'The God of Hegel's Post-Kantian idealism' and the undermining of scholarship at the University of Sydney

The Sydney Morning Herald, 05.09.13, Josephine Tovey, ‘Academic ridiculed by Coalition, says Sydney University vice-chancellor’

Photo caption: ‘ “I was personally distressed to see that the work of one of our academics was on a list of topics unfairly criticised today in a Liberal Party press release”; Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence’

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney has told staff he was ''distressed'' to see the work of a renowned philosophy academic from the university unfairly ridiculed by the Coalition as an example of ''ridiculous'' and wasteful government spending.

The Coalition announced on Thursday it would audit and redirect funds from the Australian Research Council (ARC) in an attempt to curb government ''waste'', with opposition treasury spokesman Joe Hockey singling out certain projects during a press conference.

Among the projects highlighted by the Coalition is "The God of Hegel's Post-Kantian idealism", a research project being led by Professor Paul Redding from the university's Department of Philosophy.

In a private email to staff on Thursday afternoon, obtained by Fairfax Media, Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence expressed his alarm at the Coalition's actions. ''I was personally distressed to see that the work of one of our academics was on a list of topics unfairly criticised today in a Liberal Party press release, which has been reported in the media,'' he wrote. ''The academic is globally recognised as amongst the very best in the world in his field.''

''I want to reassure you that we will do all we can to help the federal government understand the importance of university research across all academic disciplines, and the value of the robust peer-review process at the heart of our research funding system.''

The Coalition's media release vowed to ''crack down on Labor's addiction to waste by auditing increasingly ridiculous research grants and reprioritising funding through the Australian Research Council (ARC) to deliver funds to where they're really needed''.

''The Coalition would look to targeting those ridiculous research grants that leave taxpayers scratching their heads wondering just what the government was thinking,'' it said.

''Taxpayer dollars have been wasted on projects that do little, if anything, to advance Australians (sic) research needs.'' Coalition costings released on Thursday showed $103 million would be ''reprioritised'' from the ARC and put towards health spending.

The union representing university staff said the Coalition's actions were an attack on academic freedom.

''Institutional autonomy and academic freedom are the essential characteristics that define what it means to be a university,'' said Jeannie Rea, president of the National Tertiary Education Union.

''To suggest that any research projects which have been through a rigorous, competitive, peer-reviewed application process could in any way be described as 'wasteful' is an insult to the hundreds of senior researchers who give freely of their time to assess the thousands of research applications the ARC receives each year." According to the ARC website, ''funding recommendations are made to the minister responsible for research by the CEO following independent and extensive competitive peer review by Australian and international experts''.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/academic-ridiculed-by-coalition-says-sydney-university-vicechancellor-20130905-2t86l.html

Lenin: What is Philosophical Idealism?

...It is immaterial what these abstractions are called: whether Absolute Idea, Universal Self, World Will, and so on and so forth. These terms distinguish the different varieties of idealism, and such varieties exist in countless numbers. The essence of idealism is that the psychical is taken as the starting point; from it external nature is deduced, and only then is the ordinary human consciousness deduced from nature. Hence, this primary “psychical” always turns out to be a lifeless abstraction concealing a diluted theology. For instance, everybody knows what a human idea is; but an idea independent of man and prior to man, an idea in the abstract, an Absolute Idea, is a theological invention of the idealist Hegel. ... 

...this precisely is idealism; for the psychical, i.e., consciousness, idea, sensation, etc., is taken as the immediate and the physical is deduced from it, substituted for it. The world is the non-ego created by the ego, said Fichte. The world is Absolute Idea, said Hegel. The world is will, said Schopenhauer. The world is concept and idea, says the immanentist Rehmke. Being is consciousness, says the immanentist Schuppe. The physical is a substitution for the psychical, says Bogdanov. One must be blind not to perceive the identical idealist essence under these various verbal cloaks. ...

A philosophy which teaches that physical nature itself is a product, is a philosophy of clericalism pure and simple. And its character is in no wise altered by the fact that Bogdanov himself emphatically repudiates all religion. Dühring was also an atheist; he even proposed to prohibit religion in his “socialitarian” order. Nevertheless, Engels was absolutely right in pointing out that Dühring’s “system” could not be made to hang together without religion.1 The same is true of Bogdanov, with the essential difference that the quoted passage is not a chance inconsistency but the very essence of his “empirio-monism” and of all his “substitution”. If nature is a product, it is obvious that it can be a product only of something that is greater, richer, broader, mightier than nature, of something that exists; for in order to “produce” nature, it must exist independently of nature. That means that something exists outside nature, something which moreover produces nature. In plain language this is called God. The idealist philosophers have always sought to change this latter name, to make it more abstract, more vague and at the same time (for the sake of plausibility) to bring it nearer to the “psychical”, as an “immediate complex”, as the immediately given which requires no proof. Absolute Idea, Universal Spirit, World Will, “general substitution” of the psychical for the physical, are different formulations of one and the same idea. Every man knows, and science investigates, idea, mind, will, the psychical, as a function of the normally operating human brain. To divorce this function from matter organised in a definite way, to convert this function into a universal, general abstraction, to “substitute” this abstraction for the whole of physical nature, this is the raving of philosophical idealism and a mockery of science.

Materialism says that the “socially-organised experience of living beings” is a product of physical nature, a result of a long development of the latter, a development from a state of physical nature when no society, organisation, experience, or living beings existed or could have existed. Idealism says that physical nature is a product of this experience of living beings, and in saying this, idealism is equating (if not subordinating) nature to God. For God is undoubtedly a product of the socially-organised experience of living beings. No matter from what angle you look at it, Bogdanov’s philosophy contains nothing but a reactionary muddle.

V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, 1908, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, pp. 208-211

Notes

1. See F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow, 1975, pp. 361-63

Text, with minor errors, at:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/four5.htm#v14pp72h-226

The Battle for Art: Part 2 - On the Use in Capitalist Ideology of Spiritual Art and Art Education

Schiller was confident that men in the contemporary world could develop new types of harmony and new types of community predicated upon new connections between the powers of the mind. This could not, however, be developed by ignoring the enormous changes which had overtaken society since the decline of the Greek city state. Schiller saw the long-term solution to the problem in terms of a programme of aesthetic education which, by uniting facets of personal experience, would lead eventually to the development of harmonious social experience. Schiller’s typology of human development was, in a sense, therefore, triadic. It presupposed at the beginning of the historical world an undifferentiated society peopled by whole men whose capacities and powers had not been fragmented by the division of labour - such a society reached its zenith with the Greeks and has since declined as a result of the growth of science and the division of labour. These factors had led to the fragmentation of the community and of the person. The third stage of this process, which has yet to arrive in Schiller’s view, was to be induced by aesthetic education, which would procure a regeneration of both the community and the individual personality appropriate to this change in the human condition.

Raymond Plant, Hegel, An Introduction, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1983, 74

Lenin: On the Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge (or One in the Eye for Academic Philosophy)

We have seen that Marx in 1845 and Engels in 1888 and 1892 placed the criterion of practice at the basis of the materialist theory of knowledge.1 “The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question,” says Marx in his second Thesis on Feuerbach. The best refutation of Kantian and Humean agnosticism as well as of other philosophical crotchets (Schrullen) is practice, repeats Engels. “The success of our action proves the conformity (Uebereinstimmung) of our perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived,” he says in reply to the agnostics.2

Compare this with Mach’s argument about the criterion of practice: “In the common way of thinking and speaking appearance, illusion, is usually contrasted with reality. A pencil held in front of us in the air is seen as straight; when we dip it slantwise into water we see it as crooked. In the latter case we say that the pencil appears crooked but in reality it is straight. But what entitles us to declare one fact to be the reality, and to degrade the other to an appearance?... Our expectation, of course, is deceived when we fall into the natural error of expecting what we are accustomed to although the case is unusual. The facts are not to blame for that. In these cases, to speak of appearance may have a practical significance, but not a scientific significance. Similarly, the question which is often asked, whether the world is real or whether we merely dream it, is devoid of all scientific significance. Even the wildest dream is a fact as much as any other” (Analysis of Sensations, pp. 18-19).

It is true that not only is the wildest dream a fact, but also the wildest philosophy. It is impossible to doubt this after an acquaintance with the philosophy of Ernst Mach. As the very latest sophist, he confounds the scientific-historical and psychological investigation of human errors, of every “wild dream” of humanity, such as belief in sprites, hobgoblins, and so forth, with the epistemological distinction between truth and “wildness”. It is as if an economist were to say that Senior’s theory that the whole profit of the capitalist is obtained from the “last hour” of the worker’s labour and Marx’s theory are both facts, and that from the standpoint of science there is no point in asking which theory expresses objective truth and which - the prejudice of the bourgeoisie and the venality of its professors. The tanner Joseph Dietzgen regarded the scientific, i.e., the materialist, theory of knowledge as a “universal weapon against religious belief” (Kleinere philosophische Schriften [Smaller Philosophical Essays], S. 55), but for the professor-in-ordinary Ernst Mach the distinction between the materialist and the subjective-idealist theories of knowledge “is devoid of all scientific significance”! That science is non-partisan in the struggle of materialism against idealism and religion is a favourite idea not only of Mach but of all modern bourgeois professors, who are, as Dietzgen justly expresses it, “graduated flunkeys who stupefy the people by their twisted idealism” (op. cit., S. 53).

And a twisted professorial idealism it is, indeed, when the criterion of practice, which for every one of us distinguishes illusion from reality, is removed by Mach from the realm of science, from the realm of the theory of knowledge. Human practice proves the correctness of the materialist theory of knowledge, said Marx and Engels, who dubbed attempts to solve the fundamental question of epistemology without the aid of practice “scholastic” and “philosophical crotchets”. But for Mach practice is one thing and the theory of knowledge something quite different; they can be placed side by side without making the latter conditional on the former. In his last work, Knowledge and Error, Mach says: “Knowledge is always a biologically useful (förderndes) mental experience” (2nd German edition, p. 115). “Only success can separate knowledge from error” (116). “The concept is a physical working hypothesis” (143). With astonishing naïveté our Russian Machist would-be Marxists regard such phrases of Mach’s as proof that he comes close to Marxism. But Mach here comes just as close to Marxism as Bismarck to the labour movement, or Bishop Eulogius3 to democracy. With Mach such propositions stand side by side with his idealist theory of knowledge and do not determine the choice of one or another definite line of epistemology. Knowledge can be useful biologically, useful in human practice, useful for the preservation of life, for the preservation of the species, only when it reflects objective truth, truth which is independent of man. For the materialist the “success” of human practice proves the correspondence between our ideas and the objective nature of the things we perceive. For the solipsist “success” is everything needed by me in practice, which can be regarded separately from the theory of knowledge. If we include the criterion of practice in the foundation of the theory of knowledge we inevitably arrive at materialism, says the Marxist. Let practice be materialist, says Mach, but theory is another matter.

"In practice," Mach writes in the Analysis of Sensations, "we can as little do without the idea of the self when we perform any act, as we can do without the idea of a body when we grasp at a thing. Physiologically we remain egoists and materialists with the same constancy as we forever see the sun rising again. But theoretically this view cannot be adhered to" (284-85).

Egoism is beside the point here, for egoism is not an epistemological category. The question of the apparent movement of the sun around the earth is also beside the point, for in practice, which serves us as a criterion in the theory of knowledge, we must include also the practice of astronomical observations, discoveries, etc. There remains only Mach’s valuable admission that in their practical life men are entirely and exclusively guided by the materialist theory of knowledge; the attempt to obviate it "theoretically" is characteristic of Mach’s gelehrte scholastic and twisted idealistic endeavours.

How little of a novelty are these efforts to eliminate practice - as something unsusceptible to epistemological treatment - in order to make room for agnosticism and idealism is shown by the following example from the history of German classical philosophy. Between Kant and Fichte stands G. E. Schulze (known in the history of philosophy as Schulze-Aenesidemus). He openly advocates the skeptical trend in philosophy and calls himself a follower of Hume) and of the ancients Pyrrho and Sextus). He emphatically rejects every thing-in-itself and the possibility of objective knowledge, and emphatically insists that we should not go beyond “experience”, beyond sensations, in which connection  he anticipates the following objection from the other camp: “Since the skeptic when he takes part in the affairs of life assumes as indubitable the reality of objective things, behaves accordingly, and thus admits a criterion of truth, his own behaviour is the best and clearest refutation of his skepticism.” (G. E. Schulze, Aenesidemus oder über die Fundamente der von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementarphilosophie [Aenesidemus, or the Fundamentals of the Elementary Philosophy Propounded by Professor Reinhold in Jena], 1792, S. 253.) “Such proofs,” Schulze indignantly retorts, “are only valid for the mob (Pöbel).” For “my skepticism does not concern the requirements of practical life, but remains within the bounds of philosophy” (S. 254, 255).

In similar manner, the subjective idealist Fichte also hopes to find room within the bounds of idealistic philosophy for that “realism which is inevitable (sich aufdringt) for all of us, and even for the most determined idealist, when it comes to action, i.e., the assumption that objects exist quite independently of us and outside us” (Werke, I, 455).

Mach’s recent positivism has not travelled far from Schulze and Fichte! Let us note as a curiosity that on this question too for Bazarov there is no one but Plekhanov - there is no beast stronger than the cat. Bazarov ridicules the “salto vitale philosophy of Plekhanov” (Studies, etc., p. 69), who indeed made the absurd remark that “belief” in the existence of the outer world “is an inevitable salto vitale” [vital leap] of philosophy (Notes on Ludwig Feuerbach, p. III). The word “belief” (taken from Hume), although put in quotation marks, discloses a confusion of terms on Plekhanov’s part. There can be no question about that. But what has Plekhanov got to do with it? Why did not Bazarov take some other materialist, Feuerbach, for instance? Is it only because he does not know him? But ignorance is no argument. Feuerbach also, like Marx and Engels, makes an impermissible - from the point of view of Schulze, Fichte and Mach - “leap” to practice in the fundamental problems of epistemology. Criticising idealism, Feuerbach explains its essential nature by the following striking quotation from Fichte, which superbly demolishes Machism: “ ‘You assume,’ writes Fichte, ‘that things are real, that they exist outside of you, only because you see them, hear them and touch them. But vision, touch and hearing are only sensations.... You perceive, not the objects, but only your sensations,’ ” (Feuerbach, Werke, X. Band, S. 185). To which Feuerbach replies that a human being is not an abstract I, but either a man or woman, and the question whether the world is sensation can be compared to the question: is another human being my sensation, or do our relations in practical life prove the contrary? “The fundamental defect of idealism is precisely that it asks and answers the question of objectivity and subjectivity, of the reality or unreality of the world, only from the standpoint of theory” (ibid., 189). Feuerbach makes the sum-total of human practice the basis of the theory of knowledge. He says that idealists of course also recognise the reality of the I and the Thou in practical life. For the idealists “this point of view is valid only for practical life and not for speculation. But a speculation which contradicts life, which makes the standpoint of death, of a soul separated from the body, the standpoint of truth, is a dead and false speculation” (192). Before we perceive, we breathe; we cannot exist without air, food and drink.

“Does this mean then that we must deal with questions of food and drink when examining the problem of the ideality or reality of the world? - exclaims the indignant idealist. How vile! What an offence against good manners soundly to trounce materialism in the scientific sense from the chair of philosophy and the pulpit of theology, only to practise materialism with all one’s heart and soul in the crudest form at the table d’hôte” (195). And Feuerbach exclaims that to identify subjective sensation with the objective world “is to identify pollution with procreation” (198).

A comment not of the politest order, but it hits the mark in the case of those philosophers who teach that sense-perception is the reality existing outside us.

The standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge. And it inevitably leads to materialism, sweeping aside the endless fabrications of professorial scholasticism. Of course, we must not forget that the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things, either confirm or refute any human idea completely. This criterion too is sufficiently “indefinite” not to allow human knowledge to become “absolute”, but at the same time it is sufficiently definite to wage a ruthless fight on all varieties of idealism and agnosticism. If what our practice confirms is the sole, ultimate and objective truth, then from this must follow the recognition that the only path to this truth is the path of science, which holds the materialist point of view. For instance, Bogdanov is prepared to recognise Marx’s theory of the circulation of money as an objective truth only for “our time”, and calls it “dogmatism” to attribute to this theory a “super-historically objective” truth (Empirio-monism, Bk. III, p. vii). This is again a muddle. The correspondence of this theory to practice cannot be altered by any future circumstances, for the same simple reason that makes it an eternal truth that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821. But inasmuch as the criterion of practice, i.e., the course of development of all capitalist countries in the last few decades, proves only the objective truth of Marx’s whole social and economic theory in general, and not merely of one or other of its parts, formulations, etc., it is clear that to talk here of the “dogmatism” of the Marxists is to make an unpardonable concession to bourgeois economics. The sole conclusion to be drawn from the opinion held by Marxists that Marx’s theory is an objective truth is that by following the path of Marxian theory we shall draw closer and closer to objective truth (without ever exhausting it); but by following any other path we shall arrive at nothing but confusion and lies.

V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, 1908, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, pp. 122-127

Notes

1. Lenin is referring to Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) and to the works by F. Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1888) and the “Special Introduction to the English Edition of 1892” of his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (see K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1969, pp. 13-15; Vol. 3, Moscow, 1970, pp. 335-76, 95-114).

2. See F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1970, pp. 376, 101).

3. Bishop Eulogius - member of the Duma, a monarchist and extreme reactionary.

Text, with minor errors, at:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/two6.htm#v14pp72h-138

The Lucky Country: Part 11 - A Laid-Back, Happy People Help Their Friends

The Sydney Morning Herald, 17.01.14, Michael Bachelard, ‘Asylum seekers say they were tricked by navy’

A group of asylum seekers heading for Christmas Island say they were picked up by the Australian navy and told they would be taken to Christmas Island before being transported back towards Indonesia, and left on a small lifeboat-style vessel close to the Indonesian shore.

Australia has for the first time used one of its new lifeboats to send a group of 56 asylum seekers back to Indonesia in a move that is likely to plunge the bilateral relationship to a new low.

Fairfax Media has interviewed a large group of would-be refugees from Pakistan and Bangladesh who scuttled their wooden vessel six days ago in an attempt to avoid being pushed back to Indonesia.

Instead they were picked up by an Australian Navy vessel, HMAS Stuart, and kept overnight before being transferred to a Customs and Border Protection vessel.

The men said they were tricked into thinking they were going to be taken to Christmas Island. But they were put on a small, bright orange lifeboat-style vessel close to the Indonesian shore, with only enough fuel to return there.

The Indonesian man who captained their wooden asylum boat was put at the helm of the Australian lifeboat to complete the three-hour journey.

The news came as Fairfax Media confirmed that Australia escorted another boat back on December 26, bringing to five the total number of confirmed instances of turn-backs, despite Indonesia’s long-running objections to the practice.

Pakistani asylum seeker, Fazal Qadir, 28, said he had set sail from an island off Java on January 5 bound for Christmas Island with 56 people from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq and Palestine on board, along with an Indonesian captain and one crew member. There was one woman with a 20-month-old toddler.

After about three or four days at sea, he said the group was spotted by an Australian aeroplane flying overhead. The boat was already leaking.

"We were very happy [when we saw them] because we thought when the boat went into the water, then they must receive us,” Mr Qadir said.

All of the people on board already knew of other vessels which had been returned to Indonesia, so were determined to be rescued rather than escorted back. One passenger took a piece of wood and prised open the hole that was already in the hull. Others rocked the boat.

When it foundered, two Australian speedboats reached them and the 12 navy personnel on board told the asylum seekers to cling to the side. The toddler was provided with a life jacket, Mr Qadir said.

About 20 minutes later, two Australian Navy vessels, numbered 153 (HMAS Stuart) and 88 (HMAS Maitland) came into view.

Mr Qadir said the group was loaded onto the Stuart and they steamed towards Christmas Island. The men were told, and believed, they would be taken there. But the ship did not dock at the island. "We were going around Christmas all the time. For two days we were in the navy ship," Mr Qadir said.

The group was photographed and interviewed by navy personnel. They gave their names and were provided with white, numbered wrist bands.

On the second day they were transferred to a Customs and Border Protection boat that they could not identify. "We could see Christmas [Island]," the men said.

For three days they remained on the Customs boat.

During this time the men were desperate to call their families to tell them they were all right.

"We wanted to call our home because our families were scared their children were dead, but the navy and Customs would not give us a phone. They said we could call when we reached Christmas Island but they lied to us."

Finally, the men say, they were tricked once more. Mr Qadir said a small orange boat with a weather canopy was tied to the back of the Customs ship. They were told to board it because it would ferry them to Christmas Island.

At the last minute, though, a Customs officer came on board, tossed the asylum seekers a four-page document in a range of languages, and returned to the large ship, which sailed away.

The document, dated December 2013, reads: "You only have enough fuel to reach land in Indonesia. You do not have enough fuel to continue your voyage to Australia.

"The master of your vessel is now responsible for your safety. You must co-operate with the master and not act in a manner that risks your safety. You are responsible for your own actions. Your vessel is not equipped for a voyage to Australia. It is not safe to continue your voyage to Australia.

"If you continue on your journey, the master and crew of your boat will face harsh penalties, which may include a jail term."

The master was the Indonesian captain who had brought them from Java. They showed the compasses, GPS system and satellite phone that were provided with the orange boat.

The men said they were dropped very close to Indonesia. It took only three hours to reach shore.

They and the captain abandoned the Australian boat and walked into the jungle. They said they walked for five hours, including crossing a flood-swollen river, to find help.

They returned to their former houses in the West Java town of Cisarua late on Wednesday night.

On Wednesday Indonesian foreign minister Marty Natalegawa described the lifeboat option as "a slippery slope".

"It's one thing to turn back the actual boats on which they have been travelling but another issue, when they are transferred onto another boat and facilitated and told to go in that direction,'' he said.

Mr Morrison declined to comment on the asylum seekers' treatment.

A statement from his office said: "For operational security reasons, the government does not confirm or otherwise comment on reports of on-water activities in relation to Operation Sovereign Borders or disclose details of any operations.''

Part Eleven/To be continued…

Further topics of interest in today’s news which reflect the determination of a laid-back and happy people to remain as such:

‘Australia breached Indonesian waters during boat operations’: 

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/scott-morrison-admits-australia-breached-indonesian-waters-during-boat-operations-20140117-30yi1.html

‘Four detainees attempt suicide as others resort to self-harm’:

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/four-detainees-attempt-suicide-as-others-resort-to-selfharm-20140116-30xtt.html

Lenin: On Absolute and Relative Truth

Bogdanov made his discovery in 1906, in the preface to Book III of his Empirio-Monism. “Engels in Anti-Dühring,” writes Bogdanov, “expresses himself almost in the same sense in which I have just described the relativity of truth” (p. v)—that is, in the sense of denying all eternal truth, “denying the unconditional objectivity of all truth whatsoever”. “Engels is wrong in his indecision, in the fact that in spite of his irony he recognises certain ‘eternal truths’, wretched though they may be...” (p. viii). “Only inconsistency can here permit such eclectic reservations as those of Engels...” (p. ix). Let us cite one instance of Bogdanov’s refutation of Engels’ eclecticism. “Napoleon died on May 5, 1821,” says Engels in Anti-Dühring, in the chapter “Eternal Truths”, explaining to Dühring what one who claims to discover eternal truths in the historical sciences has to confine himself to, what “platitudes” (Plattheiten) he has to be satisfied with. Bogdanov answers Engels as follows: “What sort of ‘truth’ is that? And what is there ‘eternal’ about it? The recording of a single correlation, which perhaps even has no longer any real significance for our generation, cannot serve as the starting-point for any activity, and leads nowhere” (p. ix). And on page viii: “Can Plattheiten be called Wahrheiten? Are ‘platitudes’ truths? Truth is a vital organising form of experience; it leads us somewhere in our activity and provides a point of support in the struggle of life.”

It is clear enough from these two quotations that Bogdanov, instead of refuting Engels, makes a mere declamation. If you cannot assert that the proposition “Napoleon died on May 5, 1821,” is false or inexact, you acknowledge that it is true. If you do not assert that it may be refuted in the future, you acknowledge this truth to be eternal. But to call phrases such as truth is a “vital organising form of experience” an answer, is to palm off a mere jumble of words as philosophy. Did the earth have the history which is expounded in geology, or was the earth created in seven days? Is one to be allowed to dodge this question by talking about “vital” (’what does that mean?) truth which “leads” somewhere, and the like? Can it be that knowledge of the history of the earth and of the history of humanity “has no real significance”? This is just turgid nonsense, used by Bogdanov to cover his retreat. For it is a retreat, when, having taken it upon himself to prove that the admission of eternal truths by Engels is eclecticism, he dodges the issue by a mere noise and clash of words and leaves unrefuted the fact that Napoleon did die on May 5, 1821, and that to regard this truth as refutable in the future is absurd.

The example given by Engels is elementary, and anybody without the slightest difficulty can think of scores of similar truths that are eternal and absolute and that only insane people can doubt (as Engels says, citing another example: “Paris is in France”). Why does Engels speak here of “platitudes”? Because he refutes and ridicules the dogmatic, metaphysical materialist Dühring, who was incapable of applying dialectics to the relation between absolute and relative truth. To be a materialist is to acknowledge objective truth, which is revealed to us by our sense-organs. To acknowledge objective truth, i.e., truth not dependent upon man and mankind, is, in one way or another, to recognise absolute truth. And it is this “one way or another” which distinguishes the metaphysical materialist Dühring from the dialectical materialist Engels. On the most complex questions of science in general, and of historical science in particular, Dühring scattered words right and left: ultimate, final and eternal truth. Engels jeered at him. Of course there are eternal truths, Engels said, but it is unwise to use high-sounding words (gewaltige Worte) in connection with simple things. If we want to advance materialism, we must drop this trivial play with the words “eternal truth”; we must learn to put, and answer, the question of the relation between absolute and relative truth dialectically. It was on this issue that the fight between Dühring and Engels was waged thirty years ago. And Bogdanov, who has contrived “not to notice” Engels’ explanation of the problem of absolute and relative truth given in this very same chapter, and who has contrived to accuse Engels of “eclecticism” for his admission of a proposition which is a truism for all forms of materialism, only betrays once again his utter ignorance of both materialism and dialectics.

“Now we come to the question,” Engels writes in Anti-Dühring, in the beginning of the chapter mentioned (Part I, Chap. IX), “whether any, and if so which, products of human knowledge ever can have sovereign validity and an unconditional claim (Anspruch) to truth” (5th German edition, p. 79). And Engels answers the question thus:

“The sovereignty of thought is realised in a series of extremely unsovereignly-thinking human beings; the knowledge which has an unconditional claim to truth is realised in a series of relative errors; neither the one nor the other [i.e., neither absolutely true knowledge, nor sovereign thought] can be fully realised except through an unending duration of human existence.

“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 only as much sovereign as not sovereign, and its capacity for knowledge just as much unlimited as limited. It is sovereign and unlimited in its disposition (Anlage), its vocation, its possibilities and its historical ultimate goal; it is not sovereign and it is limited in its individual realisation and in reality at each particular moment” (p. 81). (Cf. V. Chernov, loc. cit., p. 64, et seq. the Machist Mr. Chernov fully shares the position of Bogdanov, who does not wish to own himself a Machist. The difference is that Bogdanov tries to gloss over his disagreement with Engels, to present it as a casual matter, etc., while Chernov feels that it is a question of a struggle against both materialism and dialectics.)

“It is just the same,” Engels continues, “with eternal truths.”1

This argument is extremely important for the question of relativism, i.e., the principle of the relativity of our knowledge, which is stressed by all Machists. The Machists all insist that they are relativists, but the Russian Machists, while repeating the words of the Germans, are afraid, or unable to propound the question of the relation of relativism to dialectics clearly and straightforwardly. For Bogdanov (as for all the Machists) recognition of the relativity of our knowledge excludes even the least admission of absolute truth. For Engels absolute truth is compounded from relative truths. Bogdanov is a relativist; Engels is a dialectician. Here is another, no less important, argument of Engels from the chapter of Anti-Dühring already quoted:

“Truth and error, like all thought-concepts which move in polar opposites, have absolute validity only in an extremely limited field, as we have just seen, and as even Herr Dühring would realise if he had any acquaintance with the first elements of dialectics, which deal precisely with the inadequacy of all polar opposites. As soon as we apply the antithesis between truth and error outside of that narrow field which has been referred to above it becomes relative and therefore unserviceable for exact scientific modes of expression; and if we attempt to apply it as absolutely valid outside that field we really find ourselves altogether beaten: both poles of the antithesis become transformed into their opposites, truth becomes error and error truth” (p. 86).2 Here follows the example of Boyle’s law (the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to its pressure). The “grain of truth” contained in this law is only absolute truth within certain limits. The law, it appears, is a truth “only approximately.”

Human thought then by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths. Each step in the development of science adds new grains to the sum of absolute truth, but the limits of the truth of each scientific proposition are relative, now expanding, now shrinking with the growth of knowledge. “Absolute truth,” says J. Dietzgen in his Streifzügen, “can be seen, heard, smelt, touched and, of course, also be known; but it is not entirely absorbed (geht nicht auf) in knowledge” (S. 195). “It goes without saying that a picture does not exhaust its object and the artist remains behind his model.... How can a picture ‘coincide’ with its model? Approximately it can” (197). “Hence, we can know nature and her parts only relatively; since even a part, though only a relation of nature, possesses nevertheless the nature of the absolute, the nature of nature as a whole (des Naturganzen an sich) which cannot be exhausted by knowledge.... How, then, do we know that behind the phenomena of nature, behind the relative truths, there is a universal, unlimited, absolute nature which does not reveal itself to man completely?... Whence this knowledge? It is innate; it is given us with consciousness” (198). This last statement is one of the inexactitudes of Dietzgen’s which led Marx, in a letter to Kugelmann, to speak of the confusion in Dietzgen’s views.3 Only by seizing upon such incorrect passages can one speak of a specific philosophy of Dietzgen differing from dialectical materialism. But Dietzgen corrects himself on the same page: “When I say that the consciousness of eternal, absolute truth is innate in us, that it is the one and only a priori knowledge, experience also confirms this innate consciousness” (198).

From all these statements by Engels and Dietzgen it is clearly seen that for dialectical materialism there is no impassable boundary between relative and absolute truth. Bogdanov entirely failed to grasp this if he could write: “It [the world outlook of the old materialism] sets itself up as the absolute objective knowledge of the essence of things [Bogdanov’s italics] and is incompatible with the historically conditional nature of all ideologies” (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, p. iv). From the standpoint of modern materialism, i.e., Marxism, the limits of approximation of our knowledge to objective, absolute truth are historically conditional, but the existence of such truth is unconditional, and the fact that we are approaching nearer to it is also unconditional. The contours of the picture are historically conditional, but the fact that this picture depicts an objectively existing model is unconditional. When and under what circumstances we reached, in our knowledge of the essential nature of things, the discovery of alizarin in coal tar or the discovery of electrons in the atom is historically conditional; but that every such discovery is an advance of “absolutely objective knowledge” is unconditional. In a word, every ideology is historically conditional, but it is unconditionally true that to every scientific ideology (as distinct, for instance, from religious ideology) there corresponds an objective truth, absolute nature. You will say that this distinction between relative and absolute truth is indefinite. And I shall reply: it is sufficiently “indefinite” to prevent science from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term, from becoming something dead, frozen, ossified; but at the same time it is sufficiently “definite” to enable us to dissociate ourselves in the most emphatic and irrevocable manner from fideism and agnosticism, from philosophical idealism and the sophistry of the followers of Hume and Kant. Here is a boundary which you have not noticed, and not having noticed it, you have fallen into the swamp of reactionary philosophy. It is the boundary between dialectical materialism and relativism.

We are relativists, proclaim Mach, Avenarius, Petzoldt. We are relativists, echo Mr. Chernov and certain Russian Machists, would-be Marxists. Yes, Mr. Chernov and Machist comrades - and therein lies your error. For to make relativism the basis of the theory of knowledge is inevitably to condemn oneself either to absolute skepticism, agnosticism and sophistry, or to subjectivism. Relativism as a basis of the theory of knowledge is not only the recognition of the relativity of our knowledge, but also a denial of any objective measure or model existing independently of mankind to which our relative knowledge approximates. From the standpoint of naked relativism one can justify any sophistry; one may regard it as “conditional” whether Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, or not; one may declare the admission, alongside of scientific ideology (“convenient” in one respect), of religious ideology (very “convenient” in another respect) to be a mere “convenience” for man or mankind, and so forth.

Dialectics - as Hegel in his time explained - contains an element of relativism, of negation, of skepticism, but is not reducible to relativism. The materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels certainly does contain relativism, but is not reducible to relativism, that is, it recognises the relativity of all our knowledge, not in the sense of denying objective truth, but in the sense that the limits of approximation of our knowledge to this truth are historically conditional.

Bogdanov writes in italics: “Consistent Marxism does not admit such dogmatism and such static concepts” as eternal truths. (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, p. ix.) This is a muddle. If the world is eternally moving and developing matter (as the Marxists think), reflected by the developing human consciousness, what is there “static” here? The point at issue is not the immutable essence of things, or an immutable consciousness, but the correspondence between the consciousness which reflects nature and the nature which is reflected by consciousness. In connection with this question, and this question alone, the term “dogmatism” has a specific, characteristic philosophical flavour: it is a favourite word used by the idealists and the agnostics against the materialists, as we have already seen in the case of the fairly “old” materialist, Feuerbach. The objections brought against materialism from the standpoint of the celebrated “recent positivism” are just ancient trash.

V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, 1908, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, pp.116-122

Notes

1. See F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow, 1975, p. 103

2. See F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow, 1965, p. 107

3. See the letter of K. Marx to L. Kugelmann of December 5, 1868 (Marx/Engels, Werke, Bd. 32, Berlin, 1965)

The Lucky Country: Part 10 - A Laid-Back, Happy People Help Their Friends

The Sydney Morning Herald, 16.01.14 ‘Shots fired as boat turned back: police’

Australian navy personnel fired warning shots into the air as they turned around an unseaworthy asylum seeker vessel, Indonesian authorities said. The boat was within sight of Christmas Island a week ago when it was returned to Indonesian waters, the authorities said. Police from southern Java said 27 people were aboard and some had to be rescued from the water after the boat was turned around, the police said. Reports of the incident emerged as the Immigration Minister, Scott Morison, said the number of asylum seekers registering with the United Nations in Jakarta had fallen dramatically.

Part Ten/To be continued…