On Sat, 23 Feb 2002 16:39:54 +0000 "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
writes:
>
> I said: >
> > > I think better of M&EC than these writers do. It's an amateur
> effort
> > > by a
> > > brilliant writer without philosophical training, and it has the
> > > strengths
> > > and weaknesses one would esxpect of such a work. Hilary Putnam
> used
> > > it as a
> > > text in his phil of science class at Harvard in the late 60s,
> back
> > > when he
> > > was a Marxist. The Hegel stuff is deeper, but far lessd
> polished.
> >
> >Although it has long been fashionable for professional philosophers
> >to deride Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and to poke holes in
> >Lenin's arguments,
>
> Well, poking holes in arguments is what philosophers do, after all.
Of course, but some of them have done so with the intent on disparaging Lenin. Of course Lenin never pretended to be professional philosopher and freely admitted his amateur status.
>
> some professional philosophers have
> >expressed admiration for it. I seem to recall reading that Antony
> >Flew (himself a right-winger) has had kind words for it.
> >
>
> Really! Flew _is_ a real right-winger, a pretty serious theist too.
I think you mean that Flew is a pretty serious atheist (unless he has undergone some dramatic conversion that I have not heard about). However, he is certainly very much a right-winger in his politics (although he reportedly did flirt with communism in his youth).
> On the
> other hand, he's a realist, so Lenin's realist arguments would
> appeal to
> him.
Indeed, as I recall, it was Lenin's defense of a physicalist realism that impressed Flew favorably.
>
> All that aside, I have always been puzzled by Lenin's fervent belief
> that
> "empiriocriticism" was a "reactionary" position associated with
> theism and
> bourgeois ideology, and incompatible with socialist or revolutionary
>
> politics. I mean, this is all aside from the merits of his arguments
> against
> the truth of the position. He might be right about realism, and I
> think, ion
> broad terms that he is, and yet it is odd that he thought it
> politically
> important enough to polemicize about it.
Like Engels, Lenin subscribed to the "two camps" view of the history of philosophy. That is the history of philosophy is ultimately a struggle between idealism and materialism (between "gods" and "giants" as Plato phrased it) and that the general tendency has been for idealism to be associated with reactionary classes and strata, and for materialism to be associated with progressive classes. Hence, for Lenin any system of thought that smacked of idealism was at least potentially reactionary in its political implications even if its formulators and leading proponents were themselves progressives. Some scholars, however, have argued that Lenin later at least partially revised his views on this matter after he had begun to study Hegel in depth.
Lenin as we know thought that Mach & Avenarius' empirio-criticism was idealist in tendency depsite the fact that the empiriocritics regarded themselves as being "neutral monists." In terms of their epistemological views, I think that this interpretation can be substantiated. After all A.J. Ayer in his *Language, Truth, and Logic* freely admitted that his logical positivsm (which after all was a sort of updated version of Machism) derived ultimately from Berkeley's subjective idealism. And in his autobiography, *Part of My Life*, Ayer basically conceded that Lenin was correct on this point.
Concerning whether Lenin overemphasized the political implications of philosophical doctrines in his evaluations of them, it is interesting to note that Rudolf Carnap in the Schilpp volume *The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap* claimed that his fellow logical empiricist Otto Neurath did much the same thing. Carnap claimed that Neurath was always very careful to avoid any theories that smacked of idealism on the grounds that this might lend support to supernaturalism, which he saw as being reactionary. Of the Vienna Circle, Neurath besides being the one Marxist, was also a stauch defender of physicalism and realism as opposed to phenomenalism.
>After all, the
> empiriocritics were,
> and most empiricists are, Enlightenment agnostics or atheists; Hume
> of
> course was a famously savage critic of religion (if Berkeley was a
> bishop).
> A number of distinguished empiricists that Lenin would have known
> about were
> socialists if not revolutionaries, e.g., J.S. Mill (not that Lenin
> would
> have had much patience for Mill's relentlessly bourgeois
> socialism--does he
> talk about Mill anywhere? I can't recall that he does). Although
> this was
> after Lenin's time, I have remarked here that the logical
> positivists of the
> Vienna Circle were radicals, revolutionary socialists, and (in
> Neurath's
> case) Marxist, with the exception of Schlick.
Well Neurath as I have already said was a realist and a physicalist rather than a phenomenalist ( he also managed to convert Carnap to that position too) and according to Carnap some of his antipathy towards phenomonalism derived from concerns similar to those of Lenin in regards to empirio-criticism. BTW I recall readin interview of A.J. Ayer by Bryan Magee, where Ayer makes a similar point in regards to Neurath.
>
> And the philosophical materialism has nothing, logically, by way of
> connection with historical materialism. One might well be an
> out-and-out
> phenomenalist and still think that in social explanation the economy
> was
> primary, etc. Gramsci was clearly some sort of antirealist, a
> conventionalist and social constructionist in the tradition of
> Croce, but if
> he wasn't a Marxist revolutionary, no one was.
I think that is true. And indeed Gramsci advanced a consensus theiry of truth that was remarkably similar to that of C.S. Peirce, and given that Gramsci does seem to have been familiar with American pragmatism, perhaps he was influenced by Peirce. Anyway, it is interesting to note that in Italy, Galvano Della Volpe was rather uncomfortable with Gramsci's Croceanism. Indeed, Della Volpe who had started out as an idealist in the manner of Croce & Gentile, seems to have turned against idealism after studying in depth the work of Hume and Carnap. Then as the Second World War proceeded, and an anti-fascist resistance began to materialize in Italy, he began to gravitate towards Marxism.
Jim F.>
> So, any speculation about why Leninw ould have thjought that
> philosophical
> materialism was politically important?
>
> jks
>
>
>
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