Sovereignty and Non-Sovereignty of Thinking

A pair of categories that reveals the contradictory relation of human capacity for thinking. Thinking here is not the thinking of a single person, but “it exists only as the individual thinking of countless billions of people in the past, present and future.” Human thinking, by its nature, faculties and possibilities, is able to know the infinitely developing material world, which is the sovereignty of thinking, that is, the infinity and absoluteness of thinking. However, each individual, and even each generation, is limited by the extent of the disclosure of objective things and their essence, the level of socio-historical practice (production, science and technology, class struggle), subjective conditions (personal experience, educational attainment, ideological standpoint, viewpoint and method), and the finitude of life, and so on, their thinking is non-sovereign, that is, limited and relative. Man’s capacity for knowledge and his capacity for thinking are a unity of the opposites of sovereignty and non-sovereignty, of infinity and finitude. Engels pointed out: “Here once again we find the same contradiction as we found above, between the character of human thought, necessarily conceived as absolute, and its reality in individual human beings all of whom think only limitedly. This is a contradiction which can be resolved only in the course of infinite progress, in what is — at least practically for us — an endless succession of generations of mankind. In this sense human thought is just as much sovereign as not sovereign, and its capacity for knowledge just as much unlimited as limited.” The capacity for knowledge and for thinking are a unity of opposites of sovereignty and non-sovereignty, infinity and finitude, meaning that the truth, as a result of the correct knowledge and thinking, must also be a unity of opposites of the absolute and the relative.