Empiriomonism

What did Bogdanov try to unify?

Alexander Bogdanov was a physician and the author of an economics textbook, and around the 1905 revolution he was the leading Bolshevik after Lenin. In the three volumes of Empiriomonism, published from 1904 to 1906, he tried to merge Marxism with the philosophy of Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald and Richard Avenarius. In 1937 the Soviet Granat encyclopaedia summed it up as the philosophy with which Bogdanov hoped to replace "outdated" dialectical materialism in the ideology of the working class. The definition is hostile, but it captures Bogdanov's ambition exactly.

Эмпириомонизм, философия А. А. Богданова, которой он рассчитывал заменить в идеологии рабочего класса „устаревший“ диалектический материализм.

The starting point was a weakness of empirio-criticism. Mach and Avenarius explained the world through elements of experience, yet experience still had two domains: outer, physical experience and inner, psychical experience. How can the same elements obey physical laws on one side and the laws of the mind on the other? Bogdanov wanted a "monism" explaining this duality by one principle, and he looked for the key in the central concept of Marxism, social labour. Hence the name, joining "experience" (empirio-) and "monism".

What is "socially organised experience"?

Bogdanov's answer runs like this. Individual experience is accidental and uneven, mixed with dreams, illusions and personal moods. But as people work together and talk with one another, their experiences are adjusted to each other and the parts that everyone can confirm are sorted out. Experience coordinated collectively in this way is the "physical world"; experience that stays with the individual is the "psychical world". That the physical world is socially organised experience is the central thesis of empiriomonism.

What, then, is "objectivity"? In Faith and Science (1910) Bogdanov restated his view: the "'objectivity' we grant to physical experience is nothing other than its general validity for people", the result of its social organisation and collective coordination. His example is an astronomer who observes a new comet for the first time. If he can fix its position precisely in physical space rather than merely in his own field of vision, and its motion in relation to the sun's gravity, he has every reason to take it for a "generally valid" physical body without specially asking whether others see it, because it fits the forms of the labour experience humanity has accumulated over millennia.

«объективность», которую мы за ним признаем, есть не что иное, как его общезначимость для людей

Truth is understood the same way. It is not an eternally fixed proposition but "a living, organising form of experience; it leads us somewhere in our activity and gives a foothold in the struggle of life". Bogdanov drew a historical perspective from this: in the primitive community experience was unified, class division fragmented it, and in communist society the unity of experience will be restored.

Истина – это живая, организующая форма опыта, она ведет нас куда-нибудь в нашей деятельности, дает точку опоры к жизненной борьбе

What is "substitution"?

The other half of empiriomonism is the theory of "substitution". Seeing another person's face and hearing their words, we assume that behind them lies that person's experience; we "substitute" what we cannot see under what we can. Bogdanov extended this operation: under physical phenomena we can substitute complexes of experience similar to them, but psychical phenomena are complexes given directly, so nothing needs to be substituted under them. In the 1937 Granat encyclopaedia's account, substitution is a way of thinking that puts into the same word (a "symbol") different contents that change as knowledge grows. Bogdanov himself wrote in 1910 that the theory of substitution was "not yet the whole of empiriomonism, but in any case half of it".

Конечно, теория подстановки еще не весь эмпириомонизм, но во всяком случае – половина эмпириомонизма

In this way Bogdanov pictured the world as a single chain. As he summed it up himself, everything that exists is "a continuous chain of development, whose lower links are lost in the chaos of elements", rising through psychical experience to physical experience above it and the knowledge arising from it.

он рассматривает все существующее, как непрерывную цепь развития, низшие звенья которой теряются в хаосе элементов

Why did Lenin and Plekhanov call it idealism?

Plekhanov attacked first. From 1908 he published articles against Bogdanov and Mach in Golos sotsial-demokrata and later collected them under the title "Materialismus militans". Lenin devoted a whole section of Materialism and Empirio-criticism to empiriomonism. To Lenin, Bogdanov's chain ran in the wrong order: the chaos of elements, then psychical experience, then physical experience is the order of idealism, which puts the mental first and derives nature from it. Lenin summed it up: "The physical is a substitution for the psychical, says Bogdanov." It was the same idealism as Fichte's, Hegel's and Schopenhauer's, only in different words.

Физическое есть подстановка психического, — говорит Богданов.

Against the claim that "socially organised experience" is the criterion of objectivity, Lenin offered a sharp counter-example. If countless people have shared the same belief for centuries, is that not socially organised experience too? "And there is no doubt that Catholicism is socially organised experience." Yet what Catholicism reflects is not objective truth but the rule of a particular class. Lenin's point was that collective agreement and objective reality are not the same thing; the scientific statement that the earth existed before humanity was true before anyone's experience was organised.

И несомненно, что католицизм есть социально-организованный опыт

Bogdanov replied in Faith and Science in 1910, but the philosophical debate had already merged with a political struggle. In June 1909, at a meeting in Paris called by the editorial board of the Bolshevik paper Proletary, Bogdanov was defeated by Lenin and expelled from the Bolsheviks. He then formed the Vpered group with Lunacharsky and others and opened a party school for workers on Capri, where Maxim Gorky lived, moving it to Bologna in 1910. Lunacharsky's God-building also grew out of this group's philosophical climate.

Where did empiriomonism lead?

After withdrawing from the philosophical quarrel Bogdanov kept broadening his ideas. The problem of organising experience led to tektology (1912–17), a "universal science of organisation" seeking laws of organisation common to all systems in nature and society. After the revolution he co-founded Proletkult in 1918–20 and became its theorist; the claim that the working class must have its own culture, organising its own experience, was also an extension of empiriomonism. Bolshevik theorists of the next generation, Nikolai Bukharin among them, were influenced by him.

In the Soviet Union the reputation of empiriomonism was fixed by Lenin's criticism. In 1937 the Granat encyclopaedia wrote that "at present this theory has entirely passed into the past". That verdict was also the result of the book being buried almost like a banned one. From the 1960s, as Soviet cybernetics researchers rediscovered tektology, Bogdanov's thought as a whole began to be reread; Empiriomonism was republished in Moscow in 2003, and in 2019 the first complete English translation appeared.

В настоящее время теория эта полностью отошла в прошлое.

Today empiriomonism is read from two directions. For those who follow Lenin's criticism it is a case of idealism that replaced objective reality with collective agreement. For readers familiar with the sociology of knowledge and science and technology studies, on the other hand, it looks like an early attempt to push the idea that scientific objectivity is made through social practice. Either way, empiriomonism was the philosophy that pushed the "social character of knowledge" furthest within Marxism.