1. The Emergence of Philosophy¶
Core Argument¶
Philosophy, this chapter argues, is not an esoteric pursuit but an inescapable aspect of human existence: everyone possesses a philosophy, a way of viewing the world. Those who disclaim one merely absorb, uncritically, the dominant ideas of capitalist society from media, religion, and education. It is only during social crises that people are forced to question these assumptions and engage with philosophy at a higher level. The central question of philosophy is the relation of thinking to being, a relation whose historical genesis is rooted not in consciousness but in the necessities of survival.
Abstract thought and language, which distinguish humans from animals, arose from manual labour and tool-making. Engels demonstrated that the freeing of the hands for labour preceded and stimulated brain development, a theory confirmed by palaeontology. Early humans, lacking scientific knowledge, explained natural phenomena through religion and animism. The notion of a separable soul originated from dreams and the resemblance of death to sleep. At this stage, religion, magic, art, and science were undifferentiated. The decisive rupture came with the division between manual and mental labour in early society, which created the first professional intellectual class: the caste of priests, shamans, or magicians. This separation gave a powerful impulse to the dualism separating soul from body, mind from matter, and thinking from doing. It coincided with the division of society into classes, freeing a minority from manual work and providing leisure for theoretical study. However, this intellectual elite used its monopoly over knowledge to increase its power, creating a deep prejudice in favour of mental labour and contempt for physical work. This radical divorce deepened the illusion that ideas have an independent existence—a misconception at the heart of all religion and philosophical idealism.
True scientific thought begins when people dispense with mythology. The Ionian materialists—Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes—developed a bold, naturalistic conception of the universe, anticipating evolution and matter as a philosophical concept. Anaximenes advanced this by introducing rarification and condensation, explaining how quantitative changes produce qualitative ones. However, the Ionian school reached its limits: its qualitative picture could not be developed further without number and quantity. The rise of idealism paralleled a social crisis. Slavery intensified the division between mental and manual labour, fostering alienation. The masses turned to mystery cults like Orphism, which preached dualism and transmigration. The Pythagorean school emerged in this context, combining mathematical investigation with mystical rules. It appealed to the wealthy classes amid insecurity and class war. Pythagoreanism inverted the real relation between thought and being, treating the soul as imprisoned in the body. Despite its mysticism, it advanced philosophy by shifting focus from matter’s qualitative aspect to its quantitative relations. The Pythagoreans viewed number as the essence of all things, describing the universe solely in terms of quantity. They made important mathematical discoveries but treated geometry abstractly and mystically, with no practical application. This idealist approach, transmitted through Plato, persists in the mystique of mathematics. However, the chapter insists that mathematics originates from material human needs: counting derived from fingers, geometry means “earth-measurement,” and symbols like + and − came from merchants’ warehouse signs. The Pythagoreans’ a priori method broke down when Hippius discovered incommensurable quantities, revealing contradictions that split the school. The central error is reducing nature’s complex, dynamic contradictions to static, orderly quantitative formulae. Mathematics is a product of social evolution, trial, and observation, not the free operation of mind.