 Well, I note that the comrades who grew up the agenda of this important school on philosophy began with epistemology. Now then, if you weren't already terrified before the start of this session, you'd be completely terrified by this word. Epistemology, what on earth does it mean? Well, it is apparently a difficult word. It's taken from the Greek, ancient Greek, like many other words in philosophy. But you know, the essential meaning of the word is quite simple. Epistemology in philosophical sense means the theory of knowledge, something that students are well aware of, I don't know, I assume some students have some knowledge of some things anyway, but then I've always been an optimist. Well then, this actually is one of the most fundamental questions in history of philosophy. It is, now the more or less, it's the relationship of thinking to being, and this is important. Actually, it's the beginning of all philosophy, think about it, because we have to ask ourselves the question, what do I know and how do I know it? Well, the Socrates, when he went to the Delphic Oracle, I like this story, and the Delphic Oracle asked him, what do you know? He answered it quite sensibly, I know that I know nothing, how much most people was intelligent, as wise as Socrates, and I know after all the years I spent studying philosophy in Marxism, I'll tell you frankly, I know that I know nothing. And that means Socrates, the wisest man in all of Athens, but we'll come back to that perhaps another time. Now, this of course occupies a central place in philosophy, and the so-called, it's known in philosophy as the subject-object problem, and it's occupied the central attention of philosophers for centuries. It's basically concerned with an analysis of human experience, and what within experience is known as objective, and what is objective, and what is subjective. In other words, how do we know the world outside us? And this question is posed traditionally in philosophy in terms of a dichotomy. Now, that's the first mistake. That's the first great error of philosophy. There's a dichotomy between the thinking subjects, I, me, myself, and the object of thought, the external world. OK? Well, now that you've had a basic lesson in ancient Greek, let's pass, let's proceed to Latin. How is your Latin these days? Not very good for my dying, but I know. What do they teach you? What do they teach you guys these days, for goodness sake? They don't even teach Latin anymore. In my day, it was compulsory, you know. We used to have a saying whenever in school, what was it that you remember? Oh, yes, Latin is an ancient language as old as old could be. It killed the ancient Britons, and now it's killing me. But that's another matter. Now then, how is your Latin? Since it's probably a bit rusty, so we'd be generous and say it's rusty. Let's try with a little bit of revision. Cogito ergo sum, have you ever heard that? Cogito ergo sum, or as the English murderers of Latin would put it, cogito ergo sum. Cogito gives you a clue to the meaning of the sentence. Cogito, to cogitate is to think, isn't it, to meditate. And this was perhaps the most famous phrase, or one of the most famous figures in the history of philosophy, the French philosopher René Descartes. I think, he said, therefore I am. Now Descartes was undoubtedly a great philosopher. No question about that, but a huge contribution to it. At a time when philosophy and science, which by the way were the same thing, you don't know if you know that, the centuries, philosophy and science were the same thing. Isaac Newton regarded himself as a philosopher. He was a bad philosopher, not a bad scientist I suppose. But anyway, this was at a time when human thought was struggling to free itself from the shackles of religion, from that terrible dictatorship of the church which held up human progress for centuries. For a thousand years it was paralyzed by this dead hand of religion. Religion's always been an enemy of progress in general, and an enemy of science and knowledge in particular. So Descartes was part of this attempt to establish a rational review of things. And he was a great philosopher, no doubt about it, who made many advances in philosophy, and indeed in science also. But he did make a serious blunder by introducing the notion of dualism into this question of thinking. Descartes depicts mind and body as two entirely separate substances. Now here's the mistake, you see. You consider thought and matter as being something fundamentally dual, hence the dual element, the duality. And the celebrated phrase which he's so famous for, I think therefore I am, which is apparently very logical and apparently self-explanatory is an explanation which explains precisely nothing. Think about it. He might just as well have said, I am therefore I think, since it is self-evident that being presupposes everything else, including thought, it becomes to that. But he said what he said and thereby caused a lot of confusion for future generations. And the mistake is, let's underline this point, there's a starting point. The mistake is to treat consciousness as a thing, as something separate and apart from matter, from being, as an independent entity, separate from human sensuous activity. And now there is just to start with, there's immediately an insurmountable difficulty in dualism, which is this. If it is true that mind, thought, ideas and so on are really entirely different to the physical body, the brain and the nervous system and the external world, how can they interact? They can't if you think it's entirely different. It's not clear at all how they could ever interact. They can't. Of course nowadays, and this is the point of view, I don't want to be unfair and take it, he was a brilliant thinker, not to waste a bullet. But the science of his time did not admit the state of human knowledge at that time, which is what the early, late to 70th century, really. Descartes didn't know what we know today about the workings of nature. He didn't know anything about the world of molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, or indeed the electrical impulses that govern the workings of the brain. By the way, the human brain, I don't even know this. The human brain is the most complex organism in the entire universe that's known to us in the dressing thought. And we're still in the process of penetrating the secrets of how our brain actually works, but we know a great deal about it. Don't worry about that. And in place of a mysterious soul, which Descartes had a very graphic phrase, I think he referred to it as the ghost in the machine. The ghost, as if there's a kind of ghost inside us, as the soul. And then this comes from, this concept when it comes and it's at the base, not just of idealism, but of religion, of course, because we're very primitive to this idea that there's some kind of mysterious spirit inside of us. And the reason, this comes from primitive times, from the earliest times, from dreams, for example, when you're asleep, your body is inert, and yet you get up and you perform all kinds of mysterious miraculous tasks and so on. So the soul appears to escape from the body. And from this conception, there's only a short step to the idea of, but when you die, this soul, this spirit, this ghost in the machine continues somehow to exist. Life after death, you know, which is the basis particularly of Christianity, also of other religions. Now the discoveries of modern science actually, let's be clear about this, the discoveries of modern science, although incomplete, have forever banished the notion of consciousness as being an independent thing. It is not, consciousness is a natural result, if you like, of a feature of electronic impulses in the brain, which is part of the nervous, central nervous system, the brain and the body and so on. And yet, despite all the advances of, so this is an interesting point here, this is a dialectical contradiction. Despite all the advances of human thought and science for the last 2000 years, strange as it may seem, this mystical nonsense about the soul and life after death and all this, it's got plenty of advocates, even in the 21st century, even among scientists. I'll never forget when the Americans put the first man on the moon and he was in his spaceships circulating the earth, it was Christmas day, I believe, I remember it. Just imagine this, this guy fitted out with all his most modern apparatus of space travel and his space suit and his helmet and all the rest of it. And he was asked to give a message to humanity on this humanly, on Christmas day and out of the whole of human literature, which is considerable, as you know, he chose what? The first sentence of the book of Genesis from the Bible, which you all know, of course, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth is this guy with his modern trappings of all the humans of technology and he's repeating the primitive ideas which have come from the caves, from the most primitive fears and superstitions of man in a state of sabbazery, if you like. I mean, this is just, that itself is, in any case, a dialect of good contradiction. Now, the chair at the beginning of the meeting mentioned the question of idealism and materialism. And it's true that the two main schools of thought overwhelmingly the main currency in philosophical thought for the last 2,000 years or more have been idealism and materialism. Now, I won't go into detail, because it's not really the subject of this talk, it's considered a separate subject. But the idealist, it's a trend in philosophy at least as old as Plato and Pythagoras, a very, very old idea, who saw the physical world, the material world as a poor imitation of a perfect idea, hence idealism, whether with the Greek word ide, it doesn't actually mean ideal, it means form actually. The perfect form that existed somewhere we don't know where before the world ever came into existence. Now, everything that we have and everything we have is merely a crude imitation of this pure ideal in this pure form. If this idea sounds a bit strange, I'm very sorry, I apologize. It is because it is very strange, very strange indeed. And it flies in the face of all the discoveries of science for the last 2,500 years. Yes, it is, but it's very persistent, very persistent. In the form of religion, it's particularly persistent. And religion and idealism are very closely linked. I won't say they're not exactly the same, but if you scratch an idealist enough, you can come across religion basically at the roots of it. It is at the roots of it. And it's very persistent. It's very persistent. And it's persistent, it emerges under different guises. You see this in the history philosophy, it emerges in different guises. How do we explain this strange phenomenon and the persistence of this irrational, it is completely irrational, for God's sake. God's sake, not quite, for Marx's sake then. It's completely irrational. Why is it so persistent? You've got scientists who believe in this guff. An intelligent, supposedly intelligent men and women, especially in academia, but not only in academia, they believe in God and go to church and say the prayers and believe in the life after death for goodness sake. For goodness sake, it's irrational. The problem is, of course, that men and women are not necessarily rational beings and very frequently are drawn to irrational views and feelings and sentiments as a moth is drawn to a lighted candle. It's a regrettable fact, but it's a fact. And this fact, of course, fits in very nicely with the religious lobby. That's why it's so powerful. But in the case we had divided, diverting. They just to say this, I'll just repeat the point, that all forms of idealism, without exception, ultimately lead back to and must lead back in very bitter religion, you better believe it. Hiding behind the respectable intellectual facade, these constructs so carefully put together by the smart Alex in the university philosophy departments is lurking, is lurking religion and superstition, neither more nor less. Now in Ludwig Feuerbach, a remarkable book by Friedrich Engels, which you must all read and study, he deals with this question. He deals with the problem of knowledge, the relation of thinking to being. And he asks, he says the following, in what, I quote with your permission from Ludwig Feuerbach, in what relation do our thoughts about the world, the world surrounding us stand to this real, to this world itself? Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real world that comes to the heart of the matter? Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correct reflection of reality? And he goes on, this is interesting. He goes on, he says, the overwhelming majority of philosophers give an affirmative answer to this question. That's what he says. By the way, the chair was a little bit unkind on the idealists. Idealism, idealism, all idealism is not necessarily a jumble of confused ideas. It can be remarkably consistent and rational, particularly objective ideas from such as Plato and particularly Hegel. And we are a lot, we are a lot to Hegel by the way. But then he adds, in addition to this, there is a set of different philosophers. Now this comes close to what we're gonna consider today. There is a set of different philosophers, those who question the possibility of any cognition or at least an exhaustive cognition of the world. To them, among the more modern ones, belong Hume and Kant. And they have played a very important role in philosophical development. This is Engels. So therefore, you see, really speaking, there are three main currents in philosophy, not two. There is consistent materialism, there's consistent idealism, but there's also subjective idealism. Now that's an interesting, which we'll deal with. The latter school, of course, was given its highest, the first expression in the philosophy of the great German philosopher, 18th century philosopher, Emmanuel Kant. Hume and Kant, by the way, the two philosophers that Engels mentions here, are the true ancestors of logical positivism. And if it comes to that, we're being a bit unkind of them because that is gobbledygook. Post-modernism, that certainly merits the expression which I'll share with you, but it's just a mass of confusion and stupidities from start to finish. But their idea, the idea of Hume and Kant was to fence off the appearance of things from the thing in itself, they said. They said, all right, you can appreciate the outer appearance of things, but you can never know the world in itself. That's quite a sophisticated argument, but we'll come to that. Now, side by side with idealism, of course, there's the opposite philosophical tendency, materialism, we are materialists. Marxism is materialism, dialectical materialism. This appears, it existed with the ancient reason, marvellous material, but it's pretty early pre-socratic philosophers at that particular reform. We're all materialists. Who else? This is remarkable stuff, but it was drowned out then by idealism, by Christianity in particular. It was crushed in the Middle Ages, of course. But it reemerges with the renewed standard about the time of the Renaissance. And when philosophy and science, we're trying to reassert themselves after the dead end, the barren desert of obscurantism under the Christian Church in the Middle Ages. And emerging from this dark night of the Middle Ages, this initially took the form, this reaction, this healthy reaction, took the form initially of empiricism, something we've been discussing with someone else today, which insisted on the superiority of the necessity of a scrupulous examination of the facts and experiment over an observation over religious dogma. You know, this is a gigantic leap forward. It's the birth of real science, where science begins to separate itself from philosophy, as a matter of fact. It triumphs in particular in Protestant England, where the Jews here overthrown the absolute disfeudal order and the rule of the Catholic Church. It was pioneered in this country by men, like great thinkers like Francis Bacon, Locke and Hobbes in particular. And these people, by the way, were materialists. These men were materialists. And they were also empiricists, that's the point. They were a particular kind of materialism, which is known as empiricism, which has been the dominant mode of thought in all Anglo-Saxon countries, including the United States, ever since then. It exerts a powerful influence. Now, what is this empiricism? Well, empiricism essentially argues that immediate experience, the experience of our senses, you know, I see, I hear, I touch and so on. Is all that is required, all that is needed to understand the world. No, no, no theoretical abstractions in general, this is unnecessary, all the empiricism states, and by the way, they start with the very important expression. Make note of this, this is where it all starts. I interpret the world through my senses. Of course, of course, you can't interpret it in any other way, you know? This was clearly stated by John Rock, a great English materialist in the 17th century when he said, there is nothing in our mind, this is an important statement of a materialist. There is nothing in the mind that was not previously in our senses. That's what he said. Now, we feel very much at home with this essentially materialist proposition. It appears to say all that is necessary to be said concerning human understanding. That was the name of Locke's book, I think Hesse's Concerning and Hesse Concerning Human Understanding. Yes, but this empiricism, rather, played a colossally progressive revolution, you told me, revolutionized human thought and science. All of our science comes from this. It firmly established observation and experiment as the basis, as opposed to religious dogma, which had been the case before. It played a revolutionary role, but there was a problem. Empiricism in the narrow sense has limitations, important limitations, which was subsequently became exposed when it was vulgarized and distorted by whom the Scottish philosopher and Barclay, George Barclay, Bishop Barclay, the Bishop of Croyne in Ireland, although he's an Englishman. Okay. Now, what is the reason? I'm particularly going to concentrate here on Bishop Barclay, which Lenin deals with extensively in a book which we just read public. Well read his published, I hope you've read it. I wrote an introduction to it. Materialism in the empirocrities. And it's not an action that Lenin deals at length with this, perhaps somewhat obscure, not that obscure, he's well-known to Philon, or to be well-known to philosophy students, any of you, George Bishop Barclay. It's not an action because subjective idealism comes from him, comes from this idea which he put forward. By the way, he put it forward much more coherently than the postmodernist garbage of the today. He was a fine writer at Bishop Barclay. A very clever, very intelligent man, completely actionary, of course. And he was a dedicated enemy of science and a defender of religion. Of course, that was his starting point. Be sure of it, that was the starting point of this stuff. And George Bishop Barclay realized there was a tremendous threat to the church from the rise of science, particularly the rise of people like Isaac Newton. And that this new science was dangerous because it had materialist implications. Atheist implications. I won't go into that, but he was right, he wasn't wrong. Isaac Newton developed the idea of a clockwork universe. It's true that because of the limitations of Isaac Newton's mechanism, mechanical approach, that was regarded as something inert. You see, that was the limitation of this symbolism. Matter seemed to be something that was inert, had no life in it, okay? And therefore, it required always external impulse. You get that in mechanics. Mechanics is all about pushing, pulling, lifting, inertia, and so on, as you know. Okay, so this whole universe required an initial impulse from without. This was the Almighty, this was God. But all that God had to do was to make a little push like this, sting with his finger. And the whole clockwork universe started operating according to his laws. And God really speaking had nothing to do after that. Nothing whatsoever to do with it. The clockwork universe functioned quite adequately without any divine intervention at all. It's rather a restricted role for God. Yes, this was definitely dangerous stuff from the standpoint of Bishop Barclay, who set out deliberately to work on the philosophical answer to this. And how did he answer materialism and science? He was very cleverly, very cleverly used the arguments of empiricism in the narrow sense to refute materialism and defend religion of how to do the accompaniment quite easily. Quite easily. Let me see. He asserted that matter, the material world, well, didn't exist. Now, how do you get to that? How do you get to that? Well, obviously, let's go back to this assertion made by Locke, you know, what I've said earlier. I interpret the world through my senses. That's absolutely correct. Now, let's give me an example. Look, take this. You know what that is? Let's see if I can get it on the screen. No, can I, can I? Yes, there we are. You know what that is? I think you do. It's called an orange. Yeah, okay. Now, ladies and gentlemen, can I get it on the screen again? Here, there we are. Can I assert that this orange exists? No, I can't. All I can assert is that I see it. I touch it. I smell it. I eat it. I taste it. In other words, all I can really know that exists is my senses. That's all. Yeah, and without my senses, now you see the orange has disappeared. The orange, really speaking, has no existence. This is the existence of the objective world, you know, this entirely dependent on the observer. Yeah? Okay. Locke said, there's nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. Berkeley asserted something different. To be is to be observed, he said. Now that's a statement. Which it seems incredible, by the way, and it is incredible, but it's persisted and by God it's had an influence even on science. Yeah, through logical positivism, as I'll deal with later on, his nonsense has been smuggled into modern science. For example, in quantum mechanics, through Heisenberg, who by the way, was a philosophical, a terrible reactionary, a Nazi, who when he was a younger man, participated 1990 in the massacring of the German workers in the Freikorps, of which he was an active member. And philosophically, he was interested in philosophy. He was a complete idealist, determined to introduce idealist nonsense into science. And he succeeded, by God he succeeded. The idea persists with subatomic particles or so, but they only exist when they're observed, you see. This is actually stated, the uncertainty principle, so-called, of Werner Heisenberg, you'll see it. There's nothing scientific about it, not to do with science. This is smuggling philosophical idealist contraband into science, and a lot of that goes on, by the way, you better believe it. Now, by the way, there's a slight problem for Bishop Barkley, which you might be able to detect. Ultimately, where does this lead? Think about it. If all I can know is my sense of my sense of my sense is not yours, because you don't exist. Ladies and gentlemen, friends and comrades, you don't exist, there's nothing out there. I'm looking at the screen and I'm looking at, well, the screen doesn't exist for the start, I close my eyes, it doesn't exist, of course. If I can only know my senses, that inevitably leads us, let's go back to Latin again, your Latin needs attention. It leads to solipsism, that's where it leads. It can't lead anywhere else, that only I exist. The rest is a figment of my imagination. You're all a figment, I don't know why the hell I'm talking to you, because you're a figment of my imagination, I'm talking to myself. I should be taking to the nearest mental hospital for examination, spending an hour talking to myself. But there you are. Yeah, solipsism, it comes from the Latin solo ipsus, only I myself, only I must exist. Bertrand Russell, actually, he made a very entertaining anecdote. He said, I once met a lady at a party who assured me that she was a solipsist and she wondered why they weren't more of them. That's quite amusing. Yeah, it's an amusing and a joke, but Bertrand Russell wasn't capable of answering the case of subjective idealism, which lies at the basis of this, and which influence him as much as anybody else. The problem is, of course, for the Barclay, if that's the case, then it applies to God as well, doesn't it? God is also a figment of my imagination. Mr. Barclay, there's a figment of my imagination. You know, this really is crazy stuff. It's crazy, yeah, but it's hard, and in fact, for goodness sake, why God has had an effect on Western philosophy ever since. Now, of course, these ideas were subsequent, he had an influence on Emmanuel Kant, who again was a great philosopher, Kant, there's no question he affected a philosophical revolution. He was an idealist, but he was a brilliant thinker. He made remarkable and brilliant discoveries, not just in philosophy, but in science, notably in cosmology, but I won't go, that falls outside this discussion. But in the field of philosophy, he failed to overcome the problem of which we discussed earlier, of dualism. That is to say, he conceived of perception of consciousness as a barrier, not as something that connects us with the external world, but as a kind of barrier. By the way, Kant was not the same as Mr. Barclay, he did accept the existence of the objective world, you say that about him, he even recognized that. Yeah, but he tried to impose a limit on what could be understood. He said, basically, his argument was, you can know what your sense is telling, you can know appearances, but you can't know the essence of something which lies outside of human experience, and could not be known. He tried to accept an absolute barrier to cognition. There's the thing, the thing that we're looking at, but there's also what he called the thing in itself, Ding and Zech in German, in Jeansites, on the other side, he said, on the other side. We'll come back to that in a moment. But he was answered, by the way, comprehensively by Hegel, another idealist, but whereas Kant tended towards subjective idealism, Hegel was an objective idealist, and Hegel didn't deny the existence of the world and his loss, not at all, no, no, no, no. The only thing is that he maintained stubbornly because he was an idealist, that the whole of the material world is just a reflection of the absolute idea. I won't go into that, that's another matter. But he did make an enormous progress in science. He answered this. Now, let's go back to this argument about sense perception. Sense perception is Locke correctly pointed out, is indeed the basis of all our knowledge. We're not arguing with that, that's correct. When you see the, when we say that all knowledge is derived from self perception, this seems to be a very complete statement, but it's not true, it's not true actually. And when I say that the whole of our mind knowledge is based on experience, that is true, yes, if you add something to that experience, but it's based on experience, but not just my experience, it isn't true, think about it. We don't approach the world, Locke said, there was a tabula rasa, a clean blackboard, a clean slate, and our empirical experience just imprinted itself on this clean slate. Not so, no, no, no, no. We do not approach the world on anything with a clean slate, with a completely empty brain. We have concepts which can't thought they might be imborn, I don't think they're imborn. We're talking here about the collective experience of the whole human race. We're talking here about the experience of 2000 years of scientific investigation and discovery. And armed and equipped with this knowledge, we approach and interpret the world, you see? And therefore, the idea that the mistake of dualism, the mistake of can't, which you conceive of, first of all, conceive of concepts as something separate from the material world, which it is not, which it is not, and to conceive of it as a barrier. It's not a barrier, it's a bridge, actually. It connects us to the external world. And we interpret this way, you don't, a scientist, when he carries out the experience, of course he bases himself on observation, what he can see, and an experiment, which he compares his hypotheses to certain experimental results, that's true. Yes, but he doesn't approach these with an empty brain. That's a piece of aren't nonsense, you know? Here we come back to the limitations of empiricism. We come up against this constantly as Marxist, you know? He told, we must have the facts, let's have the facts. Yes, of course you must have the facts. We should have a very exhaustive study of the facts. By God, you read the first volume of Marxist capital, it's replete with facts, statistics of all sorts. The more facts, the better. Yes, but it isn't just facts. It isn't just a mere accumulation of facts. Hegel said, I think it's in the philosophy of history. He says, it is the wish. This is the important statement. It is the wish for a rational insight and not the mere accumulation of a heap of acquirements of facts that ought to possess the mind of anyone that claims to be a scientist, that claims to be involved in science. Hegel also says somewhere else, when we say all animals, that's not yet zoology, is it? All animals is not zoology. You need to work out the laws, the underlying processes and so on. And by the way, the reality which we see is constantly changing. That's another thing. It's constantly changing. So the facts, the facts don't stand still. First of all, first of all, these are the facts, the facts, the facts, yeah. First of all, the facts don't select themselves. I once had a debate with a man called Orlando Figgs who had a pronunciation in one of these university academic clowns. He produced a big thick book on Russia, it says up on the shelf, it's about, I don't know how many thousands of pages, full of facts, carefully selected facts. All this mountain of quotes and facts and the rest of it is meant to show a thorough knowledge, a sign of it, it doesn't show any such thing. The facts do not select themselves. They are selected and they're not selected accidentally either. And before a scientist approached the facts, he must first of all work out a scientific hypothesis. Where does the hypothesis come from? It doesn't drop from the clouds. It doesn't suck it out of his thumb. No, it's based precisely on the accumulated wealth of knowledge of 2,000 years of science. That's the point. Therefore, cognition is not merely a static thing. That we sit there passively absorbing a bunch of facts. You probably do that on the even exam, don't you? Cramming, I think it's called. Swatting, I remember we used to go into an exam and my Latin teacher came up and said, we were all trying to learn everything we failed and learned for the past two years or whatever it was. And he said, in an ironic voice, if you don't know it now, you'll never know it. This is a way of encouraging somebody just going into an example. You can clam your mind with as much facts as you like. It doesn't make you a scientific historian or anything else. You have to get a knowledge, as Hegel said, a rational insight, that is what's required. And by the way, these facts change. That's the point also. You look at the present world situation, you might draw the most pessimistic conclusions. Yeah, that's a fair observation. The world is in a calamitous disaster state. But if you just confine yourself to that and you're making a big mistake, we must look beyond appearances. Hegel and his great work, The Logic, he develops a theory of perception of cognition. It starts with sense perception. Yes, you start with the facts. But if you stop at that level, then you make a big mistake. Then you will never penetrate any further than that. You have to go further beyond appearance. He said, you have to go to look for essence, the doctrine of essence, and finally the doctrine of the notion, which is a dialectical idea that everything is constantly changing. And therefore, what may be a fact, a correct fact now, it'll change into its opposite. You know, he said, well, you know, the facts, well, for example, let's just put a fact down. For example, it is now mid-days, sunny shining and so on. All right, write this fact on a bit of paper and put it in the drawer. A fact, a truth will not change because it's put aside in the drawer and left. But within a few months, within a few hours, you'll find that it's changed into, it's now night. This fact is stale, it's finished, it's gone. It's changed into its opposite. And therefore, that is the limitations of imperistence. The limitations of sense perception, which is really a low form of knowledge. All this was dealt with thoroughly and very well by Hegel. And therefore, I won't leave that any further. But despite, and of course, Marx then approached Hegel's great work and pointed out that that was limited by his idealist approach. And what Marx did was, as he said, he extracted the logical, the rational kernel of Hegel's thought and placed it on a sound basis, on a scientific basis, on a materialist basis. That's where we stand, okay? That's how it's done. And that's the only possible way of acquiring a scientific knowledge of anything, of nature, of human society, or of human thought, if it comes to that. Now, you see, I've got a supreme contempt, I have to tell you, I must admit that. I'm gonna claim supreme disdain towards academia in general, academics in particular, and philosophy departments above all. I mean, poor young people, probably some of you are among the ranks, I feel sorry for you, you know. You go to university, and you go to the sign on the philosophy, thinking that you learn all great thoughts about philosophy, you learn nothing whatsoever. You learn nothing whatsoever in the philosophy department, except the barrenness, the sterility, the uselessness of modern bourgeois philosophy. The latest craze of post-modernism, they said, there's no such thing as progress. Well, yes, of course. If what they mean by that is that the capitalist system is now in such a dead end, that it's incapable of any progress, that'd be correct. What is not correct, what is aren't nonsense, is to claim that progress doesn't, there's no such thing as progress. I beg your pardon. There is such a thing as progress in history. You can't understand human history, you know. It has a logic, it has a rationale, which dialectical and historical materialism serves to explain. It really is a bit of a cheek, isn't it? It really is, it is an insult to the intelligence, you know. But here we are in the 21st century. We can apparently understand and explore and lay bare the workings of the most distant galaxies. Okay. And of the tiniest subatonic particles. But when it comes to the study of human society, no, no, no, no, no, no, can't understand that. Can't understand that. Somebody once said, it's just one damn thing after another, and so on. Well, this is aren't nonsense of the worst sort. No, no, no, you can understand history. What they don't want to, is to draw the conclusion that distinct historical, socio-economic formations, such as capitalism, are born, developed, reached a point of immaturity, and then into irreversible decline. Oh yes. That decline is shown in many ways, not just economics, economic collapse and so on. It's also a broader question of intellectual decline, moral decline. Yes, oh yes, all this is clear if you look at it. In fact, the symptoms of today are strikingly similar to the symptoms of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. They strikingly be interesting to write on this subject, perhaps we'll do that sometime or other. But it's reflected in philosophy. And what we have now is the re-emergence of long dead ideas that ought to be dead, ought to have been dead and buried a long time ago, in different disguises. Presenting, parading themselves as new ideas, this is really something. When you know perfectly well, there's nothing new about them for goodness sake. These guys, they've got a shred of origin, none of them have got a shred of originality. None of them. Let me give you an example. When I went to university, for my sins I spent seven or eight years in what at that time was an elite university, by the way. I did some philosophy. I soon realized it was a load of crap. Even in my first year, I understood that. The dominant school at that time was a bit less so today, it doesn't matter. Because they have the same roots. They have the same answers to it precisely. But at that time, it was called logical positivism. Now these ideas really were answered comprehensively by Lenin in 1909 in a marvelous book, which I mentioned earlier, materialism and empiricism. You must read this, please. But subjective idealism, which he demolished in this book, there's no coming back to do these arguments, and kicked out of the front door, the same ideas sneaked back around the side and crept in through a window and re-emerged in different forms. For example, logical positivism. In Britain, by the way, it was very popular. When I was a student, this is the 1960s I've talked about, it persisted for quite a long time, actually. The leading advocate in Britain was a man called Professor A.J. Eyre, who wrote a famous book called Language, Truth, and Logic. Eyre's basic thesis is the same as what Lenin answered in empiricism, the same thing. Same thing that Bishop Barkley argued, much better than Eyre, much more entertainingly and wittily in the 17th century. What was the central assertion? The central assertion is, what can I know? I can only know sense contents. Same argument as Bishop Barkley, but there's no different language, it doesn't make any difference. Okay, sense contents. And I must go, in the first, I came home after my first term in Sussex University, 1963. I went to Swansea, which is my home. I went to Swansea University Library. I took down a copy of Language, Truth, and Logic. I sat in the library and I started to read this book carefully. And the people must have thought I was quite mad because I had a certain body, I just burst out laughing. I literally burst out laughing. I'd already read the materialism and had been pretty well prepared for this. But if you read Eyre's book, it's very logical, you know? It follows with impeccable iron logic from one chapter to the other, expanding on why we can only know our sense, sense contents, this sense contents, that and so. Okay, let us see. I'm just waiting. I'm waiting now for the moment, the decisive moment. Chapter 12, was it? I can't remember. It's a certain chapter. Ah, here we are. The chapter was entitled, What Are Sense Contents? Now then, I said, no, you bastard, no, I've got you. And I did. You know, because he wriggled like an eel, this, that, and the other, and he, finally that was a jumble of senseless nonsense. And he ends up saying, now that we've proven this, let's go on to the next part. I said, you've proven nothing, you bastard. Nothing at all. Look, let's call a spade a separate, please. Let's, I tell you what, let's put the question in simple language, such could be understood even by university philosophy professor. And if there's any of them listening into this, well, I wish you luck. But I want an answer to this, okay? Very simple question. Can there be sense contents without a central nervous system? Can there be a central nervous system without a brain? Can there be a brain and a nervous system without a material body? And can there be a material body without a physical environment? Yes or no? If the answer is yes, well, we agree. In that case, what's all the fuss about, please? Explain to me. What's all this convoluted nonsense about sense contents, please? Which is a loaded gibberish. By the way, question, second question. What uses this, even if one were to accept it which we do not, even if we were, what uses it? Just imagine a chemist which is involved in examining all kinds of molecules and so on and so forth. What does it matter to this chemist if you call these molecules, not molecules, not molecules at all, my friend, but sense contents. Good heavens above. What is this gibberish? What is this senseless garbage that passes through philosophy? What uses it? That's the question I answer. No use whatsoever other than to garble the brain, to garble the brains of unfortunate students of philosophy. And in some cases, I regret to say, scientists who've paid attention to this nonsense. I think we can safely lead this to one side. And certainly these clever arguments, oh, they seem to be so clever, so sophisticated and so on. Oh yes, it's not, we can't say that such, I can't say these books exist, they're just sense contents. I can't say that this roast beef and yorks are putting on my plate. It's not yorks at all, it's the sense contents and so on. You know, like I can imagine the professor A.J. Ebony sits down in his pouch for restaurants, eating his roast beef and yorks are pudding. He still eats it by the way. He doesn't, he's not bothered by the fact that he's only eating sense contents. Not bothered, doesn't trouble him in the slightest. Same as he doesn't trouble 99.999% of the human population. This nonsense, which is with this drivel which comes from the universe, it really makes me annoyed. You know, and I'll tell you why it makes me annoyed. Because for all its clever and sophisticated appearance, this is a mode of thinking which is childish in the most literal sense of the word. Let me prove it. Look, it corresponds to a very early stage in primitive stage in our international development as a baby, okay? As a baby that can't talk. By the way, how does this baby relate to the real world? This is an interesting point. I'll give this a slight observation. You see, we do not only think with our brains, actually, we think with our whole body. We think with our whole body. We relate to our material environment with our whole body. How does a child get to know this environment? How does the theory of knowledge apply to a young baby? How does a child get to know anything? I'll tell you why. He gets to know the material world by putting it in his mouth and trying to eat it. That's how. Oh, yes. And cognition is not a passive thing. You sit there and the facts implant themselves. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's an active thing. We interact with our environment with our whole body, not just with our mind. That's the prejudice of the intellectual eunuchs in the universities, you know? You see, let's tread on a few corns here. Let's cause a bit of offense. Why not? I'm not in a, I'm not in a forgiving mood this morning having considered this guff. Okay. You know, a carpenter, we know what a carpenter produces. He produces tables and all kinds of things. We know what a bricklayer produces too. We know what a coal miner produces. You know, we know what a metal worker produces. What does an academic produce? I'll tell you. Words, words, you know, it reminds me of a, Shakespeare's Hamlet, you know? Somebody, Polonius, then comes into Hamlet and he says, what are you reading, my Lord? And he answers, words, words, words. And that's all they produce. The sum total of their existence is words. It's like the Bible, you know? It's what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, which Gospel is that? John, I think. In the beginning was the word and the word was God, was with God and the word was God. That's the words are their God. That's why they reduce everything to words, this trivial nonsense. Oh, the definition of that. And the definition of the other. Oh, and this is politically correct and you can't say this and you must use it. As if by changing the word, you change the thing. You do not. And this nonsense really has percolated. It is a corrosive influence on the brains of unfortunate students and it's even spread beyond that. It's got political and practical consequences here. But let's go back to what I said. Childish in the most literal sense. Why? When a mother leaves the room, the child begins to cry. Why does it begin? Because it assumes that because the mother is no longer there to be seen, she doesn't exist anymore. That's true. That's an actual stage in our mental development. We've all passed through that stage. Some of us have left it behind a long time ago, but not in the philosophy departments. They're still very much trapped at this infantile stage of mental development. But in any case, this is a product of the unhealthy environment of the petty booze was here in the universities. And subjective idealism is very much in vogue. It always will be in vogue with these characters because the petty booze is a natural egotist. Whereas the working classes are relatively homogeneous class. So is the booze version, but the middle class is not. Extremely heterogeneous, individual businesses and so on, my business, my career, my individuality, my feelings, my oppression, that's the latest one. My race against an unfair world that does not understand me and so on and so forth. This is, and of course, to these people, it summarizes the egotistical outlook of the petty booze world intelligentsia, which determines its entire psychology. And it's not hardly surprising, therefore, that subjective idealism is alive and well in the philosophical habitat of universities. It holds the same fascination for the petty booze world. Think as a pot of honey does for a fly or certain other natural substances I will not mention. And I repeat, and I insist upon this, even from the standpoint of utility, one would have to say that these theories are absolutely useless. It cannot advance our knowledge by one single millimeter. And so, we have to say what we said, what we're against, what are we for? Now, the first question is what is known? And the second part of the question is how do we know it? And this is what epistemology attempts to answer, but it comes up with the wrong answer. If you, by the way, in general, if you ask the correct question, you can very often come up with a correct answer. If you ask the wrong question, you'll invariably come up with the wrong answer. It's not too high to produce, it's an elementary proposition, I've said that, I interpret the words through my senses. But it's not a question of individual human experience, but of collective experience. And how do we know that the world exists? And how do we know this enough? Well, you know it, my friends, not from meaningless, senseless debates about language in university seminars. You just, what you learn there is the stupidity of people who go to university seminars. No, no, no. Human knowledge is built up over a period of a long time of actual practice. Marx actually wrote, I think, in his thesis on Feuerbach, marvellously profound works. She said that the question of the existence of the material world is merely a scholastic question. That's all it is. It's only of interest of scholastic, little things please, little minds, frankly. The real question is practice, human, and by the way, not individual practice, collective practice, the practice of the whole society, which transforms nature and in the process transforms society and transforms, we transform ourselves in the process. We transform ourselves in the process. And the process of cognition, it is a process precisely of ever-deepening knowledge of the universe of society and of ourselves. That's what it is. Such that, and that was Kant's big mistake, he said, well, he can't confuse two expressions, two words, two sentences. They're different sentences. Let's consider. First sentence, I do not know. Well, there's many things I don't know. Many, many, many things that we do not know yet. The second sentence, I cannot know. Now then, that's a different question. We don't accept this. We don't accept any absolute barrier on human knowledge and cognition. We don't accept the thing in itself. And it's precisely the concrete, specific, practical advance of humanity and science and technology which advances, which breaks down one mystery after another. That's what they don't like. The so-called mysteries that we could not understand. Yeah, they were mysteries in the past. They're not mysteries now. They might have been the thing in itself for Kant, but they're the thing for us now, because we constantly proceed. There's a constant process here. It's a constant struggle of humanity, the human race, to pass from ignorance to knowledge. And this process, my friends, will never end. It's never ending. You'll never get a series where you can say, oh, now we know everything. That'd be a very sad day, wouldn't it be? No, no, it's a constant striving. And there'd always be new horizons. They're now talking about putting a man on the, or a woman, if you can understand that on Mars. Well, good luck to them. Eventually, we'd be putting somebody on another galaxy. At the moment, it's unthinkable. Yes, how many things were unthinkable for us 50 years ago? Many, many things were unthinkable, not thinking, not now. In other words, it's not what Kant considers as a thing, an unknowable thing in itself. Now is a thing for us to use Hegel's expression. Now, I have to draw a line here, not because of lack of material, plenty of notes here to speak for another hour, but let's just try and draw the threads together. The whole history of humanity is a history of a constant struggle from the days of the cavemen and women. You know, I always think of the picture, it sticks in my mind of a man or a woman, it might have been a woman, struggling in pitch-dark blackness in a cave, the interior of a cave, out of the flickering light of an animal-fat lamp and painting these wonderful paintings of animals, of bison, of antelopes and so on, which have never been found, never been surpassed. And that's a struggle in order to get to that place was a struggle. The whole of human life since then has been one constant struggle from darkness to light. Don't tell me that there's no progress, please. That's the sniveling pessimism and skepticism of the petty bourgeois, which is a slave to capitalist society and can't see further than its own nose. I've got no time for this. On the contrary, the human race has shown itself to be capable of great things. We are capable of great things now, despite everything, the pandemic, the crisis. Lenin said that capitalism is horror without end, he's quite right. Yes, but capitalism also has produced. Let's give the devil his due. The last 300 years has produced models of science, of technology. Such that the material conditions for a new society now exists on a world scale. You know, there's no real need now for anyone to starve to death in this plan. There's no need to talk. There's no need for anyone to be without a house or roof over his head or many other things. Okay, but what is required is to put an end to this decadent system and its ideology. These are decadent ideas, reaction to the ideas. Oh, yes. That's why Lenin insisted that we have to have an ideological struggle, not just a struggle for higher wages and a struggle for better conditions and a struggle against depression. Of course, all those things are necessary. We also need a struggle against reactionary bankrupt ideas. We must wage a war against these ideas. We'll drive them out with sticks and stones because they're an obstacle. They drag us back, they reduce the cost, they lower the consciousness of revolutionaries can be affected by this poisonous nonsense. We need to overthrow the system in order, for what? In order to establish a new kind of human civilization. And that means for the first time, in over 10,000 years of so-called civilization for the first time ever, the great majority of men and women who've been excluded from culture, excluded from education, excluded from civil resistance, excluded from democracy of the truth that we told, but the first time can really take their destinies into their own hands and consciously determine their own future. Now this is a gigantic step forward. Yes, I would say also in cognition, not in seminar departments, an irrelevant chatter among the chattering classes, but genuine cultural revolution, a genuine advance of the whole of human race, the whole of the human race to expand our knowledge, to deepen our knowledge of our planet, of the earth that we live in and which we are destroying at the moment, that's got to cease, of the seas, the oceans, the depth of the ocean, poorly understood. And of ourselves, our brain, that's the most complex thing in the universe known to us which we again poorly understand. And by expanding our knowledge to establish a qualitatively higher level of human existence, which will permit, for example, a genuine equality between men and women to relate to each other as genuine as human beings, not an animal existence. This is an animal existence, no more than that for the great majority. We are struggling here for a higher form of society. And part of that, a big part of that at this stage, is a ferocious struggle, a merciless, ruthless struggle against reactionary, retrograde ideas and thinking for the wonderful ideas, the profound ideas, the beautiful ideas, which are only represented by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, our own tendency, is based upon these ideas. And these are the ideas which will enable us, which will enable our class eventually to triumph.