David Black: I'd be interested to know if Cliff Slaughter still thinks Materialism and Empiro-Criticism can still stand up next to the Philosophical Notebooks of 1914-15.
I can't speak for Cliff Slaughter, and won't enter into the historical debate about Lenin's own development, except to allow that there is an obvious difference between Volume 14 (in which Lenin conducts a characteristically "ruthless" polemic against positivism in 1908) and Volume 38 (containing Lenin's annotations made during his philosophical studies in 1915). This difference, in my view reflects the times, and the nature of what Lenin was doing in each case.
It is worth noting that the great physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, who discovered the relation between thermal energy, entropy and "information", committed suicide not long after the writing of Volume 14, in despair at the confusion that positivism was sowing among physicists, believing that science has irreversibly "lost the plot". In fact, Ernst Mach's Analysis of Sensations eventually came to be seen by natural scientists as an historical oddity and the overwhelming majority of influential physicists rejected positivism. For his part, Lenin was rightfully concerned about the confusion positivism was sowing in the ranks of the Bolshevik Party, and was fighting for his life in a period of deep reaction following the defeat of the 1905 Revolution.
Materialism is not an easy doctrine to understand and adhere to, unless, that is, one is permitted to adopt historically outmoded forms of materialism, which cannot withstand the critique of a Berkeley or a Poincare or a Kant. Materialism in its true meaning can only be understood as the Essence of a whole historical development of philosophy from Copernicus to Marx and up to today. Granted, it is "not enough" to simply repeat over and over: "Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our sensations, outside of us, and ...there is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there cannot be any such difference." [Vol 14, Chapter 2, s 1] as Lenin does, in one way or another, in Volume 14, but it is precisely by constantly adhering to this line while "thinking dialectically" that we are able to reflect the objective world more and more adequately.
I think Kant gives a fine definition of the dogmatist: "who has not surveyed the sphere of his understanding, nor determined, in accordance with principles, the limits of possible cognition, who, consequently, is ignorant of his own powers, and believes he will discover them by the attempts he makes in the field of cognition" [Critique of Pure Reason II, II].
Lenin continues the above passage with "In the theory of knowledge, as in every other sphere of science, we must learn to think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact." Whatever you make of Lenin's "style" there is nothing dogmatic here, only the admonition that we should forget the hard-won gains of two hundred years of Western philosophy on the basis of "recent scietific discoveries".
Since reading Volume 14 about 20 years ago, I have more recently begun my own investigations of 20th century philosophy. 90 years have passed since Lenin wrote Volume 14, and I think the following observations can be made about how things have "panned out" since then:
(1) Outside of a very small band of genuine Marxist thinkers, philosophical materialism has indeed staggered forward - staggered, but forwards - as a result of the efforts of "natural scientists who do not know dialectics";
(2) Very few of natural scientists have to date embraced Marxism, for reasons which have to do with the history of the USSR after Lenin's death;
(3) Nevertheless, I think there is reason to believe that we are close to a situation where materialist dialectics can enjoy a renaissance among professional scientists, natural and social;
(4) The great majority of working physicists reject positivism, and generally adhere, if they reflect philosophically at all, to some kind of Spinoza-ism, objective idealism or muddled materialism;
(5) The kind of philosophical snake oil that Lenin criticised in Volume 38 is absolutely rampant in philosophical circles today and is a social cancer that urgently needs to be expunged.