metaphysics

Nikolai Bukharin on the criterion of practice in epistemology

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Below appears an excellent chapter from Nikolai Bukharin’s book, unpublished in his lifetime, Philosophical Arabesques (1937-1938). The whole collection is really quite good, but this portion on epistemology is particularly superlative. Lately I’ve been reading up on Marxism and the problem of truth: the way it involves the relation of subject to object, as well as theory to practice. I have to admit, Bukharin’s competence in treating difficult questions of philosophy surprised me a little. Not just because I’d read his short 1921 textbook on Historical Materialism — which, while insightful at times, is on the whole very mediocre — but because of Lenin’s low estimation of Bukharin as a philosopher. Shortly before his death, the Bolshevik leader recorded in his “Testament” that

Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party; he is also rightly considered the favorite of the whole Party. His theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, however, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of dialectics and, I think, never fully understood it).

Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács, whose studies of the philosophical legacy in Marx’s thought remain unparalleled, took Bukharin to task for this theoretical deficit. “For one faction (typified by Bukharin’s book The Theory of Historical Materialism),” wrote the former, “the whole of ‘philosophy’ has fundamentally already reached a point that in reality it was to reach only in the second phase of Communist society after the full victory of the pro­letarian revolution, viz. the transcended standpoint of an unenlightened past.” Lukács wrote that “Bukharin attributes to technology a far too determinant position, which completely misses the spirit of dialectical materialism.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fgp7XuYG9c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWp6GsMwKx0

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At first, Bukharin sided with the “mechanist” faction of communist interpreters of Marx. Other notable adherents included Abram Deborin and László Rudas, bêtes noires of both Korsch and Lukács, who admonished them for their Hegelianism. This sensibility was rather in line with Bukharin’s training as an economist and his enthusiasm for the natural sciences. During the 1930s, though, he made a renewed study of German classical philosophy. Following his imprisonment in 1937 at the hand of his onetime ally Stalin, Bukharin finally got around to writing a treatise on philosophy. He was adamant that it be published, whatever his fate:

The most important thing is that the philosophical work not be lost. I worked on it for a long time and put a great deal into it; it is a very mature work in comparison to my earlier writings, and, in contrast to them, dialectical from beginning to end.

Unsurprisingly, his wishes were not honored. These manuscripts only surfaced after the Soviet Union’s fall in 1991. You can download the translation by clicking on the link above or read the chapter on practice below the photographs underneath. Additional works by Bukharin are available here as well:

Practice in general and the place of practice in the theory of knowledge

Nikolai Bukharin
Philosophical Arabesques
September 1937
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Earlier, we dealt with the naïve claim of the agnostics to be reasoning on the basis of their sense perceptions alone, and thus to be able to demonstrate the unreality or incognizability of the external world.

This claim proved to be baseless and comic. From this we may conclude that any philosophical reasoning, since it operates with concepts, which are a social product, the product of thousands of years of mental work, must because of this very fact operate on the broad basis of all the achievements of science, leaving behind all the fuss and bother of foolish subjectivists.

Science, however, tells us that in historical terms, the starting point was the active, practical relationship between humanity and nature. Not contemplation, and not theory, but practice; not passive perception, but action. In this sense Goethe’s dictum “In the beginning was the deed,” when counterposed to the evangelical-Platonic-Gnostic dictum “In the beginning was the word” — that is, logos, or reason — furnishes us with a precise expression of historical reality. Marx noted this repeatedly: in his notes on the book by Adolf Wagner, in which he heaps scorn on the closeted professorial view according to which objects are passively “given” to humanity; in his Holy Family; in his Theses on Feuerbach; throughout the whole text of Capital; and together with Engels, in the brilliant pages of The German Ideology.

Contrary to the ravings of idealist philosophy to the effect that thought makes worlds, and that even matter is the creation of spirit (for example, the world-positing “I” of Fichte), it is human practice that creates a new world, actually transforming the “substance of nature” in line with human wishes. Historically, it was social humanity, the social-historical human being, and not an abstraction of the intellectual side of humanity, personified by philosophers as the subject, that above all produced, ate, and drank. It was only later, through the division of labor, that theoretical activity became separated off and isolated as an independent (or relatively independent) function, becoming restricted to particular categories of people, “mental workers,” with the various social and class modifications of this category. Theoretical cognition arose out of practice as well. The active, practical relationship to the external world, the process of material production, which, as Marx put it, conditions the “exchange of substances” between humanity and nature, is the basis for the reproduction of the entire life of social humanity. The chattering of the high priests of the so-called philosophy of life [Lebensphilosophie], including Nietzsche and a series of present-day biological-mystical hysterics, bypasses this fundamental fact, just as numerous representatives of classical idealist philosophy also bypassed it. Of course! After all, from the point of view of Kant the simple acts of sawing wood, smelting iron, or making liquid oxygen constitute a breakthrough into the “transcendental,” that fearful transgression which is “impossible”! What a mess the “practical” bull creates in this china shop full of unknowably subtle statuettes!

In fairness to Hegel, that “colossal old fellow,” as Engels affectionately called him, it should be acknowledged that although Marx and Engels had to wage a desperate, impassioned, and ultimately victorious struggle against the “drunken speculation” of Hegelian idealism, Hegel did have an understanding of practice, of labor and its tools. Moreover, the embryo of historical materialism, in the form of brilliant conceptions, was present in his works. We shall have cause to be convinced of this subsequently… Continue reading →

Note Concerning the Metaphysical Structure of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

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In reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason today (I’m attempting my first reading of it in toto, from cover to cover), I had a revelation as to the structure of the “Transcendental Logic” section of the book’s greater “Doctrine of Elements.” It came to me that the subdivision of the “Transcendental Logic” into “Transcendental Analytic” and “Transcendental Dialectic” corresponds respectively to the classic philosophical distinction between general metaphysics (metaphysica generalis) and special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis). There is no doubt in my mind that others have reached this insight before me. Nevertheless, its truth struck me with such force that I feel compelled to publicly elaborate on it, to speak out loud. In all honesty, it dawned upon me in a manner akin to what Kant would have derided as an “intellectual intuition” (though his Idealist successors would not discourage me from this claim).

The pure categories of the understanding, which Kant deduces in the “Transcendental Analytic,” fall under what is traditionally described as general metaphysics. There are twelve categories, which fall under the broader classifications of Quantity (Unity, Multiplicity, Totality), Quality (Reality, Negation, Limit), Relation (Substance/Accidence, Causality, Community), and Modality (Possibility/Impossibility, Existence/Non-existence, Necessity/Contingency). If my memory is correct, these are the categories. Some of the wording might be slightly off. In any case, however, Kant argues that these pure concepts, transcendentally deduced, may be validly applied to objects given to us by the manifold of intuition (via the Transcendental Æsthetic). Determinations which rely upon their proper conceptual application are held to be mathematically (in terms of Quantity and Quality) constitutive and dynamically (in terms of Relation and Modality) regulative, though in the latter case these dynamics are nonetheless empirically constitutive. These, Kant argues, metaphysically ground the legal (i.e., lawful) possibility of any future science.

Conversely, the ideas of reason, which are the subject of the “Transcendental Dialectic,” relate to the three venerable sciences of special metaphysics: 1) psychology/pneumatology, 2) cosmology, and 3) theology. In the second book of the Dialectic, entitled “Dialectical Inferences,” each of the three chapters respectively matches up with these disciplines. The “paralogisms” deal with transcendental psychology, the celebrated “antinomies” deal with transcendental cosmology, and the “ideal” deals with transcendental theology. Since Kant believes that these “sophistic” sciences of speculation transgress the bounds of possible experience (taking them beyond the limits of space and time), he declares that their so-called insights amount to nothing more than illusion. Nevertheless, he reminds us that human reason naturally elicits speculation on these matters, almost ineluctably, and that a rigorously critical attitude must be adopted in order to guard against its seductions.