The need to explore the context in which Josef Popper's ideas matured obliges us not to neglect to deal with the most famous of the controversies against the whole school of empiriociriticists.First of all, I would like to point out to the reader that the text's approach is based on that of the well-known 'Anti-Dühring', which Engels had written several years earlier. Even in the"Anti-Dühring" there is a fierce (though good-natured) criticism of the way of thinking of a German academic; also there is at the same time the illustration of the most recent discoveries of the natural science of the time in the light of a dialectical materialist interpretation.
But here the similarity stops; since Engels' criticism of Dühring is, as I said earlier, good-natured, he sings his opponent, condemning him to a not very flattering judgment: but Engels is very aware of the developments of science, and the criticism is always timely, even if he himself modestly acknowledged that he was sometimes not up to the task as a scientific communicator. It is therefore that ofthe 'Anti-Dühring' a pleasant and useful reading.
The difference that comes to the fore reading "Materialism and Impiriocriticism" is the tone not at all good-natured;
what we'll see later. Another difference is the method of criticism used by Lenin - he criticizes an entire school of thought all together, every ermpiriocriticist he knows, at the same time: he quotes the sentence of one, below the sentence of another, juxtaxtaxtats the sentence of a third, and so on. In doing so, he has a good game in asading the pieces so that they adhere to the interpretation that he himself has already given a priori. Much more scientific value would have had the book if it had taken the thought of only one of its opponents - let us put it ernst mach- the undisputed head of the school of empiriocriticists, and had placed it to severe criticism.
But that was not , I believe , the purpose of the
book; the goal was to divide between good and bad, here orthodox dialectic materialists and there the iconoclasts of materialism, and to make one appear respectively as the only true Marxists and the other of mere reactionary agents of the bourgeoisie. One of the main objectives is certainly Aleksandr Bogdanov, who we find a Bolshevik member of the central committee of the Russian Social Democratic Party at the time of the failed revolution of 1905 and then expelled from the central committee in 1909, for touting his ideas incompatible with Orthodox Marxism. And of which - regardless of the actual political role - we now generally find its primogeniture accepted in the formulation of the general theory of systems. In 1926, he established the world's first transfusion center in Moscow, and died in 1928, attempting a scientific experiment on himself. From reading Lenin's text, one might think that Bogdanov was sent to Siberia for at least twenty years in a re-education camp. That was not the case, and it is indeed extraordinary how the unacceptable harshness of his words was accompanied by tolerance and personal respect.
In fact, we read "Bogdanov personally is a sworn enemy of every reaction and in particular of the bourgeois reaction. Bogdanov's replacement and the theory of the identity of being social and social consciousness, serve this reaction. This is a sad fact, but it is always a fact." [Lenin, Complete collection of works. V.18. p. 346]
Despite the disagreements, Bogdanov considered the October Revolution to be the greatest social achievement, and it was Lenin who supported his project of the transfusion center in Moscow, in the last years of their lives.
However, it is difficult not to be impressed by the classifier intent of "Materialism and Impiriocriticism"
; While it is not possible to speak of an inquisition - since there was no repression under Lenin - on the other hand it is frightening because there is a perfect glimpse of the possibility for others to use his words to justify far more tragic consequences.
And in any case, it is possible not to recognize that constantly referring to the purity of a doctrine - because otherwise it is barbarism - is, whether we like it or not, a method of
doom.
In the sequel I will not even try to pursue Lenin in his hunt for all the reactionary little bourgeois who lurk inside the empiriocriticists (try who is capable of it); I shall confine myself to cropping his text so as to highlight only one of his attacks on Ernst Mach and to discuss it.
We read a passage of "Materialism and Impiriocriticism":
The 'principle of the economy of thought' and the question of 'unity of the world'.
"The principle of 'lower force consumption', placed by Mach, Avenarius and many others, based on the theory of knowledge,
is... undoubtedly a 'Marxist' tendency in gnoseology".
This is what Bazarov asserts in the Essays (p. 69).
Marx is about "economics." Mach is about "economics." Is it really "indisputable" that there is even a shadow of a bond between them?
In Avenarius' work Philosophy as the thought of the world according to the principle of less consumption of force (1876), this "principle" is applied, as we have seen, in such a way as to declare in the name of the "economy of thought" that sensation is the only thing existing. Causality and "substance" (a term that professors willingly use to "give themselves airs", instead of the more precise and clearer term of matter) are declared "eliminated" in the name of that same economy and in other words you get the feeling without matter, the thought without the brain. [Lenin, p.166]
[...]
Mach, as usual, creates confusion and machists contemplate and adore this confusion!
In Knowledge and Error,in the chapter Examples of researchmethods, we read:
"The 'complete and simpler description' (Kirchhoff, 1874), the 'economic representation of facts' (Mach, 1872), as well as the 'concordance of thought with the being and concordance of thought with each other' (Grassmann, 1844) express the same thought with small variations".
Isn't that a pattern of confusion? [Lenin, p.167]
To deal with the previous step, the difficulty is that Lenin juxtatats all four concepts he opposes: the economic representation of facts, phenomenological physics as "solipsistic psychiasm", criticism of the notion of causality and that of the notion of substance.
The different aspects need to be addressed separately.
Science as an "economic representation of facts" and criticism of absolute space
It is enough to have studied a little mechanics to know that from a certain point of view the whole question of "economic representation" can be connected in a clarifying way to the question of whether it is for example objective truth that the sun turns around the earth, or that it is the earth that turns on itself, generating an apparent motion.
It is clear that we are entitled to assert that the earth here and now is my reference system, and therefore to say that it is the sun that is spinning. But if we do some experiments on motion, we'll find out the existence of forces (called Coriolis forces) that tend to shift the trajectory of a body moving along a meridian, forces that are easily explained by earth's rotation. It is those same forces that cause when water falls down the sink hole, they make it form a vortex counterclockwise (for the northern hemisphere); because the center point of the vortex has a higher linear velocity than the points closest to the pole, and less than those closest to the equator (when you are exactly at the equator, the water descends from the hole without forming any vortex!).
Does that allow us to say that it is the earth that is turning on itself?
The fact is that that is not the point, it depends on our purposes; it is certain that, if we want to keep the centre of our reference system anchored to the Earth's surface, we will have to introduce apparent forces - including coriolis forces - to describe it accurately; it will be our system (called non-inertial)therefore more complex than anchoring the reference system - let's say - in the center of the sun, with the earth circling around itself and the sun. Both ways may give correct results, but the theory will be easier if we put the sun in the center.
Only in this sense can we say that it is the earth that is spinning, but in no way can we say that this is the objective truth - since we are placing the sun still, but the sun falls towards another star, and therefore we would need to consider as a reference system the "fixed stars", which are not fixed.
But to say that it is the earth that turns, is certainly a cheaper representation of the
facts. We therefore see that already with classical mechanics - and classical relativism - we can question the notion of objective truth, unless we shift our attention to functional relationships between the entities considered, which are invariant regardless of the reference system.
They would become an "objective truth", with foundation; Unfortunately, this would not help Galileo in his trial before the inquisitors of his time.
It is not possible to address this issue as Lenin
does: Is it cheaper to "think" that the atom is indivisible or that it is composed of positive and negative electrons? Is it cheaper to "think" that the bourgeois revolution in Russia is directed by liberals or against liberals? You only have to ask the question of to what extent it is absurd and subjective to apply the category of 'thought economy' here. Man's thought is "economic" when it exactly reflects the objective truth, and practice, experiment, industry serve as a criterion for its accuracy. Only by denying objective reality, that is, the very foundations of Marxism, can we seriously talk about the economics of thought in the theory of knowledge! [Lenin, p.166]
Because, as was shown before, there are experiments that can refute a theory that doesn't predict their results, but there are different theories -- simpler and simpler -- that can predict identical results; they may predict any possible identical result, and therefore shall be equivalent; or diverge in some aspect.
To paraphrase Lenin: is it cheaper to think that the sun revolves around the earth or that the earth turns on itself? The answer is that it is equally possible to think of the two things, but that it is cheaper to think that it is the earth that turns on itself, since we will not need to insert coriolis forces as immanent to the reference system. That's it. All masses, all speeds, so all forces are relative. There is no difference between relative and absolute, which we can grasp with the senses. On the other hand, there is no reason why we should admit this difference, since admission does not bring us any theoretical or other advantage. Modern authors who allow themselves to be convinced by the Newtonian argument of the water vessel [ndA: analogous to what I have just shown] to distinguish between absolute motion and relative motion, do not realize that the system of the world is given to us only once, and that Ptlemaic and Copernican theory are only interpretations, and both equally valid. Try to keep the Newtonian vase still, rotate the sky of the stars and check for the absence of centrifugal forces. [Mach, p. 246]
And Lenin actually seems to be making this pointless Herculean effort... Contemporary physics, he says, preserves Newton's idea of absolute time and space, time and space as such. This "there" conception seems absurd, Mach continues, without suspecting, evidently, the existence of materialists and materialistic theory of knowledge. [Lenin, p. 175]
But let's see another step by Mach:
Yet Newton also needs to be criticized. There is no difference between referring the laws of motion to absolute space and enunciated in abstract form, that is, without explicitly indicating the reference system. This last method is practical and does not bring harm, since every mechanical scholar, when dealing with a particular case, first of all looks for a reference system that is usable. Whenever possible, the first process was understood in this way, and precisely therefore the incorrect Newtonian idea of absolute space has produced little harm in such a long time. [Mach, p. 288]
And how angry Lenin is: This naïve remark about the harmlessness of materialistic conception turns against Mach! [...] Such "harmlessness" is synonymous with accuracy. "Harmful" is Mach's idealistic conception of space and time, since, firstly, it opens the door to fideism, and, secondly, induces Mach himself to reactionary conclusions. [Lenin, p.175]
The reader may wonder where fideism is and where reactionary conclusion is: he will not find them in Mach's text, but in Lenin's text, as a necessary logical consequence. It just sounds like a quote from Lupus et agnus...
Lenin's method throughout the book is always the same: being "wrong" the foundations of Mach's theory of knowledge - according to idealistic and fideistic Lenins, actually fruitfully critical -, then the conclusions (and any subsequent action) can only be reactionary.
One would naturally be led to excuse Lenin for not being a physicist - ignorance masked by a huge amount of reading - if it were not for insults: The philosophy of the scientist Mach is for the natural sciences what was for Christ the kiss of the Christian Judas. Likewise, Mach betrays the natural sciences for fideism, essentially siding with philosophical idealism. When Mach denies the materialism of the natural sciences, he performs an act in all reactionary senses: we have seen it with sufficient clarity talking about the struggle of "physical idealists" against the majority of scientists who remain faithful to the old philosophy. We will see this even more clearly by comparing the famous scientist Ernst Haeckel [ndA: a critic of Mach] with the famous (among the small reactionary bourgeois) philosopher Ernst Mach. [Lenin, p.342]
[...]
But Willy [ndA: in turn a critic of Haeckel] cannot but see that one hundred thousand haeckel readers mean a hundred thousand spitting directed at the philosophy of Mach and Avenarius. [...] The "war" against Haeckel has shown that our view corresponds to objective reality, that is, the class nature of modern society and its class ideologies. [Lenin, p.346]
Instead of the hundred thousand spitting,let's take a look at the calmer reflection of a certainly calm man, Albert Einstein, who attributed to Mach, instead of the kiss of Judas, even the authorship of the conceptions that had led him to elaborate the theory of general relativity: The truth is that Mach tried to avoid having to accept as real something that is not observable by striving to replace in mechanics an average acceleration referring to the totality of the masses of the universe instead of an acceleration referring to absolute space. But inertial resistance to the relative acceleration of distant masses presupposes remote action; and since the modern physicist does not believe that he can accept this action at a distance, we return again, if you follow Mach, to the ethere, which must serve as a means for the effects of inertia.
But this conception of the ethere, to which we are led by Mach's way of thinking, differs essentially from the ethere as conceived by Newton, Fresnel, and Lorentz.
Mach's ethere not only affects the behavior of the masses, but is also conditioned in its state by them.
Mach's idea finds its full development in the ethere of the general theory of relativity. According to this theory, the metric qualities of the space-time continuum differ in the environment of different points of spacetime, and are partly conditioned by the matter existing outside the territory under consideration. [from Einstein: Ethere and Relativity - 1920]
It should be noted that Einstein always remembered even in his late teens the debt that he himself attributed to Mach, which he called the incorruptible skeptic.
causality On causality, Mach essentially adhered to Hume's skeptical stance.
Although it is obviously not possible to affirm Mach's authorship also on quantum mechanics, it is curious that in a few years the principle of causality would have been called into question.
Heisenberg, the inventor of the famous uncertainty principle, as an example of a crisis of the causality principle proposes the decay of radio(Physics and Philosophy,p. 92-93), so one can determine the probability of a decay event occurring without it being possible to determine its
cause. But the example is not very fitting, since it is a practical impossibility to know all the necessary variables, without interference by the observer invalidating all the observation. Heisenberg therefore denies the possibility of a law of causality a priori,as Kant wanted.
The literature on the problems of the principle of causality in quantum mechanics is endless and I have no intention of going into the theoretical means to delve into the subject
here. Suffice it to say that the greatest physicists have been in bitter disagreement throughout the twentieth century over whether or not the principle of causality is valid at the quantum level, and moreover all quantum mechanics is based on functions of probability amplitudes.
Let's quote this cute anecdote about the great American physicist Richard Feynman, nobel laureate for inventing quantum electrodynamics: Thirty years ago Dick Feynman told me about his "sum on stories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything he likes," he said. "He goes in any direction at any speed, back or forth in time, however he likes, and then you add the amplitudes and he gives you the wave function." I said, "You're crazy," but he wasn't. [Freeman Dyson]
Considering electrons that go back in time as a normal part in physical calculus - in addition to verifying a maverick mind - indicates that the principle of causality can also be denied (albeit at the microscopic and local level) and yet there is still a science, capable of providing us with transistors, integrated circuits, CD players and computers.
Substance - phenomenological physics and "solipsistic sensism" In the song quoted at the opening, Lenin states [...] and the "substance" (a term that the professors willingly use to "give themselves airs", instead of the more precise and clearer term of matter) are declared "eliminated" in the name of that same economy and in other words you get the feeling without matter, the thought without the brain. [Lenin, p.167]
Instead, we see that Mach does not think at all that the matter does not exist, rather gives an operational definition: Elsewhere [ndA: in theAnalysis of Sensations] I tried to clarify how the constant stability of the connection between different sensations led to the hypothesis of absolute stability, which is called substance. The first and most immediate example of a substance is offered by a moving body detached from its surroundings. If we consider this body to be divisible into homogeneous parts, each of which has a constant complex of properties, we come to the representation of a substantial entity that varies quantitatively and that we call matter. What is taken out of one body, occurs in another: the amount of matter in its entirety is constant. Speaking more precisely, however, we must say that the substantial properties are as many as there are properties of bodies, and that matter has only the function of representing the constant bond of the various properties, one of which is mass. [Mach, p. 217]
Here we see that what Lenin scornfully calls "solipsistic sensism" is actually a knowledge setting on what we can actually know - the sensitive properties of bodies. The existence of an outside world in the senses is never denied (and accusing a physicist of the opposite is truly bizarre).
While distinguishing the elements of sensitive knowledge of matter we arrive at a fairly clear definition - except perhaps for
Lenin? - of the mass:
The amount of matter itself is not a mass, nor is it thermal capacity, combustion heat, nor nutritional value, etc. The "mass" has no thermal meaning, but only dynamic. The way forward is another. The different physical quantities are proportional to each other. Two or three bodies of unit mass together form a body of mass two or three times greater by dynamic definition, and the same additive property applies to thermal capacity by virtue of thermal definition. [Mach, p. 280]
In which one only dissects the matter analytically between its different characteristics in order to be able to treat each of them consistently. We see that this is in fact his criticism of the school concept of substance.
conclusion.
Lenin's text is hard and over the top.
You can't really find (I at least couldn't find it) the bourgeois reaction within Mach's philosophy of knowledge, and that's puzzling.
Mach's ideas seem to have helped to give - at a time when the very foundations of physics seemed to falter - general guidelines on which other physicists were then able to work profitably.
The most interesting recognition in this regard is that of Einstein.
Why so fiercely
then? Lenin's fear seems to be the consideration - all extra-scientific- that criticism of the foundations of the natural sciences could be exploitedby the bourgeois establishment, to deny scientific validity to Marx's theories and thus induce the proletariat into bewilderment;
but with this it was certainly a bad service to Marx himself as a scientist of history and economics, and forced the Marxist left to reject without deepening a large number of new concepts that were being elaborated in that fruitful period. The divergence in political positions between Mach and Lenin is noticeably evident in the footnote in which Lenin talks about Josef Popper: In the same spirit Mach speaks for the bureaucratic socialism of Popper and Menger that guarantees the "freedom of the individual", while the doctrine of the Social Democrats that "disadvantageously differs" from this socialism, threatens "a slavery more general and heavier than that of the monarchical or oligarchic state". See Erkenntus und Irrtum [Knowledge and Error], 2. ed., 1906, pp. 80–81. [Lenin, p. 316]
That finally makes us fully understand the ultimate motivation for lenin writing his book.
And it had nothing to do with the philosophy of knowledge!
We can therefore imagine that Lenin went backwards: wanting to counter his political position vis-à-vis the Bolsheviks,he tried to refute the basis of Mach's thought - his philosophy of knowledge, but, as we have seen, with unsatisfactory results.
If so - as I think - one can imagine that vice versa, affirming the validity of one's philosophy of knowledge, logically involved trusting in a more just and less fallible action.
This is obviously a vain hope; having a solid foundation has never prevented men from doing terrible things equally, or terrible nonsense...
Unfortunately for Lenin, the socialism of the USSR was by no means
bureaucratic; and regarding Popper, we do not know in any case if he ever read his Nährpflicht,which only came out in 1912 (we are still here in 1909), and therefore we do not even know how much he spoke about it in full knowledge of the facts in the aforementioned note. From the point of view of science, the influence of Materialism and empiriocriticism was heavy; in 1959, former Nazi Heisenberg had a good game of making fun of Soviet physicists: "Among the different idealistic tendencies of contemporary physics, the so-called Copenhagen school [ndA: Bohr, Born, Dirac, Heisenberg, Pauli] is the most reactionary. This article is dedicated to exposing the agnostic and idealistic speculations of this school on the fundamental problems of quantum physics", blochinzev writes in his introduction. The harshness of the controversy shows that here we are dealing not only with science but with a confession of faith, with adherence to a certain creed. The purpose is expressed in the end with a quote from Lenin's work: "However wonderful, from the point of view of the human intellect, the transformation of the imponderable ether into ponderable matter, however strange in electrons the lack of anything other than electromagnetic mass, however unexpected the restriction of the mechanical laws of motion to a single sector of natural phenomena and their subordination to the deeper laws of electromagnetic phenomena, and so on... all this is nothing more than a confirmation of dialectical materialism". This last statement seems to make Blochinzev's discussion of the relationship of quantum theory with the philosophy of dialectical materialism less interesting, as it seems to be downgraded to a preordained debate in which the judgment is already known before it begins. [Heisenberg, p.138]
using pseudoscientific topics in search of materialistic ontology; it should be emphasized here that Einstein also criticized the Copenhagen approach from a materialistic point of view, famous his phrase to Born "you believe a God who plays dice, and I in strict laws in a world that exists objectively", but he has never obviously been accused of having reactionary ontology.
And why would he, for that matter? What does quantum mechanics have to do with socialism?
Nothing, really nothing.
In the end of the Cold War, we try not to lose any good ideas due to prejudice. |
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