Publication Details

Abstract

According to the authoress’s opinion the Marxist solution of the contemporary problems of man would gain a lot if the often onesided sociological interpretation of human behaviour were completed by the biological one. Marxism as materialism recognizes that man is not only a social being, but also a natural one, and that not even in the society man gives up his biological component, because it is even here that this component determines his activity and behaviour in the basic features. But Marxism has not emphasized this, because continuing in Feuerbach’s fight against mechanistic materialism, which had taken man for a complicated machine or for an animal endowed with reason, it stressed that man is all in all a specificly natural creation and that it is to the society that he can thank for this specificity, as society created him in the process of inner interaction. Marxism disclosed the regularity of social development and the social, economic-social determination of human action of dialectic character. But it is apparently necessary to take into consideration also the biological side of human determination, on a higher level, of course, than the mechanistic materialism did. The contemporary theory of behaviour discloses many, seemingly purely social determinants of human activity as biological-psychological determinants. It is necessary to cope with these problems critically and to take a lesson from what is vital in them. It is also the contemporary Marxist anthropology that requires it, developing successfully in the Soviet Union and in other socialist countries.