Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/376

Rh as early as 1844 the latter, in his critique of Carlyle, following Feuerbach, rejected Spinozism as pantheism. Plehanov's belief in an objective dialectic based on materialism is equally void of foundation, for there is no such thing as an objective dialectic. Plehanov weakens his own position by his fondness for advocating dialectic as a method. He learned this from Engels, but both he and Engels were in error. Historical materialism is merely materialism; as such, in interpreting history, it may formulate its own method, but it is not itself a method. Struve, therefore, successfully maintained as against Plehanov that dialectic has no proper place in Marxism (materialism). It is true that Plehanov offers two proofs on behalf of objective dialectic. He says that motion and becoming involve an inward contradiction, Zeno, the founder of the Stoic philosophy, being again raised to honour; and he introduces into the concept of becoming an antirevolutionary contrast, which is itself however subjective, conceptual, not objective.

Against the revisionists, who advocate a return to Kant, Plehanov adduces Jacobi's argument against Kant. If we base ourselves on Kant we are faced with a dilemma. We have to choose between Feuerbach's materialism ("I am a real, a sensual being, and the body in its totality is my ego, my essence"), and Fichte's solipsism. But solipsism is absurd (no one can contend that my mother exists only within me), and we are therefore compelled to accept materialism.

It is needless to refute a disjunctive statement of this sort or to waste time discussing arguments of such a calibre. We may reject Kant and Fichte, we may reject Kantian apriorism and Kantian subjectivism; but it does not follow that subjectivism is wholly false, and that materialism as naive realism or objectivism, is sound. The whole aim of recent philosophy has been to revise Hume and Kant, and to provide a critical foundation for empiricism—"critical" in the Kantian sense. The Marxists have hitherto taken no part in this work of revision, but no one who seriously attempts it can possibly remain a materialist.

Plehanov is doubtless right in his energetic rejection of extreme subjectivism as scepticism. Bělinskii, Bakunin, the slavophils, Mihailovskii, etc., took the same sound view. Plehanov sees in the scepticism which has been diffused since the eighteenth century a manifestation of decadence, and we have in fact to do here with decadence, with the degeneration of