point, scientific observations and calculations have nothing to do with false consciousness is absolutely right. Scientific data are in themselves innocent and betray no sign of the “capitalist mode of production.” Correct facts are to be found in the most corrupted ideologies and will remain correct facts under any form of society. It is never this or that correct or false detail, it is always the basic attitude we take, the special form and meaning things receive at our hands, in which the influence of our social existence (again: not simply economy) and its reflection as ideology must be detected. Only if Marx’s thesis itself is taken correctly and attention is turned from innumerable details (which can be argued back and forth to no avail for eternities) to the general character of the processes of life — only then can the all-pervasive influence of our social existence be properly traced in whatever field one may choose for investigation.
* * *
What the capitalist system has done to our environment, namely to land, forests, water, air, animals, plants and so on, is so evident that it needs no special explanation. Much less obvious are the consequences which this change of our environment has for ourselves, for our physical and mental status. Our food is poisoned and constantly deteriorated by “scientific” methods and processes in agricultural and industrial production. The driving force behind this sort of production, with science as its most obedient servant, is by no means satisfaction of our needs and still less care for our well-being, but profit and relentless competition in the interest of more profit as a necessity in the “struggle for life.” The latter is a term highly problematical even in zoology but, in the evil intent of apologetic, readily applied by scientists and ideologists to human society in order to reduce the laws by which it is governed to those of the alleged beast. This application alone speaks books about our consciousness and intellectual production, especially if one bears in mind that consciousness includes conscience. The social process has led to a point where the extremes meet and form, turning into each other, a unity which can be expressed in the paradoxical but truly scientific formula: The age of decaying bourgeois society, the age of science par excellence, is the most unscientific through which mankind has ever passed, and the law of the dwindling force of cognition is accompanied by the law of diminishing quality in all branches of material and spiritual production, characteristically enough with the exception of production for war.
As for material production, it can clearly be seen that diseases resulting from “scientific” methods increase constantly and that our very life is, to boot, threatened by atomic experiments. As for the mental side, consciousness concerning these facts and the significance of the whole process is either lacking or falsified, perverted and corrupted, while morals have been brought to the lowest level ever experienced in history. The times so remarkable of a society in its ascent, the times when men died and suffered persecution, isolation and misery for their ideals, for the love of science, cognition and truth — those golden times are gone. Nowadays scientists responsible for or involved (objectively speaking) in production-crimes have rightly been accused in public for their distortion of scientific facts, for their outright lying and concealment with respect to the far-reaching consequences which modern production processes have for us, for their lack of courage to protest and to tell the truth — which they know.
Yet the matter does not rest there. For instance, what about scientists who have raised their voices and have protested against the insanities propelled by their colleagues, by business and government? Analysis of such protests shows that they are (valuable as they may be in other connections) nearly always characterized by inconsistency and confusion. Even in the few exceptional cases where the correct slogan is adopted and a clear, unconditional stop is demanded, consciousness about the source of the insanity and the only remedy against it is again completely lacking or at least not manifested. There is not one scientist who, after having relieved his conscience, has used his authority to call upon the people and to engage in a real fight. Inconsistency and moral cowardice dominate the field — each scientist approached with the demand to go beyond mere oral protest (which, of course, must remain ineffective if not driven farther) has answered with evasions or a clear-cut decline. One was just writing a book or an article in which he would “speak” about the subject; another had anyway “so much to do” and could not go along; a third waited for a conference and a fourth perhaps for a genuine American spring. At all events: Those who had knowledge and authority and with it the power and the responsibility for action fell back and left the disquieted people in the lurch.
Then there is the mass of those scientists, scientific workers, laboratory technicians, teachers, etc., who may or may not “know what is going on” but are, like the masses themselves, not responsible for our social existence and its course towards a catastrophe. Concerning this category it must be pointed out that the consciousness of masses, classes and social groups in bourgeois society is subject to the law of ignorance and isolation as the most general and powerful law of our social existence. The material basis for this law is furnished by the national and international division of labor and the extreme specialization both of the sciences and within the sciences in the framework of competition and the fetish-character of commodities. Modern man is an isolated atom rather than a fully developed social being; a little screw in a tremendous mechanism alien to him rather than a self-asserting individual in a community clearly recognizable in its structure. The slave in ancient society, ignorant as he may have been, had more knowledge about social relations than today’s most learned specialists; he, like the serf, knew exactly who oppressed him, what the nature and the product of his labor was, what quality it had and how it was used. Philosophers, on the other side, recognized the limitations of the material development and did not try to tell the slave that he was a free man sharing equal chances with all others. The social antagonism was there and found expression in philosophical materialism and idealism (as said: the only fundamental attitudes possible), but the limitations of the time kept both in check. For this reason the opposition between materialism and idealism did not attain the pointed programmatical form it has at present, where they meet as deadly enemies in the same way as the contradiction which they reflect: the contradiction between social production and private ownership of the means of production. In spite of all intellectual differentiation arising from the decay of the ancient world, Greek philosophers were conscious about basic relations and remained naïve materialists. Hegel quotes Aristotle who, with regard to the relation between material production and the development of thought, states in naïve materialist fashion:
It was only after nearly everything that was necessary, and that pertained to the convenience and intercourse of life, had been obtained, that people began to trouble themselves about philosophical knowledge. — In Egypt the mathematical sciences were early developed, because there the priestly caste at an early period was in such a position as to make leisure possible.
And Hegel (who had driven his objective idealism to a point where it turned into materialism) affirms Aristotle:
Indeed, the need to busy oneself with pure thought presupposes a long stretch of road already traversed by the mind of man. It is, one may say, the need of a need already satisfied as regards necessaries, the need of an attained absence of need, of abstraction from the matter of intuition, imagination and so forth — from the concrete interests of desire, impulse and will, in which the determinations of thought are wrapped up and concealed [!].
In general, one can thus say that the dependence of man’s mind on material conditions was openly recognized. Formulated as theoretical insight it dominated the spiritual life of former times, and the objective existence of the natural world around us was, on the whole, not doubted even by such prominent agnostic philosophers as Hume and Kant. Unsolved problems notwithstanding: The basic social relations remained fairly transparent until the bourgeoisie had definitely conquered political power and firmly established its own mode of production. Up to this time the bourgeoisie itself had won its battle against feudalism under the banner of materialism, atheism, reason, science, progress and optimism.
A decisive change occurred when, with the unfolding of the industrial revolution and the continental revolution of 1848-1849, hitherto hidden laws took over with full force. These laws seemed to have a more supernatural, mysterious, unrecognizable and uncontrollable character than the unknown will of God, reducing men to mere puppets in an utterly confused play. A modern author, Edmund Wilson, gives a vivid description of how Jules Michelet looked at social relations just in the period when the decisive change took place. Reviewing The People, a little book Michelet had written not long before 1848, he writes:
The first half, Of Slavery and Hate, contains an analysis of modern industrial society. Taking the classes up one by one, the author shows how all are tied into the social-economic web — each, exploiting or being exploited, and usually both extortionist and victim, generating by the very activities which are necessary to win its survival irreconcilable antagonisms with its neighbors, yet unable by climbing higher in the scale to escape the general degradation. The peasant, eternally in debt to the professional moneylender or the lawyer and in continual fear of being dispossessed, envies the industrial worker. The factory worker, virtually imprisoned and broken in will by submission to his machines, demoralizing himself still further by dissipation during the few moments of freedom he is allowed, envies the worker at a trade. But the apprentice to a trade belongs to his master, is servant as well as workman, and he is troubled by bourgeois aspirations. Among the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, the manufacturer, borrowing from the capitalist and always in danger of being wrecked on the shoal of overproduction, drives his employees as if the devil were driving him. He gets to hate them as the only uncertain element that impairs the perfect functioning of the mechanism; the workers take it out in hating the foreman. The merchant, under pressure of his customers, who are eager to get something for nothing, brings pressure on the manufacturer to supply him with shoddy goods; he leads perhaps the most miserable existence of all, compelled to be servile to his customers, hated by and hating his competitors, making nothing, organizing nothing. The civil servant, underpaid and struggling to keep up his respectability, always being shifted from place to place, has not merely to be polite like the tradesman, but to make sure that his political and religious views do not displease the administration. And, finally, the bourgeoisie of the leisure class have tied up their interests with the capitalists, the least public-spirited members of the nation; and they live in continual terror of communism. They have now wholly lost touch with the people. They have shut themselves up in their class; and inside their doors, locked so tightly, there is nothing but emptiness and chill. [All emphasis added.]
If this description is less deep than actual (and not only for the past), it has nevertheless the advantage of an uncorrupted view which will, as shall be seen, even reach the bottom of the problem, but only to be completely lost in respect to its solution. Michelet, confronted with the now fully developed anonymous forces of capital, could not understand his social existence without specific scientific insights. The insights in question, however, had not yet been formulated and could not be harvested in Michelet’s field. What he has to offer for the future of society in the second half of The People seems thus necessarily “as ridiculous to us today as the first half seems acute.” To follow Wilson:
Great displays of colored fire are set off, which daze the eye with crude lurid colors and hide [!] everything they are supposed to illuminate. The bourgeois has lost touch with the people, Michelet tells us; he has betrayed his revolutionary tradition. All the classes hate one another. What is to be done about it, then? We must have love. We must become as little children; for truth [!], we must go to the simpleton, even to the patient animal. And Education! — the rich and the poor must go to school together: the poor must forget their envy; the rich must forget their pride. And there they must be taught Faith in the Fatherland. “Here,” Michelet is forced to confess, “a serious objection arises: ‘How shall I be able to give people faith when I have so little myself?’ ” “Look into yourself,” he answers, “consider your children — there you will find France!”
Michelet is, as Wilson remarks, simply “preaching a gospel,” and since all gospels presented “as remedies for practical evils” are of the same quality, he reaches at once (Wilson does not say this) the level of the worst official and unofficial ideology. Yet there is something more, for if all gospels are alike, the general level is still higher than in 1956. Wilson notes rightly:
With all this, he says some very searching things, of which he does not perceive the full implications. “Man has come to form his soul according to his material situation. What an amazing thing! Now there is a poor man’s soul, a rich man’s soul, a tradesman’s soul. . . . Man seems to be only an accessory to his position.”[3] And his conception of the people, which at moments sounds mystical, comes down at the end to something that seems to be synonymous with humanity: “The people, in its highest idea, is difficult to find in the people. When I observe it here or there, it is not the people itself, but some class, some partial form of the people, ephemeral and deformed. In its authentic form, at its highest power, it is seen only in the man of genius; in him the great soul resides.”
In Reality, the people being the same empty abstraction as the public mind and human nature, Michelet identifies the people and humanity with himself, namely with the “man of genius” who is, according to all petty-bourgeois ideology, not only the “great soul” and the “authentic form” of the people, but also the “great exception” to the rule. In other words: Michelet, once outside his specialty (history proper), could not evade the laws of bourgeois society and became himself but an accessory to his position. Like the bourgeois, he not only lost touch with the people, he also lost contact with current events and connection with other sciences. He finds the bottom of the problem in saying that man has come to form his soul according to his material position, yet the implications escape him and he cannot even embrace Diderot’s view that it is property (or, for that matter, the absence of property in the case of the poor) which dominates man and molds his soul. Up to 1848 (roughly speaking) the general trend of thought was that man had come to master his social existence with the help of reason and science. This was in line with the revolution in which man seemed to take destiny in his own hands; it was also in line with the development of the productive forces and the progress of technology, which seemed to provide him with all he would need in the future. Now, with the stabilization of bourgeois rule, it turned out that social existence had mastered man and isolated him hopelessly from all others with whom he saw himself entangled, in one way or another and even as worker against worker, in the merciless struggle of competition. Industry and science benefited the rich, not society as a whole, and both became instruments of oppression and enslavement. Simple human and social relations, simple regardless of what could otherwise be said against them, had imperceptibly changed into a most horrible plague: relations between things. Money and Capital, the abstract expression of the new relations, emerged as the sole regulating and connecting factors in a totally reified society under which the common human ground had vanished.
* * *
The effect of this change on human consciousness and psychology was profound and had far-reaching consequences. In fact, psychology became more and more meaningless in a society in which everything was turned upside-down and which made man a mere appendage to capital, no matter whether he was its functionary, parasite or working slave. It is by no means accidental that Marx and Engels, the only men able to scientifically analyze what had happened, pushed psychology into the background. Having with their discoveries freed themselves from social blindness and false consciousness, they advanced sociology, which explained collective human behavior on a much broader basis. Wilson (who is quoted here always for a certain purpose) shows the effect of the new conditions on consciousness and behavior in several passages concerning Michelet, Taine and Renan. Stressing the important fact that the enthusiasm for science of the Enlightenment persisted without the political enthusiasm of the Enlightenment, he refers to an article of 1898, written on the occasion of the Michelet centenary, in which it was predicted that the celebration would not do Michelet justice. Michelet is no longer read, the author of the article says,
because people no longer understand him. Though he was followed in his day by the whole generation of 1850, he commits for the skeptical young man of the end of the century the supreme sin of being an apostle, a man of passionate feeling and conviction [!]. Michelet created the religion of the Revolution, and the Revolution is not popular today, when the Academicians put it in its place, when persons who would have been nothing without it veil their faces at the thought of the Jacobin terror, when even those who have nothing against it manage to patronize it.[4] Besides, Michelet attacked the priesthood, and the Church is now [!] treated with respect.
One can detect in these lines how the mechanism of reification, operating behind the scene and pushing all people with irresistible force in one direction, dehumanizes society and hardens each individual position. A kind of social schizophrenia overwhelms the consciousness of man, manifesting itself first of all in splitting off enthusiasm for science from its political side, namely the social obligations of science. One has to be scientific and to behave rationally in order to make a living and to survive in the competitive struggle, but for the very same reason one has to shun passionate feeling, conviction, humaneness and responsibility towards the whole. In a word: One has to behave unscientifically and irrationally as a human being and thus affirm the irrationality of the system. This social schizophrenia establishes itself as a veritable impersonal institution which enforces onesidedness, human indifference and hypocrisy in every sphere of life. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie furthers, protects and recognizes only those sciences, ideas, methods, teachings, arts and so forth which are useful or indispensable for its own existence, for industry, business and political rule. On the other hand, much apologetic, confusion, distortion and sham-opposition is needed for the deception of the people. The bourgeoisie therefore assigns thousands of specialists to a fixed task, throws thousands of petty and obedient scholars into the social-economic web, buys off thousands of “oppositional” politicians, turns thousands of “rebellious” artists and ideologists into respectable citizens, looks benevolently upon thousands of apostles, cranks, sect-founders, bohemians, scribblers, reformers and “radical” fools living like criminals at the verge of society and cementing its crevices.
Neither nature nor social consciousness tolerates a vacuum, and where true consciousness is lacking, false consciousness immediately fills the gap. Criticism of the system is not only permitted but is absolutely necessary as a safety-valve against too much pressure from within. Such criticism can even be cogent and sharp in many respects, yet it must never go too far, never draw the full consequences and, above all, never call for serious political action, never try to organize intransigent resistance. The system is syphilitic to the bone, generating scum, gangsterism and political adventurism on a large scale as the inevitable symptoms of a deep organic disease. In times of danger it is just the adventurer who presents himself as the savior of bourgeois society, and it is precisely with the regime of the first “great” modern adventurer, Louis Bonaparte, that the final decadence of bourgeois consciousness, thinking and morality sets in. That the Church is “now” treated with respect is an understatement when pronounced in 1898. Engels tells somewhere how hypocrisy was officially inaugurated much earlier by the “atheistic” bourgeoisie.
In 1848, the workers in France and Germany had become rebellious, and the bourgeoisie was looking upon the Church as a strong ally. What other last resource remained for the French and German bourgeois than to silently drop his “free thinking”? The scoffers, one after the other, assumed on the outside a pious demeanor, spoke with respect of the Church, its doctrines and customs, and participated in the latter to the extent that it was unavoidable. The French bourgeois rejected meat on Friday, the German bourgeois sweated in their pews through endless Protestant sermons. They had fallen into ill luck with their materialism. “Religion must be preserved for the people” — that was the last and only means to save society from total doom.
* * *
Wilson, following the decline of the revolutionary tradition in this period, remarks that with Michelet the man has created the mask, but that for Renan and Taine it is the profession that has made it:
Michelet, the man of an unsettled and a passionate generation, has forged his own personality, created his own trade and established his own place. Renan and Taine, on the other hand, are the members of learned castes. Both, like Michelet, set the search for truth above personal considerations: Renan . . . left the seminary and stripped off his robe as soon as he knew that it was impossible for him to accept the Church’s version of history, and the scandal of the Life of Jesus cost him his chair at the Collège de France; and the materialist principles of Taine proved such a stumbling-block to his superiors throughout his academic career that he was finally obliged to give up the idea of teaching. But, though rejected by their professional colleagues, they came before long to be accepted as among the official [!] wise men of their society, a society now temporarily stabilized. Both ended as members of the Academy (“When one is someone, why should one want to be something?” Gustave Flaubert wondered about Renan) — whereas it is only a few years ago that Michelet and Quinet were finally given burial in the Panthéon.
One cannot understand the decline of bourgeois thinking, the corruption of consciousness in bourgeois society and the atmosphere of general hypocrisy resulting from the separation of intellectual production from social praxis, if one does not understand that it is the “intelligentsia” itself which, with the reification of “profession,” is at the same time the instigator and the victim of it all. The civil servant has to be polite and to make sure that his political and religious views do not displease the administration? Well, the man of spirit is in the same position and must, still more, not displease his “superiors” and professional colleagues. They are, in reality, invariably his inferiors (the great talkers of all Academies, la fadaise institutionalized!), yet for this very reason they install censorship, oppression and punishment ahead of the administration. Press, Church, school, radio, police (NKVD and FBI included) and all the rest of a formidable apparatus would not suffice to uphold bourgeois rule without that multicolored army of “authoritative” watchdogs in science, literature, philosophy and so on which is the true and decisive maker of “public” opinion. This army is as stupid as the bourgeoisie itself and often afraid of nothing. It sometimes victimizes intellectuals later accepted among the “official wise men of their society” and does not recognize the advantage of certain “deviations” from its standards. At the end, however, it has the same gigantic stomach as the Catholic Church and easily digests anything which — does not go too far. Harmless declamations are indeed useful and an ornament for a ruling class entirely vulgar, brutal, deceptive and hypocritical. Nothing would be more erroneous than the belief that those who become something instead of remaining someone have not fully merited this transformation. After all, did Renan with his honesty or Taine with his brilliance do anything more than the man of “good will” who always appears at the right time and in the right place in order to increase the general confusion, ambiguity and cheating? What had Renan to offer when “the Revolution of 1848 occurred, and ‘the problems of socialism,’ as he says, ‘seemed, as it were, to rise out of the earth and terrify the world’ ”?
What humanity needs is not a political formula or a change of bureaucracy in office, but “a morality and a faith” [and that is indeed “something”!]. . . . He continues to hope for progress [and so does Mr. Muckpie in his “best” moments!]; but it is a hope that still looks to science without paying much attention to political science, whose advances, indeed, he tends to disregard, as he says the French naturalists had done with Darwinism. Where Michelet had forfeited his posts rather than take the oath of allegiance to Louis Bonaparte, Renan considered it a matter of no consequence.
Renan reaches the conclusion: “It is clear that for a very long time we must stand aside from politics,” which means in plain language: It is clear that we must let the adventurer have his way! (Contrast Quinet, who is mentioned only in passing by Wilson and who had also lost his position at the Collège de France and was banished from his country in 1852.) Yet there is still, says Wilson, an ideal of public service. “Renan ran for the Chamber of Deputies in 1869 on a platform of ‘No revolution; no war; a war will be as disastrous as a revolution.’ And when the war was in progress and the Prussians were besieging Paris, he took an unpopular line in advocating peace negotiations.”
Standing aside from politics is the great illusion of the man “in between” who, always a politician, advises, preaches, exhorts and wants neither war nor revolution in order to get both. Such men, the cursed “luke-warm” of the Bible, professional recipe-makers by the thousands in our time (though still smaller ones than Renan), have always a “code” into which their false consciousness crystallizes and in whose miracle-working power they sometimes even seriously believe, in no way different from the belief of so-called primitive people in the power of their fetish. Renan’s code is “virtue,” on which Wilson appropriately comments:
It is almost as if virtue were with Renan a mere habit which he has been induced to acquire on false pretenses. Though his devotion had been at first directed to the ends of the Enlightenment, to the scientific criticism of the Scriptures which supplemented the polemics of Voltaire, the Enlightenment itself . . . was in a sense on the wane with the attainment by the French bourgeoisie of their social-economic objects; and Renan’s virtue came more and more to seem, not like Michelet’s, a social engine, but a luminary hung in the void. In a hierarchy of moral merit drawn up in one of his prefaces, he puts the saint at the top of the list and the man of action at the bottom: moral excellence, he says, must always lose something as soon as it enters into practical activity because it must lend itself to the imperfection of the world. And this conception gave Michelet concern: he rebuked “the disastrous doctrine, which our friend Renan has too much commended, that passive internal freedom, preoccupied with its own salvation, which delivers the world to evil.” . . . Renan’s emphasis is all on the importance of the calm pursuit of truth, though the turmoil may be raging around us of those who are forced [!] to make a practical issue of it. But he corrects himself: “No, we are posted in sign of war; peace is not our lot.” Yet the relation between the rioter in the street and the scholar in his study seems to have completely dissolved.
It is a particularity of all ideologists to say “yes” when they have said “no,” and then to say “no” again. And it is an eternal truth that those who preach passive internal freedom or the calm pursuit of truth (with which they, of course, land in the void) are extremely active in delivering the world to evil and necessarily extend their own salvation in the most material sense of the word. In the best of cases (not to speak of those where sheer hypocrisy and fraud are at work) they never become conscious that passive internal freedom is an open falsehood if one at the same time participates in the affairs of the world, publishes books, gives advice, outlines directions, emphasizes one line against the other, commends virtue, a morality and a faith (don’t worry which one is the “calmest” truth!) or does anything outside of his private room. Virtue under such circumstances is only another commodity among innumerable sham-products of no use except for the producer and the system which they support. The calm pursuit of “truth” grounded on fundamental self-deception thus reflects once more the crack between intellectual production and social praxis. And whatever school of thought or tendency one may choose, it is fundamentally the same play over and over again.
Taine, in contrast to Renan who dealt mainly with “ideas,” dwells upon the mechanical aspect of history and thereby blocks the way to true consciousness from the other side — an excellent service for a thoroughly mechanical, blindly operating system. To a friend he wrote in Renan’s manner: “Political life is forbidden us for perhaps ten years.” With this self-inflicted “forbidden” he plants instead of “virtue” another fetish before us: “The only path is pure literature or pure science,” the self-deception per se. Writes Wilson:
Men like Taine were travelling away from romanticism, . . . and setting themselves an ideal of objectivity, of exact scientific observation, which came to be known as Naturalism. Both Renan and Taine pretend [!] to a detachment quite alien to the fierce partisanship of a Michelet; and both do a great deal more talking about science. The science of history is for Taine a pursuit very much less human than it had been for Michelet. He writes in 1852 of his ambition “to make of history a science by giving it like the organic world an anatomy and a physiology.”
The “science” of history follows the dehumanization of society and takes on an almost gruesome aspect in Taine’s philosophy and program, fully stated in the introduction to the History of English Literature. In Wilson’s description:
In dealing with works of literature, “as in any other department, the only problem is a mechanical one: The total effect is a compound determined in its entirety by the magnitude and the direction of the forces which produce it.” The only difference between moral problems and physical problems is that, in the case of the former, you haven’t the same instruments of precision to measure the quantities involved. But “virtue and vice are products like vitriol and sugar”; and all works of literature may be analyzed in terms of the race, the milieu and the moment.
Note, says Wilson before, that it is no longer a question of humanity creating itself, of liberty warring against fatality; but of an automaton functioning in an automaton. No wonder then that Taine, as the automaton of the automaton functioning in an automaton, is but pretending when he pretends to a detachment quite alien to Michelet’s partisanship:
It is in vain that he keeps insisting that his object is purely scientific, that he is as detached in his attitude toward France as he would be toward Florence or Athens: The Origins of Contemporary France has an obvious political purpose.
With this fatal side of all “pure” disciplines, he comes still closer to reification and loses even refinement in the technique of self-deception:
By Taine’s time, the amassment of facts for their own [!] sake was coming to be regarded as one of the proper functions of history; and Taine was always emphasizing the scientific value of the “little significant fact” [whose “significance” is usually that of the reified appearance!]. Here, he says, he will merely present the evidence and allow us to make our own conclusions; but it never seems to occur to him that we may ask ourselves who it is that is selecting the evidence and why he is making this particular choice. It never seems to occur to him that we may accuse him of having conceived the simplification first and then having collected the evidence to fit it; or that we may have been made skeptical at the outset by the very assumption on his part that there is nothing he cannot catalogue with certainty [he did not yet feel the need of a Reichenbach to deny certainty!] under a definite number of heads with Roman numerals, in so complex, so confused, so disorderly and so rapid a human crisis as the great French Revolution.
Nothing, it seems, can stop a falling body, especially if its weight is constantly augmented by the amassment of facts for their own sake. Social laws are merciless, which in the present case means: Having fallen so far back in consciousness, the “detachment” of our historian becomes pathetic, while his interpretation of the “little significant facts” reaches the border of intentional falsification. It cannot be otherwise, for there is no other choice for the petty-bourgeois mind than open partisanship of bourgeois “law and order” and the interpretation of “dangerous” past events in its sense. Consequently:
Taine plays down the persecutions for religious belief and liberal thought under the regime of the monarchy and almost succeeds in keeping them out of his picture; and he tries somehow to convey the impression that there was nothing more to the capture of the Bastille than a barbarous and meaningless gesture, by telling us that it contained, at the time, after all, only seven prisoners, and dwelling on the misdirected brutalities committed by the mob. Though in some admirable social-documentary chapters he has shown us the intolerable position of the peasants, his tone becomes curiously aggrieved as soon as they begin violating the old laws by seizing estates and stealing bread. Toward the Federations of 1789, which had so thrilling an effect on Michelet, he takes an ironic and patronizing tone. The spirit and achievements of the revolutionary army have been shut out from his scope in advance and are barely — though more respectfully — touched upon. And the revolutionary leaders are presented, with hardly a trace of sympathetic insight — from a strictly zoological point of view, he tells us — as a race of “crocodiles.”
From a strictly zoological point of view, this judgment is surely the peak of detachment plus “pure” science, plus “pure” literature. Indeed, man has come to form his soul according to his material situation! The problem of his “psychology” has been reduced to a truly mechanical one in the process of reification: There is nothing of significance in his soul anymore which cannot directly be traced down to his social existence, his position and profession. The reduction of his psychology to a mechanical problem is, in other words, reduction with a vengeance:
The human Proteus, in its disconcerting transformation, has thrown Taine and sent him away sulky, as soon as he has emerged from his library. Not only is he horrified by the Marats, but confronted by a Danton or a Madame Roland, he shrinks [!] at once into professorial superiority. At the sight of men making fools and brutes of themselves, even though he himself owes to their struggles his culture and his privileged position, a remote disapproval chills his tone, all the bright colors of his fancy go dead. Where is the bold naturalist now who formerly made such obstinate headway against the squeamishness of academic circles?
The answer to this question has by now become so obvious that one feels a little embarrassed to explain: Why, be sits in his studio, where he has slipped into the skin of the philistine and works hard on his “own,” “brand new,” “unique,” extremely “superior” gospel, code-fetish and political recipe. Though the same childish and pretentious nonsense will be repeated ad nauseam, no self-respecting ideologist can do without it, and it goes without saying that Taine has to fulfill his duties:
He is pressing upon us a social program which blends strangely the householder’s timidity with the intellectual’s independence. Don’t let the State go too far, he pleads: we must, to be sure, maintain the army and the police to protect us against the foreigner and the ruffian; but the government must not be allowed to interfere with Honor and Conscience, Taine’s pet pair of nineteenth-century abstractions, nor with the private operation of industry, which stimulates individual initiative and which alone can secure general prosperity. [Emphasis added.]
One does not know whether to cry or to laugh at this incredible program — it is only sure that it betrays all of the householder’s timidity with not one iota of the intellectual’s “independence.” But just because this independence is a legend spread eagerly by all ideologists, it forms the basis for their feeling of being the cream of humanity. It could be demonstrated in hundreds of cases that this complacent feeling grows stronger the less the single ideologist has to offer and the more servile he is. There is surely truth in it when Wilson says “that the mobs of the great Revolution and the revolutionary government of Paris have become identified now in Taine’s mind with the socialist revolution of the Commune.” Nevertheless, there is also a quite conscious effort to discredit possible attempts at a change with the help of an example from the past presented first in the light of a “particular choice,” secondly in that of pure “scientific” judgment. Strangely enough, this effort is tied up with his claim to “superiority,” which crowns the whole edifice and at first glance seems to contradict the ideologist’s function as obedient servant of the bourgeoisie. The proof is delivered by Wilson when he states about Taine:
Like Renan, he has been driven to imagining that his sole solidarity lies with a small number of superior persons who have been appointed as the salt of the earth; and he is even farther than Renan from Michelet’s conception of the truly superior man as him who represents the people most completely. [Emphasis added.]
Taine has thus fixed where his sole solidarity lies, which means that he has said “yes” to his own kind and “no” to the rest. This, however, is mere imagination and serves the same purpose as the “left-wing” color which certain ideologists like to display in order to hide the sad fact that their glorious “independence” lasts only as long as it costs them not a farthing. As said before: The bourgeoisie and the “official wise men of their society” are very much pleased with such imagination, for it deceives a lot of people (one has to take all efforts of this sort combined!) and breaks or at least diverts their energy. In spite of that, the servant has to assure his master (the bourgeoisie as his true “superior” in society) how unshakable his loyalty is. In other words, he has to declare with whom his real solidarity lies, which means he has to say “yes” to bourgeois society as a whole and, if need be, “no” to his own kind. One has, therefore, always to expect a big “but” which makes things as clear as day and which in the case of Taine reads:
But, though not much liking his ordinary fellow bourgeois, he will rise to the defense of the bourgeois law and order as soon as there seems to be danger of its being shaken by the wrong kind of superior people. [Emphasis added.]
With Taine’s division of the superior people into a wrong kind (let’s say the type of Marx) and a right kind (the type Taine), it becomes plain that he is quite conscious of what he is doing in misrepresenting the great French Revolution. Unable to deny that his “crocodiles” are nevertheless superior people, he knows only too well that he has surrendered his better ego (the “bold naturalist”) to a bad society for which the “wrong” kind of superior people are those who seriously disagree with it. Having betrayed his own kind and ready to betray it again as soon as there seems to be danger from this side (a danger which will never end), he fights for bourgeois law and order all along the line. Under these circumstances, the French Revolution, to which he owes everything, becomes the personification of his bad conscience against which (to stress it for psychoanalysts: quite consciously!) he constantly has to vindicate himself. There has never been an ideologist (the “ordinary” fellow scribbler is another matter) who is not disturbed by the fact that be “knows better” than he does and precisely thereby is forced to build up defenses in the form of distortions, sham-problems, empty talk, and circular reasoning. Final proof that Taine, too, suffers from this disease of consciousness is furnished by Wilson’s comment:
Yet something is wrong: his heart is not in this as it was in his early work. He does not like the old regime; he does not like the Revolution; he does not like the militaristic France which has been established by Napoleon and his nephew. And he never lived to write, as he had planned, the final glorification of the French family, which was to have given its moral basis to his system, nor the survey of contemporary France, in which he was apparently to have taken up the problem of the use and abuse of science: to have shown how, though beneficial when studied and applied by the elite, it became deadly in the hands of the vulgar.
* * *
Noting in passing that Taine’s “glorification” of the French family was an impossible task (it would have been a miserable apology of the petty bourgeoisie, a monstrous failure), the reasons for following Wilson along his road can now be enumerated.[5]
First: Wilson demonstrates that he has, concerning the past, a keen sense of historical development and a sound judgment. So far he therefore betrays no important signs of a false consciousness.
Second: In a very natural manner he brings to light how the minds of even “superior” men are molded by events, revolutionary or post-revolutionary situations, periods of unrest or relative stabilization — in short: by their social existence and the specific stage of development it has reached.
Third: He thus exposes how a great historical change which began, as reflected in the consciousness of enlightened men, with the ideal of uniting all sciences and of joining them to social praxis (the development of the social productive forces being the material basis) leads to political helplessness and its reification by means of abstractions (Michelet’s “We must have love” and so on, which painfully recall the abstractions of the Bible).
Fourth: He then exposes how there ensues an ever widening gap between science and social praxis until complete separation is reached, until everything is atomized and the “ideal” of “pure” science, “pure” literature, l’art pour l’art, the amassment of facts for their own sake and so forth appears as the perfect reflection of the capitalist mode of production, i.e.: Production for the sake of production or money-making for the sake of money-making. Michelet, in anticipation of what was much later to become a direct material possibility but, like the men of the Enlightenment, deeply impressed by the potentialities of the new mode of production — Michelet could still write in full sincerity: “Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. . . . All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system.” However, as the heroes of the French Revolution, who fought for the realization of the ideal of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité as the application of “one” science, did not know that they were working for the establishment of the bourgeois order, so Michelet did not know that his scientific ideal foreshadowed only the universal spread of the capitalist system, with the commodity as its “one” unifying element. If Michelet still sees that men themselves, by the very activities necessary for their life-process, generate irreconcilable antagonisms with their neighbors yet cannot, by climbing higher in the scale, escape the general degradation, Renan and Taine are already advanced personifications of this degradation and are far removed from such insight. On the contrary: Adapting themselves to the new status quo they adapt science, literature, philosophy and all the rest to their position in it, declaring that this corruption of consciousness constitutes their “superiority.” In doing so and in propagating their specific new scientific view, they fail to realize that they have turned into inferior apologists and, together with their science, have sunk to the level of automatons functioning in the automaton of capitalist society.
Fifth: Wilson, using very little psychology in dealing with Michelet, Renan and Taine, shows: Whatever the psychological motives of the “man in between,” of the professional or self-styled ideologist — things have their own logic and we can discard man’s psychology as a factor of fundamental importance as soon as he enters public life. If Taine, for example, was psychologically afraid of the Commune and identified it in his mind with the revolutionary government of Paris, nothing is gained and nothing explained about social processes by knowing it. Much more interesting and enlightening is the fact that he was afraid at all and that one part of his society took the same position and reacted exactly as he did, while another part of the same society took the opposite stand and reacted accordingly, no matter in both cases whether they did so actively or passively, afraid or cynical, identifying or not. There is, of course, no sharp line of demarcation between all members of the opposing camps. Many individuals, especially “men in between,” vacillate with two souls in one breast and greater or lesser inconsistency, but only in order to wind up, finally, in one of the two fundamental positions. Important is only the fact that internal social contradictions unfold under certain conditions up to a point where they turn into irreconcilable antagonisms which eventually clash. Important is only that before, during and after such clashes, human atoms are stirred up and driven from one position into another and that the latter is, temporarily or permanently, always the opposite one. Important is lastly that such an interchange of opposite positions takes place — unimportant is that this or that member of the working-class (to use an instance) is attracted by bourgeois social existence and this or that member of the possessing or privileged class is disgusted with it.
Sixth: Wilson continuously illustrates the law of the dwindling force of cognition in bourgeois thinking. Thinking can only develop in connection with social praxis. The bourgeoisie proper, however, the more its rule and the social productive forces expand, becomes a totally superfluous class because all its social functions are now, as Engels put it, fulfilled by salaried employees. Engendering, by its very utility in the development of the capitalist system, its own uselessness, the bourgeoisie soon becomes the only ruling class in history which has no culture at all. It is in this respect at one with the proletariat which, due to its position in society, cannot create any culture of its own and has, as a separate class, been rendered equally superfluous as the bourgeoisie. The “producer” of culture (in the widest sense) is the petty bourgeoisie, the “man in between,” the scientist, intellectual and ideologist who, being neither capitalist nor worker, regards himself therefore as at least relatively “independent” or standing “above the classes.” It has already been shown that this “independence” is sheer self-deception and that the essential function of the intelligentsia is to foster bourgeois rule. Once integrated as an automaton in an automaton, it shares the fate of the bourgeoisie to the degree that the latter loses its function and rules in the name of the anonymous power called Capital. In other words: The intelligentsia, too, loses its creative power and achieves less and less in the realm of cognition — its progressive role is restricted to the sphere of abstract production in which the stupidity of the “pure facts” reigns and the force of generalization is lost.
Seventh: From a philosophical point of view, Wilson illustrates not only how opposites turn into opposites, but also how they form a unity and mutually interpenetrate each other. Already with Michelet, illumination becomes hiding. With Renan and Taine, hope for progress turns into disregard for political science, passive internal freedom into active external bondage, calm pursuit of truth into the preaching of false codes. Scientific “detachment,” further, reveals itself to be fierce political partisanship, objectivity to consist of subjective selection of facts fitting preconceived simplifications, independence to be utter dependence and naturalism falsification of reality. To crown it all, the self-appointed “salt of the earth” and superior person appears as a fool and a liar who preaches with the boldness of the learned ignoramus that private operation of industry alone can secure general prosperity (this in the teeth of the experience of the Commune and the progress of economic science). Finally, the self-appointed “elite” man is the one who closes the circle in the decline of cognition, for he is the first vulgar person who turns science into ideology, who abuses science and in whose hands it becomes deadly. Leonardo da Vinci destroyed his design for a submarine out of fear that it would be misused. Einstein, in contrast, induced Roosevelt to produce A-bombs, with which he unchained the deadliest force ever put in the service of capitalist competition in war and peace. Was it fear, naïveté, hope or something else which moved Einstein? It was, in any case, his social existence, the logic of the system which pushed him in a disastrous direction. It was thus false consciousness, ignorance of political science, blindness with regard to social implications and the connection between all sciences if he could not even calculate the first consequence of his step and believed that the bomb would not be used without the “utmost necessity” in the sense in which the bourgeoisie itself understands this term. One has to grasp the dialectical nature of things, which imbued the production of the bomb with its own logic — the bomb was actually used wantonly, with political deception of the people, and the horrible new branch of production had to be pushed further and further. Let it be repeated: The bourgeois character of the “abstract” sciences (which “as such” contain no ideological material) cannot be detected in themselves but in their theoretical interpretation. Let it be repeated, too: In bourgeois society, science cannot benefit the people, it benefits the system and its parasites (general assertion of its bourgeois character) and remains a potential, not an actual friend of mankind. The alienation of man from his work is reproduced in the alienation of science from its social purpose, and both harden the antagonism between physical and intellectual labor in which reason has no place. The world is full of dialectical surprises, and nature, which is an organic unity and will be treated as such, revenges itself for the violation of its laws. Each step forward is now inseparably bound up with a step backwards, with greater evils, sharper antagonisms, graver dangers, deeper blindness, more intense social and human degradation.
Eighth: Wilson throws some light on the unhappy position in which the intellectual is put, with his own help, by the mechanism of the system. Whatever the state of his consciousness may be: If he is not a cynical apologist he feels uneasy in his skin and displays greater or lesser evidence of a bad conscience. The feeling that “something is wrong” is as widespread a symptom as its counterpart, namely longing for political and intellectual freedom. A letter by Einstein to the editor of The Reporter sums up the point in a rather tragic manner. Having been instrumental in what was to follow from the construction of the A-bomb (secrecy; restriction of scientific communication, freedom and conscience; deception of the people and political persecution) he commented on a series of articles by Theodore H. White under the title “U.S. Science: The Troubled Quest.” In these articles it was said “that centers of intellectual life were troubled by recent Federal actions concerning scientists.” The New York Times of Nov. 10, 1954, from which the story is taken, noted: “Dr. Einstein has been an outspoken critic of these actions. When Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer was denied security clearance by the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. Einstein said: ‘The systematic, widespread attempt to destroy mutual trust and confidence constitutes the severest possible blow against society.’ ” Then followed Einstein’s letter to the editor of The Reporter:
You have asked me what I thought about your articles concerning the situation of the scientists in America. Instead of trying to analyze the problem, I may express my feeling in a short remark: If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.
After the letter, the New York Times wrote:
In Princeton, Dr. Einstein’s secretary declined to elaborate on this comment. In publishing the letter, Max Ascoli, the editor of The Reporter, said that it was an honor but “hardly a pleasure to publish this letter from Albert Einstein.” The comment will be freely used by enemies of the United States, he said. [This is divine: As if it were the fault of the “enemies” that “something” is utterly rotten in the United States!] But he added that the freedom to protest, which Dr. Einstein used in making his comment [this is divine again: Einstein was asked for it, but Ascoli surely expected him to be a “good boy” who never uses any “freedom”!], can still [!] be afforded here. Our country must maintain a good record on this score, not just a better record than do the totalitarian nations, Mr. Ascoli said in an editorial comment.
That is all that came out of a vital issue, and the story confirms what we already know. You can, especially if you are Einstein, still express your feeling and become a “protester” who audaciously uses such freedom, but you will not attempt to analyze the problem, let alone with full documentation and in its full social and scientific impact. It is an “honor” to print a statement by a great man, but hardly a “pleasure” because it reveals a little of that truth which it should be the highest honor and pleasure for any non-totalitarian or honest paper to publish. Inconsistent criticism is compatible with any political system — it is not for nothing that the Stalinists sanction their own kind of “critical” exercise in the name of “Bolshevik self-criticism.” To be timid, to hide, to be hypocritical, to falsify, to lie has become a social command and conscious policy. On the other hand, it has become one among several of man’s “second natures.” There is an organic connection between the separation of intellectual work from social praxis and the total falsification of history and political theory consciously planned, ordered and enforced by Stalin. This connection is so strong that the whole bourgeois world has travelled along Stalin’s road, though the so-called “free” world has not yet installed the Stalinist system. On a world scale, the “new barbarism” will be victorious if the fatal trend of capitalist development cannot be checked and reversed. But in that case no psychology would be needed to depict in advance the basic behavior of those who figure as pacemakers of the new barbarism. For better or worse, the social process always prepares the soil and also has ready to hand the human material that is required when consequential decisions become unavoidable. Out of our social existence, Stalins, Hitlers, Mussolinis, Francos would spring up like mushrooms after rain. Together with their gang, all would act after the same pattern, their “individual” psychology being of no more importance for the development in toto than a grain of sugar in a pound of salt. In the intellectual sphere, the ultimate consequence would be everywhere the same as in Russia. The falsification and perversion of social consciousness would be consciously planned, ordered and enforced — whoever resists or goes beyond “criticism” organized by the state will be punished and exterminated.
* * *
All the foregoing could have nevertheless been said without Wilson if the main point had not been to have a look at Wilson himself in the light of his own presentation. He has nicely exposed the large and abstract capitalized words, the shallow syncretism of concepts, creeds and gospels such as: We must have love; Faith in the Fatherland; Education; Forget your envy; Forget your pride; We need a morality and a faith; Virtue; Passive internal freedom; Calm pursuit of truth; Don’t let the state go too far; Honor and Conscience; Pure science; Pure art; etc. The sheer mass of these deceptive abstractions, one is entitled to think, should have put Wilson on guard, but only those with little insight into the social mechanism will be surprised to see him silently drop his critical attitude and embrace the same vice. His book ends with a “Summary,” in the last paragraph of which he says that, more important than certain other features, something remains which is common to all great Marxists. It is “the desire to get rid of class privilege based on birth and on difference of income; the will to establish a society in which the superior development of some is not paid for by the exploitation, that is, by the deliberate (this word is one of Wilson’s real hits!) degradation of others — a society which will be homogeneous and cooperative as our commercial society is not, and directed, to the best of their ability, by the conscious creative minds of its members.” And then he delivers his own deceptive abstraction:
But this again is a goal to be worked for in the light of one’s own imagination and with the help of one’s common sense. The formulas of the various Marxist creeds, including the one that is common to them all, the dogma of the Dialectic, no more deserve the status of holy writ than the formulas of other creeds. To accomplish such a task will require of us an unsleeping adaptive exercise of reason and instinct combined.
Bereaved of several words which hide more than illuminate, the new recipe reads: We must use imagination and common sense, we need an unsleeping adaptive exercise of reason and instinct combined.
That, presented in 1953 as a remedy for practical evils, is worse than the codes of Love, Honor, Conscience or Faith, and it by no means becomes better if the words “one’s own” are inserted. One’s own imagination and common sense are as good and helpful or bad and hampering as reason and instinct (combined) required of us. Since nobody who has a little common sense will believe that Wilson’s abstractions have told him anything, he will conclude (and that is his “combination”): Wilson is only a present-day — Taine. If, in addition, he possesses reason (which includes knowledge and cognition) he will exercise it (throwing away the senseless flourish “unsleeping adaptive”) and work for his goal by explaining what, in each concrete case, is at stake. In the case of Wilson, he will explain, it so happens that his imagination, common sense, reason and instinct combined were not sufficient to make him carry through his — own point. If he had reflected on what he had demonstrated he would have seen that even cogent theories, if separated from social praxis, must sooner or later lead to internal contradictions, emptiness and ideology (false consciousness). Cognition is truth, and the truth is often bitter because it is brutal. Wilson states, in the case of Renan and Taine, that it is their profession that has made their mask. If one makes such a statement he invites the question: And what is the profession behind your own mask? He may also be asked: Why do you write at all? Out of deep conviction, because you can’t help it and have decided to work with others for the establishment of the society you envisage? Or do you write in order to make a living and sell empty phrases? — Schopenhauer already complained that the whole misery of contemporary literature inside and outside Germany has its roots in writing books for money. “Everybody who needs money,” he said, “sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it.” Yet all evils have their consoling side: Any writer must recognize that he runs a risk and has for his part no moral right to complain if he is taken to task.
There is, for instance, the question of the Dialectic. Wilson rejects dialectics not only in passing, as above, but in a special chapter called The Myth of the Dialectic. Here, however, the contention is that there can be no full consciousness of our social existence without knowledge of dialectics — the final reason for quoting Wilson was to have a look at him in the light of that “Myth,” i.e. to introduce it in its social aspect and significance, and to explain by way of inquiry into our present social existence and consciousness why it has so many opponents who without exception are not only victims of the law of ignorance and isolation in bourgeois society, but frequently also conscious calumniators who try to prejudice the reader against the study of dialectics by calling it mythical, metaphysical, dogma, nonsense, trash and God knows what else. Wilson, who like innumerable fellow fighters against dialectics may believe he has “finished” it once and for all, should have known as a man somewhat instructed “political science”:
As long as social contradictions and antagonisms exist they will be accompanied by partisanship in every field and in every question, while the claim to neutrality expresses per se either a lie or false consciousness. Where there is partisanship there is struggle, and in the fields of cognition and epistemology the struggle will always revolve around the positions of philosophical idealism and materialism, in the final analysis philosophical idealism and dialectical materialism. The positions “in between,” called agnosticism, empiricism, positivism and so on, are but deviations from the two basic positions. There is, furthermore, a difference between idealist dialectic and materialist dialectic, but characteristic of the ideological struggle in the last sixty years is a steadily increasing hostility to and ignorance of dialectics at all, especially among the representatives of positions “in between.” The enmity against dialectics is so intense that its rejection runs parallel with an unceasing effort to distort it, to minimize it, to limit it and to render it harmless.
The question is: Is this effort (which besides thoroughly stigmatizes Wilson’s chapter on dialectics) a chance phenomenon? By no means — the social root of it was uncovered by Marx long ago, but it is the tragic fate of the most famous quotations rarely to be understood and properly reflected upon in their full implications. That alone is reason enough to place once more before Wilson’s eyes Marx’s statement concerning the horror which befalls the bourgeoisie and its apologists at the sight of dialectics:
In its mystified form, the Dialectic became fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure what existed. In its rational form it is to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire prolocutors a scandal and abomination, because it includes in the positive comprehension of the existing at the same time also the comprehension of its negation, of its necessary destruction, apprehends every form that has come into existence in the flux of movement, thus also according to its perishable side, lets nothing impose upon it and remains in its essence critical and revolutionary.
It is in vain that Wilson pays side-compliments to Marxism (which are almost “obligatory” for any writer who wants to be “objective”) such as: “There was this much in the claims of Marx and Engels that they had been able to make socialism ‘scientific’: they were the first to attempt in an intensive way to study economic motives objectively.” It is in vain that he declares we can still use with profit “the technique of analyzing political phenomena in social-economic terms” and finally says: “The Marxist method can get valid results only if applied afresh by men realistic enough to see, and bold enough to think, for themselves.” It is in vain that he tells us of the “will to establish a society” (see above), for all his realistic seeing and bold thinking (for himself!) lands in abstractions and his enmity against the Dialectic has “an obvious political purpose.” In short, it is a fact that Wilson, too, has a “past” yet has come to make his peace with society as it is.[6] The pattern of his behavior has been set: Knowing that this society is a very bad one, he does not feel too easy about the whole business and exercises self-vindication both by “boldly thinking for himself” (he expresses the well-known qualms of the ideologists, which make him appear “independent”) and in fighting a “dogma” not very flattering for his social position, his profession and society as a whole. One could bluntly say that Wilson, who leans heavily on psychology when it comes to Marx (he calls him “Prometheus and Lucifer”) is hostile to dialectics because this method is indeed “diabolic” and does not stop before any claim to independence, remains critical toward any abstraction from social content, is not impressed by any play with empty words and shallow conceptions and apprehends the perishable side of any position in bourgeois society. With all this Wilson remains a factual witness for dialectics when, not knowing what he is doing, he demonstrates how opposites turn into opposites, form a unit and interpenetrate each other (see preceding section under “Seventh”). This is precisely an illustration of one of the laws of dialectics, which are as inexorable as social laws and from which there is as little escape as from the latter, for they are the laws of the universe and all its phenomena, including the human mind.
* * *
The first who cognized that the mode of thinking of the nice fellow to whom Wilson appeals, namely “common sense,” had much to do with our social status was Hegel. He insisted that the operations of formal logic which fixed and separated all things from each other, so that A was A, a worker a worker, necessity necessity, contingency contingency, etc., had arisen with social relations which were antagonistic and that they therefore reflected these real antagonisms. In the ancient world the fixation (reification) of social antagonisms had already been driven so far that formal thinking expressed it in the sentence: The slave is a slave, not a human being.[7] The ancient world, however, is distinguished from the modern world by a greater transparency and sincerity — in our time one is either hypocritical or unconscious about the fact that the formula “The worker is a worker” has the same significance as “The slave is a slave” and reflects a state of social affairs in which the worker is indeed not a human being and is not treated as one but, as Wilson says, is subject to deliberate degradation. Social relations have been so reified and so fixed by common sense that most people are unable to connect a professor with physical work. No, the professor is a professor and is immediately conceived of as a somewhat awkward person with glasses and beard, absentminded, impractical and unfit for physical work, which would prevent him from being a “real” professor. The professor will usually feel the same way, and since everybody has a business which makes him what he is and sets him apart from others, the capitalist will feel that he is a capitalist, the professional gangster is but a professional gangster, the Marilyn Monroe-doctrine is the Marilyn Monroe-doctrine and so on without end. Finally, the abstract character of our social existence in which all relations undergo reification finds its universal expression in the truly formal logical maxim Business is Business with which all human considerations are silenced and negated.
It is economy (and in it one decisive factor: commodity) which has shaped the whole social process as well as our form of thinking and has transformed man into a mere accessory to his position. If Michelet could have followed the development of capitalist society and commented on its present states he would perhaps have exclaimed:
What an amazing thing! Now there is not only a poor man’s soul, a rich man’s soul, a tradesman’s soul, but also a musician’s soul and that of the workers’ bureaucrat, the luxury woman, the journalist, the physicist, the poet, the ideologist, the baseball player, the hoodlum (whom somebody above likes!), the missionary, the lawyer (whom nobody likes!), the mathematician, the logician, the physician. So many professions, so many souls, each incapable, in the final analysis, of looking at the world in terms other than those of its specialty, each one incapable of a unifying human view. Business is Business and science is science, and science stands in the service of business and has to compete with other business. Consequently: Each specialty within a specialty becomes another business which must assert itself by giving the same object a different color, not unlike the way in which two equally bad toothpastes are sold under different names. What has become of my one science, nay, of one science itself! Physicists and mathematicians very often look with disdain upon philosophy, which appears to be a “mess” of 17,563 different opinions (the figure given is scientifically “exact”). Philosophers can pay them back and point to the mess in all other sciences. After the so-called fundamentals-crisis (Grundlagenkrise) in mathematics which broke out at the beginning of the twentieth century (the development of G. Cantor’s Mengenlehre had led mathematics for the first time to contradictions and split mathematicians into different camps), the student has a choice between teachers who are formalists, logicians and intuitionists. From formalists like Hilbert he will learn that there exists no specific subject-matter in mathematics, for it is only a collection of rules which permit the construction of combinations and transformations. The logicians Russell and Frege will tell him that mathematics is a grammar without subject, object, verb or predicate, a grammar of the copula and, or, etc. (in a word: a tremendous tautology). The intuitionists Brouwer and Weyl will hold Kant’s view that pure (pure!) intuition a priori forms the subject-matter of mathematics, but the logicians (who have held since Leibniz that mathematics belongs to logic) will see in the axioms and theorems of mathematics laws of ratio. And that is not all. There are scientist-philosophers like Mach who seek the subject-matter of mathematics in psychology; there are the mechanistic empiricists who negate the specificity of mathematics, classify it under physics and hold that its subject-matter is physical time and physical space. Then there is the trouble with non-Euclidian geometry and quantum mechanics in which neo-Kantians (Nelson, Bieberbach), mechanistic empiricists and formalists take different and sometimes comical attitudes. (By the way: A true Swiss-cheese genius in philosophy is Weyl!) And then there are conventionalists like Poincaré for whom mathematical notions and operations are but convenient agreements (principle of “thought-economy”) and thus evade the problem. Add to these names like Peirce, Peano, Schröder and you have a host of other nuances leading to the state of symbolic logic (also called mathematical, exact or algebraic logic). Edward V. Huntington says that it “remained for Russell (1903) to announce the surprising thesis that logic and mathematics are in reality the same science; that pure mathematics requires no material beyond that which is furnished by the necessary presupposition of any logical thought; and that formal logic, if it is to be distinguished as a separate science at all, is simply the elementary, or earlier, part of mathematics.” But he continues: “It is too early to predict what the final outcome of this new movement will be. . . . A new program has been proposed for mathematics and logic, and the true nature and scope of what is now called symbolic logic cannot be determined until this broader question of the relation between logic and mathematics is decided. It may be that, in the merging of these two sciences, no place will be left for symbolic logic as a distinctive science; it may be that the studies now pursued under that name will be supplied with a more appropriate title [which will be a great step “forward”!]; or it may be that some new form of symbolic logic will absorb the whole of logic and mathematics.” (Huntington with the cooperation of Christine Ladd-Franklin in The Encyclopedia Americana, article Symbolic Logic.)
Let’s now have a look at a single item within a science, namely the question of the ether in physics. The discussion about the existence of the ether came into full swing through Einstein who, at the time of the formulation of his special theory of relativity, was the main opponent of the assumption of an ether. He later reversed his view and declared (in Ether and Relativity Theory): “The ether of the general theory of relativity is a medium which is itself bare of all mechanic and kinetic qualities, but codetermines the mechanical (and electromagnetical) process (Geschehen).” Accordingly we have scientists and philosophers who share Einstein’s view of the ether. Among philosophers belonging to this group we find Bergson, Cassirer, Schlick, Petzold and others; among astronomers Eddington and Kopff; among mathematicians Hilbert, Neumann, Russell; among physicists Planck, A. Haas, M. Laue, A. Sommerfeld, Born, Campbell, Chwolsen. Then comes a group which upholds the concept of a ponderomotive, substantial ether, in which such prominent names as W. Voigt, O. Lodge, J.J. Thomson, W. Wien, G. Mie, E. Wiechert, V. Bjerkness, W. Nernst figure. This group, however, is not homogeneous but comprises adherents of an elastic or inelastic, a continuous or discontinuous (corpuscular), a Fresnel-Lorentz (resting) and a Hertz-Stocke (carried along) ether. Then follows a group which simply denies the existence of an ether. In it we find Poincaré, Mach, Ritz (emission theory) and, especially among mathematicians, axiomaticians. (Note: There are in all these groups numerous “oscillators,” combinations and transitions.) Then follow those scientists who say “I don’t know” (Exner, Ehrenfest, R. Millikan) but who still operate with the ether. Finally follow the confusionists whose protagonist is Weyl.[8]
Thus we need not go into biology (with its vitalistic errantries), anthropology, medicine, psychology, economy and all the rest in order to find in science the same mess of 17,563 different opinions for which philosophy is castigated. What is most amazing: Business is going on in science as in all other spheres of production! 100 different kinds of toilet-paper are produced because people must go into business, must stay in it and expand — scientists, lecturers and students produce for the same purpose en masse. Three or four kinds of toilet-paper would represent a rational production and be sufficient for any need — three or four scientific papers among each thousand would provide for all that is required in the field. The rest is useless duplication and sham-production which has nothing to do with human or scientific needs, but much with business, competition (also among the universities, which are run as business institutions) and a totally crazy system maintaining itself through tremendous waste. Wherever we look there is the dialectical unity of opposites and transformation of opposites into opposites. Material production progresses and incites scientific work as science progresses and incites material production, yet one is simultaneously as rational and irrational as the other. Material production cannot find its general purpose and science cannot define its own subject-matter — both are separated from their human end; both are driven on by blind, external laws; both are governed by false consciousness. Rationality is thus achieved through irrationality and irrationality through rationality, both turning wildly into each other and finally leaving rationality chiefly in scientific methods, laboratories, computers, generators and the means of production, while irrationality appears chiefly in production as a whole, in H-bombs, guided missiles, gases and bacteria for warfare, jet-fighters, insecticides, chemicals and so on down to 100 different kinds of toilet-paper.
* * *
Leaving Michelet and turning back to Hegel, we find that his consciousness was in many respects far ahead of his time. He was the first who denoted the antagonism between social existence and consciousness as alienation, revealing the state of affairs in modern society in which man is overpowered by his own creations and in which the unity of object and subject, society and nature, production and society, etc., is completely lost. Confronted with statements of false consciousness, i.e. with the statement of formal logic the worker is a worker (which expresses and fixes the alienation of man from his essence) he would have retorted:
The statement is true, yet only insofar as it reflects the given state of the worker in the given society. The truth of the statement is a starting point and a necessary element for establishing the fact that it is at the same time false. True and false are usually identical in modern society, which in the given case means: The worker is not a worker but a human being — he represents a living unity of opposites (worker and human being), even if this unity is hidden under his present status. To say that the worker is a worker means to say that he is a degraded human being, and to say the latter is to say that he became a degraded human being as a consequence of the forms in which society has developed. A man who works in order to live is the very opposite of a man who lives in order to work — the latter is a living antagonism, and that antagonism, like all other antagonisms created by social development and categorized by formal logic (common sense), must be overcome in such a way (there is in truth no other) that man again will work in order to live. He thus retains the content of the antagonism, but on a much higher level, in an un-antagonistic form. This form permits him to dispose freely of what he has achieved in the course of his development from primitive man who worked in order to live to civilized man who lived in order to work, yet for all that did not cease to work in order to live and reconquered his original status as cultural man who possesses now all means necessary for the realization of his human potentialities.
The kernel of Hegel’s dialectical method is to dissolve all immediately given forms of reality into a process which alone can reveal the true nature of things. It opposes therefore all forms of positivism and their fetishization of facts, which as such do not tell the truth and consequently possess no authority at all. Positivism in any form, in spite of its unceasing claims to being “scientific,” is simultaneously false consciousness (ideology), affirmation of the existing system, bad conscience and apology. It is the characteristic philosophy of a perverted society and perverts consciousness not because it violates the “scientific” principle and goes beyond facts verified by observation, but because it does not do so. It is furthermore a philosophy which by its very character refutes itself. The experience of our senses, for example, tells us that the worker is a worker, the capitalist a capitalist, the scientist a scientist and so on. But is the capitalist or, for that matter, anything that we perceive and experience, an observed fact which positivism would be rightfully entitled to celebrate? By no means! The capitalist is a general phenomenon representing infinitely more than any observed capitalist, indeed something more powerful, more essential and decisive than all observed capitalists taken together. All things are a complex of contradictions and universalities, so that first the scientist and the capitalist, too, are degraded human beings who have lost their independence and depend on the work of others while being slaves of the system. But then they are, like the genus man, also mammals, males or females, cell-states asserting the unity of life and death, being and nothing, becoming and vanishing and many more “facts.” All categories express something universal (even the categories individual, single, fact, particular, etc.) which is more than the bare fact and in truth determines its essence. It is this universal of which positivism speaks whilst believing or pretending to speak only of observed facts. To start with the “given” is justified and necessary, but to pretend that it is possible to stick only to given facts is a lie immanent in all positivist philosophy and, once more, an affirmation of the status quo.
There is always a difference between appearance (the manner in which things exist) and essence. All science, says Marx, would be superfluous if the form of appearance (Erscheinungsform) and the essence of things were immediately to coincide. In the reality of our social existence, we see the “free” worker, but the essence of this phenomenon is wage slavery. In reality, we find the “observable fact” of prices, but their essence is value which can neither be seen nor felt and yet is more “real” and powerful in its abstract quality than millions of little facts without consequence. In reality, we encounter supply and demand, yet their essence is commodity production. In reality, there exist the different forms in which profit appears (interest on money-capital, rent, commercial profit, entrepreneur profit, etc.), but their essence is surplus value. Finally, we speak of democracy, civilization, technical progress, whilst their essence is dictatorship of capital, bourgeois rule, social barbarism and regression. Alas, the world does not bow to positivism, the essence of things is not expressible in numbers, and symbolic logic is not the logic of life. Where mathematics experiences a crisis when it meets contradictions, dialectics postulates that such contradictions are the very soul and moving force of the whole universe — it hunts them (sit venia verbo!) and follows their unfolding in society in order to show that they can be freed from their antagonistic form.
* * *
Hegel, Marx and Engels cleared the path to true consciousness by demonstrating its dependence on social existence. Once this dependence was discovered and the decisive element of our social existence (production) with its inherent contradictions was analyzed, consciousness concerning the essence was established and the general result of our social development (as a consequence of its unfolding inner contradictions and antagonisms) could be predicted. Errors in details, even important ones, were still to occur as a result of shortcomings in concrete knowledge (often conditioned by restrictions of the time), yet the key to the comprehension of social processes and an adequate consciousness was found. This, however, does not mean that from then on consciousness was to spread and gain a great influence in social life. Quite the contrary, there were good reasons why this could not be. The main reason was given by Marx himself in connection with the fetish character of commodities. He explained:
The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labor, so far as they are value, are but material [objective] expressions of the human labor spent in their production, marks indeed an epoch in the history of the development of mankind, but by no means dissipates the mist through which the social character of labor appears to be an objective character of the products themselves. What is valid only for this specific form of production, for commodity production, namely that the specific social character of private labor executed independently of each other consists in their quality as human labor — this appears, before as after the mentioned discovery, to those prepossessed by the relations of commodity production just as final as the fact that, after the scientific decomposition of the air into its elements, the air continues to exist in its physical form.
In other words: If, as Hegel says, what is well known is on that account not cognized — what is cognized is on that account not well known. Nearly everybody remained prepossessed by the relations of commodity production, and the process of reification gained more power over consciousness the less commodity production had fully developed and exhausted all its possibilities. It is true that Marx, Engels and many of their followers believed that the proletariat would become the principal carrier of that consciousness required for the transformation of the capitalist system into a rational society. In a paragraph of the Preface to the second edition of Capital not contained in the English translation, Marx even wrote:
The understanding which Capital found quickly in wide circles of the German working-class is the best reward of my work. Herr Meyer, industrialist of Vienna, a man holding economically the bourgeois standpoint, pertinently demonstrated in a brochure published during the German-French war that the so-called educated classes of Germany had quite lost the great theoretical sense which was considered to be a German heritage, but that it revived anew in her working-class.
No need to elaborate that the understanding of Capital by workers and all references to the acquisition of social consciousness by the proletariat belongs to the important errors of Marx and Engels. Such errors stand, in fact, in unnecessary contradiction to their outline of social psychology, which makes it plain that the law of ignorance and isolation applies to all classes in bourgeois society. The truth is that just because reification progressed for a time and progressively degraded man (a process through which the proletariat was definitely integrated into bourgeois society), consciousness not only made no further inroads but actually regressed to an incredible degree. When Marx spoke about the “understanding” of his main work he noted also: “That the method employed in Capital has been little understood, is shown by the various conceptions, contradictory one to another, that have been formed of it.” This was due to the general regression in thinking unavoidable in a society in which the privilege of education cuts the masses off from experience with forms of thought. For in such a society the fetter in which the consciousness of the masses is held becomes a fetter for the educated strata themselves and enforces a constant lowering of cognition on both sides. The first result was the loss of the Hegelian tradition, the “great theoretical sense” embodied in its highest form in Hegel’s dialectic. It was even, as Marx says in the same place, the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated Germany, to treat Hegel in the fashion in which the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, namely as a “dead dog.” The system is endangered if cognition is acquired even by “educated” members of the upper classes, a fact which determines the level of all education from universities down to public schools. On the other side, the leaders of the workers’ movement were, contrary to common belief, the least acquainted with dialectics and (in general) the first to pervert theory altogether. This was the case for the Second International in its entirety, which produced not one great dialectician (not to speak of Kautsky, Bernstein and so on — even Mehring, Rosa Luxemburg and Labriola never fully understood dialectics and displayed great theoretical weaknesses). Although led, in the person of Lenin, by the only creative dialectician after Marx and Engels, this was also the case for the Third International, which was transformed by Stalin into one vast institute for the falsification of consciousness in conformity with the political reduction of the Russian revolution to its bourgeois content. Notwithstanding various “Marxist” sects, Marxism as a political movement, that is as the theory and praxis of the “proletarian revolution” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” is absolutely dead.
If one adds to all this the “observed fact” of general hostility towards the surviving elements of Marxism (including the permanent effort to distort them), namely the critique of political economy and historical and dialectical materialism as the key to full consciousness, one must conclude: It requires at least complete ignorance on the part of Wilson to assert that the dogma of the Dialectic is common to all Marxist creeds. There is, in the first place, no sense at all to speak about Marxist “creeds,” for the essentials of Marxism, the understanding of political economy and dialectics, is not, was never and could never be common to any of the groupings sailing under Marx’s name. Wilson himself mentions that Paul Lafargue had told Lenin it was impossible for the Russians to understand Marx, since nobody any longer understood him (in 1895, the year of Engels’s death) in Western Europe. Lafargue’s utterance voices the same deep truth as Lenin’s aphorism (20 years later) that after half a century none of the Marxists had understood Marx for lack of understanding dialectics. The comprehension of political economy and dialectics was thus always restricted to individuals and, for that matter, to very few of them. Wilson, for one, proves with every word he says concerning these subjects that he has no idea of what he is talking about and is not among the aforesaid individuals. His “arguments” against Marx as the “Poet of Commodities” and against dialectics will be reviewed in the course of the study — here one further reason why full consciousness about our social existence could not be attained by social groups.
Marx possessed the fundamental insight: It is not enough that thought strives toward reality — reality itself must strive toward the thought. True, he committed another of his errors in assuming that reality was ripe or soon to become ripe to reveal the truth of the thought and to awaken it in the minds of many. Actually, reality still had far to travel in order to arrive at conclusive results and thus left thought isolated. It is easy to see this 60, 70 or 100 years later and to grasp the force of Marx’s original insight, which compels us to recognize once and for all: Speak the purest truth with the tongue of an angel sent directly from heaven, it will fall on deaf ears if the force of appearance speaks against you.
One thing is nevertheless certain: There has been, in spite of all the gained detailed knowledge, no philosophical progress beyond the achievements of Hegel-Marx-Engels, no really new posing of the question of cognition and no new basic principles. Vice versa: Cognition has been obscured by futile attempts to “get around” dialectical materialism, by attempts to “modernize” older concepts and by masses of details (“observed facts”) which — whatever their validity, interpretation or consequence — cannot alter the situation. If under such circumstances dialectics still seems something strange or incomprehensible, then it is not because it has become obsolete but because we have not yet reconquered the level on which Hegel operated. And this due to the fact that the trivial, catastrophic and extremely painful development of bourgeois society, which with its initial revolutionary impetus gave birth to dialectics, is slow to close its life-circle and has not yet led back to the broad and immediately inspiring perspective it seemed to open at its beginning. In other words: Potentialities, which, in principle, could be visualized, had to become solid material reality before the consciousness of many could be affected by them. This latter point is basic in dialectical materialism, which declares that nature, society and thinking form a circular movement in which what is first becomes the last and what is the last becomes the first.
With the foregoing in mind, one may measure the ignorance of Wilson, who really believes he has delivered the “death-blow” against dialectics in arguing against Bernal (for whom, not being acquainted with his writings, we otherwise take no responsibility):
After all, the various discoveries invoked by Bernal were arrived at quite without the intervention of dialectical thinking — just as Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table, which so much impressed Engels as an instance of quality determined by quantity, owed nothing to the antithesis and the synthesis; and it is difficult to see how they are improved [!] by being fitted into the Dialectic.
First of all it is a fine trick to cover up the fact that one has no argument against one law of dialectics (namely, that quantity turns into quality and vice versa, not simply that quantity determines quality as the static-minded Wilson mispresents this law) by dragging in another. Nobody except Wilson has ever asserted that the former must “owe” something to the latter, especially if the latter is presented as antithesis and synthesis. Secondly: It is entirely Wilson’s own business if he finds it difficult to see how discoveries are improved by being fitted into the Dialectic, for he is again the only one who burdens dialectics with nonexisting, nonsensical claims. To give a drastic example befitting the level of a very dialectical situation:
If Wilson writes a completely correct chapter on dialectics, the difference between quantity and quality does not show up — it is only there implicitly and we say without distinguishing between them that the chapter is good. One, two or even a few more errors in the chapter would still leave it a “good” chapter; they would not change its quality, though the difference between quality and quantity is now set into motion and appears in the number of errors. The more errors Wilson introduces into his chapter, the more will it change its quality (adjectives: not so good, pretty faulty, etc.) until it consists of nothing but errors and has become a totally bad one, regardless of whether the errors result from Wilson’s ignorance, lack of understanding or good intentions. The simple increase of errors has turned into a new quality, and this new quality turns out to be a quantity of sheer nonsense. This nonsense fills a chapter in which the difference between the two again does not show up yet is implicitly there. It can, as before, be set into motion if Wilson corrects his errors one by one, until he has not only written a good chapter, but has also given an excellent lecture on how easy it is to fool readers who are ignorant enough to take everything an author tells them for granted. Yet this all has nothing to do with any “synthesis,” and Wilson will never reach one even if he piles up correct statements or errors sufficient to make up a book or a library instead of a chapter. (Besides: If he thinks that the original or regained undifferentiated unity of quantity and quality is his “synthesis” he adds only one more error to his mass of nonsense.)
If we now summarize our “discoveries,” no attempt is made to “fit” them into dialectics. We leave such distortions to Wilson and simply recognize that in the changes which we have observed a general law of dialectics is at work. And therewith we have indeed neither “improved” these discoveries nor Wilson’s chapter nor anything else he may think of. We have, instead, greatly improved our knowledge of how such changes occur and thus also improved our method of thinking and investigation, for we know much better where to look and will commit fewer errors if we are well acquainted with the laws regulating our whole natural, social and spiritual existence. Only common sense, untrained in higher forms of thought, can be so foolish as to suppose that discoveries must improve because they fit into anything, be it the Dialectic, the law of gravity or the foolishness of common sense itself. One of the merits of dialectics is precisely that it protects us against producing sheer nonsense and helps us to make discoveries, while their “improvement” is entirely a matter to follow, provided that the concrete case permits it at all. For the sake of common sense banality one is tempted say that Wilson surely is the “discoverer” of America. If he now would improve his discovery according to the laws of dialectics, the result would be something awfully good.
The best example of the superiority of dialectical thinking is Wilson’s “argument” that the various discoveries invoked by Bernal were arrived at quite without it. Since such talk constitutes no objection to the dialectical character of the discoveries in question, nonrefutation is simply confirmation. Since the whole universe is, if you please, dialectical, and since this cursed property is thus not something subjective but something very objective, it must show up in all processes, observations, discoveries, thoughts and whatever we do and experience. Molière’s famous hero was astonished to learn that he had spoken “prose” all his life without knowing it — Wilson may be surprised to learn that we arrive at dialectical results without dialectical thinking and without knowing that the results have anything to do with dialectics or even that there is such a kind of prose. Hegel knew already that the progress of the sciences in particular gradually brings to light higher relations of thought, or at any rate raises these relations to greater generality and thereby attracts more attentive consideration to them. No less than Hegel did Marx and Engels rely on the dialectical development of society and the sciences themselves. Engels made it plain even for children that one can arrive at the dialectical comprehension of nature by being forced to it through the accumulation of scientific facts, but that we come to this comprehension more easily if we meet the dialectical character of these facts with the consciousness of the laws of dialectical thinking. What he has to say further in this respect can only astonish because of its great actuality.
Engels first points out that the results of natural science force themselves upon everybody who is occupied with theoretical matters and do so with the same irresistibility with which today’s natural scientists willy-nilly see themselves driven to general theoretical inferences. And here, he notes, a certain compensation takes place: If theoreticians are sciolists in the field of natural science, then natural scientists are sciolists in the field of theory, in the field of what has been hitherto denoted as philosophy. He continues:
Empirical exploration of nature has heaped up such a tremendous mass of positive matter of cognition that the necessity to order it in each single field of investigation systematically and according to its inner connection has become simply peremptory. It becomes equally peremptory to bring the individual fields of cognition among themselves into the right connection. But therewith natural science betakes to the theoretical field, and here the methods of empiricism fail, here only theoretical thinking can help. But theoretical thinking is only as a disposition an innate property. This property has to be developed, has to be trained, and there is for this training till now no other means than the study of the hitherto existing philosophy.
The theoretical thinking of each epoch, thus also that of ours, is a historical product which assumes at different times a very different form and therewith a very different content. The science of thinking is thus, like any other, a historical science, the science of the historical development of human thinking. And this is also of importance for the practical application of thinking to empirical fields. For the theory of the laws of thinking is, firstly, by no means a once and for all established “eternal truth,” as the common sense of the philistine imagines with the word logic. Formal logic itself has remained, from Aristotle till today, the field of vehement debates. And dialectics even has till now been more exactly investigated only by two thinkers, by Aristotle and Hegel. But just the dialectic is for today’s natural science the most important form of thinking, because it alone offers the analogon and therewith the method of explanation for the processes of development occurring in nature, for the connections in general, for the transition from one field of investigation to another.
Engels then describes the decline of theoretical thinking, beginning, as has been seen, in 1848. Together with Hegelianism, the dialectic was thrown overboard and thinking was again helplessly delivered over to the old metaphysics — just at the moment when the dialectical character of the natural processes announced itself forcefully; just when only the dialectic could help natural science over the theoretical mountain. The final outcome was the unsteadiness and confusion of theoretical thinking which now reigns.
* * *
Engels’s “now” means 1878, but the unsteadiness and confusion of theoretical thinking were even more manifest on February 2, 1956, when (just as these lines were written) the eminent physicist Robert Oppenheimer addressed the twenty-fifth anniversary meeting of the American Institute of Physics and its founding societies and declared that physics is now in search of a new order in the universe.
He told the meeting that man’s probing into the mysteries of the universe within the atom have led to “a maze of findings” that could not be reduced to an orderly concept of the physical world. Whereas, in the past, vast and disparate experiences had been reduced to a few general ideas and principles, we have today “a vast jumble [!] of odd dimensionless numbers, none of them understandable or derivable, all with an insulting lack of obvious meaning.” We have not found that “single key to the new physics” discovered at the turn of the century [!] by Max Planck. Nor do we have anything analogous to the postulates of Niels Bohr, founder of the modern concept of the atom.
Above all we do not have the great guidance of the correspondence principle to relate familiar physics that we understand with the phenomena now newly discovered.
Will this world, with its variety, its un-understood numbers, ever yield to an orderly description, simple and necessary?
Will our future students be able to explain the mass of new phenomena as necessary consequences of the physical principles of the subnuclear world? Or will these remain empirical findings, to be measured with greater and greater accuracy and recorded in tables that every physicist must memorize or carry about with him?
Surely past experience, especially in relativity and atomic mechanics, has shown that at a new level of explanation some simple notions previously taken for granted as inevitable had to be abandoned as no longer applicable.
But always in the past there has been an explanation of immense sweep and simplicity and in it vast detail has been comprehended as necessary.
Do we have the faith that this is inevitably true of man and nature? Do we even have the confidence that we shall have the wit to discover it? For some odd reason the answer to both questions is yes.
The new explanation of “immense sweep and simplicity,” Oppenheimer said, however, must await the coming of a new Newton or Einstein. This Genius was not likely to come soon, possibly not in his own lifetime, he said in answer to a question. (Cf. the New York Times of February 3, 1956.)
Compare with this the following statement of “immense sweep” by Engels:
One can hardly take into one’s hand a book dealing with natural science without getting the impression that natural scientists themselves feel how much they are dominated by this unsteadiness and confusion, and how the so-called philosophy now customary offers them absolutely no way out. And there is for once no other way out, no possibility to arrive at clarity, than the return, in one form or the other, from metaphysical to dialectical thinking.
There will be ample opportunity to verify both Oppenheimer’s and Engels’s statements concerning the crisis in theoretical thinking, but it must be emphasized at this point that with regard to its solution not many scientists share even the flimsy “optimism” displayed by Oppenheimer. Engels’s prediction that the return to dialectical thinking, if it took place spontaneously by the mere force of discoveries in natural sciences, would be a long-winded and unwieldy process in which an enormous quantity of friction would have to be overcome — this prediction has been confirmed beyond his own expectations. He did not envisage that all the factors that have been examined here would prevent a conscious return to dialectical thinking and, by coming into full play, widen the existing confusion. The theoretical crisis expresses a world crisis of the capitalist system, and that is why, in addition to the many who confess their theoretical poverty, not a few have gone so far as Dr. William G. Pollard, executive director of the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies. Daniel Lang (in The Man in the Thick Lead Suit, Oxford University Press, 1945) tells us about this scientist:
Dr. Pollard says that he has no interest in trying to reconcile faith and skepticism. He considers them mutually antagonistic, and has chosen faith, in which, as he puts it, “explanations are useful but not necessary.” “I no longer believe that the approach of size-up-and-solve will produce a formula explaining all natural phenomena,” he says. “If this sounds like heresy to any of my scientific colleagues, I can only say that the more I have learned of science, the more I have become convinced that the origin of the universe will forever remain a mystery to us. And I say this with sympathy for those who disagree with me, for like them, I have been an agnostic who was sustained for many years, and happily so, by the hope of that master formula. Ten years ago, I would have been incapable of taking the step I have taken. [He was recently ordained as a Deacon in the Episcopal Church.] Wars, social upheavals, nationalism — I once reacted intellectually to such things, but now I see them as perhaps containing elements of God’s judgment. I’m less worried now about these problems than I used to be — though not because I have any greater confidence in man’s ability to cope with them.”
Explanations are not necessary but are useful, at least for all those clever people who were ever interested in trying to “reconcile” faith and skepticism. So it is good to explain (naturally, in a mutually antagonistic fashion): Only a total lack of philosophical education or an incredibly confident size-up-and-solve approach can be responsible for Dr. Pollard’s conviction that the origin of the universe will forever remain a mystery to us, nay, that it is “mystery” at all. For his high American standard and low-brow confusion, Dr. Pollard should receive two Nobel prizes — the faith-prize for his “conviction” and the physics-prize for his discovery of the “mystery.” Additional reason: The more he learned of science, the more ignorant he became. Of course, the worthy committee which so faithfully distributes the Nobel prize will not understand that this growing ignorance is due partly to the low theoretical level in general, partly to Dr. Pollard’s intelligence in particular, and partly to the factors in our social existence which work against cognition, consciousness, clarity, comprehension and education alike. So Dr. Pollard no longer “believes” that the approach of size-up-and-solve (double scientific method-prize for this approach!) will produce anything but his own nonsense (pardon: will produce a formula explaining all natural phenomena, including nonsense-producing intellects!). Having given up his former belief, he remains a strong believer nevertheless and now “sees” certain ugly things as “perhaps” (does this “perhaps” represent sheer guesswork or a remnant of skepticism?) containing elements of God’s judgment. And that, as will be shown in a minute, is for certain purposes a very useful “explanation” which fits excellently into Wilson’s remark (made in connection with Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism) that even in our own day “the findings of filmy experiments provide pretexts for theological systems.”
Since Ernst Mach’s first philosophical writings appeared in 1872, there has been a steadily growing tendency among scientists to limit science to a clearly arranged description of actualities and then — to escape into mysticism, fideism and all sorts of flat positivism, the most “modern” version of which is Hans Reichenbach’s “Scientific Philosophy.” A wonderful though not always used pretext for scientific escapists is Mach’s fundamental thesis:
Sensations are not “symbols of things.” The “thing” is rather a mental symbol for a complex of sensations of relative stability. Not the things (bodies) but colours, sounds, pressures, spaces, times (what we usually call sensations) are the real elements of the world.
This thesis, in which without any confidence in it we immediately recognize Dr. Pollard’s “element” of God’s judgment, found among scientists one great and truly cultivated opponent, Max Planck. Struggling for many years against idealism in physics and especially against Machism, Planck delivered in 1910 at the university of Leyden a lecture in which, in opposition to Mach, he defended the materialist position. Mach reacted indignantly with an article (“Die Leitgedanken meiner naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnislehre und ihre Aufnahme durch die Zeitgenossen”) crying out against the reality of the atoms asserted by Planck. Almost comical in his helpless indignation, Mach reproaches the physicists for being on the way to becoming a church and appropriating a church’s methods. Thereupon he wants to make it plain as a pike-staff that, if the belief (!) in the reality of the atoms is so essential for physicists, he for his part desists from the ways of physical thinking. Indeed: Because he values freedom of thinking more highly and is unwilling to be a pure physicist, he will then renounce any natural-scientific (naturwissenschaftliche) cognition and decline further intercourse with believing men.
What strikes us in all this is the operation (positively or negatively) with belief and the bad taste of people who act as if one faith or belief (one of the “strongest” weapons which Wilson, too, brandishes against dialectics) were not as good as another. Instead of arguments and difference of opinion, which should be possible at least in scientific matters, we have fierce partisanship, groundless insults and the “terrible” (terribly tasteless) threat of declining intercourse — just as if that would impress anybody except those who, by the loss of Mach’s grace, must fear the loss of their social relations and their jobs according to the rule: If you don’t dance as I whistle, I’ll break your neck! Economy, the blind process of our perverted social existence, breaks into science with its full impact and manifests itself where we least expect it. What, for example, is behind Dr. Pollard’s utterance that he once reacted intellectually to wars, social upheavals, nationalism, yet is now less worried about these problems? He covers it up with the “superior” tone of a former “agnostic” who knows better now because he has chosen faith. But what the Dr. is aiming at is easy to see and as primitive as the elements of God’s judgments themselves.
Formerly (that is, ten years before Dr. Pollard became “capable” of taking his step) there was — didn’t you know that? — a war going on, a war which was the consequence of a “social upheaval” (German fascism) and nationalism. It was “clear” to all the Pollards (of whom there are more than plenty) that Germany had “simply” instigated an immoral, a simply flagitious world-conflagration. Thus all the Pollards reacted “intellectually” as one man to such a crime. But, alas! times change and with them the ideological pretexts necessary to keep in line with the system. Today we have the H-bomb and Oak Ridge, and the “intellectual” reaction to it, after the war, smells consciously bad. We have, further, a nationalistic government interfering arrogantly in the affairs of the whole world. Then there has been the Korean war which still stinks to God’s heaven — there may be other wars unchained by the U.S. government. Most important of all: There may even be a “social upheaval” of the Hitler-type (which the McCarthyites tried to get under way) which would fit very well with the whole scheme of “salvaging” our blessed American system and its supremacy over all others at whatever cost.
To react to that “intellectually” becomes nearly impossible if one wants or is “obliged” to go along with things formerly judged “immoral” because we had not yet had a chance to outdo them by our own insanities. There are, consequently, plenty of Pollards, for the whole picture changes if we install faith and with it renounce responsibility and explanation. Whatever happens and whatever we do: From now on we cannot do anything about it; we see retrospectively that we never could. A higher will than ours leads us, and if it leads us into a new mess (which it will, be assured!) we have the unnecessary but very useful explanation that there is no explanation except the elements of God’s judgment. Let’s close the front of faith reaching from the government down to the “people”! Let’s be directors in Oak Ridge and other beautiful places! Let’s have it as it comes, so that everybody gets enough of the elements discerned by faith! Let’s be less worried, less than we used to be, less than worried at all! Amen!
* * *
The directness with which the social process sometimes pushes the human mind along its path is so painfully brutal that one wishes people would in no way know what they are doing, but the bad conscience and apology in Pollard’s new master formula of rationalization forbid regarding him simply as a totally blinded victim of the social mechanism. Moreover, bad conscience and apology are present in all such cases, thus also in that of Oppenheimer, who once directed the development of the A-bomb. One must surely recognize merit when, speaking of the physicist as a teacher, Oppenheimer said in his address that “as physics grows, and there appears more and more to learn, the problem of reconciling [!] know-how and knowledge grows more urgent.” This is indeed a meritorious admission of the state of alienation in our society in which know-how and knowledge need “reconciliation,” yet become daily more estranged because the mechanism of capitalist know-how dictates: Let’s have less and less to do with each other, less and less than we used to have, less than anything at all! Oppenheimer is in the grip of this mechanism when he continues:
We must make more human [!] what we tell the young physicist and must seek ways to make more robust and more detailed what we tell the man of art or letters or affairs if we are to contribute to the integrity of our common cultural life.
The gem in this empty phrase of the Renan-Taine code-type is (a) our “common” cultural life, (b) its “integrity.” It contains not one iota of knowledge about our social existence (which strictly forbids common culture as well as its integrity) but much know-how of how to produce good-sounding nonsense (the lubrication that protects the machine against running hot). Oppenheimer proves that good will alone usually helps the devil it intends to fight — without acquiring knowledge before we talk, we cannot contribute anything human or cultural but will be forced to proceed as follows:
The labors of physicists in explanation and in prophecy are not and cannot be ended; and there is no standing Joint Committee on the World’s Salvation to which they can abdicate their concern.
This is again a good-sounding tirade, combining with the former to cover up for the amazing assertion:
Yet by now the problem of living with the new dangers and the new hopes is where it belongs: with the public and its officers, the governments. Let us be sure that by our effort and our clarity we always keep it there.
If ever there was a total abdication of the physicist’s “labor in explanation and prophecy,” then it is in this revolting declaration of “standing above” the public, the government and one’s own guilt, arrived at with the words “by now.” Oppenheimer, by his own effort, wants to establish with his own “clarity” that the problem, i.e. the responsibility for the new dangers, lies first of all with the public and then with the governments (which fill only a phraseological gap) but by no means with the scientists who created these dangers. Since he does not even care for the “new hopes” (an article sold to simpletons!), one must make an effort to introduce some clarity into a deliberately distorted matter.
The new dangers were and are invoked behind the back of the public, in secrecy, without giving information to the public, without asking its opinion and without having its consent. The public is and will be, under the present system, forever ignorant about the real scope of these dangers and cannot even understand their nature, significance and ramifications. Insofar as it has become aware of the dangers resulting from experiments with H-bombs it has protested (in Japan practically the whole population), but its protests have been treated by “its” officers like all the fears and wishes of the people: as if they were nonexistent. Oppenheimer has enough experience to know that governments live apart from the public, that the public is managed by “its” officers from the cradle to the grave, that governments are the private property of the possessing classes, and that the problem of living with the new dangers and the responsibility for them belongs entirely and exclusively to the scientists and the governments. No effort must be spared to assure that it is not shifted from there to the public, from which Oppenheimer, with one stroke, suddenly separates thousands of scientists, just as if they were living in a vacuum and had nothing to do with the poor business of ordinary people.
Yet they do not live in a vacuum, they only illustrate the urgency of reconciling know-how and knowledge and how the gap is filled with false consciousness. Imagine several thousand scientists listening to Oppenheimer’s address and not one telling him on the spot or later: “Now, this kind of explanation, prophecy and clarity is . . . well, I will not use a certain word because it is not very flattering, but the word I had in mind was balderdash.” The sore spot in the affair is that our scientists were not assembled to listen to something more “humane,” but in order to do business, i.e. to make “contacts” with the “right” people, to find ways into better paid positions and to gain attention for such purposes by reading their newest scientific toilet-paper in the ten minutes granted to everyone who has manufactured one. By a fluke coming at the right time and having the effect of an act of elemental justice, an article by I.I. Rabi appeared in the New York Times Magazine of February 12, 1956, under the editorial subhead: “A noted physicist deplores a tendency to look on scientists as a sort of strategic material. The danger is that we may lose our brightest young minds.” The author himself speaks about his qualms in rather amusing terms:
What disturbs the scientist is the increasing tendency to treat science and the scientists as commodities [!] with all the appropriate export and import regulations which relate to important strategic material. The great drive now going on to increase the number of scientists and engineers takes on the appearance of stockpiling of tungsten or copper.
The aids to scientific education stem more from the fear that Russia will surpass us than from an interest in scientific knowledge and a concern for the general vigor and health of the scientific endeavor and the preservation of a strong scientific tradition. [One should remember that the interests of the bourgeoisie run violently against such — interest and concern!] They certainly do not stem from a desire of the public to know more about science and the visible and invisible world.
The impact of scientific thought on the culture of our times becomes less and less, even as science advances to greater pinnacles of understanding and discovery. [Alienation over and over again!] As the importance of science in the country increases, its dignity seems to be diminishing. [For Wilson: This phenomenon is truly dialectical!] Many scientists have had the frustrating experience of trying to explain what science is about to laymen, either in government, or in the universities, or to the ordinary professional or business man.
It is surely bitter to be treated as a commodity and to see that the dignity of science diminishes. However, as has been pointed out in connection with Renan and Taine: It is the intelligentsia itself which, with the reification of profession, is at the same time the instigator and the victim of it all — nothing is more erroneous than the belief that the scientists have not fully merited this ignominious degradation. Their science has become something so “special” that there remains only one science, namely their physics and mathematic, which under present circumstances lead to the undermining of thinking.[9] Therefore it will always be a frustrating experience if scientists try to tell the “layman” about science, even the layman in universities where, from what we have learned, they have other worries than bothering with that. Scientists are indeed so “apart” that they care little for “subordinate” matters with which the layman in governments and universities or the ordinary professional or business man are occupied. Thus said Dr. Curtis in 1945:
But scientists don’t care much, by and large, about political [!] matters. Let somebody else take care of politics — we [!] have our atoms to attend to. But the scientists have felt that they can and should make whatever contributions they could. (Science Legislation: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Military Affairs, U.S. Senate.)
Feeling that they (observe the highly “scientific” sequence in language!) can make whatever contribution they could, they cared little for their little care about politics and went straight into business when the war offered an opportunity for it.[10] Unfortunately for us and themselves, they did so with a nearly complete ignorance of social and political science and replaced knowledge of our social existence by the typical illusion of all men “in between” that their specific little bit of ideology possesses magic power and that all they need is a “free hand.”
* * *
The devastating consequences of ignorance and ideological illusions are summarized in Moral Reflections of a Mathematician by Norbert Wiener. In this document, intellectual sincerity and human concern go as far as alienation, reification and the ensuing isolation permit in the framework of bourgeois thinking, but blindness takes over when it comes to real solutions. We shall here, however, restrict ourselves to what Wiener develops around the problem of the atomic bomb, and in this only to the most essential points. The blind mechanism dominating our social existence worked, reinforced by blind and (objectively) lightmindedly-acting scientists, exactly according to the pattern set for bourgeois society. Wiener first speaks about his qualms that the A-bomb was used against Japan “when we might not have been willing to use it against a white enemy” and then says:
It is the plainest history that our atomic effort was international in the last degree and was made possible by a group of people who could not have been gotten together had it not been for the fact that the threat of Nazi Germany was so strongly felt over the world, and particularly by that very scholarly group who contributed the most to nuclear theory. I refer to such men as Einstein, Szilard, Fermi, and Niels Bohr. To expect in the future that a similar group could be gotten together from all the corners of the world to defend our national policy involved the continued expectation that we should always have the same moral prestige. It was therefore doubly unfortunate that we should have used the bomb on an occasion on which it might have been thought that we would not have used it against white men.
With the illusion of “moral prestige” where naked material might alone was the point of attraction for the defence of a “national policy” which, for a thinking person, could not inspire any confidence and inspired least of all the Stalinists or Stalinist-tinged among the scientists, while the people had to be cheated into that policy — with such an ideological deception the mechanism gained speed:
While the nuclear program did not itself involve any overwhelming part of the national military effort, it was still in and for itself an extremely expensive business. The people in charge of it had in their hands the expenditure of billions of dollars, and sooner or later, after the war, a day of reckoning was bound to come, when Congress would ask for a strict accounting of these enormous expenditures. Under the circumstances, the position of the high administrators of nuclear research would be much stronger if they could make a legitimate or plausible claim that this research had served a major purpose in terminating the war. On the other hand, if they had come back empty-handed — with the bomb still on the desk for future wars, or even with the purely symbolic use of the bomb to declare to the Japanese our willingness to use it in actual fact if the war were to go on — their position would have been much weaker, and they would have been in serious danger of being broken [!] by a new administration coming into power on the rebound after the war and desirous of showing up the graft and ineptitude of its predecessor.
Thus, the pressure to use the bomb, with its full killing power, was not merely great from a patriotic point of view but was quite as great from the point of view of the personal fortune of the people involved in its development. This pressure might have been unavoidable, but the possibility of this pressure, and of our being forced by personal [!] interests into a policy that might not be our best interest, should have been considered more seriously from the beginning.
One sees again and again that things have their own logic and overwhelm the ignorant even at the incipient stage of his interference with social processes. His essence as a commodity seller who makes himself a commodity is stronger than all his rationalizations and puts his personal fortune and personal interest above all other considerations (not the least his “moral” prestige), contrasting oddly with the scientists’ claim that their group is distinguished from other groups by a greater “detachment” from such low motives. From some glorious examples in the Renaissance, scientists have usurped the fame of men who pursued their search for cognition and truth in spite of persecution by the Powers That Be, regardless of the consequences for themselves. This stolen fame alone explains why one can read in Hall’s article quoted before:
The ethical [!] imperatives of their scientific faith were perceived by politicians to take precedence over all other moral obligations and demands for scientists. Scientists pursued their work in complete indifference to its social and ethical consequences.
It cannot be said to often: In bourgeois society everything stands on its head and the truth is the direct opposite of this perverted view in which scientists like to shine, though their “faith” is now compressed into the beautiful word gambling. Be it Leonardo da Vinci (who destroyed his design for a submarine) or Giordano Bruno (who was burned for his convictions) or Servet (who was “fried” to death in two hours of slow burning for his convictions) or men whose fate was less tragic — they were all deeply involved in social issues, they were all on the progressive side of the social process or stood in sharp conflict with the Powers That Be, and they all stuck to their scientific ideal just because of the ethical consequences it had for society. There was a man who earned his living as a lens-grinder and who rejected the better “position” of an academician in order to safeguard his independence as a thinker, recognizing not the slightest difference between his life and his philosophy, remaining a human being identical with himself. The name of this man, banished as a “heretic” from the community in which he lived, was Baruch Spinoza — one of the greatest thinkers of all time in spite of the arrogant treatment he receives as a philosopher from pygmies like Hans Reichenbach.[11] For him as for others, there existed no fetishization of profession or fear that a “position” would be weakened and broken, and instead of the alienation of science from its social purpose, the ethical imperatives of scientific faith had their living root precisely in its moral obligations and demands. It takes the complete decadence of both thinking and morals, together with the utmost fetishization and alienation, to reverse the original position of science and scientists and to place the so-called ethical imperatives above the obligations, so that the “imperatives” run on their own and imitate faithfully that production for the sake of production taking place in the “base” material sphere. The bad conscience and need for apology possessed by scientists induce them to favor this perversion, for if they are obliged to follow the “ethical” imperative of their isolated scientific faith, responsibility for the consequences belongs not to them but, first of all, to the public as the victim of a “faith” which is, after all, not superior to and not better founded than any other — superstition. The outcome of the superstition of scientists is gambling with the very existence of mankind, while reversal of the true relation also serves the scientists to hide their personal interests and the striving to keep their positions.
As for the ramifications of the superstition: One gets quite a picture of the ignorance and educational level of American senators (the implication is not that government members in other countries stand any higher) when they embrace the view of the scientists’ “complete indifference” instead of knowing: The men from whom today’s position-keepers borrow their prestige renounced their positions out of social obligations and threw their gloves in the faces of the Powers That Be rather than behave irresponsibly with regard to the social and ethical consequences of their work. In any case, on the ground of Hall’s information, one can appreciate the intellectual capacity of those who handle the people officially:
This view of scientists [as formulated in the quotation above] was expressed by Senator Johnson when he exclaimed: “Dr. Langmuir, how do you compose your two viewpoints? On the one hand you say that this country should appropriate $5,000,000,000 for scientific research; on the other hand you say that this country should destroy $5,000,000,000 worth [!] of the products of science. The scientists, according to your testimony, have made the world extremely insecure. Science has made, according to your statement just now, aggression inevitable and yet, at the same time, you say that we ought to keep pouring money into science.”
When Langmuir argued: “Science is not a thing that we make; scientists don’t create science in that way,” Johnson retorted: “But, you create [!] atomic bombs, and now you want to go and throw them into the middle of the ocean because they have made the world insecure.”[12]
Johnson’s retort is a triumph of common sense over the sophisticated scientific spirit who tries to escape the natural conclusion that fidelity to the aims of science (i.e. the exploration of all the secrets of the atom) is something very different from fabrication of the atomic bomb, which any familiarity with science and any responsibility for it should strictly forbid. Langmuir stands on the same level as the Senator and is in the position of the sorcerer’s apprentice in trying to “explain” why the bombs should be thrown into the ocean:
In order to get security — in other words, we buy something by that. It is a price. [Observe the commercial language!] You cannot get security for yourself without giving it to other nations. We have no security now for the future, because we are now in stages one or two. We are now secure but we can foresee the case that this security is only temporary, that the time will come when not only we but no nation is secure, and we must do something about that. We must start now to do something about it, because otherwise disaster lies ahead, probably a worse disaster for us than for anyone else.
The dilettante-sorcerers should have known in advance what they foresee “now,” but they were blinded by their eagerness to show their “power” and thus jumped absolutely unprepared into that realm of politics which they otherwise gladly leave to the care of — somebody else. The “something” which they propose “we” must now do in order to prevent a disaster is of the same quality as the work which evoked the disaster, for they expect this miraculous something to be put into effect by men as blind as the sorcerer himself. Neither the Senator, who delivers his trash about money, nor the sorcerer, who wants to catch the ghost he has released, are to be taken seriously. As soon as the talk is over, illusion produces the next disaster: Since “something” cannot be done about it, the government appropriates more money for “science” and the sorcerers who must at least do “something” for it deliver a bigger monster, to wit the hydrogen bomb and similar articles created as a consequence of the ethical imperatives of scientific faith. There is in some strange sense, deep truth and, at the same time, bitter irony in it when Senator Johnson
persisted in his conviction that all scientists wanted to do was to go on with their work under the financial support of the government with no concern for the social consequences of their research.[13] He declared again: "It looks to me as though you scientists have made the world extremely insecure, and now you are coming to the politicians and asking us to go about and make the world secure again by some sort of political agreement. At the same time, you are asking that the scientists who have made the world insecure be given further appropriations to discover still another and more destructive element than atomic energy.”
Naturally, this is all a family quarrel among equally guilty culprits, though it must be strongly emphasized: Our “sectarian” scientists with their “aloof and isolated nature,” living “withdrawn from the usual social relations and indifferent to concerns of ordinary [!] people” and who, as M.L. Cooke testified, “with few exceptions, feel no responsibility whatever [!] for the life of the community” (which they therefore lightmindedly poison) — these ethereal “non-political” creatures voluntarily misused their findings and voluntarily entered the arena of political action. Consequently: When these perfect ignoramuses outside of their narrow field met the ignoramuses of the Senate (that they had to do so was their own fault) the spectacle was simply — spectacular. Writes Hall:
As Senator Tydings candidly admitted to Dr. Szilard in 1945 during the hearings of the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy: “Doctor, if in 1939 we had been conducting a hearing like the one we are conducting today and men like yourself had come before our committee and projected the possible development of the bomb up to now with reasonable accuracy, I imagine they would have been called a lot of crackpots [which they really are in politics and when projecting bombs!] and . . . visionaries who were playing with theories. I certainly would not have had the receptivity [!] that I have today to say the least.”
The atomic bomb changed this situation completely. . . . It demonstrated as never before the destructive possibilities of science. But, what was far more important, detonation of the bomb drove into people’s consciousness the realization, hitherto understood by only a few laymen, that science was a major social [!] force. Moreover, their preoccupation with the complex problems brought about by atomic energy necessarily involved Congressmen with scientists, even had the latter not voluntarily [!] entered the arena of political action. . . . Whether Congressmen liked it or not, they had to take note of the crucial role of science and scientists in the atomic age.
And here are two fine samples of how they did it:
When the scientists tried to explain their orientation to abstract and remote symbols, it was clear that politicians did not understand — not even Senator Fulbright, who had an academic background himself. Thus, Dr. Wilson and Oppenheimer tried to explain the difference between fundamental and applied research as they conceived it.
To do the poor Senators justice: Wilson’s and Oppenheimer’s “explanations” are such beauties that one has only to consider their effect on the laymen present:
When Wilson tried to continue with “I think we can say that since 1940—” the listening Senators interrupted to express their bewilderment and incomprehension. Magnuson said: “Dr. Fulbright would understand that”; but it was clear he did not for when Fulbright started to say: “That was a fine explanation—” he, in turn, was interrupted by Magnuson who commented: “He doesn’t understand you either.”
Well, that settles that. Sample two:
After Alvin Weinberg had told Senator Johnson he was wrong in believing that resistance to forward motion in water increased with the depth of the water, Tydings remarked rather bitterly: “Apparently that is one of those scientific facts we are supposed to accept and not ask why.” [Indeed, science is a revolting thing for — officers!]
Senator Thye [at another occasion] exclaimed: “That is where you have always got us as scientists because you can get into that technical field and we are left behind in a daze: we are not sure whether we dare challenge you or not . . .”
As for the moral of it all:
Politicians were not only frustrated by their inability to challenge scientists but also by their dependence on scientists in the new atomic age. Whether Congressmen liked it or not, their survival depended to a large extent upon trusting scientists and admitting them to the public policymaking [!] process.
The scientists’ role in the public policymaking process, into which they were not only “admitted” but had pushed themselves — that is the essential point to be kept in mind in all discussions around the question of responsibility for the new dangers.
* * *
It would, however, be foolish to believe that scientists were not as dependent on politicians as the latter were on the former. The illusion with which the ignorant scientists rushed into political action, namely that in demonstrating their “power” they would get a “free hand,” was utterly destroyed by the behavior of the politicians. Thus the summary of the consequences of ignorance and ideological illusions, as given by Norbert Wiener in Moral Reflections of a Mathematician, cannot fail to yield testimony:
The qualms of the scientists who knew the most about what the bomb could do, and who had the clearest basis to estimate the possibilities of future bombs, were utterly ignored, and the suggestion to invite Japanese authorities to an experimental exhibition of the bomb in the South Pacific was flatly rejected.[14]
Weighing the danger to their position should they “rebel” against the decisions of the politicians, the scientists demonstrated their dependence on them and capitulated like the Pollards as one man. Since the acts count and not the words, the “qualms” of the scientists were no more than an attempt to secure for themselves a “moral” alibi which becomes still more worthless if one takes into account their later work on H-bombs. Yet still darker aspects of the summary are in store:
Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteers to see the wheels go round. Moreover, the whole idea of push-button warfare has an enormous temptation for those who are confident of their power of invention and have a deep distrust of human beings [which they themselves are decidedly not!]. I have seen such people and have a very good idea of what makes them tick. It is unfortunate in more than one way that the war and the subsequent uneasy peace have brought them to the fore.
And what makes these people tick? Wiener’s weakness is that he recognizes the symptoms of a consuming disease yet never its cause. The problem is not that war brings such people to the fore (they are always there), but that the capitalist system breeds them by the thousands with the same inevitability with which night follows day. Crises, fascism, war are only special outbreaks of the disease which provide the people in question with the opportunity of making the wheels go round in a special and more open way than under ordinary conditions. Wiener does not see how he himself reifies the symptoms — indeed, he fetishizes his own profession to such an extent that he can declare:
One of the strong points and at the same time one of the burdens of the creative scholar is that he [!] must stand alone. I wished — oh how I wished! — that I could be in a position to take what was happening passively, with a sincere acceptance of the wisdom of the policy-makers [with scientists as their pace-makers!] and with an abdication of all personal judgment. The fact is, however, that I had no reason to believe that the judgment of these men on the larger issues of the situation was any superior to my own, whatever their technical information might be. I knew that more than one of the high officials of science had not one tenth my contact with the scientists of other countries and of other standpoints and was in nowhere nearly as good a position to assess the world reaction to the bomb. I knew, moreover, that I had been in the habit of considering the history of science and of invention from a more or less philosophic point of view, and I did not believe that those who made the decisions could do this any better than I must. The sincere scientist must back his bets and guesses, even when he is a Cassandra and no one believes him. I had behind me many years of lonely work in science where I had finally proved to be in the right. This inability to trust the Powers That Be was a source of no particular satisfaction to me, but there it was, and it had to be faced.
The judgment is doubtlessly to the point, but why is only the creative scholar singled out as the one who must stand alone? And why must only the sincere scientist back his bets and guesses? “Must” not everybody who knows what is going on do so? Is the problem not precisely that only too many people act against their better insight and conviction? After all, scientists are not the only ones who know of other standpoints. There are other human beings who have plenty of contacts in the world with all kinds of learned men, not only with the particular and humanly often inferior brand called nuclear scientist. There are other men who do not trust the Powers That Be in any respect, who look at them and science and everything else from a philosophic point of view (and know more about philosophy than Wiener), who are far less one-sided than scientists and who have far better judgment on the larger issues than Wiener himself, who appears limited and helpless when it comes to the large issues of our social existence. Rare as men of character are in today’s world: There were men who stood up for their convictions, who did not remain silent (in contrast to all scientists) in the face of official propaganda, who resisted every attempt to “take them in” in a situation where positions were open not only to atomic scientists but to everyone who had any capacity and was ready to sell his soul, provided he had one. These men did not for one moment believe that Stalin (a monster by “profession”!), Churchill and Roosevelt, who congratulated Hitler, were morally in any way superior to their competitor and would not blindly and exclusively follow their narrow economic and political interests. Alone or not, they, too, had many years of work (without reward but many sacrifices) behind them and were proven to be in the right in more respects than all nuclear scientists together. They backed a little more than their “bets and guesses,” for they took it upon themselves to predict clearly and as publicly as possible the social and political result that would be produced with certainty by the Powers That Be conducting an allegedly “anti-fascist” war. If, finally, they had to be Cassandras and stand alone, they did so, preferring to starve rather than join those who, stupidly or corruptly, joined the camp of deception, crime and baseness. Yet they did not fetishize their isolation and lament about their loneliness — they knew that isolation could be overcome sooner or later and that experience would speak for them if they did not compromise in matters of principle, kept cognition intact and prepared the future by preparing consciousness.
* * *
Wiener’s line of presentation has strange implications. Assuming that he resisted publicly and did everything which the creative scholar and sincere scientist must do, it follows not only that he was the only sincere scientist but also the only creative scholar. As for sincerity, one does not need to discuss it, because here deeds are decisive and not those words which the man standing alone speaks to himself inside the four walls of his room or in a closed circle. Creativeness, however, is another matter and cannot be denied to such men as Einstein, Szilard, Fermi, Niels Bohr, Oppenheimer and others who defended “our national policy” and were instrumental in the development of the bomb. Wiener does not see that what remains, then, is the fact that the process of alienation can completely separate sincerity from creativeness — a fact which is liable to influence the consciousness of those who ignore it. Due to this influence, Wiener is not aware of what he is doing when, singling himself out and assuming a unique role, he reveals:
We had voluntarily [!] accepted a measure of secrecy and had given up much of our liberty of action for the sake of the war, even though — for that very purpose, as many of us thought — more secrecy than the optimum was imposed, and this at times had hampered our international communications more than the information-gathering service of the enemy. We had hoped that this unfamiliar self-discipline would be a temporary thing, and we had expected that after this war — as, after all, before — we should return to the free spirit of communication, intranational and international, which is the very life of science. Now we found that, whether we wished it or not, we were to be the custodians of secrets on which the whole national life might depend.[15] At no time in the foreseeable future could we again do our research as free men. Those who had gained rank and power over us during the war were most loath to relinquish any part of the prestige they obtained. Since many of us possessed secrets which could be captured by the enemy and could be used to our national disadvantage, we were obviously doomed to live in an atmosphere of suspicion forever after, and the police scrutiny on our political opinions [self-introduced and, objectively speaking, well-deserved!] which began in the war showed no signs of future remission.
The repeated use of the words “we” and “us” makes it clear that Wiener himself was involved in all this and that his strong point was in reality an illusion, for everybody can “stand alone” with his opinion and nevertheless work on the very project about whose dangers he knows so much. The strong point must be asserted in a real stand (if necessary made alone!) — everybody can tell the world post festum what he knew or sensed or foresaw, but he must not (useful as his tale may be) present it as a special case of his profession if he marched in line, did nothing about the bad weather and nursed in fact only an illusion about the creative scholar. If this is so (and there is no proof at all to the contrary), Wiener presents himself in too rosy a light because his practical attitude is in essentials not different from those of other scientists, who also had “qualms” (that unavoidable by-product!) and went into business with them exactly like Wiener, voluntarily accepting secrecy and whatever was involved in the business. Still more: The hope Wiener shared with others for the return of “normal” conditions and his present discovery of himself as “custodian” show him as a big failure, as but another sorcerer’s apprentice with basically no more knowledge (actually with an unbelievable trust in the Powers That Be) about the larger issues of the situation than those whom he helped through cooperation to gain power and rank over him and — the public. No wonder, then, that the strange aspect of his summary increases with the concluding paragraphs:
The public liked the atomic bomb as little as we did, and there were many who were quick to see the signs of future danger and to develop a profound consciousness of guilt. Such a consciousness looks for a scapegoat. Who could constitute a better scapegoat than the scientists themselves? They had unquestionably developed the potentialities which had led to the bomb. The man in the street, who knew little of scientists and found them a strange and self-contained race [ah, “we” scientists! — it sounds familiar, doesn’t it?], was quick to accuse them of a desire for the power of destruction manifested by the bomb. What made this both more plausible and more dangerous was the fact that, while the working scientists felt very little personal power and had very little desire for it, there was a group of administrative gadget workers who were quite sensible of the fact that they now had a new ace in the hole in the struggle for power.
At any rate, it was perfectly clear to me at the very beginning that we scientists were from now on to be faced by an ambivalent attitude. For the public, who regarded us as medicine men and magicians [there we go again!], was likely to consider us an acceptable sacrifice to the gods as other, more primitive publics do. In that very day of the atomic bomb the whole pattern of the witch hunt of the last eight years became clear, and what we are living through is nothing but the transfer into action of what was then written in the heavens.
This mixture of bad conscience and apology has to be dealt with in several points:
a) The public, behind whose back everything was and still is arranged, liked the bomb as little as the scientists did. — The public is right, but the scientists get the answer: In 1914, after the declaration of war, Emperor Wilhelm II pronounced the memorable words: “I have not willed this!” The public was very quick to ask (and in public, mind you): “Why, then, did you do it?” It asks the scientists the same question and is a thousand times right not to care a bit for their assurances (always post festum!) that they did not like it.
b) Whoever constituted the many to develop a profound consciousness of guilt: The public, for its part, had no reason at all to feel guilty but very good reason to hold those responsible who, behind its back, had engendered the future dangers. To call them scapegoats is misleading, for even if they did not know what they were doing or had been misled themselves (which is far from being the case), the rule under which the public suffers at every turn and point applies: Ignorance does not deter punishment and the receiver is as bad as the thief. Yet the public is not as bloodthirsty, tricky and partial as the law. On the contrary, it has a fine sense of justice and is quick to forgive. Moreover, it always has admired and always will admire upright men who frankly admit their errors and faults and decide to correct them. The most disgusting and morally paralyzing factor in public life is the characterlessness of its “leaders” in every sphere.
c) It is misleading to accent the development of the potentialities which led to the bomb. The truth to be stressed is: Scientists instigated the production of the bomb and voluntarily developed the bomb itself, regardless of how many technical workers helped them.
d) Vox populi, vox dei! If the famous “man in the street” (scientists walk somewhere else!) really had a opportunity “to accuse,” he would once again be right in asking: And what motive can be given for construction of the bomb other than the “desire for the power of destruction”? Perhaps the desire for a new sort of love-making? A little while ago Wiener told us that “the whole idea of push-button warfare has an enormous temptation for those who are confident of their power of invention.” Who, then, are the men possessing that power? Perhaps our puzzled senators or other second-rate figures in the affair? The decisive inventions belong to the scientists who have succumbed all along the line to the temptation of push-button warfare. And it alters nothing if we with Wiener add: Whether they liked it or not!
e) The same question must be asked concerning those scientists who felt very little (well, at least “some”!) personal power and had very little (well, at least “some”!) desire for it. Above, we learned from Wiener that the personal fortunes and interests of those involved in the development of the bomb (they feared that their position would be weakened and broken) were at stake in exploding the bomb (and it was the “position of the high administrators of nuclear research”). Now, there is no power worthy of the name without high position, and since we don’t exactly know what the words “working scientists,” “administrative gadget workers,” and “high administrators of nuclear research” mean, the question is: Are, for instance, Oppenheimer (who directed the development of the bomb) and Pollard (as executive director of the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Research) working scientists, administrative gadget workers or high administrators of nuclear research? If they are not working scientists, then they must belong to the gadget workers or high administrators who, holding high positions, did not want to weaken them and were thus quite aware of the fact that they had a new ace in the hole in the struggle for power. If they are working scientists, then they are again scientists holding high positions and had the same ace in the hole as the administrators. No one can escape the laws of society: Position is power and power is position — here, too, it matters not in the least whether those who have gained both “desired” them or not.
f) The public, to which we belong, flatly rejects any suspicion that it is likely to consider scientists an acceptable sacrifice to the gods. It is by far not as primitive as scientists who spread such nonsense and declares sharply that it is adding insult to injury when Wiener brings the public into any connection with the pattern of the witch hunt. Scientists themselves initiated police scrutiny of political opinions when they rushed into political action, gave up their liberty of action as scientists and voluntarily accepted secrecy. With that nefarious act they gave the Powers That Be a wonderful pretext for extending police scrutiny of political opinions to the entire population, following the world trend towards reaction and fascism after the model of Stalin.
All in all: Scientists are not regarded as medicine men and magicians (except in a deeply ironical sense often as true “medicine” men) but as men who, outside of their special field, almost invariably exhibit no great thinking power and who regularly break down when it comes to social and philosophical matters. It is fantastic to see how Wiener, struggling with the social problems of The Automatic Factory, relies for their solution on such Powers That Be as Walter Reuther of the UAW (whose “more universal union statesmanship” must necessarily be of the worst because unions belong to the extremely dangerous disguised Powers That Be), high management authorities (among them an executive of Remington Rand, Inc.) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. All his “trust” lies within the present incurable system — he has not even an inkling that there would be no problem at all with his automatic factory under a different social set-up. It is, if possible, still more fantastic to read in I.I. Rabi’s aforementioned article, after his lamentation about the scientist who is regarded as a commodity:
In the field of the utilization of atomic energy, it became clear at this conference [in Geneva] that atomic energy was the only [!] hope of a long-term continuance of our industrial civilization. . . . Atomic energy is here to stay. It will be developed even if it is not initially economical because of the necessities [!] of the immediate or intermediate range of the future. . . . Fortunately, if we survive the atom at all [indeed, if we!], power will remain plentiful for generations to come. It will not necessarily be cheap, or cheaper than at present. The important thing is that it will be available at all.
This is not the place to dwell upon the problem of energy, which can be solved without atoms as the “only” hope. Suffice it to say that the incredible ignorance and prejudice shown by Rabi and the entire Geneva conference concerning that problem merits the comment: Such trash is what perfect dilettanti or prize-fighters — unable to see beyond the tips of their noses, yet winners of the Nobel prize and makers of opinion and policy — mean by getting “security” for us or doing “something” about it. For no sooner has the energy problem been “solved” (if we survive the poison at all!) than we get from the same Rabi the reverse side of the coin:
The world-wide utilization of atomic energy which will certainly develop brings with it a host [!] of problems of the most somber [!] kind. A nuclear power installation necessarily produces material out of which bombs can be made. The technology of bomb manufacture, which is now so secret [isn’t it?], will gradually be rediscovered in many other countries. The world-wide use of nuclear energy therefore means the possibility of world-wide possession of atomic weapons [which world-wide scientists will develop!].
It is my belief that the use of nuclear energy will spread so quickly that we have only a short time to devise an international control agency, before it becomes too late. Atomic energy would then become an eternal hazard to peace, which would tend to destroy all its hopeful [in reality: radically poisonous!] and beneficial [in reality: enslaving!] features. The very fact that nuclear power means added military power will cause most countries to develop nuclear power despite [!] economic arguments, for the prestige and security alone.
Somber as these problems are, there are more somber ones, and the problem of how to handle the waste-products is not even mentioned. The point of interest with regard to the problem of consciousness is: Rabi, like all those who stick their noses into the politics and economy within range of their noses, is a colossal logician from some Reichenbach-school where “symbols” are used instead of thinking. First he told us that most countries needed atomic energy for economic reasons. It was then the only hope for the long-term continuance of our society and it would be developed because of the necessities of the immediate or intermediate range of the future. He told us also that “almost no country will fail to enter this field, which all feel to be in the stream of progress, regardless of expense” (emphasis added). Now we have learned that problems of the most somber kind are the decisive motive: Most countries will develop the beneficial stuff despite economic arguments, for prestige and security alone.
Did anybody expect that after such patent (though highly “beneficial”) balderdash anything but patent balderdash of the code-type would follow? It would be a spurious expectation — the vacuum of consciousness has to be filled with nonsense and the inevitable balderdash reads:
“We can all only [only!] urge our statesmen to press forward to devise ways to prevent this new hope for a better life for masses of mankind from becoming a curse involving misery and destruction.” As if a better life for masses of mankind were under capitalism not the most patent nonsense ever produced by ignoramuses and conscious deceivers; as if a better life for all, including scientists, were not in reach without that deadly poison called atomic energy and the scientific balderdash around it; as if this poison had not been a curse involving misery, destruction, reaction and so on from the very beginning and would not always remain a curse leading eventually to the extermination of life on our cursed planet. Statesmen, scientists and businessmen have tortured this planet to no end, but the last word of wisdom Rabi has to offer is: “Let us hope that the spirit which was generated by the Geneva conference will have its effect on the future.”
* * *
“Hope for a better life” and “Let us hope” — the infallible recipe of men in between! To borrow from Wiener: What makes all these people tick? On the ground of the material presented here the answer should be obvious: It is the ace which they have in the hole, whatever hole it may be. In this introduction only a few cases concerning the influence of our social existence on consciousness could be examined, but any further case one might single out among all possible cases will positively or negatively, on the highest or the lowest level, confirm the contentions on which everything that has been said rests. To summarize these contentions:
a) In bourgeois society, social consciousness can be acquired only by individuals. It constitutes a minority-problem and excludes the existence of a “public mind” in whatever way distinguished from the consciousness of this minority. Even if the public or masses or peoples had an organ to speak with, their mind or opinion or consciousness would be nothing else than the sum total of that of the multicolored multitude of individuals who actually can speak. Mass-psychology is for this reason an impossibility — discernible is only a political behavior of the masses consisting exclusively in their, for better or worse, passive or active reaction to inevitabilities arising out of the social process.
b) Social consciousness being a minority-problem, it follows that responsibility for the social process belongs always to individuals, never to the public, the masses or peoples.
c) There can be no full consciousness of our social existence without knowledge of dialectics.
d) Even scientists, who more than anybody else should know what they are doing, suffer heavily from lack of an adequate philosophical training and, as Horkheimer says, their autonomy as individuals, their power of imagination and their independent judgment appear to be (often greatly) reduced.
With a positive turn concerning the contentions (c) and (d): It is anything but accidental that such outstanding thinkers as Horkheimer, Adorno and other members of the Institute of Social Research [the “Frankfort School”] the are trained dialecticians and rank in knowledge of the social process far above any of their contemporary colleagues. Their greatest weakness is that they never severed their ties with officialdom and remained scholars in spite of their own insight. Since nobody can escape, they paid intellectually for this weakness and brought themselves occasionally even down to the level of ordinary official propaganda.[16] In other words: They, too, have an ace in the official hole, and as long as this is the case their thinking, too, will at one point or another move in a vicious circle, i.e. be determined by the law of ignorance and the dwindling force of cognition.
We are thus back at the fundamental contradictions of bourgeois society, which account for the crisis in thinking in general, for the theoretical jumble in science in particular, and for the flight of scientists and philosophers into mysticism, agnosticism, idealism or religion. It has been shown that scientists expose themselves as ideologists, namely as apologists of a social system which can be freed from its internal contradictions by nothing short of transforming it into a higher social order. The more urgent this transformation becomes and the more the fundaments of the capitalist system are shaken, the less interest has the bourgeoisie and its army of servants in considering its future scientifically. This future, even in times of a “boom,” has nothing attractive to offer — neither cheap energy nor the assurance of surviving the atom. It is full of fears, doubts, insecurity, problems and troubles to which the ideologists give vent. In the clear light of philosophical and scientific cognition, the bourgeoisie would see that the capitalist system must lead mankind to doom. The courage to face this sober fact is lacking — the bourgeoisie refuses to recognize the future and prefers to live on unfounded hopes and the elements of God’s judgment. As a class which abhors the sight of its own future, it feels the urgent need of “convincing” itself and its victims that it does not pay to worry about it (see Pollard), that nothing can be discerned in it anyway, yea, that future events cannot be foreseen at all. Translated into philosophical terms, this means that theoretical insight cannot grasp the lawfulness in nature and society. The next claim is that this “inability” of science, theory and intellect to tell us something with “certainty” is not accidental, not of a temporary or historically conditioned nature, but a principled one. To put it differently: The very historical conditions in which the bourgeoisie finds itself force it to go so far as to proclaim the complete renunciation of its former faith in the power of scientific cognition and thinking. It is at this point that scientists and philosophers close the circle of blindness with numerous idealistic, agnostic, positivist, pragmatic and so-called “scientific” philosophies (always utterly ignorant of dialectics or hostile to it) — it is at this point that we meet the basic contradiction in contemporary bourgeois ideology in general.
The basic contradiction consists in the fact that, for the reasons given above, bourgeois thinking is forced to admit the power of science and at the same time to deny it. It is, on the one side, taken for granted that science is a true reflection of the objective world. Even Pollard, however ignorant he became in learning more of science, must thoroughly rely on the technical power of science while directing nuclear studies in Oak Ridge. He knows only too well that the economic, political and military strength of the bourgeoisie in whose service he stands depends on the reliability of science and technique. So far then, he behaves very rationally. Yet on the other side he sees the deep internal contradictions in capitalist society: mass-misery, insecurity, wars, nationalism, social upheavals and so on amidst enormous riches and still greater possibilities for welfare and culture. He sees this and the tremendous waste and is forced by such crying contradictions to assume a skeptical attitude towards the essential point in all science. Hence the intelligentsia, while not doubting the practical and technical exactness and importance of science, is simultaneously eager to manifest in endless variations the gravest doubts about the theoretical fertility of science and, more exactly, its ability to grasp reality in its objectivity, above all in the laws determining its development. To acknowledge the theoretical power of science would oblige the intelligentsia to draw “grave” conclusions. For if scientific theories express real laws of development in nature and society, it becomes unavoidable to ask what their content is, what consequences they bear, what they achieve. And then comes the question about their underlying driving forces, the tendencies of their immediate and further development and their ultimate outcome. It is clear that the theoretical boldness and the urge for knowledge of the modern bourgeoisie fades before such incriminating problems. The limits of its historical mission are the limits of its force of cognition — the latter depends psychologically on the stability of the situation in which a ruling class finds itself in each given period, and it is strong in periods of ascent, it gets weaker and finally dies out in periods of decadence.
Yet if the bourgeoisie in our time has lost interest in cognition, it cannot simply ignore it but is forced to give ideological explanations and justifications. Hence the attempts to elevate its doubts about the future to the heights of methodological principles of “objective” validity. This can only be achieved by denying not this or that science and its specific methodology, but by denying the power of scientific cognition itself. The scientific view and scientific method as such become the objects of criticism (they are at the end but “gambling”) and the task is to discredit the main instruments of scientific cognition, namely intellect and dialectical reason. The concepts resulting from such endeavors will be examined in the study, but for the present it is important to say a few words about materialism and idealism as the two basic attitudes possible.
1. By philosophical idealism nothing more is meant than that in it, in contradistinction to materialism, either spirit or an idea or God or some other force outside of the universe is considered as the latter’s creator, mover, primary cause, origin and so on. In other words: The controversy between philosophical idealism and materialism revolves around the question whether it was spirit in one form or another out of which arose matter, or matter out of which arose spirit.
2. Beyond this fundamental difference in the two concepts it must be clearly recognized that there are no “pure” phenomena, neither in nature nor society, neither in economy nor philosophy. Every form of idealism contains many elements of materialism (even Berkeley’s solipsism cannot be constructed without them), every form of materialism embraces elements of imagination, arbitrariness and idealism.
As for all philosophical positions “in between” materialism and idealism, it can be said that they are proclamations of inconsistency in principle. Together with subjective idealism, they play the most important role in the “solution” of the basic contradiction dealt with above, for they make it possible to accept all dialectical-materialist results obtained by the natural sciences, without being obliged to renounce mysticism and religion in whose arms the bourgeoisie seeks refuge in this period of capitalist decay. They also suit scientists who want to be natural scientists and mystics at the same time without getting into a most glaring contradiction with themselves. Hume’s agnosticism particularly, proclaiming “neutrality” in the question of whether the cause of our sensations is God, an idea, the real world, nothing or something and so on, leaves the way open for those who need it to choose among all thinkable possibilities that of God.
JOSEF WEBER
1957
AUTHOR’S NOTES
1. Noteworthy is also the “neo-barbarism recently defeated on the battlefields” where, notwithstanding official propaganda around the “anti-fascist” war, this neo-barbarism, with Russia at the spear-head, emerged rather as the victor.
2. At this point only one example of how Marx is distorted by interested “scientists.” Karl Mannheim, representative of “Wissenssoziologie,” writes in his Ideology and Utopia: “The important thing in the notion Ideology is thus in my opinion the discovery that political thinking is bound [!] to social existence. That is the most essential meaning of the much quoted thesis: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.’ ” — The reader may think this is “fair,” yet one has only to compare Mannheim’s “bound” to social existence with Marx’s social existence that determines consciousness (and not only political thinking) in order to discover the trick: Since Marxism too is “bound” to social existence (and what is not?), it too is — ideology. And that is indeed what Mannheim wants to “prove.”
3. Re. Horkheimer’s “human nature” one could exclaim: There it is! — so many material situations, so many human natures!
4. This is a good illustration of how something becomes sometimes, or rather very frequently, “unpopular.” It is because Academicians and a host of other persons, tacitly assuming that their own interests must be identical with those of all, give themselves much pain to make it appear not popular.
5. All quotations are taken from Wilson’s book: To the Finland Station (Anchor Books, 1953).
6. Wilson even goes so far as to make his “own” contribution to the legend of the USA. Stating the undeniable fact that the poor and illiterate people of a modern industrial society tend to exhibit bourgeois ambitions and tastes when they first master advanced techniques and improve their standards of living, he goes on to say: “We have seen it in the United States, where we have produced what is really the earliest example of that new kind of bourgeoisie that they have been getting in Germany and Russia.” Well, whatever that means, it is the entrance to the legend: “But ours [!] is a more highly developed, that is, a more democratic, version; and when I say that it is more democratic, I am using the word not in any loose sense, but in the definite sense that, with us [!], individual responsibility, the ability to make decisions, is a good deal more evenly distributed than it is in these other countries.” — That sort of rubbish is simply to be dismissed with the remark that it is the classical product of American individual responsibility, the ability to make decisions, realistic enough seeing and bold enough thinking combined.
7. Two beautiful illustrations of the same point in modern times from Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason. First: “Charles O’Connor, a celebrated lawyer of the period before the Civil War, once nominated for the presidency by a faction of the Democratic party, argued (after outlining the blessings of compulsory servitude): ‘I insist that negro slavery is not unjust: it is just, wise, and beneficent. . . . I insist that negro slavery . . . is ordained by nature [!]. . . . Yielding to the clear decree of nature, and the dictates of philosophy, we must pronounce that institution just, benign, lawful and proper.’ ” Second: “Another spokesman for slavery, Fitzhugh, author of Sociology for the South, seems to remember that once philosophy stood for concrete ideas and principles and therefore attacks it in the name of common sense. . . .: ‘Men of sound judgments usually give wrong reasons for their opinions because they are not abstractionists. . . . Philosophy beats them all hollow in argument, yet instinct and common sense are right and philosophy is wrong. Philosophy is always wrong and instinct and common sense always right, because philosophy is unobservant and reasons from narrow and insufficient premises.’ ” — If common sense and instinct (Wilson’s pets) have social antagonisms fixed as a “clear decree of nature,” all other things will be fixed in the same way. Thus declared Edmund Burke, whom Marx chastised in Capital: “The laws of commerce are the laws of Nature, and therefore the laws of God.” Wilson could learn from such examples that his common sense, too, is a very dialectical creature — sound philosophy and judgment for the defender of slavery, a fool and scoundrel for those who oppose it.
8. The ether-question is here followed up only to 1930, at the latest.
9. Impossible not to quote the following excellent passages from Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason: “The pigeon-hole into which a man is shoved circumscribes his fate. As soon as a thought or a word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics — the model of all neo-positivistic thinking — lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of all the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. Such mechanization is indeed essential to the expansion of industry; but if it becomes the characteristic feature of minds, if reason itself is instrumentalized, it takes on a kind of materiality and blindness, becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced.” — “Concepts have become ‘streamlined,’ rationalized, labor-saving devices. It is as if thinking itself had been reduced to the level of industrial processes, subjected to a close schedule — in short, made part and parcel of production.”
10. Contrary to reality, scientists like to foster the legend that their “group” neglects material interests in favor of realizing its goals. Senator Millikin asked Compton: “Do you believe this is a correct statement that probably of all the professions in the world, the scientist is less interested in monetary gain — I am speaking of the pure [!] scientist?” Compton’s reply: “I don’t know of any other group that has less interest in monetary gain.” Yet business is — another matter, and the “continuing readiness of scientists to leave their countries of origin for more favorable conditions elsewhere was demonstrated to politicians by Dr. Schade’s testimony.” “There is an astonishingly prevalent interest among the people of that kind that you talk to in the direction of wanting to come over here and work for us. Many of them feel that the future of Germany is nonexistent, or not very pleasant from their point of view, which is, of course [!], the truth. I think perhaps that is one of the reasons why such people have been astonishingly cooperative with people such as myself and my organization over there who went over there to find out what we could from the technical point of view as to what went on during the war that might be of interest to the Navy. . . . The Germans were most cooperative and I suppose it was because many [!] of them hoped to get a job over here some day.” The “dignity” of the scientists thus consists of being “most cooperative” when a job is at stake, and it is the same hunt for a better job whether it takes place in Germany or at a meeting of scientists in New York. (All quotations from Scientists and Politicians by Harry S. Hall in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1956.)
11. For Wilson: Spinoza’s immensely dialectical Determinatio est negatio alone would make him stand head and shoulders above any positivist, agnostic, “scientific,” anti-dialectic, etc., philosopher.
12. One gets the impression that Langmuir uses the “symbolic logic” which Reichenbach recommends. First he says, “Science is not a thing that we make.” Thus it runs on its own and “we” follow only the imperative of our faith. Then he says, “scientists don’t create science in that way.” Thus “we” don’t make but “create” it, only not in that way, yet in a way God alone knows what way it is and which contains perhaps an element of His judgment.
13. Johnson is right with “no concern for the social consequences,” but wrong with “research.” Research is necessary, while the social consequences stem from misuse by irresponsible scientists.
14. This alone is proof that the bomb was wantonly used. Since then the world has learned: Peace was available with Japan without this deadly weapon (for which a proving ground was needed) and that the pretext for employing it (saving American lives) was just — a pretext. Nevertheless: Forgetting this and his own statement, Wiener offers us the official propaganda version in writing: “Of course I was gratified when the Japanese war ended without the heavy casualties on our part that a frontal attack on the mainland would have involved.” If Wiener was deceived at the time, he should not uphold the deception now.
15. For Wilson: This is true dialectics! Men first introduce secrecy and seem to “manage” the thing, but the thing turns into its opposite, gets out of hand and manages our men, who are now custodians of their own creation. Voluntarily as they acted, they deserve their debasing fate: Voluntariness has turned into compulsion. (Besides: It is a nice euphemism to call the self-imposed obedience to the Powers That Be “self-discipline”!)
16. A characteristic case in point is Franz Neumann’s much-praised Behemoth, about which a separate study will be published later.
Josef Weber’s “The Problem of Social Consciousness in Our Time” appeared in Contemporary Issues: A Magazine for a Democracy of Content #31 (London/New York, October 1957). It was subtitled “An introduction to a study on philosophical and economic questions,” but Weber died a couple years later and the projected study was never completed. The article was originally written in German and the CI translation is a bit awkward and stodgy in places, but except for correcting a few obvious typos and adding an occasional comma for clarity, I have reproduced it exactly as it appeared.
Considering the length and density of this text, I suggest that you first read my article Josef Weber and Contemporary Issues and Weber’s The Great Utopia, which served as a preliminary outline of the CI group’s perspectives. Those two pieces should help give you a sense of what Weber is doing in the present text, where in his amusingly cantankerous manner he delves into a whole range of issues — history and philosophy, science and psychology, dialectics and revolution, capitalism and war, nuclear power and environmental degradation, and above all the complicitous role of the “intelligentsia.” The text itself is a superlative example of dialectical critical analysis of the sort that has rarely been matched by anyone since Marx and Engels (I can think of only a few works by Lukács, Korsch, and Debord that are equally pithy). Dense though it may sometimes be, I think that if you read it carefully you will find a wealth of insights into some of the most prevalent and most subtle forms of the false consciousness that camouflages and reinforces the existing system.
For another, more “literary” article by Weber, see Appeal for an English Edition of Diderot’s Jack the Fatalist.
No copyright.