Материализм курильщика опиума.

[sov0k]

Третьего дня ознакомился с полемикой А. Богданова против В. Ленина.

Испытал чувство глубокого удовлетворения и констатирую, что А. Богданов был прав, а В. Ленин был лев - чудовищно (хотя, возможно, и "добросовестно") заблуждался.

Причина этого факта заключается в том, что Богданов был по образованию биологом и врачом, т. е. имел дело с реальным миром, а Ленин - юристом. Юриспруденция же есть "плоть от плоти" и "чистой воды" религия, господство которой, между прочим, пришло на смену монотеизму - в связи со сменой экономической формации с феодальной на капиталистическую. Поэтому, совершенно неудивительно, что, несмотря на весь свой достаточно воинствующий атеизм и антиклерикализм, Ленин являлся, в конечном счёте, носителем религизного сознания, которое, когда речь заходила о теории и философии, действительно побеждало в нём нечаевский прагматизм профессионального революционера.

С одной стороны, это, конечно, прекрасно, что Ленин был таким фанатиком, и его религиозное отношение к марксизму, наряду с местью за брата (по иронии - "естественника"), сыграло, по всей видимости, не последнюю роль в успехе большевистской революции в России. Однако, с другой стороны, оно же - религизное сознание Ленина - как это озвучил один исторически ничтожный фигляр, и "заложило атомную бомбу под фундамент Советского Союза". Такой вот парадокс.

Как бы это ни было прискорбно, но именно "гениальная" работа Ленина "Материализм и эмпириокритицизм" стала значительной долей критической массы заряда этой "атомной бомбы". Именно она цитировалась и использовалась всеми "попами марксистского прихода" в их крестовом походе против всего того, во имя чего этот их крестовый поход провозглашался, т. е. против объективного научного знания. И если генетика, кибернетика и "эйнштейнианство" ещё кое-как, с большим или меньшим успехом, окольными путями и с человеческими жертвами пробивали себе дорогу к неокрепшим умам заинтересованных советских граждан, становясь в этих умах - не по свой вине! - противниками и отрицателями "реального социализма", то собственно "марксистско-ленинская философия" выродилась в пустое, трухлявое словоблудие и речекряк, которыми (что самое важное) приправлялись прямые заимствования из новейших буржуазных, т. е. капиталистических, экономических теорий - для придания им внешнего вида "развития марксистско-ленинской политэкономии". Т. е., попросту говоря, именно эта книжка послужила "философским" (а на самом деле - абсолютно религиозным) основанием и предпосылкой для всех маскировачных мероприятий в отношении реставрации капитализма в СССР, осуществлённой в 1960-х гг.

Короче, возвращаясь к полемике Богданова с Лениным, именно на этом примере отчётливо видно различие религиозного сознания и научного мировоззрения, так как Ленин и Богданов (с подачи оппонента) ссылаются на одни и те же цитаты, в частности, Ф. Энгельса и трактуют их прямо противоположным образом. Но достаточно лишь взять их в более обширном контексте оригинала, как становится понятным, на чьей стороне - Ленина или Богданова - абсолютная истина (хе-хе!) соответствия сути и содержанию цитат Энгельса, и кто из них двоих оказывается в роли херра Дюринга -

Is human thought sovereign? Before we can answer yes or no we must first enquire: what is human thought? Is it the thought of the individual man? No. But it exists only as the individual thought of many milliards of past, present and future men. If, then, I say that the total thought of all these human beings, including the future ones, which is embraced in my idea, is sovereign, able to know the world as it exists, if only mankind lasts long enough and in so far as no limits are imposed on its knowledge by its perceptive organs or the objects to be known, then I am saying something which is pretty banal and, in addition, pretty barren. For the most valuable result from it would be that it should make us extremely distrustful of our present knowledge, inasmuch as in all probability we are just about at the beginning of human history, and the generations which will put us right are likely to be far more numerous than those whose knowledge we — often enough with a considerable degree of contempt — have the opportunity to correct.

Herr Duhring himself proclaims it to be a necessity that consciousness, and therefore also thought and knowledge, can become manifest only in a series of individual beings. We can only ascribe sovereignty to the thought of each of these individuals in so far as we are not aware of any power which would be able to impose any idea forcibly on him, when he is of sound mind and wide awake. But as for the sovereign validity of the knowledge obtained by each individual thought, we all know that there can be no talk of such a thing, and that all previous experience shows that without exception such knowledge always contains much more that is capable of being improved upon than that which cannot be improved upon, or is correct.

In other words, 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 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 just 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, 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 any particular moment.

It is just the same with eternal truths. If mankind ever reached the stage at which it should work only with eternal truths, with results of thought which possess sovereign validity and an unconditional claim to truth, it would then have reached the point where the infinity of the intellectual world both in its actuality and in its potentiality had been exhausted, and thus the famous miracle of the counted uncountable would have been performed.

But are there any truths which are so securely based that any doubt of them seems to us to be tantamount to insanity? That twice two makes four, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, that Paris is in France, that a man who gets no food dies of hunger, and so forth? Are there then nevertheless eternal truths, final and ultimate truths {D. Ph. 2}?

Certainly there are. We can divide the whole realm of knowledge in the traditional way into three great departments. The first includes all sciences that deal with inanimate nature and are to a greater or lesser degree susceptible of mathematical treatment: mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, physics, chemistry. If it gives anyone any pleasure to use mighty words for very simple things, it can be asserted that certain results obtained by these sciences are eternal truths, final and ultimate truths; for which reason these sciences are known as the exact sciences. But very far from all their results have this validity. With the introduction of variable magnitudes and the extension of their variability to the infinitely small and infinitely large, mathematics, usually so strictly ethical, fell from grace; it ate of the tree of knowledge, which opened up to it a career of most colossal achievements, but at the same time a path of error. The virgin state of absolute validity and irrefutable proof of everything mathematical was gone for ever; the realm of controversy was inaugurated, and we have reached the point where most people differentiate and integrate not because they understand what they are doing but from pure faith, because up to now it has always come out right. Things are even worse with astronomy and mechanics, and in physics and chemistry we are swamped by hypotheses as if attacked by a swarm of bees. And it must of necessity be so. In physics we are dealing with the motion of molecules, in chemistry with the formation of molecules out of atoms, and if the interference of light waves is not a myth, we have absolutely no prospect of ever seeing these interesting objects with our own eyes. As time goes on, final and ultimate truths become remarkably rare in this field.

We are even worse off in geology which, by its nature, has to deal chiefly with processes which took place not only in our absence but in the absence of any human being whatever. The gleaning here of final and ultimate truths is therefore a very troublesome business, and the crop is extremely scanty.

The second department of science is the one which covers the investigation of living organisms. In this field there is such a multiplicity of interrelationships and causalities that not only does the solution of each question give rise to a host of other questions, but each separate problem can in most cases only be solved piecemeal, through a series of investigations which often require centuries; and besides, the need for a systematic presentation of interconnections makes it necessary again and again to surround the final and ultimate truths with a luxuriant growth of hypotheses. What a long series of intermediaries from Galen to Malpighi was necessary for correctly establishing such a simple matter as the circulation of the blood in mammals, how slight is our knowledge of the origin of blood corpuscles, and how numerous are the missing links even today, for example, to be able to bring the symptoms of a disease into some rational relationship with its cause! And often enough discoveries, such as that of the cell, are made which compel us to revise completely all formerly established final and ultimate truths in the realm of biology, and to put whole piles of them on the scrap-heap once and for all. Anyone who wants to establish really genuine and immutable truths here will therefore have to be content with such platitudes as: all men are mortal, all female mammals have lacteal glands, and the like; he will not even be able to assert that the higher animals digest with their stomachs and intestines and not with their heads, for the nervous activity, which is centralised in the head, is indispensable to digestion.

But eternal truths are in an even worse plight in the third, the historical, group of sciences, which study in their historical sequence and in their present resultant state the conditions of human life, social relationships, forms of law and government, with their ideal superstructure in the shape of philosophy, religion, art, etc. In organic nature we are at least dealing with a succession of processes which, so far as our immediate observation is concerned, recur with fair regularity within very wide limits. Organic species have on the whole remained unchanged since the time of Aristotle. In social history, however, the repetition of conditions is the exception and not the rule, once we pass beyond the primitive state of man, the so-called Stone Age; and when such repetitions occur, they never arise under exactly similar circumstances. Such, for example, is the existence of an original common ownership of the land among all civilised peoples, or the way it was dissolved. In the sphere of human history our knowledge is therefore even more backward than in the realm of biology. Furthermore, when by way of exception the inner connection between the social and political forms of existence in any epoch comes to be known, this as a rule occurs only when these forms have already by half outlived themselves and are nearing extinction. Therefore, knowledge is here essentially relative, inasmuch as it is limited to the investigation of interconnections and consequences of certain social and state forms which exist only in a particular epoch and among particular peoples and are by their very nature transitory. Anyone therefore who here sets out to hunt down final and ultimate truths, genuine, absolutely immutable truths, will bring home but little, apart from platitudes and commonplaces of the sorriest kind — for example, that, generally speaking, men cannot live except by labour; that up to the present they for the most part have been divided into rulers and ruled; that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, and so on.

Данная формулировка про Наполеона, как пример "абсолютной истины", с точки зрения человека мигрировавшего с территории, на которой в тот момент "абсолютной истиной" cчиталась кончина Наполеона на 12 календарных чисел раньше - это, конечно, вообще нонсенс, да...

Now it is a remarkable thing that it is precisely in this sphere that we most frequently encounter truths which claim to be eternal, final and ultimate and all the rest of it. That twice two makes four, that birds have beaks, and similar statements, are proclaimed as eternal truths only by those who aim at deducing, from the existence of eternal truths in general, the conclusion that there are also eternal truths in the sphere of human history — eternal morality, eternal justice, and so on — which claim a validity and scope similar to those of the insights and applications of mathematics. And then we can confidently rely on this same friend of humanity taking the first opportunity to assure us that all previous fabricators of eternal truths have been to a greater or lesser extent asses and charlatans, that they all fell into error and made mistakes; but that their error and their fallibility are in accordance with nature’s laws, and prove the existence of truth and accuracy precisely in his case; and that he, the prophet who has now arisen, has in his bag, all ready-made, final and ultimate truth, eternal morality and eternal justice. This has all happened so many hundreds and thousands of times that we can only feel astonished that there should still be people credulous enough to believe this, not of others, oh no! but of themselves. Nevertheless we have here before us at least one more such prophet, who also, quite in the accustomed way, flies into highly moral indignation when other people deny that any individual whatsoever is in a position to deliver the final and ultimate truth. Such a denial, or indeed mere doubt of it, is weakness, hopeless confusion, nothingness, mordant scepticism, worse than pure nihilism, utter chaos and other such pleasantries. As with all prophets, instead of critical and scientific examination and judgment one encounters moral condemnation out of hand.

We might have made mention above also of the sciences which investigate the laws of human thought, i.e., logic and dialectics. In these, however, eternal truths do not fare any better. Herr Duhring declares that dialectics proper is pure nonsense; and the many books which have been and are still being written on logic provide abundant proof that here, too, final and ultimate truths are much more sparsely sown than some people believe.

For that matter, there is absolutely no need to be alarmed at the fact that the stage of knowledge which we have now reached is as little final as all that have preceded it. It already embraces a vast mass of judgments and requires very great specialisation of study on the part of anyone who wants to become conversant with any particular science. But a man who applies the measure of genuine, immutable, final and ultimate truth to knowledge which, by its very nature, must either remain relative for many generations and be completed only step by step, or which, as in cosmogony, geology and the history of mankind, must always contain gaps and be incomplete because of the inadequacy of the historical material — such a man only proves thereby his own ignorance and perversity, even if the real thing behind it all is not, as in this case, the claim to personal infallibility.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch07.htm


Богданов:

Помимо психологической загадки – как мог наш автор сочинить всю эту полемику, по существу высказывая ту же точку зрения, выступает еще и загадка логическая: каким способом эта полемика формально сочеталась в его голове с его собственными взглядами. Ключ к решению первой у нас уже есть: религиозное мышление, твердое в словесном исповедании, но смутное в понятиях. Вторая находит свое объяснение в чрезвычайно своеобразном философско-критическом методе, систематическически применяемом нашим автором, методе, который я обозначил бы выбирая наиболее мягкое выражение, как метод "замещения понятий".

<...>

Резкий, анти-религиозный тон, приписыванье враждебной стороне стремлений к "поповщине", — и глубоко религиозное мышление, с культом "абсолютного".
Это последнее противоречие, конечно, основа всех остальных.
Представьте себе человека, который, мысля религиозно, формально принял учение, глубоко враждебное всякому "фидеизму".
Тогда он во-1), создает культ из своей анти-религиозности, что само по себе еще не было бы так плохо; но при этом он, — во-2), — всякие взгляды, с которыми не согласен, или которых не понимает, будет рассматривать, как идеи враждебной секты, как враждебную религию.
Так его собственная религиозность для него субъективно проецируется на его противников.

Так что, не случайно, ой неслучайно тов. Ленин ещё в школе не сумел в логику так же хорошо, как в ЗаконЪ БожийЪ... Но он был, так сказать, обречён самой судьбой стать лидером революции. Ведь, при прочих равных, перед другими кандидатами на эту роль - более адекватным теоретиком Богдановым, более ярким публицистом и оратором Троцким, более авторитетным в узких кругах Плехановым, у него было одно неоспоримое преимущество - повешенный царём брат. Именно это наверняка и сыграло решающую роль в том, что Ленин стал вождём и главным бабуином в стае революционеров. Просто все это знали, и это было гарантией, что он пойдёт до конца, не смоется с партийной кассой, не сдастся и не предаст, пока не отомстит. Тем более прискорбно использование им философского вопроса об истине и т. п. в качестве разменной монеты в ходе "спора хозяйствующих субъектов" из-за фин.потоков. Ибо со временем на эту "разменную монету", добавление которой им на чашу весов было изначально излишне и бессмысленно, натекли такие проценты, что весь марксизм обанкротился...

Там ещё много интересного - про функцию философии, трудности перевода и др. Надо на досуге и при случае почитать Богданова побольше. Пишет он складно и по делу.