4. Scientific Knowledge and the Movement from Appearances to Reality

Marxists argue that all our knowledge arises through the activity of our senses and the impressions which our mind receives from the outside world are generally called sensations or, to take another word philosophers commonly use, perceptions. But although these perceptions form the basis of our ideas — and we can only develop thought through the action of our senses — on their own, perception or sensations, as already noted, are not ideas in the strict sense of the term. Ideas only emerge when perceptions develop into what we may call judgments (where we “conceive” as well as “perceive") so that objects around us can be named and described. Indeed, even the simplest words in our vocabulary involve an element of “abstraction” or “conception” for the word “chair," for example, requires us to be able to identify all chairs, irrespective of shape, size and location. Learning to speak, therefore, involves more than “perceiving”: it involves learning to think.

The movement of perception to ideas, of sensations to “judgment” is often called the movement of our thinking beyond “appearances” to “reality” — a penetration beyond our first “impressions” of what things are like to a correct understanding of their reality: how they arise, develop, and relate to other things around them. Indeed, this movement of our thought beyond “appearances” is the precondition for knowledge as a science, for the development of a serious and systematic body of ideas.

Marx makes the point that our everyday experience “catches only the delusive appearance of things”[1] whereas scientific investigation looks towards the inner connections and relationships which explains why things develop as they do. Appearances may be highly misleading as we know from the fact that whereas the earth appears to be flat with the sun moving around it, in reality, exactly the opposite is true. We can only go beyond superficial and often deceptive impressions by, as it were “digging beneath the surface” so as to probe the underlying reality — a method which Marx employs with great skill in Capital by showing that the exchange of one commodity for another simply appears to be an exchange of “things," whereas in reality, people have to enter into social relationships to produce the commodities. “Behind” the rosy appearance of the Cape apple or the glittering golden Kruger-Rand lies the “hidden” misery of sweated labour and low wages, just as the labour contract in which worker and capitalist “mutually agree” to exchange wages for work masks the brutal realities of exploitation. The acquisition of knowledge is a process, there fore, as Lenin describes it, of going “endlessly deeper” from appearance to essence, from essence of the first order, as it were, to essence of the second order, and so on without end”[2] and indeed it is precisely this restless search for the truth beneath appearances which makes it possible for us to learn from mistakes and adjust our plans so that they reflect more accurately the realities of the situation.

Thus we find that the South African Communist Party was able during the Rand strike of 1922 to grasp the importance of the class contradiction between the miners and the government but failed to penetrate sufficiently into the particulate nature of this contradiction. Hence while the party was critical of the racist attitudes of the white miners, it still neglected the interests of the African miners and the importance of taking a vigorous stand in support of equal pay and conditions. As Lerumo comments,

these omissions cannot be ascribed only to the objective conditions but also to the theoretical analysis made at the time.[3]

Indeed, it was only with the experience of the 1922 strike, a better understanding of the reactionary character of the S.A. Labour Party (which had been misleadingly compared to the Labour Party in Britain) and the growing African influence in the party, that a more precise understanding of the character of class contradictions in South Africa came to prevail. The “appearances” of white labour militancy had proved highly deceptive.

The importance of always searching for the reality beneath appearances brings me to the final point I want to consider in outlining the Marxist theory of knowledge and that is, [...click "Next"]