Publication Details

Abstract

As the starting-point in discussing noetical problems we may choose the first phase of humen mind’s development, winch precedes tne stadpomt of naive realism. Primitive human beings live in a mystical complexity with nature without conscious splitting of the world in subject and object. We can follow this splitting of the world through the history of human mind s development in it’s dependence on the development of social structure. At last the contradiction subject—object seems to turn an insoluble problem of noetics, the problem of soul and body. But if we once accept the standpoint of realism-and it is necessary if we wish to think at all-that contradiction is solved: the synthesis of subject and object, the negation of the contradiction is the very real world. There is therefore no need of introducing «spiritual factors®, which make all knowledge and all science impossible. There is only one existing thing, the matter; the world is totaly determined through the immanent laws of matter. Every degree of indetermination must make all knowledge impossible. The objective and subjective processes are parts of the total process of the real world; the subjective processes are therefore determined through the objective ones, they are their representations, but of course no »pictures« or even the objective processes themselves. The subjective processes have their own specifical laws and therefore a certain amount of »autonomy«, but they are just so material as the objective processes. The sentences pronounced on the base of our subjective processes have their objective value, but as our subjective processes are limited into the borders of our nervous system and are therefore unable to represent the objective process in it’s totality we are unable to pronounce absolutely true sentences about the real world and we must content ourselves with certain limited sector of that world. On the other hand we know from our experience, that we are able to coneieve ever wider sectors and therefore to aproach ever nearer to the absolute truth i. e. the actual laws of the mater. The development of our thinking is stimulated by the processes in the external world, (manily by the social structure), but our mental processes have their «autonomy®, from which follows their tendency to create an everlasting conflict between therory and praxis. In the overcoming of this conflict lies the development of all our knowledge and of all science.