Helgoland by Rovelli, Erica (story read aloud txt) 📕

Whatever we think about communism, there is no denying that Lenin was an extraordinary politician. His knowledge of philosophy is also impressive; if today we elected politicians as cultivated as Lenin, perhaps they would be more effective. But Lenin was no great philosopher. The influence of his philosophical writings is due more to his long dominance of the political scene, and his elevation to heroic status under Stalin, than to the profundity of his arguments. Mach deserves better.90

Bogdanov, indeed, replies to Lenin that his criticism misses the point. Mach’s thought is not idealism, much less solipsism. The humanity that knows is not an isolated, transcendent subject; it is not the philosophical “I” of idealism: it is real humanity, immersed in concrete history, part of the natural world. The “sensations” are not “within our mind.” They are natural phenomena in the world: the form in which the world presents itself to the world. They do not come to a self that is separate from the world: they come to the skin, to the brain, to the neurons of the retina, to the receptors in our ears. These are elements of nature.

Lenin defines “materialism” in his book as the belief that a world exists beyond our minds.91 If this is the definition of materialism, then Mach is definitely a materialist; we are all materialists. Even the pope is a materialist. But then, for Lenin, the only acceptable version of materialism is the idea that “there is nothing in the world except matter in motion in space and in time,” and that we can arrive at “absolute truths” through knowledge of matter. Bogdanov highlights the scientific as much as the historical weakness of these peremptory assertions. Of course the world is outside our mind, but things are much more subtle than naive materialism would have it. The choice is not just between the idea that the world exists only in our minds and the idea that it consists only of particles of matter in motion.

Mach does not think, of course, that there is nothing outside our mind. On the contrary, he is interested precisely in what is outside our minds (whatever the “mind” is): nature, in all its complexity, of which we are a part. Nature presents itself as a set of phenomena, and Mach recommends the study of those phenomena in order to build syntheses and conceptual structures that make sense of them, rather than to postulate a priori underlying realities.

His most radical suggestion is to stop thinking of phenomena as manifestations of objects and to think, instead, of objects as nodes between phenomena. This is not a metaphysics of the contents of consciousness, as Lenin sees it: it is a step back with regard to the metaphysics of the objects-in-themselves. Mach is witheringly dismissive: “The conception of the [mechanistic] world appears to us to be mechanical mythology, like the animistic mythology of ancient religions.”92

Einstein recognized his debt to Mach on numerous occasions.93 The critique of the (“metaphysical”) assumption of the existence of a real fixed space “within which” things move opened the doors to his general relativity.

In the space opened up by Mach’s reading of science—which does not take the reality of anything for granted, except to the extent that it allows phenomena to be organized—Heisenberg slips in, to remove from the electron its trajectory and to reinterpret it solely in terms of its manifestations.

In this same space, the possibility of a relational interpretation of quantum mechanics opens up: the elements useful for thinking the world are manifestations of physical systems to each other, not absolute properties belonging to each system.

Bogdanov criticizes Lenin for making “matter” an absolute and ahistorical category, a “metaphysical” one in the sense given to the word by Mach. He disapproves, above all, of Lenin’s forgetting one of the essential lessons of Marx and Engels: History is process, knowledge is process. Scientific knowledge grows, writes Bogdanov, and the notion of matter proper to the science of our time may turn out to be only an intermediate stage on the path of our knowledge. Reality may be much more complex than the naive materialism of eighteenth-century physics. Prophetic words, for just a few years later Werner Heisenberg would open the door to the quantum level of reality.

Even more impressive is Bogdanov’s political reply to Lenin. Lenin speaks of absolute certainties. He presents the historical materialism of Marx and Engels as if it were timelessly valid. Bogdanov points out that this ideological dogmatism not only fails to accord with the dynamic of scientific thought, it also leads to calcified political dogmatism. The Russian Revolution, Bogdanov argues in the turbulent years of its aftermath, had created a new economic structure. If, as Marx suggested, culture is influenced by economic structure, then postrevolutionary society would be able to produce a new culture that could no longer be the orthodox Marxism conceived before the revolution. Brilliant. Bogdanov’s political program was to leave power and culture to the people, to nurture the new, collective, generous culture opened up by the revolutionary dream. Lenin’s political program, instead, was to reinforce the revolutionary avant-garde, the repository of Truth that needed to guide the people. The rather repulsive style in which Materialism and Empirio-Criticism is written reflects its philosophical stance: it has been called “an angry moral tone, dim echo of anathema and excommunication”—“possibly the rudest work of philosophy ever published.”94

Bogdanov predicts that Lenin’s dogmatism would seal the Russian Revolution into a block of ice; prevent it from evolving further; suffocate the life out of all that had been gained through it; render it sclerotic. These, too, were prophetic words.

“Bogdanov” is a pseudonym; one of the many that he used to hide from the tsar’s police. He was born Aleksandr Aleksandrovič Malinovskij, the son of a village schoolteacher and the second of six brothers. Independent and rebellious from a very early age, legend has it that the first words he spoke, at eighteen months during a