What is Matter? What is Experience? (continued)

What is meant by giving a “definition”? It means essentially to bring a given concept within a more comprehensive concept. For example, when I give the definition “an ass is an animal”, I am bringing the concept “ass” within a more comprehensive concept. The question then is, are there more comprehensive concepts with which the theory of knowledge could operate than those of being and thinking, matter and sensation, physical and mental? No. These are the ultimate, most comprehensive concepts, which epistemology has in point of fact so far not surpassed (apart from changes in nomenclature, which are always possible).

One must be a charlatan or an utter blockhead to demand a “definition” of these two “series” of concepts of ultimate comprehensiveness which would not be a “mere repetition”: one or the other must be taken as primary. Take the three above-mentioned arguments on matter. What do they all amount to? To this, that these philosophers proceed from the mental, or the self, to the physical, or environment, as from the central term to the counter-term – or from sensation to matter, or from sense-perception to matter. Could Avenarius, Mach and Pearson in fact have given any other “definition” of these fundamental concepts, save by indicating the trend of their philosophical line? Could they have defined in any other way, in any specific way, what the self is, what sensation is, what sense-perception is? One has only to formulate the question clearly to realise what sheer nonsense the Machists talk when they demand that the materialists give a definition of matter which would not amount to a repetition of the proposition that matter, nature, being, the physical – is primary, and spirit, consciousness, sensation, the psychical – is secondary.

V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, 130

Part thirteen/to be continued…

What is Matter? What is Experience?

The first of these questions is constantly being hurled by the idealists and agnostics, including the Machists, at the materialists; the second question by the materialists at the Machists. Let us try to make the point at issue clear.

Avenarius says on the subject of matter:

“Within the purified, ‘complete experience’ there is nothing ‘physical’ – ‘matter’ in the metaphysical absolute conception – for ‘matter’ according to this conception is only an abstraction; it would be the total of the counter-terms while abstracting from every central term. Just as in the principal co-ordination, that is, ‘complete experience’, a counter-term is inconceivable (undenkbar) without a central term, so ‘matter’ in the metaphysical absolute conception is a complete chimera (Unding)” (Notes, p. 2, in the journal cited, §119).

In all this gibberish one thing is evident, namely, that Avenarius calls the physical or matter absolute and metaphysics, for, according to his theory of the principal co-ordination (or, in the new way, “complete experience”), the counter-term is inseparable from the central term, the environment from the self; the non-self is inseparable from the self (as J. G. Fichte said). That this theory is disguised subjective idealism we have already shown, and the nature of Avenarius’ attacks on “matter” is quite obvious: the idealist denies physical being that is independent of the mind and therefore rejects the concept elaborated by philosophy for such being. That matter is “physical” (i.e.., that which is most familiar and immediately given to man, and the existence of which no one save an inmate of a lunatic asylum can doubt) is not denied by Avenarius; he only insists on the acceptance of “his” theory of the indissoluble connection between the environment and the self.

V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, 128-129

Part eleven/to be continued…