Thinking and Speaking
—the Viewpoints from Marx through Marr and Vygotsky to Stalin
edited and interpreted by Hung Lien-te
1. Marx’s View of Thinking and Speaking
1.1. Marxism = the Critique of Capitalism
Capitalism = A social institution = Society = socio-economic formation. Its origins, development & ending subject to investigation & criticism
Nature
Human Nature investigates MEN’s relationship to Society
History
Himself
constant biological
human nature
variant historical
| | Society |
| Human Nature investigates MEN’s relationship to | History |
| | Himself |
| constant biological | |
| | human nature |
| variant historical | |
modes of production
Human Nature vs. Its Surroundings class & values
theory of alienation & exploitation
| | modes of production |
| Human Nature vs. Its Surroundings | class & values |
| | theory of alienation & exploitation |
Marx has a conception of how men appear, what they feel and think, what motives influence them and how much and what they are capable of both in existing & in new conditions.
Marx: “The ideas which these individuals form are ideas either about their relation to nature or about their mutual relations or about their own nature. It is evident that in all these cases their ideas are the conscious expression –real or illusory—of their real relations and activities, of their production, of their intercourse, of their social and political conduct. The opposite assumption is only possible if in addition to the spirit of the real, materially evolved individuals a separate spirit is presupposed. If the conscious expression of the real relation of these individuals is illusory, if in their imagination they turn reality upside-down, then this in its turn is the result of their limited material mode of activity and their limited social relations arising from it.”
Marx: “Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., and precisely men conditioned by the mode of production of their material life, by their material intercourse and its further development in the social and political structure.” (SW 5: 36 footnotes)
1.2 Marx on Consciousness and Being
According to the Young Hegelians, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are product of their consciousness. Thus demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way.
“We, set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process” (GI, 37).
“Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. On the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as living individuals; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness” (ibid., 38).
Transformation of Hegel’s pure dialectic of consciousness into Marx’s dialectic of society. The development of social consciousness = an analysis of the labor process and all its accompanying conditions as the result of contradictions between the forces and relations of production (Mode of Production).
Revolution→abolition of private property→ elimination of the division of labor→ the realization of communism. Thus the dialectic of social consciousness culminates in the theory of revolution. Consciousness transforms from a theoretical question into a practical one, namely from philosophy to political economy and its critique.
The Preface to the Critique of Political Economy:
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness… Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such of a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must he explained rather from the contradiction of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and relations of production.”
Engels: “Thoughts are nothing but mirror-image of reality.” (Dialectics Nature). “But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man’s ‘knowing’ by his ‘being’, instead of, as heretofore, his ‘being’ by his ‘knowing’ ”(Anti-Dühring).
1.3 Marx & Engels on Thought (Thinking)
Marx: “Since the Young Hegelians consider conception, thought, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (Just as the Old Hegelians declared them the free bonds of human society), it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of the consciousness” (SW 1: 18-19).
Marx: “The production of ideas, of conception, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appears at this stage as the direst efflux of their behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to them, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process.” (ibid., 24-25)
“Since the thought process itself grows out of (life, social-economical) conditions, is itself a natural process, thinking that really comprehends must always be the same, and can vary only gradually, according to maturity of development, including the development of the organ by which the thinking is done. Everything else is drivel. ” (Marx’s Letter to Kugelmann on 11 July 1868, SW 2: 419).
Engels: “In every epoch and therefore also in ours, theoretical thought is a historical product, which at different times assumes very different forms, and therewith, very different contents. The science of thought is therefore, like every other, a historical science, the science of the historical development of human thought. And this of importance also for the practical application of thought in empirical fields. Because in the first place the theory of laws of thought is by no means an ‘eternal truth’ established once and for all.” (Old preface to Anti-Dühring, SW 3: 60).
Engels: “First labor…and then with it, speech these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man, which for all its similarity is far larger and more perfect. Hand in hand with the development of the brain went development of its most immediate instrument—the senses. Just as the gradual development of speech is inevitably accompanied by a corresponding refinement of the organ of hearing, so the development of the brain as a whole is accompanied by a refinement of all senses… And the sense of touch, which the apes hardly possesses in its crudest initial form, has been developed only side by side with the development of the human hand itself, through the medium of labor. The reaction on labor and speech of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of judgment, gave both labor and speech an ever-renewed impulse to further development …This further development has been strong-urged forward, on the one hand, and guided along more definite directions, on the other, by a new element which came into play with the appearance of fully-fledged man, namely, society…And what do we find once more as the characteristic difference between the troupe of monkey and human society? Labour.” (“Part Played by Labour in Transition from Ape to Man…
1.4 Marx and Engels on Language
Marx and Engels:
“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of man at this stage still appears as the direct efflux (emergence) of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness [das Bewusstein] can never be anything else than conscious being [das bewusste Sein], and the being of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life process.”
Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of primary historical relations [1. production of means to satisfy men’s needs; 2. the satisfaction of old needs leads to new needs; 3. the procreation of man and woman, the establishment of family (‘the production of life, both of one’s own in labour and fresh life in procreation, now appears as twofold relations: natural and social relations’); 4. there exists a materialist connection of men with another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production. History of humanity = history of industry and exchange] do we find that man also possesses ‘consciousness’. But even from the outset this is not ‘pure’ consciousness. The mind is from the outset afflict with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arise from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not “relate” itself to anything, it does not ‘relate’ itself at all. For the animal its relations to others does not exist as a relation.” (CW 5:43-44).
“We have seen that the whole problem of the transition from thought to reality, hence from language to life, exists only in philosophical illusion, i.e., it is justified only for philosophical consciousness, which cannot possibly be clear about the nature and origin of its apparent separation from life. This great problem, insofar as it at all entered the minds of our ideologists, was bound, of course, to result finally in one of these knights-errant setting out in search of a word which, as a word, formed the transition in question, which, as a word, cease to be simply a word, and which , as a word, in a mysterious superlinguistic manner, points from within language to the actual object it denotes; which, in short, play among words the same roles as the Redeeming-God Man plays among people in Christian fantasy. The emptiest, shallowest brain among the philosophers had to “end” philosophy by proclaiming his lack of thought to be the end of philosophy and the triumphant entry into ‘corporeal’ life. His philosophizing mental vacuity was already in itself the end of philosophy just as his unspeakable language was the end of all language.”
2. N. Y. Marr’s Theory of Language
Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr (1864-1934). After the revolution he was converted to Marxism and endeavored to establish linguistics on a Marxist basis. In so doing, Marr sets out on the assumption that language must be regarded as a form of “ideology” and therefore belongs to the category of the “superstructure”. He distinguishes, in this connection, between “simple ideologies” (language and thought) and “higher ideologies” (religion, art, ethics, law, politics, science and philosophy). Like all ideologies, language, including grammar, has a class character. Since language, which is intimately bound up with thought, is regarded as an ideology, Marr maintains that its development does not exhibit the characteristics of a gradual evolution, but unfolds by stages (stadidl’noe razvitie) with sharply-separated qualitative distinctions between each successive language-system: a process reflecting the dialectic of social development. In the concrete, these qualitative leaps are realized in the form of “language-crossings”, which follow in the train of transformations in the economic basis of society and do not constitute an anomaly, but rather the normal mode of origin of new types of languages.
Owing to his conception of language as an ideology, Marr attaches particular importance, not only to the form of language, but also to its content, semantics, or the meaning of the words. So far as concerns the inner connection of language and thought, in Marr’s account of the matter, present-day spoken language corresponds to the thinking of formal logic; this is the thought of a society split up into classes. For thousands of years before the rise of articulate speech there prevailed a system of hand-signals or gesture-language. Formal logical thinking, with its articulated language, is due in turn to be superseded by dialectical materialist thinking, the mode of thought of the proletariat, of the classless society. Whereas, under present conditions, articulate language has the upper hand over formal logical thought, in the classless society “thought gains the upper hand over language, and will continue to gain it, until the new classless society not only will the system of spoken language be done away with, but a unitary language will be created, as far, and even farther, removed from articulate language as the latter is from gesture” (N. Y. Marr: Izbrannye raboty [Selected Works], III, p.118).
In this new, unified world-language, “thank to the latest discoveries”,
thought will no longer be in any way dependent on its phonetic expression in language; thought itself will replace language.
“The language of the future is thought, growing out of technique free from the use of natural materials. No language will be able to resist it, certainly not spoken language, forever bound as it to the norms imposed by nature.” (Ibid., p.121. V. V. Vinogradov: O lingvisticheskoy diskussii i rabotakh J. V. Stalina po voprosam yazykoznaniya [On the Linguistic Discussion and the Works of J. V. Stalin on Problems of Linguistics], in Bol’shevik, 1950, 15, pp.7-23; cf. the Collected Works, Voprosy dialekticheskogo i istoricheskogo materializma v trude J. V. Stalina ‘Marxizm i voprosy yazykoznaniya’ [Problems of Dialectical and Historical Materialism in J. V. Stalin’s Marxism and Problems of Linguistics], 2vols., Moscow 1951/52; G. F. Alexandrov: Trudy J. V. Stalina o yazykoznanii i voprosy istoricheskogo materializma (J .V. Stalin’s Writings on Linguistics and the Problems of Historical Materialism), Moscow 1952 ).
Up till quiet recently, Marr’s theory of language still ranked as the Soviet linguistics. Especially after the discussion on biology, when similar “battles” were staged between true “materialist” doctrines and old “reactionary” tendencies in every branch of science, Marr’s linguistics was paraded alongside Michurin’s genetics as a true Soviet science. An Academician by the name of Mashchaninov even had the idea of drawing a parallel between the theory and of the Ursprache, denounced by Marr and his school, and the “mythical unalterable units of inheritance” of Mendel-Morgan-Weismann genetics.
3. L. S. Vygotsky (本節以中文呈現)
韋郭茲基心理學與語言學的創思及其貢獻
4. Stalin’s Idea of Language
All at once, a “free discussion” on linguistic problems as opened in Pravda on 9th May 1950, with an article by professor A. S. Chikobava, On Certain Problems in Soviet Linguistics. On 20th June, Stalin himself intervened in the discussion, contributing a letter Concerning Marxism in Linguistics. This as followed by four further letters, the first dated 29th June, published in Pravda on 4th July, Concerning Certain Problems of Linguistics. Reply to Comrades E. Krasheninnikova, then three letters, headed Reply to Comrades, published in Pravda on 2nd August (To Comrade Sanzheyev, on 11th July, To Comrades D. Belkin and S. Firer of 22nd July, and To Comrade A. Kholopov, of 28th 1950).
Stalin’s first point against Marr is that language is not to be assigned to the superstructure. It is not the product of a basis, a particular social structure, itself temporarily conditioned and relatively short-lived, but the outcome of society as a whole. Nor, again, can it be assigned to the superstructure, if for no other reason than because it stands in direct relation to production, whereas the superstructure is only indirectly dependent on production, i.e., by way of the basis (the economic structure of society). But language cannot, on the other hand, be reckoned part of the basis either. And that means that there are social phenomena belonging neither to the basis nor the superstructure.
It follows further from this, that language is not conditioned by the class-structure, as Marr had mentioned it to be. It is the creation, not of any single class, but of the whole of society; it is created as a whole for society in general, not in the interests of any one class at the expense of others, but in the same fashion for all. One should therefore beware of confusing language with dialect or jargon. Class-conditioned words peculiar to jargon constitute barely one per cent of the total vocabulary.
There is a special interest and significance in what Stalin has to say against Marr on the subject of linguistic development. The latter is governed by the development laws of society as a whole (the people), not those of the superstructure. This means that language develops, not by way of sudden eruptions (vzryvy—‘explosions’), but by way of a gradual accumulation of new elements and an equally gradual dying away of old ones; in general, the law of transition from one equality to another by way of leaps continues to hold in the sphere of social development only for the society divided into mutually hostile classes, not for the socialist classes society; here this law emerges in a new form.
As for Marr’s doctrine of “language-crossing”, Stalin maintains for his part, that when different languages encounter one another they do not mingle to form a new one, but one prevails over the other; this is particularly observable in the history of the Russian language, which has always emerged victorious from encounters of this kind.
Stalin finally goes on to accuse Marr of idealism, on account of his doctrine of the unitary world-language of the future, which will in fact no longer be a ‘language’ at all, but rather a soundless and immediate communication of thoughts. Stalin regards this as implying a separation of language an thought; his view, on the contrary, is that thought is essentially bound up with language; there can be no thought without a material basis in language; the instance of deaf-mutism only appears to constitute an argument against this, for even in their case thoughts are associated with sense-impressions (visual sensations and impressions of touch, taste and smell).
To these factual objections Stalin adds a last accusation, that Marr and his ‘disciples’ have set up an ‘Arakcheyev régime’ within the field of linguistics, [1] which has hitherto blocked all free expression of scientific opinion and which now, thanks to the discussion opened in Pravda, has at last been exposed and demolished. For no science can prosper without conflict of opinion and freedom to criticize.
These articles of Stalin again produced a shattering effect, not only in the sphere of linguistics, where Marr, hitherto a star of the first magnitude, is now described as the “Don Quixote of linguistics” and his “new theory” of language, like his “school” and his “disciples”, referred to only in quotation marks, but also in every department of theoretical enquiry. The articles have been discussed in innumerable sessions of learned bodies, and the new doctrines have been disseminated in books and articles by the score.[2] The editor of Voprosy filosofii expressed their regret at having published in recent numbers of the paper (Nos. 1 and 3, 1949), fallacious articles propagating the ‘anti-Marxist’ doctrines of Marr and endorsing the Arakcheyev régime of his supporters; at the same time they announced publication of further articles promulgating the ‘Marxist’ theory of language and illuminating the problems raised by Stalin in his articles within the fields of dialectical and historical materialism. [3]
Even before all five of Stalin’s articles had yet appeared, the Philosophical Institute of the
All speakers were in agreement that these articles of Stalin’s represented a “new, world-historical contribution to the treasury of Marxism”[5]. And this time they were not mistaken. Stalin’s last personal intervention in the realm of Marxist theory far outweighs in importance the incursions of the Party Central Committee in previous years and may yet perhaps establish itself in fact as of “world-historical significance”. For whereas the previous attacks were chiefly directed against the formal aspects of bolshevik doctrine (“partisanship”, “pseudo-objectivism”, “cosmopolitanism”, etc), Stalin has on this occasion shaken the pillars of Marxist theory itself (in his applications of historical materialism) and the main positions of dialectical materialism as such, as understood in the Soviet Union (the basic laws of the materialist dialectic concerning the transition from quantity into quality and the unity of opposites). Indeed one almost has the impression that Stalin deliberated chose so harmless a field as that of linguistics for purposes of his attack, in order to correct certain fundamental points in bolshevic doctrine. The seeming concern with linguistics in this connection was intended to lessen the impact which would otherwise have been produced by an open realignment of the basic tenets of Marxist-Leninist doctrine as hitherto understood. The real meaning of this demarche of Stalin’s seems to us to lie in the fact that the new course, which Stalin had been pursuing for at least sixteen years in the field of bolshevic politics, was now at last to find a theoretical anchorage also in “Marxist-Leninist theory”, we shall return to this subject again in the course of the following chapter.
From this time on, Stalin’s booklet on linguistics was to occupy a central position in all the subsequent activities of the Soviet philosophers.
[1] Count Alexey Andreyevich Arakcheyev (1769-1834), the favorite of Alexander I; as Minister of War he showed reckless brutality in implementing Alexander’s universally unpopular scheme of ‘military colonies’, which enforced life-long military service upon some 750,000 members of the population in the frontier provinces of Russia and subjected their entire economic life, and to a large extent their private life as well, to a rigid system of discipline. In the last decade of Alexander’s reign especially (d. 1825), Arakcheyev enjoyed the unlimited confidence of the monarchy, so that in practice the whole conduct of the régime was in his hands (Cf. K. Stählin: Geschichte Russlands, III, pp. 258ff)
[2] We may cite as an instance a leading article in Izvestiya Akademii Nauk, Otdelenie ekonomii i prava (Bulletin of the Academy of Science, Economic and Law Section), under the title: ‘The Works of Comrade Stalin on Problems of Linguistics and their Significance for the development of Economic and Legal Science’ (Truty tovarishcha Stalina po voprosam yazykoznaniya i ikh znachenie dlya razvitiya ekonomicheskikh i pravovykh nauk), 1950, pp. 331-339.
[3] VF, 1950, 2, p.350.
[4] Stat’i tovarishcha Stalina po voprosam yazykoznamiya i obrasti istoricheskikh i filosofskikh nauk (Comrade Stalin’s Article on Problems of Lingustics and the Tasks in the Field of Historical and Philosophical Science), in IAN, VII (1950), pp.322-359, q. v. p.349.
[5] Ibid, p.345.
