The Thinking Reed

After dialectics had been restored to its rights, even if only formally, Marxist philosophers tried to free themselves from Lenin’s ‘theory of reflection’. Lenin himself considered the very expression a most unhappy one, because it implies that consciousness merely reflects reality in a passive way: he realized this, and tried to make the necessary correction himself, speaking of ‘active’ reflection: ‘Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world but creates it.. ’31 But ‘active reflection’ sounds rather like ‘salty sugar’. In his Marxism in the Twentieth Century Roger Garaudy tried to resolve this contradiction but was unsuccessful, for it turned out that the more active the reflection, the less accurate it is (distorting mirrors reflect ‘more actively’ than ordinary ones). Actually, consciousness does not ‘reflect’ the world but cognizes it, trying actively to penetrate into the depths of things, without confining itself to mere reflection of what is visible. Of course, cognition is a historical process, with all the ensuing consequences. Marx understood the problem in this way when he wrote his Theses on Feuerbach.

An open onslaught on the theory of reflection was launched in 1968 by P. Egides, who later became editor of the samizdat journal Poiski. He wrote:

In order that thinking may be dialectically identical with being, dialectically coincident with it — that is, in order that thinking may follow all the slightest twists and turns of being, its versatile and complex dialectic, it must indeed be highly active. It must create, transform the world, it must be free, rejecting in a revolutionary way everything that prevents it from grasping the truth in all its fullness.32

He showed that the question of ‘reflection’ is closely connected with the philosophical question of freedom and necessity and that, in its turn, with the question of political freedom:

Without cognition of necessity there is no freedom, but freedom itself, the essence of freedom, is not the knowledge of necessity but mastery thereof, the controlling and overcoming of necessity. All freedom is cognized necessity, but not all cognized necessity is freedom.33

Official philosophy, in calling for submission to necessity and seeing that as freedom, ‘may turn into an apologia for slavery.’34 For Egides, ‘freedom means the creation of something new — otherwise, it is not freedom’, and alienation reigns: ‘Alienation is the antipodes of freedom. Alienation is also connected with that frame of mind in which one does not even dare to think of overcoming necessity.’33 Genuine freedom of thought means ideological breakthrough, the overcoming of dogmatic schemas which fetter the intellect.

Egides, G. Batishchev and P. Naumenko endeavoured to revive dialectical thinking by turning to Hegel and early Marx, counterposing their ideas on freedom and alienation to the official schematism of the state philosophy. An American philosophical journal described their works published in 1967-68 as blows struck ‘against dogmatism, conservatism and the apologetics of official Soviet philosophy’.36 Their positions, it said, are reminiscent of ‘the criticism of industrial society and official Marxism by the philosophers of the “Frankfurt School” (M. Horkheimer, T. Adorno, E. Fromm, H. Marcuse, J. Habermas) and the Yugoslav philosophers grouped around the journal Praxis (C. Petrović, R. Supek, M. Marcović, P. Vranitskiy).’37