Re: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

At risk of actually killing the horse I'm flogging, I want to return one
more time to the debate over 'reflection.' Mike asked me why I would be sad
to hear that Vygotsky was significantly influenced by Lenin. I've been
reading some of the work in the 1920s and 30s by Sidney Hook, on the topic
of Marx and Hegel. I'm copying below a fairly long excerpt in which Hook
takes to task both Engels and Lenin (in 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,'
at least) for viewing ideas as "reflections" of reality - exactly in the
sense of mirror images or copies. That Lenin did this was the sense I have
got from reading other comments on Lenin, though I haven't read Lenin
myself.

The problem, as Hook points out, is that the reflection view treats thinking
as a passive process, that solipsism and skepticism cannot be avoided, that
in this view knowledge cannot be creative, and consequently knowledge of the
world cannot change the world. This, as he notes, is a long way from Marx.

Martin

The excerpt is from:
Hook, S. (1928). The Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism. II. The Journal
of Philosophy, 25(6), 141-155.
[ http://www.jstor.org/stable/2014691 ]

"He [Engels] presents the "dialectic" as the method which
corrects the limited and ossified character of classificatory thinking
and claims that it enables one to avoid the predicament of English
empiricism which is peculiarly addicted to this way of thinking.
But Engels failed to understand the real weakness of English
empiricism. Otherwise he would have realized that his uncritical
reference to ideas as reflections, pictures, or images (Abbilder,
Spiegelbilder) of things made him fall into an epistemological trap
whose mazes lead into the cul-de-sacs of solipsism and nominalism-
the very positions he was anxious to avoid. Since sensations, accord-
ing to Engels, gave immediate knowledge, the organizing activity of
thought becomes purely ancillary to classifying and relating sensa-
tions. Practice and experiment, which he later says must serve as
the criteria of truth, are introduced by a double inconsistency. For
if our sensations are copies, we can never know anything of the
originals or even know that there are any, while if sensations give
immediate knowledge there is no sense in trying to check up upon
them by experiments which only give other sensations, just as im-
mediate. The disastrous consequences of the belief in the cognitive
character of sensations comes to light in Lenin's fanatical insistence
upon accepting every word of Engels literally. According to Lenin,
sensation is "a copy, photograph, and reflection of a reality existing
independently of it." He takes Plekhanov to task for regarding
sensations as "signs" or "symbols" of what things are, instead of
adhering to the crude formula, "(sensations) are copies, photo-
graphs, images, mirror-reflections of things" (p. 195). He adds
further on, "the idea that knowledge can 'create' forms and change
the primeval chaos into order, is an idealist notion. The world is
a uniform world of matter in motion, and our cognition, being the
highest product of nature, is in a position only to reflect this law."
But if knowledge only "reflects" the laws of the world, how can it
change the world? A mirror or a lake reflects the natural scene,
but neither knows nor changes it. This is, indeed, a far cry from
the functional and experimental theory expressed in Marx's gloss
on Feurbach and strange words from one who believed that by "mass
action" and the creation of new machines and forms of distribution,
a better social system will be evolved." (p. 149-150)




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