Knowledge in the old sense of passive contemplation is an unreal abstraction; the process that
really takes place is one of handling things. "The question whether objective truth belongs to
human thinking is not a question of theory, but a practical question," he says. "The truth, i.e.,
the reality and power, of thought must be demonstrated in practice. The contest as to the reality
or non-reality of a thought which is isolated from practice, is a purely scholastic question....
Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but the real task is to alter it." *
I think we may interpret Marx as meaning that the process which philosophers have called the
pursuit of knowledge is not, as has been thought, one in which the object is constant while all
the adaptation is on the part of the knower. On the contrary, both subject and object, both the
knower and the thing known, are in a continual process of mutual adaptation. He calls the
process "dialectical" because it is never fully completed.
It is essential to this theory to deny the reality of "sensation" as conceived by British empiricists.
What happens, when it is most nearly what they mean by "sensation," would be better called
"noticing," which implies activity. In fact--so Marx would contend--we only notice things as
part of the process of acting with reference to them, and any theory which leaves out action is a
misleading abstraction.
So far as I know, Marx was the first philosopher who criticized the notion of "truth" from this
activist point of view. In him this criticism was not much emphasized, and I shall therefore say
no more about it here, leaving the examination of the theory to a later chapter.
Marx's philosophy of history is a blend of Hegel and British economics. Like Hegel, he thinks
that the world develops according to a dialectical formula, but he totally disagrees with Hegel as
to the motive force of this development. Hegel believed in a mystical entity called "Spirit,"
which causes human history to develop according to the stages of the dialectic as set forth in
Hegel's Logic. Why Spirit has to go through these stages is not clear. One is tempted to suppose
that Spirit is trying to understand Hegel, and at each stage rashly objectifies what it has been
reading. Marx's dialectic has none of this quality except a certain inevitableness. For Marx,
matter, not spirit,
* Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, 1845.