Scholasticism and Politics. Jacques Maritain

in detail; I should like, however, to explain briefly how, in my opinion, it should be envisaged.

      There are in Marxist epistemology a certain number of traits, which do not displease a Thomist: its aversion for idealism, its affirmation of the reality of the external world, the role it grants to the body in knowledge itself (in the first degrees of human knowledge), the importance (unfortunately principal) which it bestows upon material causality, the sense which it possesses of historical becoming (and which, reduced to just proportions, would be a highly philosophic sense, but which in the Marxist theory devours everything). Marxist dogmatism itself, even if it appears to us a counterfeit of real, organic, doctrinal force, has at least the courage of systematic unity. And even Marxist atheism, however absurd we may think it, supposes at least, that human reason must answer the question whether God is or is not, without seeking refuge in the parentheses of a science of phenomena, from which it refuses to emerge.

      Having said as much, I will indicate two highly typical traits of Marxist epistemology: that which one might call its practicalism, and that which one might call its dialecticism. In both of these respects, the Marxist theory of science is, in my opinion, a destruction of science.

      To sum up, Marxism not only ordains knowledge to action (which, according to Aristotle, is proper only in a certain category of knowledge); it makes knowledge itself consist in an activity exercised on things, in an activity of work and domination of matter, and of transformation of the world: if Aristotle is right in considering activity ad extra, ‘transitive’ activity, as the mode proper to activity, not of the mind, but precisely of bodies, of physical agents,—it appears that this demiurgic conception of knowledge is something like an idea of titans, still indistinct from nature and enslaved by it, and moving in the depths of the earth their members made of roots and rocks.

      It is true that the practical aspect has predominated in science since Bacon and Descartes, and has imposed itself with particular force in modern times, by reason of the close relations existing between our science and industry. But this practical aspect will never succeed in excluding the irreducible speculative value of science,—in other words, the relation of truth, with its proper criteria. Let us admit that what in the modern world interests the scientist, and gives him the courage to work at tasks which dispense but meagre intellectual delights, is the growing desire to act on the world and to transform matter; such is the aim of him who works (finis operantis). But the aim of the work itself or of science itself (finis operis), that which interests science as such,—the end which it aims at in so far as it is a mathematical interpretation of phenomena,—is now and always to know. To banish this speculative finality from empiriological sciences, to deprive them of their speculative nature, is to become immediately extraneous to the question. It is a sort of barbarity which, if it had the efficacious power, would dry up at its very roots the activity of knowing.

      The second character of Marxist epistemology is its dialecticism. It pretends to find in the sciences themselves the typical process of dialectics, understood in the sense which Marx gives to this word: the self-movement of the concrete by negation of the present position, negation of the negation, etc.; and as this pretension cannot be achieved by merely considering the relation of science with its object, it is to the movement of science itself in time, to the history of science, that it must have recourse. That human science, by virtue of its structure, demands to evolve in time, to have a history; that it should consequently imply a certain dialectical movement, due to the interaction of the internal logic of ideas with the needs and dispositions of the thinking subject—this indeed is a great truth. But what I should like to note here is the typical procedure of dialectical materialism: this consists, not merely in recognizing the importance of history, but in using the history of a thing, first, in order to juggle away the nature of the thing, and then to explain the thing by replacing it by its history. The history of poetry presupposes poetry. Are you going to study poetry and to ask yourself in what poetry consists (which by the way will not hinder, and will even encourage reference to its history)? No: you will say how poetry has developed in history; thanks to a series of successive internal contradictions, oppositions and syntheses, one state of poetry engendering another state by auto-negation,—romanticism springing forth from classicism, and proletarian poetry emerging from bourgeois poetry, which, by denying itself, surpasses itself, etc. And behold!—this is all. There is nothing more to say about poetry. Dialectical materialism is satisfied with this account of it. All this supposes, of course, empirical notions concerning poetry, collected more or less extensively, but no philosophical analysis whatever regarding the nature of poetry. The scientific form, which is the definitive condition of knowledge, is sought for in history.

      Even if the history in question is exactly reported, the matters in question well observed and well described, all that is true in this pseudo-explanation will have served only to prevent and to annihilate the very problems of philosophy and of science concerning the nature of poetry and its constitutive truth. Moreover, the history in question will not be apt to be exactly reported, because it will not be content with being a history, but will make all the explicative pretensions, which it has stolen from science and philosophy, reappear in itself. It will inevitably use facts in an arbitrary manner. Philosophy will oblige history to lie, and history will oblige philosophy to lie.

      Thus understood and practised, dialectic is an extraordinary instrument of illusion. I am far from being an enemy of dialectic, either of dialectic in its ancient sense as a logic, or of the dialectic of the concrete, conceived as an historical development due to the internal logic of a principle, or of an idea, in action in the human concrete. But the hegelian dialectic is something quite different, and this dialectic has precisely spoiled everything. In a sense, Marx is, in relation to Hegel, what Aristotle is in relation to Plato; he has brought hegelian dialectic down from heaven to earth. As a result it has become the more pernicious. It is of hegelian dialectic, turned over by Marx, that I am speaking at the present moment, and I am considering the logical virtue it has in its purity. No more causes and effects in being; everything in history happens of itself, according to the play of immanent antinomies.

      Now, the more this dialectic wants to be realistic and take possession of reality as of a thing to be intellectually manufactured, the more it liquefies reality in order to recompose it according to the fancy of the mind in the schemas of a logical universe, or rather of a logical becoming. I do not know whether I have explained with sufficient clearness what appears to me so marvellously sophistic in this proceeding. Marx has spoken of the mystification of the hegelian dialectic. His own dialectic, inasmuch as it imagines itself realistic, only doubles this mystification. It makes historical explanation a parasite of the knowledge of natures,—a parasite which reabsorbs and annihilates in itself the parasited subject, and which having nothing left to live on, lives and prospers all the better inasmuch as it becomes ideal and delusive.¹

      Now, it is this universal process which Marxist epistemology applies to the particular case of science. In principle it admits a reciprocal conditioning between the theory of knowledge and history. In fact, it uses the latter in order to escape the authentic problems of the former. The relation of physics with reality, and the proper problems put forth by this relation, then pass into the background. And what acquires all importance for the mind is the relation of physics to itself (and to cultural and economic conditions of humanity), and the dialectic process explaining the passage of one physical theory into another physical theory. Science as a specific energy of truth, as a specific vitality of intelligence, has vanished, has been annihilated in the illusion of historical explanation; the latter can carry abundant materials and fecund views concerning the human becoming of science and its cultural connexions; but, in so far as the epistemological problem, properly speaking, is considered, this explanation yields the mind only an illusory satisfaction.

      Perhaps, after these considerations, we can understand better the profound opposition existing between the neopositivist conception of science and the materialistic-dialectic conception of science. In the eyes of the logicians of the Viennese school, dialectical materialism must appear as a metaphysics of the worst kind, based on an idea of matter not only out of date but devoid of meaning. For Marxist epistemology, the ideas of the school of Vienna correspond to a ‘bourgeois’ and undialectic conception, artificially