The Philosophical Background of Marx and Engels

Extract

Although the writer on Chinese philosophy who looked up first ‘China’ and then ‘philosophy’ in the encyclopaedia and proceeded to combine the information thus obtained can hardly be said to have followed an adequate method, there is something to be said, when one is investigating dialectical materialism and its antecedents, for considering materialism and dialectics separately and then seeing what happened when they came together. Materialism is a recurrent mood of human thinking on the pre-philosophical as well as on the philosophcal level. When our existentialist contemporaries point out that a denial of God is more than a failure to work out a metaphysical syllogism, they are uttering what is in one sense a truism but in another may be grossly misleading. For the atheist or agnostic is blind precisely to the necessity by which any instance of being entails as its ultimate source the fullness of being} and this is a metaphysical inference, although it can be made inarticulately and needs in any case to be lived at the instinctive, as well as elaborated at the logical, level.

The mind which is, for whatever reason, thus metaphysically defective is confined in its search for explanation to factual correlations and temporal sequences within the world of experience. Instead of the world as a whole being seen as an overflow of infinite fullness, it becomes merely a pattern of material fragments building themselves up into such systems as we call organisms and collapsing again on the wheel of time. The spirit of materialism is essentially a contentment with proximate and partial explanations which leave the whole finally unexplained. The materialist cannot ask or answer the question why things should exist at all.