The first thing to say about this book is that it is not what a reader might expect from its title and its date. It is not a symposium, not a collection of institute papers, not a committee product with a general editor's name on the spine. It is a single sustained argument of some 120,000 words by one man, Theodor Ilyich Oizerman, translated by Robert Daglish, and it is the fourth of his books to appear in this series. Its subject is not the history of philosophy in the ordinary sense — there is no march through the schools here — but the theory of that history: what philosophy is, why philosophers disagree, whether the disagreement can ever end. Oizerman calls this "historico-philosophical science" and treats it as a discipline with its own problems. Whatever one concludes about his answers, the questions are real ones, and he asks them at length.
The spine says 1973. The text does not.
The scholarly apparatus of this book — the working literature an author actually reads and argues with — stops in 1968. The most recent Soviet philosophical source cited is N. N. Semyonov in Kommunist no. 10 for 1968, which Oizerman quotes three times; the most recent Western source is Piaget's Sagesse et illusions de la philosophie (Paris, 1968). Nothing else in the argument's furniture is later. Every single citation dated after 1968 falls into one of two categories. Either it is a Progress Publishers English edition of a Marx or Engels classic — Anti-Dühring (Moscow, 1969), the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1969), Selected Works in three volumes (1970), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1971), Dialectics of Nature (1972) — which is simply the translator swapping the author's Russian page references for the ones an English reader can follow; or it is the single quotation from Brezhnev's Central Committee report to the 24th Congress, sourced to 24th Congress of the CPSU (Moscow, 1971), which sits at the very end of the concluding chapter.
So: a Russian text completed around 1968–69, carrying one paragraph updated to 1971, published in English in 1973. A four-year lag, which is modest by the standards of this catalogue but not nothing. The book belongs to the last years of the 1960s, and it should be read against them — against the Prague spring and its suppression in August 1968, an event this book does not mention and was in no position to mention.
The commission is legible from the back matter. Progress advertises Oizerman as a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences and notes that "Several of his books have been translated" — The Formation of Marxist Philosophy, it records, "has been published in German, Japanese, Polish and Hungarian", and other works in English, French, Spanish, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech and Greek. This is a détente-era export of scholarly respectability: proof that Soviet philosophy could argue with Heidegger and Reichenbach on their own ground and in their own languages. That was the sales pitch, and — this matters for what follows — it was to a large extent true.
A great deal, and the series' credibility depends on saying so plainly.
Oizerman writes as a man who has read the books he is discussing, in the languages they were written in, and who is interested in them. His chapter on the nature of philosophical problems opens on the observation that philosophy differs from the specialised sciences precisely by staying close to what everyone already knows: "Philosophy is mainly interested in what is known to everyone and yet still remains incomprehensible." He illustrates this with a page of ancient answers to ordinary questions that is genuinely delightful — Thales explaining magnetism by the soul, Heraclitus explaining why a drunk cannot stand up straight, and best of all: "Lucretius asked why sea water is salty. His reply was that the sea sweats, and sweat, as everyone knows, is salty." A man writing to a formula does not stop to enjoy Lucretius.
The engagement with living Western philosophy is by name, at length, and from the primary texts in the original. His long section on Heidegger works through Was ist das — die Philosophie? in German and gives Heidegger's case a fair run before rejecting it: Heidegger's attack on the rationalist cult of reason, Oizerman concedes, contains "a fair portion of truth", and the verdict — "Heidegger tries to straddle both rationalism and irrationalism, but he develops a fatal list in the direction of the latter" — is a judgement, arrived at by reading, not an anathema. The Conclusion is built around a patient reconstruction of Hans Reichenbach's charge that philosophy, unlike physics, has never managed to teach "a common doctrine". Oizerman takes the charge seriously enough to organise his final chapter around answering it.
He is good, too, on a question that reaches beyond his subject: whether the history of philosophy can be told as a history of great men. His answer is no, and the reasoning is careful. To treat the philosopher as the ultimate rather than the immediate cause of his system is to smuggle in subjective idealism through the back door; "Hume could have been born a philosopher only in the England of the early 18th century." Against the romantic theory of heroes and the crowd he sets Francis Bacon, whom he quotes with evident approval: "For rightly is truth called the daughter of time, not of authority."
Hold that sentence. It is the best line in the book, and the book will not survive it.
Because the strongest chapter, and the one that makes this volume worth reprinting, is the last: "On the Nature of Philosophical Debate". Its opening section is an argument that disagreement is not a scandal in science but its normal working condition. "Anyone can adopt a pose of unshakeable impartiality, wave aside all polemics and spend his time spouting platitudes; but it is quite impossible for him or anyone else, in any field of knowledge, to say something new without the spur of passion and partiality." And, flatly: "But polemics or no, there is bound to be controversy." From there he builds an account of error as a productive moment in cognition rather than a stain to be removed — where truth is metaphysically counterposed to error, he argues, truth itself becomes metaphysical and "comes near to error" — and arrives at a formulation about truth that is very nearly a manifesto: it is self-critical, and it "implies an awareness of its own incompleteness, limitedness and need for development."
This is a Soviet academician, writing in Moscow in the late 1960s, mounting a defence of open philosophical argument out of Lenin's own epistemological notebooks. It is not nothing. It is the sound of a discipline arguing quietly for permission to work.
Now watch what happens next. Immediately after the passage on the fertility of error, Oizerman installs a brake:
This dialectical principle of the relative opposition between truth and error has nothing to do with the unprincipled demand for toleration of error.
One can read that as a routine guard against relativism, and in a Western journal it would be. Here it does other work. If error is fertile but its toleration is unprincipled, someone must decide, in each case, which is which — and the book never says who, because it does not have to. The answer arrives at the end, in the closing paragraphs of the Conclusion, where a treatise on why philosophers must be free to argue produces its final authority:
In the Central Committee's report to the 24th Congress of the CPSU, Leonid Brezhnev said: "The struggle between the forces of capitalism and socialism on the world scene and the attempts of revisionists of all hues to emasculate the revolutionary teaching and distort the practice of socialist and communist construction require that we continue to pay undivided attention to the problems and creative development of theory."
Truth, the daughter of time and not of authority, signing off with a quotation from the General Secretary. This is the same figure the reader will find in Oizerman's The Main Trends in Philosophy, also in this series, where an argument for the partisanship of philosophy closes on the 1986 Party Programme. Twenty years apart, two different books, the same door shutting at the end of the corridor.
The house rule of this series is that where a book is silent on something central, the silence is the finding. Here the silence has an unusually precise shape, and it is in the footnotes.
Search this text and the following do not occur once: Zhdanov. Deborin. Stalin. Lysenko. Bukharin. Trotsky. The year 1947, in any connection with Soviet philosophy — its single occurrence is the imprint date of a Moscow edition of Lucretius. Pod znamenem marksizma, or Under the Banner of Marxism, the journal. The phrase Menshevising idealism. The word partiinost' (the English "partisanship" appears six times, in the ordinary epistemological sense, without the doctrine attached). "Alexandrov" occurs twice, and both times it is A. D. Alexandrov the mathematician, quoted on the subject-matter of mathematics. A book of eight chapters on the nature of philosophical debate contains no reference whatever to the debates that had actually taken place in the author's own institution within his own working life.
What it contains instead is this, in a footnote to the chapter on wisdom in the Middle Ages:
"Stoicism in its vulgarised form," we read in Volume One, p. 383, of the History of Philosophy (Ed. G. F. Aleksandrov, B. E. Bykhovsky, M. B. Mitin and P. F. Yudin) …
And this, in a footnote on Hegel's philosophy of nature, which cites the same multi-volume work and gives its date: the point has been made "particularly in the third volume of the History of Philosophy, published in 1943". (I have closed a line-break in the scan; the words are Oizerman's.) And this, from Chapter Two: "The question of man," M. B. Mitin writes, "is an old and eternally new problem" — sourced to Mitin's Philosophy and Modern Times (Moscow, 1960).
These are ordinary scholarly citations. They are presented exactly as the Piaget and the Heidegger and the Reichenbach are presented: as literature, to be used. And the men named in them are not ordinary.
G. F. Alexandrov ran the agitation and propaganda section of the Central Committee. In June 1947 Zhdanov intervened personally at a philosophy conference convened to discuss Alexandrov's History of West European Philosophy, and the charge — as the Fourth International reported it at the time — was that Alexandrov had "shown a servile adulation toward Western European thought" in his book on the history of philosophy. That is Ernest Germain, writing as the Belgian Marxist who would later publish under his own name of Ernest Mandel, in "Purge of Soviet Culture", Fourth International vol. 10 no. 11, December 1949. Twenty-four years later George Novack put the same episode more bluntly in Intercontinental Press — in July 1973, the very year this translation appeared: "In 1947, at Stalin's behest, his watchdog on the cultural front, Zhdanov, indicted the History of West European Philosophy by the unlucky G.F. Alexandrov, who saw something good in the works of Kant, Hegel and Fourier."
M. B. Mitin was one of the young philosophers who in 1930–31 denounced A. M. Deborin's school as "Menshevising idealism", took the journal Under the Banner of Marxism away from it, and inherited the institutions. P. F. Yudin was the other. They ran Soviet philosophy for two decades. Some of those swept up in that reorganisation and in the years after it did not survive them.
So the discipline Zhdanov disciplined in 1947 was Oizerman's own discipline, and the man Zhdanov disciplined is the first name in one of Oizerman's footnotes, followed by the names of the two men who had run the field since the purge of 1931. The whole cast is present. Nothing is concealed — every name is printed, correctly spelled, with volume and page. What is absent is any indication that anything ever happened to any of them, or was done by any of them to anyone else.
There is one flicker. Introducing the state of the field, Oizerman writes that "The six-volume History of Philosophy (Moscow, 1957–1965) was the first attempt to make a global study of the development of all philosophy from the time of its inception to the present day." The first attempt. The Aleksandrov–Bykhovsky–Mitin–Yudin volumes, which he footnotes twice, thereby cease to have been an attempt at all — quietly demoted, in a subordinate clause, without a word of explanation. That is as close as this book comes to a judgement on its own past, and it is delivered so softly that a reader who did not already know the history would not hear it.
Compare F. V. Konstantinov's Development of Revolutionary Theory by the CPSU (Progress, 1971), also in this series, which at least concedes that "The personality cult damaged the development of Marxist theory and philosophy." Oizerman cites Konstantinov twice, on ideology, and never on that. Compare Philosophy in the USSR (Progress, 1977), the profession's own collective self-portrait, in which the destruction of Soviet genetics and the events of 1947 survive as a period when "difficulties" arose and were subsequently "overcome". Oizerman does not even reach for the euphemism. His method is omission, and it is more complete.
Let the record be fair to him on one point. The history of philosophy was one of the very few fields in which serious Soviet scholarship remained possible after 1947, precisely because its subjects were dead and foreign and could not be interviewed by anybody. That was the permission. This book shows what the permission was worth: a real argument, in four languages, that a philosopher anywhere could read without embarrassment. It also shows what it cost. The one history the author was not permitted to write was the history of the room he was sitting in, and a theory of philosophical debate that cannot describe the debates in its own building has a hole at its centre that no amount of Heidegger will fill.
The anti-Stalinist left never reviewed Oizerman. A search of the collected English Trotsky, the Biulleten' Oppozitsii, the run of Fourth International for 1940–1956, Intercontinental Press for 1968–1977 and International Viewpoint returns his name nowhere. The tradition did not track Soviet academic monographs. What it tracked was the general question, and on the general question it produced, three years after this translation, a direct answer.
George Novack's "Freedom for Philosophy" appeared in Intercontinental Press, vol. 14 no. 12, 29 March 1976, under the standing head "On the Right to Think Without Reprisals or Constraint". It is a survey of the condition of philosophy across the postcapitalist states — Kolakowski stripped of his Warsaw chair in 1968, Karel Kosík's manuscripts seized by the Czechoslovak police in April 1975, the eight Praxis professors dismissed by the Serbian legislature in January 1975 — and it is scrupulous about the West too, noting that American philosophy departments rarely let a convinced Marxist present dialectical materialism to students, and that "few university philosophical departments treat dialectical materialism seriously, even though this world view has the broadest international influence."
On the Soviet Union in the exact years of this book, Novack's verdict is measured rather than triumphant, and it should be quoted in full because it concedes what Oizerman is owed: "The situation has also somewhat eased in the field of philosophy, though Soviet philosophers are far from enjoying freedom of expression even within the framework of the Marxist world outlook."
That is the frame this volume belongs in. And Novack states the principle that the volume cannot state for itself. A Marxist party, he argues, is entitled and indeed obliged to propagate dialectical materialism openly; the line is crossed elsewhere. Neither a party nor a state, he writes, nor its considerations of political expediency, "should dictate the writing or rewriting of the history of philosophy, dominate its life, or prescribe its course of development." And:
But that is entirely different from adopting a state philosophy and then compelling everyone from the scholars and teachers in the universities to schoolchildren to pay obeisance to that viewpoint. That is as bad as enforcing a state religion.
Novack then names the cost to the orthodoxy itself, and this is the sentence to set beside Oizerman's Chapter Eight: "When it encounters no strong and serious open challenges to its positions and formulas, official thought grows dull, slothful, and unsure of itself." Oizerman had argued, from Lenin, that controversy is the necessary form of the development of knowledge. Novack argues that a philosophy protected from controversy decays. They are the same proposition. One of the two men was free to follow it where it led.
His positive statement is the answer to the last page of this book: "A living and effective philosophy must earn and win conviction by the force of its arguments rather than by arguments of force." And: "Dialectical materialism wants free competition in philosophy as well as in the arts and sciences, just as its politics favors a plurality of parties in a socialist democracy." (Column breaks in the scan have been closed.)
The reader who wants to see what a history of philosophy written under no such constraint looks like has one further option, and it is a strange and moving one. In 1942, while the Socialist Workers Party was under federal prosecution under the Smith Act, Novack delivered nine lectures to party members and sympathisers in New York on the history of logic from Aristotle to Marx, revised and published as An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism (5th ed., Pathfinder, 1971). He opens by remarking on the oddity of the occasion: revolutionists under government persecution in the middle of a world war, meeting not to decide anything but "for the purpose of studying a science which seems to be as remote as higher mathematics from everyday political struggle". Lecture IV is on Hegel's revolution in logic; Lecture VII on what Marx and Engels did to it; Lecture VIII on the categories. Lecture IX ends not with a Congress resolution but with an auto worker in a Detroit plant reasoning his way from a singular judgement about his own foreman to a general judgement about a class.
That is the same enterprise as Oizerman's — philosophy as the self-consciousness of an epoch, the class content of thought, the history of logic as a real history — pursued by a man with no institute, no Academy, no translation into Japanese, and no permission required from anyone. The comparison is not offered to belittle Oizerman, who was much the better-read of the two and knew far more philosophy. It is offered because the difference between the two books is not a difference of intelligence or of learning. It is a difference in what could be said at the end.
As theory of the history of philosophy, this is a serious book, and a reader can take a great deal from it: the treatment of philosophical problems as questions that cannot be left unanswered, the demolition of the great-man account of philosophical change, the whole of Chapter Eight on the necessity of debate, and a running engagement with twentieth-century Western philosophy that is more attentive and better-tempered than most of what Western philosophy was then saying about Marxism.
Read Chapter Eight first, and read it twice: once for the argument, which is good, and once for the brake at the end of it. Then turn to the footnote in Chapter One that names Aleksandrov, Bykhovsky, Mitin and Yudin, and consider what it cost to print those four names as though they were simply the editors of a book.