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CHAPTER 2

Kant and the Enlightenment 1500 to 1800

Feudal society, the bourgeoisie and the scientific revolution

Gramsci proposed to write a historical drama in which philosophy and history merge: this book is not a history book in which a particular epoch or period of human history is presented; it is also not a textbook on philosophy in which the thought of various philosophers is explained. Following Antonio Gramsci’s suggestion, it is an attempt to write a historical drama in which philosophy and history merge. The focus is on the philosophy developed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant at the end of the 18th century at the time of the American and French revolutions. The presentation of Kant’s philosophy is embedded in the social conflicts of the time. In this way, philosophical thought is tied to the needs of its time, the geographical space in which it was thought, and the social conflicts it reflects. Kant is considered one of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment. His major themes-so far as they are treated here-were epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, the ethics of bourgeois society, the political philosophy of the democratic republic, and the philosophy of history. The Enlightenment is commonly understood to be both an age in human history and an intellectual and cultural movement. The beginning of the Enlightenment is often defined as the period beginning in 1648. Here, a broad interpretation of the Enlightenment to the period from 1500 to 1800 is favored. By the end of the Enlightenment period, that is, by the end of the 18th century, the superstitions that had prevailed in much of Europe during the Middle Ages had been successfully destroyed or at least challenged. Bourgeois mores had replaced feudal tradition in many areas of society. With this picture, the Enlightenment is often reduced to an intellectual and cultural path to the modern bourgeois world. Here a different picture is to be drawn. The Enlightenment is understood as a tremendous social upheaval, which is to be grasped in its economic, scientific, political dimensions and above all in the philosophical thinking of its time. In the course of this process, all spheres of social life, the entire economic and philosophical foundation and all conventions of feudal society were radically overturned. The Enlightenment is the way of the European part of mankind from feudal to modern bourgeois society. This process reaches a historical climax with the philosophy of Kant and the French Revolution. The Enlightenment is thus understood as an upheaval of social conditions extending over a long period of time. In the course of this upheaval, new relationships between people, new scientific knowledge, new technologies, a new way of producing, and finally, after a whole series of political revolutions, a new type of state emerged. The Enlightenment is not a self-run, mechanical reflex to changing economic conditions; it is a 300-year struggle of “urban groupings” (Gramsci) for their freedom in a republic, that is, in a new form of state without prince or king. After Napoleon I, the ruler who emerged from the French Revolution, crushed the feudal rulers of Europe, his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 led to a temporary end of the Enlightenment on the European continent. In the concluding section of this book, a brief sketch shows how the social and political process of the Enlightenment continued in the two centuries following the French Revolution. It is shown that even today, in every nation and at every time, there is a struggle for the principles of the Enlightenment. The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal powers – the emperors, the kings, the feudal nobility, and the churches – was waged sometimes with and sometimes without the support of the peasants; it is characterized by bloody revolutions, insipid compromises, grandiose errors, and a multitude of defeats and detours. The philosophers of the Enlightenment were the great thinkers of this epochal upheaval; with their systems and concepts, they tried to understand these conflicts, to interpret history retrospectively and to advance social development with new concepts.

Marx called Kant’s philosophy the “German theory of the French Revolution”: From Kant comes a philosophy at the end of this epoch. In a phase, in which the whole development came to a head, he developed the rational law variant within the philosophy of the Enlightenment. This contained a theory of how man gains knowledge by means of his intellect and how reason always produces new ideas and thus advances the intellectual development of man. Kant refuted the main proofs of the existence of God and thus the foundation of science in feudal society; with his ethics he laid the philosophical foundation for political self-determination of man in freedom and he defended the principles of the First French Republic, which emerged from the French Revolution. That is why his philosophy was called by the young Marx the “German theory of the French Revolution,” that is, the theory of a revolution that had taken liberty, equality, and fraternity as its banner.⁹⁰ Kant was only one of many important philosophers in the Age of Enlightenment, and he owed much to his Italian, Dutch, English, American, and French predecessors. Compared to these Enlightenment thinkers, his immediate political-practical effectiveness in Germany was minor. Nevertheless, Kant stands out, because in philosophy it is not short-term practical effectiveness that counts. What matters in philosophy, according to a formulation of the young Marx, who was enthusiastic about philosophy, are “ideas which our intelligence conquers, which our mind conquers, to which the intellect has forged our conscience, these are chains from which one cannot break free without tearing one’s heart, these are demons which man can conquer only by submitting to them.”⁹¹ In Gramsci’s thought, the Enlightenment philosophies, and specifically those philosophies that established the equality of human beings with the “capacity to reason,” were one of the “most powerful links in the chain of historical development,” namely, the transformation of the medieval world into the modern bourgeois world.⁹² According to Gramsci, Kant’s philosophy takes on a unique significance within Enlightenment philosophy because, according to a formulation by the Italian philosopher Croce (1866-1952), it represents the “first annual ring” of a new philosophy that went beyond what manifested itself in the bourgeois revolution that began in France in 1789.⁹³ The image of the “first annual ring” stands for the Kant-Hegel-Marx line of development that Gramsci explores in his “Prison Notebooks.” Kant as the founder of a philosophy that extends through Hegel to Marx? This idea confronts Soviet Marxism-Leninism, but also the complete Marxist philosophy in Western Europe. The following chapter on Kant and the Enlightenment reaches its culmination in precisely this thought. First, however, it must be clarified from what kind of society the bourgeoisie moved out in the form of the Enlightenment.

The main features of feudal society

Christianity became the state religion in the Roman Empire from around 300 AD. In the Early Middle Ages, a theocratic conception, a divine state, prevailed in Europe: The origins of feudal society in Europe predate the millennium. Ancient society, which had been shaped by the Roman Empire, had already largely dissolved and mixed with the peasant societies of Central Europe. Christianity, after centuries of persecution and then toleration, had given itself its own sacred law, distinct from Roman law. Already in the Roman Empire from about 300 AD, Christianity became the state religion. In the centuries that followed, it became the predominant religion throughout Europe. Kings and princes also professed this religion. At the head of the Christian Church was the Pope. The original separation of Christianity from the political life of Roman society continued in the persistence of two different legal systems. The old Roman law was retained because Germanic law had proved unsuitable to regulate the burgeoning economic life in Europe. The existence of two legal systems was a condition for the emergence of conflicts between the rule of kings in the secular sphere and the rule of the pope in the spiritual sphere. A dual character characterized papal rule: The pope represented, on the one hand, a “universal spiritual monarchy” and, on the other, a “secular principality” with extensive landholdings throughout Europe.⁹⁴ The Pope was and still is elected by an assembly of all the Cardinals; he was and still is the Bishop of Rome and at the same time the highest authority in the Roman Catholic Church; he is called the Holy Father and is considered the Vicar of Jesus Christ on Earth. From a certain point in time, the Carolingian kings, rulers over the Frankish Empire, which included large parts of Central and Southern Europe, allied themselves with the Pope in Rome. In 800, the Carolingian king Charlemagne was crowned emperor by the pope in Rome. The form of government of a kingdom or empire is called a monarchy, or secular autocracy. A noble is given, by election or inheritance, the office of the secular head of state with extensive powers. Since the secular rulers did not want to be dominated by the Pope in Rome, a struggle broke out over several centuries, which was concluded at the beginning of the 12th century with a victory for the papacy. The primacy of the spiritual, that is, the supremacy of religion over the secular, was established. Gramsci writes in this regard that although this “theocratic conception” was repeatedly opposed by the secular powers, it essentially endured over the next centuries.⁹⁵ A theocracy is a divine state in which the ruling norms are of divine rather than human origin. Around 1050, Christianity first split into the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. While the Christian Orthodox Church consolidated its dominance in the eastern part of Europe, especially in Greece, the Balkans, and Russia, the Catholic Church, led by the Pope in Rome, was able to establish itself as the dominant religion in the rest of Europe. In the years 1100 to 1300, the Crusades were waged to liberate the Holy Land, and Jerusalem in particular, from Muslim rule. During this time, a number of independent kingdoms professing Catholicism emerged in Central Europe.

Beginning and end of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation: From about 1250, several kings and princes of Central and Southern Europe united under the leadership of the Pope to form the Holy Roman Empire. The name “Holy” also provided the justification for the secular rule of the highest monarch, the emperor, because this was attributed to God’s grace. God’s grace was pronounced by the pope, expressing the theocratic character of feudal rule. The Holy Roman Empire was the domain of the German-Roman emperors, stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. It geographically included the territories that today are called Germany, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, and Italy. Around this core area of the Holy Roman Empire were grouped other Catholic-influenced principalities and kingdoms, such as in Poland, France, Spain, England, and Scandinavia. The Holy Roman Empire was a supranational feudal ruling structure whose internal structure consisted of the emperor, the pope and the imperial estates. Built into this structure was the “dualism of power” between the emperor and the pope that was to lead to a multitude of dramatic conflicts in the Middle Ages: popes were deposed from office, counter-popes were installed. The Estates of the Empire were a corporative organization in which about 300 princes, bishops, and representatives of knightly orders and free imperial cities had a voice. The medieval order of estates knew three estates. The first class was the clergy, i.e. all members of the religious clergy. The second estate consisted of the landowning nobility and the urban aristocracy, the patricians. The third estate united the free citizens – consisting of merchants, craftsmen and civil servants – with the peasants. Around the year 1500, the name Holy Roman Empire was supplemented by the addition of “German Nation”. The Holy Roman Empire formed the spiritual, legal and political parenthesis around the feudal society in Europe and formally existed under this name despite a number of internal crises and wars from 1250 to 1806, i.e. for about 550 years. After the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, Napoleon I, the ruler who had come to power in the wake of the French Revolution, dealt the final blow to the empire by issuing an ultimatum, and the last German-Roman emperor laid down his crown in 1806. Thus, after a centuries-long process of dissolution under the sign of the Enlightenment, the central, theocratically shaped ruling structure of feudal society in Central Europe also formally ended.

Noble landowners and serf peasants: In the feudal society, the clear majority of people in the villages lived in the countryside as free, bonded, or serf peasants until the late 18th century. The characteristic of feudal society was the ownership of land by the nobility with the work of the serfs tied to it. The serf peasants were obligated to perform services for the lords of the manor; they were not free and were bound to the landlord’s clod as well as subject to the jurisdiction of their lord. The landlords could physically punish their serfs; if they escaped, they were usually brought back by force. Serfdom, as well as bondage as a mitigated version of serfdom, was hereditary, meaning that these forms of personal bondage were passed down from parents to children. Marriages without a marriage license were strictly forbidden to the serfs. Marx defined the most important trait of feudal society as personal dependence: “serfs and landlords, vassals and feudal lords, laymen and clergymen. Personal dependence characterizes just as much the social relations of material production as the spheres of life built upon it.”⁹⁶ In the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the social importance of urban life steadily increased over the centuries. Cities would be the starting point for the development of bourgeois society in the first place. At the top of the urban society were the noble aristocrats and the rich merchant families. This group determined the fate of their city in the council and in the offices. This old-established upper class ruled over the urban burghers and the professional craftsmen, who struggled for influence in the city councils. Excluded from civil rights were journeymen craftsmen, day laborers, and the urban poor. Engels summed up in his analysis of the German Peasants’ War, which took place in the years 1524 to 1526: “Beneath all these classes, with the exception of the last, stood the great exploited mass of the nation: the peasants. (…) If he was a serf, he was at the mercy and disfavor of his lord. If he was a bondman, the legal, contractual benefits alone were sufficient to crush him …”⁹⁷ Feudal society was characterized by a multitude of dynastic conflicts and wars over territorial claims and succession in a kingdom or principality. Local peasant uprisings, which took place over the centuries and into the 19th century in virtually all parts of Europe, were repeatedly put down militarily.

Slavery and serfdom: Slavery played an important economic role in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire from the 8th century BC to the 7th century AD. In the feudal society in the center of Europe, it was forbidden to keep or trade Christians as slaves. On the edges of Europe, slavery was very much permitted. The slave economy and slave trade took off with Europe’s colonial expansion into overseas territories beginning in the 1500s. Millions of African slaves were abducted and used on the plantations of South America, the Caribbean, and the southern American colonies. By the early 19th century, slavery was largely abolished in Europe. The American Civil War (1861-1865) ended slavery on the North American continent. Serfdom in feudal society differed from slavery primarily in that the serf was not a tradable commodity. Serfdom denoted a personal power of disposal of the serf lord, that is, the noble landowner over the serf. The exploitation of the unfree peasants was carried out in such a way that on some days of the week they worked their own land with their own tools (plow, cattle, etc.) and on the other days they had to work for free on the lands of the landlords.⁹⁸ The breaking up of these feudal forms of rule, the driving away of the peasants from their land and the freeing of labor for the craft trades emerging in the cities and later also for industry, was treated by Marx under the heading “The original accumulation” in “The Capital” of 1867. Serfdom was abolished in some parts of Germany in the 1780s.⁹⁹ The french Revolution ended serfdom in France. In the Kingdom of Prussia, serfdom was abolished only in 1810, after the defeat by the French army. In Russia, the serfdom of peasants was ended only in 1861 – and this only in formal legal terms. Serfdom, indentured servitude, and various mitigated forms of personal rule over peasants persisted in some areas of Europe well beyond the middle of the 19th century, while in other areas – for example, in the Netherlands and Great Britain – wage labor already prevailed.¹⁰⁰

Subsistence economy and guilds: The feudal economy was a form of subsistence economy, meaning that peasants largely provided for themselves without the products they produced becoming commodities.¹⁰¹ Each village produced almost everything necessary for life itself. There was no production for a market under competitive conditions. The feudal organization of crafts was the guild system in the cities. The guilds performed not only economic but also religious, social and cultural functions and controlled the lives of their members. The guild system was designed to meet needs rather than to expand; it cut off the development of a free market and competition both internally and externally. Internally, for example, by fixing the number of crafts, the quality of products, and prices. Externally, by closing off the domestic market to foreign products. The combination of subsistence farming in the countryside and the guild system in the cities gave the feudal society of the Middle Ages an essentially stationary economic character. As Gramsci notes, “Any economic activity that left the confines of medieval production was ‘materialism’ because it appeared as an ‘end in itself,’ economy for the sake of economy, activity for the sake of activity, etc.”¹⁰²

The Catholic Church as a spiritual and economic power: In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church was a powerful institution in the structure of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and the kingdoms bordering it. While the emperors represented secular rule, the popes, based in Rome, surrounded the feudal constitution with the halo of divine consecration. The Roman Catholic Church was the spiritual center of feudal society in Europe; it formed the unifying spiritual parenthesis that held the entire empire together despite various wars within it and the constant rivalries between the emperor, the pope, and the princes. The Catholic Church had its own position of economic power within feudal society: the Church was the largest of all feudal lords. It owned about one third of all landed property in the Catholic world. Gramsci writes: “The clergy as a social stratification must always be taken into account in the analysis of the composition of the propertied and leading classes.”¹⁰³ At the top of the clerical hierarchy were the bishops, archbishops, and the cardinals who elect the pope. At the bottom were the rural and urban preachers. The clergy were the most important group of intellectuals in feudal society. To be brief at this point, Gramsci refers to intellectuals as people who have learned to deal with concepts at a professional level: For example, with the terms of Christian dogmatic teachings. Groups of intellectuals such as clergymen, lawyers, teachers, journalists play an important role in Gramsci’s analysis of society and will be discussed in detail later. The most typical group of intellectuals in feudalism was the “churchmen, who for a long time (…) had monopolized some important services: religious ideology, that is, the philosophy and science of the epoch, including the school, education, morality, justice, charity, welfare, etc.”¹⁰⁴ On the character of the clergy, Gramsci notes, “The category of churchmen can be seen as the intellectual category organically tied to the landowning aristocracy: it was juridically equal to the aristocracy, with which it shared the exercise of feudal ownership of the land and the enjoyment of the state’s property-linked-privileges.”¹⁰⁵

The domination of religion over the human mind: The rule of the Catholic Church over people’s thoughts and actions was extensive in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Individuals moved in feudal society within a dense web of regulations that the church had religiously sanctioned. People were born into a particular segment of feudal society and usually belonged to that segment until they died. They were bound by the beliefs, customs, and secular law of the feudal aristocracy. Their thoughts were filled with the fear of God, sin, providence, and the predestination of their lives, eternal life after death, the immortal soul, and purgatory in hell. As a rule, there was no escape from this world of thought. The Bible and its respective interpretation by the pope were decisive for the answers to all individual and social questions. The basic rule was: what is right cannot be decided, but only found; what is true cannot be known, but only believed; what is morally right cannot be judged, but only followed. The internal unity of belief in the Holy Roman Empire was ensured by the Inquisition procedure, which was established from the 13th century to the late 18th century to combat deviant behavior, doctrines, opinions, and philosophies. The Inquisition was a special form of judicial procedure, specialized in the detection, conversion and condemnation of heretics, as well as the prosecution of blasphemy and magic, also with the help of torture.

In the following, the most important economic, scientific and political developments that eventually led to the dissolution of feudal society in Europe will be outlined in broad strokes. In the course of this presentation, some early bourgeois philosophies will also be introduced, which represented the intellectual and political liberation struggle of the bourgeoisie in the Enlightenment. Thus, the presuppositions of Kant’s thought are grasped. On this basis, his philosophy can be presented in an understandable way at the end of the process of dissolution of feudal society in the context of the American and French revolutions.

The emergence of the bourgeois mode of production

At many points in the “Prison Notebooks,” Gramsci refers to a short and concise text by Marx, in which the latter set out the scientific guideline for his studies: the so-called “Preface to the Critique of Political Economy” of 1859. There it says that in the study of an epoch of social revolutions a distinction must always be made “between the material upheaval in the economic conditions of production, which can be faithfully stated in natural science, and the juridical, political, religious, artistic or philosophical, in short, ideological forms in which men become aware of this conflict and fight it out.”¹⁰⁶ The “upheaval in the economic conditions of production” during the Enlightenment will first be considered from the point of view of the formation of wage labor and capital as a new social relationship in production, in order to then include the scientific-technological as well as the political development in the presentation.

The beginning of capitalist production: About the beginning of the bourgeois mode of production, Marx wrote in “Capital”: “The discovery of the gold and silver lands in America, the extermination, enslavement, and burial of the native population in the mines, the beginning of the conquest and plunder of the East Indies, the transformation of Africa into an enclosure for the commercial hunting of black skins, denote the dawn of the capitalist era of production.”¹⁰⁷ The discovery of America through voyages of the Genoese-born navigator Christopher Columbus between 1492 and 1504 formed an initial condition for the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. The plundering and enslavement of people in America, Africa, and Asia was an important moment in the emergence of wealth in Europe, which was to drive further development. The increasing importance of cities and trade, the accumulation of enormous wealth by merchant capital and the flourishing of manufactures in the cities undermined the feudal economy.¹⁰⁸ The production of goods and the circulation of money spread within feudal society. The dissolution tendencies in feudal society were manifested in a variety of changes in the economic, political, and cultural fabric. The number of inhabitants in the major cities of Europe exceeded one million by 1800. Along with the cities, the number of merchants and craftsmen grew. The class of free citizens grew in size and social importance. This was accompanied by the emergence of an urban underclass of day laborers and runaway serfs. The strict hierarchical organization of society gave rise to a mass of individuals who were no longer linked by class organizations, who could choose their place of work and profession at will, and who competed with each other in the markets. The economic, military, and legal power of the landlords in the countryside and the guilds in the cities was successively dismantled.¹⁰⁹ Princes and entire royal houses became financially dependent on rich merchants, bankers, and the capitalists of large manufactories. The production of goods for a market, i.e. the outgrowth of guild production beyond the established limits, was the starting point for the emergence of new relations in production. The owner of a guild craft business – freed from the shackles of the guild – became the owner of a manufactory, a capitalist; the guild journeyman became a free wage laborer. Marx historically determined the starting point of capitalist production within feudal society as follows. “Capitalist production, as we have seen, begins in fact only where the same individual capital employs a greater number of workers simultaneously, the labor process thus enlarges its scope and yields product on a greater quantitative ladder. The action of a greater number of workers at the same time, in the same space (or, if one wishes, in the same field of labor), for the production of the same kind of commodity, under the command of the same capitalist, constitutes historically and conceptually the starting point of capitalist production. With reference to the mode of production itself, the manufactory, for example, in its beginnings differs little from the guild craft industry except in the greater number of workers employed simultaneously by the same capital. The workshop of the guild master is only extended.”¹¹⁰ Thus the two main classes of bourgeois society spread throughout Europe: The bourgeoisie, which owns the means of production and uses wage labor for its own purposes, and the proletariat, the class of wage laborers who own no means of production of their own and depend on selling their labor power to live.

The separation of rural producers from their land: In the nations where capitalist production was developing, the dissolution of feudal serfdom in agriculture was already in full swing. The formation of a class of capitalists had as a prerequisite that large masses of people were torn from their land and implements-their means of subsistence-and became available as free proletarians in the labor markets of the cities. The separation of rural producers from their land took very different forms in the various countries of Europe.¹¹¹ This process began before the Renaissance in Upper Italy and England, did not set in on a large scale in Germany until 1750, and in Russia until 1860. In Upper and Central Italy, the first beginnings of capitalist production appeared as early as between 1400 and 1500, but Marx dated the actual beginning of the capitalist era only to the 16th century, that is, between 1500 and 1600.¹¹² Within the Holy Roman Empire, the wealthy citizens in the Upper Italian cities such as Venice, Florence, and Naples were able to secure certain trading rights and to build a colonial empire in the Mediterranean region. A historically new phenomenon occurred, which appeared in northern Europe in the form of the Hanseatic cities: the citizens of Venice and other cities won the status of a republic, that is, the status of a state without a princely ruler. The trading empire of the upper Italian republics extended to Central Europe, Africa, and Asia. Gramsci’s exploration of history and philosophy in the “Prison Notebooks” begins in this phase of the emergence of bourgeois society, specifically with the Renaissance in Italy and the Reformation in Germany.

The Renaissance in Italy from 1400 to 1600: The Renaissance was a European cultural period between 1400 and 1600, which had its starting point in Italy; it is associated with the work of such famous artists like Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, and Albrecht Dürer. Renaissance means rebirth; it was an attempt to bring forth the cultural achievements of Greek and Roman antiquity in a renewed form. Man was to be placed at the center of artistic creation and thus above religious dogma. The struggles between the emperor and the pope, the bourgeoisie in the cities and the landowning nobility in the countryside took complex forms in this epoch, with shifting alliances and fronts. Thus, referring to the history of the upper Italian city republics, Gramsci writes: “the emerging bourgeoisie seeks allies in the peasants against the empire and its own local feudalism …”¹¹³ The clashes between the bourgeoisie and the nobility over labor became more violent: “the bourgeois need labor, and this can only be provided by the rural classes; but the nobles want the peasants tied to the soil; flight of the peasants to the city, where the nobles cannot catch them.”¹¹⁴

The Reformation in Central Europe from 1517: The Reformation was an ecclesiastical renewal movement that began in Germany in 1517. The beginning of the Reformation in Germany coincides with the height of the Renaissance in Italy. Reformation means restoration. Its original goal was to reform the Roman Catholic Church. An older, a true conception of Christian doctrine was to be restored in the church institutions, dogmas, and rules. The most important intellectuals of the Reformation were Martin Luther (1483-1546) in Germany and Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) and John Calvin (1509-1564) in Switzerland. From there, the Reformation spread as Protestantism throughout Central Europe and on to Scandinavia, Great Britain, and the English colonies of North America. After the emperor and the pope had begun to recatholicize Protestant areas, the first armed conflicts with those sovereigns and cities in Germany that had professed Protestantism began in 1546. From then on, a war raged in Europe for about a hundred years between the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and the followers of the Reformation. The war was never a purely religious war, but also a power-political confrontation between the feudal Catholic central power and the rising Protestant bourgeoisie. The Hundred Years’ War ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. More on that in a moment. In Germany, France, Spain and some other countries, so-called absolute monarchies developed in the wake of the Peace of Westphalia from 1650 onward, in which the monarch ruled largely without the participation of the medieval estates.

After the Upper Italian republics, first the Netherlands and then Great Britain dominated the world market: After the Upper Italian trading system and especially the Venetian one had passed their bloom, the Netherlands experienced a Golden Century between 1600 and 1700. In the Netherlands, the Protestants were particularly strong in a Calvinist form. As early as 1581, the Netherlands was able to break away from Catholic rule as a united republic. After 80 years of war, this independence was also legally certified to them in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The Netherlands’ dominant position in international trade was based on its manufactories and a worldwide colonial system with a slave trade embedded in it. At the beginning of the 18th century, Great Britain outstripped the Low Countries as the leading nation in world markets. An important factor in this was that Great Britain dominated the textile and clothing industry and its basis – the cotton industry. Marx wrote: “While it (the cotton industry, the author) introduced child slavery into England, the cotton industry at the same time gave the impetus for the transformation of the formerly more or less patriarchal slave economy of the United States into a commercial exploitation system. In general, the veiled slavery of the wage laborers in Europe required as a pedestal (foundation, the author) the slavery sans phrase (without a cover) in the New World.”¹¹⁵ The first industrial revolution had its starting point in Great Britain from 1750; it was technically linked to the invention of the steam engine and the spinning jenny, the first industrial spinning machine for spinning wool into yarn. “The machine, from which the industrial revolution proceeds, replaces the worker handling a single tool with a mechanism operating with a mass of the same or similar tools at once …”¹¹⁶ With the multiplication of human labor by the machine and the development of machines to drive machines, an economy based on industry emerged in Britain at the end of the Enlightenment. The bourgeois mode of production created its own foundation with the emergence of industry and successively spread throughout Europe and from there throughout the world in the following 19th century.

The bourgeoisie destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations: By breaking the feudal bonds in the countryside and the guild system in the cities, the development of a bourgeois individuality became a necessity. The personality of man became a central theme of the Enlightenment. In the emergence of personalities, the ability of people to be able to control their own lives beyond the sharply regulated life plans of feudal society became apparent. Marx expressed this connection in the “Communist Manifesto” (1848) as follows: “The bourgeoisie has played a highly revolutionary role in history. The bourgeoisie, where it has come to rule, has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has ruthlessly torn asunder the motley feudal bonds which tied man to his natural superior, leaving no other bond between man and man than naked interest, than unfeeling ‘bare payment.’”¹¹⁷ Marx determined the connection between a reality changed by man’s productive activity and the men who set this change in motion as follows: “In the act of reproduction itself, not only do the objective conditions change, e.g., the village becomes (a) city, the wilderness thinned out, etc., but the producers change by putting new qualities out of themselves, by developing themselves through production, by reshaping themselves, by forming new forces, new ideas, new modes of transportation, new needs, and new language.”¹¹⁸ The short version of this insight, so decisive for Marx and Engels, is: “(…) the people developing their material production and their material intercourse change with this their reality also their thinking and the products of their thinking.”¹¹⁹

The feudal economy, the feudal faith, the feudal culture, and finally the entire feudal world of states were successively replaced by a new bourgeois world: In Gramsci’s thought, the Renaissance and the Reformation formed the first fundamental impulses for a development that in the course of three centuries – from 1500 to 1800 – became a social phenomenon called Enlightenment in the Anglo-Saxon world (in German: Aufklärung). The Enlightenment, as a scientific, philosophical, political, and cultural movement based on the emergence and successive establishment of the bourgeois economy, culminated at the end of the 18th century in the founding of the American and French republics. A new bourgeois world successively replaced the feudal economy, feudal beliefs, feudal culture and finally the complete feudal world of states. In all areas, bourgeois life was based on completely different principles than the declining feudal world. The task of philosophy was to grasp and understand these social changes, to criticize the old principles, and to formulate those principles that could sustain the new bourgeois society. Kant will prove to be a master of this subject. A particular front line in the century-long struggle of the Enlightenment against feudal powers was the sciences. Underlying this dispute were differing responses by feudal religion and the Enlightenment to Kant’s first question: “What can I know?”

The scientific revolution 1500 to 1800

The feudal repression against new findings in the natural sciences: In 1509, building on the preliminary work of other astronomers, the German astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) had put forward the mathematically based thesis that the Earth must revolve around the Sun and on its own axis. His theses spread throughout the scientific community of Europe, although his main work was not printed until 1543 – after his death. “And yet it moves!” the astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is said to have muttered, according to legend, as he left the Inquisition court after publicly renouncing Copernicus’ findings. However, these words may also have come from the Italian philosopher and astronomer Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who may have uttered this sentence at the stake. The question of whether the Earth revolved around the Sun was at the center of a centuries-long dispute over the scientific dogmas of Roman Catholic doctrine. Galileo and Bruno were both natural scientists and philosophers of the late Renaissance from Italy. Giordano Bruno had traveled through Germany and briefly held a professorship in Helmstedt. He died at the stake for postulating the infinity of space and the eternal duration of the universe. Both assertions contradicted Christian doctrine because an infinite material world did not allow for an afterlife, and the eternity of the universe contradicted the doctrine of creation and belief in the Last Judgment. Giordano Bruno’s books were placed on the Catholic Church’s index of forbidden writings, where they remained until the index was abolished in 1966. Pope John Paul II declared Bruno’s execution unjust in 2000. After Galileo abjured, he refrained from making further public statements about his scientific findings. The Vatican rehabilitated Galileo’s reputation in 1992. With a wave of repressive measures, the Catholic Church contributed to the end of the Renaissance in Italy.¹²⁰ Kant, too, was still immediately caught up in the controversy over whether or not the Earth revolved around the Sun. The integrating role of the Roman Catholic Church in the feudal society of Europe was based on its unchallenged position as the guardian of the Word of God, the interpretation of the sacred scriptures and a whole canon of scientific truths. The entire field of this sacred knowledge is called theology. In what follows, theology will be understood as a philosophy in Gramsci’s sense: As the Roman Catholic philosophy of the feudal world, from which the answers to the four Kantian questions can also be drawn.

Scholasticism and Thomism as the doctrinal edifice of feudal philosophy: The totality of theological attempts in the Middle Ages to justify the ecclesiastical dogmas of Catholicism by philosophical means is called scholasticism. Within this body of doctrine, Thomism – named after Thomas Aquinas – can be identified as the most significant current. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) himself conceived of theology primarily as a theoretical science, a philosophy. He sought to combine the philosophical teachings of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 B.C.- 322 B.C.) with the religious dogmas of Roman Catholic doctrine.¹²¹ In 1567, Thomism became the doctrine of the Church; in 1879, Pope Pius VIII declared this doctrine the official philosophy of the Catholic Church. For Thomism, and thus for Christian scholasticism, all that man could know was already contained in Scripture and the works of Aristotle. Human knowledge was not conceived as expansive, but as a closed fund that was at most open to interpretation to a certain extent. The first cause of all being and all truth is God. God has revealed His truth in the Bible; it is considered the Word of God. The truth lies in the knowledge of God, His will and His work. Therefore, there is truth at all and eternal truths. Eternal laws, moral norms and regulations given by God govern morals, manners, law and state. The Thomistic proof of God assumes the guidance of the world by God, i.e. a being in the very highest place, which is able to prescribe the goals of the movement in the world of men. Providence and destiny denote the power of God, who directs or at least influences the destiny of people and the course of world history. Man thinks and God directs according to a Bible saying, “Man’s heart devises his way, but the Lord alone directs his step.” (Proverbs of Solomon 16: 9) Thomas Aquinas also provided a rationale for the Inquisition based on these theological teachings.

Teleology as the doctrine of the purposes in the feudal-religious philosophy: If today of purposes the speech is, then the purpose is understood mostly in the sense of Kant as the motive of a person for a purposeful activity for the satisfaction of a need. Man pursues a purpose or better, a multiplicity of purposes. The purpose is realized in which certain means are used according to the purpose – purposefully. The realization of a purpose, in today’s parlance, means a causal process set in motion by man and determined by the expediency of the means and the attainment of the end. Medieval scholasticism, however, had formulated a very different doctrine of ends by recourse to Aristotle. This doctrine of ends according to the feudal-religious philosophy is called teleology, the doctrine of the ends of God. And according to it, it was precisely not man who sets the purposes, but God. The purposes that God set once and for all in his plan of creation appear in the things themselves, in their movements and aims. The things that man can experience sensually and in the scientific research process are already given in their essence. The essence and cause of everything is the purpose resting in it, which God has put into the thing. Gramsci dealt intensively with teleology in the “Prison Notebooks” and in this context quotes Goethe (1749-1832), who caricatured religious teleology in the work “Xenien” as follows: “The teleolog. – What veneration deserves the creator of the world, who graciously, when he created the cork tree, at the same time also invented the stopper!”¹²² In the quote, Goethe ironically rejects religious teleology: the cork tree only acquires a specific purpose through the human being who makes a cork out of it, which corresponds to a human need. Friedrich Engels also mocks this “teleology, according to which cats were created to eat mice, mice to be eaten by cats, and all of nature to display the wisdom of the Creator.”¹²³

Teleology as the epistemology of feudalism: Religious teleology specified an interest in knowledge: The world was to be recognized as the work of God, nature was regarded as the open book of God, and man as a creature of God. In this respect, teleology was not only faith, turning to and confirming faith, but it was also an early form of epistemology. Just as scholasticism was the religious philosophy of the Holy Roman Empire, teleology was the epistemology within that philosophy. Teleology as the doctrine of purposes was based, as follows from the preceding, on an ontology, a doctrine of being. The special feature of this doctrine of being consisted in the assertion that all being was given by God and that the knowledge of this being as revealed in the Bible must therefore stand outside the historical development of human knowledge.

By way of introduction: The doctrine of thinking and being and epistemology: Epistemology has been a main field of philosophy until today and deals with the possibility of obtaining human knowledge as well as the prerequisites and conditions of obtaining knowledge and especially true knowledge. The term epistemology became common only after 1860.¹²⁴ Therefore, Kant, Hegel, and Marx did not use this term in their works. Epistemology developed from the philosophical discipline of logic – the art of thinking or the study of thought – a discipline known to the Greeks over 2000 years ago. Logic examined the forms and laws of human thought and was transformed by classical German philosophy into the doctrine of the concept. The doctrine of thinking is opposed by ontology, the doctrine of being. The history of philosophy knows many different doctrines of thinking and of being. Some particularly important ones are presented in the following. A fundamental task of philosophy is to clarify the relation between thinking and being. Thus, the work of a philosopher in his time is to relate a way of thinking that is prevalent in that time to a way of being that he has constructed, to clarify this relationship. One result of such an investigation may be to establish in a contemporary way what true knowledge is. Since thought is one of the salient features of man, clarifying the relation between thought and being involves a number of important determinations about man in his world. Thus, the broad field of epistemology is outlined as the set of attempts to clarify the historically changing contents, forms, presuppositions, conditions, and means of human cognition.

Introduction: Metaphysics and Ontology: Kant’s epistemology, as well as his ethics, fell into the realm of metaphysics according to his own understanding. This classification is hardly understood today outside of academic philosophy. According to the translation into German, metaphysics is that part of philosophy, which deals with the topics that go beyond the material physically present in nature and thus beyond what can be grasped by the senses. Kant counted an important part of his epistemology to the field of metaphysics, precisely because pure reason and its concepts do without any reference to empirical material. Kant also dealt with his ethics under the term metaphysics, for example in the “Metaphysics of Morals” of 1797. The question of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul also fall into the realm of metaphysics. Ontologies such as the Catholic Church’s doctrine of being were conceived, criticized, and rejected by Kant as a realm of metaphysics. Ontologies that emerged in the 20th century-such as Heidegger’s-are concerned with Being as the basic structures of reality that lie outside the empirically knowable and thus outside the historical process of human cognition. Although the terms metaphysics and ontology played an important role in Kant’s work, their use will be largely dispensed with in what follows. The many facets of their meaning are difficult to comprehend and factually not decisive for the understanding of the Kant-Hegel-Marx line. Thus, Hegel will replace all ontology with his objective logic and will no longer use the term metaphysics in a constructive way.¹²⁵ Epistemology, as understood here, looks back at its own history and turns to the question of how man in his time came to know his reality and what theories were developed about it. From the examination of the question of how knowledge can be gained, other questions immediately arise: What are true cognitions? What are objective truths? Are there absolute truths? How does knowledge arise from non-knowledge? How is knowledge produced? In the 20th century, epistemology grows into a modern philosophy of science. Kant’s question “What can I know?” was aimed at confronting the epistemologies common in his time and formulating his own epistemology in the spirit of the Enlightenment.

In the epoch of Enlightenment, two incompatible methods of scientific research confronted each other: For the feudal-religious teleology as the epistemology of scholasticism, the result of scientific research was fixed in advance. The divine order and therein the purposes, which God had assigned to the things, were to be examined and recognized. The most important means of teleology was Bible exegesis and the interpretation of texts and speeches of authorized persons, such as the Pope. The basic structures of being – the origin of being and the purpose of being – were fixed as well as the thinking of man. This thinking was determined as the thinking of a pious Christian, insofar as it was in accordance with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Precisely because the things according to the religious dogmatics carry this inner, from God determined purpose in themselves, every research going beyond it was at least superfluous and became therefore also fast a heretical presumption or even a blasphemy. If the truths of teleology were questioned, as the natural sciences did in the 16th and 17th centuries, this was already an offense. Thus, Copernicus’ assertion contradicted a certain passage in the Bible (Joshua 10: 12-13). Thus, two methods or principles clashed in research: on one side was the philosophy of feudal society, teleology, which practiced science as biblical interpretation, and on the other side was something new, indeterminate, namely the emerging natural sciences, which were based on observation of nature, experiment, and proving mathematics. The dispute between these two principles escalated on a very specific issue: the questioning of the Roman Catholic Church’s scientific view of the world by the scientific revolution of 1500 to 1800. Ultimately, this dispute was about whether knowledge and the “science of nature should be recognized as an essentially historical category, a human relation” (Gramsci) or remain a collection of definitive certainties drawn from God.¹²⁶

The Ptolemaic worldview

Scientific worldviews summarize the knowledge of an epoch: That the Earth revolves around the Sun is a discovery only about 500 years old. Before the theories of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, people and even the best scientists thought that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the Sun, the Moon and the other planets revolved around the Earth. This geocentric worldview, that is, the worldview in which the Earth is the center, was named after the Greek astrologer and philosopher Ptolemy (100-175 AD). The idea of the Earth as a disk is a worldview from the preceding epoch; this idea shaped the Babylonian world. The Ptolemaic worldview included the idea of the Earth as a sphere. This conception was traced back to Aristotle. In feudal society, the Ptolemaic worldview was valid until the late stages of the Enlightenment and was defended by feudal rulers as an immovable scientific and at the same time religious truth against all questioning. In a scientific worldview, like the geocentric one of Ptolemy, the physical and mathematical knowledge of an epoch about the position of the Earth in the solar system is summarized. It is literally a picture of the Earth in the universe based on the scientific knowledge of an epoch. World pictures can also arise in other sciences, for example in biology. This has blurred the original meaning of worldview as a picture of the Earth in the cosmos. In this book, three main scientific worldviews are discussed: the religious Ptolemaic worldview of feudal society, the heliocentric mechanistic worldview of bourgeois society in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the relativistic or relational worldview that developed in the early 20th century from the research of Albert Einstein. The change from the Ptolemaic to the heliocentric worldview is called the “Copernican Revolution”. The associated “change of the way of thinking” formed the backbone of Kant’s theory of knowledge and science. That is why the upheaval in the sciences at the exit from feudal society is of such central importance.

Overcoming the Ptolemaic Worldview: The Ptolemaic view of the world with the Earth as its center had an eminently practical meaning for seafarers in the Middle Ages: it was successfully used for navigation. The ships (mostly) arrived at their destination. The Ptolemaic picture of the Earth was already based on the spherical shape of the Earth. Its definition of latitudes is even valid today (equator 0°, poles ±90°). The worldview of Ptolemy emerged from the scientific disputes of his time. So it was not a superstition based on religious ideas, but a worldview which as a scientific theory could predict the planetary movements relatively exactly and which had proved itself as a social practice, for example in seafaring. It was appropriate to the state of science at that time and to the practical requirements of seafaring in this sense. The Catholic Church had integrated the epistemology of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and the scientific findings of Ptolemy into the doctrinal edifice of its religion. It reacted with energetic defense to every scientific questioning of this worldview. Therefore Galileo had to abjure and Giordano Bruno to the scaffold. One of the first to question the geocentric worldview at the beginning of the 16th century was the Prussian jurist and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543). Building on the preliminary work of other astronomers, Copernicus theorized in 1509 that the Earth must revolve around the Sun. Copernicus’ work was continued by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and the German philosopher, mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). The natural scientist Galileo also questioned other results of Aristotle’s scientific researches. For example, he had proved that a piece of ice does not float on water because it is flat, but because it is lighter. Moreover, he had determined the specific gravity of air, which went against the prevailing doctrine that air had no weight. Galileo had confirmed the researches of Copernicus, who had already assumed a rotary motion of the Earth. Johannes Kepler was one of the founders of the modern natural sciences. He discovered the laws according to which the planets move around the Sun – Kepler’s laws – and thus proved the heliocentric worldview, i.e. the worldview centered on the Sun. While Copernicus had still assumed that the planets move on circular orbits around the Sun, Kepler discovered that the planets must move on ellipses.

For the everyday mind, it is ‘true’ that the Earth stands still and that the Sun with the whole firmament revolves around it: For Gramsci, the process in which the Ptolemaic worldview was criticized and finally replaced by another scientifically superior worldview is more than an episode in the development of natural sciences. The Ptolemaic worldview was for him not only a religious distorted image of past days, not only arbitrary philosophy of the rulers in feudal times. It marked the limit of human knowledge at that time and was an elementary part of the social practice of those days. However, it was not only accepted in science and secured by religion. This worldview also corresponded in a very direct way to the everyday mind of the people who lived at that time. “For the everyday mind it is ‘true’ that the Earth stands still and the Sun with the whole firmament revolves around it …”¹²⁷ Gramsci points out an important aspect in this context. The scientists Copernicus, and after him Galileo and Kepler, had proved a scientific knowledge that contradicted not only the religious and scientific worldview of the feudal state, but also the sensual experience and thus the everyday mind of the people in feudal society. Gramsci writes about this: “incidentally, the everyday mind falls into the grossest errors in describing this objectivity, in part it is still stuck in the phase of Ptolemaic astronomy, is unable to determine the real cause-effect relationships, etc., consequently claims as ‘objective’ a certain anachronistic ‘subjectivity’ …”¹²⁸ The Ptolemaic worldview thus also corresponded to the sensual subjectivity of people in feudal society and was able to reassure itself in it. Gramsci concludes from this that the state of the sciences and the everyday mind of the people of an epoch can diverge widely, so that even a view that is already firmly established in science and is no longer disputed need in no way coincide with the everyday mind of the people.¹²⁹ He quotes from an essay of 1930 describing the everyday mind at that time: “Mankind is still quite Aristotelian, and general opinion still follows the dualism inherent in Greek-Christian realism. That cognition is a ‘seeing’ rather than a ‘doing,’ that truth is apart from us, existing in and of itself, and not our creation; that ‘nature’ and the ‘world’ are incontestable realities, no one doubts, and one risks being thought mad if one asserts the contrary.”¹³⁰

All science would be superfluous, if the form of appearance and the essence of things coincided directly: The decisive epistemological breakthrough expressed in the replacement of Ptolemy’s geocentric worldview by Copernicus’ heliocentric worldview was that people with their sensual impressions and experiences only perceive the appearances of things, but not their essence, only “see” the false appearance and do not recognize the actual truth. What turns out to be the essence of a thing is not given spontaneously, but is the result of a complex scientific process, the results of which can also mean the painful break with the proclaimed word of God or dearly held traditional beliefs. The sense impressions can be deceptive; they often do not reflect, with reference to the Ptolemaic worldview in no way the real conditions. The questioning of the sensually perceptible appearances, the looking behind these appearances, the penetrating to the essence of the appearances, is at all a characteristic of the modern sciences. Marx wrote: “All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance and the essence of things coincided directly …”¹³¹

The Copernican turn in the sciences and in epistemology: The dispute about the Ptolemaic worldview has been given a name in the history of philosophy. Kant will bring the fundamental insight from this upheaval in one of his main philosophical works – the “Critique of Pure Reason” – precisely to the point: “It is herewith just as with the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, after it did not want to go well with the explanation of the celestial motions, if he assumed, the whole star army turns around the spectator, tried whether it would not succeed better, if he turned the spectator, and on the other hand left the stars in peace”.¹³² With this thought – no longer the stars turn, but the man, the recognizing subject itself turns – Copernicus pulled the ground from under the feet of the sciences of his time and the religious dogma. Only with this fundamental change of the perspective, his calculations about the movement of the heavenly bodies made sense. The appearance – the Sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening – does not show the essence of this movement. The person who observes the Sunrise in the morning – that is, the subject who perceives the phenomena – is in reality on an orbit around the Sun and rotates with the Earth around its axis. The upheaval that accompanied this change of perspective in astronomy and established a fundamentally new methodology in the sciences was later called the “Copernican turn in philosophy.”¹³³ Kant systematized this rational view of the phenomena of the world in his “Critique of Pure Reason.” As a consequence of the Copernican turn, Kant presented an investigation of how human beings think and how these subjective-human forms of thinking produce knowledge. One premise of this investigation was: All sensual impressions, which are to serve the explanation of an appearance, must be examined for their logical validity.

The heliocentric and the mechanistic worldview

The epoch of the Enlightenment, which began with the Renaissance in Italy and the Reformation in Germany and lasted until the French Revolution, i.e. from about 1500 to 1800, is also known as the Age of the Scientific Revolution.¹³⁴ After the astronomers Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, the English physicist Isaac Newton (1642-1726) became one of the most important representatives of the scientific revolution. Newton was born after Kepler died, and when Newton died, Kant was only two years old. With his research results, Newton confirmed the heliocentric view of the world, in which the Earth revolves around the Sun. Newton laid the foundation for classical mechanics in physics and established the particle theory of light. The principles of the theory of motion he devised, as well as his conception of space and time, dominated the natural sciences for more than 200 years until the beginning of the 20th century, when Einstein published his special theory of relativity.¹³⁵

The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principles: A sensational Interpretation of the Enlightenment and the Work of Isaac Newton was delivered by the Soviet physicist and historian of science Boris Hessen (1893-1936) at the II International Congress of the History of Science in London in 1931.¹³⁶ The title of Hessen’s lecture was “The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia.” The title, “The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” referred to Isaac Newton’s magnum opus, called “Principia Mathematica” or simply “Principia,” published in 1687. Gramsci had a volume of the papers presented at this congress in prison.¹³⁷ Boris Hessen’s text on the socioeconomic roots of Newton’s principles will be used below as the basis for an externalist understanding of the scientific revolution.¹³⁸ Kant developed an internalist approach to the upheaval in the sciences. More on this later in the sections on Kant’s epistemology and philosophy of science. In his lecture, Boris Hessen drew a picture of a struggle between the Roman Catholic Church, which represented feudal rule, and the emerging natural sciences as an outpost of bourgeois society. Fundamental to the flourishing of the sciences between 1500 and 1700, he argued, was the ongoing decomposition of the feudal economy by the bourgeois mode of production in the manufactory period. Boris Hesse highlighted the increasing importance of merchant capital, international maritime shipping, and the rapid development of mining and metallurgical industries. New scientific discoveries and technologies based on them gave the emerging manufactory owners and merchants previously unknown opportunities for economic expansion beyond the narrow confines of feudal society.

The role of universities in feudalism: The feudal universities were not teaching and research institutions in the modern sense; they acted as bulwarks against the emerging modern natural sciences. These universities were part of the feudal state structure and thus subordinate to theology. Their task was to teach the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures and Aristotelian logic and to suppress heretical experiments and findings. Even medicine was taught as a course of scholastic philosophy and required a 3-year course in Aristotle’s logic. Fundamental to the operation of universities was the premise that anything not found in the Bible or Aristotle could not exist. Boris Hesse noted a story that may well be considered a very innocuous variant of the church’s defensive reaction. According to the story, a young professor had asked an older scholar to look at the recently discovered spots on the Sun through a telescope. The older scholar replied, “It is useless, my son. I have read Aristotle through twice and have not found anything there about spots in the Sun. There are no spots on the Sun. They are caused either by the imperfections of your telescope or by the defects of your own eyes.”¹³⁹ As a consequence of this defensive struggle, the modern sciences developed largely outside the traditional universities.

Newton as scientist, Protestant and parliamentarian: England took a special role in European development in the 16th and 17th centuries, which was also related to the early separation of the Anglican Church in England from the Catholic Church. This allowed a certain head start in the spread of the scientific revolution. More on this in a moment in the next section. Isaac Newton researched and taught at the London Royal Society, of which he was also president for many years. The Royal Society was a British society of scholars founded in 1660 and an institution under the sign of the Enlightenment insofar as it pursued an anti-scholastic research concept. This research concept was expressed by the motto “Nullius in Verba” (“according to no one’s words”) of the Royal Society. The principle of research was experimentally proving science rather than the proving collection of words from authorized sources. Newton was an English Protestant and a member of the Cambridge Parliament during the period of the “Glorious Revolution” from 1688 to 1690. On the “Glorious Revolution“, see the section immediately following. Newton was an outspoken advocate of religious and scientific freedoms and gave a decisive impetus to the sciences under the sign of the Enlightenment. At the same time, his person and his theories embodied the contradictions of his time. Due to his intensive occupation with alchemy, Isaac Newton was also called the last of the great “Renaissance magicians”.¹⁴⁰ Building on three basic laws of motion, later called Newton’s laws after him, Newton proved again that the Earth must revolve around the Sun. Newton explained the movement of the Earth in the orbit of the Sun by two forces: One, which was directed to the Sun and a second, whose original impulse he attributed to God. Newton’s worldview, his picture of the universe and the forces acting in it still needed the ordering power of God. His premise that the laws of motion should apply on Earth as well as in heaven was in itself a scandal. The Catholic Church sharply attacked him for his research findings. To illustrate this continuing political explosiveness, Boris Hessen quoted the editors of another edition of Newton’s main work in 1760, i.e. 30 years after Newton’s death and during Kant’s lifetime: “In his 3rd book Newton assumes that the Earth is in motion. (…) But we declare for our part that we agree with the explanations of the Pope’s commitment against the movement of the Earth.”¹⁴¹

Newton’s principles: Absolute space, absolute time, atomism and determinism: With his main work the “Principia” (in German: “Mathematische Prinzipien der Naturphilosophie”) of 1687 Newton laid the foundation for a new scientific worldview. Due to its inner content and its effectiveness in the natural sciences, the worldview developed in the “Principia” became the successor of the Ptolemaic worldview. The worldview, which Newton sketched in its first outlines, was characterized by four aspects: First, one and only one absolute three-dimensional space in which everything is; second, one and only one absolute fluid time in which everything is; third, atomism, which explains the properties of any system by the properties of its smallest elements (atoms); and finally, fourth, determinism. Atomism, which goes back to Greek natural science and philosophy, is based on the assumption that the universe consists of indivisible, indestructible atoms that can be distinguished from one another. Mechanical atomism seeks to explain the entire material world from the motion of particles and their interaction with each other. Determinism consists of the view that all natural processes can be explained by natural laws that are not based on probabilities. With complete knowledge of the origin of a system state, all further future states can be calculated. The motion that takes place in a system and its results are then determined by the laws of nature. Attempts to apply this natural philosophy to man and human society will have a lasting impact on the philosophical “flavor” (Gramsci) in the 19th century. The counterposition to this in ethical terms will be formulated by Kant.

The causal principle as the dominant principle of modern research: In Newton’s time, not only in Great Britain but in all of Europe, a natural science emerged that was freed from theology, teleology, and the authority of Aristotle and that thought of all natural events as the movement of bodies through forces. The doctrine of motion, mechanics, becomes the basis of all natural science. Its basic concept is work. A force is necessary to perform work. The force becomes the cause of a mathematically precisely detectable and predictable change in the velocity of a mass. The scientific premise is that real knowledge, that is, the knowledge that is productively useful, is produced by the study of cause-and-effect relationships. With Newton, the causal principle asserted itself as the dominant principle of research in the sciences beyond religious dogma and the supposed certainties of everyday mind.

The importance of the new physics for the development of the bourgeois mode of production: Newton’s work on the mechanical laws of motion, the rotational motion of the Earth, and the force of gravity confirmed the theses of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. The physical and technical fields of research at that time were closely related to the emerging bourgeois mode of production. Of particular importance were seafaring and all problems connected with navigation, such as the position and motion of the planets in the solar system, theories of light and colors in connection with reflecting telescopes, the tides, the laws of free fall and the trajectory of projectiles, the laws of hydrostatics with regard to pumps and channels, and the mechanical problems of simple machines.¹⁴² The theory put forward by Boris Hessen in 1931 asserted a systematic connection between these new discoveries and the way the bourgeoisie advanced its own production in conflict with the feudal powers. The scientific and technical foundations for modern global trade and the manufactures of the bourgeoisie were provided by the new physics beyond traditional teleology. The emerging bourgeoisie was eager to incorporate the new physics into production in the best possible way. In the process, the limits set by the feudal rulers were repeatedly tested and exceeded. From the bourgeois mode of production, which developed slowly over centuries, the scientific revolution drew the means, the instruments, and the institutions for its further research. In the process, the sciences had their own rhythm, which was reflected in the individual scientific breakthroughs of the great scientists. But crucial to the sweeping expansion of the scientific revolution throughout Europe was its productive usefulness to the bourgeois economy. Engels wrote in 1892: “Step by step, however, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, the tremendous upsurge of science developed. Astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology were again pursued. For the development of its industrial production, the bourgeoisie needed a science that investigated the properties of natural bodies and the modes of operation of natural forces. Hitherto, however, science had been only the humble handmaiden of the Church, not allowed to transgress the barriers set by faith – in short; it had been everything but science. Now science rebelled against the church; the bourgeoisie needed science and joined in the rebellion.”¹⁴³

The Catholic Church could not prevent the detachment of science from Bible exegesis: The early bourgeois scientific establishment achieved Enlightenment about the “real” conditions in nature by detaching science from Bible exegesis. The most important instrument for this was the scientific experiment. A new scientific methodology emerged, which challenged the entire scholasticism of the Middle Ages not only at one point, at this or that “scientific” knowledge, but affected the absolute certainties of religious rule in general and thus the religious beliefs of the everyday mind in feudal society. The new methodology prevailed in the scientific research enterprise for immanent epistemological reasons that could be traced back to the causal principle. Inextricably linked to this was the fact that the new physics offered considerable advantages in the generation of social wealth and found in the bourgeoisie a social force that was able to assert itself. The Roman Catholic Church, as the institution that embodied feudal-religious philosophy and whose epistemology – teleology – was struck to the core by the modern natural sciences, was unable to integrate the emerging bourgeois sciences. It proved incapable of making fundamental reforms of itself. The dual rule of pope and emperor countered all challenges to its philosophical doctrinal edifice with repressive defenses. The most visible expression of this strategy was recatholization, which had as its purpose the systematic and violent establishment of the Catholic faith as the only valid confession, and the Inquisition, which accompanied the entire phase of the scientific revolution until the late 18th century.

Newton’s worldview raised new epistemological questions: The decisive line of demarcation between research at feudal universities in the late Middle Ages and the modern bourgeois sciences under the sign of the Enlightenment consisted in the opposition of teleology and causal principle. Newton’s worldview formed a kind of intermediate stage. The sciences took God continuously out of all equations due to the achieved knowledge until the end of the 19th century. In the course of the process that ousted God and his work from the sciences, the philosophers of the Enlightenment began to ask a series of questions. What are these things that people grasp with their senses and yet are described quite differently by the sciences? How can the causal conditions of the origin of things be determined if a creator is omitted as an explanation? How do people think of the things that surround them when the truths of the Bible have become fragile? To summarize: The fundamental question, then, was how to conceive of human reason as distinct from an extra-human divine reason.¹⁴⁴

The mechanistic worldview leads to a transformation of the everyday mind: The heliocentric worldview of Issac Newton was further developed and expanded in the 18th century; it solidified into a new holistic mechanistic worldview in the course of the 19th century. The Ptolemaic worldview, scholasticism, and teleology were successively displaced from dominant positions in European research institutions, in economics, and eventually in law and jurisprudence. The mechanistic conception of nature was reflected in everyday mind in European feudal societies. Causal patterns of explanation spread from the sciences to everyday life. In trade, manufactures, agriculture, medicine, education, and even personal relationships, causal explanations replaced the traditional teleological interpretations. In a book about this transformation, the Austrian social democrat Otto Bauer wrote in 1924: “The people of the feudal world think of the world as the product of a will consciously active above it; the people of the capitalist world think of it as the result of competing individual forces. Thus, the teleological worldview is replaced by the causal worldview.”¹⁴⁵ The mechanistic worldview thus drove the transformation of the teleological everyday mind based on the sciences and entirely practical experience. A new bourgeois everyday mind, shaped by the principles of causality and expediency, emerged. However, Gramsci states in the “Prison Notebooks” that it would be an “Enlightenment error” to assume that a “clear idea” such as the knowledge that the solar system is heliocentrically structured must also quickly establish itself in the everyday mind.¹⁴⁶ Whether and to what extent such a transformation takes place, the manner of this transformation, the selection of the elements that are replaced, can only be determined in the individual historical case. For Gramsci, this phenomenon was part of a “molecular process” that takes place in the consciousness of individuals.

The experimental method as the birth of modern thought: Gramsci defines the sciences in his time as the “study of phenomena and their laws of similarity (regularity), coexistence (coordination), succession (causality).”¹⁴⁷ Thus, he hits the most important aspects of the sciences, which emerged under the sign of the mechanistic worldview. All four aspects of Newtonian physics – space, time, atomism, and determinism – flow together in the principle of causality. The regulating principle of research in the emerging bourgeois world became the search for causes and effects. The means by which this principle was put into practice was experimental science. Gramsci formulates the summary of this upheaval in scientific thought as follows: It was this “revolution, carried into the scientific world in general and also into practical activity by virtue of the imposition of the experimental method, which in fact separates two worlds of history and inaugurates the dissolution of teleology and metaphysics and the birth of modern thought …”¹⁴⁸ For Gramsci, the significance of the birth of modern thought extends far beyond the realm of the sciences: “The scientific ‘experimental experience’ is the first cell of the new labor process, of the new form of active unity between man and nature: the scientist-experimenter is a ‘laborer,’ an industrial and agricultural producer, he is not pure thought: he is also, indeed he is the first example of a man who has taken the process of history out of the position of walking on its head in order to make it walk on its feet.”¹⁴⁹ In defining the modern labor process in terms of an “experimental experience” as a counterposition to the religiously connoted “walking on one’s head,” Gramsci uses a metaphor that was also used by Hegel and by Marx. For Hegel, the French Revolution was the attempt at “Walking on the head” (in German: Auf-dem-Kopf-zu-Gehen). Marx criticized Hegel’s philosophy because in it man “goes upside down,” that is, remains in the abstract concept and ultimately within theology. More on this later.

The determinism and the Laplace demon: The determinism of the mechanistic worldview got a special expression by the French mathematician and astronomer Laplace (1749-1827). Laplace, who was briefly Minister of the Interior under Napoleon in 1799, is regarded as Newton’s consummate scientist and had already assumed the existence of black holes at that time. His “Essay on Probability”, in which he described an all-rationally grasping world spirit, which knows the present with all its details and therefore can grasp the past and future of the world events in all details, received philosophical importance.¹⁵⁰ This “Laplace demon” has been reflected in the idea that if – according to the billiard ball model – the first cause is known, all further effects become exactly calculable. Determinism in the mechanistic worldview thus leads to the fundamental premise that all processes and developments can be accurately predicted scientifically if only the initial conditions and the acting forces are known. This premise will be transferred from the natural sciences to the social sciences and philosophy in the course of the 19th century. With far-reaching consequences, as will be shown in the following chapters.

Gramsci on the philosophy of an epoch and the historical block

Before presenting in the next section the bourgeois revolutions, the emergence of republics, and the new philosophies emerging in this context, it is useful to introduce three conceptualizations of Gramsci using the example of feudal society. These three conceptualizations are the “philosophy of an epoch,” the “everyday mind of an epoch,” and the “historical block.” This is followed by some methodological notes about the historicity of philosophy and an ahistorical approach to the philosophy of a past epoch. These conceptualizations will be enriched and elaborated in the following chapters.

The division into epochs: The feudal society, the Enlightenment and the bourgeois society: European history is divided into 4 ages: Antiquity, the Middle Ages from 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D., the early modern period from 1500 to 1800, and from then on the modern era. Instead of this common, not very meaningful nomenclature, Marx, like many other historians, used the concept epoch. The concept of epoch also shimmers in many variations. Marx distinguished four epochs in history, each of which he linked to economic characteristics: “In broad outline, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production may be called progressive epochs of the economic formation of society.” Between two epochs, for example, between the feudal and the bourgeois epoch, according to Marx, lies in each case an “epoch of upheaval “; it is an “epoch of social revolutions.”¹⁵¹ This division into epochs largely coincides in time with the division into ages. Accordingly, the temporal core area of the feudal epoch can be set at about 1000 years, from 500 to 1500. This is followed by the “revolutionary epoch” from 1500 to 1800, an epoch of transition in which the bourgeois developed within the feudal society. The year 1800, i.e. the time after the American and the French revolutions, was determined with a certain arbitrariness as the beginning of the modern bourgeois epoch. This determination also finds its justification in the fact that the most important great power of feudalism in a historical perspective, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, disintegrated in 1806 after military defeats by the Napoleonic armies. The Holy Roman Empire (German Nation) existed from about 1250 to 1806 and encompassed both the heyday and the period of decline of feudalism and its economic, political, and philosophical foundations.

The epoch of Enlightenment as the epoch of transition from feudal to bourgeois society: For the epoch of the transition from the feudal to the bourgeois epoch, no independent concept exists in literature. The concept of Enlightenment, in its common meaning, encompasses only the intellectual and cultural aspects of this upheaval. In the literature, the beginning of the Enlightenment is often set at 1648, the year in which the Peace of Westphalia was concluded. Gramsci uses the concept of Enlightenment rather sparingly in the “Prison Notebooks,” and when he does, it is only in close connection with Kant and the Enlightenment philosophy of the 18th century. However, he lets the “epoch of social revolutions” begin with the Renaissance in Italy and the Reformation in Germany around 1500. Gramsci views the Renaissance in the result as a first defeat of the urban bourgeoisie in the struggle against feudalism. Crucial, however, for fixing the beginning of the Enlightenment to the period around 1500 is that Gramsci believed that the bourgeois world could not be understood without understanding the historical context of Reformation-Renaissance.¹⁵² Reformation-Renaissance constitutes for Gramsci the first historical beacon of the bourgeois world. When the epoch of Enlightenment is discussed below, it is understood as the epoch of transition from feudal to bourgeois society from 1500 to 1800, including the economic development and liberation struggles that the bourgeoisie waged during this period. The Enlightenment was an “epoch of upheaval”; an “epoch of social revolutions” in which the bourgeoisie waged a sometimes covert, sometimes open struggle against the feudal powers at all levels: politically, culturally, economically, militarily, and philosophically.

The philosophy of an epoch consists of the philosophies, the scientific worldview, the religions, and the everyday mind: Gramsci takes up Marx’s epoch concept from the preface of 1859 in the “Prison Notebooks” and works on a conceptual further development. While feudal and bourgeois societies were firmly established epochs of economic social formations, the Enlightenment was an unstable transitional phase in every respect. Following Marx’s formulations of the “social forms of consciousness,” Gramsci tries to capture a certain section of the “intellectual life process” of an epoch with the concept “philosophy of an epoch.”¹⁵³ Gramsci summarizes those intellectual activities in which the kernels of a conception of the world are expressed in the philosophy of an epoch and understands by it “the ensemble of all individual and tendentious systems plus scientific opinions plus religion plus everyday mind.”¹⁵⁴ Gramsci here creates a broad concept of philosophy that encompasses the relevant intellectual expressions of a conception of the world and life that can be found in an epoch. Gramsci’s definition can be reformulated in the following way to make it more understandable: All relevant conceptions of the world and of life constitute the philosophy of an epoch, and this is composed of four elements: The individual philosophies and philosophical currents, the sciences, the religions and the everyday mind of the people who lived in that epoch. Now it is decisive for an understanding of the philosophy of an epoch that it does not belong to the purely intellectual, ephemeral region of opinion and arbitrariness in the modern liberal sense. From a conception of the world that was historically effective in an epoch, binding, materially effective norms of life and behavior arise that determine the everyday life of all, such as the norms of the Catholic religion from the early Middle Ages into the early modern era.¹⁵⁵ In a historical epoch, a particular conception of the world establishes the state, the economy, the scientific research process, the cultural coexistence of people, and the means of coercion necessary to enforce the norms it sets. Gramsci uses both the concept “worldview” (in German: Weltanschauung) and the concept “conception of the world” (in German: WeltauffasSung) in the “Prison Notebooks.” He clearly prefers the latter, however, because it expresses an active wanting to understand the world rather than just a passive view. For Gramsci, a conception of the world is the general term for philosophies as well as for religions. By philosophies in contrast to religions, Gramsci understands all attempts to justify and systematize one’s intuitions of the world and of life critically and in a non-religious way.¹⁵⁶ Gramsci wrote very precisely about this: “Philosophy is an intellectual order, which neither religion nor everyday mind can be.”¹⁵⁷ For Gramsci, an intellectual order is an order whose concepts have been justified and elaborated in a coherent way. In this respect, philosophy for him is also always a “critique of religion and everyday mind.”¹⁵⁸ This theme is taken up again in the section “Kant and the Critique of Feudal Religion.”

The philosophy of one epoch differs seriously from the philosophy of the following epoch: Gramsci does not conceive the elements of the philosophy of an epoch, for example, the philosophy of feudal society, as unchanging qualities. They are changing historical categories. The philosophies, the scientific worldview, the religions, and the everyday mind of an epoch do not present themselves as a homogeneous unity in each case, but as a wide spectrum of differing views. All four elements form a diversely structured whole of interconnected views that mutually support each other in the heyday of an epoch. The answer to the question of whether one element dominates within this whole depends on the outcome of scientific research work. In the Holy Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic religion in its feudal form had a widely dominant conception of the world that permeated and determined all other areas of social life. A new epoch usually features a new composition of all four elements. Gramsci notes in this regard, “the new philosophy cannot coincide with any system of the past, whatever it may be called.”¹⁵⁹ A comparison of two successive epochs should reveal that all four elements of their philosophy differ from each other in a serious way in a broad sense. Certain archaic ideas of one epoch belong to the past in the succeeding epoch, while the ideas of a future epoch are hardly to be found in the preceding one. Individual philosophies, the scientific worldviews, the religions, and the everyday mind of an epoch do not move in mechanical lockstep. Rather, it follows from Gramsci’s concept of the philosophy of an epoch that the relations between the four elements must be examined in their dynamics and determined in a concrete way.

The everyday mind is the most widespread conception of the world in an epoch: The concept of everyday mind has a prominent role in the “Prison Notebooks”. Gramsci uses it to refer to the thinking of “ordinary” people as opposed to the thinking of state and economic leaders, their philosophers, and their intellectuals.¹⁶⁰ Gramsci uses the concept everyday mind to describe the specific peculiarities of the thinking of people in a particular historical epoch. Gramsci wants to show with this concept that all people live and realize in their everyday life one philosophy, namely the one that prevails in each case. “Everyday mind is the conception of the world widespread among the mass of the people in an epoch.”¹⁶¹ Gramsci notes, “Everyday mind is not a uniform conception, identical in space and time: it is the folklore of philosophy, and like folklore, it presents itself in innumerable forms: its fundamental character is to be a disintegrating, incoherent, inconsistent conception of the world …”¹⁶² The everyday mind is “the philosophy of the non-philosophers.”¹⁶³ Gramsci notes that there is not just the one everyday mind, for each social class, each social stratum produces its own everyday mind, and across all phenomena, it is true that the everyday mind changes. The everyday mind of an epoch is a “historical product and a historical becoming” with specific characteristics in each case. “Every social stratum, every social class has its own everyday mind; it can be determined, in a first approximation, as the most widespread conception of life and of man.”¹⁶⁴ According to Gramsci, a certain anachronistic trait is evident in the everyday mind. The latest philosophical theories, the latest state of science, and the currently prevailing religious dogma are rarely present in the everyday mind. Frequently encountered, on the other hand, are set pieces of previous religions, earlier scientific views, and older philosophies already considered obsolete by professional intellectuals. The everyday mind, according to Gramsci’s generalizing view, is shaped primarily by religions; this is not inconsistent with the distinctly realist and pragmatic views often found in the everyday mind.¹⁶⁵ In the “Prison Notebooks,” Gramsci examines a wide variety of cultural, religious, and political developments in Italy from the Renaissance through the Risorgimento of the mid-19th century to the 1920s. The aim of his investigations is to arrive at as dense and substantial a conception as possible of the everyday mind in Europe and especially in Italy, to explain the continuing transformation to which this everyday mind was subjected.

The everyday mind of the feudal epoch was Ptolemaic, anthropomorphic, and theocentric: The Roman Catholic religion was a comprehensive conception of the world in the feudal epoch, which provided justifications for the feudal state, the division into social classes, a scientific worldview, as well as the norms for the cultural coexistence of many peoples and the everyday life of individuals. The people were in their vast majority simple peasants, illiterate, who rarely left their village; they thought and acted within the framework of the order established by religion. Gramsci notes on the rationality of this order that the Christian religion “was and continues to be, in a certain period and under certain historical conditions, a ‘necessity.’ A necessary form of the will of the masses, a certain form of rationality of the world and of life, which gave the general framework for real practical activity. “¹⁶⁶ That people were born into a certain class (nobles, serf peasants, free citizens, etc.) was considered a necessary component of an order willed by God. According to the creation myth, God was the creator of heaven and Earth. People had to fit into this God-ordained world as an order already created and defined once and for all. The conventions of religion ensured that this world was recognized as such by the faithful in daily recurring rituals.¹⁶⁷ Thinking or even acting against this order entailed secular and religious punishments. In severe cases, exclusion from the religious community, excommunication could be decreed, that is, the denial of eternal life and, instead, punishment with hell. The rule of a godly order did not exclude the existence of oppositional milieus in feudal society. Their existence was expressed in the surveillance of believers, repression against heretical tendencies, and the occasional military suppression of peasant uprisings. The everyday mind considered the Bible to be the revealed word of God and, accordingly, the Earth stood still. People not only believed and thought this; they saw it every day and, along with most scientists and religious dignitaries, knew it from deep conviction. A natural disaster or a good harvest was judged the result of God’s wrath or benevolence. This thinking – in its highest and also its simple folkloric forms – was prevalent in the feudal epoch and in this sense true, valid and necessary for social cohesion. Gramsci, referring to the Age of Enlightenment and the 19th century, notes that the transformation was very gradual, that “the everyday mind still remained Ptolemaic, anthropomorphic and anthropocentric.”¹⁶⁸ Thus, people still thought in pre-scientific forms and reasoning contexts; they gave God human characteristics (anthropomorphism) and understood themselves as the center and goal of divine creation (anthropocentrism).

Feudal Scholasticism as the philosophy of the feudal epoch and the 4 Kantian questions: In the feudal society of Europe, the Catholic religion in the form of Scholasticism was the ruling philosophy; it expressed with all its nuances the highest thinking of the secular and religious rulers in theological forms and at the same time also determined the sciences and everyday mind. This religion determined what and how could be investigated and what could be thought; it also formed the framework for all individually developed philosophies, for thinking outside the official doctrine could quickly lead to accusations of heresy even in the case of only slight deviation. The entire transitional epoch of the Enlightenment, beginning with the Renaissance and the Reformation, must be understood as a breaking of this tight corset.

Driven by the schism of the church from 1517 on, the Roman Catholic religion and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation on the one hand and the sciences, philosophy, and everyday mind on the other diverged. In a variety of ways, these different forms of human thought began to differ from one another; they came into religiously over-formed opposition to one another and eventually into a life-and-death conflict. According to Gramsci, not every religion or even religious community can be characterized as a conception of the world, but the feudal religion of the Holy Roman Empire can.¹⁶⁹ To clarify the character of feudal religion as a conception of the world, Kant’s four questions are to be applied to this religion and answered with it. “What can I know?” The epistemology of the feudal epoch was religious teleology. Based on the research principles of Aristotle and revelation, the sciences of this epoch brought it to the Ptolemaic worldview. To the question “What should I do?” the Catholic moral philosophy answers with the reference to the prescriptions contained in the Bible. The question “What may I hope for?” is interpreted below as a question of historical philosophy. In Catholic doctrine, this question is answered with statements about the themes of sin, forgiveness, and redemption, as well as with references to an approaching Last Judgment on all the living and the dead. Fundamental to the Roman Catholic Church is the answer to the question “What is man?” Man is a creature of God, and according to the Bible, “the world was created by God for Adam.”¹⁷⁰ The mayor premise of feudal religion, which was valid for the highest dignitaries as well as for the everyday mind, was: God is the cause of everything. It will be shown how the social effectiveness of this philosophically significant mayor premise collapsed in the course of the Enlightenment and the accompanying transformation of the everyday mind.

Feudal society as a historical bloc: The epoch of feudalism presents itself as a relative unity of economy, politics, everyday life, and philosophy in the societies of Europe. Gramsci refers to such a unity as a historical bloc. The concept bloc is meant to emphasize the inner unity of “socio-economic content and ethical-political form.”¹⁷¹ In the concept of a historical block, philosophy in a broad sense enters in the following way. “The philosophy of a historical epoch is consequently nothing other than the ‘history’ of that very epoch, (…) History and philosophy are in this sense inseparable, forming a ‘block’.”¹⁷² The historical block formed by European feudalism, its philosophy, and the modes of thought belonging to it are historical categories that are to be understood in their having become one. The unity of history and philosophy is not an arbitrary one; the philosophy of an epoch is not detachable from the economic conditions and the productive forces of a society, from its scientific horizon. Philosophy itself has been created by means of intellectual efforts; it establishes the conditions as necessary as well as the norms of behavior by which people live. In a higher conception of philosophy, this produces a “practical activity and will” that manifests itself “in art, in law, in economic activity, in all individual and collective expressions of life…”¹⁷³ Not every philosophy, but the truly significant ones that shape an epoch, become practical. They then produce, as a necessary dimension of social life, the unity of a historical bloc and cement that unity. The bloc thus becomes a “moral-intellectual bloc.”¹⁷⁴ Once a “moral-intellectual bloc” has formed, it can survive severe economic and political crises and become a stabilizing factor for the entire bloc. For the “moral-intellectual block” the human being, his consciousness, his worldview and thus his life practice is the determining factor. The historical block of an epoch can be formed by one or more societies, nations or states. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was the state center of the feudal bloc in Europe. The decline of feudal society in Europe presents itself as a process of dissolution and decomposition of this historical bloc and thus of the philosophical, economic, and political power positions of the emperor and the pope as well as of the entire nobility. In examining this process, Gramsci traces the thesis that the historical bloc tends to disintegrate when the propelling economic function of the ruling classes has been exhausted.¹⁷⁵

To conceive of philosophy as historicity is a somewhat arduous and difficult mental operation: After these remarks on the philosophy of an epoch and the importance of the Roman Catholic religion in the feudal society of Europe, there is enough material to frame the general understanding with which Gramsci approaches philosophy. To access this understanding, Gramsci requires his readers to undergo a “difficult mental operation”. “To think of a philosophical statement as true in a certain historical period, that is, as the necessary and indissoluble expression of a certain historical action, of a certain practice, but annulled and ‘nullified’ in the subsequent one, but without falling into skepticism and moral and ideological relativism, that is, to conceive of philosophy as historicity, is a somewhat arduous and difficult mental operation.”¹⁷⁶ Certain philosophical propositions must be conceived as historical truths in their epoch, as phenomena of intellectual history without which life in that epoch could not take place, and without which such a society cannot be understood in retrospect. In this respect, the prevailing philosophy must be understood as historicity, as a historical became-being (in German: Geworden-Sein). As mentioned in the first paragraphs of this chapter, the “theocratic conception” of the Middle Ages was a result of long-lasting struggles between pope and emperor. That the Sun revolved around the Earth was a true statement throughout an entire epoch. Likewise, the social relationship between nobles and clergy on the one hand and unfree peasants on the other was a “necessary and indissoluble expression” of a society characterized mainly by simple agriculture. The feudal-religious conception of the world fulfilled a necessary function for practical life and formed a limit for human thought that could not be arbitrarily transgressed either in science or in the shaping of social relations.¹⁷⁷ Moreover, Gramsci points out that “philosophies (…) assume in practice the granite fanatical compactness of ‘popular faith,’ which assumes the same energy as ‘material forces.’”¹⁷⁸ Only when the firm unity of social conditions, the everyday mind, and the conscious life of people in their time is recognized, and it is taken note of the fact that thought, opinion, knowledge, and belief in the everyday mind are precisely not fleeting phenomena, can the rebellions and attempts to break out of feudal society be fully appreciated. The immediately beginning section on the 300-year struggle for religious freedom and the early bourgeois republics aims to show this difficult path.

Philosophical views of the past are not to be condemned as a fever pitch: To underscore his understanding of philosophy, Gramsci distances himself from certain views held within Marxism in the 1920s; he refers to these views as “methodological ahistoricism.”¹⁷⁹ “The way of condemning philosophical conceptions of the past as feverish is not only an anti-historical error, namely, the anachronistic claim that in the past people should have thought as they do today, but it is a veritable remnant of metaphysical conceptions (here: religious conceptions, the author), because it assumes a dogmatic thinking that would be valid at all times and in every country, according to the measure of which the entire past is judged. In reality, ‘anti-historicism’ in the methodological sense is nothing but a metaphysical remnant.”¹⁸⁰ The advocates of “methodological ahistoricism” in Marxism imply that the currently advocated principles of knowledge were valid at all times and everywhere, and thus that a universally valid standard would be available for judging the thought of past times. The core of this anti-historical fallacy is the assumption that people in the past should have thought, or could have thought, in the same way as people at any later time. “The philosophical doctrines of the past are all presented on the level of triviality and of banality, so that it seems to the reader that the whole preceding culture was a phantasmagoria of bacchants (drunken, disinhibitedly partying people, the author) in delirium.”¹⁸¹ “Methodological ahistoricism” degrades everyday mind, views of life, scientific horizons, the prevailing philosophies of earlier days to mere quirks and fantasies.¹⁸² However, these, Gramsci argues, are mere paper victories without any gain in knowledge. That a particular religion or prevailing philosophy loses its validity and becomes obsolete in historical development is not a moral judgment or a judgment from the standpoint of superior objective truth. Gramsci writes: “The historical lapse of the philosophical systems of the past is a concept which does not exclude that they have been historically valid: Their decrepitude is considered from the standpoint of the whole historical development.”¹⁸³

The following section traces the dissolution of the feudal historical bloc in Europe. The emphasis in the account is not on historical developments in Europe, changes in theological dogma, or the changing reasons of the state of late-feudal rulers. Rather, the focus is on the political rebellions of the bourgeoisie and the new philosophies that arose in connection with them.

90 Marx, 1842, The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law, MEW 1, p. 80.

91 Marx, 1842, Communism and the Augsburg „Allgemeine Zeitung,” MEW 1, p. 108

92 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 4, issue 7, § 35, p. 891.

93 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, §49, p. 1461. See also ibid, vol. 5, issue 8, §208, p. 1060.

94 Ibid, vol. 3, issue 5, § 55, p. 621

95 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 2, issue 3, § 87, p. 409. See in general on this subject Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 2, issue 3, § 87, pp. 406 to 409

96 Marx, 1867, The Capital, MEW 23, p. 91

97 Engels, 1850, The German Peasant War, MEW 7, p. 339

98 Marx, The Capital, Vol.3, MEW 25, p.798 “If one considers the land rent in its simple form, the labor rent, where the immediate producer works part of the week with labor tools (plow, cattle, etc.) that de facto or legally belong to him on the land that de facto belongs to him, and works the other days of the week on the landlord’s property, for the landlord, free of charge, then here the matter is still quite clear, rent and surplus value are identical here.”

99 Marx, 1867, The Capital, MEW 23, Twenty-fourth Chapter. The so-called original accumulation

100 In vol. 5, issue 9, § 3, p. 1088, Gramsci describes the still existing frond services in Sicily at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century.

101 Marx, 1867, The Capital, MEW 23, p.92 “A closer example is formed by the rural patriarchal industry of a peasant family, which produces for its own needs grain, cattle, yarn, linen, clothing, etc. These various things face the family as various products of their family labor, but not themselves reciprocally as commodities.”

102 Ibid, Prison Notebooks, vol. 5, issue 8, § 211, p. 1062.

103 Ibid, Prison Notebooks, vol. 2, issue 3, § 77, p. 396 Under the heading: “The clergy, the Church property and related forms of real and personal property.”

104 Ibid, vol. 7, issue12, § 1, p. 1498 similar ibid, vol. 3, issue 4, § 49, p. 514

105 Ibid.

106 Marx, 1859, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, MEW 13, p. 9. It must be noted at this point that Marx, in distinguishing between material upheaval and the spiritual forms, by no means intended the construction of a mechanical-causal connection, but rather established his methodological guide for the investigation.

107 Marx, 1867, The Capital, MEW 23, p. 799

108 Marx/Engels, 1846, The German Ideology, MEW 3, p. 53 “The conditions of life of the individual citizens became, through the opposition to the existing conditions and through the kind of work conditioned by them, at the same time conditions which were common to them all and independent of each individual. The citizens had created these conditions insofar as they had broken away from the feudal association …”

109 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, issue 4, § 49, p. 514 “The feudal lords were also bearers of a special form of capacity: the military one, and precisely from the moment when the aristocracy loses the monopoly of military capacity, the crisis of feudalism begins.” The new firearms spread in the 15th and 16th centuries.

110 Marx, 1867, The Capital, MEW 23, p. 341

111 Ibid, p. 743 and p. 742 “The process which creates the capital relation can therefore be nothing other than the process of divorce of the worker from the ownership of his conditions of labor, a process which on the one hand transforms the social means of life and production into capital, and on the other the immediate producers into wage-laborers.”

112 Ibid, p. 743

113 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, issue 1, § 44, p. 104 (similarly vol. 8, issue 19, § 24, p. 1951)

114 Ibid.

115 Marx, 1867, The Capital, MEW 23, p. 787

116 Ibid, p. 396

117 Marx/Engels, 1848, The Communist Manifesto, MEW 4, p. 464. They continued as follows: The bourgeoisie “has drowned the holy showers of pious rapture, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of bourgeois melancholy in the ice-cold waters of egoistic calculation. It has dissolved personal dignity into exchange value, and in place of the innumerable vested and well-acquired liberties, it has substituted an unconscionable commercial freedom. It has, in a word, put in the place of exploitation cloaked with religious and political illusions, open, brazen, direct, arid exploitation.”

118 Marx, 1857/8, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, MEW 42, p. 402

119 Marx/Engels, 1846, The German Ideology, MEW 3, p. 27

120 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 8, issue 17, § 15, p. 1864 Gramsci notes “that above all in Italy the cultural reaction has been effective. The great publishers wither away in Italy: Venice resists longer, but finally the Italian authors and the Italian works (of Bruno, Campanella, Vanini, Galilei) are printed entirely only in Germany, France, and Holland. With the ecclesiastical reaction, culminating in the condemnation of Galileo, the Renaissance comes to an end in Italy, even among intellectuals.”

121 See, for example, the account by the Social Democrat Karl Vorländer in “History of Philosophy,” vol. 1, Verlag der Dürr’schen Buchhandlung, Leipzig, 1908, Chap. IV. The Heyday of Scholasticism § 65 Fusion of Aristotelianism and Church Doctrine: The Dominicans Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas (Primacy of the Intellect), pp. 258-263.

122 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 11, § 35, p. 1442 Gramsci here quotes the Italian philosopher Croce

123 Engels, 1873-1882, Dialectics of Nature, MEW 20, p. 315f.

124 See Sandkühler, 1991, The reality of knowledge, Edition Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, p. 217f with a treatment of the history of the concept epistemology. According to this, the concept became common only with the writing “On the meaning and task of epistemology” by Zeller, 1862.

125 “According to Hegel’s self-conception, his philosophy presupposes the ‘end of metaphysics’ as an event in the history of philosophy.” (Jaeschke, 2020, Hegel’s Philosophy, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, p. 122)

126 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 11, § 30, p. 1435 See also ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 37, p. 1447

127 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, issue 4, § 41, p. 505

128 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 37, p. 1447

129 An analogy to the current discussion about global warming is as follows: To the statement of the meteorological science that the global warming caused by humans will have catastrophic consequences for the climate, the everyday mind answers with the information: There is no relevant weather change detectable yet.

130 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 4, issue 7, § 1, p. 861 Gramsci quotes a 1930 text by Italian journalist Mario Missiroli. Missiroli was editor of the “Messaggero” during Italian fascism.

131 Marx, The Capital, vol. 3, MEW 25, p. 825

132 Kant, 1781, Critique of Pure Reason, vol. 1, Kant works vol. 3, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1st edition, 1974, p. 25 This passage was taken from the “Preface to the second edition” of 1787.

133 This expression is not found in Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”. See later “Kant and the theory of knowledge”.

134 The concept “scientific revolution” was largely coined by the British historian of science Rupert Hall (1920-2009) through his book The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800. The Formation of the modern scientific Attitude, Longmans Green, London, 1954. See https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Rupert_Hall

135 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Mechanics_and_gravitation

136 Hessen, 1931, The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia. In: Science at the Cross Roads. Papers from The Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology, 1931, ed. N. Bukharin, 3rd edition, Oxon, Routledge, England, 2013, pp. 149-215. Boris Hessen was executed as a Trotskyist in 1936 under Stalin and rehabilitated in 1956. Leading the Soviet delegation in London was Nikolai Bukharin (1988-1938), who was convicted and shot in 1938 as a leader of the Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyists. Both belonged to the same generation as Antonio Gramsci and had participated in the October Revolution.

137 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 4, issue 7 A398/9

138 Boris Hessen’s lecture was groundbreaking in that he was one of the first representatives of an approach in the philosophy of science that placed the socioeconomic conditions of research at the center of its consideration. Alongside the analysis of the intrinsic factors of the research enterprise (the individual efforts of researchers, its choice of methods, etc.) came the study of social influence in terms of the direction, blockage, or extent of support for particular branches of research. In the history of science, Boris Hesse’s approach is referred to as “externalism.” See Loren R. Graham, 1985, The Social-Political Roots of Boris Hessen: Soviet Marxism the History of Science, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Nov. 1985), S. 705-722

139 Hessen, 1931, The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton’s ‘Principia’, S. 164

140 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

141 Hessen, 1931, The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton’s ‘Principia’, p. 165

142 Hessen, 1931, The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s ‘Principia’, S. 162

143 Engels, 1892, Introduction to the English Edition of “The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science,” MEW 22, p. 299

144 In the “Critique of Pure Reason” (vol. 2, pp. 601-603) Kant will try, within the limits of his possibilities, to distinguish a concept of divine reason (intellectus archetypus), which was not that of the Catholic Church, from the concept of human reason (intellectus ectypus). Kant concluded his reflections on a “divine reason” to the effect that it was to be understood only as an “analogy of a causal determination of phenomena as systematically interrelated.”

145 Otto Bauer (1881-1938), 1924, The worldview of capitalism, section “Teleology and Causality,” Makol Verlag, 1971, p. 22.

146 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, issue 1, § 43, p. 93/4

147 Ibid, vol.6, issue 11, § 37, p. 1446

148 Ibid, vol. 3, issue 4, § 47, p. 512 and similarly ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 34, p 1441. Regarding the concept of metaphysics, Gramsci explains on ibid vol. 6, issue 11, § 14, p. 1399) “Metaphysics means (…) any systematic formulation that posits itself as extra-historical (truth), as an abstract-universal outside time and space.”

149 Ibid, vol. 3, issue 4, § 47, p. 512

150 For the “Laplace Demon” see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon

151 Marx, 1859, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, MEW 13, p. 9.

152 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, issue 5, § 147, p. 697 and vol. 4, issue 7, § 43, p. 897

153 Marx, 1859, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, MEW 13, p. 9

154 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 11, § 16, p. 1406. How Gramsci’s concept of culture fits into this definition will be discussed later.

155 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 10, § 17, p. 1268f; vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1378f; vol. 6, issue 11, § 12 and vol. 6, Issue 11, § 13, 1397f

156 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1379

157 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1377

158 Ibid, vol. 5, issue 8, § 204, p. 1056

159 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 16, p. 1406

160 Marx used similar concepts, such as the “religion of everyday life”: “It is the great merit of classical economics to have dissolved this false appearance and deception, this independence and ossification of the various social elements of wealth against each other, this personification of things and objectification of the relations of production, this religion of everyday life …” (Marx, The Capital, MEW 25, pp. 838-839)

161 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 5, issue 8, § 213, p. 1064 similar ibid, vol. 5, issue 8, § 220, p. 1072

162 Ibid, vol. 5, issue 8, § 173, p. 1039

163 Ibid, vol. 5, issue 8, § 173, p. 1039 and ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 13, p. 1393

164 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1377 similar ibid, vol. 5, issue 8, § 204, p. 1056

165 Ibid, vol. 5, issue 8, § 173, p. 1039

166 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1387

167 Ibid, vol. 5, issue 8, § 215, p. 1068

168 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 5, issue 8, § 173, p. 1039 and ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 37, p. 1447. The phrase “anthropocentric” in the Gramsci quote does not really make sense; perhaps the opposite statement – the everyday mind is still theocentric – is intended.

169 This provision is to be understood only as a first approach to the subject. The relationship between religion and philosophy is further elaborated in the section “Kant and the Exclusion of Feudal Religion from Reason.” See also Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 10, § 10, p. 1245/6 and vol. 6, issue 10, § 31, p. 1281.

170 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 4, issue 7, § 47, p. 899

171 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 10, § 13, p. 1251 Gramsci’s concept of the historical bloc is very similar to that of the social formation used by Marx in the 1859 preface. An analysis of this possible connection will be omitted here, since Gramsci himself states that he borrowed the concept from the French philosopher Georges Sorel (1847-1922). On ibid, vol. 6, issue 10, § 40, p. 1309, Gramsci writes: “The concept of the ‘historical bloc’ constructed by Sorel fully captured this unity asserted by the philosophy of praxis.” The editors of the Prison Notebooks, on the other hand, record that “the expression, however, is not to be found literally in his (Sorel’s, the author) writings” (See vol. 3, issue 4, § 15 A223/4). A discussion of Sorel’s reactionary and anti-Semitic positions is omitted here. Sorel renounced Marxism around 1909. His writings later inspired the Italian fascists.

172 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 10, § 17, p. 1269

173 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1380

174 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1383/4

175 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 8, issue 19, § 24, p. 1949

176 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 14, p. 1399 and similarly vol. 5, issue 8, § 174, p. 1040

177 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 18, p. 1412

178 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 62, p. 1474 Gramsci is probably referring here to Marx’s sentence “theory alone also becomes material violence as soon as it seizes the masses.” (Marx, 1844, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, MEW 1, p. 385)

179 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 18, p. 1412

180 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 5, issue 8, § 219, p. 1071.

181 Ibid, vol. 3, issue 4, § 16, p. 476. Alternatively, it should be added, a clever trick by obese, haunch-wielding puffins who slapped their thighs in laughter because they could hoodwink the faithful into indulging in their lavish lifestyles along with the nobles.

182 Ibid, vol. 5, issue 8, § 219, p. 1071 183

183 Ibid.