Empiricist Philosophy and Empiricist Habits of Thinking

[p026] Empiricist Philosophy and Empiricist Habits of Thinking — THE term ‘empiricism’ is often used in the literature of Marxism but its exact meaning is not always under- stood. Empiricism refers both to a specific type of philosophy occupying a particular place in the history of modern thought, and to habits of thinking which the empiricist uses. These two aspects, of course, co-exist and this article seeks to show the way in which they are inter-related. It is proposed to give answers to the following ques- tions: (1) What role has empiricism played in Western philosophy and what did it accomplish? (2) What did empiricism teach? (3) How did empiricist philosophy develop and what distinguishes the modern empiricist, i.e., what habits of thought nurture and are nurtured by empiricism? (4) What attitude does dialectical materialism take toward this school of philosophy? THE HISTORICAL ROLE OF EMPIRICISM Britain has one of the oldest capitalist cultures and empiricism is a characteristic product of that culture. Since the seventeenth century, empiricism, in one form or another, has been the major philosophy of the English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. Its long dominance coincides with the period of bour- geois rule in Britain and its radiation to other parts of the world. The connexion between the philosophical method of empiricism and the social system of capitalism is not an accidental connexion but an organic one. In its theo- retical content, empiricism is a view of the world. It performs a definite social function, acting as a method of thinking appropriate to the specific historical condi- tions and serving the class requirements of the bour- geoisie. The periods of the birth, maturity and senes- cence of empiricism are bound up with the rise and decay of the bourgeois mode of existence. Empiricism in its youth was an integral part of the mightiest technological, economic, political, scientific, artistic and philosophical revolution England has yet experienced. This many-sided revolutionary trans- formation of Britain arose from the commercial and industrial advances which enabled the British bour- geoisie to establish capitalist economy and establish its political rule in the seventeenth century. Empiricism was born as the philosophical challenge of the budding bourgeois society to the scholastic, Roman Catholic ideological superstructure of feudal society. The religious side of this process began with Wycliffe and Lollardry, continued through the Reform- ation of the English Church and its break with Rome, and culminated in Puritanism. Empiricism drew many of its key ideas from the new world outlook stimulated John Marshall by the new phase in the natural sciences identified with such figures as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Huyghens, Boyle, Harvey and Newton. Empiricism, however, was not the most revolutionary theoretical product of this period. A substantial school of materialists held the most advanced outposts. Yet empiricism was, in its origins, an extremely radical de- parture in the field of philosophy. Classical British empiricism, from Bacon to Hume, acted as a powerful stimulant to progress in Western thought. It challenged many medieval ideas, shattered scholasticism and dislodged many old props of feudal theology. It sought to devise a new logic and a more fruitful method of investigation of natural phenomena, of society and of human reasoning processes to replace the formal logic and sterile speculations of the scholas- tics. It aided the revival of materialism and helped to clear the ground for the growth of the natural and social sciences. Empiricism proved an invaluable theo- retical tool in the tasks of destruction and renovation undertaken by the bourgeois-democratic forces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Empiricism thus won a lasting place in the historical development of modern thought. Its successes have been so great and the influence of its methods and ideas so widespread and enduring that they have entered into the very bloodstream of British culture, until now they appear to many people as the normal, natural, eternal attributes of all human reasoning. BACON: THE INSPIRER OF EMPIRICISM All the power and promise inherent in empiricism was contained in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the illustrious innovator of modern philo- sophy. Bacon may be regarded as the father of British materialism and the grandfather of empiricism. Bacon set British philosophy on a new road in the following ways: (1) By a very ‘back-handed’ concession to theology he severed ‘natural philosophy’ from religion by main- taining that humans could not know God’s nature by means of reason or sensation but only through revela- tion of his inspired word. By being separated from theology, natural science was allocated a definite terri- tory of its own in which it could expand more freely. Unintentionally, but none the less effectively for that, Bacon initiated a process of differentiating philosophy and science from theology which, when carried forward by later thinkers, undermined the theological founda- tions of religious dogmas and so cleared a path for materialist and even directly atheist conclusions. (2) By divorcing philosophy from theology and reason from faith, Bacon joined the new philosophy to natural science in the form of a materialist physics. He directed men’s attention away from the barren scholastic 23

[p027] LABOUR REVIEW learning of the universities! towards outdoor study and direct observation of natural phenomena. (3) Bacon proceeded from a materialist conception of nature which viewed matter as indestructible, self- moving, ever-active and constantly changing. Although God had created nature, he did not interfere with its causal order. (4) Bacon based his philosophy not upon metaphysics {i.e., upon learned disputes about the meanings of terms or unverifiable abstractions) but upon methodical in- vestigation of ‘the universal process of motion’, (i.e., upon physics, especially mechanics). (5S) Bacon set out a new logical method which relied not upon the ‘vicious habit’ of jumping to unverified general propositions and deducing consequences from them, but which relied upon the method of making narrow general propositions from observed data and then, step by step, moving from these narrow general- izations to broader generalizations and checking them at every stage by reference to the results of experiment. (6) This empirical and inductive method, depending upon the observation of nature, inquiry and experiment rather than upon abstract propositions, stressed work- ability instead of formal consistency as the test of truth. “What is most useful in practice is most correct in theory,’ Bacon wrote. ‘For truth is shown and proved by the evidence of works. . .’ (7) Bacon switched the main function of philosophy from providing theoretical: arguments for religious dogmas to serving the practical needs of mankind. The increased knowledge of nature acquired through Bacon’s innovations in scientific method were used to promote useful works, to stimulate mechanical inven- tions (e.g., printing, gunpowder, the magnetic compass) which, because they advanced the efficiency and power of the instruments of production, augment wealth and help to satisfy more effectively men’s needs and even to increase their comforts. Bacon declared his aim when he wrote that he was seeking ‘the knowledge of Causes, and Secret Motions of Things; and the Enlarging of bounds of Humane Empire to the effecting of all things possible.’ These aims corresponded to the basic requirements of the emerging bourgeois order. Bacon sought to devise ‘an engine’ of thought adequate for the social practices of the new era. His theorizing heralded the coming in- dustrial revolution. He announced that wedding of natural science and industry which has showered so many benefits upon mankind. For Bacon experience, based upon what we learn through the senses and aids to the senses like the teles- cope, was the sole valid source and sure road to useful knowledge. These tendencies in his thought bore fruit in 1The method of developing men’s knowledge of the world adopted by the scholastic philosophy was to take a general proposition of, usually, Aristotle, and to construct an account of the world by purely deductive methods—i.e., by deducing what the world ‘must’ be like on the unquestioned and un- questionable assumption that Aristotle’s general proposition was absolutely correct. There are, of course, modern scholas- tics and they are not always to be found in theological seminaries. 24 January-February 1958 various ways in the seventeenth century. During the Civil War, the materialism he pioneered acquired an aristocratic and monarchist form in the hands of his companion Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and a plebeian and democratic expression in the Leveller leader Richard Overton (1597-1663). THE CLASSICAL EMPIRICISM OF LOCKE The purely empirical aspect of Bacon’s thought was developed later in the century and under different cir- cumstances by John Locke. John Locke (1632-1704) was the founder of the empirical school of philosophy. The empiricists did not have to produce any comprehensive cosmological theory of their own. They simply took over the mechani- cal conception of the world ready-made from the natural scientists of the seventeenth century. They aimed to create a theory of knowledge in tune with the premises of natural science and to extend the methods of thought which were achieving such brilliant results in the natural sciences to the problems of philosophy and to the study of mankind. Empiricism is not based so much upon a particular view of the real world as upon a statement concerning the ways and means of acquiring knowledge of the world. It is in fact a special theory of knowledge—an epistemological theory. The primary principle of empiri- cism is that all knowledge is founded on experience of the senses. Hobbes states that sensation was the principle of the knowledge of principles themselves and all science is derived from that source. Locke approached the problem of the origins and basis of knowledge along the same line. He wrote: Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? . . . To this I answer in one word, from ex- perience: in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. This proposition was directed against the idealist theory, propounded in Locke’s time by, among others, the Cambridge Platonists, that knowledge is somehow drawn from innate notions implanted in the mind be- fore birth and deriving ultimately from God, their author. Thus, in 1660, in a discourse called Of the Im- mortality of the Soul, one of these Cambridge Platonists, John Smith, spoke about The Archetypall Ideas of Justice, Wisdome, Goodness, Truth, Eternity, Omnipotency, and all these either Morall, Physicall or Metaphysical notions, which are either the First Principles of Science or the ultimate complement and final perfection of it. These we always find to be the same and know that no Exorcisms of material mutation have any power over them; though we ourselves are but of yesterday and mutable every moment; yet these are Eternall and depend not upon any mundane vicissitudes; neither could we ever gather them from our observation of any Material thing where they were never sown. Referring to such ‘Eternall Archetypall Ideas’, Locke remarked: It is an established opinion among some men that there are in the understanding certain innate principles, some primary notions, characters, as it were, stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul receives in its very first being and brings into the world with it.

[p028] EMPIRICIST PHILOSOPHY Locke set out to demolish this supposition of the Platonists but, as we shali see, only partly succeeded in this task. THE ORIGINAL SOURCE OF IDEAS Locke relies on plain empirical evidence, or the absence of it, to disprove the existence of innate ideas. If there were self-evident truths, he argued, these should be present in all men and clear to savages, infants and even idiots. In fact, this is not so; the supposed innate principles in religion, logic, morals and mathematics are consciously held only by educated minds. This theory of empiricism is true so far as it goes. However, it cannot be said to provide a complete theory of knowledge. Whatever ideas or knowledge we have do ultimately derive from physical contacts with the world around us, through our senses. This is denied by proponents of the idealist school who teach that some, if not all, of our ideas come from an immaterial source. They have used this doctrine to uphold the existence of eternal and self-evident truths in religion, morals and logic. Ever since this view was expressed in classical Greece by such philosophers as Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato, the idealists have held up mathematics as the surest evidence that general ideas could not possibly be taken from sense experience. Berkeley tells us: ‘Number is no object of sense; it is an act of the mind.’ Dr Whewell, an English historian of science of the early nineteenth century, maintained, following Plato, that such propositions as two and three make five are ‘necessary truths’, ie., truths which have a certainty, universality and stability mere experience could not give. John Stuart Mill replied that this simple arith- metical statement expresses ‘a truth known to us by early and constant experience . . . which rests on the evidence of sense’. The empiricist Mill was right on this point against the Kantian idealist Whewell. The ‘early and constant experience’ out of which simple arithmetic emerged and on which it is based, belongs not only to childhood but to the childhood of mankind. The art of counting originated among the savages through their handling and observation of definite objects for specific social purposes. If there were no such objects in men’s ordinary experience of the world they live in, there would be no need or use for the art and science of enumeration. Numbers are still taught to children by pointing to their fingers and toes, beads, blocks and so on—that is to say, through the evidence provided by their organs and senses of touch and sight. There are some primitives who cannot count beyond ten and have no special words in their language for numbers greater than five. Our own decimal numeration testifies to its lowly origins and bodily basis, since we reckon by tens in accord with the primitive practice of depending upon fingers and toes for calculation. Today, in the construction of electronic calculators, mathe- maticians find the binary system, i.e., one using a base of two, to be most suitable. Similarly, other mathematical concepts and methods may be traced back to their sensory and social roots. Thus the very evidence which the idealists bring for- ward to prove the immaterial sources of ideas may be used to show the truth of the empirical assertion of their earthly origins. The persistence, however, of the belief in the im- material origin of mathematics is demonstrated by the fact that Hume, the otherwise ruthlessly consistent sen- sationalist, puts mathematical propositions, including arithmetic, into a different class from ideas about matters of fact. He assigns them to a category of purely abstract ‘Relations of Ideas’ which are ‘without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the Universe’. THE AMBIGUITIES OF EMPIRICISM We stated at the outset that empiricism is first of all a theory of knowledge, not a theory of being. Locke’s classical exposition of Empiricism is aptly called An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke says that he will not venture on ‘the vast ocean of being’— although he cannot help diving into it now and then. This conscious limitation of empiricist thought to epistemology alone was the source of its most serious weakness. Empiricism came into the world with an ineradicable birthmark—an inherent ambiguity. The empiricist is clear on the fact that all knowledge is based on experience, but he is not clear on two further questions: (a) what generates this experience? and (b) what are the things which experience informs us about? Materialism, unlike empiricism, gives a direct answer to these two questions. It states that objective, physical being precedes animal and human sensation, perception and knowledge. It insists that all the ‘furniture’ in man’s - mind comes from his interactions and connexions with the social and natural environments. Materialism insists upon the unity of objective being and subjective thought. Empiricism, as such, however, does not commit itself whole-heartedly on this crucial point. Locke defined knowledge as ‘nothing but the perception of the con- nexion and agreement or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas’. This definition can be interpreted in two opposing ways. In this ‘agreement’ of which Locke speaks is taken to consist in the correspondence of ideas with their objects in the external world, that coincides with the materialist view. John Toland (1670- 1722), a blunt and therefore embarrassing materialist disciple of Locke, drove this point home when he de- fined the basic principle of evidence in his philosophy as ‘the exact conformity of our Ideas or Thoughts with their Objects, or the Things we think upon’. If, however, this agreement is regarded merely as the harmony of ideas with one another or with sense-data which are self-enclosed and have no essential bonds with material reality, the door is left open for idealist con- clusions. Thus an inconsistency, an inconclusiveness, even a certain shiftiness is implanted in the very heart of the empirical philosophy. This makes it possible for empiri- cists to swing in either direction on this pivotal question of the relation between thought and being. That is also why empiricism by its very nature is a theory of know- ledge particularly suited to individuals and_ social groupings, like the middle classes in bourgeois society, who are themselves inconsistent, unstable, caught be- tween contending forces and unwilling to commit them- selves decisively on decisive matters. Here, for example, is another instance of the same 25

[p029] LABOUR REVIEW sort of ambiguity in Locke. He asked whether, when we have ideas in our minds, ‘we can thence certainly infer the existence of anything without us which corres- ponds to that idea . . . whereof some men think there may be a question made’. Locke repudiated this sug- gestion implied in the question of the sceptics. He states in reply that there is a manifest difference between dreaming of being in a fire and actually being in it, and that in practical life we are certain of this difference and guide ourselves by it. Our knowledge is accurate and real, Locke teaches, and there is ‘a conformity be- tween our ideas and the reality of things’. This is good materialist doctrine. At the same time, however, Locke holds that the knowledge derived sensation is inferior in certainty and clarity to that knowledge which is presumably obtained through the superior channel of demonstration and_ intuition. According to him, we are intuitively aware of what spirit, the soul and God are, but have no clear idea of material substance. The latter ‘is merely the something, we know not what ... the supposed, but unknown support of those qualities we find existing’. This ‘we know not what’ is the seed out of which Kant’s theory of the unknowable thing-in-itself grew and nineteenth century agnosticism (‘we know not if’) emerged. THE SOCIAL SOURCE OF LOCKE’S INCONSISTENCIES. Locke’s writings are filled with such inconsistencies and they are lamented by many critics as the source of confused thought and of the weakness of his ideological structure. His critics are right here, but these self-same commentators fail to grasp the historical source and the class necessity of this evasiveness. It was inevitable that Locke should have developed a theory with inconsisten- cies of this type since only in this way could he effec- tively serve the English bourgeoisie. What was weak- ness from the viewpoint of formal symmetry of doctrine was strength in the service of rising capitalism. It has been well observed: ‘Locke’s theory of know- ledge reveals that quality which his philosophy shares with the Church of England and perhaps other English things, its power to comprehend in a vague synthesis principles really belonging to opposite schools of thought.’? This ‘English’ quality is basically bourgeois in origin. It is equally prominent in the governmental organization of England which crowned the seventeenth century bourgeois revolutions. What an incongruous yet ingenious combination of institutions derived from different ages this State structure was—and so remains to this very day. The Monarchy, the Established Church and a House of Lords, all carried over from feudalism and every one subordinated to the sovereignty of the House of Commons, the prime institution of bourgeois parliamentarism! Locke’s thought exhibits similar mixtures of con- traries. These constitute the distinctive quality of his philosophy. It must be remembered that he was the principal ideologist of the victorious bourgeois revolu- tion in England—a revolution which ended in a com- promise between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy and which sought to consolidate its positions rather than 2B. Willey, The Seventeenth-Century Background (1934), pp. 274-5, 26 January-February 1958 move forward to higher ground. Locke as an ideologist was called upon to reconcile the conflicting claims of Christianity and practical philosophy, of divine revela- tion and bourgeois reason, of the existence of a State Church with the toleration of nonconformist sects, of the King with Parliament, of traditional beliefs with new discoveries and progressive ideas, of the rights of man with the demands of private property. It would have been impossible to satisfy fully both sides and maintain consistency. Locke, for example, is regarded as the architect of religious tolerance in England. Yet he refused to grant freedom of worship and thought to Catholics on the one side and atheists on the other because these extremes were repugnant to the new bourgeois régime. Locke did not hesitate to sacrifice theoretical con- sistency for the sake of arriving at practical compromises and ideological combinations that gained his ends! He believed that principles should not be the master but the servant of practical necessity. Is not the English crown Presbyterian in Scotland and Episcopal in Eng- land? This was the very spirit of the British bourgeoisie of Locke’s epoch, and even later periods of British history. No wonder that Locke became the favourite philosopher of conciliators and compromisers, the patron saint of liberalism and the apostle of ‘the middle way’. Thus the dualisms inherent in empiricism derive his- torically from the difficult position of the British bour- geoisie who fought against the feudalists on the one side and were hard-pressed by the plebeians on the other. The needs of the struggle against the old order gave a radical sharpness to empiricism (and even a revolutionary im- pulse to its later influence in America and France) while fear of the lower classes blunted the edge of its criticism and restrained its representatives from going all the way in their theoretical expressions and practical conclu- sions. Subsequently this very indefiniteness of empirical philosophy appealed to those thinkers, especially those connected with the petty bourgeoisie, who were caught in similar social contradictions. The empiricists are the philosophical incarnation of Bunyan’s character ‘Mr Facing-Both-Ways’—a_ character not unknown in Britain today. (To be Continued) Correction There was a misplaced line on page 173 of the last issue of LABouR REVIEW. Lines 11 to 9 from the bottom of Column 2 should have read: *... and might well jib at a third phase of opportun- ist manoeuvring. Moreover, as recently as February he had criticized the weakness of .. .’

[p030] Communications + Contradictions in Freud JOHN McLEISH’S most interesting article in your last issue does not, to my mind, bring out sufficiently the contradictory nature of Freud’s contribution to modern thought. The philosophy of Freudism is partly materialist. But be- cause it utilizes certain unverified and unverifiable hypotheses (the death instinct, the pleasure principle etc.), its conclusions are at times absurd. If a man has one wooden leg it is not surprising that he should limp. Freudism is scientific in so far as it proclaims that thoughts are not accidental, that they are the effects of certain causes and that their roots are to be found in man himself. It refuses to consider them the ethereal products, in the minds of men, of the ministration of some supernatural agency. Freudism is also scientific when it proclaims that the bases of human belief may not be immediately apparent, that the mind is organized in many layers, some closer to consciousness than others, and that ‘unconscious’ material may powerfully in- fluence both thought and action, at times erupting into cons- ciousness itself. Freud’s concept of the unconscious layers of the mind, and his provision of tools (such as idea-association and dream-analysis) for exploring this region, must rank among the greatest achievements of modern psychology. Where Freud is completely unscientific however is in his arbitrary and unproven assertions concerning the determinants of man’s thought. Here speculation, myth and rationalizing reign supreme. It is as if Copernicus, having proved the earth to revolve around the sun, had proceeded to postulate devils to do the job! Trotsky, in his letter of September 27, 1923, to the Russian physiologist Pavlov and in certain other writings, contrasted the scientific and speculative methods of investigating psy- chological mechanisms. He compared Pavlov’s method (based on neurology and a rigidly scientific analysis of conditioned reflexes) to that of a diver who in order to explore a well puts on a diving suit, descends to the bottom, carefully ex- plores the ground and walls, continuing his examination as he gradually comes up to the surface. The method of Freud- ism, he states, is that of conjecture. The examiner sits at the top of the well and, with a piercing gaze, attempts through the mass of murky and ever-moving water to discern the nature of the ground beneath. Freud is scientific and materialist only in so far as he assumes that the ‘well’ of the human mind can be explored, that it is of finite proportions and that he rejects all idealist notions about the bottomless ‘abyss of the soul’. Swansea