Going through old emails, not remembering which I've responded
to. Comments below.
At 04:02 PM 1/11/2006 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
..............
Lenin:
"The Machians contemptuously shrug their shoulders at the antiquated views
of the dogmatists, the materialists, who still cling to the concept
matter, which supposedly has been refuted by recent science and recent
positivism. We shall speak separately of the new theories of physics on the
structure of matter. But it is absolutely unpardonable to confound, as the
Machians do, any particular theory of the structure of matter with the
epistemological category, to confound the problem of the new properties of
new aspects of matter (electrons, for example) with the old problem of the
theory of knowledge, with the problem of the sources of our knowledge, the
existence of objective truth, etc.
It's rather peculiar how the views of Lenin relate to Philipp Frank, who
cites Lenin periodically in his book. Aside from numerous mentions
dispersed throughout the book, there are a couple of essays defending
Mach. Curiously, Lenin and Frank agree on the separation of metaphysics
from the state of the art of science. Frank argues that the two are
constantly confounded, and that Mach's paramount achievement was to
separate them, not establish a new metaphysical positivist position. Frank
affrims a radical separation of the language of science (a neopositivist
conception) from metaphysical claims. He doesn't exactly reject the
latter, as Neurath and Carnap would: Frank is rather on the fence when it
comes to the future role of metaphysical/ontological positions. He makes a
strong case for the value of Mach, but in the end, his finesse of the whole
issue is not completely convincing. Frank is aware of the larger
ideological issues to be sure, but unlike some Marxists, Frank can't
account for the observed phenomenon that positivism and revanchist
theological/metaphysical positions are two sides of the same coin, as with
Duhem.
We are told that Mach discovered the
world-elements: red, green, hard, soft, loud, long, etc. We ask, is a man
given objective reality when he sees something red or feels something hard,
etc., or not? This hoary philosophical query is confused by Mach. If you
hold that it is not given, you, together with Mach, inevitably sink to
subjectivism and agnosticism and deservedly fall into the embrace of the
immanentists, i.e., the philosophical Menshikovs. If you hold that it is
given, a philosophical concept is needed for this objective reality, and
this concept has been worked out long, long ago. This concept is matter.
Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is
given to mall by his sensations, . . .
This I think is a superb insight. I assume "mall" is a typo for "man."
and which is copied, photographed and
reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.
The copy metaphor has caused a big flak, probably because it is taken so
literally.
Therefore, to say that such a concept can become antiquated is childish
talk, a senseless repetition of the arguments of fashionable reactionary
philosophy. Could the struggle between materialism and idealism, the
struggle between the tendencies or lines of Plato and Democritus in
philosophy, the struggle between religion and science, the denial of
objective truth and its assertion, the struggle between the adherents of
supersensible knowledge and its adversaries have become antiquated during
the two thousand years of the development of philosophy?
Obviously not. The neopositivists tried to outflank this struggle
linguistically, but could not succeed.
Acceptance or rejection of the concept matter is a question of the
confidence man places in the evidence of his sense-organs, a question of the
source of our knowledge, a question which has been asked and debated from
the very inception of philosophy, which may be disguised in a thousand
different garbs by professorial clowns, but which can no more become
antiquated than the question whether the source of human knowledge is sight
and touch, healing and smell. To regard our sensations as images of the
external world, to recognise objective truth, to hold the materialist theory
of knowledgethese are all one and the same thing. To illustrate this, I
shall only quote from Feuerbach and from two textbooks of philosophy, in
order that the reader may judge how elementary this question is.
How banal, wrote Feuerbach, to deny that sensation is the evangel, the
gospel (Verkündung) of an objective saviour.[Feuerbach, Sämtliche Werke, X.
Band, 1866, S. 194-95.] A strange, a preposterous terminology, as you see,
but a perfectly clear philosophical line: sensation reveals objective
truth to man. My sensation is subjective, but its foundation [or
groundGrund] is objective (S. 195). Compare this with the quotation given
above where Feuerbach says that materialism starts from the perceptual world
as an ultimate (ausgemachte) objective truth.
Sensationalism, we read in Francks dictionary of philosophy,[Dictionnaire
des sciences philosophiques [Dictionary of the Philosophical Sciences],
Paris, 1875.] is a doctrine which deduces all our ideas from the experience
of sense-organs, reducing all knowledge to sensations. There is subjective
sensationalism (scepticism and Berkeleianism), moral sensationalism
(Epicureanism),[2]
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/two4.htm#fwV14E049>
and objective sensationalism. Objective sensationalism is nothing but
materialism, for matter or bodies are, in the opinion of the materialists,
the only objects that can affect our senses (atteindre nos sens).
If sensationalism, says Schwegler in his history of philosophy,[Dr. Albert
Schwegler, Geschichte der Philosophie im Umriss [Outline History of
Philosophy], 15-te Aufl., S. 194.] asserted that truth or being can be
apprehended exclusively by means of the senses, one had only [Schwegler is
speaking of philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century in France] to
formulate this proposition objectively and one had the thesis of
materialism: only the perceptual exists; there is no other being save
material being.
These elementary truths, which have managed to find their way even into the
textbooks, have been forgotten by our Machians.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/two4.htm
These are all good points. If you read Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks
(CW, vol. 38), not limiting yourself to the famed conspectus on Hegel, you
will see how much of the philosophy of science of his time Lenin reviewed,
hitting on its underlying dynamics.
On another note, reviewing Frank, it seems that something went awry in
reconciling the views of Frank and of materialism. This has, I think, to
do with the limitations of the time--the 1940s--both of the LPs and of
Stalinist diamat.
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