THE PROBLEM OF MORAL NEEDS

T. A. Titova

(Presented by the scientific seminar of the Department of Philosophy)

The modern world is characterized by unprecedented rates of development. The scientific and technological revolution has spread and is operating with inevitability in all spheres of material human activity. And it is precisely now, more than ever, that we are reflecting on how all these changes are connected with changes in the human being himself, in his spiritual makeup. A developing socialist society creates the prerequisites for an ever fuller satisfaction of the constantly growing material and spiritual needs of the individual; hence the study of the nature of needs, their essence, and the laws of their development in general—and in the communist formation in particular—acquires special urgency, since the education of “a rich human being and rich human needs” is a most important part of communist construction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of needs within the system of all the sciences of man appears extremely urgent and, at the present time, a central problem in the process of the scientific knowledge of man. For human behavior, man’s relation to the external world, and his practical activity are determined precisely by needs—these motivating forces of every human act. “No one can,” wrote Marx, “do anything without at the same time doing it for the sake of some need of his own”¹). There is no doubt that needs are fundamental properties not only of man, but also of animals. Moreover, organic life presupposes reactions directed toward the preservation of the highly stable state of the organism (survival and continuation of the species). “It is precisely this property that serves as the primary basis for the emergence of all other needs. From survivability follows the organism’s striving to select the external conditions most necessary for this, which determines the activity of every living organism in relation to the environment”²). This point of view is expressed by a number of researchers: V. S. Tyukhtin, for example, considers the existence of need-states to be a distinctive feature of life in general³); the same opinion is held by A. N. Leont’ev, who sees the living organism as an “energetically tense structure,” i.e., a structure in a state of need. In the interaction of a living organism with the environment

¹) K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 2, p. 245.
²) S. I. Kovalev, On Man, His Enslavement and Liberation. Politizdat, Moscow, 1970, p. 27.
³) V. S. Tyukhtin, On the Nature of the Image. Moscow, 1963, p. 83.

there occurs a transformation of the energy of external influence into internal, tense, actively motivating states, and only as a result of these states are certain reactions of the living organism performed¹. M. M. Filippov goes further and advances the hypothesis that states analogous (or homologous) to needs are present in all material systems. He believes that there are grounds, following the logic of Lenin’s well-known statement that “all matter possesses a property essentially akin to sensation—the property of reflection”², to suppose that all matter possesses a certain property essentially akin to the state of need, the property of tension. Human needs in this sense are the highest stage in the development of this universal property. But human needs themselves are also a long historical path, lasting exactly as long as human society has existed. “People,” wrote K. Marx, “in fact began by appropriating the objects of the external world as means for satisfying their own needs...”³. And further: “...the first need already satisfied, the action of satisfying it, and the instrument of satisfaction already acquired, lead to new needs, and this production of new needs is the first historical act”⁴.

Our task is to clarify, as far as possible, what specific features connected with the emergence of morality are acquired by needs in the process of the emergence of human society.

Let us begin, first of all, with the definition of needs and their structure. There is no single definition in the literature. To this day one encounters the definition of needs as a person’s requirements for that which provides him with the possibility of existing as an organism and as a personality. Such a definition is given by A. V. Vedenov, D. A. Kiknadze, and A. G. Kovalev. In the opinion of other authors, the concept of requirement characterizes above all an organism or human personality from the standpoint of the external, necessary relations between this organism or personality and the surrounding environment, whereas needs characterize the organism or personality from the standpoint of internal factors. Consequently, there is a difference between requirement and need. “The internal,” in V. N. Myasishchev’s expression, “is that which has passed inward, or the assimilated external”⁵. Need, as an internal factor of human behavior and activity, is a reflection of external, objective relations of requirement. “In short: need is not requirement, but is the reflection of requirement in the inner sphere of man”⁶.

In a pathological state of the brain, the process of reflection is distorted, and objective requirement is not transformed into need. We must pay attention to this essential moment in the emergence of needs—the necessity of awareness of requirement. The degree of awareness is, of course, varied: from the instinctive feeling of hunger to the need to live and work in a communist way, which has been transformed into conviction. Two principal structural features of needs are distinguished: the presence in the subject of a need of an actively motivating state and the orientation of this state toward some object or type

activity. What will interest us is precisely this second feature—the directedness of the active-impelling state. Further, there exists a classification of needs, i.e., their division into material and spiritual (by spheres of being), natural and social (by origin), and public and personal (by affiliation). It is precisely such a classification that was proposed by M. F. Kazakova, but some authors offer their own classification. A. G. Kovalev, while considering spiritual and material needs to be social in origin, nevertheless supplements them with “properly social” needs, directly connected with people’s social activity and their social behavior. But outside social activity there can be no human activity, and, surely, there is no need, among needs already social by their very nature, to single out as a supplement properly social needs. Marx observed that “various needs are internally linked with one another into one natural system”^10). That is, the system of needs must obviously be understood not as a simple aggregate of a person’s impelling states—like easily scattered beads—but as a most complex hierarchy, where each need is conditioned by the presence of others and its development depends on the state and level of development of other needs. But even if, owing to their relativity, we do speak of separate specific needs, we must still take into account both their interconnection and their mutual conditioning; and the principle of historicism must be taken into account by us as the most important principle in our approach to needs. To understand the genesis and development of needs outside the concrete-historical is impossible. The history of the development of needs is a distinctive open book of humanity. Let us try to look into the first pages of this book, using the development of moral needs as an example. Moreover, let us immediately make a reservation. The term “moral needs” is highly conditional, just as there are no independent moral needs. Moral behavior, moral consciousness, moral needs—these are aspects of behavior, consciousness, and needs. Therefore, speaking of moral needs, we shall understand them as the moral aspect, as the directedness of needs.

When, then, do needs with a moral orientation arise? Evidently, together with the emergence of society. As soon as the evolution of primates leads to the emergence not simply of a herd, where instincts alone operate—need (hunger, defense)—and where animals, even the highest, do not bear any conscious obligations, but of a productive collective, then there arise, however primitive, social requirements flowing from the very essence of the primitive productive collective. A herd is a means of adapting animals to the surrounding environment. The evolution of the herd is the evolution of the individual animal. Whereas society, the collective, is an organic whole, having its own evolution, possessing a new quality distinct from the qualities of individual human individuals. Highly developed matter was developing in its highest quality—the social. From that moment there arise also the needs of this new form of the existence of matter—social needs; and the individual person became aware, more or less, not of properly biological needs; his state of need, this external relation to a sphere, changed under the influence of the demands of society. And the very mode of satisfying needs changed. For the reproduction

^10) K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 23, p. 368.

of his life; in order to satisfy need, man assimilates natural material. Only when he began to reproduce by labor the products of satisfaction did he become human. “At the same time, the product of labor, the product of production, became his needs”⁷. From natural, nature-given needs they become natural-labor, production needs. The primitive collective cannot exist without the subordination of its members to it, without their awareness of the necessity of submitting to a social demand. Engels noted that already at an early stage in the development of society there arises the need to bring under a general rule the acts of production, distribution, and exchange that are repeated from day to day. The appropriation of products ceased to be direct, but was mediated by human, essentially social, relations; their moral core appeared. Every action carries a moral charge: good or evil (benefit or harm). One of the most essential functions of morality—the regulative—began to operate. Now a social demand in the form of a moral norm is refracted in the consciousness of the individual and contributes to the formation of the directedness of an active-motivational state, to its coordination and realization (activity) in the process of social activity. Consequently, moral principles arise in behavior, and therefore in needs, only with the emergence of society, which became the determining and primary factor in relation to its members. And everything human and conscious that exists in man is given to him by society in the process of ontogenesis. Science today has established the fact that not a single feature inherent in man (speech, thinking, upright walking) appears by nature, from birth. On the contrary, all of them are formed only as man is included in social life and especially in productive activity. Therefore the moral element in human behavior, and consequently in his needs, must be regarded as a specific, qualitatively new formation that is wholly determined by the character and level of development of society and arises only with the appearance of society itself.

Undoubtedly, the chief place in the development of social needs belongs to economic needs—they are the foundation and basis of the development of society; but moral needs may with full justification be regarded as a specific social formation. In the chain of social needs—tension as a general property of matter, biological tension, need, the needs of higher animals possessing a developed brain and, consequently, a certain degree of awareness of need, i.e., its transformation into a need, and finally, the needs of the highest form of existence—the social—are the highest stage in the development of this property of matter. The appearance of the moral aspect at this highest stage may serve as a definite boundary from which the development of human society begins.

Thus, needs are concrete manifestations and forms of the object-activity essence of man; they are demands upon the external environment, consciously recognized by man, that have taken shape on the basis of historically conditioned social-practical activity aimed at transforming this environment. As actively motivating states, needs have directedness; and since moral relations are one of the coordinates of such directedness, the very fact of the emergence of needs is a fact of the appearance of the individual’s inner freedom to choose such activity, such a way of satisfying need, as will allow the organism (individual and social) not to be destroyed. But

this is incomplete freedom. The environment determines choice. In a person, social needs and the social possibilities for satisfying them determine his needs. The moral regulator of individual needs is a reflection, to varying degrees, of assimilated social requirements. Clarifying the mechanism by which this moral regulator acts within needs is an important and interesting task. Here a host of problems arises, and chief among them is the problem of educating needs: the development of scientific recommendations and practical advice for regulating the formation of needs, both social and personal. The character of the social system determines the character of the development and satisfaction of the needs of the individual.

Progressive people of the capitalist world speak with alarm about contemporary capitalist society as a consumer society, where the very process of capitalist production develops ugly, inhuman needs. In the article “Hippies and Others,” E. Rosenthal writes that observing the fashion for goods that satisfy needs calls to his mind Mark Twain’s aphorism that civilization is the unceasing creation of needs for which no one feels the slightest need.^12 Automobiles, washing machines, refrigerators, and other attributes of long-term use are transformed from ordinary goods into a symbol of social policy that distorts the natural character of consumption. “On the one hand,” E. Rosenthal goes on to write, “conditions are created under which it is considerably easier for working people to acquire an automobile than, say, to educate their children or pay a doctor; on the other hand, such a policy shifts the center of gravity of human values from the sphere of production to the sphere of consumption and thereby crosses out one of the most important social functions of the human being—creative activity. The worker, as Erich Fromm notes, ‘does not at all feel that he is an active agent, a bearer of creative powers and abilities. His goal is to sell himself at a higher price.’ In other words, the human being does not work, but earns. The atrophied sense of the creator has as its logical consequence the hypertrophied sense of the consumer.”^13

The problem of moral needs can have many aspects. Here this means studying the mechanism of consumers and the mechanism of their upbringing—moreover, a directed upbringing, the framework of which is conditioned by the specific circumstances of one or another social group. For example, the problem of educating students cannot fail to be of concern, and it is quite obvious that the specific character of the educational process and of students’ everyday life leaves its imprint on the formation of needs in general, including moral needs. Whereas the policy of the Communist Party is directed not only toward solving the principal task—the growth of the welfare and cultural standard of living of the people—but also toward creating conditions “conducive to the all-round development of the abilities and creative activity of Soviet people, of all working people...”^14 Only in a socialist society, where the human being is free from exploitation, has concern for human needs become the chief concern of our entire society, of our socialist state. It is precisely in socialist society that there are conditions for educating harmonious needs not of an isolated person, but of every individual. That is why the scientific solution of problems connected with the emergence, content, and education of needs becomes an urgent, pressing demand of the present day.

^12 E. Rosenthal, “Hippies and Others,” Novyi mir, 1971, No. 7, p. 191.
^13 Ibid., p. 193.
^14 Materials of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the Party. Publishing House of Political Literature, Moscow, 1971, p. 41.

1. A. N. Leontiev. Problems of the Development of the Psyche. Moscow, 1965, p. 28. ↩

2. V. I. Lenin. Collected Works, vol. 18, p. 19. ↩

3. K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 19, p. 378. ↩

4. K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 3, p. 27. ↩

5. V. N. Myasishchev. “The Problem of Needs in the System of Psychology.” Leningrad State University Notes, no. 244, 1957, p. 6. ↩

6. M. M. Filippov. Author’s Abstract. Tomsk State University Press, 1967, p. 3. ↩

7. Ya. A. Kronrod, Voprosy filosofii, 1967, No. 8. ↩