Beginning in the mid-19th century, criticism of metaphysics as a set of teachings on the supersensible grew in philosophy. The transcendental was decisively expelled from philosophical systems. If such criticism came from existentially minded authors, it resulted in an emphasis on the significance of the mundane aspects of life; if it came from social philosophers, economic and other intra-social factors were put forward in place of Divine Providence as the driving force of history. And even while preserving the concept of the Divine, it acquired a new meaning: man and humanity became the object of deification.
All these tendencies could be labeled as “positivistic” since they are oriented toward a positive attitude toward the world, rather than toward its denial for the sake of transcendental values. But historically, the term “positivism”, as shown in the previous chapter, has acquired a narrower meaning of scientistic philosophy. Positivists not only displace metaphysics, but also try to replace it with empirical science.
It is obvious that one of the important components of such a replacement should be the elimination of metaphysical rudiments in science itself. And it is not surprising that Ernst Mach , who emphasized this problem, occupies an important place in the history of the positivist movement. The famous psychologist and physicist, who paved the way for the creation of A. Einstein’s theory of relativity, Mach moved towards the purification of science from metaphysics, starting from the needs of science itself. He even declared that he was “not a philosopher, but only a natural scientist” (6: 32). But the elimination of transcendental entities from physics and empirical knowledge of the world in general means that the scientist must work exclusively with available, empirical data. However, these data are traditionally identified with sensations, the concept of which obviously has a psychological character. Thus, the elimination of the metaphysical ballast of empirical science confronted Mach with a complex philosophical problem of demarcation of various scientific disciplines, primarily physics and psychology. The bringing of this problem to the forefront is a characteristic feature of the Machian version of positivism
[42] .
Mach was born in Moravia in 1838, graduated from the University of Vienna in 1860, and taught physics there. In 1864 he became professor of mathematics at the University of Graz, and in 1867 professor of physics at Prague. In 1895 Mach returned to Vienna as professor of inductive philosophy. He retired in 1901, but continued his scientific and political activities (he became a member of parliament). Mach died in 1916. His main philosophical works are The Analysis of Sensations (1886) and Knowledge and Error (1905). Mach recalled that when he was about 15 years old, he came across Kant’s Prolegomena in his father’s library. This book made a huge impression on him, freeing him from his naive-realistic view of the world, but two or three years later, on one of the sunny summer days, he suddenly realized the uselessness of Kant’s concept of the thing-in-itself, which splits existence into subjective and objective components. He felt that the I and the world form one complex of sensations, only more closely united in the I. Over time, this intuition turned into a coherent theory.
Thus, the world, according to Mach, is a set of experiential data, which he called “sensations” or “elements”. These terms are not equivalent and it is initially more correct to speak of depsychologized, neutral “elements”. They are not chaotic, but are connected to each other by certain relations of dependence. Close dependence leads to the formation of relatively stable “complexes of elements”. In everyday speech, such complexes are called things. Although all elements are essentially homogeneous, they can be divided into three different headings. The first consists of elements that form bodies external to us. Mach designates them as “A BC”. The second heading contains the elements of our body, “K L M”, the third – such secondary states as thoughts, memories, etc. – “α β γ”.
In each of the groups of elements there are some kind of horizontal connections, when the appearance of new elements is caused by a combination of other elements from the same group. But changes in any of the groups can also be generated by elements of another group. For example, changes in the color of external bodies, i.e. the appearance of new elements in the group “A B C”, can occur not only from other elements of the same class (new light sources, etc.), but also from the modification of our sense organs, i.e. from the elements of the group “K L M”. Moreover, the dependence of the elements of the first group on the elements of the second has, according to Mach, a universal character: “In reality, ABC always depends on K LM” (5: 280). The states of our body mediate the interaction of external bodies and elements of the third group, which make up the conceptual image of the world.
Despite the total interdependence of elements, Mach asserts that a person can focus attention on certain types of dependence, while abstracting from others, or rather accepting the values of the elements corresponding to them as an unchangeable value. This procedure—choosing a “point of view”—allows one to give physical or psychological meaning to neutral elements in themselves. If the elements of “ABC” are studied in the aspect of their connections with elements of the same group, then they appear as objects of physics. But if we study the same elements in the context of their dependence on the states of our body, then such a study will already belong to the sphere of psychology
[43] . Thus, color is a physical object, since we consider its dependence on a light source, etc. But if we consider its dependence on the retina, it becomes a mental object, i.e. a sensation.
Since all elements depend to some extent on the states of our body and its sense organs, i.e. on the elements of the group “K L M” (this is also true for the elements of this group itself), then all the components of the world can be called sensations. However, such an approach inevitably gives rise to the problem of the boundaries of the human I. After all, sensations are states of the I, and if the world is reduced to complexes of sensations, then it all fits within the limits of our I.
Mach does not try to gloss over these difficulties, and he does not follow the path of solipsism. He proposes to reconsider the very concept of the Self. It is wrong to think that it is some kind of independent entity, a substance with clearly defined ontological boundaries. In this sense, the Self does not exist at all. The world is a collection of elements, and the Self is nothing more than a relatively constant core of the latter
[44] , closely connected with the feelings of pleasure and pain and partly having, as he specified in Knowledge and Error, a private character. The blurring of the boundaries of the Self has, according to Mach, important practical consequences, demonstrating the groundlessness of those ethical teachings which, like Nietzsche’s concept of the superman, pay too much attention to human individuality. The attitude toward the problem of the immortality of the individual must also change. However, Mach does not call for abandoning the term “Self” altogether. Its use is justified for the same practical purposes for characterizing stable complexes of elements of the second and third groups. These complexes are relatively independent and enter into specific relationships with other elements. They are best described using biological categories, Mach’s interest in which is explained by his understanding of the significance of the Darwinian revolution.
I strive for self-preservation and try to adapt to the world. Cognition turns out to be the most important component of this process. To achieve the best results, organisms must spend on cognition exactly as much energy as is necessary for adaptation. In other words, the principle of “economy of thinking” dominates in cognition, according to which thoughts adapt to the world, and then to each other. At the initial level, this principle manifests itself, in particular, in the attitude to unite various ideas with general concepts, as well as in fixing complexes of elements with some single term. Despite the “economic” justification of such actions (it is advantageous to replace plurality with unity), their results can in some cases turn out to be obstacles on the path to cognition, coming into conflict with more universal requirements of the same kind. For example, the use of a single name for a complex of elements may lead to the erroneous conclusion that behind the multitude of these elements there is some unchanging essence, substance, or thing-in-itself, which in turn may initiate a fruitless search for a material equivalent of this fantasy. A similar result may result from the uncritical treatment of such fictions as atoms, which are useful in themselves. Hypostatizing atoms may hinder the progress of science, which at some stage may require completely different fictions. Mach spent a lot of effort identifying various kinds of metaphysical obstacles to natural science and showing that all theoretical constructions of human thought should be considered not in the ontological but in the epistemological plane as means of economical description of the functional relations between elements. It is precisely in the establishment of such relations that the real task of science consists, and only in the process of its resolution, i.e. in the process of discovering the laws of the connection of elements, does science prove to be an effective means of biological adaptation.
According to Mach, the principle of economy of thought was formulated by him back in the early 1870s. For some time, it seemed to him that he was doomed to defend it alone. However, in 1883, he became acquainted with the views of Richard Avenarius, and soon became convinced that they were on completely parallel courses: “As for R. Avenarius,” wrote Mach, “our spiritual kinship is as great as is generally possible between two people who developed completely differently, worked in different fields and were completely independent of each other” (5: 58). However, unlike Avenarius, Mach did not strive to create a complete philosophical system. In addition, Mach noted that he came to his views from the idealism of Kant and Berkeley
[45] , while Avenarius, in his opinion, was based on realistic or even materialistic premises. However, Avenarius himself painted the opposite picture.
Avenarius was born in Paris in 1843 and educated in Leipzig. From 1887 until his death in 1896 he was a professor at the University of Zurich. His major works include Philosophy as Thinking about the World According to the Principle of the Least Measure of Force (1876), Critique of Pure Experience (1888–90), The Human Concept of the World (1891), and the article On the Subject of Psychology (1894).
In his essay on philosophy in 1876, Avenarius declared the expediency of mental functions that serve the preservation of the organism, and derived from this the principle of the least measure of force, which also applies to cognition. To know with the least measure of force means to reduce the unknown to the known through recognition or subsumption under a general concept. This is a completely ordinary procedure, but Avenarius shows that in the final analysis such “apperception” leads the mind to unite data in some one higher concept. Philosophy helps to understand what this higher concept, the concept of the world or being, can be. It should not contain anything that is not directly given in the experience of the individual. Meanwhile, for a number of reasons, this concept contains many extraneous impurities that distort the idea of such experience. The task of philosophy is to “obtain pure experience” (1:50), freeing it from “anthropomorphic apperceptions” – the endowment of parts of the world with aesthetic or ethical value, feelings and will, as well as from the attribution of substantiality and causal connections to things. The correct, i.e. purified concept of the world presupposes the recognition of its content as sensations, and its form as movement.
Avenarius considered the 1876 work as a prolegomena to the Critique of Pure Experience, which he conceived as a continuation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. According to Avenarius, Kant had shown that experience contains many imported components, but had not analyzed the composition of what remains after their elimination. However, over time, Avenarius abandoned the idea of explicating the content of pure experience on the basis of the “idealistic” premise that this experience is composed of sensations, and in the Critique of Pure Experience he turned to more “realistic” explanations. In this vague treatise, he attempted to reveal the structure of pure experience on the basis of the “empiriocritical assumption”: “Any part of the environment stands in such a relation to human individuals that if it appears, they declare their experience” (2: 1, 1). He emphasized the key role of the central nervous system of the individual (C) in mediating the environment (R) and the latter’s statements about the environment (E), based on the doctrine of “vital difference”, i.e. the discrepancy between the individual and the environment that arises when he falls out of the practically “ideal environment” at birth, and the desire of the system “C” to eliminate this difference for the purpose of self-preservation of this system and the individual to whom it is inherent. “Independent life series” that arise in the process of its implementation determine “dependent life series” of statements about the environment, reflecting the specificity of the processes of energy-saving self-preservation of individuals.
Later, from speculative biology and biologized epistemology and psychology, Avenarius turned to attempts to clarify the mechanisms and clarify the sources of the clouding of pure experience. Experience itself is not infected with erroneous interpretations, but when trying to reflect on it, many erroneous “variations” arise. The most serious negative consequences are caused by the so-called “introjection”. Introjection is “inserting the ‘visible’ into man” (4: 21), i.e., the assumption that the immediate data of experience that make up the environment are subjective, “internal” representations that are essentially different from the things represented.
Avenarius is sure that despite the apparent naturalness of introjection, it is a “distortion” of the real state of affairs and gives rise to insoluble problems. After all, if external things differ from internal representations of them, then the question immediately arises about the exact location of these representations. If we say that this is the brain, then it remains unclear how processes in the brain can cause completely dissimilar feelings and images. If we correlate representations with a special spiritual substance, then how can we explain its interaction with bodily organs? Meanwhile, introjection pushes towards the idea of the spirit. It aggravates the “anthropomorphic apperceptions” that Avenarius wrote about in his 1876 work, and gives rise to an anthropomorphic consideration of man himself (see 3: 58), i.e., doubling the individual, singling out the internal (spiritual) and external (bodily) components in him.
In order to discover the hidden errors that people make during introjection, in The Human Concept of the World and the work On the Subject of Psychology, which continues this treatise, Avenarius proposed to return to the pre-reflexive “natural concept of the world” and analyze it from the point of view of its universal structure, without touching on the particulars of the relationship of its moments, which were discussed in the Critique of Pure Experience. This concept includes two essential components: 1) what is “originally found,” i.e., what is directly given, and 2) what is hypothetically thought of in relation to it.
Initially, the necessary is divided into two parts – the I and the environment (Umgebung). The concept of the I, not identical to the concept of spiritual substance, is interpreted by Avenarius as a set of various states, including components or movements of “my” body, as well as thoughts and feelings, or affects. It is important, however, that all states of the I are somehow connected with the environment or aimed at it. But this environment itself cannot be thought of without the concept of the I. Even when we imagine a place where no human foot has yet set foot, we “need the so-called I, of which it would be a thought” (4: 14). This circumstance allows Avenarius to put forward the thesis of the “fundamental coordination” of the I and the environment, with the I being the “central member” of this coordination, and the constituent parts of the environment acting as “countermembers” (4: 14).
The hypothetical part of the natural concept of the world is the admission of “non-mechanical” aspects of the lives of other people. Although people are directly given to our Self only in physical form, we can rightfully assume that certain “feelings” and “thoughts” are connected with these mechanical givens, just as in ourselves, which form other central members of the fundamental coordination. It is only important not to invent more than what we find in ourselves. In other words, if a certain object is given to us as something found outside of us, then this must be admitted in relation to other people as well. In fact, without directly noticing the thoughts and feelings of other people, we admit that they are hidden “inside” their brain, and then we interpret the givenness of objects as “internal” representations, subjective images of the latter (3: 26). This is introjection, distorting the natural concept of the world.
But such a distortion cannot be eternal. The entire history of intellectual culture, Avenarius believes, leads to the elimination of introjection and, along with it, the real opposition of external and internal, spirit and matter. But getting rid of introjection makes it relevant to clarify the subjects of such sciences as physics and psychology. Like Mach, he asserts that the mental differs from the physical only by point of view. Experienced data turn out to be mental, since they are considered dependent on the nervous system, which forms the main link of any “central member”. The elements of experience are physical when they are considered in abstraction from the “central member”. According to this classification, we can talk about different types of dependence of elements – physical, mental, etc.
Of greatest interest to a philosopher is, of course, the question of the interdependence of the “central member” and counter-members, or the Self and the environment. This is due to the fact that philosophy deals with universal structures of experience, and the universal form of any experience is precisely the fundamental coordination of the Self and the environment. Avenarius spoke somewhat ambiguously about the possibility of the existence of elements of the environment without a corresponding “central member”. On the one hand, he claimed that the “central member” determines the elements of the “counter-members”, which excludes their independent existence, on the other hand, he spoke of the numerical identity of these elements for different “central members” (with possible qualitative variations – see 3: 82) and did not dispute the thesis about the existence of the world before man, discussing in detail the “potential central members” associated with “lifeless matter”. These theses seem incompatible, but Avenarius got out of the difficult situation by arguing that the recognition of the reality of the world before man means only that he does not deny that if the “central members” were to be attributed to past times, they would see themselves surrounded by that original environment that science reconstructs.
The philosophy of Mach and Avenarius, who are sometimes united under the rubric of “empiriocriticism”, caused an ambiguous reaction among their contemporaries. Avenarius created his own school, which, however, did not produce any significant figures. Mach had a stimulating influence on the philosophers of the Vienna Circle. The philosophy of Mach and Avenarius aroused considerable interest among Russian Marxists of the early 20th century. Lenin opposed the fashion for Mach and Avenarius, arguing in “Materialism and Empiriocriticism” (1909) that they were the heirs of Berkeley’s “fideism”. Husserl criticized the principle of economy of thought of Mach and Avenarius, seeing in it a tendency to relativize thinking and psychologize logical laws. Recently, Mach has attracted the attention of specialists in evolutionary epistemology.
Literature
1. Avenarius R. Philosophy as thinking about the world according to the principle of the least measure of force. St. Petersburg, 1913.
2. Avenarius R. Critique of Pure Experience. Vol. 1-2. St. Petersburg, 1907-1908.
3. Avenarius R. The human concept of the world. Moscow, 1909.
4. Avenarius R. On the subject of psychology. M., 2003.
5. Mach E. Analysis of sensations and the relationship of the physical to the mental. Moscow, 1908.
6. Mach E. Knowledge and error. M., 2003.
7. Osipov V. I. Theory of knowledge of E. Mach. Arkhangelsk, 1999.
8.Ewald O. Richard Avenarius as the Beginner of Empirical Criticism. B. 1905.
9.Raab F. The Philosophy of Richard Avenarius. Lpz., 1912.