Library:Elementary principles of philosophy

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Preface by Maurice Le Goas

This elementary textbook reproduces the notes taken by one of the students of Georges Politzer, during the classes taught by him at the Workers' University (l'Université Ouvrière) in the school year 1935-1936. In order to understand its character and scope, it is first necessary to specify the aim and method of our teacher.

We know that the Workers' University was founded in 1932 by a small group of professors to teach marxist science to manual workers and to give them a method of reasoning that would allow them to understand our times and to guide their actions, as much in their technique as in the political and social fields.

From the very beginning, Georges Politzer took on the task of teaching marxist philosophy, dialectical materialism, at the Workers' University: a task all the more necessary as official teaching continued to ignore or distort this philosophy.

None of those who had the privilege of attending these courses – he spoke each year before a large audience of people of all ages and professions, but dominated by young workers – will forget the deep impression that everyone felt before this big redheaded young man, so enthusiastic and learned, so conscientious and fraternal, so attentive to bringing an arid and ungrateful subject to an inexperienced audience.

His authority imposed on his class a pleasant discipline, which knew how to be severe, but always remained just, and there was emanating from his person such a power of life, such a radiance that he was admired and loved by all his pupils.

In order to make himself understood, Politzer first removed from his vocabulary all philosophical slang, all the technical terms that only the initiated could hear. He wanted to use only simple words known to all. When he was forced to use a particular term, he did not fail to explain it at length using familiar examples. If, in discussions, one of his students used learned words, he would take it back and mock it with the biting irony that was familiar to all who approached him.

He wanted to be simple and clear and always appealed to common sense, without ever sacrificing the accuracy and truthfulness of the ideas and theories he put forward. He knew how to make his lessons extremely lively by involving the audience in discussions before and after the lesson. At the end of each lesson, he would give what he called one or two control questions, which were designed to summarize the lesson or apply the content to a particular topic. Students were not required to cover the topic, but many did and brought a written assignment with them at the beginning of the next lesson. He would then ask who had completed the assignment, raise his hand, and select a few of us to read our text and complete it with oral explanations if necessary. Politzer would criticize or praise and provoke a brief discussion among the students, and then he would conclude by learning from the discussion. This lasted about half an hour and allowed those who had missed the previous class to fill in the gap and relate it to what they had learned before; it also allowed the teacher to see how well it had been understood; he insisted on delicate or obscure points if necessary.

He would then begin the day's lesson, which lasted about an hour; then the students would ask questions about what had just been said. These questions were generally interesting and insightful, and Politzer would take the opportunity to clarify and rephrase the essence of the lesson from a different perspective.

Georges Politzer, who had a thorough knowledge of his subject and an intelligence of admirable flexibility, was concerned above all with the reactions of his audience: he took the general "temperature" each time and constantly checked the degree of assimilation of his students. He was also followed by them with passionate interest. He helped to train thousands of activists, many of whom are now in "responsible" positions.

We, who understood the value of this teaching and who thought of all those who could not hear it, and especially our provincial comrades, wanted the publication of his lectures. He promised to think about it, but, in the midst of his immense work, he never found the time to carry out this project.

Then, during my second year of philosophy at the Workers' University, where they had created a higher course, I had the opportunity to ask Politzer to correct some homework for me, and I gave him, at his request, my course notebooks. He found them well done, and I suggested that he write the lessons of the elementary course according to my notes. He encouraged me to do so, promising to review and correct them. Unfortunately, he could not find the time. His occupations being more and more heavy, he left the upper course of philosophy to our friend René Maublanc. I informed him of our plans and asked him to review the first lessons I had written. He eagerly accepted and encouraged me to finish this work which we were then to present to Georges Politzer. But the war came: Politzer was to die a heroic death in the struggle against the Hitlerian occupier.

Although our professor was no longer there to finalize a work he had approved and encouraged, we thought it would be useful to publish it according to my lecture notes.

Georges Politzer, who began his philosophy course at the Workers' University each year by establishing the true meaning of the word materialism and protesting against the slanderous deformations that some people subjected him to, energetically recalled that the materialist philosopher is not lacking in ideals and that he is ready to fight to make this ideal triumph. Since then he has been able to prove it by his sacrifice, and his heroic death illustrates this initial course, in which he affirmed the union, in marxism, of theory and practice. It is not useless to insist on this devotion to an ideal, this abnegation and this high moral value at a time when, once again, one dares to present marxism as "a doctrine which transforms man into a machine or an animal barely superior to the gorilla or the chimpanzee" (Lenten Sermon at Notre-Dame de Paris, pronounced, on February 18, 1945, by the R. P. Panici.).

We can never protest enough against such outrages to the memory of our comrades. Let us only remind those who have the audacity to pronounce them the example of Georges Politzer, Gabriel Péri, Jacques Solomon, Jacques Decour, who were marxists and who professed at the Université Ouvrière de Paris: all good comrades, simple, generous; fraternal, who did not hesitate to devote a good part of their time to come to a lost neighborhood to teach the workers philosophy, political economy, history or science.

The Workers' University was dissolved in 1939. It reappeared, after the Liberation, under the name New University. A new team of dedicated professors, taking over from those who had been shot, came to resume the interrupted work.

Nothing can encourage us more in this essential task than to pay tribute to one of the founders and animators of the Workers' University, and no tribute seems to us more just and useful than to publish Georges Politzer's Elementary Principles of Philosophy.

Maurice Le Goas.

The philosophical problems

Introduction

Why should we study philosophy?

In the course of this book, we propose to present and explain the elementary principles of materialist philosophy.

Why is this? Because marxism is intimately linked to a philosophy and a method: those of dialectical materialism. It is therefore indispensable to study this philosophy and this method in order to understand marxism and to refute the arguments of bourgeois theories as much as to undertake an effective political struggle.

Indeed, Lenin said: "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. "(Lenin: What is to be Done?) This means, first of all: it is necessary to link theory with practice.

What is practice? It is the act of realizing. For example, industry, agriculture realize (i.e., put into reality) certain theories (chemical, physical or biological theories).

What is theory? It is the knowledge of the things we want to achieve.

We can only be practical - but then we realize by routine. We can be only theoretical - but then what we conceive is often impossible to achieve. So there has to be a connection between theory and practice. The whole question is to know what this theory should be and how it should relate to practice.

We think that the worker activist needs a method of analysis and reasoning that is just in order to be able to carry out a just revolutionary action. That he needs a method that is not a dogma giving him ready-made solutions, but a method that takes into account facts and circumstances that are never the same, a method that never separates theory from practice, reasoning from life. Now this method is contained in the philosophy of dialectical materialism, the basis of marxism, which we propose to explain.

Is the study of philosophy a difficult thing?

It is generally thought that the study of philosophy is for workers a difficult thing, requiring special knowledge. It must be admitted that the way in which bourgeois textbooks are written is well done to confirm these ideas and can only repel them.

We do not intend to deny the difficulties involved in the study in general, and in the study of philosophy in particular; but these difficulties are perfectly surmountable, and they come above all from the fact that they are new things for many of our readers.

From the outset, we will, moreover, by making things clearer, call upon them to review certain definitions of words that are distorted in everyday language.

What is philosophy?

Vulgarly, we understand by, philosopher: either the one who lives in the clouds, or the one who takes things in the right direction, the one who does not "worry". But, on the contrary, the philosopher is the one who wants to give precise answers to certain questions, and, if we consider that philosophy wants to give an explanation to the problems of the universe (where does the world come from? where are we going? etc.), we see, therefore, that the philosopher is concerned with many things, and, contrary to what is said, "cares a lot".

We will therefore say, in order to define philosophy, that it wants to explain the universe, nature, that it is the study of the most general problems. Less general problems are studied by the sciences. Philosophy is therefore an extension of the sciences in the sense that it is based on the sciences and depends on them.

We immediately add that marxist philosophy provides a method for solving all problems and that this method comes under what is called: materialism.

What is the materialist philosophy?

Here again, there is a confusion that we must immediately denounce; vulgarly speaking, the materialist is the one who only thinks of enjoying material pleasures. By playing on the word materialism - which contains the word matter - we have thus come to give it a completely false meaning.

By studying materialism - in the scientific sense of the word - we are going to give it back its true meaning; being materialistic does not prevent us, as we shall see, from having an ideal and from fighting to make it triumph.

We have said that philosophy wants to give an explanation to the most general problems of the world. But, in the history of humanity, this explanation has not always been the same.

The first men did try to explain nature, the world, but they did not succeed. What makes it possible to explain the world and the phenomena that surround us are the sciences, and the discoveries that have allowed the sciences to progress are very recent.

The ignorance of the first men was therefore an obstacle to their research. This is why, in the course of history, because of this ignorance, we see religions arise, which also want to explain the world, but by supernatural forces. This is an anti-scientific explanation. But as, little by little, over the centuries, science will develop, men will try to explain the world by material facts based on scientific experiments, and it is from there, from this desire to explain things by science, that materialistic philosophy is born.

In the following pages, we are going to study what materialism is, but, from now on, we must remember that materialism is nothing other than the scientific explanation of the universe.

By studying the history of materialist philosophy, we will see how bitter and difficult the struggle against ignorance has been. It must be noted that this struggle is not yet over, since materialism and ignorance continue to exist side by side, side by side.

It is at the heart of this struggle that Marx and Engels intervened. Understanding the importance of the great discoveries of the nineteenth century, they enabled materialist philosophy to make enormous progress in the scientific explanation of the universe. This is how dialectical materialism was born. They were the first to understand that the laws that govern the world can also explain the workings of societies; they formulated the famous theory of historical materialism.

In this book, we propose to study first materialism, then dialectical materialism and finally historical materialism. But, above all, we want to establish the relations between materialism and marxism.

What is the relationship between materialism and marxism?

We can summarize them as follows:

1. The philosophy of materialism constitutes the basis of marxism (See Lenin: "Materialism and the Philosophy of Reformism", Karl Marx and his Doctrine, Social Editions 1953, p. 60).
2. This materialist philosophy which wants to bring a scientific explanation to the problems of the world progresses, in the course of history, at the same time as the sciences. Consequently, marxism stems from the sciences, rests on them and evolves with them.
3. Before Marx and Engels, there were, on several occasions and in different forms, materialistic philosophies. But in the nineteenth century, with the sciences taking a great step forward, Marx and Engels renewed this ancient materialism from the modern sciences and gave us the modern materialism, which is called dialectical materialism, and which forms the basis of marxism.

We see from these few explanations that the philosophy of materialism, contrary to what is said, has a history. This history is intimately linked to the history of science. Marxism, based on materialism, did not come out of one man's brain. It is the culmination, the continuation of ancient materialism, which was already very advanced in Diderot. Marxism is the flowering of materialism developed by the Encyclopedists of the 18th century, enriched by the great discoveries of the 19th century. Marxism is a living theory, and to show right away how it sees problems, we will take an example that everyone knows: the problem of class struggle.

What do people think about this issue? Some think that the defense of bread dispenses with political struggle. Others think that it is enough to punch in the street, denying the need for organization. Still others claim that only political struggle will bring a solution to this issue.

For the marxist, class struggle includes:

1. An economic struggle.
2. A political struggle.
3. An ideological struggle.

The problem must therefore be posed simultaneously on these three terrains.

1. One cannot fight for bread without fighting for peace, without defending freedom and without defending all the ideas that serve the struggle for these objectives.
2. The same is true in the political struggle, which since Marx has become a true science: one is obliged to take into account both the economic situation and ideological currents in order to wage such a struggle.
3. As for the ideological struggle, which manifests itself through propaganda, in order for it to be effective, one must take into account the economic and political situation.

We see, therefore, that all these problems are intimately linked and, therefore, that no decision can be taken in front of any aspect of this great problem of class struggle - in a strike, for example. - without taking into consideration every aspect of the problem and the whole problem itself.

It is therefore the one who is capable of fighting on all terrains that will give the movement the best direction.

This is how a marxist understands this problem of class struggle. Now, in the ideological struggle that we have to wage every day, we are faced with problems that are difficult to solve: immortality of the soul, existence of God, origins of the world, etc. It is the dialectical materialism that will give us a method of reasoning, that will allow us to solve all these problems and, as well, to unveil all the campaigns of falsification of marxism, which pretend to complete and renew it.

Bourgeois campaigns against marxism

These attempts at falsification are based on a wide variety of bases. One seeks to set against marxism the socialist authors of the pre-marxist period (before Marx). This is how we very often see the "utopians" used against Marx. Others use Proudhon; others draw on the revisionists of before 1914 (though masterfully refuted by Lenin). But what must be emphasized above all is the campaign of silence that the bourgeoisie is waging against marxism. It has done everything in particular to prevent materialist philosophy from being known in its marxist form. Particularly striking in this respect is the whole of philosophical teaching as it is given in France.

Philosophy is taught in secondary schools. But one can follow all this teaching without ever learning that there is a materialist philosophy elaborated by Marx and Engels. When, in philosophy textbooks, we talk about materialism (because we have to talk about it), we always talk about marxism and materialism separately. Marxism, in general, is presented only as a political doctrine, and when we speak of historical materialism, we don't speak of the philosophy of materialism; finally, we don't know anything about dialectical materialism.

This situation does not only exist in schools and high schools: it is exactly the same in Universities. The most characteristic fact is that one can be a "specialist" in philosophy in France, with the highest diplomas awarded by French universities, without knowing that marxism has a philosophy, which is materialism, and without knowing that traditional materialism has a modern form, which is marxism, or dialectical materialism.

We want to demonstrate that marxism has a general conception not only of society, but also of the universe itself. It is therefore useless, contrary to what some people claim, to regret that the great defect of marxism is its lack of philosophy, and to want, like some theorists of the workers' movement, to go in search of this philosophy that marxism lacks. For marxism has a philosophy, which is dialectical materialism.

The fact remains, moreover, that despite this campaign of silence, despite all the falsifications and precautions taken by the ruling classes, marxism and its philosophy are beginning to become more and more known.

The fundamental problem of philosophy

How should we begin the study of philosophy?

In our introduction, we said several times that the philosophy of dialectical materialism was the basis of Marxism.

Our goal is the study of this philosophy; but to reach this goal we must advance in stages.

When we speak of dialectical materialism, we have before us two words: materialism and dialectical, which means that materialism is dialectical. We know that before Marx and Engels materialism already existed, but that it was they, with the help of the discoveries of the nineteenth century, who transformed this materialism and created "dialectical" materialism.

Later we will examine the meaning of the word "dialectical," which refers to the modern form of materialism.

But since, before Marx and Engels, there were materialist philosophers (for example, Diderot in the 18th century), and since there are points in common to all materialists, we need to study the history of materialism before discussing dialectical materialism. We also need to know the conceptions that are opposed to materialism.

Two ways of explaining the world

We have seen that philosophy is the "study of the most general problems" and that it has to to explain the world, nature, man.

If we open a textbook of bourgeois philosophy, we are astonished by the multitude of different philosophies that can be found in it. They are designated by multiple more or less complicated words ending in "ism": criticalism, evolutionism, intellectualism, etc., and this multitude creates confusion. The bourgeoisie, moreover, has done nothing to clarify the situation, quite the contrary. But we can already sort out all these systems and distinguish two great currents, two clearly opposed conceptions:

1. The scientific conception.
2. The non-scientific conception of the world.

Matter and spirit

When philosophers set out to explain the world, nature, mankind, everything that we Finally, they were called upon to make distinctions. We see for ourselves that there are things, objects that are material, that we see and touch. Then, other realities that we do not see and that we cannot touch or measure, like our ideas.

So we classify things in this way: on the one hand, those that are material; on the other hand, those that are not material. are not material and are in the realm of mind, thought, ideas.

This is how philosophers found themselves in the presence of matter and spirit.

What is matter? What is the spirit?

We have just seen in a general way how we have been led to classify things according to whether they are matter or spirit.

But we must specify that this distinction is made in different forms and with different words.

Thus, instead of talking about spirit we talk about thought, our ideas, our consciousness, the soul, just as when we talk about nature, the world, the earth, being, it is matter that we are talking about.

So again, when Engels, in his book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, talks about being and thinking, being is matter; thinking is spirit.

To define what is thought or spirit, and what is being or matter, we will say:

Thought is the idea that we have of things; some of these ideas usually come to us from our sensations and correspond to material objects; other ideas, such as those of God, philosophy, infinity, thought itself, do not correspond to material objects. The essential thing we must remember here is that we have ideas, thoughts, feelings, because we see and feel.

Matter or being is what our sensations and perceptions show and present to us, it is, in a general way, everything that surrounds us, what we call the "external world". Example: My sheet of paper is white. Knowing that it is white is an idea, and it is my senses that give me this idea. But the matter is the sheet itself.

That is why, when philosophers talk about the relationship between being and thinking, or between mind and matter, or between consciousness and the brain, etc., it all concerns the same question and means: what is, of matter or mind, of being or thinking, the most important term? Which is the one that precedes the other? This is the fundamental question of philosophy.

The fundamental question or problem of philosophy

Each of us has asked ourselves what we become after death, where the world came from, how the earth was formed. And it is difficult for us to admit that there has always been something. We tend to think that at some point there was nothing. That's why it's easier to believe what religion teaches: "The spirit hovered above the darkness... then came the matter. "In the same way, we wonder where our thoughts are, and so the problem arises for us of the relationship between mind and matter, between brain and thought. There are many other ways of asking the question. For example, what is the relationship between will and power? Will is, here, mind, thought; and power is what is possible, it is being, matter. We also often encounter the question of the relationship between "social consciousness" and "social existence".

The fundamental question of philosophy thus presents itself under different aspects and we can see how important it is to always recognize the way in which this problem of the relationship between matter and spirit arises, because we know that there can only be two answers to this question:

1. a scientific answer.
2. a non-scientific answer.

Idealism and materialism

This is how philosophers have been led to take a stand on this important issue. The first men, completely ignorant, having no knowledge of the world and of themselves, and having only weak technical means to act on the world, attributed to supernatural beings the responsibility for everything that astonished them. In their imaginations, excited by the dreams in which they saw themselves and their fellow creatures living, they came to this conception that each of us had a double existence. Troubled by the idea of this "double", they came to believe that their thoughts and feelings were produced not by their

own bodies, but by a particular soul living in that body and leaving it at the moment of death

This idea of the immortality of the soul and of a possible life of the spirit outside of matter was born later on.

Likewise their weakness, their anxiety before the forces of nature, before all those phenomena which they did not understand and which the state of the art did not allow them to control (germination, storms, floods, etc.) led them to suppose that, behind these forces, there were all-powerful beings, "spirits" or "gods", beneficent or evil, but, in any case, capricious.

In the same way, they believed in gods, in beings more powerful than men, but they imagined them in the form of men or animals, as material bodies. It was only later that souls and gods (and then the One God who replaced the gods) were conceived as pure spirits.

This led to the idea that in reality there are spirits that have a very specific life, completely independent of that of bodies, and that do not need bodies to exist.

Subsequently, this question was posed in a more precise way according to religion, in this form:

Was the world created by God or does it exist from all eternity? Depending on how they answered this question, philosophers were divided into two main camps

Those who, adopting the non-scientific explanation, admitted the creation of the world by God, i.e. affirmed that spirit had created matter, these were the camp of idealism.

The others, those who tried to give a scientific explanation of the world and thought that nature, matter was the main element, belonged to the different schools of materialism.

Originally, these two expressions, idealism and materialism, did not mean anything other than that.

Idealism and materialism are therefore two opposite and contradictory answers to the fundamental problem of philosophy.

Idealism is the non-scientific conception. Materialism is the scientific conception of the world.

We will see later the proof of this affirmation, but we can say, from now on, that if we observe well in experience that there are bodies without thought, like stones, metals, earth, we never observe, on the other hand, the existence of mind without body.

To end this chapter with an unequivocal conclusion, we see that to answer this question: how is it that man thinks? There can only be two completely different and totally opposite answers:

1. Man thinks because he has a soul.
2. Man thinks because he has a brain.

Depending on which answer we give, we will be trained to give different solutions to the problems that arise from this question.

Depending on our answer, we will be either idealistic or materialistic.

The philosophical materialism

Study of metaphysics

Study of dialectics

The historical materialism

Dialectical materialism and ideologies