LENIN AS PHILOSOPHER
409
The one chapter of Lenin's book that has meaning beyond the
limits of the immediate philosophical-factional controversy is Chapter
V, entitled: "The Latest Revolution in Natural Science." Here Lenin
handles the "crisis in science" that had just been proclaimed by
Poincare; the notion that "matter is disappearing," or being swal–
lowed up by energy or dissolved into pure mathematical formulae;
or that the material universe was dissolving, merely because science
was stumbling from one-sidedness of inert matter-without-motion into
the contrary one-sidedness of motion-without-anything-which-moves.
The approach here employed by Lenin, and more skillfully and subtly
by Engels before him, is helpful, too, in considering fresh muddles
which have arisen since their day: the supposed entrance of "spirit"
into every phenomenon by virtue of the alleged inseparability of the
thing-observed from the observer; the emergence of "free
will"
inside
the atom via the principle of indeterminacy; along with other bewil–
derments of certain recent scientists turned amateur philosophers and
philosophers turned amateur scientists, without sufficient mastery of
the accumulated heritage of philosophic and scientific thought.
The weakness of Lenin's work, as Bogdanov hastened to point
out, was its authoritarian character. Its proofs are all proofs by
authority-the authority of Marx and Engels. The final touchstone
is always a quotation from one of their works. The authority, on closer
examination, almost always proves to
be
Engels. Curiously, though
Lenin mentions the name of Marx scores of times, there is only one
three-sentence quotation from the philosophical writings of Marx in
the entire book. To
be
sure, Engels' more specialized
Anti-Dilhring
and
Feuerbach,
if
less seminal, are more systematized, more apposite
to Lenin's immediate purposes. Still, the neglect of Marx by this
orthodox Marxist points to the limitations in his orthodoxy, like the
Christianity of a theologian who forever quotes Paul but finds no use
for the words of Christ.
When Lenin has succeeded in confronting some quotation from
Bogdanov (or from anyone whom he can, by whatever literary strata–
gem, link up with Bogdanov) with some quotation from Engels, and
has shown divergence between them, his task is finished. Lenin is not
only "authoritarian" himself, but he insists that all his opponents
must be authoritarian, too: "Your clamor against argument from
authority," he writes," is only a screen to conceal the fact that you
substitute for the socialist authorities-Marx, Engels, Lafargue, Meh–
ring, Kautsky-the bourgeois authorities--Mach, Petzold, Avenarius,
and the immanentists."
