Engels, then, applies this same process to history. Initially, everywhere, there is common ownership of land. At a certain point, as social productivity rises, this common ownership becomes a fetter on the further development of production. Common ownership dissolves, as certain members of society accrue private property, which they pass down via inheritance. As Marx describes, in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 9,
“although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed for the interests of the species in the human kingdom, as in the animal and plant kingdoms, always assert themselves at the cost of the interests of individuals, because these interests of the species coincide only with the interests of certain individuals, and it is this coincidence which constitutes the strength of these privileged individuals.”
But, just as common ownership becomes a fetter, and was negated by private property, so too private property becomes a fetter, and is negated by social property, the negation of the negation.
“But this demand does not mean the restoration of the old primitive common ownership, but the institution of a far higher and more developed form of possession in common which, far from being a hindrance to production, will on the contrary free production for the first time from all fetters and enable it to make full use of modern chemical discoveries and mechanical inventions.” (p 176)
This same dialectical law can be observed in philosophy. In antiquity, philosophy consisted of “primitive, natural materialism” (p 176). However, the very fact of thinking about this material world, and trying to understand it, leads to the question what is this thing – mind – that is doing the thinking, and appears to be something separated from, and different to this material world. Perhaps the clearest expression of that comes from Descartes in his “Meditations”, and his method of only accepting as fundamental truths those things that can be proved without reliance on the senses and their perception of that material world. That method he had developed in his Discourse on Method, in which he arrived at he conclusion that the most basic thing known is summed up as Cogito Ergo Sum, (I think, therefore, I am).
Our senses deceive us, says Descartes, and so we have to not rely on them for such proof. In fact, this is a precondition of science. We cannot simply take superficial appearances to be real, or fundamental. As Marx puts it, for example, in his Letter to Kugelman, setting out The Law of Value, to understand reality, it is necessary to go beyond those superficial appearances and to look beneath the surface. Descartes, also, concluded that although the basic thing I know, is that, because I think, I must exist, that does not tell me what I am, only that I am something, a mind, that thinks. In other words, my mind exists, as the thing that is thinking, but I still can't go from that to the assumption that, when this mind perceives the existence of my body that this is what “I” am. That would, again, mean accepting a reliance on my senses to truthfully, and accurately, provide me with the information about what we perceive as constituting our body, and the rest of the material world.
And, of course, that is correct, as all subsequent science has demonstrated. Yet, at the same time, it is not correct. It is correct that we cannot rely on our senses to tell us the truth about the material world, because our eyes can only give us certain information that is very superficial and subjective. If we could see in infra-red, or ultra-violet wavelengths, as some creatures do, the world would look very different, let alone if we had X-Ray vision. But, science does allow us to develop technology to see in those electro-magnetic wavelengths, so that the deficiencies of our senses are continually reduced, and we incrementally obtain a more accurate and truthful understanding of that material world.
However, the exploration of this material world, in the realm of thought, before science was able to study the true nature of perception, via the senses, and also to study the brain, and its functions, which are the means by which both those perceptions are interpreted, and, then, also, processed and manipulated, i.e. in the mind, via the thought process, inevitably gave rise to the idea that mind and body are completely separate, that mind is some aspect of God, or the soul, and so on.
In Yoga, for example, there is the concept that when “observing” the action of the mind in meditation, the “observer” is something different from the mind itself. More recently, science has framed this in other ways, for example, in trying to understand consciousness. In psychology there is the ego and the id.
“As such, it was incapable of clearing up the relation between thought and matter. But the need to get clarity on this question led to the doctrine of a soul separable from the body, then to the assertion of the immortality of this soul, and finally to monotheism. The old materialism was therefore negated by idealism.” (p 176)
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