The Philosophy of Living Experience

296 Pages·2015·1.1 MB·English

The Philosophy of Living Experience
Historical Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Sébastien Budgen (Paris)
Steve Edwards (London)
Juan Grigera (London)
Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam)
Peter Thomas (London)
volume 111
Bogdanov Library
Editors
Evgeni V. Pavlov (Metropolitan State University of Denver)
David G. Rowley (University of Wisconsin-Platteville)
volume 8
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/boli
The Philosophy of
Living Experience
Popular Outlines
By
Alexander Bogdanov
Translated, Edited and Introduced by
David G. Rowley
leiden | boston
This book is an English translation of Alexander Bogdanov’s book, entitled (in Russian) Filosofia zhivogo
opyta: Materializm, empiriokrititsizm, dialekticheski materializm, empiriomonizm, nauka budushchego.
Populiarnye ocherki, third edition, Petrograd and Moscow, 1923.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bogdanov, A. (Aleksandr), 1873-1928.
[Filosofiia zhivogo opyta. English]
The philosophy of living experience popular outlines / by Alexander Bogdanov ; translated, edited and
introduced by David G. Rowley.
pages cm. – (Historical materialism book series, ISSN 1570-1522 ; volume 111)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-23190-0 (hardback : acid-free paper) – ISBN 978-90-04-30646-2 (e-book)
1. Philosophy. 2. Philosophy and religion. I. Title.
B99.R92B6413 2016
197–dc23
2015031025
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering
Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more
information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 1570-1522
isbn 978-90-04-23190-0 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-30646-2 (e-book)
Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and
Hotei Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided
that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive,
Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
Editor’s Introduction vii
Introduction 1
1 What is Philosophy? Who Needs It andWhy? 1
2 What Came before Philosophy? 14
3 How Did Philosophy and Science Become Distinguished from
Religion? 29
1 What is Materialism? 42
2 Materialism of the AncientWorld 65
3 ModernMaterialism 95
4 Empiriocriticism 131
5 Dialectical Materialism 163
6 Empiriomonism 201
1 Labour Causality 201
2 Elements of Experience 206
3 Objectivity 211
4 Sociomorphism 219
5 Substitution 221
6 The Picture of the World 232
Conclusion: The Science of the Future 236
Appendix: From Religious to Scientific Monism 249
Bibliography 263
Name Index 265
Editor’s Introduction
When Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovsky (1873–1928) joined the under-
ground Social-Democratic movement, he, like most other Russian revolution-
aries, adopted pseudonyms to conceal his real identity from the authorities. For
party activities andpropaganda, he variously usedVerner,Maksimov, Riadovoy,
and others, but for his legally published works on economics, philosophy, sci-
ence, and literature, he chose the name A. Bogdanov, taken from the middle
name of his wife, Natalya Bogdanovna Malinovskaia (née Korsak). ‘Bogdanov’
is howhe is nowknown, just as Vladimir IlichUlianov is ‘Lenin’, LevDavidovich
Bronstein is ‘Trotsky’, etc.
Bogdanov helped create the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social-Demo-
cratic Labour Party (rsdlp). He published influential works on political econ-
omy, historical materialism, philosophy, organisational science, and prolet-
arian culture. His two science-fiction novels depicting socialism and social
revolution on Mars were bestsellers. He inspired and led (from 1918 to 1920)
the ‘Proletarian Culture’ movement, a nationwide network of local working-
class cultural groups. He was a founder and member of the Presidium of the
Socialist (later Communist) Academy; he was a member of the Institute of Sci-
entific Philosophy attached toMoscow State University; and he taught courses
at a number of other universities. Finally, Bogdanov was named the director
of Russia’s first institute for blood transfusion, to which he dedicated the last
two years of his life. Yet, despite this remarkable career, Bogdanov is the least
well-known of Russia’s Social-Democratic leaders and theorists.
For most of the Soviet period, he was known in the Soviet Union only as a
heretic from Marxism. Even before 1917, G.V. Plekhanov, later designated ‘the
father of Russian Marxism’, denounced Bogdanov as an idealist and refused to
call him ‘comrade’. Lenin, who had called a truce in philosophy so that the
two could work together during the Revolution of 1905, publicly broke with
Bogdanov in 1908 by publishing Materialism and Empiriocriticism in which
he anathematised Bogdanov’s philosophy as un-Marxian. Until the end of
his life, Lenin continued actively to oppose ‘Bogdanovism’, and, because of
Lenin’s prestige, even Communists who were influenced by Bogdanov tended
to downplay or even conceal it. A thorough study of Bogdanov’s influence on
Soviet economics and philosophy has yet to be written.1
1 A valuable survey of this issue is presented in Biggart 1998, ‘The Rehabilitation of Bogdanov’.
A discussion of Bogdanov’s influence is also to be found in Gloveli 2003.
viii editor’s introduction
In the West, Bogdanov has been known for the works that seem to diverge
themost from historical materialism. English speakers can read his novels, Red
Star and EngineerMenni, a few of his poems,2 an explication of The Philosophy
of Living Experience,3 parts of Tektology: Universal Organizational Science,4 and
The Struggle for Viability5 (about his experiments in blood transfusion) – all
works that seem to locate him outside of the mainstream of Marxism. His
novels are mostly read in the context of Russian science fiction; K.M. Jensen
considers The Philosophy of Living Experience to have gone ‘beyond Marx’;
Tektology is famous as a pioneering work in systems theory; and Bogdanov’s
involvement in blood transfusion is sometimes interpreted as an escape from
politics.6 Indeed, it has been suggested that Bogdanov’s death in 1928, when
he exchanged blood with a patient suffering from malaria, was suicide out
of despair at the direction in which he thought the Soviet Union was head-
ing.7
Moreover, Bogdanov was a voracious reader of contemporary works
that dealt with the philosophy of science or that attempted to create system-
atic, scientific accounts of the world. These included Richard Avenarius’s em-
piriocriticism and Ernst Mach’s neutral monism, a radical empiricism that
dissolved the distinction between the psychical and the physical, Darwin’s
theory of evolution, Herbert Spencer’s System of Synthetic Philosophy that ap-
plied the principle of evolution to biology, psychology, sociology, and moral-
ity, Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionism, founded on materialist monism and Ger-
man idealism, Wilhelm Ostwald’s energetics, a universal monism which
posited energy as the only reality and which held that evolutionary advance
occurs when organisms become increasingly efficient in the use of energy,
and Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, which proposed that evolution is not
mechanistic but creative – based on a ‘vital impulse’ (élan vital).8 That many
2 Both novels and a poem ‘A Martian Stranded on Earth’ are included in Bogdanov 1984.
3 Jensen 1978.
4 Bogdanov 1980 and 1996.
5 Bogdanov 2001.
6 Two recent books do take Bogdanov’s Marxism seriously. Nikolai Krementsov shows how
Marxism, literature, and science ‘intertwined, interacted, and mutually reinforced one an-
other’ in Bogdanov‘s work (Krementsov 2011, p. 5), while McKenzie Wark considers how
Bogdanov’s Marxism is relevant to the contemporary world (Wark 2015).
7 Loren R. Graham strongly implies this in his afterword to Red Star (Bogdanov 1984, p. 252).
Krementsov discounts it (2011, ch. 6).
8 Rewarding discussions of influences on Bogdanov includeWhite 1998, Adams 1989, Krement-
sov 2011, and Gloveli 2003.
editor’s introduction ix
of these ideas found expression in Bogdanov’s works has also been taken
as evidence of his going ‘beyond Marx’.
Nevertheless, despite misconceptions in both the Soviet Union and the
West, Bogdanov was a sincere and consistent historical materialist throughout
his life. He believed that his work in economics, philosophy, sociology, cultural
studies, and organisational science was consistent with, supplemented, and
advanced the thought of Karl Marx.
The Philosophy of Living Experience was written between 1910 and 1911, a critical
point of transition in Bogdanov’s political and intellectual career, and it will
therefore be useful to review the political and philosophical developments at
the centre of which The Philosophy of Living Experience stands.
Bogdanov, the son of a school teacher, received his secondary education in
Tula, studiednatural sciences as anundergraduate at theUniversity ofMoscow,
and earned a graduate degree in psychiatric medicine from the University of
Kharkov in 1899.9 Bogdanov was also active in the revolutionary underground.
He was arrested and exiled twice in the 1890s for anti-regime activities, the
second time for social propaganda inworkers’ study circles. It was in the course
of teaching economics to workers’ groups that he read Das Kapital, became a
Social Democrat, and wrote his first book, A Short Course in Economic Science
(warmly praised by Lenin upon its first publication in 1897).10 Bogdanov was
nearing the end of his second exile in the summer of 1903 – the time of
the divisive Second Congress of the rsdlp, at which Lenin and Martov split
over organisational issues, and the terms ‘Bolshevik’ (Lenin’s supporters) and
‘Menshevik’ (Martov’s supporters) were coined. Bogdanov supported Lenin in
this split, and as soon as he was freed from exile (January 1904), he travelled
to Geneva where Lenin and other Social-Democratic leaders had taken up
residence. In August 1904, he participated in the ‘Conference of the 22’, the
founding conferenceof theBolshevik fraction, andhewas elected to theBureau
9 No book-length biography of Bogdanov has beenwritten in English. (Those who readGer-
man should consult Grille 1966). The single most valuable book on Bogdanov is Biggart
1998. Not only is it an exhaustive bibliography of Bogdanov’s writings – books, pamph-
lets, articles, letters – which can, itself, serve as the outline of a biography, biographical
information can be found in two introductory essays, John Biggart, ‘The Rehabilitation of
Bogdanov’, and Georgii Gloveli, ‘Bogdanov as Scientist and Utopian’, and in an appendix,
‘Bogdanov: A Biographical Chronicle’ by Peter Plyutto. An autobiography and a very brief
biography can be found in Haupt 1974.
10 It became a classic, going through fifteen editions, the last one in 1924. One of the latest
editions appears in an English translation (Bogdanov 1923).
x editor’s introduction
of Committees of the Majority – the Bolshevik leadership. Bogdanov returned
to Russia during the 1905 Revolution. He wrote tactical leaflets about armed
uprising; he edited the Bolsheviks’ two periodicals; he served on the Bolshevik
bureau in St. Petersburg; and he was a delegate to the Third Party Congress
in 1905, at which he was elected to the new Central Committee of the rsdlp.
In the autumn, when the Revolution reached its height, Bogdanov was in
St. Petersburg, deeply involved in party work and serving on the Executive
Committee of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. In December he
was arrested, along with the entire Executive Committee, when the Soviet was
suppressed. He remained in prison until May 1906.
At the same time, from the turn of the century through the Revolution of
1905, Bogdanov was elaborating a philosophy he called ‘empiriomonism’ – the
application of Marxian historical materialism to empiriocriticism, the empir-
icist philosophy of Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach. However, when he
gathered together his articles onphilosophy andpublished themunder the title
Empiriomonism,11 he was publicly criticised for ‘idealism’ by the Mensheviks –
most notably by G.V. Plekhanov. Lenin also read Bogdanov’s work and disliked
it intensely, but, in the interest of Bolshevik solidarity during the revolution, he
kept his criticism private.
In the aftermath of the revolution, however, Bogdanov and Lenin began
to diverge. They took opposing positions on the question of elections to the
Third Duma (the representative assembly forced from the tsar by the Revolu-
tion of 1905). Initially, Bogdanov called for a boycott of the election (to protest
against PrimeMinister Peter Stolypin’s arbitrary change to the election law giv-
ing greater representation to the wealthy), while Lenin was in favour of using
the Duma elections for propaganda purposes. In the end, Bogdanov accepted
the Bolshevik majority and campaigned for Bolshevik candidates.12 Neverthe-
less, a left Bolshevik faction emerged – with Bogdanov at its head – which
Lenin opposed and continued to refer to as ‘boycotters’. The political differ-
ence between Lenin and Bogdanov concerned the contemporary situation in
Russia and the proper strategy for Social Democrats. Lenin felt that the revolu-
tionarywave had receded. He saw the reaction in Russia as an obstacle that had
to be endured for the time being, and he urged patient rebuilding of local party
organisations, insisting on the full use of legal opportunities to advance the
cause of Social Democracy. Bogdanov and the Left Bolsheviks refused to believe
11 Bogdanov 2003. The three volumes were originally published between 1904 and 1906.
12 In his autobiography, Bogdanov said: ‘I had advocated a boycott of the third Duma, but
after the rejection of this line by the Party conference, I conducted an electoral campaign
in the illegal workers’ paper Vpered, of which I was the editor’ (Haupt 1974, p. 287).