Empirio-criticism

What problem did empirio-criticism try to answer?

Natural scientists in the late nineteenth century were in an odd position. Physics had advanced brilliantly, yet nobody had ever directly seen the concepts at its foundation, such as "atom", "force" or "absolute space". What does science really know, and what is metaphysics added out of habit? Empirio-criticism is the philosophy that answered: keep only experience and remove the rest. As the name says, it is a "critique of experience", an effort to sort out what is actually given in experience and what has been added to it.

Richard Avenarius, regarded as its founder, published Philosophy as Thinking of the World according to the Principle of the Least Expenditure of Force in 1876 and the Critique of Pure Experience in 1888–90. His theory of knowledge starts neither from thought or the subject nor from matter or the object, but from "pure experience" as people directly undergo it. Around the same time Ernst Mach published The Analysis of Sensations (1886). Around 1900 their books were widely read not only by natural scientists but also by writers and poets. Because Mach's influence was especially great, the current is also called "Machism"; strictly, Machism sometimes means only Mach's own doctrine, so the two words are partial synonyms.

What does "bodies are complexes of sensations" mean?

Mach started from the observation that when we say we know an apple, what is actually given is only sensations: red colour, round shape, hardness, sweetness. Because these sensations appear together in a relatively stable way, we give the bundle the name "apple". Then there is no reason to set up, behind the sensations, a "body itself" that causes them. In The Analysis of Sensations Mach wrote: "It is not bodies that produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) that make up bodies."

Nicht die Körper erzeugen Empfindungen, sondern Ele- mentencomplexe (Empfindungscomplexe) bilden die Körper.

Mach called these sensations "elements". The same element, red, is an object of physics when considered in its relation to other elements (light, other bodies), and an object of psychology when considered in its relation to our body (the eye, the nerves). The physical and the psychical are not two different substances but two directions in which the same elements are viewed; today this idea is called "neutral monism". The same reasoning applied to the self. The ego too is only a relatively stable bundle of elements, and Mach wrote: "The ego cannot be saved."

Das Ich ist unrettbar.

To this was added the principle of the "economy of thought". The laws of science do not reveal the hidden essence of the world; they are tools summarising countless experiences with the least effort. Avenarius's "principle of the least expenditure of force" expresses the same idea. By this principle atoms, which cannot be observed directly, become an uneconomical hypothesis; after a lecture by Ludwig Boltzmann in 1897 Mach said, "I don't believe that atoms exist!" On the other hand his criticism of absolute space and absolute time influenced the young Albert Einstein, who wrote in 1930 that "it is justified to consider Mach as the precursor of the general theory of relativity".

Why were Russian Marxists drawn to it?

After the defeat of the 1905 revolution a movement arose among Russian Social Democrats to re-examine the philosophical foundations of Marxism. The materialism of Engels and Plekhanov looked old-fashioned beside the new physics shaken by the discovery of the electron and radioactivity, and Mach looked like the philosopher of the latest science. Mach himself was on good terms with the Austrian Social Democratic leader Victor Adler and left money in his will to the party paper Arbeiter-Zeitung. On the Bolshevik side Alexander Bogdanov, Vladimir Bazarov and Anatoly Lunacharsky, on the Menshevik side Pavel Yushkevich and Nikolai Valentinov, tried to supplement Marxism with empirio-criticism. The symposium they published together in 1908, Studies in the Philosophy of Marxism, contained essays by Bazarov, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Yakov Berman, Osip Gelfond, Yushkevich and Sergei Suvorov.

What they saw in empirio-criticism was a critical spirit that rejected dogma and a way to connect knowledge with the practice of human collectives. Bogdanov started from it to build his own system, empiriomonism, and Lunacharsky moved on to God-building, which made the collective power of humanity the object of a new faith. On the other side Plekhanov and his pupil Lyubov Axelrod (Ortodoks) attacked them as "philosophical apostates" before Lenin did.

What did Lenin criticise?

Lenin wrote Materialism and Empirio-criticism in Geneva and London in 1908 and published it in Moscow the following year. The core of his criticism is simple. If bodies are complexes of sensations, the world is a complex of my sensations, and then other people and the external world exist only in my sensations. "If bodies are 'complexes of sensations', as Mach says, or 'combinations of sensations', as Berkeley said, it inevitably follows that the whole world is but my idea." For Lenin Mach's "elements" were nothing but a new name for the subjective idealism of the eighteenth-century Irish bishop George Berkeley.

Если тела суть «комплексы ощущений», как говорит Мах, или «комбинации ощущений», как говорил Беркли, то из этого неизбежно следует, что весь мир есть только мое представление.

Lenin called the common sense of natural science as a witness. The earth existed long before man appeared, before any sentient being. If only experience is real, how can this plain fact be stated? Against empirio-criticism he defined matter: "Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man in his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them." Lenin's point was that because this definition does not tie matter to atoms or to any particular physical theory, it is not shaken by the talk of a crisis in physics claiming that "matter has disappeared" with the discovery of the electron.

Материя есть философская категория для обозначения объективной реальности, которая дана человеку в ощущениях его, которая копируется, фотографируется, отображается нашими ощущениями, существуя независимо от них.

Lenin held that philosophy too has its parties: the struggle of materialism and idealism ultimately reflects the class struggle in society, and empirio-criticism, however scientific its dress, opens the door to fideism. Bogdanov replied in 1910 with Faith and Science, arguing that it was Lenin's thinking, clinging to absolute truth and the thing-in-itself, that was religious thinking leaning on authority. Lenin's book itself is covered by the entry and the document Materialism and Empirio-criticism in this dictionary; this entry covers the philosophy it criticised.

What became of empirio-criticism?

In the Soviet Union Lenin's book became a canon of Marxist philosophy, and empirio-criticism was for a long time known only through it. The Short Course of 1938 reproduced Lenin's conclusion that "the whole school of Mach and Avenarius is moving towards idealism". The Russian Wikipedia notes that because Lenin's book was raised after the revolution into a model of Marxist philosophy, a biased picture of this philosophical current spread in the USSR. Without original works such as The Analysis of Sensations being properly presented to Soviet readers, empirio-criticism became a byword for "reactionary philosophy".

Вся школа Маха и Авенариуса идет к идеализму

In the West things went differently. Mach's positivism led directly to the Vienna Circle, which founded the Ernst Mach Society in Vienna in the 1920s, and to logical positivism, becoming one strand of twentieth-century philosophy of science. Its position that only experience is real was, however, revised again and again as science dealt with objects it cannot observe, such as atoms and electromagnetic fields. The atoms Mach did not believe in were confirmed by experiment early in the twentieth century.

Today the debate is read in two ways. One side holds that Lenin crudely identified Mach's subtle philosophy of science with Berkeley. The other holds that empirio-criticism really was stuck in a predicament in which it could not state the reality of the external world, and that Lenin's definition of matter caught the point of realism by not tying the object of science to a particular theory. Either way, empirio-criticism was the channel through which the long twentieth-century argument over the "philosophy of science" entered the Russian revolutionary movement.