The English title promises a book this is not. Emotions, Myths and Theories sounds like a survey of feeling — the sort of volume that would take on William James and Freud and the existentialists and settle accounts with the Western psychology of emotion. It is nothing of the kind. Open it and you find a dense, patient treatise on the theory of knowledge: the ancient quarrel between the senses and reason, sensationalism against rationalism, and the problem that has run under that quarrel since Plato — how does thought get out of the animal and into the human head? The chapters are "A Contribution to the History of an Old Dilemma," "Did Hume Think Animals Perceive the World?", "Time and Space as Objective Entities," "Myths and Logic," "The Social Premisses of Reason." Emotions do appear, but as the affective ground of sensory reflection — the positive and negative charge an organism puts on what it perceives — not as the subject. The translator's title fishes three attractive nouns out of a work whose real name says plainly what it is about. The Foreword gives that name: the book is "a revised version of our monograph The Sensory, Rational, and Experience published in Russian by the Moscow University Press in 1976."
That sentence is the first thing a reader should hold onto, because it dates the book. The spine and the catalogue say 1985, and the Progress edition is genuinely of that year — commissioned, the Foreword tells us, by the publisher's philosophy department for translation into English and Swedish. But the thought is a decade older. This is a mid-1970s monograph of the Brezhnev academy, lightly revised and exported in a 1985 jacket — and it reads like its real date, not its printing date. The formula "developed socialism," which the Twenty-Seventh Congress of 1986 would quietly retire, is used without embarrassment; there is no Gorbachev, no perestroika, no glasnost, no Chernobyl, nothing that would betray the later 1980s at all. The English citations reach editions printed as late as 1982, but those are the Progress translations of Marx, Engels and Lenin the author happened to quote from; they date the type-setting, not the argument. What we are reading is the settled dialectical materialism of the Soviet philosophical establishment as it stood before the ground began to move.
Of V. G. Panov the volume itself tells us almost nothing beyond the name on the title page and the Moscow University provenance of the original. He is a professional philosopher of the theory of knowledge, and the book is an academic monograph rather than a party primer: it carries no study questions, no glossary, no numbered topics, none of the apparatus that marks the cadre manuals in this series. It was written for people who already read Kant and Carnap in the original, and it treats them at that level. Whatever else is to be said about it, it should be said with that in view. This is not a pamphlet; it is a serious book by a serious man, and it deserves to be argued with rather than merely exposed.
The doctrine is the dialectical-materialist theory of reflection, worked out for the specific problem of how rational knowledge arises from sensory knowledge. Panov's starting point is orthodox and, on its own terms, unimpeachable: "the sole source of our knowledge is sensation," in the words of Lenin he quotes and returns to throughout. The whole of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism stands behind the book, and its polemical targets are Lenin's brought up to date — the neopositivists (Carnap, Reichenbach, the Vienna Circle) in the seat once held by the Machists, phenomenology (Husserl) and intuitionism (Bergson) in the seat of idealism, and behind them all the old sceptic, David Hume.
But sensation cannot be the whole story, and here is the dilemma the book is built around. If all knowledge comes from the senses, where do general concepts come from — "tree," "cause," the universal that no eye ever saw? Panov states the trap that has caught every consistent sensationalism with real force. He runs the classic examples: no number of observed white swans licenses "all swans are white"; a flash of lightning followed a thousand times by thunder still cannot guarantee the thousand-and-first peal. Push sensationalism to the end and you reach Hume's scepticism about causality, and then the modern positivist retreat into probability logic, in which — Panov's phrase, and it is a good one — "the human mind proves doomed to skate about on the surface of events." Push rationalism to the end and you reach an intellect stocked with truths the senses never delivered, which the rationalists could only explain by an innate faculty or, at the limit, by God. Kant's mediating "third term," the productive imagination, is examined at length and credited with seeing the real problem while failing to solve it from subjective-idealist premises.
Panov's own solution is the interesting part, and it is where the book is at its best. The missing middle term between sensation and reason is not in the head at all: it is labour. Man, unlike the animal, does not confront nature directly; he "interacts with nature in an indirect mediated way, putting natural objects that he has altered between himself and nature as an intermediary" — the tool, "second" or "humanised" nature. "A tool is therefore an object that represents 'humanised nature' or a 'subjectivised object'." The tool has a relative self-action: the campfire burns by itself once lit, the axe does its work once swung. In grasping the tool's own activity — foreign to him, external, "alienated" from his own body — primitive man is compelled to form the first mediating representation, and out of that, over immense stretches of time, grows the general concept, the word, the second signalling system, speech. Reason is not a gift of nature to one favoured species; it is precipitated out of social, tool-using practice. Concepts are, in the deepest sense, historical and social products. That is what the two culminating chapters, "The Social Premisses of Reason" and "Class and the Human in Socio-Historical Experience," are for.
Two threads that the English title pulls out of the book deserve their own word, because they are genuine and they are good. The first is emotion. Before reason, Panov argues, there is feeling: the living organism evaluates everything it perceives on a single scale — conducive to survival, or hostile to it — and registers the verdict as positive or negative emotion. Emotion is thus the original evaluative background against which mere sensation becomes meaningful, and as tool-using labour transforms "the whole sphere of sensibility, including instincts, emotions, perceptions, sense of needs," feeling is intellectualised along with everything else, until the satisfaction of making a tool or solving a problem can dominate the raw reflexes of pain and hunger. It is a materialist psychology of the emotions in miniature, embedded in an epistemology — which is presumably what the translator reached for in the title, and it is more interesting than the title's promise of settled scores with the West. The second thread is myth. The chapter "Myths and Logic" treats mythological consciousness not as mere error to be swept away but as a real and necessary stage in the historical formation of reason — the long period, the Foreword says, that man "passed through" before he could construct theoretical models and a scientific picture of the world. That is a genuinely dialectical point and a humane one: it declines to write off pre-scientific thought as simple stupidity and insists it be understood as a stage in a real development. Both threads show the book at its characteristic best — patient, genetic, materialist about mind without being crude about it.
This is a real philosophy, and a good deal of it holds up. The genetic account of concept-formation through tool-mediated labour is not Panov's invention — it belongs to one of the twentieth century's genuinely first-rate intellectual traditions, the Soviet activity theory of Vygotsky, Leontyev and Ilyenkov, the "cultural-historical school" that a companion volume in this series, Karl Levitin's One Is Not Born a Personality, portrays from the inside. The thesis those psychologists made famous — that the specifically human mind is built, assembled in the individual out of the signs and tools a culture hands him — is exactly Panov's thesis carried into epistemology, and where the psychologists showed it working in the deaf-blind child learning to think, Panov shows it working in the descent of the concept from the flint. His engagement with the opposition is likewise the real thing and not a set of straw men: he reads Hume seriously enough to take the problem of induction as a problem, quotes Kant and Hegel at length in their own words, and follows Carnap and Reichenbach and even Thomas Kuhn's "normal science" into their own territory. Where so many volumes in this series only characterise the Western thinkers they attack, Panov actually reads them. A reader who wants to know what the best of Soviet philosophy could do when it was doing philosophy rather than liturgy will find it here.
The root of all this is older and better than the Brezhnev academy, and Panov knows it: it is the young Marx. The chapter "Humanisation of Nature" is Marx's theme under Marx's name, and Panov cites the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 directly. It was there that Marx wrote that "the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present" — that even the capacity to perceive is a social and historical acquisition, not a fixed biological endowment. Against every biologism that would read the mind off the nervous system, and every idealism that would find it already complete in the newborn, this is the materialist charter, and Panov deploys it honestly and well. When he insists that reason is socially conditioned, historically formed, and cannot be understood apart from the collective and its practice, he is standing on solid Marxist ground.
But the 1844 Manuscripts contain a second doctrine bound to the first, and it is here that the book quietly declines to follow its own logic. The senses are formed by labour; and labour, under private property, is alienated — the worker's own activity confronts him as an alien power. Panov has this too, and he uses it with force and precision — against capitalism. In class society, he writes, the collective force of men's own interdependence "was not then separated from them or counterposed to them as an alien force standing above them," but with the division of labour it "now already stood above them as an alienated, mysterious, dominant force," and its personification as political power "was not long in coming." He quotes The Holy Family on the mutual self-estrangement of proletariat and bourgeoisie. The analysis is real, and it is turned, unwaveringly, outward — at monopoly capital, at "mass culture," at the wage system, at exploitation.
Turn to the same category and ask it the reflexive question — does the alienated force that "stands above" society still stand above Soviet society? — and the book goes abstract exactly where it had been concrete. Socialism, Panov writes, "is a decisive step toward eliminating alienation," and "for the first time in history the state is becoming the real and not the fictitious representative of the overwhelming majority of the public, and then of the whole nation." The estrangement is not simply declared abolished; that would be cruder than Panov is. He concedes, in a single guarded sentence, that it can return: "Subjectivism in direction of the economy that does not take objective laws into account leads to that force coming out again into the open as a necessity counterposed to people." It is a remarkable admission, and it is left hanging in mid-air as an abstract hazard of bad management — a possible error of "subjectivism," never an existing institution with a name, a payroll and a policy. The category built to name an alien power standing above society is applied to every social formation in history except the one the author is living in.
That is the book's silence, and it is the standard silence of this whole library, appearing here in its most refined form: not a falsified date or a doctored quotation — this is a philosophy book, and it has very little history to falsify — but the refusal to turn its own sharpest instrument on itself. The instrument was made for exactly this cut. The Fourth International's answer had been in print for half a century, and it uses Panov's own vocabulary. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) describes a Soviet bureaucracy that, far from withering, "has grown into a hitherto unheard of apparatus of compulsion," "an uncontrolled force dominating the masses"; a stratum that "rises above the new society" and "succeeded in raising itself above society and getting its fate firmly into its own hands" (chapters 3, 5 and 9). That is Panov's "alien force standing above them," reconstituted — not in the capitalist West, but in the state Panov calls the majority's real and no longer fictitious representative. Panov's own concession about "subjectivism in direction of the economy" is the door through which that analysis walks; he opens it a crack and looks away. A reader who takes the book's materialism seriously — as it asks to be taken — is obliged to finish the sentence the author would not, and The Revolution Betrayed, above all its chapters 5 and 9 on the Thermidor and on the real social relations of the USSR, is where the finishing has been done.
There is a smaller irony worth marking, because it cuts both ways. Early in the book, defending objective truth against relativism, Panov writes that "the fighters for truth who do not recognise the existence of objective truth in some way attribute the status of universal truth to their own subjective convictions." He means the positivists and the pragmatists. But the sentence is a mirror held up to a state philosophy that had, within living memory of 1976, raised particular Party convictions to the "rank of universal, extra-historical" truth and shot the men who disagreed. Panov's defence of objective, mind-independent truth is philosophically correct and, against the crude relativisms he attacks, entirely welcome. It is also the last doctrine a Soviet philosopher should have wanted examined too closely for its institutional record. The point sharpens a page later, where Panov — again following Materialism and Empirio-Criticism to the letter — dismisses Bogdanov's notion of truth as "socially organised experience," which, he writes, "had nothing in common with the position of historical materialism about the objective character of the operation of the laws of social development." He is right against Bogdanov. But "socially organised experience" is an uncomfortably exact description of a régime in which what counted as true was what the Party had organised society to affirm, and the objective laws Panov invokes against Bogdanov are the same laws his own concession admits "subjectivism in directing the economy" had been violating. The philosophy is sound; it is the standing on it that will not bear weight.
None of this is a reason to dismiss the book, and a reader told it were worthless would be badly served. Panov's central achievement is genuine and it is portable: a materialist account of how reason is generated out of social, tool-using labour, developed with real philosophical care and in serious dialogue with the Western philosophy of science. The treatment of the Hume problem, of Kant's productive imagination, and of the neopositivist collapse into an epistemology that skates on the surface of events is worth any philosophy student's time. The rooting of the whole enterprise in the young Marx's 1844 Manuscripts — the senses themselves as a work of history — is the durable core, and it is the same root from which the Vygotsky–Leontyev–Ilyenkov psychology grew, so that this volume and Levitin's belong on the same shelf and illuminate each other. Where Soviet philosophy was doing philosophy, it could be this good.
The book fails only where the whole tradition failed: at the mirror. It possesses, and wields brilliantly, a theory of alienation that explains precisely the society it was written in — a bureaucratic apparatus risen above the producers, appropriating their collective power as an alien force — and it points that theory everywhere but home. Read it, then, for its materialism, which is real; and read it against its one evasion, which is the evasion this series exists to name. The concept that would have let Panov see the state he lived under is in his own hands, on his own pages, borrowed from the same Marx he cites by chapter and verse. He tells us the alien force can return through what he calls subjectivism in directing the economy. He simply neglects to mention that, by 1976, it had never left.