Lenin and Meillassoux: Is Speculative Materialism Possible?

Emel'yanov Andrei Sergeevich PhD in Philosophy Senior Educator, Department of Philosophy, Kursk State University 305000, Russia, Kurskaya oblast', g. Kursk, ul. Radishcheva, 33, of. 325 andrei.e1992@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

The publication in 2008 of Quentin Meyasu's work "After Finiteness" ^[14] renewed the debate in philosophical circles about the epistemological and ontological status of "correlationism" – a methodological principle that allows the correlation of being and thinking. Equally distancing ourselves from both apologetic ^{[12; 15; 18]} and critical ^{[5; 16; 17]} assessments of the content of the "crusade" against correlationism, we note, however, that in itself it is not the first of its kind. It is known, for example, that in the post-Kantian tradition (in particular, in Schelling, Hegel, Husserl), long before the release of "After the Finiteness", their own options for undermining the "correlationist circle" were proposed. The latter, however, in their struggle for pure philosophy and science, unfortunately, only aggravated this problem, transforming Kant's "weak" correlationism that existed at that time into a "strong" one. Thus, the struggle against irrationalism and metaphysical dogmatism in modern philosophy has paradoxically led to the revival of the "argument of blind faith" and "skeptical fanaticism" ^{[6; 68-69]}.

It is to combat religious obscurantism and the relic of dogmatic metaphysics, based, as is well known, on ontological proof and the principle of sufficient reason, that Meyasu turns to materialism. The author's campaign "After Finiteness" against correlationism positions itself as a continuation of the materialist line of L. Feuerbach, F. Engels, I. Dietzgen and V. Lenin. With the latter's work "Materialism and Empirio-criticism", Meyasu's work brings together not only anticorrelationism and materialism, but also a number of general issues. These include both the question of the existence of matter before us (the problem of the archbishop) and the questions of causality and necessity in the world (Hume's problem and the problem of contingency, respectively). By the way, the existing connection between the Lenins by the French philosopher after the release of "After the Limb" was immediately noticed in Russia ^{[2; 3; 7]} and abroad (R. Brasier, S. Zizek) ^{[11; 19; 20]}. However, despite the fact that Lenin and Meyasu are engaged in solving similar questions, they give diametrically opposite answers to them, which indicates that the apparent union of speculativism and materialism is in fact imaginary.

In the framework of this study, we will focus on two mutually opposite poles of the creative heritage of Lenin and Meyasu. First, we will consider the common things that unite the Soviet and French philosopher, for example, the criticism of correlationism, as well as the principle of demarcation of philosophy and science, which is in a certain way connected with the question of the ontological and epistemological roots of fideism. Secondly, and this is the central point of our research, we will try to identify what is special about their philosophical programs. The latter will serve as the basis for refuting the thesis that "Meyasu is a modern Lenin." A positive solution to this problem will allow us to identify the essential difference between dialectical and speculative materialism, as well as answer a number of questions arising from this fact. Namely: how and on what epistemological and ontological grounds does speculative materialism become possible? And, after all, is Meyasu's speculative materialism actually materialism?

I. Criticism of correlationism and Fideism by Meyasu and Lenin

The central idea in After the Finiteness, which, like the thread of Ariadne, permeates the entire book, is the struggle against fideism in modern philosophy. According to the French philosopher, if the entire philosophy preceding Kant can be called the "metaphysics of substance", then the entire subsequent tradition (and modern philosophy in particular) should be defined as the "metaphysics of correlation". The latter is based on the idea "according to which we can only have access to the correlation between thinking and being, but never to one of them separately" ^{[6; 11]}. It is this method of reasoning that exists in modern post-Kantian philosophy that the author of "After Finiteness" calls "correlationism".

Meyasu states that the main nerve of the correlationist philosophy is the epistemological principle, according to which it is impossible to consider the spheres of the subjective and objective as independent of each other. Thus, correlationism asserts that we are not only unable to know the object "in itself", isolated from our relationship to it and to its opposite – the subject, but also the subject itself, without its relationship to the object or the conditions of its existence. As Meyasu emphasizes, the belief in the primacy of the substance of subcritical philosophy has now turned into a belief in the primacy of relations between the members of the correlation, becoming a kind of "mantra" that is repeated by philosophers over and over again. Examples are Husserl's transcendental, Heidegger's Ereignis, Derrida's différance. Correlation can have various forms (subject-object, noema-noesis, being-person, language-referent), but its essence does not change from this: we do not know and cannot know thinking and being in isolation. For us, these are "things in themselves". They become "things for us" only through correlation.

It is against this kind of faith – the belief in the eternity of correlation, in the inadmissibility of the existence of the absolute – that Meyasu speaks out, offering to revive the New European subcritical philosophy: "Modern thinkers have irrevocably lost the Great External, the absolute External of subcritical thinkers: The External, not mediated by the attitude towards us, given as indifferent to its own reality, existing in itself, it does not matter whether we think of it or not" ^{[6; 14-15]}. Commenting on this fragment later, the Italian philosopher A. Toscano will note that the claim of thinking to access the absolute is decisively rejected in modern philosophy, while irrationalist absolutes persist and even multiply. Hence the almost unchallenged dominance of skeptical naive and at the same time pluralistic "fideism of any faith, whatever it may be" ^{[17; 86]}.

A hundred years earlier, anticipating many of the ideas that will be expressed in "After Finiteness", V. Lenin in his work "Materialism and empirio-criticism" also made the criticism of correlationism and fideism the central theme of his research. In the first chapter devoted to the critique of the empiricist theory of knowledge, Lenin examines the theory of fundamental coordination by R. Avenarius, which in terms of Meyasu can be designated as subject-object correlationism. As the Soviet philosopher points out, Avenarius' theory consists in the position of "inseparable (unaflösliche) coordination" (i.e., the correlative connection) of "our Self (das Ich) and the environment" ^{[4; 63]} with the central position of the Self as the central member of the coordination of human experience. Criticizing this view from the standpoint of dialectical materialism, Lenin notes: "Fichte also imagines that he has "inextricably" linked the "I" and the "environment", consciousness and the thing" ^{[4; 63]}. Thus, the Soviet philosopher continues, Avenarius repeats "Berkeley's argument: I feel only my sensations, I have no right to assume "objects by themselves" outside of my sensation" ^{[4; 65]}.

Lenin emphasizes that there is a certain connection between the philosophy of Berkeley, "the ancestor of the correlativistic theory of the relative givenness of subject and object" ^{[4; 83]} – Fichte's philosophy, as well as the empiriocriticism of Mach and Avenarius, which allows them to be considered as historical forms of the "main philosophical line of subjective idealism" ^{[4; 83]}. This is the position according to which "the world is my feeling; the non-Self is "supposed" (created, produced) by our Self; the thing is inextricably linked with consciousness; the inseparable coordination of our Self and the environment is an empiriocritical principled coordination – it's all the same position" ^{[4; 83]}.

In contrast to the correlationism of Berkeley and Fichte, as well as the coordination of Avenarius, Lenin puts forward a realistic argument similar to the one that Meijas would later put forward in the pages of "After Finiteness": things, the environment and even the world "exist independently of our sensation, of our consciousness, of our Self and of man in general" ^{[4; 83]}. In his opinion, the mistake of correlationism, which postulated an indissoluble connection between object and subject, is that it replaces the real world with an imaginary world. The image of the external world that exists in our consciousness in concepts and judgments about the world, the reflection and reflection of this world cannot, firstly, exist without the displayed, and secondly, cannot precede the world itself!

Lenin and Meyasu agree that any attempt to connect thought and reality, subject and object, simultaneously wrapping it in a naively realistic shell, i.e. correlationism– "is sophism of the cheapest kind" ^{[4; 65]}, which inevitably leads us to "fideism of any faith" ^{[6; 64]}. In addition, both philosophers recognize that the only "cure" for modern philosophy, science and society from metaphysics, fideism and the eternity of specific ideological contents can only be materialism. However, already here you can see the difference in their views. If for Lenin any correlationism means "fundamental coordination", i.e. subjective idealism, which leads to fideism, then for the French philosopher the greatest danger is not correlationism itself, but only its "strong" variation, asserting its eternal character.

II. Did nature exist before man?

The question of the existence of nature before us is one of the central points of explication of two vectors of the materialistic understanding of the process of cognition: dialectical, expressed in "Materialism and empiricism", and speculative, presented in "After Finiteness". At the same time, special attention should be paid not so much to the answer to the above question itself (in this both philosophers are in solidarity: both recognize that nature, i.e. objective reality, exists independently of us), but how the authors answer it.

In Lenin's work, the question of the existence of nature before man, before the appearance of his cognitive abilities, with which nature could be represented in the form of concepts, i.e. thought, is raised in the context of the criticism of the theory of fundamental coordination of Avenarius already mentioned above. Recall that thanks to the concept of a "potential central member", the latter comes to an empirically critical point of view, according to which "natural science has no right to raise the question of such periods of our present environment that preceded the existence of man in time" ^{[4; 67]}. No thing, including the Earth, can exist independently of our consciousness until the moment when man appeared on it, since we always strive to "imagine ourselves", i.e. to put our imaginary presence on the same level with the actual existence of the Earth in the form of a red-hot fireball.

As Lenin shows, the position of Avenarius (as well as the arguments of his followers – E. Mach, I. Petzoldt and R. Willy) is "philosophical obscurantism". According to the author of "Materialism and Empiricism", it "leads us to something that has not only never been experienced (has not been an object of experience, has not been experienced), but to something that can never, in any way, be experienced by beings like us" ^{[4; 68]}. As the Soviet philosopher adds, the absence of sensation or perception of an object is not a condition for its non-existence. The fact that I have never had the experience of perceiving Socrates or Plato does not mean that Socrates or Plato never existed. Therefore, materialism defends the position of natural science on this issue: "the earth existed in a state when neither man nor any living being at all existed on it and could not exist" ^{[4; 71]}.

For Meyasu, the question of the existence of nature (Earth) before us (before the appearance of man) is a semantic trigger for the deployment of an anticorrelationist program. It is thanks to this question that the French philosopher "reanimates" the theory of primary and secondary qualities of Locke and Descartes, implying the existence of the world external to us, as "mathematical statements" (extension), which are properties of the "object in itself" ^{[6; 8]}. However, unlike Lenin, Meyasu focuses not on the ontological side of the question of the existence of the world before us, but only on the epistemological one – namely, on the conditions of the conceivability of nature outside of us.

The condition for the conceivability of nature outside of us, according to Meyasu, is the prehistoric (ancestral), which represents a reality "that preceded the appearance of man as a species" ^{[6; 19]}. However, the archiepiscopal or "fossil matter", from which the prehistoric is woven, is only a material carrier on the basis of which experiments are carried out to evaluate various phenomena. In fact, fossil matter is not the substantial basis of the world without us, since "regarding the moment of formation of the Earth, it makes no sense to talk about the qualities associated with the presence of a living being (secondary qualities)" ^{[6; 22]}. Continuing, the French philosopher points out that we can only describe the state of the Earth without us as the state before us (prehistoric) and the state after us (apocalyptic) in "mathematical terms". In other words, the only possible condition for the conceivability of the Earth without us is the absoluteness of mathematical description, the language of harmony that permeates events, things and eternity.

Literally in the next sentence, Meyasu, however, clarifies, prudently avoiding accusations of mathematical fideism and Pythagoreanism: "We are not saying that the existence of the formation of the Earth has a mathematical essence – that numbers or equations ... exist by themselves" ^{[6; 22]}. It is worth noting that Meyasu's approach to the ontological status of mathematical formulas and scientific statements in a number of points coincides with the approach of Henri Poincare, who in a similar way considered the mathematical formula as a substantial unit of the world. However, the modern philosopher goes even further. Meyasu points out (and in this he goes further than his teacher A. Badiou ^[9]) that a mathematical statement, term or formula are only conditions of (objective) conceivability, but in no way substantial units on the basis of which the ontology of the world is constituted. However, if fossil matter is only a carrier, and mathematics is only a condition for its conceivability, a logical question arises: what are fossil matter and mathematics as a carrier and condition for conceivability? The answer to Meyasu is the Absolute (or "absolute"), which exists as a referent regardless of the fact, whether we think of it or not. Thus, the existence of the formation of the Earth as an absolute contains "referents of statements containing dates, volumes, etc." that "have existed for 4.56 billion years. years ago" ^{[6; 22]}.

Of course, Meyasu repeatedly speaks out against logical empiricism and positivism. However, this does not prevent him from coming to the position where Berkeley, Fichte, Mach and Avenarius had already stood before him. This position consists in the fact that something (the subject, the transcendental Self, the referent of the absolute), which is only our subjective product of reflection, is taken as something that precedes the world, the Earth. In other words, within the framework of speculative materialism, we arrive at the same result as empiricism: reflection precedes the reflected thing, objective reality (or is assumed before them).

III. Is there an objective truth?

So, why does Meyasu, who, like Lenin, put the struggle against correlationism and fideism of idealistic metaphysics at the center of his project, eventually come to empiricism? Strangely enough, the answer to this fundamental question is given by the work "Materialism and Empiricism". Unlike Meyasu, who in his research limited himself to considering only the relationship between fideism and correlationism, Lenin drew attention to another source of fideism – agnosticism and skepticism. The Soviet philosopher points out that fideism itself is a consequence not only of correlationism, but also of agnosticism and skepticism ^{[4; 72-78]}. In other words, it is not enough to think objectively only outside of correlation with the subject; it is not enough to abandon correlationism in its weak and strong version.

In this regard, the question of the actual conditions of the conceivability of nature outside of us acquires fundamental importance (in an epistemological sense). Is it necessary, as Meyasu did, to abandon the correlation of subject and object and think of thinking as a "process that is completely different from our existence/non-existence", which exists only "by chance", "as a contingent combination of atoms" ^{[6; 49]}? For an answer, it is necessary to turn to how the author of "After Finiteness" looks at questions about absolute and relative truth, as well as about causality and randomness in our world.

One of the characteristic features of Meyasu's arguments about the absolute is the simultaneous orientation towards both Hume and Kantian transcendentalism. The above–mentioned dualism manifests itself primarily in the fact that the absolute in it, on the one hand, turns out to be a "foundation" that frees "everything that stands outside of causal necessity from reality" ^{[6; 134]}, and on the other hand, a "non-foundation" that represents the "true content of the world" ^{[6; 119]}. However, at the moment when Meyasu begins to substantiate and define the Absolute (or the absolute referent, which simultaneously concentrates the possibility and impossibility) of the factual existence given to me in the experience, he moves from the position of objectivism to the position of agnosticism.

"In my experience of factuality, I am not dealing with objective reality, but with the insurmountability of the boundaries of objectivity in the face of the fact of the existence of the world: <...> the fact that the world is logical, or that it is given in representation, avoids the structures of logical justification or representation. "In-itself" becomes impenetrable – it is impossible even to assert that it exists – and this concept tends to disappear completely, leaving only facticity" ^{[6; 54]} (italics – A.S.).

Thus, according to Meyas, in the process of cognition we are always dealing not so much with the objective reality itself as with its facticity. The objective world itself, as follows from the above fragment, is an "in-itself" thing that is so impenetrable that it is impossible even to assert whether it exists at all or not.

By the way, de facto materialism has never denied the existence of an "in-itself". However, as Feuerbach also noted, two traditions in the understanding of "things in themselves" should be strictly distinguished: the Kantian and the materialistic. According to the first, An sich is an abstraction without reality, which can only be conceived, but it is impossible to know. According to the second, "in-itself" is an abstraction with reality, there is a reflection of objective reality. And although, as Feuerbach continues, "nature, which is not an object of man or consciousness, of course, represents for speculative philosophy, or at least for idealism, a Kantian thing in itself, an abstraction without reality," i.e., "an absolutely inhuman being" (absolut unmeschliches Wesen), from this at all It does not follow that the factuality of my existence is an adequate reflection of objective reality ^{[8; 130]}. In other words, the factuality of my existence, my experience, does not at all imply the factuality and finiteness of objective reality.

Ultimately, as Lenin adds in "Materialism and Empirio-criticism", from our feelings we can follow either the line of subjectivism, leading to agnosticism, or the line of objectivism, the only one of all leading to materialism ^{[4; 128; 129]}. Of course, at first glance, it may seem that Meyasu chooses the second path. He completely discredits the need for a correlation between subject and object, between thinking and existence, which allows him to think of nature and the world before us as independent. However, this fact in itself is not evidence that we are facing materialism. Indeed, in Hegel's objective idealism, nature and being also exist independently. Therefore, for Lenin, completed anticorrelationism, i.e., a program aimed at purifying philosophy and science from fideism and ideology, is directly related to the question of the source of perception and the question of absolute and relative truth that follows from it.

In the second chapter of "Materialism and Empirio-criticism", in the fourth paragraph entitled "Does objective truth exist?", Lenin writes: "Is objective reality the source of perception? If so, then you are a materialist. If not, then you are inconsistent and will inevitably come to subjectivism, to agnosticism – it does not matter whether you deny the knowability of the thing in itself, the objectivity of time, space, causality (according to Kant) or not allow the thought of the thing in itself (according to Hume)" ^{[4; 129]}.

These words, written by Lenin more than a century ago and addressed to the machist A. Bogdanov, who declared the independence of the external world from the content of consciousness, but at the same time denied the existence of objective truth ^{[1; 17]}, in our time can be fully attributed to Quentin Meijas. As the Soviet philosopher repeatedly points out, for materialism it is important not what is the accuracy of the description of causal relationships and whether they can "be expressed in an accurate mathematical formula" ^{[4; 164]}, but what is the source of knowledge. Lenin, unlike Meyasu, strongly insists on denying the identity between thinking and being, and therefore causality and order existing in nature are not for him substantial units (monads) that control nature, but only its reflection, an arbitrary translation.

On the contrary, for the author "After finiteness" the Absolute is a substantial unit packed into the Absolute of a mathematical formula. The absolute of a mathematical formula has the property of contingency and avoids any final ("frozen") forms of knowledge, because it is the sum of not subjective, but intersubjective truths. However, how does mathematical fideism differ from empiricism? Criticizing Henri Poincare (in the words of Lenin himself, "a great physicist and a minor philosopher"), A. Bogdanov and P. Yushkevich for agnosticism and denial of objective reality and objective regularity, the author of "Materialism and empirio-criticism" points to similar premises in their argumentation, which in a hundred years will be reproduced by Meyas. Namely, the presence of some "eternal" referent – "harmony of the world", "flow of the given", "empirical symbol" ("prehistoric" in Meyasu), which, being only a reflection of objective reality, turns out to be on the pages "After the finiteness" by what precedes it.

IV. Why isn't Meyasu Lenin?

So, why do the philosophical systems of Meyasu and Lenin, being focused on solving a common problem, come to two mutually opposite conclusions? In other words, why is Meyasu not Lenin?

1. Two philosophers reveal the causes of fideism in science and philosophy in a mutually opposite way. While the French philosopher considers the ideal and the material as one of the possible variations of the representation of the Absolute or the Great External, for the author of "Materialism and empiriocriticism" consideration of the disposition of the ideal/material acquires a certain meaning only based on the basic question of philosophy. Hence the completely different meaning that both authors put into the concept of "materialism". For Meyasu, this is just one of the possible predicates of the Absolute, which represents its facticity in fossil matter (the principle of factuality). For Lenin, materialism is primarily a philosophical position, a worldview that considers matter as a source of data for our consciousness.

2. Despite the fact that Lenin and Meyasu criticize correlationism, each of them implements this criticism in different ways. If the former implements a consistent program of total withdrawal of "pre-established coordination" ("strong" correlationism) from the sphere of experience, the latter, on the contrary, not only preserves Kant's "weak correlationism" as the "least evil", but also comes to the conclusion that the very factuality of correlation is absolute.

3. While acknowledging the existence of things in themselves, Meyasu at the same time denies the possibility of knowing them. According to the French philosopher, they are completely "impenetrable" to us. Thus, in the question of the existence of things in themselves and their epistemological status, Meyasu stands on the position of idealism rather than on the position of materialism.

4. Unlike Lenin, Meyasu denies the existence of objective truth. The latter circumstance indicates that the speculative materialism of the French philosopher is in fact not materialism, but empiricism, i.e. a kind of subjective idealism.

Conclusion

Is speculative materialism possible? Back in the sixties, the Italian Marxist Lucio Colletti in his work "Marxism and Dialectics" pointed out that speculativism, claiming to be a logically consistent description of existence, is incompatible with materialism, since such a task can only be accomplished by idealistic means ^[13]. For the Italian Marxist, speculativism is fundamentally incompatible with materialism. Moreover, this provision is not an axiom, but a consequence arising from the very foundations of materialistic dialectics. For Lenin (as for his predecessors in the person of Feuerbach, Engels, Dietzgen), speculative materialism could also be only a theoretical construct, and of a sophistic nature, striving in an imaginary way to connect two opposing philosophical traditions. The Meyasu project is a clear proof of this.

The impossibility of speculative materialism is a direct consequence of the impossibility of non-metaphysical speculativism. Speculativism, by definition, cannot be non-metaphysical. This, in our opinion, is the imaginary nature of the expression "speculative materialism". It is a paradox, but it turned out that under the mask of speculative materialism there is an "enemy", which the French philosopher's work was originally aimed at fighting – speculative idealism! Despite the fact that Meyasu acts as an opponent of fideism (or, as Lenin would say, "dragging religion" into science and philosophy), reviving objective reality in philosophical discourse, he nevertheless comes to agnosticism, which completely negates the positive significance of his anti-correlationist program. One way or another, but it is worth recognizing that none of the tasks stated by Meijas was fully implemented by him, which makes his materialistic thesis about the existence of reality outside of us to some extent even paradoxical. The latter, by the way, is not denied by the French philosopher himself, emphasizing that "materialism, if it follows a speculative path, must believe that it is possible to think this reality, abstracting from the fact that we think it" ^{[6; 48]}. It is quite obvious that the fideism of modern science and philosophy cannot be defeated by another fideism, even if the latter is "disguised" as mathematics or natural science.

Despite its failure, the Meyasu project is a clear evidence of what is currently happening in the modern philosophy of the "renaissance" of materialism. The concepts of transcendental materialism by Badiou ^[10] and speculative materialism by Meyasu hint to us that the materialistic tradition, which until recently was considered a relic of classical philosophy and Soviet dogmatic Marxism, is again relevant and worries the minds of philosophers of various trends and schools.