Soviet Philosophical Anthropology and the Foundations of the Human Sciences

Abstract

In Soviet Marxism, the methodological structure of the relationships among the various sciences has traditionally been conceived as hierarchically ordered, at the top of which stands dialectics, taken in the broad sense as including both dialectical and historical materialism. In fact, the claim is still being made that the fundamental methodological principles of all the sciences are provided by dialectical materialism. B. S. Ukraincev recently wrote that “dialectical materialism as a world view has universal methodological significance for science”, insofar as it “orients scientists in their choice of the theoretical and methodological assumptions of their research”.1 Historical materialism performs an analogous function, in a more specified sense, for the social sciences. B. M. Kedrov designates historical materialism as the “general method of the Marxist social sciences”,2 in which class he includes most of the sciences dealing with man or the products of human culture — history, economics, law, the history of literature and art, and others. However, he cannot claim that the social sciences are the only ones that deal with man, or that historical materialism provides the methodology for every science of man. Psychology, which in one of Kedrov’s classifications is listed as a social science, in another scheme is located at an intermediate point between the natural and the social sciences. And though human physiology and anthropology both deal directly with man, they are grouped by Kedrov with the natural sciences. If one turns to Marxist-Leninist philosophy, which is alleged to provide the basic principles and methods for the special sciences, a similar lack of clear-cut boundaries is found. One cannot say that dialectical materialism provides, in addition to certain principles relevant to all sciences, the philosophical orientation for the sciences of nature, while historical materialism does the same for the sciences of man. The difficulty is that fundamental theses relating to the nature of man and the mode of study of human phenomena are found in both dialectical and historical materialism. Human consciousness and knowledge are topics treated in dialectical materialism, while freedom, the person, the nature of man, practice, and others have usually been addressed in the context of historical materialism.